Why eating normally can make you overweight and unhealthy. A Happy Hour Conversation with Lucas Rockwood

This week's show is with Lucas Rockwood, a yoga teacher trainer, digital nomad, green food junkie, and serial entrepreneur. With a formal yoga training background in Hot Yoga, Ashtanga Yoga, Gravity Yoga, and the Yoga Trapeze, Lucas has studied with some of the most well-respected teachers on the planet. Lucas founded Absolute Yoga Academy in 2006, one of the top 10 yoga teacher training schools in the world with 2,000 certified teachers (and counting) and courses in Thailand, Holland, United Kingdom, and The Philippines.

 

In search of nutritional products designed specifically for achy yoga students’ bodies, Rockwood worked with senior nutritional formulator, Paul Gaylon, and founded, YOGABODY Naturals, in the back of his yoga studio in 2007. The company has gone from strength-to-strength and is now an internationally-renowned nutrition, education, and publishing organization serving 81 countries. 

 

In this show we talk about how unnaturally most humans eat in today's modern world and what that's doing to our health, weight and energy levels. And what we can do instead! I’d love to know what YOU think about this week's show. Let’s carry on the conversation… please leave a comment below. What you'll learn from this episode: 

• When we get caught up in diet religions or paradigms (such as paleo or raw vegan) and they don't work, it's easy to give up on the approach altogether and flip back to the way they were eating before... typically the standard diet of foods which are convenient, hyper-palatable, high glycemic, low nutrient and processed, which is unlikely to be optimal for anyone. 
• Eating a low fat and high carb diet is very common these days, whether it's a standard diet or a raw food diet but Lucas cautions that this way of eating can cause health issues in the longer term - 'a metabolic disaster' in Lucas's words. That's why many of us find that we run into health issues, sexual dysfunction, mood disorders, and weight gain as we get older even when we're eating the exact same way as we did when we were younger. 
• The best place for most of us to start is by looking at our macros - fat, carbs, and protein. Lucas's suggests starting with eating a gram of carb for each pound of your ideal body weight, around half a gram of protein for each pound of your ideal bodyweight and then fill in the rest with the healthiest fats you can find (i.e. not yellow vegetable oils in clear plastic bottles). And experiment! Measure your blood glucose and see how your diet changes are working for you... we're all a bit different, what works for me might not work for you!