Roots releases Tuesday, July 26th. For anyone with no real sense of a calendar (guilty!), that’s tomorrow.
In advance of the official launch, though, I’d like to offer you all a glimpse into what the book contains — a little sneak peek at the content on offer to anyone wondering what I’ve been working on for these last few months. This book has been a labor of love in every sense of the phrase, so I have my fingers crossed that you’ll enjoy what it brings to table. I hope too that it’ll help you uncover some balance in this crazy, chaotic world, or at least put you on the path to discovering it.
Read on for a glimpse at the book’s introduction and a brief excerpt from one of the sections on sleep.
The Introduction
This book, in a word, is about balance.
Balance between the new and the old, the simple and the complex, and an in-depth guide to finding your place somewhere smack in the middle of both spectrums.
This comes in contrast to my first book, Simpler, which covered one thing — simplicity — and spread it liberally to the three aspects of life I’d had the greatest success in changing. Those early ideas have stuck with me for the long haul, and you’ll see their hand in the pages here, as I’d be remiss if I didn’t pay respect to my origins — to my roots.
Nine months ago, I started my Paleo lifestyle. To say this was a Big Change would be kind of an understatement, especially since those early ideas — that conventional wisdom came flawed, that so many modern ideas about health and nutrition had no evolutionary basis — laid down roots, locked in tight, and grew into the book you’re about to read.
Our discussion here will cover far more than what’s on our plate, however. Call it a silly analogy, but Roots isn’t just about eating like a caveperson. It’s also about living like a caveperson, as unhygienic as that might sound, in a world that has carried us further than ever from those long-forgotten origins.
Let’s be clear: I’m not glorifying any distant past. Our Paleolithic ancestors lacked some of the bare necessities of modern life (abundant bacon, toilet paper, etc.), so don’t think for
a minute that I’m advocating we all huddle together in caves and start gnawing on insects. That said, I don’t think any one of us can keep turning a blind eye to the reality of modern life: an unending health crisis, rampant consumerism, and every needless complexity that our ancestors couldn’t dare to imagine.
Balance.
That’s what Roots is about. It’s about uncovering the middle ground between two vastly different worlds that share a common thread: you. Me.
Every single human just trying to survive this crazy, complex planet, and the humans that can thrive like never before when they take a moment to remember their roots.
I hope you enjoy the book.
And A Sample Excerpt
1: BLUE LIGHT, BAD LIGHT?
We don’t give a lot of thought to our circadian rhythms, and frankly I’d argue that we’re not supposed to. When our internal ‘clock’ is functioning properly, each twenty-four hour allotment pans out pretty simply: we wake up, feel energized during the day, and then sleep during the night.
It should be as simple as that. For thousands of years, likewise, we had no need to know more, no need to research, as we do now, the complex machinations behind one of the most vital of human needs: sleep.
Our clocks are off. The reasons are many, and most of them are well beyond the scope
of this book, but bear with me a moment longer. There are at least a few factors worth considering from an evolutionary standpoint, and the first — light — might be the easiest to try and control.
Sunlight, those golden rays that once stirred us from sleep, represents the entire electromagnetic spectrum of light. I wish I could call it straight white light for the sake of this argument, but the sun’s position at any given moment changes where its rays fall on the spectrum of color temperature. (Thanks, sun.)
Without drowning ourselves in the science behind color, however, let’s start with this: all visible light has a temperature rating in Kelvins that indicates the temperature of the light’s source. Just to mess with our cultural conceptions, blue lights are associated with higher (5,000K and up) temperatures, while red lights are those that occupy the lower end of the spectrum. Why is this important?
Sunlight, as mentioned before, can run the gamut from red to blue. Higher color temperatures (think bluer) tend to reduce drowsiness, increase alertness, and so forth, which is why modern offices are experimenting with installing lighting that occupies the warmer end of the spectrum. During the daytime, at least, this has practical benefits, but things get wrinkly the minute the sun starts to duck below the horizon.
Consider, for example, the average LCD monitor. The color temperature can vary, but most models clock in somewhere between 6,500K or 9,300K, with older CRT monitors leaning towards the latter.
Laptop screens, in other words, are designed to mimic bright sunlight. Given how blindingly blue they appear in an otherwise dark room, I’d argue that they do a pretty damn good job at it.
Problems pop up, likewise, when our computer use extends well beyond the daytime hours. That’s a common sight in modern times, and I doubt I’m alone in saying that my evening hours usually come complete with all sorts of flickering, glowing screens from a variety of sources. Let’s not forget our cell phones, too, which are often the last thing we see before closing our eyes and trying to fall asleep at night.
To call this a contrast to how we evolved would be a pretty gross understatement. For thousands of years, nightfall forced us to find shelter and settle in for the evening ahead. The lack of electronic light sources kept our ancestors on a pretty strict schedule: early to bed and even earlier to rise, a far cry from the all-night movie marathons we see today.
You can probably guess the problem with this.
Blue light, once confined to the daytime hours, has crept into our evenings as well. It’s not the sole source of your sleep problems, admittedly, but nor should it be ignored as a disruptive force to both our sleep and our circadian rhythms.
A Few Final Words About Roots
The book launches tomorrow. This is awesome.
This is a world-shattering, mind-numbing kind of thing — the culmination of many months of hard work, and the slow-sinking realization that the time to release has finally come knocking. I’m excited beyond belief to see the book launch, and I’m excited too to see what all of you think of it.
It’s no understatement to say that Roots is a herald of things to come. You can call it foreshadowing, even, of where Three New Leaves is going from here, and for this reason in particular I can’t wait until the book lands in your hands. I hope you enjoy it. And I hope, now, that you’ll stick with me for the rest of the road that begins — at long last! — with Roots.
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I'm a writer, minimalist, and health dork with three goals in mind: to teach you how to lose weight, move more, and be happier by living a simple, natural life. It works. Like what you read here? Get 3NL delivered straight to your inbox!
