The thing about nutrition is that it’s one of those things that’s hidden in plain sight — there’s honestly no-one’s health that is more immediate and present and real than your own, no-one’s ability or performance more readily measured qualitatively, no feeling any closer to your own worldly experience than your own. And no language getting in the way or making things imprecise or open to interpretation. But it’s still so damnably hard for us to eat how we should eat to be the most stable and best performing humans we can be.

The trick is that you have to be aware. Lots of foods taste amazing and give you an immediate sense of well-being simply from pleasure, and we can’t deny that pleasure is a wonderful and important part of human experience. But we know, too, that we’ll get a stomachache after eating that ice cream, or that we’ll get tired if we chow down on that pasta and bread. We know the consequences, but take on the pleasure anyway, because we want it now, and because we’re not mindful of the holistic situation given what we put into and do with our bodies.

That’s the trick, and it’s a huge misnomer to call or even think of the paleolithic diet as “primitive” or as “acting like a caveman.” There is serious mindfulness at work that’s about as primitive as calculus. It’s difficult to decipher over long time domains how much better or worse you feel after you eat one thing versus another, and it’s difficult to say with certainty that a workout was easier or harder because of what you ate or drank recently. You can, though, be mindful that this connection, larger in time than you’re normally aware of, exists and has a real effect on you. And that’s key: be aware of that connection, boil it down to hard science and meter out your food in precise balance if you like, but at least do that one thing — be aware.

Anyway, I have some numbers I can throw at you:

• Deadlift, 210 before, 300 after
• Max Pull-ups, 2 before, 12 after
• Grace, 5:16, 65lb before, 2:54, 85lb after
• Helen, 14:16 before, 11:07 after

We don’t have a version of me that did the same workout regimen over these past three months and still ate whatever he felt like, don’t have the version that ate paleolithic and didn’t work out this much, and don’t have the version of me that ate poorly and sat on the couch. So we can’t say much scientifically about it, but I do certainly feel much better, stronger, and fitter than I ever have, and these gains are huge.

But more important is mindfulness, awareness of things hidden in plain sight, that this Paleo challenge and CrossFit on the whole has given me.