The 4 Season Solution

In my experiments, I sped my life up at certain times but slowed down at others, as our ancestors did. I made my life more intense and challenging at certain points, and much more restorative and restful at others. I aimed for excitement and adventure and growth at certain times, calmness and placidity and quiet withdrawal at others. I was still living what most people would consider a “normal” life, but beneath the surface I was doing many things very differently than others around me. The more I experimented, the more I saw the ancient wisdom of a more natural, oscillatory way of life. And the more I learned about natural rhythms, the more I experimented. A positive dynamic took hold that left me feeling more energetic and creative, but also more peaceful, rested, grounded, and connected with others. My mood improved, as did my focus. Everything felt better. And I wasn’t trying nearly as hard to maintain healthy habits as I had been before. Because I was making incremental changes that felt intuitively right to me and that helped me feel better, I owned those changes in a whole new way. How could I not behave in these ways, now that I knew that it made me feel deeply better? Living well became far easier and more fun than it had ever been before.

I knew I was onto something, and I was excited to tell others about it. So, I began to present my ideas at academic conferences. My friend and colleague Jamie Scott, a health researcher based in New Zealand, and I presented a talk on the seasonal model for health at the Ancestral Health Symposium to a packed house. The simple-but-profound approach resonated deeply with people, and they told me that I was presenting a new paradigm for thinking about living in a more integrated fashion. They were excited and urged me to write a book on the subject. The momentum was building. And then… I did nothing.

Well, not exactly. For a number of years, I put my new, integrative model aside and focused on one particular piece of it, the part dealing with food. Many readers will know me for having coauthored the bestselling books It Starts with Food and The Whole30. These books, which empowered people to bring their diets in tune with their bodies’ innate needs, were key components of my four-part rhythmic model. In 2011, when I was working on It Starts with Food, I didn’t merely think of the word “it” as meaning “good health.” To me, “it” also meant dedication to rhythmically attuned living. If you want to bring your body in harmony with its natural rhythms, you can’t do it with the wave of a magic wand, or simply by adhering to a new shopping list. It has to happen incrementally as you learn, unlearn, relearn, and eventually integrate lessons along the way. If you could only pick one place to start, my training, research, and personal experience all told me that this should be diet. It starts—but certainly doesn’t end—with food.

The thirty-day Whole30 experiment clearly emphasizes diet. Over a monthlong period, we ask participants to radically change their dietary habits, avoiding all alcohol, legumes, grains, sugars and refined sweeteners, dairy products, and artificial additives (like carrageenan and MSG). In their place, we tell people to stock up on healthy fats, meat, seafood, poultry, veggies of all types, fruit, and nuts and seeds. I always considered this diet part of a larger, fully integrated program of behavior change and self-awareness, aimed at empowering people by helping them rediscover what their own bodies were telling them. That’s why we discouraged any “fake treats,” like Paleo waffles made from mashed bananas, or pizza crust fashioned from a crushed cauliflower. Consuming such foods followed the letter of the law but definitely not the spirit of the program, which wasn’t to imitate conventional or junk food products, but to entirely reimagine your attitude toward food and your own health. It’s also why we eliminated all the most commonly problematic foods that cause digestive issues, like gluten and dairy, allowing people to create a clean digestive slate, and then progressively, little by little, to reintroduce certain foods after the thirty days and see how they felt, both physically and emotionally. To be sure, some people who embraced the Whole30 did so because they wanted to attain specific health objectives such as losing weight or relieving disease symptoms, but that was never my deepest intention. With the Whole30 program, I sought to give people some initial tools for becoming more aware of their own bodies’ inherent needs, so that they could feel empowered to take steps on their own to satisfy those needs, become healthier, and even more important, live a life of purpose and deep joy. The Whole30 was just the beginning of the beginning.

The 4 Season Solution is the book I imagined writing almost a decade ago—the prequel to It Starts with Food, really. The book presents my four-part theory and introduces a groundbreaking health approach that you can deploy immediately to achieve steady, sustainable gains over time. Within my framework, you attend to your health and well-being in a personalized way, on your own terms, and without requiring doctors, coaches, or other outside experts. Whether you’ve struggled to stay well or you simply want to be living better than you currently are, The 4 Season Solution will cast new light on your current health behaviors and how they might be undermining your goals and values. The book will also show you how to start changing those behaviors so that you can progress toward many important goals at once—better sleep, a healthier weight, more energy, brighter skin, deeper meaning and purpose, lower stress, and a greater sense of connectedness, contentment, and peace.

Leaning into Wellness

Many people who completed the Whole30 program have written to me to describe the transformative changes they have seen in their lives—changes that went far beyond the food they eat. For some, the opportunity to learn how their diet affected them individually led them to rethink unhealthy relationships and to improve them. Others were moved to start exercising, stop smoking, go to graduate school, or pursue creative endeavors that they had long neglected. What I’ve found absolutely fascinating and inspiring is that Whole30 participants consistently took on these higher-order growth opportunities once the roadblock of their unhealthy diet was removed. Repeatedly, people posed this question: “I’ve changed my diet, and I feel so much better. What can I do next?” Clearing the fog caused by problematic foods allowed them to spontaneously and energetically pursue other avenues of growth and meaningful experiences.

As I knew firsthand, there isn’t just one particular change or even a series of discrete changes you can make to achieve optimum health. Living better is an ongoing and never-ending process of behavior change, all grounded in your ability to cue into your body and its rhythmic needs. What was needed, I thought, was a book that presented the larger framework for rhythmically based living, so that others could do what I did: move yourself toward better health by changing your behaviors in a way and at a pace that feels right for you.

Unlike The Whole30, which offers a highly structured, tightly constrained program for people to follow, The 4 Season Solution presents a conceptual road map to explore your own body and health… and life! It helps you rethink your health habits from an ancestral and biological standpoint so that you can then reshape them. Who knows where you’ll start—or where you’ll go—as you learn how our bodies have evolved to function, how we’re failing to effectively meet our body’s most basic needs, and how our health gets compromised as a result. One thing I do know: the more you learn, and the more you experiment, the more you’ll want to learn and experiment. That’s because this book prompts you to consult the greatest health expert of all, and one who is most routinely neglected—you. I know a lot about how human bodies work, but I don’t know what’s best for your body. That’s for you to discover and for you to champion.

Although we might have fallen out of touch with our natural rhythms, all of us intuitively know what our bodies need. We have just become habituated to ignore the urges inside us that would cue us to sleep, eat, move, and connect in certain ways at certain times of the day or year. With our intuition consistently ignored and underdeveloped, we rely almost exclusively on our rational selves—and our willpower—to adopt and stick with healthy behaviors. But willpower alone doesn’t usually help us stick with health regimens. We all have a limited supply of willpower, and all too frequently, the tank runs empty because we are using it to deal with annoying coworkers, traffic, tempting treats, and strained relationships with friends or partners. Plus, mustering up willpower all the time is hard. Your intuition is the path to a healthier, saner, happier, calmer, and more fulfilling life, all with progressively less brute effort on your part.

This is not to say that syncing your body with natural rhythms will always be easy. It won’t. If you travel every week for your job, sitting for many hours on planes or in cars, you might have some ability to pay more respect to your bodily rhythms, but ultimately, achieving better health might require that you change your life so that you travel less. If you eat pizza multiple times a week because it’s cheap and convenient, you might have to spend more on food to improve your diet. You don’t have to be independently wealthy to live a healthy life, but you do have to recalibrate how you live, as well as allocate your time and money in ways that echo your personal values in order to respect your body’s evolutionary needs. This might mean cutting back on impulsive shopping or getting a cheaper cable TV plan so that you can afford higher-quality, locally produced, organic food. Or it might mean asking your boss to adjust your work schedule seasonally so that you can more closely follow your body’s natural sleep rhythms. The point is to become more aware of your rhythms, so that you can understand the impact of your daily behaviors and make conscious decisions about how you live and the level of health you enjoy. Small, sustainable changes in your behavior lead you to better health over months, years, and ultimately, a lifetime. The key is simply to get started somewhere with an experiment of your choosing.

I’ve organized this book to make it as easy as possible to understand our premodern bodies and to try on new behaviors. The first chapter builds on the behavioral theory of health I’ve sketched out, detailing several key concepts that will help us understand our collective and problematic disconnection from our bodies. The following four chapters present my model, arguing that for optimal human health the four basic needs—sleep, food, movement, meaningful connection—must align with one another, and that they must oscillate. I’ve used the phrase “coordinate then oscillate” to succinctly express how to bring these four areas of health behaviors back into harmony with each other. Match, then move. Each of these chapters draws on the latest science to examine our bodies’ natural patterns in one of these areas. Comparing these patterns with the demands of modern life, I identify areas of mismatch and explain how they lead to dysfunction, disease, and a general feeling of being “stuck.” Chapters 6, 7, and 8 explore how our natural rhythms in the four areas interact during the course of three time periods, respectively: the day, the year, and your entire lifetime. Here I’ll help you assess where your daily habits might be going astray from your body’s needs, and I’ll suggest some behavior change experiments to try. I’ll close the book by evoking the “endgame” that long-term dedication can yield: a life of deeper peace, enrichment, and fulfillment beyond the usual bodily cravings that occupy us.

My own health has improved dramatically since I started realigning my behaviors and habits with my internal rhythms. After a decade of experimenting, I understand that my previous ways of sleeping, eating, moving, and connecting left a lot to be desired. At certain times of the year, I now spend less time exercising and more time sleeping. At all times, I eat food seasonally that helps support my exercise program. I’ve become adept at slowing down and turning inward at certain times, and accelerating and expanding outward at others. Best of all, I’ve learned to apply rhythmic principles to my social relationships. That means, for example, that I don’t throw myself headlong into “holiday party season,” since the intense stimulation of parties with coworkers or friends is at odds with our natural autumnal desire to hunker down for the coming winter, to withdraw, to rest. When healing after a painful divorce, I took solace in an extended, symbolic winter season, using it to introspect, develop my self-awareness, and restore my sapped energy.

I’ve also put sensible limits on my social media use and our always-on culture. While I maintain a large and growing social media following, and enjoy interacting with followers all over the world, I now spend more time connecting deeply with just a few close friends and family members, as well as with myself. My social way of being varies seasonally as well, with more boisterous social engagements in the summertime, and far fewer in the winter. My life is far more satisfying and, in all senses of the word, healthier.

Just as Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would imply, healthier tends to beget happier. Meeting foundational needs such as enough nourishing food and proper synchronization with intrinsic circadian rhythms allows humans to spontaneously and meaningfully address other, higher-order needs, such as those of cognitive and emotional growth, appreciation of beauty and wonderment, and inspiration to impart a legacy to future generations. That is, a sense of contribution and meaning outside one’s self. When I do choose to behave in ways that run contrary to my intuitive rhythms, which isn’t often, I make that choice consciously and purposefully, aware of both the potential benefits and known costs.

We don’t have to part with the comforts of civilization to realize the full, rich, beautiful potential of our existence. Although civilization remains starkly at odds with what we might regard as a “natural state,” most of us enjoy more latitude than we might think in acknowledging natural patterns and living in concert with them. Imagine what you might achieve if you broke free of modern life in your thinking, reexamined all of your behaviors and habits looking for those biological mismatches, and began the gradual process of tuning in to your body’s innate inclinations. Imagine how you’d grow as you came to cut through all the noise and understand what your body really wants at specific times throughout your day and year (and life). Imagine not having to run interference on your cravings and intuitions, understanding and honoring them instead of suppressing and ignoring them, or helplessly caving to them. Imagine how fulfilling it would be to experiment with small behavior tweaks—and to see sustained, quantitative results. It’s an incredible adventure, and it’s yours for the taking. The solution is upon you.

PART ONE

GETTING STUCK

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