What if you could cook fantastic meals similar to the heartwarming comfort dishes your grandma used to make…and have them be good for you? In Paleo Comfort Foods, Charles and Julie Mayfield provide you with an arsenal of recipes that are healthy crowd-pleasers, sure to appeal to those following a paleo, primal, gluten-free, or “real-food” way of life—as well as those who have not yet started down such a path.

Implementing paleo guidelines and principles in this book (no grains, no gluten, no legumes, no dairy), the Mayfields give you 100+ recipes and full color photos with entertaining stories throughout. The recipes in Paleo Comfort Foods can help individuals and families alike lose weight, eat healthy and achieve optimum fitness, making this way of eating sustainable, tasty and fun.
 

About the Author

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As co-owner of four CrossFit affiliate gyms, Allison Wenglin Belger juggles management of the family business, her work as a licensed psychologist and fitness coach, and her role as mom to two young daughters. She knows first-hand the importance of community—of having a network of mutual support and human connection in the midst of our hectic, technology-driven lives. A former division-one collegiate soccer player and five-time marathoner, she has also been part of the wilderness adventure community and has trained for various elite athletic events, competing both individually and as part of a team.

Belger takes the reader on a journey from her childhood in suburban New York as she follows her passion for fitness and sport, with pleasures and pitfalls along the way, finding a new dimension in the CrossFit culture and its emphasis on camaraderie and community. She explains the transformative aspects of CrossFit’s physically and mentally demanding workouts as performed with others. Drawing on her psychology doctoral research, Belger describes the emotional and physical benefits of participation in an affinity group. She shares the stories of military wounded warriors and everyday heroes who have faced life-threatening illness—all with the help of their community affiliation. She relates inspiring examples of individuals who have created communities and support networks for populations in need, including underprivileged youth and cancer patients.

With her unique perspective as psychologist and athlete, the author explores the mind-body connection and how it can relate to all of us. Through her compelling narratives, each of which intersects with the CrossFit experience, Belger encourages us to examine our own lives and relationships so that we may find motivation and meaning in a world of stress and challenge—if we are open to the power of community.

Do you want to lose weight, regain your health, and achieve a level of fitness you never thought possible? Are you interested in eating the foods that our bodies are intended to eat, but have no clue where to begin? You may already be a Paleo diet enthusiast; but are you struggling to feed your family the same foods that fuel you?

In Everyday Paleo, Sarah Fragoso gives detailed instructions for acquiring a Paleo lifestyle and improving the health and longevity of your family. An active mother of three, Fragoso shows that eating Paleo is not only feasible for the busiest of families, but also easy, delicious and completely life-changing. She offers numerous recipes for all meals of the day, and provides tips for getting around common roadblocks, such as eating out. Finally, to keep your entire family fit and sane in the 21st century, she lays out easy-to-follow workout routines that you can do either in the gym or your own home. In Everyday Paleo, Fragoso shows you how to make Paleo your lifestyle, not just another fad diet.

In MUAY THAI CLINCH FOR MMA, UFC Middleweight Champion Anderson Silva reveals the clinch fighting system that propelled him towards becoming the best pound-for-pound fighter on the planet. Using detailed analysis, slow motion, multiple camera angels, and seamless editing techniques, he unveils everything from fundamental clinching concepts to advanced attacks.

In this one-of-a-kind DVD, Anderson teaches you how to destroy your opponent’s base and balance in the Muay Thai clinch, and then batter him up-close and personal with knees and elbows strikes. He teaches you how to transition from one dominant clinch position to another based upon your opponent’s reactions, allowing you to constantly maintain the upper hand. And when your opponent manages to establish the Muay Thai clinch, he not only details numerous escapes, but also how to follow up your escape with an aggressive counterattack. Leaving know stone unturned, he even breaks down the most effective drills to increase the speed, power, and timing of the Muay Thai clinch techniques in your arsenal. Whether you are a beginner martial artists or a professional MMA fighter, Muay Thai Clinch for MMA will take your game to the next level.

AVAILABLE FEBRUARY 20, 2011

Night after night I wander the streets of this city, looking for the Phin Man. He emerges only at night; this I know, but little else, and so I wander, searching.

When the sun burns down into the Chao Phraya, backlighting Wat Arun and making all the magical legends of Bangkok seem tangible, I step off a canal pier. As sleek and serpentine as a naga, lurching, roaring and trailing black curling diesel fumes, the monstrous canal boat rushes through the city, past the infamous traffic locked streets. The canal it travels on, one of the city’s few remaining, was built under terrible conditions by prisoners captured in expansionist wars in the south a century and more ago. Their ancestors still live in the canal-side slums, beneath the shadows of their mosques. Saan Sab canal was built to marshal Thai armies quickly from one side of the capital to the other, when Bangkok was still surrounded by enemies. Now, the canal only ferries tired workers on their way into or out of the business core of the city.

Under a pastel pink and purple evening sky, I step into the crush of Siam square. Here beneath the missile shaped sky-train and the garish lights of the giant cinema marquees, in this resonating concrete amphitheater, pace the crowds. Businessmen at the end of their day, carrying their coats and releasing the top button of their shirts, squeeze past pitiful beggars carrying dying babies. University girls with short black skirts tiptoe on high heels past mounds of garbage, chattering on phones worth a couple month’s average wage. Vendors cook skewers of fish balls, pork balls and stinking dried squid over small charcoal grills, and the odd Ferrari guns it’s motor helplessly in the gridlock a few feet away.

Yet, there is no Phin Man here. Not tonight.

I grab a coffee and ascend the skywalk to survey the crowds below; squinting, looking for the Phin Man, this musical phantasm. I have seen him before, so I know he exists. When I lived here, I would encounter him fleetingly; from the street, through the open window of an ancient city bus, I would sometimes hear him. Walking through the densest crowds, bent with age and a head shorter than those around him, the Phin Man sometimes would suddenly appear.

In those days I never thought much of him. The Phin, the three stringed instrument he plays, can be compared to nothing else I have ever heard. The music seems so incongruous beneath the air conditioned skyscrapers of Bangkok, this sinking city, but if you have a look at the Phin Man, it all makes sense.

Chewing blood red betel nut, he wears threadbare provincial clothes and has dark, leathery skin, a stooped posture, testament to a life spent in the rice fields. That he now brings this antiquated instrument to the city to scrape a living from the generosity of modern Thais who turn toward the future more than the agricultural past, likely means he has lost his old rice farm.

Now that I am here again in Bangkok, equipped with the latest technology to shoot a documentary film about an old Thai and Burmese feud, I know that no music can so properly bring to life the story I want to tell as can that of the Phin Man.

When the night is mature, I walk up Sukhumvit road to Nana. Nana is the Bangkok of popular culture; a hedonistic, exotic capital of base desires. Indian touts pull at my sleeves, offering curries or tailored suits as I wander through the small sois, dark but for the gaudy neon overhead, reflected in shiny pink puddles on the otherwise pitch black ground. Sidewalk shop stalls offer lubricants, souvenir t-shirts and cheap chromed over brass knuckles and throwing stars. Apple scented hookah smoke lingers around Lebanese restaurant verandahs. Arab women, swathed in yards of black linen stride by Thai and African and Ukrainian girls in the shortest of minis, their cleavage pushed up over low cut tops. A group of quiet Africans watch, half concealed in a darkened stairwell, as fat white tourists trundle carelessly by, beers in hand, intoxicated by the open door glimpses of writhing naked women.

I also watch. I watch the crowd just like everyone else, because everyone is looking for something here. I find an old man much like the Phin Man, only this old man plays the Saw, an instrument something like a violin made by a crafty fisherman of bamboo and hemp. The Saw produces haunting music, but it won’t do. It doesn’t have the same strength as the Phin.

I ask the motorcycle taxi drivers if they know the Phin Man. They know everything there is to know here; they will happily take you to an air conditioned brothel to pick girls from behind one way glass like in a police show. They will also find Yabaa, the cheap amphetamine of Bangkok, a cheap suit, or a rundown hotel, they are often rumored to execute certain problem people, for people with problems, but the Phin Man eludes even these steely urban creatures.

I continue to search. Up and down Sukhumvit Road I find country relics like elephants and poor farmer’s daughters misplaced in the city. Never do I find the Phin man again. On Sunday I will go to Chatuchak market, the weekend market, as one bemused driver suggested. I will ask around until, hopefully, I find the Phin Man, and I will ask him to play his old songs for my cutting edge microphones.

“Life’s not fair”. I can’t count the number of times I heard that growing up. It was my mom’s favorite colloquialism, right after “shit in one hand and wish in the other, see which fills up first”. Or maybe “shit and Two’s Eight”….. My mother had a filthy fucking mouth. But at least most of what she said makes sense (still have no clue how shit and two somehow equal eight). I remember at 6 years old immediately understanding the gravity of shitting in one hand whilst simultaneously wishing into the other. Even as a dumb ass little kid, I understood right away that if I squatted over my hand and released my bowels, that hand would immediately fill up. Filled up with greasy, oily, putrid, dark brown baby shit. The kind of shit you take when 88% of your total daily caloric intake comes from gummy bears, Tootsie Rolls, and mountain dew. BUT at the same time, I understood equally well that I could close my eyes and wish for toy cars until the cows came home, and that hand would always come up empty. Probably a good thing since now my other hand is full of shit, and I’m going to need to do some major cleaning.

So I got it. Great life lesson for a toddler. Nothing gets accomplished by wishing. But what about “life’s not Fair”. I thought life was fair. Back then everything seemed fair to me. At school each kid would have to read aloud in class, in order, to spread the misery around to all students equally. Me and my brother got the same cash payout for cutting the grass. All was well in my baby faced, snot nosed, rug rat world. It didn’t click until I became an adult. All the great things in my life were due to some unforeseen bias acting upon me in favorable ways. I had good parents who taught me values (unfair, most kids are raised now by Sesame Street and the Tele-tubbies). I went to a decent school, with teachers who actually taught (unfair, some teachers do this instead of teaching) and I was born in America (still a pretty good place to grow up).

OK so I graduate high-school, and then I finally get it. Now I’m an adult, and I realize life isn’t fair. So what to do? Give up? Try harder? NO, I know……I’ll ask someone else to try to make things fair for me! How could that go wrong? So at 17 I got a nice union job doing manual labor, and I paid the Teamster’s Labor Union $30 a month to make sure that I got treated fairly. They’re fighting for the little guy, making sure everyone gets a equal treatment. Just ask, they’ll tell you. And boy were they right. Everyone got equal treatment, regardless of whether they deserved it or not. I fondly remember comparing productivity numbers with my senior co-worker, and we determined I was 4 times faster at the same job, despite him having been in the position for over 20 years. So what’s fair? Should I get paid 4 times more than my lazy ass friend? NO actually, HE got paid 4 times more than me. I was 16 times more productive than him, and due to his 20 years worth of fairness, in a recession I would get laid off before him. Awesome.

So what the hell is fairness then? Is a race only fair if everyone starts at the same point, or finishes at the same point? Unfortunately neither situation is practical. I could train sprints for the rest of my life and never beat Usain Bolt in a 100M race. Even if we both start on the starting line, he’s starting miles ahead of me in terms of awesome sprinter genetics. Does that mean the only logical solution is for me to lobby the race organizers and attempt to get a head-start? This seems to be the trend? Seven states just passed minimum wage increases. The politicians and voters alike claimed it was in the interest of fairness. Unfortunately those who aren’t able to vote must not be entitled to fairness, as rising minimum wages has wiped out hundreds of thousands of teenager jobs, despite the fact only 3% of workers over 25 make minimum wage. Where do those jobs go? China I’m guessing, or to our future overlords, super-smart computer/machine hybrids. I haven’t seen a 16 year old cashier at the grocery store in years. Mostly I just go through self-check. Or you could point to the recent FCC ruling that now makes the internet more fair and neutral (as if the internet weren’t great enough already), despite the fact that it’s almost certainly going to make internet access more expensive for the average user, despite having questionable or no-effect on internet neutrality.

So now I finally get it. Life isn’t fair. There will always be winners and losers. This is called competition. Most of us think it’s great when Georges St. Pierre dominates the next possible contender. It’s fun to watch, and it forces the other fighters to train harder in hopes of besting GSP. But none of us get our panties in a bunch about the loser. He loses, so what? We don’t require GSP to wear a weight vest to make things more fair. We say tough shit Fitch, train harder and try again or you’ll get cut from the UFC. And that’s OK too. Because one time losers always end up bouncing back and becoming eventual winners. Fitch has had some great fights, made a lot of money, and will undoubtedly have a great career, both peri and post-UFC, despite his loss to St. Pierre.

I realize too now that even as a child, the things I thought were fair, weren’t even remotely equitable. The slowest readers in class had to read one paragraph, just like me. Except it took them six times longer, thus prolonging their humiliation. And even cutting the lawn was bullshit. My brother and I both got paid five bucks, despite him being more athletic and physical than I. It took him half an hour, and it took me a fucking week to cut the grass. Did I mention we had a push mower when I was kid. Ya, a fucking push mower, like they had in the roaring ’20′s.

My little 60 pound body pushing a rusty ass 30 pound lawn mower uphill, dodging dog shit, avoiding the patches of bare dirt in our decrepit, neglected front yard. Ugh it was awful….and I got $5 for it. But I’d do it anyways, because I’d rather have the $5 than $0. Honestly I would have paid $5 just to prevent my brother from getting any money. I’d fight tooth and nail just to get an slight advantage over my siblings.

Real life is a lot like that too. People should compete and reap the benefits and downfalls of their own hard work (or lack thereof). Just like Jon Fitch’s one time loss to the best fighter on earth is somewhat of an afterthought now. One time losers eventually morph into long term winners with proper persistence and motivation. As long as everyone is ACTUALLY starting from the same spot, even the slowest person will still eventually finish the race. I can deal with that, even if it means I personally am going to end up in the middle of the pack. After-all, that’s only fair.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMNBXxW2l4Q

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvVWdU12zAc

As a journalist, I have met a variety of people. Each person I have met has a unique story, a story much more interesting than mine will ever be. That’s why I love being a journalist; I get to hear and share these stories. Many of my favorite stories are in The Cauliflower Chronicles, but the publishing of that book has led to more.

Which is why I want to tell you about Jon and Katie.

After reading my book, Jon added me on Facebook to tell me that he enjoyed it. I clicked to his profile to make a reply post on his wall and noticed that he listed a blog just below his picture. I loaded the blog out of curiosity. What I read felt like a punch in the stomach. The title of the blog: “For My Katie.”

I am a man made of words, and suddenly I had none, which feels a bit like stepping into the cage with your arms taped behind your back. You’re defenseless. You take every shot on the chin. So I kept reading, each sentence another blow.

Katie passed away on March 27 from a cerebral aneurysm. She was 24. Jon considered her to be his soul mate, and he maintains the blog as a tribute to her brief but beautiful life. The blog is filled with essays—memories scrawled as though in the fog of a dream—and photographs—of Katie and of her letters and of her artwork. Jon is like us. He is a fighter. I suspect that his writing is therapeutic—his way of fighting through—but more than anything, I think that he writes so that he can remember. As I read, I realize that Jon is more of a fighter than I will be. He has been in that cage with his arms behind his back since March 27.

In one of his messages to me, Jon wrote, “No one and I really mean no one has been able to really reach out to me and help put what I’ve been through this year into perspective the way your book did.”

That was the greatest compliment for my work I could ever receive. I’m not sure how it did, but I am happy that reading my book softened at least one of those blows. I urge you to read Jon’s blog. Maybe you sharing Katie’s memory will make some of the future blows easier, at least a little bit.

Jon’s blog: http://formykatie.blogspot.com/

“There’s a ghost that comes at night” F told Glen and I. Camped out on the twins’ floor, we were awoken almost every night by wolfish howling. The house pack was rallying, howling at the moon, at a nighttime intruder, or at a ghost.

Outside Hua Hin city limits begins a low, hot scrubland studded here and there with temple topped limestone hills. Long ago, before man changed the face of this simmering junglescape, the lush foliage hid elephants, water buffalo, cobra, leopard and tiger. From India through Southeast Asia, the rich diversity of the African Savannah met the particular morphology of Asia.

Those days, alas, are gone. A few wild elephants do still roam Thailand, but conflicts with farmers and highways have seriously imperiled them. Even fewer wild tigers survive, though there are captive tigers “farmed” for superstitious Chinese “medicine”. As housing developments go up and jungle is cut away, Cobras do find their way into human habitation, with predictable results. The water buffalo are all chained up.

Now the scrubland is roamed by huge, humped Brahma cows and each and every scrap of land is jealously guarded by packs of feral dogs. Down the dirt road leading to where O and F live there are two such ravening packs. Territories, though invisible, are well known and though the neighbor pack will nip your legs as you ride in on a motorbike or as you run, they stop some ten yards before the Gym pack’s turf begins.

Always hungry, the pack maintained a rigid structure of dominance. For luck and to satisfy the Buddhas, the twins would feed the dogs, the challenge being keeping the alpha busy long enough to feed the others and avoid fights. Over time, the dogs came to know Glen and I, and to defend us from the neighbor pack, but the reason for the howling was a mystery unresolved. Until I asked F.

“It’s a ghost I think” said he, “But I don’t know because when they howl I pull my blanket over my head…whatever they see, I don’t want to.”

Over the last two years, I have visited high schools in the Pittsburgh area to talk about writing. English teachers like it because I can show students that writing and reading are not as dull and useless as reading the Scarlett Letter and writing a response essay has lead them to believe. The kids like it because they get to not have English class for a day. I like it because 15 year olds always seem to laugh at my jokes.

While I certainly hope that students learn something from my brief visit or are inspired to pursue writing as a career, I suspect that I learn more from the experience than they do, which is unfair, I know, because I already get to check my cell phone and use the restroom without asking permission. Since my policy is the same no matter where or what I am presenting, whether I am talking to middle or high school students about careers in writing or I am giving a seminar on publishing to college students, I am often answering unusual questions. That policy is: if you’re brave enough to ask it, I am brave enough to answer it, so be bold.

The questions range from off-the-wall—Have you ever been arrested? No.—to the vaguely related—How long could you last against Brock Lesnar? How much space do I have to run?—to the sincerely honest—What if you failed? What if your dream never came true?

That last one knocked me on my ass.

What if I had spent the rest of my life talking about my manuscript, my book that I one day wanted to get published, but never actually did? I know writers like this. They have written a novel, their masterpiece that they spent a lifetime crafting, but the chances of it ever being published are slim because it is either not the great, it’s not done and never will be, or out of sheer bad luck the right people never take a chance on it. As I considered my answer, trying to imagine where I might be in 40 years if I had never published The Cauliflower Chronicles, I looked at the young, awkward faces staring up at me from their desks. It occurred to me that every kid in the room had a dream, a hope for their future selves. And some of them, a lot of them, might never see their dreams realized, even if they worked as hard as possible. Bad luck alone could derail them.

“It’s hard to imagine something like that,” I said. “I would be pretty sad probably, but I think that I could be okay with it as long as I knew that I did everything within my power to succeed. If I got to my death bed and could think of a point in my life where I didn’t try my hardest or I wasted an opportunity, I would have regrets, very serious regrets, but if I knew that I tried everything and kept fighting until the very end, I couldn’t regret failing. At least I would know that I went down swinging, and that I gave it my all.”

For a moment, the class was quiet. I felt like I had been pretty profound just then. The girl that had asked the question nodded slowly. The weight of what I had said was sinking in. She was probably dreaming of becoming President or of curing Jersey Shore disease. She was inspired.

Another hand shot up. “Will you choke me out?” a student asked. “I want to know what it feels like.”

With that question, the moment—if there was every actually a moment at all because moments are very hard to capture and define without clever editing and a touching soundtrack—was gone. For me, however, the question lingered. If a few circumstances were different, I may have never had the opportunity to write for Victory Belt. Hell, it is by sheer chance alone that I was born in a place where having a public education is a given. I could very well have been born into third world poverty where I would have grown up barefoot, digging through trash to feed myself and my family until malaria inevitably strikes. To have a dream is easy, but to have the opportunity to reach for a dream is a blessing.

I never want to have kids because I can only handle pondering and answering these sorts of questions once a year. If I had some ankle-biter following me around, he would be asking me about the nature of the universe and the meaning of life every damn day. And he would probably beat me at Battlefield: Bad Company. No, thank you.