I'm not doing enough, and I know it.

"Every time I feel the urge to exercise, I sit down until it goes away." - Mark Twain

Simply changing your diet can have a profound effect on your health.  Changing your diet, however, is simply one aspect of a true health transformation.

It's clichéd, but exercise is vital.  It's not all about the calories (yes, burning those calories is great for losing weight and replacing fat with muscle).  The body is such a complex machine.  Exercising is never as simple as burning those calories and losing weight.  Instead, your body is creating needed chemicals, performing complex reactions to make sure that you can actually exercise without fainting (or worse).  You're processing energy and eliminating waste chemicals and heat at a faster rate.

The following article gives us a little bit of perspective on the magnitude of our bodily functions:
http://www.darwinstable.com/2010/02/23/paleo-exercise-will-heal-you/

In a nutshell, even though we are one being, we are comprised of trillions of cells (not to mention trillions upon trillions of bacteria and other pathogens that live with us).  Those cells all have jobs to do--many, many different jobs.  Exercise leads to improved efficiency at doing those jobs, and you don't need an article to tell you that.  I think this is the major reason that exercise should be at the very top of our priorities.  Although it's not quite this simple, exercise is akin to oil for the machine that is your body.

Paleo stresses exercise as an absolute must.  The book I'm reading (The Paleo Solution, by Robb Wolf), at 331 pages, mentions exercise 100 times.  Here are a couple of chastising quotes from the book (pages 234-235):

"What If Things Are Not Working?
Are things going in the right direction? They should be, and if they are not, let's make the first point of evaluation one of honest self-reflection: Are you really doing the program 100 percent. Sleep, food, exercise? The folks we see who have "problems" in their blood work happen to be the same people who have "compliance issues." This stuff works, but only if you do it."

"If you are not doing the program but hoping to garner the results, this is simply not realistic."

I'll be frank--I have seen improvement, without question.  I have also seen setbacks (headaches and irritability last weekend).  Am I where I should be?  Absolutely not.  I haven't exercised properly since before I started eating differently (late December).  I've also been under extreme stress, which I'll cover in more detail later as another stumbling block to the healing the body can do.  These two issues must be addressed if I'm even to expect the magic to occur.

So I'm starting tonight--it's happening.  It must.  I wouldn't mind doing CrossFit (often goes hand-in-hand with Paleo), but I'd need to buy some equipment.  Instead, I'll most likely be hitting the gym at our apartment complex.