My Story

Hi there! My name is Carl Ekholm and I’m the creator of Ecological Fitness. I’m a level 2 MovNat Certified Trainer, a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Anthropology, and I’m generally obsessed with nature, health, and the intersection of the two. That's me in a nutshell, but if you're interested in hearing more of my journey, read on.

Natural Curiosity

Growing up, I always loved animals and nature. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of my neighbors and I running around our neighborhood playing, especially in the woods. We made a fort in the bushes near my house where we spent countless hours running, crawling, climbing and playing. The world-- or at least the woods and rocky coastline near our houses-- was our playground, and it was awesome.

I've always loved watching wild animals move around the Earth. The way they traverse the land, air, and water is so smooth and seemingly effortless. It just seems so “right” to me. By comparison, I grew up seeing lots of people who had trouble moving around even flat surfaces, and drove cars which ran over innocent animals whom I so deeply loved. I was profoundly disturbed by the the relationship most people had with the Earth and their fellow inhabitants from a very early age, but I frankly had no clue what to do about it for a long time.

Naturally, I was curious about traditional Native American people and their way of living so much closer to nature. In 2010, this led me to reading Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, initially because of the first-hand accounts of a group of Native Americans called the Tarahumara that dwell in the Copper Canyons of Mexico. The focus of the book was the author’s quest to find a way to run that doesn’t result in chronic pain and injuries as he and many people experience. The Tarahumara (“the running people”) regularly run long distances (they have an annual 100-mile race in their rugged mountain home) in a very basic pair of running sandals made from old tires. Through their wisdom and the help of others, the author was able to learn their method of running that was safe and efficient, even for someone of a larger build like him. This book inspired me to start running barefoot or in minimalist running shoes/sandals which I quickly fell in love with. Barefoot trail running rekindled my love for movement, and segued into taking up rock climbing, slacklining, and eventually, natural movement which tied everything together.

One day I found myself at Barefoot Ted’s blog (he was a person featured in the book), where he mentioned that he was going to attend a MovNat workshop to learn some of the other ways that humans can move naturally besides running. This intrigued me, so I hopped over to MovNat’s website to learn more. I watched some of the videos featured on the website (“The Workout the World Forgot”, “True To Your Nature”) of the founder moving over a natural landscape seemingly effortlessly. He crawled under bushes, rocks, or up a steep cliff. Ran barefoot, climbed tall trees, jumped from boulder to boulder. Lifted and carried rocks and logs over land and water. Swam in the waves and deep into the depths. It was the closest thing I had ever seen to a person moving as well as wild animals in a natural environment. Something immediately clicked with me when I saw these videos, and I knew this was something I really wanted to try.

Soon after I was regularly venturing out into the woods by my apartment to run barefoot, lift and carry logs/rocks, crawl, climb, balance, and anything else I could think of, going off what I saw MovNat’s founder doing in the videos. To me, it was the perfect way to cultivate a meaningful connection to nature, become stronger, more physically capable, healthier, and as an unexpected added bonus, much more confident. I was hooked.

I had been tinkering with my diet when I came across MovNat, and was leaning toward vegetarianism until I stumbled upon another gem on MovNat’s website. There was a short list of books that were recommended to read, one of which was The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf. Soon after, I bought a copy and quickly devoured it, which marked another game-changing milestone on my journey toward health and connection to nature.

I was never really sold on the vegetarian diet, but for a while it seemed like it was the healthiest choice. However, upon reading about diet from an evolutionary perspective as it was presented in Wolf’s book, I had another epiphany that this was the way I should be eating for optimal health. I was raised to view the world from a very scientific perspective, with my dad being a physicist, and neither of my parents being church-goers. Due to that, viewing diet and health in general from an evolutionary framework made so much sense to me. Suddenly it felt like I was given two very powerful keys to health and happiness; a way of moving and eating based on our natural heritage. I dove in head-first.

It was always a struggle for me to build muscle throughout my life. I was very skinny for my entire upbringing, and not for lack of access to food. This was something I was very self-conscious about as a guy, especially in our society where there is a perception that the ideal male is strong and muscular. Even though I had been rock climbing, running, and doing yoga regularly up to this point, putting on any muscle was a real challenge for me. Once I started eating “paleo” (the Latin word for “old”, referring to the Paleolithic “Old Stone-Age” Era of human pre-history) and practicing MovNat, I very quickly gained weight pretty much entirely in the form of fascia/muscle. You read that correctly; I gained weight after I started following the Paleo diet. This usually isn’t the case for most people who switch to the Paleo diet, but for people with my genes it is. My body wasn’t handling all the grains and processed foods that I’d been giving it for years very well, and when I cut all that out and finally ate substantially more meats and healthy fats along with nutrient-dense vegetables, I very quickly got a lot stronger, more flexible and mobile, had loads more energy, and my mind felt much clearer. It was another profound “ah-ha!” moment for me, that, combined with MovNat, profoundly changed my life for the better in a fairly short amount of time.

Formal Education

Fast-forward to August 2012 when I was fortunate enough to be able to attend one of the first MovNat Certification Workshops in Woburn, MA. I learned a ton during the short duration of the workshop, which greatly expanded upon my Natural Movement practice that I had been developing over the last few years. The MovNat method that Erwan Le Corre developed for practicing Natural Movement is incredibly effective, intuitive, progressive and scalable for all levels. The knowledge I gained from the workshop was the very important missing piece of the puzzle for my Natural Movement practice, that I never could have learned solely on my own, or certainly not in such a short amount of time. Initially, I attended the workshop to expand upon my own personal practice, and didn't plan to teach immediately, especially as I was still finishing up at the University.

One summer I signed up for an apprenticeship at the Maine Primitive Skills School in Augusta, which I didn't realize at the time would profoundly change my perspective of the natural world and our place within it. They teach survival skills and nature-based knowledge there such as tracking, foraging for food and water off the landscape, shelter construction, friction fire methods, nature awareness, philosophy and much more. I spent most of that summer sleeping and living outside, and learning many different ways to engage with the natural world that I never thought were possible. The school is run by Mike Douglass (and a few other instructors) who studied and worked with Tom Brown, Jr., founder of the Tracker School in New Jersey. Tom had a rather unique upbringing in which he was mentored by an Apache tracker, scout, and medicine man called Grandfather Stalking Wolf. Stalking Wolf lived an almost impossible to imagine existence nowadays in that he never spent money or drove a car, and literally walked everywhere he needed to go. He hunted and gathered all of his own food, and traveled nearly everywhere in North, Central, and South America, visiting with local tribes to learn their perspectives in order to discover the "pure and simple truths" common to all of humanity, particularly in regards to the Spirit, but in other ways, too. He synthesized these pure and simple truths into a philosophy which he passed down to Tom, who in turn started the Tracker School and has passed on this incredibly important knowledge to countless thousands over the years. It's difficult to put into words how my experience at MPSS and the knowledge Stalking Wolf passed on has changed me, but the closest I can say is that I finally have a very real sense of purpose and connection to the Earth, nature, and the Spirit, but also to humanity.

The more I learned about health, the more I came to realize that there isn't one aspect that's more important on its own than others, but rather it's the culmination of multiple factors that result in optimal health. For example, I felt that my personal nutritional journey was just as transformative for me as my movement practice, as well as quality sleep, time spent in nature and with loved ones. For this reason, I decided to enroll in the Nutritional Therapy Practitioner program offered through the Nutritional Therapy Association in September 2017. I wanted a formal education on nutrition to improve my own diet, but I also wanted to be more effective at helping others improve theirs. It turned out that the NTP program was the perfect choice, as it is incredibly thorough and has highly effective tools for determining a person's optimal diet such as the Functional Evaluation, which was quite different from the one-size-fits-all approach that the Paleo Diet offered. I had known for some time that an ideal diet for one person may not be the case for another, but this concept only became much more evident to me after studying to become an NTP, where I learned just how important the bio-individuality of each person actually is. It was a truly enlightening and profound experience for me, and I can't recommend the NTP program enough to anyone who wants to learn more about nutrition.

Out of the Darkness Comes the Light

Like many people who get very interested in health these days, I had my share of health struggles before I started down this path. I didn't want to begin my story with this, so I'm putting it here, but it very much influenced the rest of my journey.

My dad was diagnosed with Melanoma when he was 33, and fought it on and off for the rest of his life until his passing at 56 when I was 20. Obviously, growing up with a dad who was battling a terminal illness had a profound impact on me. I don’t remember a time when my dad was completely healthy. There were some years when it was in remission, and he regained a lot of his health and happiness, but it never lasted long before another tumor would pop up somewhere. He went through many surgeries and a variety of pharmaceuticals in an effort to cure his disease. Ultimately, none of them worked for long.

Being a physicist and atheist, he put all of his faith in science and therefore the medical doctors that he met with. We even moved from New Jersey to southern Maine so that he could be close to Boston, where some of the best hospitals and doctors in the world are, to get what he thought would be the best treatment he could have. He had to retire very early from his job at Bell Labs, which he had spent so much of us life working toward, because of his diagnosis. I didn't put it together for a few years after he passed, but the primary treatment he received from his doctors was pharmaceuticals and surgeries, and very little if any in the way of nutritional or lifestyle therapies. It of course didn't help that I was told by my mom that he wanted nothing to do with any dietary or “alternative medicine” approaches to therapy, and kept trying new and more dangerous pharmaceutical drugs that poisoned him terribly in an effort to kill the cancer. It was very difficult to bear witness to.

I don't mean to imply that conventional medical doctors aren't incredibly important, but since their approach is almost always focused on treating the symptoms, often relying heavily on pharmaceuticals for this, they're often missing a very large part of the health picture, especially when it comes to chronic illnesses. For example, the average time spent on nutrition in the 4 years of medical school is about 5 hours, if you can believe that. The highly reputable doctors my dad went to didn't mention anything about dietary changes, or any other lifestyle factors that we now know have a strong influence on health, even though he was battling his illness for many years. Instead, they offered various pharmaceutical options, sometimes very new and largely untested, that often made him sicker than the cancer seemed to, or surgery to remove tumors or body parts that were heavily infected. This is where Nutritional Therapists and other healthcare practitioners who practice functional medicine who deal with addressing the root cause such as lifestyle factors could be tremendously beneficial. They can serve to compliment the medical doctors' therapies by filling in the gaps that most doctors either don't have time to focus on, or simply aren't knowledgeable about, such as nutrition, movement, sleep quality, circadian rhythm and other lifestyle factors.

One thing I learned during my Nutritional Therapy Practitioner course is that cancer never just “happens” out of nowhere. Cancer cells are actually present in our bodies at all times, but our immune systems are generally able to keep them in check, so that they don’t pose any real threat. However, when the immune system is compromised, such as from prolonged exposure to toxins which continually occupy its attention/resources and prevent it from being able to address other threats, like cancer, this can eventually create an environment in the body where a disease can take hold, such as melanoma.

It’s pointless to try to determine exactly why the disease developed, but needless to say his prolonged suffering and eventual death in 2008 dramatically changed how I viewed health and life in general. My dad always blamed it on a single bad sunburn he remembered getting as a kid, along with his genetic predisposition. After his diagnosis, he avoided the sun like the plague. Knowing what we know now about the crucial importance of vitamin D (not to mention all the other phytonutrients we get from the sun that there isn’t a ton of research about yet), particularly for immune and skin health, I think this was a tragic mistake.

In addition to my dad's health issues, I personally suffered from a few issues of my own. Aside from breaking both of my wrists at different times, both involving jumping over ramps in my driveway when I was little... I also got a stress-fracture on my upper left tibia during my sophomore year of high school. It happened when I was out running with the cross-country team one day of pre-season. After 2 weeks of being told it was just shinsplints by the school's athletic nurse, I went to get an x-ray and quickly learned it was a fracture. When I told the doctor I'd been attempting to run despite being injured, per the school nurse's instructions, he said "Wow, that must have hurt a lot!" He was right about that!

I ended up taking a few weeks off to let it heal, and also went to see an orthopedic doctor who prescribed me custom orthotics to counteract my collapsing arches, which, after my feet callused over after getting very large blisters on the arches of my feet from running with the orthotics, enabled me to keep running throughout the rest of high school. It wasn't until I was in college and I came across Christopher McDougall's book Born to Run that I learned that my feet and lower legs were weakened after years of wearing highly supportive footwear, similar to being in a cast, which resulted in my arches collapsing. This, combined with running countless miles on hard pavement in very thick soled running shoes, in the conventional method of "heal-striking"-- where the heal of the foot hits the ground first, as opposed to the ball of the foot as is done in "minimalist" or "efficient running" technique-- before quickly transitioning to the whole foot, resulted in the fracture in my tibia. More recently, I learned that my diet wasn't highly supportive of strong bone health, with the abundance of processed foods that I ate growing up, which undoubtedly played a role in this injury, too. This was one of the first major lessons where I learned that acting out of accordance with our biology often leads to disastrous consequences to our health and well-being.

I also managed to pick up a couple of injuries in quick succession the summer after my dad passed away. The first was a bad sprain of my right ankle, which the doctor described as such: “with a sprain this bad it’s almost better to have broken it instead.” A couple of weeks after the sprain I hyper-extended my left knee to the point where it swelled up like a grapefruit in a very short amount of time. Both instances were the result of basically being young and stupid, and I’ll spare myself humiliation by withholding the details. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t respecting my body or my health in general. This happened early on in the summer, and I spent the next few months unable to do a lot of my favorite summer activities.

Whether it was sheer luck or some other force, not long after my latest injuries, I came across highly effective natural remedies which not only helped heal, but actually strengthening the injured areas. The regular practice of Natural Movement through the MovNat method, combined with eating a nutrient-dense diet properly suited to my own bioindividuality made this possible. Obviously there were other lifestyle factors that contributed greatly to my improved health, such as sleep quality, sunlight exposure, nature connection, etc., but Natural Movement and diet most likely played the greatest role in my recovery and ultimately allowing me to thrive.

Giving Back

Now comes the time when I give back by helping other people achieve their optimal health--which ought to be everyone's birthright--through movement/exercise, nutritional therapy, nature connection, and other lifestyle factors based on our natural heritage.