Paleo Diet Blog

From Tonic.com:

Swimming, healthy living and being a great mother are all things this Olympian knows very well.

Amanda Beard began her Olympic swimming career at the 1996 Atlanta games (at age 14!), winning three medals (two silver, one Gold). As a four-time Olympian she’s won seven medals and looking for more as she trains for the 2012 games. But being under the microscope at such a young age isn’t always a great thing as Amanda shared the ups-and-downs swimming with the New York Times yesterday. But regardless of previous expectations, Amanda has managed to do it all — whether it’s been her broadcast career, spread in Playboy, or anti-fur campaign for PETA, Amanda is a super-athlete — and now a super-mom.

MindBodyGreen: How is your training and preparation different for the 2012 Olympics than your other Olympics?

Amanda Beard: My schedule is 100 times more hectic then ever. With my son occupying every free second. That changes everything! My training is a lot more intense in and out of the water then it has been in years. I am lifting a lot more then I ever have. I also just started doing a lot of kettle bell work. My pool workouts are pretty similar to what I’ve always done but I only do one pool workout a day now instead of two.

MBG: How did you lose weight after giving birth?

AB: It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve done in awhile. I’ve never had to lose weight before, but I put myself on a strict paleo diet and workout everyday.

MBG: How has becoming a mom changed your attitude about food?

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A typical paleo meal could include grilled chicken with a salt-free herb dry rub, grilled fennel brushed with olive oil and grilled halibut.

From The Press of Atlantic City:

Our Stone Age ancestors lived in an uncomfortable world, spending their 30-year life spans hunting and gathering without air conditioning or heat.

But some say cave men ate better than we do.

That’s the premise behind the Paleo diet, a health and weight-loss trend that encourages people to eat modern-day versions of Paleolithic food.

Several weeks ago, one group of health-conscious Californians took on the Paleo diet and planned to spend nine weeks eating like cave men. That means consuming only animals, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and mushrooms, said Rick Larson, co-owner of CrossFit West Sacramento, the gym running the challenge.

“A lot of people at our gym were getting good workout results, but I knew they weren’t supporting it with their diets,” Larson said. Because other gyms in the CrossFit family have had success with the Paleo diet, Larson decided to test it at his gym. Fifteen people took the bait.

Like any diet, the hardest thing about the Paleo diet is what you can’t eat.

Out is anything humans began eating after the agriculture and animal husbandry revolutions, meaning no dairy, beans, grains or starches and absolutely nothing processed.

“If you can’t eat it raw, then you shouldn’t consume it,” Larson said. (Although, since our Paleolithic ancestors did have fire, cooking food is permissible.)

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From The Globe and Mail:

Six weeks ago, I would have smashed you over the head with a club and dragged you by the hair into a cave if it meant I could eat a chocolate bar. Don’t even ask what I would have done for a bowl of ice cream.

I had been warned that the first two weeks of the Paleo diet would leave me feeling, shall we say, sub-optimal.

“You’re going to feel like shit,” said Dhani Oks, director of programming at Academy of Lions/CrossFit Gyms in Toronto.

He was right.

Two weeks into eating like our Paleolithic ancestors, a diet that the body takes time to adjust to, I was feeling terrible. There were headaches. There was a general feeling of ickiness. There was a lack of energy. There was a G.I. incident it’s best we not talk about.

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Caveman

From A Sweet Life:

No one would argue that actually living in conditions similar to a caveman’s would be beneficial for health, since lack of shelter, illness, injuries and predators led to relatively short life spans (approximately 30 years) for early man. What the cavemen ate, however, known today as the Paleolithic diet, was very beneficial for health.  It was, in fact, exactly what the human body was designed to eat.  The Paleolithic diet can provide anyone with a healthful eating plan, and holds special promise for diabetics.  I have type 1 diabetes, and for several years I’ve been experiencing its benefits.

What is the Paleolithic diet?

The Paleolithic diet categorizes food into two groups, in and out.

In foods are foods that humans ate prior to agriculture and animal husbandry (meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, tree nuts, vegetables, roots, fruit, berries, mushrooms, etc).  Out, or Neolithic Era foods, are foods that resulted from agriculture or animal husbandry.

This sweeping cut removes a vast quantity of the foods we eat on a daily basis, most notably grains (including pasta and bread), dairy and refined sugars.

The question you are probably asking is why would someone eat this way?

The answer is multi-fold. Many who eat in this manner extol the virtue of “removing the toxins” from their highly processed diets. Others speak of truly “getting back to their roots” in a way unlike any other. The most fundamental reason to consider eating a Paleolithic diet has to due with evolution.

Early man was limited in his ability to eat many of the items in the aforementioned out list because they are inedible in their raw state. Then a wondrous discovery took place – fire.  And with fire, previously inedible foods became palatable.  Then, about 10,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution took place.  At this juncture, our current grain-based diet came to be.  And with time came the modern staples such as flour, bread, noodles and pasta, but the human body was unprepared for such things.

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Here is an interesting article discussing the connection between being paleo, and being a libertarian.

From LewRockwell.com:

As a libertarian who discovered the paleo approach to health a couple of years ago, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find a solid contingent of libertarians in the paleo community. I’ve come to call such people paleo-libertarians (the hyphen distinguishes us from the paleolibertarians). Some of the big names in the paleo movement are principled anti-statists, including Kurt Harris,Richard Nikoley, and Don Matesz. Paleo is rapidly gaining popularity, and there are a growing number of paleo-libertarians.

Paleos Against the State

In fact, the paleo health community is astonishingly libertarian, if only unconsciously so. Of course, there are many statists, but the libertarian presence is disproportionately large. Paleos generally reserve a special hatred for the state. After all, the state and its allies in academia and industry are spreading deadly health advice that is responsible for the bulk of disease and obesity, and it continues to do so in the face of a growing mountain of evidence contradicting it. It should have been obvious from the start that the conventional wisdom was bogus – it totally contradicts evolutionary biology. The conventional recommendation to avoid red meat and animal fat, for example, flies in the face of over 2 million years of evolutionary adaptation to eating animals (the whole animal, including all of the fat). The recommendations to eat grains and vegetable oils are also suspect – grains were only introduced into the human diet about 10,000 years ago, and vegetable oils haven’t even existed for more than a century. The state’s health advice is not only wrong, but directly harmful to health. That makes the state responsible for an unfathomable amount of misery and death. For paleos, this elicits a deep mistrust in the state – how can they trust that the state doesn’t screw up this badly in anything else it does?

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From WBUR.org:

The word “Paleolithic” might evoke images from the 1980s film “Quest for Fire” — or, more recently, the scruffy cavemen in those Geico commercials. But Nate Rosenberg says going back in time to eat like a Neanderthal doesn’t make him one.

“It’s obviously not a reenactment of Paleolithic life,” Rosenberg says.

The 27-year-old foraged through his contemporary kitchen in the cute Somerville apartment he shares with his Paleo partner Michal Naisteter.

“We eat modern foods,” he says. “In the Paleolithic era they did not have ground beef or, you know, dried oregano from Whole Foods and stuff life that, which we benefit from. But we try keep in mind our evolutionary history.”

Added Naisteter: “I eat fish, I eat eggs, I eat vegetables and I eat berries and nuts.”

Naisteter and Rosenberg are part of an international fitness and nutrition movement known as “ancestral health.” The theory is that while the food humans eat has evolved and gone “high-tech” through the ages, our bodies have not. Primal eating is pre-agricultural. “Going Paleo” means no processed foods, no sugar, no whole grains, legumes or dairy. But they eat lots of meat. Naisteter gave me a tour of their fridge.

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From the Huffington Post:

Food is the newest “It-girl”, the topic du jour. Our First Lady is emphasizing it, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is advocating its safety, and Jamie Oliver is conducting a revolution in its name!  But many people have a complicated relationship with food. Mine can be characterized as a bipolar, love-hate hybrid that was destructive for some time before it became productive.

I grew up as a competitive figure skater. One of my earliest memories was being surprised by my first “weigh-in.” Several young girls all under age twelve were lined up single-file. Nerves ate up what little oatmeal I had that morning, as I shuttered from the cold, hoping that I would not be publicly humiliated by the graying coach standing at the scale. That day, I had not gained but I watched my friend eviscerated for an invisible five pounds. In later months, I would catch her trying to purge her food in the public ice arena bathroom.

Incessant dieting and food anxiety became a part of my identity as I honed my sport. One of my coaches impressed a cabbage soup diet on me, while I conducted Gwyneth Paltrow-esque detoxifications on my own. This compulsion tapered off in my early twenties and ended when I became pregnant at age twenty-four. We were euphoric by the news, but inside I was also terrified of getting fat. As I felt my old, self-flagellating demons returning I vowed to change for my new family. Instead of running from food, I would empower myself through food education.

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From AnnArbor.com:

When you think of a caveman, do you summon up images of Fred Flintstone chewing on a leg bone? Maybe you picture long-haired, bearded insurance pitchmen? Think again. You might just have cavemen living in your neighborhood. Or at least someone who eats like one.

Designed by Colorado State University professor Loren Cardain, and based on his book “The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat,” the so-called Caveman (or Paleo) diet has been gaining traction among people who don’t consider themselves dieters. In fact, many would rather you not refer to the Paleo Diet as a diet at all – it’s a lifestyle.

A recent article in Canadian news magazine MacLean’s takes at look at the phenomenon. The idea behind the Paleo Diet is that our diet has evolved faster than we have as a species. Agriculture-derived foods are eschewed in favor of meats, seafood, vegetables, nuts and fruits – foods that our ancestors could have hunted and/or gathered.

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From ESPN.com:

NFL goes paleo

There are plenty of guys in the NFL who are roughly 6-foot-6 and 300 pounds. But it was the fact that John Welbourn had 8 percent body fat that made the New England Patriots’ locker room take notice.

“When I was in New England [during the '08 preseason] a bunch of the guys saw the way I ate and asked a lot of questions. So I ended up writing out some diet stuff for them,” Welbourn said. “They were pretty interested.”

As they should be.

Welbourn, a 10-year NFL veteran, had just introduced them to the Paleo Diet, more popularly referred to as the “Caveman Diet.” But don’t let the catchy name fool you — there’s plenty of science behind it.

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From the Denver Post:

Fat. Sedentary. In love with fried cheese.

That’s how Blakely Graham, 36, described herself before she started an intense exercise regimen and tapped her inner cave woman.

Now, she’s trim and athletic. She still bats her eyes at deep-fried dairy, but finds the strength to reject the stuff.

In September, Graham, a Boulder marketing executive, joined a gym called CrossFit Roots, one of more than 1,700 CrossFit gyms around the world. The program emphasizes intense, simple workouts in bare-bones gyms, where people perform squats, throw heavy balls against walls, perform countless pull-ups and push-ups, and nearly (or do) collapse by the end of the workouts. The workouts first were popular with police academies, military units, martial artists and firefighters but have spread to fitness enthusiasts in general.

Shortly after joining the gym, Graham, like a lot of CrossFitters, also began eating “paleo” (short for paleolithic), an approach to diet that in some regards mirrors CrossFit’s minimalist, no-nonsense training ethic: the diet eliminates dairy products, legumes, all grains, refined sugar and most salt. It is a diet, in other words, similar to what people ate during the Stone Age.

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