As another high-willpower individual, the lack of hunger that I feel on this diet as opposed to others is key. On Weight Watchers, I was constantly starving, especially as I got close to goal. On this diet, I do not restrict calories in any major way, but as someone noted upthread, hunger isn’t that all-consuming lightheaded MUST EAT NOW feeling that I got when I was purely restricting calories. It’s more of a “Hmmm, eating something now might be nice.” I skip meals and do just fine–on any other diet, a skipped meal would have led to a disastrous blood sugar crash and caused me to get disoriented and nauseated.
It’s actually easier to do this than it is to do other things. Now that I’ve been doing it for so long, if I eat something I shouldn’t, I feel disgusting.
I think this, more than anything else, is the key to losing weight and maintaining your new weight long term. You have to change your relationship with food.
As you say - you don’t have to have the goodies, the sweets, and the other bad-habit foods. A lot of people have been taught/trained to always have desert, but you can untrain yourself.
Something like the paleo diet gets you eating unprocessed foods (processed anything tends to have empty calories along with added salt) which are better for you. You might wind up eating a greater variety of foods, and almost any study or research will tell you that the more different things you eat the better off you will be, the less likely you’ll have a deficiency, not to mention there are so many wonderful things to eat in the world. Increasing vegetables and fruits is good for almost anyone.
I don’t see getting fanatical about it - I see no reason that, absent some medical issue, you can’t have the occasional non-paleo thing, whether that’s eating out, eating dinner at a non-paleo house, or a beer, or getting a bag of candy for a special occasion or whatever makes you happy. It’s probably the case that our paleo-ancestors would eat things like honey or a handful of oats when they could get them, they just didn’t have access to them on a daily basis like we do.
Flirting with vegetarianism, or veganism, or macrobiotics or gluten-free or a number of other diets can have similar effect of getting you out of your dietary rut, get you eating less processed food, more vegetables, more fruit, and changing your long-term eating habits.
Interesting commentary here on the “paleo diet”, including the observation that our gastrointestinal tracts likely have changed quite a bit from what cavemen had.
*"The thing is, unlike what the paleo-people think, evolution can work really fast. An article from 2007 suggested that the human ability to drink milk, for example, is only 7000 years old…So no, Paleo-Diet nutritionists, the human dietary system probably isn’t the same as that of stone-age man. We have changed.
But the more damning thing for me, is the simple fact that by all accounts, WE LIVE A SHIT-LOAD LONGER THAN CAVEMEN…Paleolithic Man didn’t often live past 35. Sure, part of that is due to the other good effects of agriculture: civilization. Better housing, medicine, not having to constantly run after our food, depleting energy reserves while trying to rebuild them – all this has also helped increase our life-span. But you know what else has helped? Bread. Access to a source of food with easy calories in abundance. Bread. What a concept.
I don’t eat too much, I don’t eat a lot of junk, and I try to spend between six and eight hours a week exercising, but when it comes to food, I’m with the French. Food should be something we enjoy, and these hi-protein diets just seem like turning eating into a chore."*
I’ve seen that exact same argument many times and don’t find it very interesting. Apparently a lot of people don’t understand that life expectancy was low then due to high infant and childhood mortality. Many people throughout history have lived to be elderly, as long as they make it to their teens. Plenty of primitive people in more modern times, eating an approximately ‘paleo’ style diet and with no medical care, make it to their 70s and 80s.
This diet saved my health. I’m not nearly as concerned with the details of how we have evolved to cope with a grain-based diet as I am with not being crippled by painful IBS, GERD, and periods (oh, the shitting and vomiting…)
If this way of life makes someone feel worse instead of better, fuck the dogma and the ‘science’. Live a lifestyle that makes you feel good, individually.
French cooking is pretty damn ‘paleo’, actually, as long as you eliminate the pasta and bread and especially if you include dairy. High in animal fats and vegetables, good amounts of meat and seafood. To me there is no more delicious way to eat, but to each their own.
Yup, what was good to help a Paleolithic person live long enough to pass on their genes, may have little to do with what helps a more modern human live well pass that point. Also, Paleolithic diets varied depending on where they were. And unless current Paleo-dieters are eating exclusively game meats and fish, what most eat as meat is very different today than what was eaten tens of thousands of years ago.
But … what that commentator is missing is what many here are stating: eating a diet significantly less grain predominant does not feel so much like a chore.
I can’t say I disagree with that much. Lots of vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, fish, lean meats (especially game meats) … as a foodie those things sound more appealing than does a baguette. Now I wouldn’t want to (and won’t) give up my morning Greek yogurt (mixed with nuts, seeds, and dried fruits), legumes, a beer or a Scotch here and there, and being rigid about it seems silly, but when it comes to enjoying food the simple starches are not what leads my list.
I haven’t finished reading it, but I have to say that anyone who claims to be a skeptic and all about science and good information who still thinks an average lifespan of 35 actually means most people died by 35 isn’t very impressive in his super-skeptic-all-about-science skills.
The “average lifespan” of people who lived prior to the last hundred years of medical advances was dragged way down by the very large number of human beings who never made it to adulthood, expiring sometime between the womb and 18 from a huge number of things. (Also the reason I think it’s nice we have the luxury of pretending that it’s “unnatural” for a child to die before its parents: in fact it’s extremely natural for parents to watch their children die, because children are inherently vulnerable: rare was the family that didn’t lost at least one child.) But once someone navigated the perils of growing up, they were almost as likely to live into their 60s (and older) as we are today. Modern medicine has done an awesome job of saving children and old people from the deaths that would otherwise have taken them at 7 or 70, but it hasn’t made that big an impact on the “prime -of-life” population, because people in the prime of their lives aren’t all that likely to die of natural causes *to begin with.
So, since the writer himself says “*But the more damning thing for me, is the simple fact that by all accounts, WE LIVE A SHIT-LOAD LONGER THAN CAVEMEN.” it’s apparent that he’s starting from a false premise, which makes it very unlikely that he would recognize that our modern American diet is actually having a terrible impact on exactly the population that was doing alright for itself: middle-aged adults, since he is erroneously assuming that most people didn’t make it to middle age.
But I’ll finish reading and see what else he has to say.
From my POV, that’s not the relevant point. The concept of those who promote a paleo diet is that we are evolutionary selected to eat that diet, therefore it must be healthy. That concept evinces an ignorance of how evolution works. Evolution doesn’t select for longevity per se (unless old folks around add to the survival chances of subsequent generations); it selects for living long enough to have passed on genes and for being able to do so. The premise is flawed. Which does not prove that the nutrition plan is bad or good … just that the concept of presuming it is healthiest because it is what we evolved eating makes little sense.
Of course if someone really wanted to live the Paleo way then they’d be burning another thousand calories a day exercising than most do and going through months at a time of famine followed by gorging when the hunting and gathering was good, storing as much fat as possible then to make it through the next shortage period.
There weren’t many famines until we started depending on agriculture for sustenance, which led to a population explosion (with more babies closer together) and environmental destruction and more and more and more famines…
Also modern hunter-gatherers don’t appear to have very strenuous lives, despite living in much less ideal habitats than our ancestors did. One study found their work-week was about 20 hours.
Really? Remember we are talking about humans as they spread across into areas with real winters … little to gather, little to hunt. Sorry, they were not living in Gardens of Eden. Most years had a famine built in, not severe years on ones, but months of getting through winter. What constrained population growth was a lack of food, and agriculture led to a population explosion because there was much less of that lack.
I’m not sold on the idea that I should eat like a caveman. They ate whatever they could get, not what was best for them. Perhaps if they had access to a wider variety of food, they would have lived longer.
I agree that the argument that we should eat this way because it’s the way people ate ten thousand years ago is kind of dumb. I started eating Paleo-ish (I include dairy, nuts, and booze) after reading “Good Calories, Bad Calories” and kind of found Mark’s Daily Apple after that. After about a month, I felt so fantastic that I’m convinced this is the healthiest way of eating for me, and it’s the first time I feel like I don’t have to watch what I eat and count calories to keep from getting fat. I consider this way, way easier than the normal way of “eating healthy” and some chronic conditions that I’ve had since puberty have cleared up. YMMV, but I think just about everyone could benefit from eliminating grains from their diet for a month, just to see how they feel. I don’t know anyone that tried Paleo, got past the first month, and then went back to normal eating.
In the case of human beings, old folks DO add to the survival chances of subsequent generations, since our success as a species has been very heavily influenced by the fact that we have extremely rich cultures that include elderly people as a source of information and wisdom.
We’re like elephants, which are also long-lived: most elephants would be stumbling around like idiots if they didn’t have Grandma and her many decades of experience and knowledge helping them all stay alive.
Perhaps. But a) was this true on an evolutionary time scale and b) once written culture was created passing on that information no longer required keeping the older folks around.
Yes, the argument can be made (which is why I included it) but is not clearly the case. Remember there is also a cost of elderly in a tribe, resources devoted to their care, so on. The factt hat most tribal societies value the elderly makes me think that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages … but thinking that does mean that it is for sure so.
I’ve been leading a very Paleo life since March of this year, and I agree wholeheartedly. It’s amazing how little I miss simple starches.
I do still like sweets, but most of those cravings are easily satisfied with a little fruit or (I’m not religiously Paleo, I’m more about the carb restriction in general) some artifically sweetened treats- I make a mean brulee-free creme brulee. (I never cared for the burned sugar on top, I was always about the custard.) I douse the top with nutmeg, which I’m crazy about.
I mostly miss the starches as a kind of blank-slate background to the stuff that I’m really after, which is generally the protein part, the meat or cheese. I like a crispy pizza crust edge or a nice roll to put my corned beef in, but if I am going to give some part of those dishes up there’s no contest about which part.
If you are trying to lose weight, it will probably work great. It’s damn hard to get enough calories with those foods. If, like me, you tend to have a hard time gaining weight/keeping weight on, it’s probably not what you want. I tried it just to see if I felt better, had less inflammation from workouts, that sort of thing. I ended up losing around 7 or 8 lbs, even though I was trying to avoid it. It can also be fairly expensive.
Yes, they ate what they could get, but the point is that over millions of years of eating what they could get, the body evolved to process those foods very well. And you still have the body that is adapted to those foods. So, eat those foods and you should do well. Eat other things and who knows?
Nonsense. “those foods” include plenty of fat, which has more than double the calories (9 per gram) of both protein (4 per gram) and carbohydrate (4 per gram).
Hard to get enough calories to be fat, not hard to get enough to survive.
And aside from fatty cuts of meat (and the paleo diets that I’ve seen recommend lean meat), where is the plenty of fat? I don’t see someone getting fat on avocados. Granted, I tend to have trouble keeping weight on as it is, and I am very active, but I was supplementing my paleo with regular spoonfuls of olive oil, to no avail. I have heard other lean athletes make similar statements.
Again, I see no reason to believe, per se, that eating in a Paleolithic manner is healthier just because it is the nutritional backdrop for most of our evolution, but … do you really think corned beef represents anything like what those early humans ate? I’m a big fan of dairy as an intelligent part of a nutrition plan, but you really think that cheese is “very Paleo”? A Paleolithic diet was likely not all that high in fat. They ate game meat, fish, nuts and seeds, all prepared simply. Not modern farm raised cattle then highly processed. A half pound loin of venison, for example, has a total of under 3 grams of fat, and much of it good omega 3’s. The same cut of beef has 9 grams of fat (three times as much!) and 10% less protein. And corned beef? 48 grams of fat for the same serving size, yeah 16 times the fat of what a Paleolithic human likely had … and 40% less protein in that serving than in the venison. And sodium? Just 3 ounces of corned beef has almost 1000 mg; to get a 1000 mg of sodium in venison you’d need to eat about 4 pounds of it.
I’m not telling you what you should or should not be eating here, and if this is working for you I am very happy, but no, what are eating is not at all similar to what early humans ate.
misterW, I think you are, to some degree correct, for those who actually eat as early humans ate. Lots of vegetable, fruits, very lean meats, fish, seeds, nuts … fairly easy to lose weight eating like that. Putting on mass would require a conscious effort to up the amount of meats and adding in some higher calorie choices, yes like avocado. That said, with the effort to get adequate daily calories in it is a wonderful bodybuilder dietary plan. And unless one goes all out to get the game meats it can be cheaper to eat that way than the usual American diet. The lean meat cuts are often cheap. I can buy frozen tilapia for virtually nothing. A big bag of frozen boneless skinless chicken breasts can be bought for just a few bucks. Veggies, fruits, nuts … really not much money per serving.
Fun stuff. The misinterpretation of what a Paleo diet should be apparently goes back to some of the original articles on the subject. Here is a response of one of the original group’s reactions to how their work was being twisted:
Anyone serious about Paleo may want to read this Mayo Clinic Proceedings article and note that the hunter-gatherer diet is the highest in protein but only moderate in fat (compared to Atkins which is relatively moderate in protein and high in fat, especially in saturated fat). The hunter-gatherer diet is also low in salt.