The Paleo Diet? Chances Are You Are Already On It

Paleo Weight Loss :

The Paleo Diet (also known as the Caveman Diet) is a way of eating that has grown in popularity in the last few years. Often this way of eating is lumped together with "low-carb" eating, with a few distinctions. It is very fashionable and many people have reported great health benefits. However, if you are overweight the chances are very high you are already on the true caveman diet, which is really the "see food" diet.

The Paleo Diet? Chances Are You Are Already On It

The theory behind the popularized Paleo Diet is that our bodies are best designed to metabolize lean protein (meats and seafood) and plant foods (fruits and vegetables). When caveman stopped hunting and gathering and started growing grains and making them a large part of his diet, disease started appearing, as evidenced in the skeletons of prehistoric man vs. agricultural man. Grains are inherently high-glycemic, which contributes to blood sugar imbalance, diabetes, and weight gain, while protein and vegetables are low glycemic. And never mind the sugar and fat that were to come later in history. Even though the caveman's lifespan was shorter, this was usually due to accidents or traumas (such as being killed by an animal) rather than poor health.

This all makes sense - eat more natural, low-glycemic foods, lose weight and feel healthier. However, the benefits to modern man may not be as dramatic as the literature would suggest, and the implementation might not be the easiest. The major consideration which is rarely talked about on Paleo Diet websites is the level of physical activity required to maintain a healthy body. Cavemen hunted their food, and even if they weren't hunting and simply walking around, they were getting far more daily activity than today's human, who gets in the car and takes the escalator. Thus the ability for this diet to promote lean muscle mass is probably rather limited if you are not exercising. In fact, this is the diet that many bodybuilders use to sustain their muscle mass.

The other part of the lifestyle difference is the fact that cavemen didn't necessarily eat everyday. They hunted, they gathered. Maybe they ate a handful of berries here and there in between kills. Intermittent fasting was a way of life. When they did have a successful kill, they didn't eat with "portion control" in mind. They gorged themselves because they didn't know when they were going to eat again, and they stored the extra calories as fat for a rainy day. (Extreme modern Paleo Diet adherents have regular periods of fasting, as well as vigorous exercise routines).

This is how our bodies are truly designed to work. They are designed to be very efficient fat storage machines. We are also biologically programmed to see food and eat it in order to store it away. The problem is our body cannot calculate how much is already stored away, so it just keeps piling on the fat regardless of how much is already stored. The feeling of fullness is supposed to be our biological defense against overeating, but we know that most Americans eat way past the feeling of "full" to feeling "stuffed." This is how people today are able to weigh 1000lbs. If you were to put the healthiest caveman into our modern society, what do you think would happen to him? He would become an unhealthy, overweight caveman rather quickly. There is no limit to the amount of fat we can store, until we die from the associated diseases.

You can see why being overweight is not necessarily our fault because we were designed to store fat. And you can also see why just eating the "right" foods will not necessarily equate to weight loss unless we also eat the right amounts and at the right times of day. We're just a bunch of cavemen living in a world of high-fat, high carbohydrate foods that appeal to our caveman brains (and the big food companies market DIRECTLY to this part of our brains, by the way). In the end, weight loss is partly about what we eat, but mostly about learning how to reprogram our minds to not want to eat calories when we see them. It might be healthy to eat what cavemen ate, but we actually have to stop eating how cavemen ate if we're not willing to do the fasting and the exercising that cavemen did.

Training the non-caveman brain to make better food choices than the caveman brain takes effort, every minute of every day, but it's the ONLY way to prevent fat storage. Most people are well-versed in quieting down caveman brains when it comes to social manners, but the vast abundance of unhealthy food in this country makes controlling our caveman brains a real challenge when it comes to feeding our bodies. This is why support is so important, so that we are not surrounded by other cavemen who, while not intentionally unsupportive, allow their caveman brains to make decisions about food. Cavemen rarely hunted alone, so why should we? Get someone to support you on your hunt for better health.

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