Do you want to lose weight, recover from various health problems, feel better about yourself, and become seriously healthy?
I decided to create this site to share how I did exactly that. I was overweight, week, suffering from chronic digestive issues, asthma, poor sleep, constantly tired, dealing with poor self-esteem, etc. It took me a long time to find the solution to these problems (till my late twenties) but I began to naturally move toward a different way of eating, sleeping, and exercising. Then I discovered authors that had written about these ideas, and it changed my health permanently. The beauty of this way of living is that it requires almost no effort. By following these ideas, the body will automatically revert to its natural state of health.
The solution is far simpler than you may realize: WE EAT HOW OUR ANCESTORS ATE. There are many names given to this form of diet such as, Paleolithic (Paleo) Diet, Caveman Diet, Primal Diet, etc. During the Paleolithic era we ate completely differently from how we do now. Simply, we ate what we could find outside. There was no keeping careful tabs on calories, no crazy killer workout needs, no headaches from strategizing for your health. When you adopt a Paleo Diet/lifestyle, these things fall into place on their own. That may be hard to believe if you are like me and have in the past taken the sight of a medium pizza as a challenge. The pizza always lost.
If you would like to skip the following explanation, you can get started eating this way right away by going straight to this recipe book and grabbing yourself a copy. These recipes will get you on track with basically zero effort. Your body will do the rest and naturally start navigating its way back to its natural state of health. For those wanting more detail, read on.
About 10,000 years ago we had the agricultural revolution and began cultivating cereal grains. Oddly enough, it’s at this time that the fossil record shows, unambiguously, that we began to suffer from many of the diseases that we are now familiar with. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors just did not suffer from things like cancer, obesity, diabetes, dental degeneration, dementia, and a host of other familiar diseases with anywhere near the frequency that we do today; These diseases are almost unknown to the ancient world. We can verify the findings in the fossil record with mountains of anthropological data and by looking at the remaining hunter-gatherer societies still in existence. I didn’t create this site as an in depth look at the supporting evidence for this lifestyle, but to share the basic knowledge about how it’s done and to share my experience with it.
Here is the basic underlying idea:
On a Paleo diet we do not eat grains, legumes, dairy, or packaged/processed foods. Why? Because they cause disease! Instead, we eat meat, vegetables, fruit, berries, nuts and seeds. Why? Because these are the things we ate for most of our evolution. Our genetic material has not changed significantly in over 100,000 years. In other words, our genes are still designed to eat what we were eating when we were running around half naked and dwelling in caves. Grains (the big bad guy) on the other hand, we have only eaten in any quantity for about 10,000 years. That’s 500 generations; not nearly enough for any great change in our genetics. What I am saying is that our bodies are still expecting to be running around outside taking down animals and and picking berries and sleeping well, but we are giving them a couch, a bowl of cereal, and infomercial assisted insomnia. The body doesn’t like that. I should also mention that grains make other animals sick as well. When you eat factory farmed meat (pretty much all meat found in grocery stores) you are eating the meat of an animal that is close to death when it is slaughtered and is polluted with antibiotics and other substances. This says nothing of how they are treated before slaughter. They are usually fed a grain based diet. They are fed grains because it makes them fat ,which is good for business but not the animal or you. When you feed animals grain it messes with the balance of essential fatty acids Omega 3 and 6 distorting it from the ratio we need to be consuming (1:1 or 1:2) to a ratio of 1:15 to 1:20! This means that we may be eating as much as twenty times the pro-inflammatory Omega 6 that we need. That’s right, pro-inflammatory...Inflammation. Our bodies are designed to eat meat from grass fed, pasture raised animals. As I said, I wont go into the science/evidence too much here but I will point you towards sources for your own investigation.
Just to give you a little taste for each of these items though:
- GRAINS AND LEGUMES First off. Grains conflict with what is called Optimal Forage Theory; In basic terms, we would lose more energy gathering grains than we could replace by eating them. Both grains and legumes contain many gut irritating compounds called lectins, and other compounds called anti-nutrients that prevent us from properly absorbing nutrients from our food. This says nothing of what grains do to insulin. Interestingly, you may have noticed that there are a whole lot more gluten free products these days. That is because more and more people are realizing that they are intolerant to gluten (a nasty protein found in wheat and some other grains that destroys your guts and causes autoimmune diseases) and my suspicion is that the number will increase until it’s understood that none of us can actually handle gluten. In some, the damage caused by this compound is extensive and impossible to ignore and in others the damage goes on unchecked and unnoticed for long periods of time until a related disease manifests. Unfortunately, the industrial-agricultural complex is concerned with the bottom line and not your health so grains aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Our doctors want to help us but they’ve been trained within a system that is completely twisted up with agribusiness and the pharmaceuticals industry. A healthy population is no good to pharmaceutical companies because healthy people don’t buy drugs. Paleo people are no good to an agribusiness based on grains because they don’t buy grains, just as they are no good to the pharmaceuticals industry because they rarely need the drugs they sell.
- DAIRY Here’s an experiment: Go back say... 13,000 years, find a wild cow, and try to approach and milk it. I can tell you right now that the cow is not going to be impressed in the least. What you are used to seeing as a cow these days is the result of thousands of years of animal husbandry and careful genetic selection. It may have struck you as odd at some point that we are drinking the milk of a non-human mammal in the first place. You’d be right to question that. Humans are designed to drink human milk and, even then, only during infancy. To get a bit technical, the enzyme that we use, lactase, to break down the milk sugar lactose drops off precipitously as we age. The reason for this is that we are only supposed to be breaking down milk sugars during infancy. Instead we are like big sick babies still suckling at our bottles well into adulthood and, worse, we aren’t even drinking the milk of our own species. More and more people these days are realizing that they are lactose intolerant. Consequently, we are seeing many more products that proudly claim to be lactose free. If the cigarette companies told you that their cigarettes were now formaldehyde free, would you say “Okay. Great. Now I can smoke!” or would you simply avoid a product that ever had formaldehyde in it in the first place. What I mean is that instead of removing unhealthy compounds from the products we consume, maybe we should just make the connection that nature must not intend for us to consume those products in the first place! Hmm, lactose free milk? If we need to modify it, if I can’t eat it the way it comes from nature, then I must not be intended by nature to eat it at all.
- PACKAGED/PROCESSED FOODS Do I really have to explain why these foods are not good for you? If nature intended for us to be eating processed foods full of additives and a laundry list of suspect constituents, it would have put it outside for us to find. I wont go into too much detail here. I will say though that high fructose corn syrup is one of the most awful food components ever created. It is in everything and is SERIOUSLY BAD FOR YOU! It is in food because of major lobbying by the corn industry. Lets put it this way: The average grocery store contains surprisingly little food. The perimeter of most grocery stores is where you will find some food, ie. meat, vegetables, fruit, nuts/seeds. The food in the center of a grocery store is very well designed to line the pockets of food manufacturers while simultaneously destroying your health. When I go into a grocery store I think one thing: “What is here that I could hunt or gather outside?” Those are the foods that my genetics are expecting and those are the foods that I supply.
Again, if you would just like to start eating this way, you can go straight to this recipe book and start getting healthy now! It’s jam-packed full of good stuff!
The long and short of it is that when you combine these modern foods with improper sleep and chronic stress (most of us deal with these in this world) you are looking at mangled health.
I saved the best for last here. This is the book that utterly changed my life and taught me most of what I know about the Paleo diet. The book is THE PALEO SOLUTION by Robb Wolf.
If you read this book and follow Robb’s advice I promise you that you will see dramatic improvements in your health, not the least of which will be losing any excess fat/weight and looking and feeling great! As a former research biochemist, Robb Wolf knows the science inside and out and has a knack for making it understandable for regular (non-nerd) folks. Robb Wolf was mentored by Professor Loren Cordain, another big name in the what I would call the Paleo movement.
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