Does anyone do this? Has it worked? What are the downsides to doing this? I am really skeptical about eating all this meat and lard. I am trying to find a way to lose weight and be healthier. I also want to not jiggle when I walk down the street.
i think it's a fad. yeah sure, get protein, eat veggies, eat bacon. that's all good. there's nothing wrong with the occasional pizza. or ice cream or bread. or beans. want to lose weight and be healthier? work out consistently, track what you eat, weigh yourself consistently, make the right choices. listen to your body; if you're storing fat, you're most likely eating too much.
Well how come the cross fit community is so into this? It must work somewhat. I have a friend who does crossfit and he swears by the diet. The pounds have dropped of him.
You don't need, or indeed want to be eating lard, but you do want to be consuming good quality animal fat as part of a healthy diet. This website is a good starting place.
the cross fit community is 'so into' just about anything. In fact, if I had to describe a cross fitter in two words, it would be 'so into'. You don't have a friend, you have one datapoint. There are arguments for and against Paleo, but the biggest one against it is simple - if a diet makes you miserable, you wont stay on it. Just cut out the junk from your diet, start counting calories (at least until you get a good feel for how many calories a particular meal holds) and start working out.
I haven't gone 'all paleo', but taken a couple of concepts. Mainly, I avoid carbs and sugars where possible, and instead eat more meat and vegetables and eggs. Reducing carb intake without eating less has made me drop 10 pounds without feeling bad about eating less.
he probably dropped the pounds because he does a lot of weight lifting. i've lost lots of weight recently. i did it by watching what i eat. i did concentrate on eating way less refined carbohydrates. but i also tracked everything i ate, weighed myself every day, worked out consistently, in general improved everything.
My diet is more or less paleo in that I emphasize protein, vegetables, some fruit, and low refined carbs. I save refined carbs like desserts for weekends. The "thing" about this sort of diet is that you have to drink a lot of water (which you should be doing anyway ) to avoid problems with your kidneys and such.
It's a wise idea to eat predominately organic fruits, veggies, nuts, and lighter meats. When I eat that way I feel substantially better long-term than I do when I eat too much trash. If you wanna call that Paleo and be trendy, go for it. Refined, processed foods high in sugars and starches are horrible for your health and are linked to many diseases. Look up the Dean Ornish diet and the caloric restriction diet and you'll see they look a lot like this whole Paleo diet thing (they tend to be a little more flexetarian though). Those diets have been well studied and seem to pretty radically reverse major disease symptoms and improve quality of life.
I have always had success with eating whatever the hell I want, tracking calories for a week and seeing I'm up around 3k calories a day with a normal diet, and then making sure I just do a hell of a lot more activity for calorie burning and making sure I burned more calories per day than I took in. When I was dropping weight earlier this year for boxing I shed a good 50 lbs in 4 months, eating 4k and sometimes 5k calories per day. That's a lot of food : P. There are a ton of online data sheets for how much certain activities burn calorie wise at what weight/fitness level. I used those along with a pedometer program. That said, you're not going to be able to put out that much activity if you're on a diet of twinkies. I wouldn't eat junk food except on the weekends (fried chicken : D) because workouts would absolutely suck being field off of something like that. I think Holyheadache's speech about "it's a battle won in the kitchen" is the easier method though, but not always true if you can be extremely active.
One of the problems that I have with the paleo diet is not so much the content of their diet as their courting some sort of naturalistic, primal fantasy. When we talk about prehistoric man, we're discussing a critter which lived in a number of environments and was able to adapt to a great number of different diets with differing contents and macronutrient ratios. Stating that these diets would be optimal for physical fitness, aesthetics and health also seems to be an ill-founded conclusion; just because human societies were able to survive on such fare does not imply that they are optimal diets. All of this also discounts the fact that modern human critters are not paleolithic human critters. With that said, eating unprocessed low carb has done amazing things for me, and I think paleo is a very good shorthand for cleaning up your diet. Eat meats you recognize as critters and plants you recognize as vegetables.
Because the controls on pesticides and food preservatives are stricter with organic labeling, because GMO foods are linked to a laundry list of diseases in the animals they have been tested on, and because a Chinese researcher found freely circulating pesticides in the urine of people who ate non-organic produce for three days after they switched to organic produce. Free circulating poison absorbing into your cells isn't the smartest idea ever. As a general rule, if it kills insects it will probably kill people too.
i like your post a lot. i find the "evolution"-lite reasoning of the paleo diet to be ridiculous, and i'm not even a biologist, just a hobby-ist evolutionist. like all "woo", once i started really thinking about it, there are so many more questions, as you've alluded to. totally agree. nothing wrong with cleaning up the diet, eating lots of veggies and getting the protein you need for an active lifestyle. in that sense, paleo does a good job as a kind of short-hand. i don't drink soda, and while i like bread and pizza, it was pretty easy to cut that stuff out. for me, it came down to over-eating and not exercising enough. i already ate lots of veggies and fruit so the only thing i had to do is ensure i'm getting enough protein for all the martiall-y arts and calisthenics i do. also, maybe someone with paleo experience can tell us, you're not supposed to eat fruit? is that right? or is that adkins?
Typically speaking it's less lard, more "natural fats". I managed it for about three months in my first year of karate. Yeah, I lost a silly amount of weight. I was also training over 2 hours on average hours a day every day at that time. Fact is it made me miserable. It is simply unsustainable long term in my eyes. Any diet that you feel crap about after a while is not a diet you will stick to when eventually you hate the fact you can't allow yourself a slice of pizza, a small doughnut or anything similar. Once I came off it I gained over a stone in the space of just over a month because I was that glad to not be eating paleo all the time that I went the other way. The reason CrossFit-ters like it (aside from the fact they can be really "fad"-ish as a group of athletes) is that it can work a great deal to shift a lot of weight in conjunction with physically demanding exercise. The downside is that a hell of a lot of people end up having to drink massive amounts of water and also tend to ingest ridiculous amounts of caffeine to help keep their energy levels up for a diet that is unsustainable. However you look at Rich Froning (3 time CrossFit Games World Champ, multiple time Open champ and a couple of other titles to boot) and what he eats and he has no problem with coca cola, fries, burgers in buns, pasta (etc) for most of the year running. I'm in the camp that - as long as your diet is balanced - you can eat what you want as much as you want. But you have to train to burn off the extra calories.
studies please cos if you're referring to the Pusztai affair then their are many arguments against this. the chinese research - i'd like to see the methodology cos it sounds like crap antibiotics kill bacteria - should that kill us too - well ususally no because of scaling and other factors like specificity.
Re: paleo. It works, it helps people feel good and get lean. I would have stayed small for ever if I'd stuck to it though.... If we learn one lesson from it; it's that sticking to single ingredient, natural as possible food has a great effect on the body. Things that are man made tend to be the issue. For the rest of it I'm not going to push as far as others do, rice is natural I'm gonna eat it, kidney beans? You bet I'll eat them. Trying to stick to it to the extent we are pretending to eat like cavemen is daft IMO but paleo esque food choices are generally good choices to me.
Have you got a source for that? Because according to my understanding, long term studies of GMO consumption in animals haven't found any ill side effects. Not being snarky, legitimately interested in a source
The best/worst we have for GMO is "unproven effect" - although the term is also something of a misnomer since pretty much anytime a plant has been cross-pollinated it is genetically modified
