The Real Paleo Diet

Its indisputable. Nutrition plans modeled around the diets of pre-agricultural humans offer significant fat loss, weight control, and even disease reversal benefits. Don’t believe me? Have a look at Dr. Loren Cordain’s site: http://www.thepaleodiet.com/success_stories/

Arguing that we’re built to consume grains, legumes and dairy, and that we need them for optimal health is just plain silly. Actually, its just the result of a successful multi-billion dollar marketing machine.

The reality is that the fuel mixture that have made us the top predator, and the most successful one this earth has yet seen, is the same fuel mixture that we still need to operate at our best. We’re finely tuned machines, tuned by evolution, and we need the best fuel we can get. We don’t expect to see a finely tuned Formula One race car being run on low-grade petroleum now do we? Of course not! And that’s because besides running like crap, the engine would probably blow up. That’s exactly what happens on a ‘western’ diet, we blow up – and in more ways than one!

I’m not being judgmental here – I’m in the same boat! After ±18 years of consciously eating a diet based primarily on whole foods – large amounts of fruit, veg and animal protein – and keeping active, I am now just a shadow of my former self. At my peak, I was a lean 115kg @ 1.8m tall, and was a submission wrestling champion at one time. While decreased physical activity due to over-prioritizing ‘work’ was a big factor, it was the quality of my diet that played a bigger role. It wasn’t overeating either – by the time I finally ‘caught’ myself, I was eating about 50% less than I did just 2 years earlier! As someone who has the experience, formal training and scientific instincts to know better (I have 20 years experience in performance and nutrition strategies and four degrees in Biology, including a PhD in Bioinformatics/Genomics with a genome evolution research focus), I am kinda disappointed in myself, but I am already turning things around.

Naturally, when I made the decision to fix things, I looked at my strategies that worked best in the past, since most of them have a sound scientific basis (IMHO). To me personally, exercise is a given and a whole food/paleo type diet too. But, when I reviewed some strategies that worked very well, I realised that there were a few that worked extremely well in the short term, but then often abruptly just stopped giving results.

These ranged from the one main meal a day ‘Warrior Diet‘, to The Zone, to Atkins, to ‘Cyclic Ketogenic’ diets to a mostly fruit diet. I also remembered that most of those worked especially well when I went onto them from a 6-meals a day – like Dr. John Berardi’s system (one of the very few nutrition systems that would actually endorse, since it maps so well to Paleonutrition).

Now before I get ahead of myself: just what do I mean by work well? Well, every time I went on one of those diets I mentioned, the aim was fat loss. And they always worked – but only for a while. The first 4 weeks was usually fantastic. And then, when the fat loss slowed and I went back to my more ‘balanced’ 6-meal a day plan for a ‘mental break’, there was a surprising benefit. A short term re-acceleration of fat loss, a major energy boost, and a period of rapid gains in lean tissue.

This benefit of cycling and mixing things up did not go unnoticed. Its just that now that I have returned to a healthier lifestyle that I have started assessing the meaning of unexpected but welcome results in the context of the paleolithic reality, i.e. real paleonutrition is not only about types of food, but also about the scenarios that dictated when/how those foods would be consumed.

I will further expand on that idea of ‘nutricycles’ in this blog (hence its title), and will discuss things like:

• Calorie cycling – one could actually call it ‘planned crash dieting’, or ‘planned yo-yo dieting’
• Importance and benefit of Protein cycling (no, its not some artificial construct)
• Importance of whole food
• How to supercharge ‘low carb’ diets and even the supremely successful 6-meal-a-day high protein diets
• How to repair a slow metabolism without having to chronically consume tons of protein
• How to go ‘almost paleo‘, to make the diet bearable in the 21st century
• Exercise strategies (muscle building, fat loss and overall fitness) that have worked very well for me in the past. I went from a skinny 70kg to a very lean 95kg in my first 4 years of serious training, and later got to a lean 115kg. (No, not roids – this was over a period of several years)
• Also how to map those strategies to simulated ‘time-of-plenty’ and ‘lean-times’ to reach your specific goals.

Those will be short snappy posts. Some will be in mp3 format. Subscribe to this blog if you think you can benefit from them. Most of it will be fresh, and some will probably upset the applecart a bit. At the very least, they’ll be food for thought…

Before I go, here are two important things to remember:

Nothing is as certain as change – in Paleolithic times, there was no such thing as a boring routine. Life was just too unpredictable. Our genome is prepared for change, and I argue that as long as we stay within a sound nutritional framework, we need to consciously change our foods, eating patterns, macronutrient ratios,  because:

Too much of a good thing can be bad – and nutrition is no different.