From FoxNews.com:

Modern hunter-gatherers can now order delivery and still follow the paleolithic diet, or the “paleo” diet for short. This diet imitates the daily meals of our ancestors and purports that diseases like type-2 diabetes, heart disease and hypertension are in large part due to the diet of modern civilization.

The Paleolithic Era dates back more than 2 million years, before the age of wide-scale farming and domesticated animals. People following the paleo diet try their best to adapt today’s foods to yesterday’s nutritional intake, opting for high fat meats and vegetables over grains and legumes. If you are interested in this prehistoric food pyramid, here is a guide to the paleo diet:

What to eat
Hunter-gatherers did not write cookbooks, so the conditions of a paleo diet can vary greatly, depending on different speculations about prehistoric diets. Broad guidelines encourage eating red meat, fish, poultry and eggs for protein. A variety of fruits and vegetables contribute fiber and important nutrients to the diet. Oils such as canola oil, mayonnaise and olive oil are welcome additions to the meal.

Hunter-gatherers were limited to the food within proximity and non-domesticated animals, so followers of the diet should try to eat locally grown produce and free-range meat.

What to avoid
One of the largest game changers for today’s diets was the industrial revolution. Mechanized food preparation has led to a nationwide prevalence of fast food, high salt content and sugary snacks. Paleo diets advocate cutting out processed food completely, as well as limiting salt and sugar intake. Daily menus also typically exclude dairy products, legumes, cereals, grains and potatoes — all products of developed agriculture.

 

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Dinner last night was oh so good. I just had to share it. Steak and sauteed veggies. Steak is one of those things I’m willing to spend a few extras sheckles on for quality. These two pieces were prime USDA choice. The key of course is proper marinating and seasoning. Here is a list of everything that went on these bad boys:

• Coat of olive oil
• 10 year aged balsamic vinegar
• Crushed garlic cloves
• Salt and pepper
• A small dollop of honey

Paleo Dinner - seasoned steaks

For a side I sliced up 2 zucchinis and threw them in a pan with olive oil, salt and pepper. It doesn’t get simpler than that.

The finished product was a beautiful, incredibly delicious paleo-friendly meal. Obviously the beer is not paleo-friendly, but it was my little reward for an otherwise fully paleo day.

Paleo Dinner - Steak and veggies

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Salads are a great way to have a paleo lunch.

Salads are a great way to eat clean when you are on the go. I work in downtown DC and most days I don’t bring my lunch with me. Fortunately, there are a number of salad places around here. A new one I recently discovered is called Freshii.

What I really like about Freshii is that you can completely customize your salad, and perhaps more importantly, they have a fantastic variety of paleo-approved choices from which to choose.

When you walk in you grab a clipboard and get to work on creating your salad. You can choose your type of lettuce, proteins, fruits, vegetables and dressings. Today I went with the following:

• Freshii salad mix (usually I just get all spinach)
• Organic grilled steak
• Blueberries
• Mandarin oranges
• Granny Smith Apples
• Walnuts
• Broccoli
• Tomatoes
• Roaster red peppers
• Avocado
• Olive oil

Today's lunch: a paleo salad from Freshii

An added benefit is that I now have a great idea about what foods I can buy at the grocery store to create my own salads. Not only will preparing my own salads be a lot cheaper, but I can also pick and choose which higher quality ingredients I want to splurge on. For example, I strongly prefer organic fruit if I have the option.

What do you like to do for a paleo lunch on the go?

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I’ve fallen off the wagon recently; both in updating this blog regularly and, more importantly, eating clean. I’m working on changing both of those things though. Last week gave me just the impetus I needed to get back on the horse. So what was the event that gave me the push? My girlfriend invited me to go with her to California in June for her brother’s college graduation. I will be meeting family and friends, traveling and hiking and having some fun in the sun. This has provided me with an anchor event around which I can set defined, realistic goals.

The reason most people fail at achieving goals, particularly related to diet, is that the time frame is too undefined or unrealistic. Saying “I will eat paleo from now on” is not a recipe for success. Saying “I will eat paleo from April 1st through June 17th” is a much more defined goal that should allow for more success.

So with June 17th set as my “anchor” date, I can now start to develop “small anchor”-based goals built around the larger anchor. For example, this Friday I will be traveling to Delaware for Passover dinner with the family, and the next day I will be in Philadelphia for some business meetings. So this weekend now becomes my “small anchor”. My goal is to eat 100% clean until Friday night. If I eat 100% paleo from Sunday April 1 through the rest of the week, I can feel good about straying a little bit while I’m out of town. I’ll also feel good knowing that I’m successfully working on my larger goal, which is to eat clean the majority of the time until my big trip in the middle of June.

As for updating the blog on a more consistent basis, I will make an effort to start off small. I will make sure I do at least one original post a week, and of course I will continue to post links to other relevant articles.

In the mean time, here is a picture of my breakfast this morning: two organic eggs, 1.5 links of apple-cider chicken sausage and a handful of organic blackberries.

Paleo breakfast of eggs, chicken sausage and blackberries.

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From Business Insider:

The paleolithic diet, popularly called the ‘caveman diet,’ is the inspiration for ‘Palæo,’ a new restaurant slated to open in the coming weeks in Denmark, the Guardian reports.

Paleo diets are based on a single premise—if cavemen didn’t eat it, neither should you. So no more refined sugar, dairy, legumes, and grains; followers eat only meat, fish, poultry, fruits, and vegetables, according to U.S. News and World Report.

This is what Palæo is attempting to emulate. Thomas Rode Andersen, 43, who has created the menu for Palæo and is head chef at the Michelin-starred Kong Hans in Copenhagen, has become the poster boy for the paleo movement in Denmark.

The menu for the restaurant is already online, featuring such tasty treats as a “Meatzza” (which unusually features a meat-base rather than dough) and meat sauce with “spaghetti”, featuring pickled mushrooms and parsley pesto. Both of these meals are 69 Krona, around 10 bucks.

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Paleo Comfort Foods

From the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Three years ago, Charles and Julie Mayfield connected through a food swap at their gym.

They shared platters of lasagna, pots of chicken soup. And fell in love.

Their love survived. But not their diet. Early in their courtship, they developed a passion for a new — and also very old — way of eating. They turned to a cavemen-like diet — plants, meat, seafood, vegetables and a little fruit. You won’t find dairy, beans and wheat in the Mayfields’ cupboards. Nor will you see sugar, soft drinks or processed foods. Nuts and seeds are OK. But peanuts, which are legumes, are not allowed.

The Mayfields follow the Paleo (short for Paleolithic) diet, a low-carb regimen gaining some intrepid adherents, that they believe humans followed up to 2 million years ago. If they can’t forage, hunt or gather the food, they won’t eat it. (How this works today: Charles Mayfield hunts deer and quail, and fishes. They eat blueberries cultivated in their garden. In the end, they buy most of their food from local farmers markets and Whole Foods.)
Paleo devotees believe our bodies are genetically programmed to eat like our ancestors. Supporters believe this diet is rich with minerals, vitamins and anti-oxidants.

Critics, including some trained nutritionists, say the diet is too restrictive and excludes lots of healthy foods that the body needs.

“Why is being like our ancestors the goal?” said Sally Brozek, a registered dietitian at Piedmont Hospital. “Why would we want to live that way? … Our ancestors didn’t live long enough to develop diseases.”

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From The John Hopkins Newsletter:

If you can think back a few years, what differences between your diets then and now come to mind? For many and especially myself, I always broke even. That is, I always ate just enough bad foods to cancel out the hard work that I had put in to get rid them.

Plateauing of two years in college was probably the result of equally weighing bad eating and good eating. We don’t want that. We want to create an imbalance where the right food choices always outnumber the wrong ones.

Recently, a friend introduced me to a new concept of dieting – the Paleo Diet. As most of us would guess, Paleo is short for Paleolithic age, the time period 2.5 million years ago when hominids lived by hunter-gatherer standards, as opposed to the advent of the Neolithic era when humans first learned how to farm crops and animals.

The Paleo diet suggests eating as our ancestral cavemen did; we should stick to things that can be hunted, fished and gathered. Before you join the fad of calling this nutritional plan a fad, consider the rationale behind living as a modern person and eating as a Stone Age person. We humans have been evolving for the past two million years with Darwinian Fitness producing a seemingly final winning species in the form of Homo sapiens. Our DNA is inherently programmed to best handle “Stone-Age” food. It has only been 10,000 years since the dawn of agriculture and just over 100 years since the introduction of manufactured chemicals to expedite the farming process.

One might argue that life expectancy has risen to 70 years in most developed countries. Why would we want to eat like our ancestors who at the age of 40 were considered old? Remember that, aside from dieting, we have millions of technological gadgets all contributing to the increased life expectancy. Our genetics haven’t changed to allow us to survive for 30 more years in the wilderness compared to someone from a million years ago.

Since evolution is an extremely tedious process based on trial and error, and while some scientists argue that humans have stopped evolving, the fact remains that time is on Paleo’s side.

So what exactly does going Paleo imply?

The bottom line is to ditch the carbs and go for what you can hunt and gather in nature (but make sure it’s edible by developed country standards). Meats, eggs, animal fat, fish and seafood are the obvious choices of protein, iron and essential fats.

Berries, fruits and plant derivatives have antioxidants, vitamins, phytonutrients and low-carb sugars. Nuts and seeds also provide protein and healthy fats. Mushrooms are one of the only sources of vitamin D in the produce aisle and have an amazing combination of vitamins, antioxidants and compounds that can help protect many kinds of cells and reduce the risk of different types of cancer. And, of course, vegetables are always just plain good for anyone.

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From the Washingtonian:

“How a Gluten-Free, Paleo Diet Changed My Life

A local physical therapist and trainer shares her personal story of how she got her life back after the rare autoimmune disease Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis invaded her body.

By Ann Wendel

All of your blood work looks fine. The only thing that comes up is thyroid antibodies, but that’s nothing to worry about.”

My primary care doctor said these words to me in 1999, after I told him I’d been feeling anxious and jittery and couldn’t sleep for days at a time. I’d just had my first child a few months before, so since nothing else could be determined, the most obvious diagnosis was that I had postpartum anxiety and depression.

But while the symptoms went away over time with treatment, they were soon replaced by a mind-numbing fatigue. Little did I know that my own body was in the process of attacking itself because of an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis.

Fast-forward to 2007. I had been under a tremendous amount of stress over the year. Though I continued to exercise, somehow I gained almost 20 pounds, and my hair began falling out in clumps. Even after eight hours of sleep, I was still so exhausted I could barely get out of bed in the morning.

I began researching my symptoms. My doctor’s words came back to me, and I began reading everything I could find on thyroid disorders. After getting an ultrasound, I discovered I had nodules on my thyroid.

So with medication, over a few months I began to feel like I was getting some energy back. But my weight didn’t change, and exercise still proved too painful.

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From Phillyburbs.com:

Sunday morning, when the hubby and I were lying in bed, happily contemplating how we just scored a bonus point apiece in our Wrightstown Health & Fitness Paleo Challenge — for adequate sleep; what did you think I meant? — an infomercial came on TV.

Shocking, right? No, and neither is the fact it was for a weight loss program. What’s interesting is, this program, called “Food Lovers” because Infomercial Rule No. 1 is you have to sound stupid and gimmicky, is very similar to the Zone diet we’re doing right now.

Meaning, it’s based on keeping a certain ratio of carbohydrate to protein to fat in your meals. Zone mandates that 40 percent of calories should come from carbs, 30 percent from protein and 30 from fat, which ostensibly will keep your body “in the zone,” or, at its fat-burning, energy-producing and athletic-performing best.

At WHF, we added Paleo to the mix, meaning the food we eat in those 40-30-30 Zone proportions is the kind that sustained our hunter-gatherer ancestors. That would be meat, veggies, fruit, nuts, seeds, water and tequila. (My ancestors were lushes. I looked it up.)

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Paleo Diet For Beginners

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

Unleash your primal energy through an all-natural prehistoric diet.

About 18 years ago, I started competing in fitness figure competitions and needed to lower my body fat. I had about 22 per cent body fat and needed to reach 16 per cent.

My trainer told me to cut out grains and starches, including bread, pasta and rice, as well as refined sugars. My eating plan consisted of fish, chicken and other meat, eggs, salad, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds. This was my first experience of the Palaeolithic or ”caveman” diet, which is based on the premise ”if the cavemen didn’t eat it, you shouldn’t, either”.

After overdosing on protein at first, I focused on a plant-based fresh-vegetable diet that included 65 grams of animal-based protein a day. I felt strong and full of energy, and never hungry. I leaned up ready for my competition and placed second. Since then, I’ve based the way I eat (and cook) on the paleo lifestyle.

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