so so i just started doing this paleo diet thing - feels like it should be bullshit. is it?

were you guys all on the atkins diet ten years ago serious question

I still do this in phases from time to time. Paleo is a more common-sense, sustainable 'lifestyle' diet imo, but when I want to shed a few pounds, Atkins + exercise has proven to be the most effective method for me. ymmv obv

To be honest, paleo just seems like a dogmatic version of a normal weight-training diet. Pound of kale + whole roast chicken for dinner? Sure. Eliminating carbohydrates is weird to me, though, I don't think that's good for your body. And eliminating nightshades just sounds like insanity.

― a whiter shade of paleo (Ówen P.), Thursday, September 20, 2012 1:16 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you can eat tons of carbs just not starches or refined sugars, as for everyone saying this just seems like common sense, interesting to see how the common sense has changed over the years via the popularity of fad diets, i mean like the us government still recommends a shit ton of starches to this day, although less than they used to

not long ago people thought pasta was super healthy cause it doesnt have any fat!

you can eat tons of carbs

mmmmm sweet potatoes

Oh, OK. My Crossfitting friend told me "no carbs" and I was like "you crazy". He looks good, though. Tough.

personally I just try to observe simple rules (drilled into me primarily from my mom, whose father was this guy) - don't eat any processed shit (transfat, junk food, sodas, mass market meat products, etc.), cook at home, eat a lot of veggies (primarily organic produce from the co-op plus our CSA box), meat a couple times a week. that's pretty much it. I walk a mile a day. I do not have a catchy name or rationale for this diet.

xp

Oh, OK. My Crossfitting friend told me "no carbs" and I was like "you crazy". He looks good, though. Tough.

― a whiter shade of paleo (Ówen P.), Thursday, September 20, 2012 1:22 PM (59 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well carbs often is just used as shorthand for starches, just also like the sugar in fuit is carbs too

so its not like atkins where youre really going for the metabolic response to eating no carbs at all

yeah atkins is trying to shoot ketosis all the time

i do keep to relativity low carb but that's just me

No I understood paleo to be about monitoring your insulin and so forth.

I can't get behind eating so much meat, myself, nor giving up nightshades or legumes. Plus, the rhetoric like "Mbutu tribes in modern day Papua New Guinea surely subsisted on cassava root and yams so these root vegetables are deemed paleo" infuriates me. Honestly I feel like I have more in common with Ted Nugent's "let's kill something + eat it" style than "let's go to the supermarket and pretend we're cavemen" thing. Not knocking paleo, I just can't suspend my disbelief enough to actually try it out

Also pasta is good for you especially when topped with sauce of nightshade and shaved dairy product, welcome to the 21st century

all that mumbo jumbo is like yeah whatever then you start eating this way and feel great and see results in body composition. that's what sold me on it

You only have to give up nightshades if you're sensitive to them - it's kind of an elimination diet thing.

let's go to the supermarket and pretend we're cavemen

yeah this shit is obnoxious

I clubbed the last person that told me that and stole there fire btw

Paleo strikes me as somewhat different from other fad diets because you don't, strictly speaking, have to be in caloric restriction to eat paleo. It's a lifestyle/diet you can maintain even once you've reached your goal weight (if you want to lose weight) because all it really boils down to is the Michael Pollan line about eating food, mostly plants, etc..

(really, you only have a caloric restriction BECAUSE you're cutting out so many high-calorie/high-carb foods like bread and pasta and milk)

yeah i'd think that paleo/veganism (our resident NNs favorite diets) are more focused on maintenance than they are on "losing weight"

I figure you could skip the mumbo-jumbo and just write the world's shortest diet book:
- eat a solid amount of protein to maintain lean mass
- eat a ton of non-starchy vegetables, mostly greens
- don't drink sugar
- dairy's okay if it doesn't give you the shits, don't drink too much
- bread/rice/etc. in small doses - don't live on the Endless Pasta Bowl, etc.
- fast for a day or two on occasion

^^^

well I dunno about the fasting thing

See I prefer "eat lots of rice and quinoa and ease up on the corn, wheat and potatoes" but I used to be macro/vegan so that's my own bias talking. I think I just have a problem with "lots of meat!" in any diet b/c of processing, sodium, environmental concerns, cruelty, non-sustainability, mercury, nitrates, expense, and that it's such a privileged diet to indulge upon. Boring concerns, yeah zzzzz. Generally I decide what to eat protein-wise by allowing myself a chicken, a fish, a steak and a dozen eggs every week but I like that kind of symmetry. The parable diet.

totally feel you on the meat thing. industrial production of beef is pretty fucking odious.

paleo diet is like this one weird trick to get you to eat unprocessed foods

fast for a day or two on occasion

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Thursday, September 20, 2012 1:42 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

milo tell me more about fasting

just eat more fancy beets. you'll feel like a million bucks!

― Broney, Pt. 1 (Pillbox), Thursday, September 20, 2012 9:38 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark

Words to live by!

So what do you paleo people eat for breakfast? No fiber cereal or oatmeal?

a live salmon

OP: Mostly bullshit. There's no question that eating less processed food is healthier, and if you're going to eat meat that grass-fed beef is healthier (its higher in n−3 fatty acids). But, overall, a low carb animal protein based diet will kill you.

The argument in Loren Cordain's books (which started the paleo fad over a decade ago) was a lot of hand-waving and few studies. Our paleo ancestors weren't subsisting on a diet of persistance hunting run down antelope. Hunter gatherers get around 60% of their calories from plants, with the exception of the Eskimos, who died young, with lotsa of gout and osteoporosis from eating too much protein. And there's ample evidence that our common ancestor with the common chimp and bonobo got 80% of their calories from plants, the average human has 3 times the number of amylase (starch digesting) gene as chimps (even the Eskimos), so we've likely been cooking tubers and seeds over the campfire for as long as we've controlled fire (400k, maybe 700k years BP). So a evolutionary argument for a mostly animal protein paleo diet would rest on any adaptations we picked up in the window after bipedalism and before fire - a pretty short window considering how long our primate ancestors were eating leaves a fruit.

the thing is, everything will eventually kill you

paleo endorses eat plants and carbs just fyi, you might be thinking of atkins

So what do you paleo people eat for breakfast? No fiber cereal or oatmeal?

― curmudgeon, Monday, September 24, 2012 10:25 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eggs and kale usually, maybe a lil smoked salmon

leafy green (spinach, yam leaves, whatever, steamed) + leftover block of protein (whatever i ate for dinner or pwo meal) . first meal is always mainly protein + fat + leafy green. and the last meal of the day is always prepped with breakfast in mind.

if im really pressed its boiled egg * 3 + block of frozen spinach splashed with olive oil after microwaving

so i am a week in now, and pretty sold on this deal. lost 1.5 pounds, but more importantly the location of that weight seems to be shifting out of ye old beer belly and into like muscles and stuff in a pretty notable way? way more energy, sleeping better, not feeling like i am going to die after i work out, drinking a shit ton more water. and most of the recipes have been awesome (crustless swirled quiche less so) - in particular a laab esan variant made with ground turkey that made me realize that up until now i have been living a lie thx to not having chinese 5 spice in my house.

one quick question - this thing keeps hassling me to replace my soy sauce with coconut aminos, which sounds terrible to me. is it a thing? does it suck?

are you using a specific cookbook or piecing together stuff based on a cornucopia of sources

a specific cookbook that pretty much rules, ks brother who is one of those terrifyingly healthy dudes (hes a physical trainer) tried a bunch of them and recommended it. lemme find a link

one of the things i like abt it is that it has a bunch of 30 day meal plans, and you can go to the website and download complete weekly shopping lists, which is urgent and key for a slack asshole like me that needs to be told what to do wrt feeding myself.

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Paleo-Customized-Whole-Foods-Lifestyle/dp/1936608758/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348764484&sr=8-1&keywords=practical+paleo

oh that's pretty awesome, right now we keep having this issue where instead of planning meals we will buy "staples" which then means we end up with a freezer full of catfish for three months

jj can i ask what your workout is?

beercan curls

ha i was gonna say we can have a tedious gym talk over some complex sugar and alcohol beverages sometime

beercan curls a component of course

nothing crazy, long dog walking (which is an upper body workout as well because 110 pounds of dog + a world full of terrible things to smell is an adventure) and the dusty elliptical machine upstairs. prob going to return to doing kettlebell stuff with ks brother after the first month of this, but i dont want to kill myself that way quite yet.

"the HENRY workout"

to be clear, i think my positive results are going to be a little more extreme than most thx to the fact that prior to this i basically ate complete fucking garbage 24/7.

hooray for my weird metabolism, by all rights i should weigh like 300 pounds at this point.

also there are moments of super weird cravings, i was walking through trader joes and there was a little carrot juice sample counter and i was suddenly ravenously interested in drinking like a carton of the stuff, despite not giving two shits abt carrot juice in the preceding 30+ years of my life on this planet.

well carrot juice is the best of all juices so I think that just means your body is readjusting to normal