You see, I hate counting calories.
I don’t have time for that. I don’t like keeping track of how much I’ve eaten nor do I obsess over how many grams of a particular nutrient I’ve had. One of the reasons I hate counting calories: not all calories are created equal. Stuffing 400 calories worth of Doritos in my mouth (mmmm!!) definitely does not affect my body in the same way as 400 calories of high-quality vegetables and proteins. I also just hate math.
Enter the Paleo Diet – I don’t have to count calories anymore! Ever! And it’s helped me lose weight, build muscle, and get in the best shape of my life.
So what is it? Basically, if a caveman couldn’t eat it, neither can you. The Paleo Diet is an effort to go back to eating how we’re biologically designed to eat. And cavemen didn’t eat grains. Grains are composed primarily of carbohydrates, and those are turned into glucose (a type of sugar) in our system to be used for energy and various other tasks to help our body function. But here’s the thing – any glucose that isn’t used as energy is stored as fat.
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Who wants that? Well, turns out a lot of people do. But it’s not for me. The Paleo Diet also almost completely erases sugar from your diet. Unless you’re getting your sugar from a fruit, forget it. Sugar is a dangerous drug, and the sooner you start thinking that way, the healthier you’ll be.
So, no grains, no sugar, and no processed foods. Bye bye, late night Taco Bell runs!
To help, here is a basic scheme of what to eat on the Paleo Diet:
Eat:
Grass-fed meats
Fish and seafood
Fresh fruits and vegetables
Eggs
Nuts and seeds
Healthful oils (Olive, walnut, flaxseed, macadamia, avocado, coconut)
Don’t eat:
Cereal grains
Legumes (including peanuts)
Dairy
Refined sugar
Potatoes
Processed foods
Salt
Refined vegetable oils
Here are a few easy ways to start changing your daily meals for the better:
Breakfast is easy – make an omelet. Sauté some onion, peppers, mushrooms, and broccoli in olive or coconut oil; add omega-3-enriched or free-range eggs and diced turkey or chicken breast.
Lunches are a snap. At the beginning of the week, make a giant salad with anything you like. Need some ideas? Here you go: mixed greens, spinach, radishes, bell peppers, cucumbers, carrots, avocadoes, walnuts, almonds and sliced apples or pears. Store the salad in a large sealable container. Each morning prepare a single serving for lunch, and then mix in a meat of your choice. Toss with olive oil and lemon juice and that’s it.
For dinner, try spaghetti squash as a substitute for pasta. Top with pesto, marinara and meatballs. Any other grilled meats and vegetables topped with olive oil and garlic will also do nicely.
Sweet tooth? Turn to berries and other fruits, and skip the ice cream.
There are many more ways to Paleo your life but these simple suggestions should get you started.
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Heather Brook
The best diet I ever tried is Paleo. Lost weight, and feel much better and healthier.
The meals are also much better and tastier than other diets. I use the paleo grubs cookbook,
found it at http://lookingupstuff.com/weightloss/2015/04/23/paleo-grubs/
minddenizen
The Paleo logic is flawed. Check out Paleofantacy by Marlene Suk. She lays out in easy to understand language how evolution doesn’t suggest we eat like a caveman.
Matthew A R Sherian
legumes are so good though.
patricko
Cavemen had olive oil? No. Marinara? No. I could go on but won’t.
Tom Pollack
I like my vegan diet 3 1/2 years and no issues trained for a marathon while being vegan
hyhybt
Too gimmicky, never mind the misleading name. But better a paleo diet than paleo medicine.
Glücklich
God I hate eating. I like feeling full and like things that taste good but I rarely think of food as anything other than fuel. I will get so involved in work or some project I will forget to eat unless someone reminds me or I start to get shaky. If I could get a food implant that would be ideal.
Not into cooking or food smells in my house. At home I still have the jar of McCormick pepper my mother gave me when I moved into my first apartment in 2002.
That said, I don’t eat garbage. Lots of sashimi from Seamless and Broccoli Wokli from TJ’s.
Giancarlo85
The diet is a fantasy and is discredited. Just like the Atkins diet.
Mary Nana Moyer
you dont need to count calories! wow! whatever youre doing, keep doing it, seriously!
Bromancer7
@patricko: Exactly. He contradicts himself many times. Nuts but no peanuts (meaning no peanut butter)? No potatoes, despite it being a root vegetable that cavemen would have eaten if they had found?
Bromancer7
@Giancarlo85: It’s not fantasy, nor has it been debunked. There is no doubt that sugar and simple carbs are not good for us. Cutting back on them, or even cutting them out of your diet completely, is certainly not a bad thing.
That being said, not all grains are bad for you. Whole grains, in moderation, are good for us. But this still means cutting out all the white sugar, simple carbs (like pasta, bread, rolls), and processed foods. Personally I’m a bit on the fence about dairy — I think milk is horrible for us, but a small to moderate amount of organic cheese probably won’t hurt.
It’s not really about what cavemen would have eaten, it’s more about what our bodies are designed to eat — what is the most optimal fuel for us. While it’s convenient to say “eat like a caveman” the reality is that we are no longer biologically the same as cavemen. We have evolved over many millennia to eat grains, as as they were for thousands of years the staple food for us once we no longer were cavemen and developed agriculture. Those that could not tolerate them would have died off, leaving those that thrived on them to produce offspring that could also thrive on them.
Again, it comes back to the *processed* grains and sugars — things that are recent additions to our diet (less than 100 years) that we are NOT able to properly process. These are the things we should be removing from our diet.
Captain Obvious
“Cavemen” on average didn’t even make it to the ripe old age of 30. They also didn’t have grocery stores and would eat everything in sight if it was placed in front of them.
If you want to lose weight you just have to eat less calories, period. Most people eat their maintenance everyday or slightly over(which causes weight gain) and expect to lose weight without any exercise.
Cut 500-1000 calories per day and tada! You’ll lose weight.
People also expect to take weight off in a few short weeks or months when it took them years to pack it on. That’s what’s unrealistic and fantasy.
Yes some people can lose weight that quickly and most who do also end up with a lot of loose skin that causes other issues. It’s also unhealthy.
The problem usually isn’t meals for most people(who aren’t eating fast food all day), it’s the snacking. Americans snack horribly, our snacks for full of chemicals. All that said I’m about to get contradictory.
People try to turn natural sugar into the issue when it isn’t. High Fructose Corn Syrup made America obese so put blame where it’s due. Anyone born in or before the 80s should know this. When food was still mostly natural hardly anyone who had a mild activity level was not fat by any means. Now we can barely muster the energy to be active because our food isn’t really food at all.
Even the ingredients for meals aren’t really food. Genetically modified fruits, vegetables, and even MEATS are slowly killing us.
Keep up the diet fads, it makes the problem yours, when the blame really belongs on these food companies. The fact that so many people don’t pay attention to the massive amount of chemicals and mutated “foods” going into their bodies is scary but that’s the world we’ve been conditioned to live in.
People really aren’t eating that much differently than we did in the 80s when most of us were a healthy weight. The “food” is different, so we have to change what we eat now to balance it out.
If you want it, make it yourself. Google anything you want to eat and there will be multiple recipes for it. You can make things in advance, even your favorite breads, and you will lose a lot of weight faster than you’d ever imagined without changing anything but your shopping habits.
MarionPaige
The potato is only native to South America. There are a lot of foods that could have only been found in certain “regions”. So a true caveman diet would mean only eating foods indigenous to where you were born.
The thing about “oils” is kinda funny – cavemen pressing oils?
Wilberforce
Two words: The Plant Based Diet
Giancarlo85
@Bromancer7: Oh absolutely, I should have been more specific. Sugars are good to cut back on and in moderation, but the part on grains certainly isn’t true. To me this is just another diet fad and one people just try without making a serious commitment to a healthy lifestyle.
dave lopes
Burn more calories than you take in.
Reduce sugar and carb.
Increase protein and good fat.
exercise.
Aranos
Yeah, and cavemen were like 1m40 tall and died aged 25 or so.
So I do not think adopting their diet is such a good idea. Eating less sweets, less fat and less meat is, though.
Aranos
In fact, this article made me want to eat one of the chocolate-desserts topped with wipped cream I have in the fridge. And I’m gonna make an espresso to go with it. God, I just love civilization!
Warwick Palfrey
I went Paleo for the New Year…and what a year so far. I sleep better. I feel great. I’ve lost 40 pounds,,, and I’m getting new clothes to fit my frame!
notevenwrong
God, those pictures! Be still my heart! Who is the model?!?!
kurt_t
@Bromancer7, a peanut isn’t really a nut, it’s a legume. Kind of like a koala bear isn’t really a bear but a tree-dwelling marsupial. Although I suppose the paleo diet would permit you to eat koala bears.
Back off, vegans. I’m just reporting the facts.
rand503
If you want to eat like a caveman, which one? If you lived near the ocean or a river, that meant almost 100% fish. If you are landlocked, it means mostly meat.
If you, as a prehistoric man, lived in mongolia, you would eat as they do today, which is mostly meat and almost no vegetables. Mongolians even today have shorter life spans that others.
It also means that you can only eat fruits and vegetales that are organic and in season. That means blueberries only a few weeks during the summer, at most.
It means that you gorge on meat once in a while and survive foraging in between. Cavemen did not eat meat that much and usually went on a raid only once in a while.
No alcohol of any sort, of course.
Bascially, it’s just a made up diet. It might work, it might not — results about the long term effects are hard to find. Most people lose weight on any sort of diet in the early months., and most put it back on later.
Chris-MI
Yeah, it’s too arbitrary. Coffee? Hell yes, the people who invented the diet were addicted. Coffee good! Grains? Grains bad! Why? Why wouldn’t paleo people have eaten grains when they were available? Why wouldn’t they have stored their grains and made beer for that matter? Why sweet potatoes and turnips but not potatoes? Why is ghee paleo but no other dairy food? Why is bacon paleo when beer is easier to make? How did paleo people manage to eat so much lard yet not eat so much fruit?
hyhybt
@Chris-MI: The name isn’t really meant to be accurate. It’s a marketing label, and simultaneously a simple way to remember what you’re allowed to eat and what you’re not: think of, not a genuine prehistoric person, but a cartoon caricature of a caveman. Fred Flintstone ordering a rack of ribs big enough to tip the car over.
AJAnders
@ dave lopes
Bingo. That’s exactly how I’ve lost, almost 100 pounds (2 more to go) since the last week of September.
My exercise routine is just walking, walking, walking. Whether it’s on the treadmill, through the neighborhood or walking the track at the park. I’m up to about 11 miles of walking a day. It’s all about the four things you listed.
Just 27 more pounds to go and I will reach my goal weight.
Giancarlo85
Seems like we have some who are advertising for this diet. Some articles attract spam.
AlliterationAddict
@Chris-MI: well, grains literally did not exist at the time. We selectively bred them for greater energy content. Of course, by the same process, homo sapiens sapiens coevolved alongside early domesticates. Not to mention that paleolithic humans would not have eaten half of the stuff in the paleo diet. But in my experience, people who love the paleo diet are very uncomfortable with science published in anything that isn’t People magazine. And before the knives come out, it should be made clear that I am an anthropologist who specializes in diet and food security, so I do know a thing or two about the subject.
Giancarlo85
If people are claiming grains suddenly made us more unhealthy, not exactly. Our life expectancy has doubled or even tripled in the last century. The paleo diet is not historically accurate.
If people think sugar is what is causing the obesity epidemic… I need to kind of question that too. It isn’t sugar alone, and sugar in moderation is just fine. Sugar has existed a lot longer than recent history despite what people claim on here. It isn’t a recent invention. It is one of the world’s OLDEST crops. Some say perhaps the oldest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarcane#Sugarcane_plantations_in_the_19th_century
The real problem isn’t sugar cane. It’s the artifical sweeteners such as aspartame, splenda and other garbage, as well as the corn syrup shit that may be linked to obesity. As artifical sweeteners took off in the 1980s, the level of obesity increased. And as HFCS was used more commonly in food products there is a potential correlation.
http://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/HFCS_Rats_10.pdf
Specific studies have noticed this factor and have substantiated that HFCS has been linked to obesity in certain tests on animals. I am willing to bet if someone cuts it from their diet they’ll notice a difference on that alone. My brother who stopped drinking softdrinks with that crap in it lost 20 pounds alone. And any softdrink he or I may drink from time to time will have only actual sugar cane (whether it be Mexican cola or jarritos, etc).
I never had an issue with my weight, I’ve always been thin… but I still take care of my body. I just don’t need fantasy diets or bullshit to keep healthy. And yes, processed food are not good for you! A sweet might be fine every now and then, but don’t overdo it. All about moderation.
jwtraveler
Cavemen didn’t wear clothes or live in heated homes. They didn’t have cars or any kind of transportation. Let’s all sleep outside naked in January and walk everywhere barefoot. Also no books, music, internet, videos or phones! Try to live without your phone. Cavemen also didn’t have vaccinations or medical care.
Saint Law
Genes play a bit part in what food we can most effectively metabolise – else Eskimos would die from coronary heart disease aged seven what with all the fat they eat.
For some, a protein intense diet like the Paleo will be very hard on their system, particularly their kidneys. For others though it will work a treat.
Heather Brook
Natural ways are the best for loosing weight. It not about the looks, it’s about health. Paleo is the best diet I ever tried. Lost weight, and feel much better and healthier.
The meals are also much better and tastier than other diets. I use the paleo grubs cookbook,
found it at http://lookingupstuff.com/weightloss/2015/04/23/paleo-grubs/
Ron Parsons
I’m sorry, I cannot eat like a cave man as my area has run out of woolly mammoths and such….
Mykaels
Except this is not how the paleolithic people ate. The fastest human being cannot run faster than a bunny. Most were scavengers who ate whatever they could find in an area, mostly roots.
Good diet, bad bad bad name.
onthemark
@jwtraveler: I saw a documentary called “The Flintstones” that contradicts much of what you say.
Bromancer7
@Giancarlo85: You’ve got a lot going on here.
1.) Sugar in moderation is not bad for you. The problem is we no longer consume it in moderation. It’s in virtually every packaged food you buy. As a society we are consuming more candy, cakes, and other confections than ever before. Drinking more soda than ever before. And forget “low fat” products. They take the fat out and just dump more sugar into it. There is a reason why the low-fat diet fad of the 80s and 90s made us even fatter — because dietary fat isn’t the problem. Sugar is.
2.) The preponderance of artificial sweeteners also plays a role. We have more and more evidence that ASs actually stimulate appetite, causing you to eat more. Again, in small amounts they are fine. But when people are sucking down 2-4 liters of Diet Coke a day, that’s not a small amount. To this day I still roll my eyes when an obese person orders a huge meal and then asks for a Diet Coke. Really?
3.) HFCS. Poison. Avoid at all costs. Period.
Ronbo
Yes my commenting friends, paleo is just a fad. Millions of years old: but, just a fad.
Now, eating grains and sugar… that’s been around for over 2,000 years and look at how thin and lean we’ve all become on it! Oh, I know, some of you are thin and lean on it; but, just wait until you are a few years older.
I am Gay (just like you), Black, HIV-Positive, and Back Bitches!!!
@Giancarlo85: “Some articles attract spam?”
Yeah, and here you are whore! Now can you shut the fuck up for a change, and stop projecting already! Yes, or no? Because much like “The Atkins Diet” you’re a fantasy that’s being discredited! It’s no wonder you showed up with a bunch of random factoids about dieting you fat douche, but I would suggest you start waiting until you’re atleast spoken to this time before you start-in with your typical, random attack shtick again whore! Wouldn’t want to chip a nail you fat fucking cow, now would you? And the last thing we all need is another misguided, crybabying attempt from you about how you were “attacked” for all the crackheaded bullshit that you spouted first! Speaking of crack, why don’t you tell them all about how you really go about losing all of the weight you gain in life Gigi?
I am Gay (just like you), Black, HIV-Positive, and Back Bitches!!!
@Saint Law: Funny seeing you here! Giancarlo told you he was coming, so you felt like it would be a safe venture? Well, isn’t this a fun “Nazi Day at the Park”?
I should have guessed you were an expert on cavemen! You know for a fact that eating like a caveman isn’t any good, because that’s not the way you used to do it!
Bromancer7
@Ronbo: Actually we’ve been eating grains for about 100,000 years, well within the “paleo” period. The claim that paleo people didn’t eat grains is a myth. They certainly did. Of course they weren’t anything like the refined, processed, and GMO grains of today, but they certainly ate them.
jwtraveler
@onthemark: Do you know where I can get a pet dinosaur?
onthemark
@jwtraveler: The documentary didn’t say, but it did imply that if you live like a caveman you will have “a gay old time”!
Enron
When my brother did bodybuilding, he ate all kinda stuff, even the stuff you said is not healthy. The only thing outside of that was the Joe Wieder powder he drank with the food. He was ripped like he was carved out of stone.
His secret, he went to the gym every single day and he built his own. So none of this sh!t you said really counts. You have to go to the gym everyday and be persistent if you want to have White Party Currency.