So, for the past couple of months I have been trying to drop considerable weight; I am tired of racing at or near clydesdale weights. I find it hard to simply “eat less” as a dietary philosophy, so I have been trying to find a “diet” that makes intuitive sense to me and will provide me with guidelines that I can both follow and that will work. At our Wednesday Night ITT last week, I saw a friend for the first time in a couple of months, and for the first time since he had gone on the “paleo diet.” He had lost 30 pounds in three months and set a PB in the year’s first ITT by over a minute.
Needless to say, my next stop was Google to find out about the paleo diet. I had always associated it with Atkins and the “high protien/low carb” diets. What I learned was that the diet is in fact a “no grain based calories” diet, with additional strictures of no dairy, no legumes, and no refined sugars. What you are encouraged to eat are meats, eggs, fruit, nuts, and vegetables. The idea being that you are constrained to those foods eaten by our hunter/gatherer forbearers before they learned the calorically more efficient tricks of agrculture and animal domestication (note, I realize that this may be an oversimplification of prehistoric man’s eating habits, but I am more concerned with the theory as it relates to my diet and nutrition and less worried about anthropological veracity).
So I am giving this a shot. I would be interested in any insights or tips people have on this diet, particulary as to how to make it work with high volumne training. This week hasn’t been too bad because I resting for Sea Otter this weekend, but after I recover from getting my ass handed to me in Monterrey, I will be riding 15-20 hours a week in prep for a double century and more bike races. I will be curious to see how well-fueled I am on apples, almonds, tri-tip, and salad.
after reading about it in gordo’s forum i gave it a shot for about a week. realistically, long term it’s just not gonna happen. i do abide by the basic principles that anything you can hunt or gather is good (ie, lean meat, fish, chicken, nuts, berries, fruits) but i don’t get carried away on the details. i like multigrain bread at breakfast so i eat it. big deal. i think any “diet” that’s restrictive is going to be a problem. concentrate on high quality food. save the white flour, processed foods (pasta, rice, etc) for after training, if at all. hope this helps.
Good tip. I have looked at the site before and read some of his nutrition articles. What struck me in skimming them again was his distinction between energy dense foods and nutrition dense foods. That is something I saw in reading about the paleo diet as well and am trying to follow. Byrn’s own diet seems to contain too much grain for my purposes, but I can see how, once I reach an ideal weight, I could return something like oatmeal to my diet.
Friel and the original author of ‘The Paleo Diet’ are coming out with ‘The Paleo Diet for Athletes’ around August. It’d certainly be a good read.
I think that you’ll find that even if you include some of the very whole grain breads (Ezekial bread as an examply), whole grains like Brown rice and Barley, and even beans, that you will lean up or out or whatever. Your body composition will change.
Friel and the original author of ‘The Paleo Diet’ are coming out with ‘The Paleo Diet for Athletes’ around August. It’d certainly be a good read.
I think that you’ll find that even if you include some of the very whole grain breads (Ezekial bread as an examply), whole grains like Brown rice and Barley, and even beans, that you will lean up or out or whatever. Your body composition will change.
See, that is why I post questions on this forum, cuz’ someone always has the inside dope! Hopefully by August I will be approaching my ideal weight and their book will help me start adapting and refining my diet for maintenance, if need be. And maybe there will a chapter that says something like, “Paleo dieters living in northern California will benefit from including copious amounts of M&Ms, plain or peanut, in their diet.” Thanks for the heads up.
While the paleo diet has a large part to play in the weight loss of the aforementioned cyclist, his stepping up his training regime was also a big factor. He very doggedly rode 1000 miles in March which I believe was quite an increase from his traditional base. I rode 800 miles in the same month (a huge jump from 200 miles the previous month) and tuned my diet so that it was more paleo in nature - although dairy products and breads sometimes snuck in there. On less cycling and a looser diet I lost about 10 lb in a little over a month. So, I am sure we were both on quite comparable regimes. I also took 30 seconds of my personal best in the 10 mile TT.
The paleo diet just make evolutionary common sense to me.