I have been thinking about giving this diet a try and I would like some feedback first. Does anyone know the pros and cons of this diet? Or has anyone had any experiences with it, either positive or negative? Thanks in advance.
you might get eaten by a saber tooth tiger!
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Not a classic first post, but please… Search and you will find - you aren’t the first poster who wants to know more about it.
- 1 on the search function.
I’ve been paleo for over a year and my performance has improved significantly. I adjusted the protocol for additional carbs when racing and training hard. Like most Paleo folks will tell you, just do it for 30 days and see how you look feel and perform. You may experience some “carb flu” symptoms, but its worth it.
And no, you don’t have to eat bacon at every meal, although it is really appealing!
Dave
Heard a lot of bad about it.
I adjusted the protocol for additional carbs
What did you add?
- 1 on the search function.
I’ve been paleo for over a year and my performance has improved significantly. I adjusted the protocol for additional carbs when racing and training hard. Like most Paleo folks will tell you, just do it for 30 days and see how you look feel and perform. You may experience some “carb flu” symptoms, but its worth it.
And no, you don’t have to eat bacon at every meal, although it is really appealing!
Dave
I love it when people say “I am paleo, except for ____.” You know what that means? That means you are not paleo. That means you “hopefully” eat a diet of healthy meat, vegetables, and fruit with very low amounts of processed items.
My problems with paleo. Well, no one knows what people actually ate 10,000 years ago. And second, there are almost as many different paleo diets as there are christian denominations, and each one thinks the others are going to hell. Plus 10,000 years is a joke, give me a break. We do know what higher primates have been eating for 65 million years, but the paleo experts seem to ignore that.
I think it has some good ideas that are sound, much more sound than any other diet i have researched. It is an anti inflamtory diet which is great for people with IBS or other intestinal problems. Also it provides a good general and easy to follow framework to choose food from. I am not strict at all, i just try and eat clean, but the paleo books have provided a lot of information that has shaped my current diet.
If you are training at a decent load I would recommend tweaking the diet to account for your workout windows; what you eat in the 30 minutes before a workout, during the workout, and in the 1-2 hours after a workout. If you are doing meaningful work, you will want to have that period (e.g., the workout window) fueled mainly by carbs (before/during) and then carbs and proteins (after). During the rest of the day, eliminating grains is probably OK. Just make sure you don’t short-change your body’s ability to prep for workouts and restore glycogen after, and only carbohydrates will get you there, and generally, simple carbs (sugars) work best. This doesn’t mean that you have to go processed. Cherries, bananas, and other hi-sugar fruits work great.
Good luck.
It is too bad they have to turn such good advice into a quack job of a scientific basis and are working so hard to make money from it.
Mike Pollan did a good job of summing up their books in three lines:
Eat real food
Not too much
Mostly plants
Just bumped up the sweet potatoes, yams, taro root, casava root and added a few more bananas to the mix. Most Paleo folks are low carb too and that won’t work for endurance training.
There is a lot of very intelligent discussion going on in paleo circles regarding “safe starches” that in and of themselves are not 100% Paleo. Those most often cited are white rice and quinioa. Many athletes incorporate those two items with good results. I gave white rice a shot but didn’t see any dramatic change so I dropped it again.
OP: I encourage you to try it and don’t listen to the people who are spouting ignorant half-truths about not knowing what people ate 10,000 years ago. Fossil records are pretty good, the research is out there. If you want to take a more moderate approach, have a look at the book, nurishing traditions, its rather well done and ismore of a whole foods, low grain/fermented grain style of diet than a full on paleo approach.
I just finished providing 5 years of blood work to a study on the paleo diet and autoimmune disprders being conducted by Dr. Loren Cordain, the guy who wrote one of the more heavily reasearched books on the subject “The Paleo Diet”. I have both hypothyroidism (15 years) as well as Psoriasis (35 years). Following a strict paleo protocol has not cleared up either one, but I have seen improvements in my psoriasis a bit and my energy levels are much better (an issue with hypothyroidism).
Best of health to you.
You must have terrible karma if you have two chronic diseases.
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I would recommend you do some reading to decide this. Two exceptionally well researched books I would recommend:
-the Paleo Answer by Lorne Cordain
-The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf
I would read Wolf first, then Cordain. If you doubt what you read there are very good citations in each and you can track down the studies and see for yourself (I did that a lot). I think the clinical evidence is compelling and my anecdotal experience with the PD has been incredibly positive.
The two things that concern me about the paleo diet, even though there are some good principles.
Getting all your carbs from fruit and vegetables: That is a lot of fibre, and fibre is really hard on the digestive system. Grains if cooked well are much easier to digest.
Getting all your protein from meat: The meat that we have, whether it is organic or not, is loaded with bad fat. You can get protein from other food groups and not have to take in all the bad fats all the time.
Is there any way around this? Is tweaking more the answer.
Thanks for the book reference. I like some of the principles from the paleo diet. Especially the non processed food idea and the low grains idea. However I tried reducing starchy carbs before and I found myself either sitting down with a bunch of bananas at around 5pm, and eating like a monkey. Or having a huge dinner full of vegetables and fruit and having horrible stomach cramps. I find the starchy carbs much easier on the stomach than fruit and veggies. I also eat 5 serving of protein a day, and according to the paleo diet, that is a lot of meat. Heart disease runs in my family so I worry about that. I am going to pick up the book and read it though, that might be a better answer for me.
Getting all your carbs from fruit and vegetables: That is a lot of fibre, and fibre is really hard on the digestive system. Grains if cooked well are much easier to digest.
This. I was on paleo for a while until it became an absolute chore to eat enough carbs while worrying about the impact of the fiber. White rice and white flour pasta became far more efficient than downing bowl after bowl of veggies while adding variety.
There’s also something to be said for having a medium to transport sauces on your plate instead of having them pool around the veggies/sweet potatoes…
After posting this I did some research on the pros and cons of the paleo diet, and apparently this diet gained popularity recently after “The Paleo diet for athletes” was published. And this diet seems to be mostly advocated by athletes. I don’t understand how an endurance athlete has enough energy for workouts just using fruit and veggies for carbs alone. Whenever I cut grains out of my diet, I seem to develop this affinity for bananas and go through several bunches of bananas a week. I am assuming the satiation on the paleo diet comes from the “high fat” nature of it. High fat diets in the past for me just tended to pack on the pounds of body fat, the low fat diet worked wonders for me years ago when I first tried it, I dropped into the healthy range of BF % just by switching to low fat, even though I didn’t cut calories.
That is why I am so curious about other people’s experiences with it. Based on what I have read though, everyone seems to agree on one thing about it. Cutting out refined sugar and processed foods, seem to be the key to the health benefits. Where people tend to disagree is more on the cutting out of the real food: grains, beans, dairy and starchy vegetables such as potatoes. They say that the “cooking” of these things kills the most of the natural toxins. One article says that our bodies have evolved to be able to deal with the natural toxins more so than those you find in the modern meats that are listed on the paleo diet anyways, so it is questionable what real good it is doing. One article said that variety in a diet is good, and when a diet cuts out many natural foods, you are short changing yourself.
The reason I mention ‘what carbs do you add’ above, was because I am always open eared when it comes to hearing about the next big thing. Always curious as to whether it is something I should be doing. But inevitably I find two things.
In order for it to become popular it has to include some form of severity. Absolutely no this or you can only eat that. The you can join the club.People say they do it, but add a caveat that it has been amended to suit them, which I am in no way saying is wrong. But does it not mean that they are no longer doing that diet? If you are doing Ironman, but get a taxi for half of the run because it helps your energy levels, are you actually doing ironman? A laboured point but a valid one I think.
I think any focus on having a good diet is a good thing with obvious health benefits but can’t help but feel that I don’t necessarily need a label. Maybe others do. I guess the reason for my post is that I have received a reasonable level of evangelical ‘you should do Paleo’ from people who have adjusted Paleo so that it has simply become a more traditional, healthy diet. Cutting out processed food is not news when it comes to maintaing a healthy, balanced diet or am I missing something?