Christians, Christianity and the Paleo Diet. Compatible or Not?
For your weekend consumption, I encourage you to read a rather unique article which I wrote on HubPages:
Christians, Christianity and the Paleo Diet: Are they Compatible?
You have to click through to HubPages to read the article, but I would like to provide some background on it here.
I have made my position as an advocate for the paleolithic style of eating and exercise very clear. I have researched the subject for the past year and have seen remarkable results in my own life from adopting it as a complete lifestyle. Simultaneously, I also do not shy away from letting people know that I am a Christian.
People are fond of reminding me that grains are in the Bible. Fair point. Furthermore, the science behind the Paleo diet is almost entirely based on evolutionary biology, so aren't I compromising? How can I live the way that I do without compromising my beliefs or subjecting myself to ongoing cognitive dissonance?
These were questions which, after a long enough period, I had to ask myself in a structured manner. So I poured myself a cup of strong coffee, settled in with my Bible and my old friend, Google, and did as I always do when I want to educate myself on a subject: I read, researched, assimilated and typed out my findings.
This article was the result. I would appreciate your reading the full story, but here is the CliffsNotes abridgment if you are pressed for time.
- Nutritionally, the Bible and the paleo diet give the same advice. (Genesis 1:28-29, 9:1-3).
- Christ used grains and bread as a metaphor because that is what his audiences understood when he spoke to them, 2,000 years ago. The grains of today are much different than the grains spoken of in the Bible, and now contain many harmful anti-nutrients.
- The paleo diet's reliance on an evolutionary model is rooted in its desire to express why a pre-agricultural diet is most beneficial for the human body. Evolutionists in the paleo community state that we evolved to our physical and mental apex through a diet free of grains and other products of agriculture. However, this fits in very well with the Biblical model as well, only in this paradigm, it simply means accepting that an Intelligent Designer created us to eat this way, and we messed it up.
Favorite Blogs: Fitness and Nutrition
If it's true that what goes around comes around, I'd like to start throwing a little love toward some of my favorite blogs.
This week, I want to focus on blogs about healthy nutrition and fitness.
Almost a year ago, I decided to make some fairly drastic changes in my life. I was very overweight and eating a steady diet of processed, unhealthy food. Starting last June, I made incremental lifestyle changes to the point where I am right now; fifty pounds lighter and enjoying a grain-free, primal/paleo diet of whole foods.
To stay current on information and stay inspired in my new lifestyle, I read a lot of blogs about paleo nutrition and natural exercise. I am also building a home library of books which I steadily lend out to friends and family seeking a new lease on life. In that spirit of sharing knowledge, these are a few of my favorite blogs, with my reasons for liking them:
- Diabetes-Warrior.Net - Steve Cooksey has not cured his diabetes, but he no longer takes medication for it. He manages his health entirely through a low-carb paleo diet and keeps up a lifestyle which is far more active and healthy than most diabetics can even dream of without insulin. His blog is rife with data gathered through research and self-experimentation. I am not diabetic and never have been, but Steve is an inspiration, and his straightforward approach to health and longterm wellness is just a reminder that Hippocrates was right when he said "let thy food be thy medicine."
- Fed Up With Lunch - Sarah Wu, known for a long time under the pseudonym "Mrs. Q," is an amazing human being. She is committed to improving the quality of American school lunches. Sarah ate these lunches for a year before writing a book about her experiences. Her blog has a global perspective, examining the content, quality and cost of school lunches around the world, and her friendly, conversational writing style helps expose ways in which American school systems can help their kids through serving them better food.
- Free the Animal - The online paleo community is made up of many diverse personalities. Richard Nikoley is one of the more colorful figures in the blogosphere. Styling himself as the "Angry Dick" of paleo bloggers, Richard has a no-nonsense delivery which appeals to me. He is also a titan in the field of self-experimentation. If there is a sacred cow, he will chase it down and convert it to burger, just to see what happens. Free the Animal has great value as a source of researched data and experiments on a variety of topics, but it is also worth reading for its sheer entertainment value. I recently picked up Richard's book, also entitled Free the Animal, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it as a starting point for anyone interested in a paleo meal plan.
- Gnolls.org - J. Stanton authored one of the most life-changing novels I ever read in the form of his book The Gnoll Credo. It is a story which made me clean out my closet and reevaluate my life. I wrote a review of it on Hubpages, which actually led to my corresponding with Stanton via email. Stanton is a proponent of ancestral health, and his articles on nutrition and biology are both interesting and exhaustively researched. Readers beware; reading anything written by J. Stanton is liable to cause unscheduled life change, increase in focus and sudden and vocal expressions of primal energies. You have been warned.
- LivingSuperhuman - Brothers Andrew and Anthony Frezza don't settle for anything less than life lived to the fullest. They are committed to encouraging other people to break plateaus and raise the bar for themselves as both physical and emotional beings, hence the presence of "superhuman" in the blog's title. It is less a stated "paleo blog" than it is about eating foods that yield optimum results. It just so happens that the best foods to eat fall in line with a paleo meal plan. Together, the Frezzas provide excellent workout advice, nutrition information and recipes for delicious and nutrient-dense meals designed for athletes' needs. LivingSuperhuman also recognizes something that many other paleo-minded writers minimize: that "cheat" meals are inevitable. Instead of criticizing or reminded people to mind their creeping carb counts, the voices of LS are encouraging, going so far as to freely share their own (infrequent) indulgences. In my opinion, such departure from the rigidity of dogma elevates Frezzas; both as a fitness writers and as all-around decent human beings. I'm currently involved in their Superhuman50 Challenge.
- Mark's Daily Apple - When someone first begins to research paleo nutrition, their first encounter is usually through the work of either Mark Sisson or Robb Wolfe. Mark Sisson's web site is updated steadily with articles, recipes and advice for living a healthy lifestyle according to Mark's easy to follow template, The Primal Blueprint. Mark writes excellent books and sells powerhouse nutritional supplements, but 99% of his work is available for free on his web site, indexed according to topic in an excellent search engine. Mark is a rare breed of health guru. He has an educational background in nutrition, a professional background as an world-class marathoner, and a compelling story of his own personal journey from a conventional athletic diet to a primal lifestyle which he makes extremely accessible to his readers. Mark's work is important to me, because it was his book and blog which were most instrumental in helping me to take control of my own life and reclaim my health. I always read his blog first.
- Physical Living - John Sifferman is a more recent discovery, but his blog is excellent. He talks about nutrition from time to time, but his blog is all about fitness. His workouts range from new strategies for old favorites (his posts about pull-ups are fantastic), to compound workout drills for more unique training tools and methods, such as clubbells.
- Zen to Fitness - Sometimes, information becomes so familiar that we stop hearing it. Zen to Fitness is a great blog because it takes the concept of fitness, which should be simple but is usually overcomplicated in the way it's presented, and reduces it back to its simplest terms. Needing to think less about something isn't always a bad thing; over-thinking fitness is usually what makes it drudgery, and Chris, the editor of Zen to Fitness, keeps the site stocked with articles espousing a healthy, fit lifestyle that is achieved and maintained through very simple methods.
Intermittent fasting and the myth of "three squares a day."
Scenario #1 Standard American Life
I wake up in the morning and start my day with a bowl of cereal, toast and a glass of juice.
At noon, I eat a sandwich with chips and a Snickers bar for dessert.
At 3pm, I'm hungry and focusing on work is difficult, so I eat another Snickers and wash it down with a cup of coffee.
For dinner at 6pm, I eat a "real meal" of meat, vegetables and a dinner roll. A piece of leftover cake follows for dessert.
I go to sleep and repeat the sequence the next day.
Scenario #2
I wake up in the morning and start my day with some eggs and salsa or a leftover piece of meat from the night before.
At noon, I have a salad with grilled chicken strips, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I eat a few squares of dark chocolate for dessert.
At 3pm, I'm feeling a bit peckish, so I toss back a handful of nuts.
For dinner at 6pm, I eat meat, vegetables and some fruit as a garnish or a dessert.
I go to sleep and repeat the sequence the next day.
Scenario #3
Primal Blueprint + Intermittent Fasting
I wake up in the morning. I ate a big meal the night before, so I drink a cup of coffee and decide to wait until I'm hungry to eat again.
At noon, I'm hungry for lunch, so I go out to my favorite restaurant for a bunless hamburger with plenty of onions and mushrooms on top, served with a side salad or some mixed vegetables. A few squares of dark chocolate round out the meal to satisfaction.
At 3pm, the fats and proteins in the burger are satisfying enough so that I am not hungry and can work through the day without loss of focus.
At 6pm, I'm hungry but not ravenous. Dinner is another arrangement of meat and vegetables, light portions.
I go to sleep and repeat the sequence the next day, with variation in schedule and meals skipped based on hunger.
Which of these makes the most sense? The latter two are obviously the more healthy choices of food, as well as in which order the meals are consumed, i.e., starting the day with protein and fat instead of simple carbs...but what's all that nonsense about skipping meals?
Question for your Sunday: Why do we eat three meals a day? Do we eat because we're truly hungry, or because a government-recommended diet high in simple carbohydrates has conditioned us to want three meals a day?
America has an epidemic. It isn't obesity or diabetes or heart disease; those are symptoms.
The epidemic is herd mentality. Blind acceptance of a status quo.
A USDA stamp on a box does not make a food nutritious or ideal as an energy source. It simply means that it has the required amount of certain ingredients or "fortifications" to make it passable to be sold to consumers. 60 Minutes aired a piece several months ago that showed how companies actually engineer processed foods to have the same qualities as addictive or controlled substances. Pre-made food bought in colorful boxes is created specifically to manipulate you into feeling hungry sooner, desire that taste again, and buy more. Think about that.
Healthy foods, that is to say, whole foods, meat and produce, raised or grown without additives, are where true nutrition is to be found. They provide necessary fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals for human life. And most importantly to the human experience, they provide satiety.
When your food is satisfying and provides your body with what it needs to replenish cells and nourish your muscles and organs, there is no reason to eat, unless you are hungry. The problem is, food is so easy to procure in our culture that we often forget what hunger actually feels like, resulting in snacking and overeating. One reason for this is the Western attachment to the idea of three meals a day, and the oft-repeated mantra that breakfast is somehow the most important meal of the day.
However, if your meals are complete and provides actual nutrition, you might not really be hungry first thing in the morning. If so, don't eat! Alternatively, if you are hungry in the morning and eat breakfast, and the satisfaction from breakfast stays all the way until the lunch hour, do you really need to eat lunch?
This applies to any meal, or more than one meal. Modern life often requires a lot of time spent being sedentary, either working behind a desk or, in my case, spending time sitting in a college lecture/regurgitate-lecture-on-paper environment. The assumption that we need to constantly replenish the very minor caloric expenditure of sitting is just silly.
In a hunter-gatherer society, or at the very least, a society that is not dependent on grain agriculture (something that wasn't necessary until humans started congregating in cities and found it necessary to sustain large populations with cheap, bulk crops), food isn't always readily available. That is why primitive cultures who still hunt and gather instead of rely on farming for their food sources tend to be incredibly healthy until "heroes from the West" descend to "civilize" them.
If you're not hungry at one of the culturally prescribed 8am/12pm/6pm meal times, do yourself a favor and just wait. The idea that "one size fits all," that something terrible will happen if you skip a meal, is just silly. What you put into your body is an individual experience, and should be a conscious choice. If you're not hungry, no one has the right to make you eat.
Every now and again, I like to go twenty-four hours without consuming food. I'll drink some black coffee (no sugar) or tea, but I give my body time to reset. It accelerates fat-burning, it sharpens my mind through consequent ghrelin production and restores insulin sensitivity. And when I am between meals, I try not to snack; my liver needs a break now and again. This comes in handy on long flights, where the unapologetically disgusting food served on airplanes actually does more to discourage one from eating.
But, perhaps most importantly, it makes me appreciate food. You have to eat properly before you can skip meals properly. When you eat real foods like meat, fowl, fish, vegetables, fruits and nuts, your palate becomes much more sensitive; the act of enjoying a meal when nobly hungry takes on special significance.
When you choose to set your own schedule, you are no longer one of the herd. Your relationship with food changes. Instead of mindlessly shoving back lab-engineered, factory-assembled crap every few hours, the food experience becomes just that: an experience.
I am fasting as I write this. I indulged in a large meal of Indian food yesterday, liberal helpings of chicken and vegetables topped off by an indulgence in the heavenly Indian dessert gajar halwa. I haven't been hungry since, so I haven't eaten. It's been almost twenty-four hours now, and I feel fantastic. I am awake and alert; the words are flowing freely as I write.
Respect yourself. Respect your food. Eat when hungry or not at all.
Further reading:
- Mark Sisson's "Why Fast?" Series [Mark's Daily Apple]
- I Am a Ghrelin Addict [gnolls.org]
- Intermittent Fasting: A Beginner's Guide [Art of Manliness]
- The Flavorists [60 Minutes Excerpt - Video]