Paleo no more!
A brief interlude from my India recap. I'm editing photos like crazy to get them ready for the blog, but I wanted to get this entry off my chest before going any further with the travelogues.
Backstory:
A little over a year ago, I was about 230 pounds. The stress of college and multiple moves exploited all of my weaknesses for food, especially "comfort" foods like pasta and sweets. And I had no sense of portion control. Lasagna in the house? Two bricks please. M&Ms? I would fill a soup bowl full of them after every lunch. By my senior year of college, at the less than remarkable height of 5' 10", my neck and my chin were becoming a little too similar. It was time for a change.
Several factors pushed me toward a decision to reverse the unhealthy trend and lose some weight:
First, I had practiced karate for five years. It was getting harder and harder to keep up. And my uniform size had gone up; a tangible reminder that my gut had expanded considerably. I was teaching kids how to be healthy, but I wasn't living it out. I felt like a hypocrite (I was).
As a further kick in the pants, a very specific quote from a teacher inspired me to action. While on a school trip, I heard that the professor leading the trip had lost forty pounds. One of my classmates asked him if he had more energy, and his reply stuck with me. "Um, YES I have more energy. My kid weighs forty pounds, it was like carrying him on my back all the time."
In that same year, I made my first mission trip to India. There, I saw real poverty and want for the first time in my life. Long story short, after I arrived home, my lifestyle of excess felt very ill-deserved. I knew that if I was going to make any enduring improvements to my health and body, it would require just that: long-term lifestyle modification.
I began with a series of incremental changes in late June of 2011. First, I stopped drinking soda, limiting myself to one or two per month when I would order a frozen Coke at a movie theater. Second, I cultivated self control over my portion sizes. I also quit partaking in massive desserts after every meal, and when I did have dessert, it was a glass of Ovaltine. For fitness, I started swimming once or twice a week, in addition to my usual regimen of karate and kickboxing. These common sense changes were easy, and startlingly effective. The weight came off fast, and the success drove me to make more changes. Like a skateboarder on a smooth grade, I had momentum, and I wanted to increase it.
By September, I had drastically reduced my carbohydrate and grain intake, and I had lost forty pounds. I didn't eat chips or potatoes any more, my rice intake was limited to sushi on the weekends, and I only ate grain products when I had my weekly Subway veggie delite or a baked dessert on a special occasion. With so much already cut out of my diet, the extremist in my decided to make one more change.
I had read Mark Sisson's The Primal Blueprint, and I knew the strong case against grain products. Gluten, gliadin, empty carbs, systemic inflammation--there was a laundry list of grievances to be laid at the feet of wheat, and I was finally ready to accept them and act accordingly. The Primal Blueprint advocates a return to "ancestral health," a diet based on whole foods (meat, fish, fowl, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds), no legumes and absolutely zero grain products.
I went completely grainless as a thirty-day experiment, going a month entirely without bread, pasta or flour-based desserts.
The results? I lost ten more pounds and made it through October without encountering my yearly seasonal allergies.
I was sold. T'was a primal life for me! Mine became a life sans wheat products, legumes and most forms of sugar. I based my diet on animal protein, healthy fats, an absolutely irresponsible quantity of vegetables, some fruit and dark chocolate (90% cacao content or higher) as an indulgence. Then I drifted toward a more hardcore, strict paleo point of view, cutting back on dairy and sourcing grass-fed meats. None of these things were wrong in and of themselves, but in pursuing this lifestyle, I made a huge mistake.
Today.
Originally, I just wanted to lose some weight to look and feel better. But I turned my diet into an obsession. I made being "the healthy guy" my identity instead of just something I did. I became a food nazi to the point where people apologized to me for eating sandwiches in my presence, without my having spoken at all. I gloried in what I perceived as enlightenment and superiority. While everyone around me continued to eat their "healthy whole grains," they were sick all winter and I wasn't. While others yo-yoed up and down the scale on their low fat diets and bemoaned inevitable weight gain over the holidays, I lost another ten pounds over my Christmas break.
All the while, I expected some kind of social return on my obsession. I don't know what I expected. Applause? A mass conversion of Pop-Tart-popping college students into svelte Crossfitters? I don't know what kind of castle in the air kept me going, but it never materialized. And now, the whole experience has left me hollow.
Over a year later, I'm fifty-something pounds lighter and look a lot better in a tshirt, but I still don't have a six-pack. I don't have the bodyfat percentage I desire. But far worse than these cosmetic details, I realized the other day that I have severely alienated people. I made them uncomfortable with my constant yapping about how all their favorite foods were going to kill them. I lost track of my original goal. Instead of sticking to my original plan of getting in good shape, I drifted into pedantry and demagoguery.
Lately, several things have brought me back down to earth.
First, I started to notice how many headlines get recycled on Mark's Daily Apple. The information is always sound, and MDA is one of the best searchable resources on the web for good nutrition information, but after a year of reading every article, it is apparent to me that there is only so much information that Mark or any other guru can give for the first time, and beyond that, any and all articles will be declarations of theory confirmation with the end goal of selling more books. Speaking of the "paleo blogosphere," it has turned into a nasty place. As the "paleo movement" becomes less of an underground health movement and more of an established faction among the various fitness dynasties, all the blogs look increasingly alike, and I think the authors are aware of this fact. They all have the same interviews, they all have ebooks for sale, and the in-fighting and pettiness gets ridiculous. As a community, I never sense support as much as judgment from the paleo crowd if my beef isn't grass-fed or my vegetables organic.
Second, I feel like sports nutrition is not taught properly by most paleo writers. Caught up in the fervor of "defying conventional wisdom," preaching the doctrines of intermittent fasting and "eating fat to lose fat," the importance of protein is neglected. Eating healthy, natural fats is the best way to lose weight (I'm walking proof of this), but for muscle maintenance, protein should be the highest priority. It wasn't until I read Timothy Ferriss' book The Four-Hour Body that I was made aware of the full importance of protein--not just as a catalyst for building muscle mass, but for cutting fat instead of just losing weight. My personal experiments in intermittent fasting suddenly felt like monumental wastes of time, because it hit me like a ton of bricks that when I was fasting sixteen hours a day to increase insulin sensitivity and production of human growth hormone, I wasn't eating enough protein during my "eating window" to obtain the results I desired.
Coming back to my food nazism, my burgeoning epiphany of my relationship ineptitude was further hammered home by J. Stanton's article "Why Are We Here, And What Are We Looking For? Food Associations And The Pitfalls Of The Search For Novelty," which ranks as one of my favorite pieces of writing that I have ever read on the internet. As he always does, Stanton put the attitudes within the paleo movement into their proper context in his article, and recognized the fact that eating for health in a serious way, ala the paleo lifestyle, is very hard psychologically. In the US, we grow up with PB&Js, Snickers bars and birthday cakes, and in breaking ties with these familiar foods we don't just give up the taste, we give up the feelings attached to them. Stanton's article helped me to be totally honest with myself about the effects of my lifestyle on my relationships with other people. Who was I trying to kid when I insist that Lindt's gourmet, 99% cacao bar is superior to a Butterfinger? They are both delicious, simply in different ways to different people.
For those of you who were hoping to see a total recant of my principles and a video of me gnawing on a French loaf, I'm sorry to disappoint you, because despite my new attitude and grievances with the paleo blog culture, I still agree wholeheartedly with the tenets of paleo nutrition. But I have some modifications to make in my own life. I used my most recent trip to India to test my body's responses to different foods, and the results were interesting:
- A plate of noodles, given to me by a host who was under the impression that Americans live on pasta and french fries, confirmed my suspicions that I have a gluten sensitivity. It was the first time I had eaten any wheat product in almost a year, and within minutes of eating what I was given out of politeness, I experienced harsh stomach cramps and diarrhea. Gluten problems are real, even if you don't have celiac.
- For weight loss and weight management, there is no such thing as a "safe starch." When consumed on a daily basis, rice and potatoes will increase your waistline as much as any other starch or grain. I gained a lot of weight eating a rice-based Indian diet for the first few weeks of the trip, and it was very uncomfortable.
- Natural fats and proteins are STILL the best fuel for the human body. For the above reason (and others, see below) I requested my last host to cook me nothing but eggs and vegetables while I stayed with him. Most of the photos in this entry are of the delicious egg scrambles he cooked for me. On that meal plan, I lost four weeks of rice weight inside of four days. My host even commented on the visible change in my appearance. I might add that my food was cooked in ghee (clarified butter), and I was always given huge portions--my record was fourteen whole eggs in one day. I don't recommend that as an everyday practice, but nevertheless the weight still fell off quickly and my muscle tone reappeared. It is confirmed: low fat diets are, and always will be, the hard and unnatural route to weight loss.
- Counter to what many paleo talking heads will spout, legumes are not all bad. To avoid rice, I would sometimes fill my bowl with dal (boiled and seasoned lentils or mung beans) instead. In the primal/paleo world, legumes are often vilified along with wheat as a source of lectins and phytates, which, long story short, can contribute to leaky gut syndrome (feces leaking into the bloodstream) after long-term consumption. However, in my more recent readings, I have learned that an overnight soak kills 97% of the anti-nutrients in lentils. That is acceptable.
- Industrially processed vegetable oils are legitimately harmful. For reasons of cost and availability, most Indian homes cook their food in mustard oil, palmseed oil or soybean oil. These oils are filled with extremely high volumes of Omega-6 fatty acids. When your body's ratio of n-6/n-3 are out of balance, the result is interior inflammation, which I felt in spades due to the amount of oil used in most authentic curries. I will save you the graphic details, but sufficed to say that my nightly "green apple quickstep" was yet another reason I went on a recovery diet of eggs and veg (boiled in water or cooked in clarified butter instead of oil) late in the trip.
- The occasional indulgence will not destroy health or weight maintenance. On one occasion in India, I consumed somewhere between twenty-four and thirty ounces of sweet lassi (a yogurt drink) combined with fruit juice and chopped banana, inside of an hour. Contrary to my old fears [paranoia], I did not balloon back to an unhealthy weight. I'm not saying this was the healthiest thing to do, but at the time, my Indian host and I felt compelled to judge the merits of several competing lassi vendors.
So where does this leave me? Well, my opinions about what makes up a truly healthy diet remain largely unmoved. I still believe that some foods are best not consumed by humans (modern wheat, most forms of dairy, anything from McDonalds), but after a year of making myself miserable about it, I have decided to resign my position as the community food nazi. The following list represents my new paradigm, which, like everything else, is subject to change with new data:
- I will never budge on the subject of wheat. I saw a shirt once that said "the road to hell is paved with gluten," and I agree wholeheartedly. Some research has speculated that as many as a third of Americans are gluten sensitive, but are so used to the symptoms (sinus inflammation, IBS, etcetera) that they never even consider possible dietary causes. On a broader level, I also I firmly believe that wheat and the concomitant bread and snack food industries are responsible for the epidemic of heart disease and diabetes in America. Read any label, and the only praise you will find for "healthy whole grain" products is the fiber content. Fiber can be obtained through vegetables, along with many other vitamins and nutrients absent in wheat. Balanced against the problems of gluten, I maintain that there is literally no need for grains in the human diet.
- I am incorporating legumes back into my diet, albeit judiciously. Lentils are kind to blood sugar levels and an effective way of filling out meals while reducing grocery costs. And with some some of my recent, post-India stomach trauma, I needed the extra fiber to restore some regularity to my GI tract. On a more recreational and positive note, cashews are back in the mix, too. I had the chance to eat fresh, raw, locallyg-grown cashews in India...I had forgotten how good those little buggers are!
- Systemized intermittent fasting, ala Leangains, is overrated, and the way most people talk about it right now, it has become a fad for most people. Unless you are already well-muscled and sub-12% bodyfat (sub-20% for women), I believe that the visible results are marginal at best. Spontaneous meal-skipping, for weight loss or to aid in cell autophagy, on the other hand, is something I think is healthy to do once or twice a week.
- There is only so much nutrition you can get from whole foods. Supplementation is important. Omega-3 (fish oil, flaxseed oil), vitamin D and acidophilus are all supplements which I take daily now.
- Protein is the new king. Yes, a tall smoothie of coconut milk, nuts and berries is paleo-approved, filling and healthy, but it is not the ideal lunch when you want to cut the last five pounds of fat and build new muscle, which is my goal. I don't believe in counting calories, but I believe firmly in macronutrient ratios.
- I will no longer call myself a devotee of the "paleo diet." I have developed a strong dislike for the groupthink and the tendency toward confirmation bias and anecdotal arguments. The very definition of "paleo" as a set of dietary guidelines has yet to be standardized, but every Grok and Grokette with a blog seems to think that his or her personal definition is the universal standard. The arguments that arise out of the lack of mutually-understood terms are hilarious in the insipidity. In the end, it doesn't matter if "paleo" means high-carb, moderate carb, low carb or ketogenic, the argument of "well, I don't think ancient man would have eaten ____" is always used too often and too lightly.
For the first time in my life, I am going to follow a structured diet. I mentioned The Four-Hour Body earlier in this entry, and I am intrigued by the "Slow Carb Diet." The whole first chapter on the subject is available to read for free, but what I like the most about it is that it brings me back to my original reason for changing my diet in the first place. I wanted to cut fat and build muscle. In my zeal to be perceived as a holistic know-it-all, I drifted away from that stated goal, and as such I never reached it. It's time to return to my original purpose. The Slow Carb Diet is designed out of sound nutritional principles, solid data, and is specifically designed not just for weight loss, but for reducing body fat and maintaing muscle.
The SCD approach includes a weekly "cheat day" for reasons of metabolism and social well-being. I originally had mixed feelings about cheat days. The old me always considered "cheating" to be a sign of weakness and inability to make lasting changes, but lately I realized that my monk-like consistency made me a social pariah in most arenas. Taking one day off from dietary restriction not only prevents metabolic downshifting, but it gives the individual a day to be "normal" again. Even one of my favorite paleo fitness blogs (one of few that is truly well-adjusted in its presentation of information) advocates cheat days wholeheartedly. John Romaniello, one of the most stacked fitness coaches I've ever seen, has written extensively about using planned cheat meals effectively. Good enough for me. For my own first designated cheat day, I plan to indulge heavily in sushi, Nikki's Coconut Butter and perhaps a big cup of chai or creamy turmeric tea for a nightcap. I'm looking forward to it.
So there you have it. If you are one of the people whom I harangued in the past year for what you ate, I apologize. It wasn't my place. I changed my lifestyle at a time when I had little control over anything else in my life, and I allowed myself to be consumed by the idea of controlling both my own diet and that of others. I will not pontificate any more. If asked, I will be glad to share my experience and help other people improve their lifestyle, because I do have good advice to offer on the subject.
But!
Unless or until that happens, I am no longer the "paleo" or "primal" guy. I'm just Steven, and I eat a certain way.
And I really, really love breakfast food.
The M&M's website is not safe for kids!
I told them I was eleven.
While researching material for the fitness ebook I am currently writing for Kindle, I pulled up the M&M's company website a minute ago to check some nutrition information. To my surprise, it has an age lock!
On a hunch, I screencapped the page. Then I put in my date of birth, but changed the year. According to the Mars Corporation, I was an eleven year-old boy. As such, I was too young to be a participant in their "responsible marketing" of sugar-coated sugar to American youth via "toys and games."
Between HBO's Weight of the Nation ringing its bell and Mayor Bloomberg capitalizing on the publicity with the NYC ban on large sodas, the entire snack food industry is on edge right now.
Heck, even Alec Baldwin is weighing in on the fun,
I didn't intend to post a second entry today, but I just found this little tidbit way too entertaining not to share. I don't generally follow the news, but I am writing about health and fitness a lot these days and the fact that it took a well-publicized documentary to kickstart this sudden hysteria interests me greatly.
I had a film teacher in college who talked about working for the California Department of Transportation in the 1960s (yeah, he was old). His job was to assist in filming informational shorts about automobile safety.
Every film included elaborately staged crash tests in which dummies were mercilessly hurled through windshields and slammed into steering wheels. The air was thick with statistics and numbers, chosen specifically for their capacity to frighten viewers into wearing seat belts and stopping completely at every intersection.
"But," Dr. Karimi said, with an air of disbelief which had not waned in fifty years, "no matter how much damn information we threw at them, the statistics never changed! People still got into accidents and acted stupid all over the highway." He took a deep breath and looked up at the class again. "I learned...one thing...from that experience. You can't sell safety. You can tell people how bad something is and show them exactly what will happen, but people will still do whatever they want to do."
You can't sell safety. And you can't sell health. Government initiatives can throw as much money as they want at the issues of obesity and public health consciousness, but people will continue to eat whatever makes them feel good. And, to stir the pot even more, America is built on the ideals of free enterprise. What happens to other laws when a mayor can ban something as insignificant as a soda cup? I don't want to veer into a slippery slope fallacy, but laws do set legal precedents...
If people want it, companies will make it. If companies make it before the people think of it, people want it all the more. It's an interesting cycle that is very telling about our culture.
On that note, there are some excellent blog entries which I would like to recommend. I don't know if the moon is full or not, but today was a great day for paleo bloggers.
I wrote a few lines ago that people will eat what they want to eat. J. Stanton's latest post on Gnolls.org, beautifully titled Why Are We Here, And What Are We Looking For? Food Associations And The Pitfalls Of The Search For Novelty helps illuminate exactly why we become so attached to certain foods, good for us or not.
Concluding our contemplation of the government's attempting a nationwide stomach-stapling through "reform," Richard NIkoley (whose book I recently reviewed) just blogged about how the government is not great hope for our nation's health--healthy people are. He also included a superb video. Check it out at Free the Animal: Paleos & Primals: YOU are the Key, not Disney or Michelle Obama
Be healthy. Be blessed.
Favorite Blogs: Food!
Among my friends and relations (and anyone who follows me on Instagram), it's no secret that I love food and that I love to cook. I follow a low-carb, grain-free diet, (primal style), and rather than feel restricted by it, those slight limitations inspire me to stay creative with meats, vegetables and spices in the kitchen. Food is meant to be enjoyed.
I am also extremely interested in food culture and culinary history. To be entirely honest; my obsession with health has created a bit of a monster--I always want to find out why people eat what they eat, especially in America, where choice reigns supreme and cuisines from around world are represented in all their splendor.
In my mission to stay open minded, inspired and creative, I subscribe to a few blogs which keep my palate and my mind working tandem. Today's blogroll includes a list of a few of my favorite food and cooking-related blogs:
- Anthony Bourdain - Did you know that the cynical host of "No Reservations" has a tumblr account? Well, he does. He posts his thoughts on shooting the show, as well as his own ideas about world foods and food culture. Personally, I'm a big fan of Tony Bourdain. We share a love of meat in tube form, and I appreciate the fact that he differentiates between the image of a culture's advertised cuisine versus the reality of what people actually eat, while still acknowledging the significance of of both styles of food.
- The Foodie and the Family - In line with my own primal/paleo lifestyle, this blog is a great inspiration for gourmet cooking with the family in mind. The paleo diet is based on a wheat-free diet that is generally low in starch and high in protein, and TF&tF is great for ideas that are not only extremely creative in their ingredient combinations, but appetizing enough to appeal to the whole family.
- The Food Lover's Kitchen - Another paleo recipe sharing hub. Much like The Foodie and the Family, this site offers many extremely creative recipes, constant reminders of how truly delicious it is to eat healthily. But the true hallmark of Food Lover's Kitchen is that it is an interactive web site, with new recent additions of user-made meal plans, recipe books and kitchen profiles. If you don't need or want to spend a lot of time logging your kitchen into a web site and all you're looking for is a good recipe, don't run off, because Food Lover's Kitchen boasts one of the cleanest and most comprehensive databases available.
- Happy to Serve You - Life is too short to waste time on sub-par coffee, and although this web site is Australian, its sensibilities concerning coffee are on par with anything one might expect from Portland itself. Happy to Serve You is hopelessly devoted to artisanal coffee and the people and equipment who bring it from the bean to cup. The team behind HtSY doesn't update the page very often, but their site's uniqueness, the quality of the photography and reviews (covering shops, beans and equipment) have it firmly anchored in my bookmarked RSS feeds. In case you haven't guessed it; I, love, coffee.
- Paleo Spirit - Like most of my favorite blogs, I enjoy this one for the author's personality as much as its content. Lea is a great writer who includes her family in her blog as much as possible. She is also a vocal Christian, which is hard to find in the paleo community. She goes the extra mile to review some awesome restaurants, letting the rest of us know where the best places to find good, real foods are in major cities. She also includes her kids in many of the posts, not only as taste-testers and photogenic kitchen subjects, but as contributors, such as a recipe her son posted, based on the lamb stew in Suzanne Collins' bestselling novel The Hunger Games.
- The Primal Kitchen: A Family Grokumentary - One more family-oriented, Christian primal eating site. This one I followed to first show my mother that it was possible to maintain a grain-free diet and still make family meals, but I continued to follow it because I found the voice behind the blog engaging. "Mrs. Grok" is just like you and me, but she uncompromisingly follows through in her conviction to feed her family healthily (and feed them extremely well) in a way that makes the rest of us very jealous. And, somehow, she and her husband find time to raise a family and actively participate in CrossFit.
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.
Maybe it's not just the carbs...
Last year, I went Primal. No regrets. Mark Sisson's book got me going and his blog remains inspirational.
However, Mark isn't the only person who writes on primal living and ancestral health. Through expanding my knowledge of health and fitness, I have been exposed to the the ideas of other writers and bloggers who talk about the paleo and primal schools of thought.
The Primal Blueprint is a title. It is a structured "blueprint," written by Mark Sisson, for getting into good health and losing weight.
Bear in mind the meaning of the word "blueprint"--A plan, a map, a diagram. I most readily associate the word "blueprint" with house-building. But as we all know, there is more than just one way to build a house.
The Primal Blueprint is Mark Sisson's blueprint. It is based on sound research. It is effective for weight loss and body maintenance. It is, above all, a healthy way to live.
However, promoting this style of living is how Mark Sisson makes a living. His books are written by and large for people with bad habits and addictions to break. His meal plan is strictly regimented to bring the greatest results out of the greatest number of people. He tends to use a lot of general guidelines in his blog. That keeps his material well-reviewed and ensures that people like myself continue to refer other newcomers to his body of work.
I have followed the Primal Blueprint quite faithfully for the past six months. But as I wrote before, Mark's books and web essays are not my only source of information. If you read enough material, it becomes apparent that, although Mark is a larger-than-life figure in the primal/paleo movement, he represents only one school of thought. I do not say this to denigrate Mark or his work. Quite to the contrary, I believe that Mark has done more good than possibly any other individual in the paleo community. But I want to explore some thoughts of my own.
If one explores the "paleo diet," The Primal Blueprint is a fairly standard first encounter. But beyond the body-repairing information it offers for someone who is insulin-resistant and overweight, questions are rising that the paleo movement has not yet done research to answer fully. I have a few of my own which I would like to pose at this time.
Once the body has had time to repair itself, that is, for insulin sensitivity to be restored and for the body to adapt to the ideal fat-burning state for its energy needs, are natural carbohydrates still a problem?
I ask this because Richard Nikoley has done some extremely interesting self-experimentation lately, purposefully including extra starch in his diet in the form of potatoes. However, he has not increased his caloric intake, he has simply changed the fat : protein : carbohydrate ratios of his daily meals. And he has had good results, actually seeing beneficial changes in body composition.
This is one factor which increased my curiosity on the subject. Another was a point raised by Angelo Coppola in the last episode of his podcast, Latest in Paleo. He has also been eating more starch each week in the form of sweet potatoes and rice, and has reported results similar to the "leaning out" described by Richard Nikoley: looser pants, increased muscle definition.
This comes after the mainstream paleo community's applying a long-standing mantra of "lower = better" in reference to carb intake. But the movement is still relatively new. Its influence is creeping into everything from 60 Minutes to celebrity fitness, but there have yet to be many serious studies done to provide new baselines with which to measure more specific effects. More on that in a minute.
Is it carbs on their own, or the kind of carbs that are the problem?
The paleo diet, in its broadest definition, is simply eating the foods which our spear-weilding ancestors would have access to. Meat, fish, fowl, vegetables, fruit, nuts. Basically, this is a "whole foods" diet. Foods which can be consumed in their natural state without the need for processing. Grains are excluded from this list (yes, even whole grains) because not only do they require husking, grinding and the addition of extra ingredients to be eaten at all, the grains of today are not the same as what existed a hundred years ago, much less thousands of years ago. And it goes without saying that the recent phenomenon of mass gluten intolerance is yet another reason to avoid grain. I have personally found going grain-free to be the cure for my seasonal allergies.
With the exception of fruit, the paleo diet is grain-free and fairly low carb by its very nature. But when following a regimented eating plan like The Primal Blueprint, it has been my experience that it becomes easy to demonize many natural and pleasant foods like fruit and potatoes; relegating them to "once in a while" treats. But these foods occur naturally. Yes, they contain sugar, and, yes, that sugar is fructose. But, as even Dr. Lustig will readily state, fruit delivers its fructose load amidst naturally-occuring vitamins, minerals and fiber. They contain enough caloric weight that it is simply unpleasant to gorge oneself on fruit to the point of the sugar's affects on the liver, blood sugar and deposition of fat being worse than concurrent nutrients of the fruit delivering it.
If someone is breaking long-standing food addictions, that is where The Primal Blueprint is instrumental.
Speaking from experience, when an individual changes their entire lifestyle to eat natural foods instead of processed foods, it is hard not to constantly seek out "cheats" while there is a lingering addiction to processed sugars. Until the individual's palate returns to its "natural" state and can appreciate the full taste of natural foods, as well as the unbelievable sweetness of natural sugars in fruit, a structured meal plan, with "approved" foods and a carb count is not only helpful, one might say it is catalytic to long-term success.
The physical results of an individual's eating habits show themselves fairly readily and obviously. But what is too often overlooked, or under-discussed, is the unhealthy mental relationship that overweight individuals maintain with food. A popular Lao Tzu quote states that "mastering yourself is true power," and one could easily extrapolate that into an argument that if you can't master your own food consumption against the influence of a very flawed and unhealthy food culture, that is weakness. People declare this weakness every day; telling someone about your own grain-free or paleo diet is usually met with the knee-jerk response of "I could never do that."
It takes guidance and encouragement to help people overcome the onslaught of it, and sometimes a well-written book or a blog are all the only good influence an individual has in their life. For beginners, a blueprint is necessary.
After the initial stages, there comes a certain point in the primal/paleo journey in which it becomes obvious to you and everyone who knows you that you have made a decision to change your life permanently toward a whole-foods approach. This point is usually apparent when you realize that you no longer crave dark chocolate to "complete" a meal, and dairy products are seen less and less on your plate. It is something which I would describe as a mature relationship with food. It is a state of no longer being attached to or craving foods which are culturally mandated as "fun" or "special." Heck, you might be so in tune with your daily needs that you ignore the old standard of "three squares a day" and only eat when you're hungry, regardless if it's a regularly-timed for breakfast lunch or dinner. That is taking the idea of ancestral health beyond ingredients into the re-creation of habits and conditions--worthy experiments, but I digress.
Back to my point. If one has a established a healthy relationship with food, then the allure of sugar should not spark a binge if one chooses to eat some fruit or cut into a sweet potato. The whole idea of "ancestral living" is based on eating healthy food, and eating it according to need. This isn't your mom's low-fat crash diet; it is not about eating healthy food "most of the time" so as to feel better about a weekly nosedive into pizza, nachos and cheap beer.
Claiming a mature relationship with what and how you eat also implies that you are not going to habitually overeat. If natural sugar or starch is part of the meal, it should be factored in as part of the meal, not a superfluous addition that puts one "over the edge" of being full. Remove the desire to binge by including rewarding foods in daily meals.
Finally, if grain-free, whole foods are your first choice, regardless of carbohydrate content, this means that many of the studies which have been conducted about carbohydrates and weight gain no longer apply to you. To my knowledge, the accepted baseline studies have never been conducted from subjects who have lived any significant part of their lives on a whole foods diet. Therefore, their carbohydrate intake was largely from grains and sugars. The kinds of carbohydrates offered to the body by a sandwich bun or a sack of Fritos are much different than those offered from a berries, bananas or yams. The last three all have benefits to the human body that extend far beyond quick energy or post-workout glycogen replenishment. Furthermore, they are not full of synthetic, compound ingredients. The only ingredient in the last three foods are the foods themselves.
Like politics, religion and virtually everything else in any human culture that exists simultaneously in the areas of philosophy and process, the paleo movement has become fragmented into contrasting ideas.
"Paleo" does not strictly mean "low-carb, ketogenic diet."
The definition of the word "paleo" literally means "old," and is most often combined with geologic or biological terms. Hence the "Paleolithic Diet," referring to the eating habits of early humans.
This simple definition (and it truly is appallingly simple compared to many of the other ludicrous options offered to the weight and health conscious) only became fractured into its present, multi-faceted form as various new-school health and nutrition professionals have written and spoken to educate the masses on the subject.
Most books are written with weight loss in mind. Weight loss requires insulin sensitivity. To ensure insulin sensitivity, low-carb is ubiquitously recommended among paleo writers as the surefire way to go.
But once sensitivity is restored, and the decision has been made to eschew grains and processed non-foods, the old damage will not return. There is also the assumption that moderation is a way of life and that food will be eaten when hungry until the individual is not hungry any more.
So are natural carbs a problem?
I've been eating right for a long time now. At this point, it seems much more natural to eat right than it does to eat poorly. I was at a business meeting the other night where the dinner provided for attendees was a stack of delivered pizzas. I won't name the franchise, but I will say that I have never seen anything quite so repugnant as the overcooked slabs of dough with their scant population of cheese, sauce and toppings. And there was a time in my life when I would have eaten an entire pizza by myself in one sitting, washed down with a sugary beverage. Never mind the relative quality of ingredients or preparation...it's pizza, and pizza means good things are happening, right?
That was a long time ago. My entire life is different now. Now that the psychological chains are broken, even milder attractions don't appeal to me any more. I readily admit to indulging occasionally, but I reserve those times for foods that are truly unique and well-made, like when a friend brought home-dipped, chocolate-covered bacon to a movie party. With such exceptions accounted for, the other 99% of my diet is made up of naturally-occuring fats, proteins, starches and sugars.
So, last paragraph. let's see if I can make it good for a change...
Should we give some respect to our day-to-day preferences, eating a little more starch or fruit on some days and little-to-none on others? If one is not simply stacking extra calories on top of regular intake in their starchier meals, it does not seem like an unbalanced way to live. This is especially true when intermittent fasting is involved and leptin and insulin sensitivity is optimal. A mature relationship with food and not fretting over natural carbohydrate consumption seems a lot more fulfilling than avoiding something as tasty and refreshing as a piece of mango because of its sugar content.
Thoughts?
External Links:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-book/the-primal-blueprint/
http://freetheanimal.com/2012/03/the-moderate-carbohydrate-flu.html
http://www.latestinpaleo.com/blog/2012/4/27/latest-in-paleo-56-who-you-gonna-trust.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57407294/is-sugar-toxic/
http://hwbfitness.hubpages.com/hub/matthew-mcconaughey-workout
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/how-to-intermittent-fasting/
Internal Links: