Mango spinach salad
Are you looking for a new old way of eating that will help you live with less pain, lose weight, build muscle and give you more energy?
I’ve taken a lot of nutrition courses over the years, including during the 1000 hours of postgraduate courses I took on the weekends while I was attending chiropractic college. The paleo diet takes much of the current thinking and what I’ve learned about nutrition and puts it in easy to use essential guidelines.
Does it work well? Yes. After getting a toothache last year, I lost my normal appetite for the “Standard American Diet” (SAD) because I didn’t want to eat anything with an achy tooth. I decided to just eat for nutrition and not for pleasure. I thought and felt that I wouldn’t otherwise enjoy eating foods that are naturally abundant in nature, and that I would want to continue to eat high-carb, high-grain foods, and I thought that I wouldn’t enjoy eating raw vegetables.
What I found is that it is rather easy to substitute starchy or grainy foods with foods that are not processed or that you can eat raw if you had to. What I also found is that when I started enjoying healthier foods, I lost about 20-30 pounds. I don’t know exactly how much I lost because I don’t actually own a scale, but I do have a collection of slacks I wear to work that are in incrementally decreasing sizes. And, it’s always a surprise to me when I put my pants on in the morning and they are clown baggy and I have to donate them because they no longer fit.
So here is the paleo diet for beginners. I don’t capitalize paleo because that’s just short for paleolithic. It’s what we ate in ancient times before we learned how to cook and process foods. Apparently, we didn’t start eating grains until recent times.
Here’s why grains are bad for your health.
In a nutshell here is what you should eat,
- Avoid sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and refined seed and vegetable oils as these are not available in nature, and only become available after heavy industrial processing.
- Avoid grains (particularly wheat), legumes (particularly soy), and starchy tubers (such as potatoes) as these foods cannot be eaten raw.
- Prefer grass-fed and grass-finished beef over grain-fed beef.
- Prefer pasture-raised poultry over conventionally raised poultry.
- Natural fats like butter, coconut oil, lard and tallow are generally considered neutral but superior to refined seed and vegetable oils.
I found a link to this website through one of our chiropractic colleagues. The paleo diet is something that is more of a lifestyle way of eating that makes a lot of sense.
Books they recommend:
,and The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat
And here are their benefits that they say you should see when you start eating this way.
- Reduction of body fat percentage and increase in muscle mass with no change in exercise.
- Reduction of fasting blood glucose levels, in some cases allowing for the elimination of diabetes medication.
- Reduction in triglyceride levels and increase in HDL levels, in some cases allowing for the elimination of cholesterol medication.
- Reduction in blood pressure, in some cases allowing for the elimination of blood pressure medication.
So, if any of these benefits interest you, if you feel like you need to eat a little more healthy and educate yourself on how to do so, check out the paleo diet.
Todd Lloyd, DC
Chiropractic Physician in Salt Lake City