david58

Hi folks! As I wait a few minutes before I sit down and eat my steak and veggies, I figgered I'd ask if anybody here has done the Paleo Diet thing. I am needing to drop 30 pounds or so, and have had some success going low carb, but I need to modify that approach a bit. I like Paleo because I can get good carbs, and not feel as deprived.

Any commentary? Successes? Failures? Just kinda wondering what real folks that ride bicycles have experienced with this diet.

John E

Since I derive most of my protein from legumes in my quasi-vegetarian diet, I am not a big fan of the paleo in that regard. However, I strongly concur with eschewing refined sugar, flour, and alcohol and with emphasizing fiber, fruits, and vegetables. Eliminating junk and quasi-junk is a good start to any diet.

I obtained my best weight loss and blood pressure reduction results on the Pritikin diet, which is low in fat, rather than low in carbs. However, I can maintain a steady weight pretty easily by burning 500 cal/day (that's a pound a week!) in aerobic exercise, avoiding junk foods, and watching my food portions. I do snack rather freely between meals, but I always start my day with a hearty breakfast.

DaveWC

I read the book and decided that if I just dumped the obviously bad food from my diet that would be the best thing. The idea dropping some of the foods listed as bad in that diet makes no sense.

jdon

Cavemen didn't live long.

donheff

I don't like the full paleo deal - I look for studies that confirm my innate biases But over thirty years I had swelled up to 195 at 6'0". Last March I started a low carb high fat diet which quickly became a lifestyle rather than a "diet." I don't radically reject carbs but I am careful to limit them to ~100 grams a day. Within 3 months I dropped thirty pounds and have stabilized at about 163, which is about my college weight. I feel better than I have in decades. I am never hungry and I never count calories or worry about portion size. My blood work improved dramatically. I simply stay away from most wheats and grains and almost all sugar. A few fruits, lots of salads, eggs, cheese, bacon, meats, fish, low carb bread and cereal, lots of nuts. Luckily for me, despite the fact that I love pastas, rice, potatoes, bread, and especially chocolate and chocolate chip cookies, I was able to quickly adapt and don't crave any of them. This approach works for a lot of people but not everyone. I believe calories still matter but without the sugar and other carbs I simply can't eat enough to gain. YMMV.

Edit: I forgot one critical feature. Wine with dinner every night. Don't ever worry about the calories. Like I said, it has become a lifestyle. I need my wine for that.

GeorgeBMac

For myself: that's the only way I will do it...

Most diets will succeed in reducing weight. I won't say it is easy. But if the pounds don't stay off, the diet was, ultimately, ineffective.

hartphoto 

The Paleo lifestyle is very similar to the Nutritarian lifestyle. I dont say 'diet' anymore....cause it needs to be a long term change no matter which you may choose. The nutritarian lifestyle limits the meat down to ~10% of intake, and dairy down to 'rarely'.

I will say, IME, eating the nurtritarian style, the pounds fall off extremely quickly for my body chemistry and exercise routines, and whether it's placebo effect or something else, I've never had this much energy or 'clarity' with anything I do or undertake.

Velo Dog

There's no magic here. You lose weight by burning more calories than you consume. When you limit intake, it makes sense to be sure you're getting proper nutrition, so for that reason cutting back on empty calories is a good idea.
For years I burned 4000 to as many as 10,000 calories a week between work and cycling. I could eat anything and stay below 220 pounds at 6'4". As I aged, I couldn't maintain that pace and gained 50 pounds. I've taken most of it off (twice, in fact...), but I absolutely can't do it without exercise. With a desk job and no physical activity, I have to limit intake to about 1700 calories a day just to stay where I am.

jdon

Exactly. No magic at all. I know many on Paleo and similar diets that lose weight but I know several family members with kidney disease that lose plenty of weight on higher carb, low/no protein diets. I practice moderation but eat little processed foods and no soft drinks. I don't think pure Paleo is particularly healthy long term.

Mobile 155

Many of the people I know have gone to a modified Paleo diet. They simply call it a Primitive diet and simply means eating more natural foods that were available to our ancestors. I don't happen to be in the 33 percent of the population that can function as a vegitarian so a modified Paleo or primitve dite has replaced it. I also got the book "Lose the wheat lose the weight". And have cut back on gluten. Mine was because I reached a point where I wasn't losing any more just from cycling so something had to change. There is a new Paleo book out however called Paleo for Athletes.

ModeratedUser150120149

A couple people have mentioned it in passing. I would like to focus on it as primary.

Long term health and fitness are the result of lifestyle. No diet, by whatever name will give it to you.

Lots of money is made peddling this or that diet, or exercise program, or whatever. None of them work over the long term. Diets and specific exercise programs do nothing except make the company money. Sorry, they also risk the health of those who blindly follow them.

We as a society are so disconnected from our food sources it is hard to make rational, good choices. So, the very first thing for each individual is to break that disconnect. Spend your time learning about the food you eat and the food that is available. Then spend some time deciding on how you will exercise the body to make it a useful machine for your use. No substitute for personal effort for this. Just copying someone else just won't do.

bobthib

I'm in the boat with dhoff. Despite 150 - 200 mi a week, I could not get to 165 or loose my "aero-belly." Got on to a LCHF eating plan, and poof, dropped 10 lbs and lost the aero-belly in 3 months. Now I'm 165 and holding, feeling better than I have since I can't remember when. Got of the $(%**# statin drugs and the BP meds. Did my first Tri in Sept. My drs are happy.

My wife got on the plan and didn't have much success at first, but then she does not get as much exercise as me. But since we are eating LCHF, she started to shed lbs and now is down 15 lbs, about 1.5 lbs a week. She's hooked. She wants to drop another 5 lbs then introduce more carbs and maintain. Her dr too is very happy with her weight loss and her lower cholesterol.

Like dhoff, I shoot for about 100 carbs a day. But I don't count close, I just know what to eat and what not to eat. And I ignore calories. That's too complicated.

About Paleo, I don't know too much about it, but like most of the comments above, shunning refined and processed foods makes a lot of sense to me.

LCHF makes sense to me from a biological sense, and it works for me and my wife. YMMV.

David Bierbaum

I lost weight incidentally, while trying to lower my cholesterol, and I did this by NOT going on a diet. Rather, I just changed the way I eat, by dumping most all the red meat, fried food, and over-processed foods. I added fish, turkey & chicken white meat, WAY more vegetables, and whole grain cereal, bread, and/or noodles. I'd already dropped drinking soda in favor of coffee, tea, juice, and just water. I kept my dark chocolate addiction, however! This is okay, since it seems that dark chocolate can actually rev up your metabolism in a way that more than makes up for the extra calories!

This way, instead of following a diet, I just carry on by eating in a way that I can keep up for eternity. I was doing this to lower my cholesterol, which was marginally high, and the pounds came off while I wasn't looking, and I only noticed the missing 30 lb when my pants wouldn't stay up unless I cinched the belt so that the pants scrunched up in a most uncomfortable way.

david58

I have had good success with the LCHF diet in the past, but it just didn't make total sense to me. The Paleo approach does seem to be logical - and dumping grains, legumes, and processed meats and foods just makes sense. The focus on avoiding processed foods, and eating nutritionally dense foods (basically foods our "hunter gatherer genetic forebears" would have eaten), seems sensible. In the past I lost a tremendous amount of weight on a low fat diet, but I never seemed to be satisfied and was always thinking about food. So going to stick with this for a while, and see where I get to. I'm dialing my riding back up a bit, lengthening the evening ride home to add a longer, more sustained bit of climbing instead of only the shorter very steep climb - a few more calories burnt. We'll see where this goes...

And yes, it is Lifestyle and not just Diet - my wife and I have to change what we have been doing so we can be sure to do our part to hang around to play with grandchildren!

chasm54

Actually, that probably isn't true. Or more correctly, if they died young it was more likely through violence or other hardship than poor diet. Paleolithic men, the hunter-gatherers, were often as big as we are, which indicates that their diet was sufficiently varied and vitamin-rich to allow them to fulfil their genetic potential. It was the neolithic farmers, who were largely dependent on a single grain for most of their nutrition - rice, wheat, maize, depending where they lived - who were smaller and probably more sickly. Farming created surpluses that could sustain large, static populations but in terms of individual health and strength, it had its disadvantages.

Having said that, the paleo diet seems to me to worry too much about carbs. There's nothing much wrong with potatoes and whole grains. And we can get most of the protein we need from plant sources if we want to. Having said that, cutting out processed food - especially, but not exclusively, refined sugars - must be a good idea. The less your food has been through some industrial process before arriving in your mouth, the better you're likely to do, IMHO.

David Bierbaum

It was poor diet too. In winter, you survived on what you managed to store away and preserve in one way or another. All our preservation arts from fermenting and pickling (where basically, it rotted, and you ate it anyway) to drying, salting, and smoking, come from those days. There were only certain times of the year where you could eat fresh nutritious food, and the rest of the time was spent eating less balanced diets of easily stored food that sometimes went bad and killed you itself. The rye mold in Salem Massachusetts, that led to the Salem Witch Trials, was a good example of how your own food stores could kill you or get you burned at the stake or hanged.

chasm54

I take it that was a response to my post. If so, I think you are mistaken. There wasn't much difference between paleolithic and neolithic periods in terms of the technology available to preserve foods, as far as I know. Winter was pretty tough. And, of course, Salem came a long time after either of those periods.

Aboriginal Australians, for example, didn't have to worry too much about winter. Their lives were undoubtedly hard, by our standards, but many of them lived to ages comparable with our own lifespan. Very few if any of them were what we would consider fat.

jdon

About the only solid evidence we have to go by is bone density measurements of our Paleo forerunners. It is a widely accepted theory that infant mortality dragged the average down significantly but with an estimated lifespan of 32-35, I stand by my claim.

There is tooling evidence that supports wide use of grains in the paleo diet as well. There is however, no evidence of donuts, Cheetos, Coke, etc. Just step away from the vending machines and bakery isle. Fact is, nobody knows what the Paleo diet really was.

When most people decide to diet, regardless of which diet they choose, they almost always increase physical activity and mind portions. Hmmm, maybe it is as simple as that.

Looigi

Without beer, what's the point?

jdon

david58

That is my single conscious exception to the rules and regulations. Beer may violate Paleo Diet principles in all kinds of ways, but this program is my choice - I ain't in prison.

David Bierbaum

Since I was just skimming the thoughts floating on the surface of my mind at the time, it's entirely possible that I'm mistaken! I will not try to defend that position with any vigor, since all I based it on were hazy memories of some NPR talk shows where the author was talking about the differences in percieved vs. actual prehistoric human diets.

Flying Merkel

Eat lotsa grubs. All they are is land based shrimp.

andrewclaus

A close family member is a recently diagnosed Type 1 diabetic, a 50 yo+ very athletic woman. She switched to a paleo diet from a low carb diet (excuse me, lifestyle--I like that better) and reduced her insulin intake by 50% and leveled out her blood sugar. She has no extra weight to loose, and actually maintaining weight is a bit of an issue. She's not quite an endurance athlete, but pretty close. She's working out carb levels needed for exercise. She's buying her grass fed beef from a local rancher, and eating local produce as much as possible. That makes her feel pretty good. She's been at it for over 6 months now and it seems to be a good lifestyle choice for her.

david58

So far the hardest part of this approach for me is the lack of bread. I LOVE hard crusted french bread with tons of butter. Hmmm...so that's where the aerobelly may have been sustained.

Any diet/lifestyle change is tough. I could be on the Beer and Burger/Burrito diet and I'd hate it, cuz it's a diet. But the Pale approach is making sense, and I am dropping about a pound a week. My exercise level is helping, since I am back on the bike most days now, after most of August and September off the bike (burnout, travel, and a new puppy kinda impacted that).

It remains to be seen where this all ends up. I do see the benefit in getting rid of things that have to be processed to be edible (beans, for instance, most of which are poisonous unless cooked), and grains (gluten causes all kinds of problems), and processed stuff (how much sodium can you consume in a meal?). I do feel more satisfied by the foods that we eat.

I have not done any long hard rides since starting this. My longest is 32 miles, last Saturday, but the miles should start growing if weather allows, since I have the road bike fixed. But the commute is feeling better, my times on the round trip are dropping, and the prospects of hitting 180 pounds by spring are exciting. So, we'll see...