Paleo / Caveman Diet

[Anonymous]

Anyone have any experience using the Paleo/Caveman diet. My husband wants to eat healthier and lose some weight so we were thinking of buying one of the recipe books on this diet and trying it out for dinners to start. Not sure I can live without dairy though

[Anonymous]

Why not just eat a balanced diet and limit your caloric intake? My husband and I each lost 30 lbs eating what we wanted, just less of it. We measured our portions and counted calories (not hard to do when you use sparkpeople.com or thedailyplate.com). No crazy diet. No deprivation. When you count calories, you automatically limit the "bad" foods because you want to maximize your food value (that is, you automatically avoid high-calorie foods like bread and pasta because a serving of those has a lot more calories than a serving of veggies or rice, for example, though bread and pasta are certainly not off-limits).

[Anonymous]

Never heard of it but I remember learning in anthropology that cavemen ate carrion. Does this diet involve snacking on roadkill?

[Anonymous]

It does not sound logical to me. Our caveman ancestors did not live past 40 at best. So their diet might be great in the short term but set you up for an early grave.

[Anonymous]

Previous posters are funny

I think the idea of the caveman diet is to eat more fruits, veggies, lean meat, water, and reduced intake of sugars and carbs.

I also want to plug exercise. I find that when I am most active, I crave healthier foods. So I suggest starting a family activity - walking, bike riding, etc. while the weather nice - and it will become routine by the end of the summer. You will find you won't want to come home to a greasy pizza after sweating for an hour.

Good luck!

[Anonymous]

I just watched the Daily Show with the National Geographic Genome guy. He said that even the paleolithic diet actually is a lot healthier. That the increase in life span now is relatively new to the last century and that it is not influenced by diet but by public health and medicine (technology of course). He said that human health actually took a turn when we started eating grains (Don't know if that information will influence me enough to give up bread, but...) anyway, it feeds more people but not necessarily more healthfully.

[Anonymous]

join weight watchers..it's a legitimate way to lose wt & keep it off.

[Anonymous]

I think the caveman diet may be part of the whole gluten free (GF) revolution. I do recommend giving GF a try. I lost a little weight and feel more energetic. Agree with lots of fruits and veggies and lean protein. Weight watchers is great too.

[Anonymous]

It wouldn't work for me because I'm not a big meat eater. I also like greek yogurt and eat it a few times a week.

I agree with the person that said you have to follow a moderate plan and not do a diet. Already you are setting yourself for failure if you don't think you can give up dairy.

I just think "cavemen" didn't have the heavily industrialized versions of poultry and meat that we did, so be careful what kinds of meat you are eating. I would choose humanely raised and grass fed, because the meat and poultry industry pump chickens and cows full of crap that wasn't around during the cavemen years and feed them a ton of corn, which is not natural to their diet.

[Anonymous]

Only if you process it with stone tools and cook over a campfire or eat it raw, otherwise it is cheating.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I just watched the Daily Show with the National Geographic Genome guy. He said that even the paleolithic diet actually is a lot healthier. That the increase in life span now is relatively new to the last century and that it is not influenced by diet but by public health and medicine (technology of course). He said that human health actually took a turn when we started eating grains (Don't know if that information will influence me enough to give up bread, but...) anyway, it feeds more people but not necessarily more healthfully.

It's difficult to disentangle the effect of grains from the other two things that happened as we started farming: calories went way up, and we started living in large groups - towns and villages - which brought us into a time of communicable disease. But you can cut calories in any diet style, and I doubt you would want to live outside of civilization.

[Anonymous]

The main difference between the kind of meat that we eat today and the kind of meat eaten by our paleolithic ancestors is the amount of fat in it. The meat they hunted was wild, and had very little fat. Today, cattle are bred and raised to produce fatty, more tender meat.