Why To Follow A Paleo Diet

Last Monday during a session with my personal training clients I was talking to the girls who have just joined one of my new group programmes.

The group is there to teach exercise primarily but I would never train anyone without at least informing them of the basics of diet in relation to exercise.

So there we were at the end of the session having a chat about food/diet/weight loss etc.

Whilst chatting away, something became very clear I realised that despite these girls reading my weekly email's and blog articles for some time, they still didn’t really have a clue about their eating.

So in this article I wanted to be a bit more clear about the nutritional advice that I suggest people follow and tell you the basics of my whole nutritional approach.

It's based around the PALEO diet.

My main message with nutrition is always - get the basics right - which is just healthy eating.

Which is still good advice, and most people don’t need any special diets or more information than that, they really do just need to cut out the crap(bad foods and booze) and stop being over indulgent and greedy.

But once people have done “stage one” as I call it. They are, excuse the pun, hungry for more information.

So this is the next stage in the information process. It's called the Paleo diet - also known as the cave man diet. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense.

The further away we have come from what cavemen ate and even what people ate 100 years ago, the fatter and unhealthier we have become. Its pretty basic.

Cave men/women would of only had access to very limited food, it's a low carb/high protein approach.

Here is the summary of the Paleo diet approach:

Eat:
Meat, Poultry & Fish (including organ meats and put bone broth in soup)
Eggs
Vegetables(lots of greens and raw veg/salad! No roots for weight loss)
Fruit(1-2 pieces a day for weight loss goals)
Fermented Foods(sauerkraut, vinegar, miso, tempeh, bio yoghurt)
Healthy Fats (butter, coconut oil, avocado, extra virgin olive oil, ghee, duck fat, lard, dripping)
Spices & Herbs
Nuts & Seeds (in moderation)
Natural Sweeteners (honey, maple syrup, coconut sugar)

Avoid:
Grains (wheat, cereals, rye, corn, rice, quinoa)
Legumes (beans, soy, lentils, peanuts)
Dairy (for at least the first 30 days, then small amounts of live yoghurt, butter and hard cheese after, if desired)
Vegetable & Industrial Seed Oils (sunflower, vegetable oil, soybean)
Processed & Artificial Sweeteners
Processed Food (most packaged food)
Preservatives & Additives (basically any ingredient that you don’t recognise as food)
Potato and sweet potato’s (none for first two weeks, then none/low/moderate intake depending on body fat levels and goals)

Of course this is the simple version, many people need adjustments and tweaks and IDEAS to make it “fit” their life/body.

But this is the basic of what you need to do if you are struggling to stick to an eating program.

Take care,

Rich Clarke