The Paleolithic diet is usually referred to as the “Stone Age Diet,” “Hunter-Gatherer Diet,” or the “Caveman Diet.”
The basics of the Paleo diet are easy to understand, and take just a little while to put to use. The Paleo diet presents a fully integrated, holistic, complete diet the mixes all of the best things from all of the other diet theories, getting rid of the worst parts and making it more simplified.
Each part of the diet is covered, like fats, vitamins, carbohydrates, phytosterols, and so on. This diet features what has always been available to us during our evolution, and not anything else.
Humans have eaten fish, fowl, meat, leaves, roots, and fruits of lots of plants for millions of years. Potatoes, grains, and beans have lots of energy, but cannot be eaten in their raw state since they have harmful toxins. We began to cook these foods about 10,000 years ago, making them edible. The grains were things like flour, barley, rice, millet, oats, and corn. Since this was during the New Stone Age, they are referred to as Neolithic Foods.
Being able to cook beans, grains, and potatoes changed our food intake, just about doubling the number of calories we got from foods in the environment. This was also beneficial since they could be stored for extended periods, they had a great amount of calories, and they were easy to farm. However, they have many toxins, and should never be eaten without cooking first.
The essentials of the Paleo diet are:
- Avoid grains like bread, pasta and noodles
- Avoid beans like string beans, kidney beans, peanuts, peas, and lentils
- Stay away from potatoes, dairy products, sugar and salt
You should instead eat things like:
- Chicken, meat, fish
- Vegetables like root vegetables
- Nuts like walnuts, Brazil nuts, almonds, and macadamias. Avoid cashews and peanuts.
- Eat berries like strawberries, raspberries, etc.
- Eat more carrots, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips
- Eat organ meats like kidney and liver
Your body will take a while to get used to the changes, since you will have many more vitamins, and many less toxins.
It is easiest to begin this diet with breakfast for the first few days, and you can ignore the carbohydrate part at first, but you will have to follow it to lose weight. Then you can add lunch and dinner after a while, and eventually all three meals.
We now know that the intake of omega 3 fats is critical to the proper health. In the 90’s, the low fat diet craze virtually eliminated the intake of omega 3 fats from the diet. It has been discovered that this diet doesn’t work, and that we need a greater intake of omega 3 fats.
Using the Paleo diet is quite a change for most of the world, but can lead to much better health, with less illness, greater energy, and a slim figure.