Stay Hungry My Friend

Is The Paleo Diet Healthy :

Feast or Fast?

Stay Hungry My Friend

In 1916 Rasputin's enemies put enough cyanide in his wine to kill five men. He drank it with no ill effects. In 1934 Mary Crowell and Clive McCay of Cornell University occasionally forgot to feed their lab mice. Those mice lived twice as long as the well fed ones. Today I usually eat once a day.

What do all of these things have in common? I'll try to explain. I just have to figure out where to begin. I think I'll start with my eating only once a day.

Long before I started on the paleo diet and caveman lifestyle, I usually only ate when I was hungry. Most of the time that was once or sometimes twice a day. As a matter of fact, what appealed to me about this lifestyle was that it made sense to me on a gut level (no pun intended). Sleep when you are tired, eat when you are hungry and exercise when something is chasing you. It just seemed natural.

A few days ago a friend of mine said that he was going to do some intermittent fasting. He wasn't going to eat his first meal until noon. Noon? Intermittent fasting? What's up with this?

I decided to check out this idea of "intermittent fasting" It led me back to 1916 and to Grigori Rasputin AKA the Russian "Mad Monk". Rasputin's enemies tried to poison him by putting cyanide in his wine, that didn't work. So then they shot him 4 times, stabbed him, beat him, tied him up and threw him under the ice in the river. That worked.

The important question here is, why didn't the poison kill him? It turns out that Rasputin suspected that someday someone would try to poison him, so he ate a little cyanide every day in advance. Eventually his system had built up an immunity to cyanide. (Unfortunately, he hadn't figured out a way to be immune from being shot, stabbed, beaten and drowned.)

This brings us to 1934 and the folks that forgot to feed the mice and discovered that the "calorie restricted" mice lived longer than the well fed mice. (I don't know that they forgot to feed the mice, but that's what I would tell my boss too.) Anyway, the concept of "calorie restriction" took off and before long scientists were calorie restricting everything from fruit flies to monkeys. Some of them were actually even calorie restricting fungi. The results were interesting. As long as you kept them this side of total starvation everything seemed to be healthier and live longer (although probably somewhat crankier).

Then someone came up with the idea of intermittent fasting. Maybe we could reap the same benefits of near starvation without being miserable all the time? Turns out we probably can. After all, that's how the cavemen lived. Personally, I think it all comes down to hormesis.

"Hormesis" comes from the Greek word "hormain" which means to excite. Hormesis is the response an organism has to a low level of stress. You've heard the expression "If it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger"? That's hormesis. Whether it's taking a little cyanide every day, lifting weights or intermittent fasting, the process of hormesis makes you stronger. We all need a certain level of stress to survive.

How does it actually work? Who knows? And does it really matter? Our bodies are designed for survival. Our muscles need to be stressed to grow. Our immune system needs to be exposed to germs to stay strong. Our body needs to be exposed to famine to stay tuned. It's just how we were made. Want to stay healthy and live a long life? I'll give you 2.5 million years of advice:

Eat real food... and... stay hungry my friend

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Lose Weight With a Paleo Diet

Is The Paleo Diet Healthy :

It's no secret that American waistlines continue to expand, despite regular headlines about the dire health consequences of excess body fat. We eat too much sugar, refined carbohydrates, junk food, fast food and hydrogenated trans fats. Compare our modern diet to that of our evolutionary ancestors and you'll quickly see why we're putting our lives in peril every time we eat.

Lose Weight With a Paleo Diet

Cave Men Set Our Dietary Genes in Stone

The food we eat every day sends powerful chemical messages throughout our body which directly influence our genes. This happens with every meal, as we switch our genes either toward health or disease with every bite of food. We were never intended to eat massive quantities of processed foods laced with sugar, salt and fat that many people consume throughout the day.

Like it or not, we are a product of evolution and our genes are switched toward health and natural weight loss when we eat a diet similar to our Paleolithic brethren. Information reported in the Chicago Tribune reveals the importance of eating closer to the way nature intended to significantly reduce the risk of disease and drop the excess weight which packs on as a consequence of our poor culinary habits.

It's important to understand the reasons behind the obesity epidemic which keep us from losing weight. Once we understand the powerful genetic influence our diet exerts over fat storage and mobilization in our body, we can make simple dietary changes to achieve our healthy weight loss goal.

Reason 1 - Too Much Sugar and Fructose

As the genes we carry today were being coded thousands of generations ago, sugar was virtually nonexistent, and fructose from fruit was a rare treat which bore little resemblance to the highly cultivated sweet fruit we buy on store shelves today. From a metabolic perspective, our body has difficulty processing the great amounts of sugar we consume, and most is converted into triglycerides (blood fat) and then stored as fat.

Research demonstrates that fructose, and especially high fructose corn syrup used in so many sweetened beverages, has an even more disruptive effect on fat metabolism. Reading nutritional labels is the best way to avoid added sugar. Cut out desserts, sugary soft drinks and sweet snacks, and be mindful of condiments like ketchup which are loaded with sugar.

Reason 2 - Refined Carbohydrates and Wheat

In between meal snacks and junk food can account for up to 40% of our daily calories, and these are typically high calorie foods with no nutritional value. Chips, fries and breads are immediately broken down by our efficient digestive system into glucose which hits our blood stream hard, and ultimately leads to metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance and diabetes. Wheat has only been in our food supply for the last 5,000 years, and genetically we haven't yet evolved to eat wheat based foods.

Wheat is foreign to the body, and causes our immune system to spring into action every time we dine on breads or pasta, resulting in systemic inflammation which leads to heart disease and certain forms of cancer. Replace wheat with fresh vegetables, nuts and healthy monounsaturated fats which promote health and natural weight loss.

Reason 3 - Hydrogenated and Trans Fats

Hydrogenated and trans fats are artificially produced substances designed to boost the shelf life of many foods and appeal to our natural taste for fat. Fat is essential to our health, and one of the biggest mistakes many people make is trying to eliminate it from their diet. Our cells use fat to construct membranes which allow nutrients and oxygen to pass freely. Fake fats don't have the same properties, and encourage disease and weight gain.

Avoid synthesized fats by reading all ingredient labels carefully, and don't fry anything, as this cooking method produces trans fats from overheated oil. Use healthy fats from extra virgin olive oil and flax seed sources, adding them onto your food after cooking to preserve their natural qualities.

Following our evolutionary counterparts may provide an important insight into how we have evolved to eat, and why our present day diet is largely responsible for our declining health and excess weight gain. Our food has a significant impact on our genes, and by cutting unhealthy dietary options we can regain control of our health destiny and lose weight as a natural consequence.

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