Paleo Recipes / Benefits of the Paleo Diet

The paleo diet has proven to be a boon for many people looking for a simple and natural way of eating that promotes great health benefits.  It is a completely natural diet, allowing you to eat paleo recipes like our ancestors, and you may see weight loss results dramatically better than any fad diet or weight loss program you may have tried out in the past.

Think of the paleo diet as efficient and nutritionally dense.  When you cut out all the sugary, processed foods that have been linked to so many diseases of modern society, while simultaneously replacing them with nutritious foods that humans were actually designed to eat, you will be rewarding your body and helping it along in the process of normalizing your body weight.

Advocates of the paleo diet believe that people were meant to live off the land, to eat fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds and animals.  This is the best way to lose weight, stay lean and muscular, and achieve optimal health and well-being..

The paleo diet need not be restrictive.  While you will be eating primarily meat, nuts and seeds, fruits, and vegetables, there are tons of great paleo recipes out there that are delicious, with a surprisingly wide variety of tastes and textures to assure you will not get bored or burned out.  You will be avoiding grains, legumes, beans, potatoes, processed sugar, preservatives - and depending on how strict you are - dairy.

Many people have reached and exceeded their health goals.  They have lost extra body fat, eliminated allergy symptoms, cleared up acne and skin conditions, and reached levels of fitness they never before dreamed were possible.  In other words, they have experienced the true health and vitality that can only be achieved when our bodies are operating the way they were meant to.

Eat Like a Neanderthal

Often called cave-man diets or Neanderthal diets, Paleo diet principles implore us to return to hunter-gatherer practices of the Paleolithic period of human evolution more than 10,000 years ago. This requires that we refrain from eating grain foods, potatoes, beans, milk, and refined sugars -- foods only eaten within the last 10,000 years and which are deemed to be unsuitable for consumption because of an insufficient time for Homo sapiens to adapt to these foods. The Paleo Diet is high in meats, vegetables and fruit.

Paleo Diet Recipes - Gluten-Free, Low-Carb?

"Take only what you need and leave the land as you found it." -The Arapaho People

A diet high in legumes, carbohydrates, and grains could be making you ill. Why would a diet high in post-agricultural-era foods be detrimental to our health? Because these foods are foreign to our bodies. Our genes have not had the time nor the evolutionary pressures to adapt to these new foods.

Celiac Disease/Gluten Intolerance Web Sites

http://paleofood.com/

If you are interested in starting a paleo diet, start with breakfast for few days, as this is the easiest place to start as most people eat it at home, and it tends to be the least Paleo meal of the standard 3. For weight loss you will eventually need to reduce your carbohydrate intake, but ignore this initially as most people have high carb intakes and this can continue for the first few days that you are on this diet. If you reduce too quickly then you may fell unwell. Then move on to lunch or dinner for a few days and then to all 3 meals. If you work, you will often find it easier to take your lunch to work.

Paleo Diet Summary

The Paleo Diet is a weight loss program that shows users how to eat like our "ancestors." Dr. Loren Cordain, who is not a medical doctor, but has a PhD in Health, created this program. Cordain is self-described to be "the world's leading expert on the natural human diet of our Stone Age ancestors." Cordain has also founded an institute based on this diet and has written three books: The Paleo Diet, The Paleo Diet for Athletes and The Dietary Cure for Acne.

Those who advocate that contemporary humans should regularly consume a Paleo diet base their advocacy on the premise that natural selection had 2 million or more years to genetically adapt the metabolism and physiology of the various human species to such a diet, and that in the 10,000 years since the invention of agriculture and its consequent major change in the human diet, natural selection has had too little time to make the optimal genetic adaptations to the new diet. According to those advocates, physiological and metabolic maladaptations result from those suboptimal genetic adaptations, which in turn contribute to many of the so-called diseases of civilization.

The diet of our pre-agricultural ancestors consisted of meats, insects, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. The advent of agriculture brought us potatoes, legumes (i.e. peanuts, beans, and soy), grains (i.e. corn, wheat, rice, barley, and oats), and processed foods (i.e. sugar, bread, pastries, alcohol, etc.). Furthermore, we have bred our plants to produce the biggest and sweetest (highest sugar content) fruits. The best example of this is the blueberry.