Paleo Workouts For Dummies
Book image
Explore Book Buy On Amazon

The Paleo diet has caused quite a ruckus lately. But the benefits are now common knowledge — even the most obstinate of physicians and college professors can’t help but acknowledge them.

Here are just a few of the benefits of the Paleo diet:

  • Burns off body fat

  • Clears skin

  • Improves sleep

  • Reduces allergies

  • Stabilizes blood sugar

Eating the way you were designed to eat

The Paleo diet, also known as the cave man diet, is a way of eating that resembles the diet of your Paleolitic ancestors. It’s a reversion to how people used to eat before the emergence of agriculture or the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Really, it’s how people were designed to eat.

The Paleo diet has become nothing short of a welcome and timely phenomenon and has helped thousands upon thousands of people all around the world rejuvenate their bodies cell by cell. It also works quite marvelously for fat loss and muscle.

Eating Paleo means eating in accordance to your genetic blueprint. This diet isn’t based on deprivation. The Paleo diet is about promoting a healthy gut and a healthy hormonal balance through the choicest selection of foods. The rules are few and simple:

  • Eat mostly meats, fish, and eggs. Choose meats, such as beef and lamb; seafood, such as salmon, tuna, and sardines; poultry, such as chicken, turkey, and duck; and even organ meats. Organic meats are the best choice.

  • Eat a plethora of nutrient-rich vegetables. Naturally, you should aim to eat the most nutrient-dense and lowest sugar vegetables possible, including spinach, kale, seaweeds, and most roots, shoots, and tubers.

  • Get plenty of healthy fats. Get your healthy fats mostly from meats, nuts, seeds, and Paleo-approved oils. Coconut oil is one of the choicest cooking oils, and extra-virgin olive oil is a great oil to dress your salads with. Macadamia nuts, hazelnuts, and Brazil nuts are all great sources for healthy fats.

  • Eliminate all grains, dairy, and legumes. Grains, dairy, and legumes all promote inflammation to various degrees. Chronic inflammation is a serious health matter leading to an almost limitless number of malaises and is often brought about from disagreeable food choices. Really, people were never designed to eat these foods, nor did they before the agriculture came about some 10,000 years ago.

    Either way, grains, dairy, or legumes don’t contain any nutrients that you can’t find elsewhere for fewer calories and without the detrimental side effects of inflammation. This is to say that they’re wholly unnecessary.

  • Avoid processed/industrial oils. Common vegetable and seed oils, such as cottonseed oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, corn oil, peanut oil, and soybean oil, all require a considerable amount of processing to make them edible.

    Consequently, when many of these oils are exposed to light or heat, they quickly turn rancid. Rancid oils contain free radicals, are highly inflammatory, and sometimes taste weird. If you have any of these oils in your home, promptly relocate them from your cupboard to your trash can.

Making the Paleo diet work for you

At first glance, the Paleo diet can seem a little intimidating. You have to overcome many obstacles when getting started on a new nutritional regimen. The Paleo diet is both practical and reasonable. Furthermore, no other nutritional regimen guarantees such high performance or effective recovery from intense bouts of exercise.

Also, keep in mind that no fitness program, no matter how cleverly it’s designed or how vehemently you adhere to it, is enough to ward off the harmful effects of poor eating habits.

And when you eat right — that is, when you eat like a cave man — you can expect four times the results from Paleo fitness than you could otherwise. So, it could also quite easily be said that when you eat poorly, you can expect one-fourth of the results.

Fat loss starts and ends in the kitchen. Exercise just hastens the process. A proper Paleo nutrition plan is crucial for your success.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

Dr. Kellyann Petrucci, author and nutritionist, appears on various news streams nationally and conducts workshops and seminars worldwide to help people feel — and look — their best. She is also the author of the popular website www.DrKellyann.com and gives daily news, tips, and inspiration on Twitter @drkellyann. Patrick Flynn, a fitness minimalist, conducts workshops and certifications worldwide, teaching people how to get more fit with less — but more effective — exercise. He is the driving force behind ChroniclesOfStrength.com, a top-500 health and wellness blog.

This article can be found in the category: