How Does the Paleo Diet Work?
Obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease are some of the many health problems that are attributed to our sedentary lifestyles and modern diets. 21st century diets are very high in sugar, unsaturated fat, and processed foods, and research shows that our bodies were not designed to digest a lot of this type of food.
A paleolithic diet focuses on eliminating foods that were not around 10,000 years ago. This means the diet typically consists of lean meats and fatty fish, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. All of these food groups were previously only obtained by hunter-gatherers because it’s what they could pick off a tree or out of the ground. Read on to understand how this diet works and why it has become so popular in recent years.
Meal Preparation is Important
The paleo diet is popular because it has helped many people lose weight and become healthier. The issue is that most people cannot sustain the diet for very long because it requires that you cook all the meals from scratch. This is to avoid any sugar, unsaturated fat, and salt that many restaurants and fast-food places use to cook their food. If you are concerned that you won’t have the time to properly prepare three cooked meals each day, consider buying pre-packaged meal kits, by looking at an overview of the best paleo meal kits out there by Top10.com.
Meal kits are helpful if you are a busy working professional and still want to eat healthily, but some people find that this type of diet can be quite expensive. If you insist on only eating organic vegetables and grass-fed meats, you can expect the price to go up even more.
Increased Nutrient Intake
With the paleo diet, there is no need to take additional multivitamins, unless you are vegan. In this case, you will need to up your intake of leafy green vegetables and high protein soya. The diet is simple. Focus on fresh produce free from chemicals, and ones that have not been manufactured. The paleo diet restricts foods such as dairy, grains, and legumes because these are considered man-made manufactured food with tons of calories per portion.
The essential vitamins a person needs each day to remain healthy include ascorbic acid, and vitamins A, D, E, and B. These are readily available in the foods allowed on the paleo diet. There are cases where reducing your carbohydrate intake can be more detrimental to your health, and this is especially true for athletes, such as MMA fighters.
Calorie Restriction
By replacing your daily meal of rice, bread, or potatoes with more fresh vegetables you are likely to cut down your calorie consumption without realizing it. The diet aims to eat as many natural products as possible, and this is limited to what you can grow or catch in the wild. Think about how people prepared food 10,000 years ago. Agriculture was not as cultivated as it is today, so people relied on foods that could be eaten straight from nature. Hunter-gatherers also ate a lot of lean meats, and the animals were grass-fed, and not pumped with hormones like they are today.
The great thing about eating fresh fruits and vegetables as your main source of food is that you can eat quite a bit more. One cup of cooked white rice is equal to 205 calories, whereas a cup of broccoli is only 31 calories. Yes, you will need to eat far more vegetables to maintain your minimum daily calorie intake, but you will find it very difficult to eat the same amount of broccoli compared to white rice.
The only major difference is the food type legumes such as beans, lentils, and peas that should be avoided. They are naturally producing foods; however, they are considered to cause inflammation. Instead, include more cauliflower, tomatoes, spinach, and low-sugar fruits such as grapes, bananas, and apples into your daily meal plan.
It’s Only Half the Battle
For all the good that the paleo diet can do to reduce inflammation and heart disease, it’s still only part of the equation when losing weight. If you are increasing your calorie intake because you are eating healthier foods, you won’t lose weight. The trick is to replace those empty calories with nutritious food but not overdo it. You will still gain weight if you somehow manage to eat 3000 calories of lettuce a day.
Exercise is the next important factor. The two go hand-in-hand and you cannot expect to see the scale drop without some physical activity. Keeping this in mind, you also cannot rely only on exercise to lose weight. It needs to be the perfect balance of burning more calories than you consume and ensuring that those calories are made up of fresh fruit, vegetables, and lean meat.
There is research to back up the benefits of the paleo diet, however, many scientists say there isn’t enough evidence to tell whether the eating style is completely safe. The diet has also not yet been proven effective enough to reverse diseases like diabetes, but it has helped thousands reach their weight loss goals.
