11/05/2011
Fitness First
Eat and drink only the food types shown in the picture. Fruit, meat, nuts, limited veg. And eat until you are full. Don’t worry, no one has ever gotten fat from chicken breast and apples. The caffeine from tea and coffee will provide a little boost.
Your body is evolved to run on this stuff. While bread, granola, dairy, are all recent intrusions on the human diet. These foods pack high nutrient efficiency, and that was the purpose of agriculture, but they are not optimal for people who want to stay lean. Think of it this way, if you had a pet tiger, you would feed it meat because its evolved to eat meat. Treat your diet the same way.
2 comments:
Isn't there a lot of controversy about whether a low-carb/no-carb diet is the way to go? I realize eating unlimited amount of carbs is not gonna get you lean but I've read a lot that if you don't get enough whole grains or complex carbs in your diet, it is hard to keep energy and your body needs that fuel. Especially if you're working out tough everyday. And I know veggies have carbs but it's not necessarily the same as grains, right?
Carbs are an important part of any healthy diet. And completely abstaining from carbs altogether runs serious risks including prolonged ketosis and unnecessary stress on the liver. The more important question is carb sources and the % of your diet they represent.
I'm not a hardline paleo diet guy but its true that genetically we are almost identical to our hunter gatherer ancestors meaning that our bodies are evolved specifically to run off of the foods available to them throughout the evolutionary process. Nuts, fruit, roots, and some wild vegetables constituted the carbs within our ancestral diet. If you look at the nutritional information of these foods you'll find their carb count is amazingly low in comparison to modern bread, cereals, beans, and processed sugars which don't fit into our evolved diet. Ancestral carb sources provide more than enough carbohydrates for energy. I've played entire football seasons only eating fruit, meat, nuts, and some vegetables- and if anything, I felt I had more sustained energy.
The point is that grains do pack a lot of energy, but at the cost of a serious surplus in carbohydrates which can lead to 'diseases of affluence/civilization' obesity, diabetes, heart disease, acne etc. Things almost never displayed in hunter gatherer populations. Currently most individuals opt for a diet too heavy in carbs and coming from the wrong sources.
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