{"id":755,"date":"2009-09-14T21:18:22","date_gmt":"2009-09-14T21:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/?p=755"},"modified":"2010-03-17T21:09:05","modified_gmt":"2010-03-17T21:09:05","slug":"30-day-paleo-diet-experiment-terminated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/14\/30-day-paleo-diet-experiment-terminated\/","title":{"rendered":"30 Day Paleo Diet Experiment &#8211; Terminated"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At the beginning of September, I decided to have a go at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/01\/1-months-paleo-diet-experiment\/\">Paleo Diet<\/a>.  In brief, you could call this the caveman diet, the stone age diet, the <strong>&#8220;don&#8217;t eat anything invented in the last 10,000 years&#8221; diet<\/strong>.  So you can see that there&#8217;s a lot of things that you can&#8217;t eat when eating Paleo(lithic)ly. No:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> Bread<\/li>\n<li> Pasta<\/li>\n<li> Grains<\/li>\n<li> Cereals<\/li>\n<li> Flower<\/li>\n<li> Dairy (Milk)<\/li>\n<li> Cheese<\/li>\n<li> Sweets<\/li>\n<li> Chocolate<\/li>\n<li> Alcohol<\/li>\n<li> etc etc<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now I should say, that I agree with most of that, but I wasn&#8217;t doing the Paleo for the reason most do.  I wasn&#8217;t doing it to lose weight.  There&#8217;s no doubt at all, that if you follow a classic western diet, or even the recommended high carb, low fat diet, <strong>you will definitely shed the fat on this diet<\/strong>.  No question.  Not only that, you will feel full of energy and probably the healthiest you&#8217;ve felt since being a hormonal teenager.<\/p>\n<p>But I am already at a good weight.  In fact, many of my friends and family think <strong>I should be putting a few pounds on!<\/strong> I also have good energy levels and rarely feel tired.  That&#8217;s what 2.5 years of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zonediet.com\/\">the Zone Diet<\/a> has done for me, a story I&#8217;ve told a few times on this blog.  So the reason for trying Paleo, was to see if it would make me feel even better&#8230; and the short answer is: it didn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>You see my diet was already close to a Paleo Zone diet, as recommended by Crossfit.  The Crossfit dietary recommendation is simply:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>&#8220;Eat meat and veg, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar.&#8221;<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>However for me, I would have to rewrite it slightly, to be more like:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>&#8220;Eat meat, fruit and dairy, nuts and seeds, some veg, little starch, occasional sugar, no wheat.&#8221;<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Yes my balance of fruit to veg is probably off, but that&#8217;s down to lifestyle and lack of time to prepare veg for every meal. <strong>I also don&#8217;t eat wheat<\/strong> as I&#8217;ve discovered it simply doesn&#8217;t agree with me. The major addition is the dairy though.  I drink a pint of milk a day + eat cheese regularly.  That was the thing that really put the stopper on a proper paleo diet.  Removing dairy would mean no:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Milk<\/li>\n<li> Cheese<\/li>\n<li>Yoghurt<\/li>\n<li>Chocolate *<\/li>\n<li>Ice Cream *<\/li>\n<li>Cakes, even wheat free ones *<\/li>\n<li>Even salami!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>* = these foods can be &#8220;zoned in&#8221; on the Zone diet, and so are not taboo from a Zone perspective. <\/em><\/p>\n<p>Milk crops up in a lot of places that I must confess, I hadn&#8217;t originally thought about.  <strong>I like the zone diet, because you can eat anything you want<\/strong>, so long as you adjust portion sizes to compensate.  So that occasional chocky bar, whilst not condoned, can be fine, so long as you balance it with some protein.  Or indeed, a few glasses of wine are ok with a meal, as long as the meal is light on carbs to compensate.  The point is, <strong>with the exceptions of bananas, offal and egg yokes<\/strong>, nothing is off limits on the zone. (And they are only strongly advised against, at least in most circumstances.)<\/p>\n<p>Whereas a straight Paleo diet is the opposite.  It heavily regulates *what* you can eat, but places no limits on when or how much you eat.  The zone diet is quantitative; the paleo diet is qualitative.  So ironically, <strong>doing a Paleo Zone diet is actually the worst of both worlds,<\/strong> you are restricted in what you eat, and you can only eat certain proportions!<\/p>\n<p>Either way, I simply decided, that for the gains the paleo might have brought me, it simply wasn&#8217;t worth the sacrifice.  That&#8217;s a personal choice and <strong>I applaud the Paleo diet&#8217;s goals and ideals and heartily recommend it<\/strong>, if you are hoping to lose weight and currently struggling.  Personally, I&#8217;d <a href=\"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/15\/before-and-after-the-zone-diet-crossfit\/\">try the Zone diet first, it&#8217;s worked for me<\/a>.  And indeed I mostly follow a paleo zone diet, but with dairy and the occasional sugar and wine, however 90% of the meals I eat are simple meats, nuts and fruit &amp; veg.  A healthy and balanced way to live in my opinion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the beginning of September, I decided to have a go at the Paleo Diet. In brief, you could call this the caveman diet, the stone age diet, the &#8220;don&#8217;t eat anything invented in the last 10,000 years&#8221; diet. So you can see that there&#8217;s a lot of things that you can&#8217;t eat when eating [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1,7],"tags":[122,174,127],"class_list":{"0":"post-755","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-crossfit","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"category-the-zone-diet","9":"tag-crossfit-workouts-exercises","10":"tag-paleo","11":"tag-zone-diet"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}