With all of the fad diets out there these days I couldn’t help but wonder “Does the Paleo Diet Work?”
The Paleo Diet also known as a the Cave Man Diet is becoming more and more mainstream these days and for good reason.
The name itself sounds kind of weird but as it turns out, the principles of The Paleo Diet are not very outlandish at all.
Essentially the core principal behind the Paleo Diet is that the human genome has not changed much since Paleolithic times.
As such, the foods that our “hunter gatherer” ancestors ate during Paleolithic times were foods that the human body understood how to process and therefore, the most beneficial for the body.
The foods our ancestors ate were whole foods like meats, vegetables, nuts, legumes and fruit. There were no processed foods during that time.
To me, this diet just makes a lot of sense so I decided to give it a try.
At first it was a little frustrating getting used to this new way of eating. The hardest part at first was not eating bread. No pizza, no sandwiches, no toast, bagels or pizza!
But once I got past the psychological addiction to bread, a shift occurred.
I still wanted to eat bread because it was convenient and tasty, but all of the sudden I started thinking about what that bread would do inside my body.
And that thought alone was enough to help me skip the bread and eat some type of whole food during those times of conflict.
Then I began to really feel the benefits of eating this way. The biggest and most important benefit as a parent was that I felt more energetic. I didn’t need 2-3 cups of coffee a day anymore. Actually most days I didn’t even need one!
When I woke up in the morning, I felt fully awake and I wasn’t totally exhausted when I went to bed at night. I was tired, but not exhausted.
I had also been feeling some slight aches and pains in my legs and arms that weren’t really painful but they just didn’t seem to go away. After about a month of eating Paleo, they were gone.
Now those were some pretty awesome benefits but I also saw some visual results as well like less fat in my abdominal area and more definition in my arms and legs.
More energy, less body fat, no more aches and pains… could all of this just be coincidence?
Maybe but I seriously doubt it. It’s just too coincidental and I didn’t make any changes to other areas of my life like sleep and exercise that could have impacted these results.
With that said, I still haven’t gone to a completely Paleo Diet though.
That would mean I’d have to give up things like pizza and ice cream for good and as a father, I’m just not ready to do that.
Aside from the fact that I really enjoy both of them, there are also situations where it is virtually impossible to avoid eating them like parties, work meetings where food is served, vacations etc.
However, based on the research I’ve done on the benefits, the fact that it just makes a lot of sense to me to eat un-processed foods and the results I’ve seen in my own body, I see no reason to abandon the Paleo Diet.