The Eating

Unfortunately, I didn't get all of my ideas in writing before the start of the month. September started on the 2nd this year by the way.

They say that diet is the foundation that fitness is built upon. I've had a growing interest in eating real "foods" for years. The idea that living as our ancestors did, something I would today call living "evolutionarily correct" has been growing in me for a long time. Michael Pollan's great article in the New York Times back in 2007 was exactly what I'd been thinking, but more so. I haven't thought about food the same way since I read that article.

Fast forward to today and the Paleo Diet. Paleo is best described as "lean meats, seafood, non-starchy vegetables, fruits, nuts and healthy oils," and I think paleo is the culmination of this trend. The hard thing about paleo, I'm finding, is no bread, no grains of any kinds, no refined sugar, no dairy, no extra sodium. Paleo is what you'd eat if you were a hunter-gatherer ten thousand year ago. There was no agriculture, hence no grains and no dairy. Obviously great stuff like ice cream, pizza, and twinkies are completely out. So is booze.

The healthy idea behind paleo is that its the diet your body is evolved to thrive on. Apparently, hunter-gatherers had pretty much no heart disease, cancer, cavities, or other "diseases of civilization."

So, paleo is fortunately quite easy in principle, and in some ways its easy in implementation. Its not too difficult to tell if a piece of food is paleo-qualified or not, think about if you could find it in nature or make it yourself as a hunter-gatherer.

For this reason, I'm setting a firm criteria of strict paleo for the month. Strict paleo is a simple criteria to judge: if I eat anything that isn't paleo, I fail.

The Zone is the other criterion I'm setting up for this month, but I'm not going to be as strict here. In brief, the zone means nothing more than getting nearly exactly 40% of your calories from carbohydrates, 30% from protein and 30% from fats. You generally eat something every four hours that you're awake, allocating calories, or zone "blocks" (one block is 7g protein/9g carbs/3g fat) in three meals and two snacks, always eating the same number of blocks of each nutrient at each meal.

Strict zone, in my mind, would be using a measuring cup and food scale to measure absolutely everything you eat. It also means eating every four hours pretty strictly and eating a LOT of food, especially when combined with paleo (I'm supposed to eat 17 blocks / day).

However, I've eaten plenty of very strict zone meals, so I'm going to do "eyeball" zone, erring on the side of too few carbs, and too much fat or protein. Its actually not that hard to get a good handle on the protein and judge your carbs and fats from there, so that will be my strategy. When time and energy allow, I'll cook zone-balanced paleo-compliant meals.

The two of these diets together form a rock solid nutritional foundation for human beings. The zone tells you when to eat and how much of each nutrient, paleo tells you what kind of food you can eat.

Over the past few months, as I've learned more about zone and paleo I've had intermittent success adhering to both, but I've learned a lot, lost a good bit of weight and have had some incredible energy when I nail it. I'm looking forward to seeing what dedication to these diets can do over a month.