As for exercise (going to the gym), I don’t think it’s as important as the food that you eat. I’ve been really inactive lately, but I haven’t gained wait and my figure is getting better. However, I do walk a lot. Anyway, my point is that exercise accelerates your progress, but your daily routine–walking to work, climbing up stairs, hanging out at the pool, playing with your kids/nephews/neices–is exercise too.
Make the sandwich or burger, but don’t add bread (don’t even buy it), and then use a knife and fork to eat it. At a restaurant, you can take the bread off and also use a knife and fork to eat it (plus, it makes you looks classy). Also, instead of fries, get salad or vegetables.
With the caveat that sedentariness is positively bad for you (believe me, I’m an expert in this what with my cubicle job), I whole-heartedly agree. I’m down 6 pounds in just over 10 days … no major exercise at all.
Clayton -
am I correct in recognizing that your entire argument relies on data from the united states federal government?
There are some locations out here and I’ve heard good things about them but haven’t yet tried it… definitely will now that you’ve recommended it.
Clayton -
As an aside, I have a theory that this mania for long-distance running ultimately comes from the military establishment. The military is the primary consumer of endurance cardio in the form of long marches, runs, swims, and so on. The ancestral human did not have the luxury of performing feats and was not interested in performing feats… he just wanted to eat his next meal at the least cost and risk to his person.
Remember, though, that nature wouldn’t want to make man a fat-burning machine. Perhaps those “natural” workouts aren’t the ones best for burning fat…?
Right on. This is a very similar thought process that lead me to the Paleo/Primal diet a couple years ago. I’ve been using it as a general guide since then, and in recent months a couple of my buddies at work started doing it very strictly and that’s given me the motivation to do the same. I’ve been listenly to my body as Mark Sisson says (i read mark’s daily apple) and i’ve been included rice and potatoes to my diet, but no dairy and no wheat-based grains. Going dairy and gluten free have done wonders for my energy level, digestion, skin, stomach and hair.
I’m guessing you have heard of the book The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain, but i thought i would mention it because this is the book that first introduced me to the paleo diet and i really liked it.
Clayton, based on your attraction to the ideas behind the primal lifestyle, i would recommend the book Sleep for Success by James Maas. I think you might find it very interesting.
My following of the ideas in The Paleo Diet and Sleep for Success have given me levels of physical and mental energy that i haven’t felt since i was a young kid. (i’m in my 20’s now and relatively active and fit for an office worker, but the eating the paleo diet and getting sufficient sleep has done wonders for me)
I don’t understand what you mean by this. I understand the term “fat-burning machine” as Sisson uses it to mean that our metabolic pathways favor fat over carbohydrates as a fuel source and that this is the result of natural selection… the long history of our ancestors who were well-adapted to a high-(animal)-fat diet. Other animals have metabolic pathways that favor carbohydrates over fat as a fuel source.
If you mean that Nature inteded for us to be able to store fat, that much is obvious, just look around you. But it is just as obvious that our ancestors were insanely fit just by looking at our secondary sex characteristics. Most of our ancestral humans and pre-humans must have looked good naked. The typical rounding and flabbiness of modern humans (even humans that are within the medical guidelines for BMI can still have a “soft” appearance) is inconsistent with the primitive environment where you had to look great if you wanted to mate… the result is the modern human, an incredibly well-sculpted animal body form.
Clayton -
Grass-fed meats, experiment, never go all-in to any diet but primal is almost definitely the closest to being being sensible. Did I mention grass-fed meats? Organs from very healthy, high-quality animals (Kobe beef liver, heart, tongue) is in fact delicious, even raw liver. I won’t touch the stuff otherwise.
why wouldnt nature want to make man a fat-burning machine?
I will definitely look into it. My sleep patterns have been a wreck for years and I know it’s dragging me down. What I need to find are strategies to reconcile my schedule demands with my sleep needs…
Clayton -
Also take this into account: Hunting and Gathering. living freely means a return to nature.
Seems some of the things said counters my diet, and I know different diets can work for different people, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Rice and pasta are a staple of my diet, and of course vegetables, but I could literally live off white rice with soy sauce. I guess my diet takes in more carbs, but it works for me. My weight hasn’t fluctuated much at all, I think I’ve been 185 for the past few years (which should be more correct weight, I’m 6’2").
am I correct in recognizing that your entire argument relies on data from the united states federal government?
You are not correct. If you view my blog in my sig (which I haven’t updated in at least a month…) you’ll see where I get my data from.
I will read your blog at my leisure. However the argument you mentioned in this thread to support your perspective on protein consumption relies on the us rda which is highly politicized and has no bearing on actual human beings with actual nutrition needs. You say that the fda’s ceiling of 0.8g/lb is satisfactory for athletes, but athletes and physical trainers actually reccommend a floor of 1g/lb and many consume upwards of 1.5 to 2 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass. Just based on results, I will take bodybuilder conventional wisdom over the reccommendations of some nerdy public servant who got a degree in nutrition from a university.
you could live on white rice withsoy sauce but you would become malnourished quite soon. Yet somehow aborigines in the far north subsisted for generations on diets consisting of almost exclusively animal parts.
I’ve done a fair amount of research on this subject. I am convinced that poor diet is the greatest factor in poor health. I am also convinced that the paleo/primal diet is the way to go. The particular mix of protein/fat/carbs is less important than the quality of each. Eskimos lived on almost pure fat diet and had zero diabetes or heart disease until they began eating western foods. On the other end of the spectrum new guniaians eat mostly sweet potatoes, high gycemic carbs, and also had very little disease. More important than exercise if you are trying to lose weight is to know how many calories your body needs a day to maintain the same weight, eat less than this magic number and you will lose weight regardless of what you eat.
Some sources I would recomend (first three are books, last is a movie):
Change Your Brain, Change Your Body (this book is a great sourcce for supplements and also includes a battery of tests that you can have your dr run to get an idea of where your body is)
Food is Your Best Medicine (out of print but I found a copy at my university library. out of all these sources this one blew my mind the most. it was written by a dr who after 50 years of family practice concluded that poor diet is the cause of ALL disease. he does an excellent job explaining how your digestive and endocrine systems work and how our modern diet is incompatible and causes our bodies to become toxic waste dumps.)
The Paleo Diet (this is a good overview of what the paleo diet is, but most of the info in the book can be found online for free. the book is worth the read if you can get it from a library.)
Food Matters (this is an excellent documentary that is on netflix, maybe youtube? it opened my eyes to the importance of eating raw whole foods.)
If you guys are serious about changing what you eat I would recomeng getting a jack lelane juicer or one of the blenders montel williams was hawking awhile back.
If you know anyone suffering from cancer encourage them to look into gersen therapy, especially if they do not want to be cut up, irradiated, or poisioned with chemicals. Juicer Jack was once a pro football player. then he was disgnosed with cancer. Gersen therapy cured his cancer and saved his life. Gersen was working wonders with patients that had been diagnosed with terminal cancers. He used no drugs and cured ove half of his patients until he was murdered…
Finally, Clayton, if you have not yet had a sleep study done I encourage you to do so. It is possible you have sleep apnea.
Malachi, I’ve come across a lot of sources, and thing is I’m sure they are vary to a degree, so from that I gather a general idea to go on, not just one source. I also don’t really cater to that of a bodybuilder, so whatever I do find is more in tune with someone like myself. For example I have a “vegan food pyramid” on my blog, thus the conventional food pyramid loses it’s role in my diet. I also get sources from vegan doctors which I feel like are the experts who are “tried and tested”.
For a while my diet was heavily in white rice, it was twice daily with something else later in the night. Now the rice I eat is a variety, but I plan to go back to a more rigid white rice diet (mainly due to costs). As you state aborigines had a diet who’s staple was/is meat I can cite people who’s diets are heavily vegan (eastern diets). The thing with citing aborigines and more meat based diets is the meat they eat isn’t like what’s here, and from what I’ve come across they didn’t have long life spans and/or they did have high cholesterol and heart disease just from their diet alone.
As far as body building goes, how about some vegan bodybuilding?
Vegan body builder Robert Cheeke.
This is true and this is part of why I like Sisson’s way of thinking. When I was a kid, I dropped 5-10 pounds whenever I felt like it without the slightest bit of suffering or hunger. I think my diet (Mom’s home cooking) was just so much better that I could do that. When your body is working correctly, you should be able to invert your calorie intake-output and drop weight for a few days at will without getting hunger headaches and all that crap. Others may have a different experience but I’m finding in just the few days I’ve been doing this so far that Sisson is right on every count. Fats are good for you so eat plenty of them. Well, except hydrogenated crap and vegetable oils which I already refused to eat anyway, except when it was in junk food which I have now happily eschewed as well. It’s time to get healthy again and feel like a real human being.
Clayton -
“a lot of sources” that dont even agree with each other is not very persuasive. The us fda, that gets its reccommendations from big agra is also not very persuasive. Its great that you can find small populations that consume nonprimal foods and supposedly dont have health problems, but its mostly irrelevant. Bodybuilders are a great resource for things like nutrition (when correctly interpreted) because they specialize in modifying their bodies through natural physiological processes and can manifest the results. Vegan bodybuilders are likely genetic outliers even moreso than other bodybuilders, and they generally are not very muscular.
Also, I find it hard to imagine that a vegan bodybuilder would consume at or fewer than .8g/lb in his mass-building phase. I will google it.
Mike mahler splits the difference, he advocates between .7 and 1g
Other articles I browsed were not very detailed. I bet they cannot eat much more protein than that because all of the protein sources have way too many carbs and anti-nutrients, and they would end up weighing a million pounds because of 4 bowls of oatmeal and 7 cups of lentils etcetera
“a lot of sources” that dont even agree with each other is not very persuasive.
Difference in something that doesn’t agree at all and something that varies in degree, which is what I stated.
Its great that you can find small populations that consume nonprimal foods and supposedly dont have health problems, but its mostly irrelevant.
Ha, small populations? Irrelevant? 20% of India’s population is vegetarian/vegan, that’s about 2 billion people, but according to this site it’s 40% of their population which should be accurate seeing that a majority of their diet is vegan (and the absence of beef for religious reasons). That site also has numbers for other countries (as well as wiki).
Also, I find it hard to imagine that a vegan bodybuilder would consume at or fewer than .8g/lb in his mass-building phase. I will google it.
I’m sure it’s on the vegan bodybuilding site I linked since that is Robert Cheeke’s site.