Paleo

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How I finally started losing weight

Me on Aug-18-13 at 1.04 PM Miami

On January 1st 2013, like so many people all over the world I took that pledge of getting back to my healthy weight.

Ever since I’ve not missed a single week of weight lifting, running and swimming.

In the process I’ve tried different diets like controlling portion sizes, diets where you eat only during certain hours but then you have to fast, but all of that is simply unsustainable and you gain the weight right back. My biggest achievement with those “diets” was just going from 200lbs to 196lbs, despite all the hard work at the gym, despite running 6 to 8 miles (I like running) several times a week, I’d just gain the weight back.

So then I read about the Paleo diet, and some of the things in that diet don’t really convince me very much (like not eating beans for example), so I started a Paleo-ish diet with a simple rule: Eat as much as you need but whatever it is you put in your body it has to be non-processed, it has to be natural and organic if possible. I’m now like a vegetarian that adds beef, chicken or fish on the other half of the plate.

This meant basically getting rid of bread, pasta, white rice, and lowering my cheese and milk consumption (but I think I’ll be bringing back milk since I’m lactose tolerant something which I’ve confirmed with a genome scan)

In only 4 weeks of eating lean meats, a lot of vegetables and fruits to accompany the meats I’ve finally lost 10lbs and after a run this morning for the first time in about 3 years I saw my weight into the high 180s (188).

I’ve found that this simple rule has controlled my appetite, I get full with less food, and since I’m eating so healthy now I don’t feel guilty if I eat something outside of the diet whenever the opportunity is presented, I just have this mentality now of seeing some things as “not food” and I just don’t put it in my body anymore. It’s as if my palate has been retrained after just 4 weeks.

In the process I’ve learned to cook a bit more, and now I find it very enjoyable the act of cooking, specially with other people in the kitchen.

If you’re struggling with weight, stop putting poison in your body, working out will only make you stronger and agile, more toned, but you won’t lose any weight. It’s absolutely true when they say eating is 80% of the weight loss equation.

Eat natural, be kind to your body.

Once I reach the first goal of 175 lbs I’ll post pictures of how I looked on Jan 1st, and how I’ll look then, I’ll try to wear the same clothes.

The final goal will be to reach my natural weight of about 165 lbs.

The Paleo Argument against 100% vegetarian diets

Here’s a quote from the book The Paleo Diet

“The notion that human beings were meant to be vegetarians runs contrary to every shred of evolutionary evidence from the fossil and anthropological record. We owe a huge debt to lean meat. In fact, scientific evidence overwhelmingly suggests that if our ancient ancestors had eaten a meatless diet, we wouldn’t be where we are today… and we would all look a lot more like our nearest animal relative – the chimpanzee.

How can this be? Chimps are hairy, and they have a big gut. They swing from trees. Well, yes, but about 5 to 7 million years ago, so did our prehuman ancestors. The evidence is that the family tree forks – and humans moved into a category all their own. But genetically speaking, we are only about 1.7 percent different from the chimp.

Chimps are mostly vegetarians (although they do eat a few insects, bird eggs, and the occasional small animal), and they have the big, protruding belly characteristic of vegetarian animals (horses and cows, for example, have big bellies, too). Apes need large active guts to extract the nutrients from their fiber-filled, plant-based diet.

About 2.5 million years ago, our ancestors began trading in their big guts for bigger brains – to the point where today our bellies are about 40 percent smaller than those of chimps and our brains are about three times larger. The turning point came when our ancestors figured out that eating animal food (meat and organs) gave them much more energy. Over the years, their bellies began to shrink because they didn’t need the extra room to process all that roughage. All the energy formerly needed by the gut was diverted to the brain, which doubled and then tripled in size. Without nutrient-dense animal foods in the diet, the large brains that makes us human never would have had the change to develop. Meat and animal foods literally shaped our genome.”

It’s in our DNA, our digestive tract evolved to eat meat, it is healthy to eat meat and a lot of the myths against meat come from the findings related to saturated fats in the 1950s (the ones that come from butter, cheese and fatty meats) which raised cholesterol and increased risk of heart disease, and then this created more of the high carb diets which just fucked us all up.