After the 1.1. Run, I was talking to a friend who told me that she’s going gluten-free this year.  This Ironman athlete made an intriguing find during her 2009 season: she planned gluten-free meals in the weeks leading up to her races, and she performed and felt better than she ever had before.  Through the season, she killed her age groups, and is looking at making a more permanent diet change.  While her training is of course key to her success, her diet is more important, as we only perform as well as the fuel with which we race.  Why did the move to gluten-free work?  Read on…

The Paleo Food Pyramid (from The Paleo Diet)

There’s been a ton of press lately around a “new” kind of diet. The Caveman Diet, Paleo Diet, Primal Diet – they’re all used to describe similar diets, yet none of them are particularly new. Instead, these diets take an evolutionary perspective, and look back in time to see what we ate before modern agriculture came around. The theory is simple: genetically-speaking, modern-day humans are not much different from pre-agricultural humans, and since agriculture really hasn’t been around too long, we should eat like we’re genetically built to.

Researchers around the world have found the following: in modern-day hunter-gatherer societies, people are healthy. There is very little evidence of obesity, heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disorders, or any of the several other health issues plaguing industrialized societies.  These societies eat meat, the entire animal (seriously, just about the whole thing); vegetables as they can find; berries are a treat; nuts and seeds are around.  What’s missing from this list? Any kind of processed food: bread, protein bars, bagels, oats, refined sugars.  In other words, they eat what man has always eaten, before the advent of grains and processed foods.

What about science and medicine, you say? This flies in the face of the Food Pyramid, of almost everything we’re taught, and certainly contradicts the endurance athlete’s carb-loading traditions.  Look no further than your waistline to see what’s going on.

Extra fat around the waistline, the kind that you just can’t seem to get rid of, is a sign of insulin resistance. Processed carbs and sugars, particularly those found in gluten-bearing foods like breads, are known to spike your insulin levels, leading to systemic inflammation and resultant chronic disease.  For those of you not only looking out for your health, but also your figure:  wild fluctuation in insulin levels leads to the storage of excess energy as fat (the culprit of those extra inches around your waistline.

Want to look better, perform better, and feel better?  Regulate your insulin levels by eliminating processed foods and focusing on high-quality foods that we were meant to eat: meat, vegetables, some fruit, nuts and seeds.  Try it for a month.  Replace the missing carbs with high-quality vegetables and fats.  The first two or three weeks may be tough, but your body will adjust, leaving you with more energy, a slimmer waistline, and better biological markers like the following: reduced inflammation (recover from your workouts faster!), improved cholesterol readings (healthier hearts!), reduced body fat (look good in those cycling kits!), and improve the immune system (no swine flu for you!).

The Paleo Food Pyramid (from The Paleo Diet)

I hate the word diet.  I know even saying that is cliche in and of itself… everyone claims their diet is not, in fact, a diet… it’s a lifestyle.  But let’s face it, Zone, Skinny Bitch, Nutrisystem, South Beach, Atkins, the list can go on… those are diets.  No one ever ate like that.  There are not cultures of people who do this regularly.

Paleo is different.  We, as a species, used to eat like this.

In thinking a little more about this Paleo diet, and see its popularity beginning to rise, I hear people’s concerns about how boring it may be, or how hard it may be.  This site, and all of us, are here to tell you the otherwise.  If you’re willing to accept the simple fact that the Standard American Diet (based on the Food Pyramid) is not the best for you, then you’re most of the way to mentally accepting Paleo.

What it comes down to is shedding the notion that you’re eating for weight loss, nourishment, or performance, and instead eating because you like good food.  Seriously, you can’t tell me the Paleo diet is bad, or boring food.

To show that, let’s outline what I’ve eaten so far this week:

• Breakfast: omelet muffins. use a muffin tin and create muffin-shaped turkey, pepper, onion omelets.
• Lunches: Bison meatloaf, using almond milk as a binder instead of bread.  Almond milk, cabbage, onion, garlic.
• Dinners: grass-fed flank steak salad, more bison meatloaf, almond meal crusted pork chops, carmelized broccoli.
• Dessert: coconut milk ice cream, dark chocolate with sunflower seed butter.

Tell me this list does not sound good.  None of these meals took me more than 30 minutes to prepare.  For most of them, I made enough so I can use them as leftovers for lunch.

Eating like this is not only good, it’s good for you.  I have more energy, I don’t crash after my meals, I’m shedding body fat and setting PR’s in the gym.  In the words of Robb Wolf, I look better, feel better, and perform better.

When I eat tons of processed carbs, breads, lots of sugar, I get an instant headache.  I crash within an hour of eating.  We were not meant for this.

I like what Dutch has to say about cheating, and more importantly, about eating in general.

First of all lets talk about why I do the things i do.
I drink Coffee black for the caffeine.
I drink Tequila on the rocks for the alcohol.
I eat beef, barely cooked and with little seasoning for the nourishment.
I lift heavy weights so i can be strong.

Why do you do the things you do?  Why do you eat what you eat?