I have always been aware of food and what constitutes a healthy and complete meal, where in my teens I began to study to nutrition. I thought of learning as a way of mastering another part of my life. I began by reading about nutrition and what was actually in food.
Food, I learned, was an incredibly complex stuff. It had lots of different components and many, many variables. However, I learned that the simpler the food, the better it was for you. This ultimately led me to the Paleo diet, which I have adopted as my eating for the body philosophy. I redesigned my entire eating idea around simple food which could have been gathered by our long passed ancestors.
Because of the almost overnight adoption of the diet, I encountered some very specific happenings with my body. For the most part, these issues were related to the sudden decrease in carbohydrates.
For the first two weeks of the Paleo diet adoption phase, I experienced quite drastic energy level fluctuations. This was due to the decrease in overall carbohydrate consumption. My body was learning that its primary source of carbs had changed, and so I was in a carbohydrate slump.
This was only temporary though, as my body soon learned to expect carbohydrates from the large volumes of vegetables I was now eating. While I stuck to the Paleo diet for the most part, I sometimes felt the need to introduce some legumes, such as beans and lentils into my meals. This made a massive difference to me physically, as because I exercise regularly, I was in an almost constant caloric deficit. This was not good, thankfully, the new twist on the Paleo diet allowed for caloric boosts which would often power me through the day, and then keep me going right into my exercise.
What physical changes have I noticed while being on the Paleo diet?
I noticed that almost immediately after adopting the diet, I started to lose weight. I am around 6ft 3 and weigh in the region of 200 pounds. I have relatively low muscle mass because of always doing cardio based workouts, but at the start of the diet I had a high amount of body fat.
That fat was specifically located on my stomach and legs, one of the most common fat storage areas on men. I noticed that a combination of a low-carbohydrate diet and an exercise like cycling, my legs were stripped of pretty much all their fat. If I had to estimate, I would say that I dropped around 4-7% body fat in my first month.
That was easy easy fat loss, and I continue to passively lose fat while enjoying eating large amounts of food. There is a psychological element here I'll explore later on in this short article. I continued to lose fat around my legs, hips and stomach. While I still haven't lost all the fat on my stomach, I have decreased my fat percentage from around 28% to around 18%.
Remember, most of this fat loss is achieved by doing no exercise at all.
That is the psychological element I was referring to earlier. You can eat as much good, Paleo food as you want, and still you wont put on fat. You'll just keep stripping fat because for the most part, humans don't really need carbohydrates as much as we think, or as much as we are TOLD we do.
Don't listen to what you have been told constitutes a healthy diet. Anything white, or anything that could be white should not be eaten. Bar eggs, cauliflower and white food on binge days. Binge days? Yup.
While the Paleo diet and the subsequent Paleo lifestyle have changed my life, I wanted to keep this article relatively brief, I'll chat about the other changes in some subsequent, follow up articles, or perhaps I'll make them a series.
Keep well,
Andrew
