Learn how to become a Healthy Beast with the Paleo Diet

The old adage is true: You are what you eat. One more time: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT!

You wanna be strong like a bull? Eat grass-fed beasts and other wild animals and seafood

You want to be weak, unhealthy, pasty, and disgusting? Eat seeds and grains all day (and other processed junk)

Eating a clean Paleo Diet, also known as the Caveman Diet or Hunter-gatherer diet (my fav), can make women sexier and men stronger. It will improve every single aspect of your health. It will make you better at every single thing you do. Yes I believe in it very much.

Forget anything you have heard about this or that diet. In fact, don’t even think in terms of ‘diet’. Think only about eating whole, natural foods.

It comes down to a very simple style of eating:

Unprocessed plants and animals from nature

Boom..I just changed your life. Well not exactly, I just armed you with life-changing information but any change is up to you…and you alone.

• I can’t do your grocery shopping for you…
• I can’t control you from ordering that fried chicken at KFC…
• I can’t stop you from eating the bread that they put on the table to fill you up…
• I can’t keep you from eating 6 meals a day
• I can’t stop you from drinking gluten-filled beer every weekend (try cider)
• I can’t help you put down the fork

No, I can’t do any of that. But I can arm you with the proper information to help you start a change that could save your life.

Anything worth having comes ONLY, and I mean only, after effort.

Food should be treated as a scarcity and should be respected

Our ancestors, and many documented scientific studies, point to a calorie-restricted diet as being ideal for long-term health. Calorie restriction is not just for ‘dieters’ or people looking to lose weight, it is for everyone. Of course we are all different and everyone will have varying levels of what can be considered healthy in terms of calorie consumption or restriction. This is why self-experimentation is so important.

We won’t know until we try.

Do not mistake my recommendation for a calorie-restricted diet as saying you should eat a bird-like 600 calories a day and deem this ‘calorie-restricted’. No, what I’m suggesting is a protocol that uses intermittent fasting and skipping meals from time to time. If you aren’t hungry, don’t eat.

It’s ok to be hungry at times. Avoid over-eating, and avoid starving yourself. Look for somewhere in-between.

“Gettin jacked bro”

Eating a ton of calories for athletics, bodybuilding, or just ‘getting big’ is not a healthy long term option. You may reach your goal, that’s cool, but what did you have to sacrifice for it? And, more importantly, remember that you will eventually have to wane off and return to a natural sustainable way of eating. You will have to cut back or you will end up trading your health to pay the debt.

We are meant to be lean and agile creatures. Extra mass, whether it’s fat or muscle, takes its toll on your health. It is a burden to your body, plain and simple.

Think: Investing

Everything you do in life has long-term repercussions, for better or worse. If you waste one hour of your day watching mindless TV you may lose hundreds of hours in the future from the lack of exercise and loss of brain cells. If you spend a dollar on pointless crap instead of investing it, you may lose out on thousands of dollars that you could have received from an investment..

In fact, investing is the perfect analogy: You are investing in your health on a daily basis with every single small thing you do (or fail to do).

Life is a marathon and you should treat it as such

You can’t win a marathon by sprinting but you can’t win it by going too slow either. You have to keep going at a moderate pace. If you work consistently towards your goals on a day-to-day basis you will eventually reach them.

Most people don’t have the endurance to keep going. At the beginning of every new year, gyms sell a ton of memberships to people who convince themselves that this year will be different. Most last a month or two before letting life get in the way and falling back into old habits.

If your health isn’t important enough to you RIGHT NOW, it will never be important enough. I hate to sound pessimistic, especially because I am an eternal optimist, but I have seen it far too many times to spin it any other way. I truly hope that many of you can make a real change.

Personal Development

One thing I love about personal development-as it pertains to health and fitness-is the positive carry over to everything else we do in life. If you can eat a clean diet and stay on an exercise protocol, I believe that you can do anything else you set your mind to. Health and fitness improvements are some of the hardest habits to maintain as humans living in our modern world.

This is why I recommend health as the first and foremost thing to work on for people. Making improvements here have huge carry over to other things you are working on like relationships, stress, work, sleep, etc. They also give you a longer life and a better standard of living for the rest of your days.

What is better than that? If you can name something please email it to me

I encourage you to shoot me an email anytime, for any reason. Questions, comments, suggestions, whatever. I love helping people out with this stuff..It’s what I do. If you have hate or other negative shit to say I encourage you to NOT E-mail me.

So what do I eat?

My answer: some damn good food - The Paleo Diet - Or my personal favorite via Mark Sission: The Primal Diet

With that long introduction out of the way, I will now get down to the specifics. Proper nutrition is pretty simple to understand. Don’t let the newest ‘expert’ or ‘guru’ tell you otherwise. Many people get hung up on trying to find perfection and end up worrying about trivial things like ‘what oil has the perfect omega balance?’ or ‘How many carbs should I eat?’. Instead of doing hours of reading to learn it all, you should just focus on the basic nutrition protocol:

• Food quality (best can buy)
• Eat meals (2-3 a day)
• Skip meals if not hungry
• Avoid sugar, grains, lentils, beans, rice, processed food, dairy (most), processed food

If you stay in the realm of this short list you will achieve excellent health and body composition.

FOOD in a nutshell:

Eat the highest quality meats, seafood, nuts, seeds, vegetables, fruit, and starches you can find. Also include grass-fed butter and organic coconut.

Courtesy of MarksDailyApple

This way of eating is called Paleo or Primal. It is based on the hunter-gatherer diet that humans have lived on for thousands and thousands of years before the invest of agriculture. In remote parts of the world, there are cultures that still eat this way and enjoy excellent health with virtually no heart disease, diabetes, or other western diseases.

For further study and research: MarksDailyApple, Robbwolf, Archevore, to name a few…

Food: Where To Get It, How To Prepare It, and Restaurants Suck

Home-cooked food is the best because you control what goes into your meals, and thus, your body. Restaurants use preservatives and cheap processed ingredients to keep food costs low.

When eating out, be picky and vocal with your server. Ask for a gluten-free menu, request butter or olive oil for cooking your meal if possible. Typically, I tell the waiter that I have a gluten intolerance and that my meal must be gluten-free.

The better restaurants usually have a gluten-free menu. However, many restaurants will not. You will have to ask the waiter questions and sometimes he will have to go to the kitchen and ask the chef what goes in certain dishes. It’s worth the hassle.

Go gluten-free for 30 days then have it slip in one meal: you will bloat like the Goodyear blimp, it’s not pleasant.

Home Food Prep

If you are pressed for time, or your budget is tight, I recommend making big pot meals like soups, stews, and braises. A crock-pot or Dutch oven is your best friend.

Here is a quick basic stew/braise technique:

1. Preheat Dutch oven - med heat
2. Add oil
3. Sear protein on each side 2-5 minutes until crust forms
4. Remove protein
5. Add various vegetables and cook until soft and browned (onion, carrots, leeks, celery, mushrooms, potatoes, etc)
6. Add wine or vinegar or both and deglaze pan, scraping up browned bits at bottom of pan. Return meat to pan
7. Add stock/broth/wine until fill to desired level. Optional: add tomato sauce/paste, or canned tomatoes
8. Season and bring to boil. Reduce heat and cover and cook until protein is tender 30 minutes to 2 hours depending.
9. Eat and refrigerate leftovers

Or the crock pot method:

1. Throw in bunch of ingredients: Protein, veggies, stock, wine, vinegar, seasoning, herbs, spices
2. Cook on low 8-10 hours.
3. Serve

Finishing options: organic cream, garnish with herbs, chopped green onions, a splash of olive oil, or a thick-grained sea salt

Recommend tools:

Hand-blender
Cast-iron Dutch oven
Crock-pot
Wooden spoon
Ancient sea salt

*The more you practice each of these methods the better your dishes will become. Make sure to season each ingredient as you add it to the pot. This develops deep flavor. Always taste throughout the cooking process and adjust with vinegar, lemon juice, salt pepper, herbs, and spices.

Food quality: The most important thing…PERIOD

Many people stress over carb amounts or their protein and fat ratios. The bulk of your diet will be high quality proteins and fats and the rest will comprise starchy carbs from sweet potatoes/yams, veggies, and some fruit. Don’t be neurotic with your food.

Everyone is different and can sustain different ratios. There is not a one-size-fits-all answer.

This is why food quality is so damn important

Paleo or not, if you only consume the highest quality ingredients, everything else tends to fall into place. It’s hard to eat 80% of your calories from carbohydrates if you are eating only starches from potatoes, veggies, and some fruit. Whole foods fill you up because they are full of satisfying nutrition that signal your body that you are full and nourished.

The same is not true for processed foods. Processed food tends to have the reserve effect where the body craves more because it isn’t nourished. As a result we end up eating more of the processed crap.

If you are eating a balanced and colorful diet of fresh ingredients, and mixing it up often, it is hard to go wrong. The problem is people eat at restaurants, snack on crap, drink soda, and have other unhealthy habits that screw it all up. In these instances I recommend protein and fat as the bulk of calories and minimal amounts of starches and fruit.

Meat and potatoes

A typical Paleo meal looks a lot like the meat and potatoes (+ side of veggies) meal that was a common American dinner some 30+ years ago. Unfortunately, times have changed with the development of factory farming, fast food, and the low-fat food revolution. America has been convinced that eating animals is bad, that egg yolks raise your cholesterol, and that fat is the devil. What is ironic about all of this, is these so-called ‘bad’ foods are actually the BEST foods we can eat.

The fat-hypothesis trend allowed food companies to start creating processed food for a fraction of the cost that local and small farms could produce. It was the perfect disguise that allowed them to dupe the American people into buying so-called healthy low-fat products. This turned into a multi-billion dollars a year business.

The research that helped fuel this trend started with faulty research from Ancel Keys and led to promotion by the American Heart Association and other government agencies that ended up creating the completely inaccurate food pyramid. I won’t get into the ‘Meat and potatoes’ (you like that?) of it right now, but I highly recommend you check out Gary Taubes book: Good Calories Bad Calories

In a nutshell: Eating cholesterol from animals is not proven to raise blood cholesterol levels nor increase the risk of heart disease. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that proves this.

More information: www.MarksDailyApple.com, www.Robbwolf.com, www.archevore.com

Eliminate grains, beans, lentils, and peanuts from your diet. These ingredients are anti-nutrients and cause inflammation as well as a host of other issues in the human body.

Basically, you want to stick with the very simple Paleo formula: Eat meat, leaves, and berries.

Do this and you will live a longer and more enjoyable life. Your blood lipids will improve. You will easily burn fat and build muscle. You won’t feel sick, bloated, or irritated. You can literally change your life with your food.

Read The Manifesto and get motivated..