The Top 5 Signs You’ve Taken The Paleo Lifestyle Too Far

So you’re on the ancestral health kick. Trying your best to eliminate grains, beans, legumes, and dairy from your diet and embrace your inner caveman or woman. Believe you me, I am right there with you.

The Paleo Diet allows for good meats, plenty of veggies, fresh fruit, nuts and seeds, and plenty of healthy fats. Plus, the scientific research to back up its health benefits speak for themselves:

Improved blood pressureGlucose toleranceDecreases in blood sugar secretionIncrease insulin sensitivityReduced risk of cardiovascular diseaseImproved cholesterol profile

The list really goes on and on. But this isn’t a love fest for adopting a Paleo diet template for yourself. This is for those that have already embraced the lifestyle…but maybe a little too much so. For them, I present the top 5 signs you’ve taken your Paleo lifestyle too far — and how you can get back on course.

You have checked both the fridge and freezer and there is no meat in sight. It’s grocery shopping time. Instead of grabbing your wallet and car keys you decided to snag a fishing pole and spear. The zoo and aquarium are the only places you are convinced you can actually get game meat and unique fish in order to satisfy your primal urges.

A better option: Whole Foods, Sprouts, and a quick Google search for grass-fed meats or wild fish will allow you to pick up high quality proteins with beneficial Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratios. It’ll probably save your life as well — literally and figuratively.

You sold your bed, sheets, and pillow and now insist on sleeping outside on the dirt like your ancestors, bundled up by a zebra blanket you recently created from — you guessed it — a grocery shopping trip.

A better option: If you are looking to sleep more like your cave brothers and sisters there is no need to step outside. Cover your windows with a heavy dark blanket and wear a sleeping mask in ensure that your sleeping experience is similar to a cave. Use a fan to cool the air in the room and (if possible) do your best to wake when the sun rises and go to bed when it sets. This will allow your body’s natural sleep patterns to align.

Why? Because you no longer need them. You’ve started showing up to work, formal outings, and really anything imaginable barefoot. All of your workouts, runs, and leisure activities are done without shoes as well.

A better option: Pick up some five finger shoes. There are tons on the market now and plenty of benefits associated as well. You’ll strengthen the muscles in your feet and lower legs, improve the range of motion in your ankles and toes, improve balance by stimulating neural function, and simply allow your body to move naturally. If you work on your feet most of the day, think about asking your work if you can try it out for a week to assist in lower back pain.

Instead of painting your home, communicating verbally with family and friends, or hanging up art on your walls at home you’ve decided it is best to use petroglyphics to communicate. Tiny pictures of animals, shapes, and people drawn in clay litter your walls at home and in your workspace. Although your little cave daughter or son gets a kick out of drawing with mommy and daddy, there are better ways to communicate.

A better option: When you are with those that you love really be with them. Turn of the cellphone and ignore incoming calls and text. Forget about those emails too. Check in with each other and start talking. See how everyone’s day is going, what’s new, and plan an adventure together. Maybe a trip to the zoo — to view the animals, not shop for them.

You want that caveman physique, so you are hitting the weights like crazy. Picking up and putting back down the heaviest stuff you can find over and over again.

A better option: Lifting weights is great but make sure not to overdo it. Two to four weight training sessions per week should do the trick — and make sure to get in some body-weight movements. Cave people used a lot of their own body weight to perform exercise. Do sprint work and interval training, get in your push-ups, pull-ups, and walking lunges. Try swimming, slack lining, and maybe Parkour for some alternative exercise. Strength, balance, coordination, and agility were all a part of the caveman’s workout. Make sure yours emphasizes this too. (And get outside! Cavemen were outdoors all the time. Take advantage of the vitamin D.)

Embrace your inner cave person…but make sure not to take it too far.

(Photo credit: Stoneage Hunting via Shutterstock)

Justin is the crossfitting, paleo eating, skydiving, bungee jumping, philosopher leader of Limitless365. He's interested in doing more of what he loves and less of what he doesn't, and helping others to do the same. You can follow Justin on Twitter as @justinmiller06.

View the original article here

The Unconventional Guide to Adopting a Paleo Lifestyle

While I was in Barnes and Noble last weekend I notice that there were an influx of diet books scattered throughout the center portion of the store. It makes sense with all the New Year crash dieting going on. What I thought was more interesting was that some of these were Paleo dieting books, which, until recently hasn’t been accepted by the mainstream as well as a low fat or even the low carb type of diet approach.

This got me thinking about my slow and unconventional approach making it to the Paleo lifestyle. So, if you want to start to get lean, feel better, have more strength and vitality, you could go the traditional route by buying a good Paleo book (some recommended below), read some Paleo blogs, listen to a Paleo podcast, and turn into a caveman. Or, you could follow my long, winding path that has gotten me to a Paleo lifestyle.

A Paleo lifestyle is rather simple and straight forward. There is a lot of literature out there of what is good and what is bad for you when it comes to eating, but it comes down to a few simple things:

Eat quality, preferably grass-fed, meatEat fresh vegatablesStay away from legumes and dairy as much as possibleLay off the processed sugarDon’t eat grains, don’t consume wheat gluten, and lay off of industrial seed oilsMove around, lift heavy things, walk every day

Though it seems simple, this type of lifestyle can be tough to get to.

My first foray into a low carb diet was eating Atkins about 6 years ago. I ate meat, veggies, cheese, and fats. I also started exercising three times a week. It worked. I lost around 30 pounds in all of 3 or 4 months and started to get some muscles and energy back.

This was a great first step. It showed me that I could actually lose weight and start to get lean if I wanted to, that my genes weren’t “destined” to make me fat, and that I could keep the weight off if I followed a diet.

At the time I still thought that whole grains and grains in general were OK for me and that I just needed to lay off of them until I reached an acceptable weight to resume eating them. Little did I know is that the whole grains were the things that were keeping me fat, as they opened my up to eating more and more starches as my body craved them more.

Needless to say, when I slowly put grains back into my diet I slowly started eating more of them, and slowly started to gain weight. It was all a downhill progression from there taking me back to junk foods, fast food, sweets, and the like.

It’s important to remember that we are all human and that we can’t do everything perfectly at first. It took several attempts at a diet until I finally could keep it going. Once I found the Paleo lifestyle and decided to eat to live rather than live to eat, I haven’t had a problem falling off the diet wagon and am closer than I have ever been to my ideal weight.

The next thing is that you have to get active to live the Paleo lifestyle. The nice part about this is that there is no “set regimen” when it comes to exercising. You can make it up as you go, just as long as you are active.

I tend to walk for about an hour a day and do body weight exercises 3 to 4 times a week, but this isn’t even a hard and fast rule. Plus, I go in and out of the doing the body weight exercises. But, as long as you are moving for at least an hour a day that should be fine. I’m not talking about running the rat-race on the treadmill, I mean you can walk, hike, do pushups, pullups, whatever, for a total of an hour a day.

This is the reason that most everyone fails and decides to give-up on the Paleo approach. Most humans tend to be all or nothing creatures and if something doesn’t work or we screw something up just a little bit, we might as well not do it at all. I know that this is the case for me.

So what if you snuck a candybar after dinner or had a few french fries? Just keep moving forward in the Paleo lifestyle. You are bound to make mistakes in this new way of life. No need to be too hard on yourself.

The Pareto principal has been around for a while and if you are a productivity nerd then you have definitely heard of it. But, Mark Sisson, of Mark’s Daily Apple fame, has taken this and applied it to the Paleo approach. He believes that if you follow the lifestyle 80% of the time, or do the 80% of the lifestyle that is the most important, that you will succeed without being hard on yourself.

I’d say there are some things that you need to follow to the ‘T’, like avoiding gluten at all costs as well as the industrial seed oils, but the other things can are malleable; like eating strictly grass-fed beef or no potatoes or rice.

Below are the three things that introduced me to the Paleo lifestyle and kept me inspired when the going got tough:

So how do you make it to the Paleo lifestyle? Through trial and error, getting active, not being too hard on yourself, following the 80/20 principal, and getting inspired. Looking back, I wouldn’t have liked to get to to my Paleo lifestyle in any other way, and frankly, the traditional “buy-this-book-and-follow-this-plan-forever” kind of way probably wouldn’t have stayed with me long term.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity, creativity and how to use technology to get things done. Check out his writing at devburner.net or follow him on Twitter.

View the original article here