Hunter Gatherer Diet

So you want to eat like a caveman or cavewoman? Do you want to be stronger, fitter, faster, and healthier than you’ve ever been?

The paleo diet, which is also called the Caveman Diet, or the Hunter Gatherer Diet, is a diet plan that tries to mimic closely what humans have been eating over the course of millions of years of evolution.

How is the Hunter Gatherer Diet different than other Diets?

The main principle of the hunter gatherer diet is to eliminate things that our bodies are not genetically coded to digest. Your DNA has only changed 0.005% from cavemen who are over 2 million years old. Simply put, your body is designed to eat what cavemen ate. It’s not designed to eat the latest laboratory creation by some for-profit mega-corporation.

If you can’t pick it from a tree, bush, or out of the ground, and if you can’t hunt it with a spear; you shouldn’t be putting it in your body.

1. No Grains

The first principle to following a Paleolithic diet is to eliminate all grains and starchy carbohydrates from your meals. This includes all forms of bread (Yes, even whole wheat.), rice, corn, barley, and even white potatoes.

This may be hard for some people, but it gets easier when you understand that our bodies have been adapting to eating raw foods for over 2 million years, whereas we have only been farming for approximately 10,000. Our bodies are just not physically suited for ingesting the products of agricultural processing.

If your goal is to lose weight, you should eliminate carbohydrates like bread no matter which diet you follow. When you eat carbohydrates, they are converted to glucose (a sugar) in your body. A small bit of this glucose is then converted to glycogen which is stored as fuel for your muscles, but ALL the rest of this glucose is stored as body fat. To lose body fat, you need cut out the carbohydrates.

Since the Paleo diet restricts breads for physiological reasons, it’s already made itself out to be a great diet for rapid fat loss.

2. No Added Sugars

The second rule of following a Paleolithic lifestyle is that you should eliminate any added sugar from your dietary intake. This includes things like table sugar, High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), processed honey, and chemical artificial sweeteners.

The Paleo Diet is a great diet for diabetes and pre-diabetics because of the restricted amount of sugar. With less sugar, your body dumps less insulin into your bloodstream and you become less insulin resistant (diabetic).

3. No Dairy

Many people who follow the Paleolithic diet eliminate or severely restrict their dietary intake of dairy. You may already know that dairy is hard to digest and absorb by many people — ever heard of Lactose Intolerance? Milk allergies?

Paleolithic diet philosophy dictates that the prevalence of these illnesses are because the human body is not adapted for properly handling dairy. After all, it was meant for calves — not humans.

4. No Legumes

The legume family contains beans, soy products, peanuts, peas, lentils, among others. Strictly speaking, cavemen wouldn’t have ate many legumes because of the extreme measures in which they must be prepared for proper digestion. Legumes (and grains) contain high amounts of lectins. Your body’s digestive enzymes only do about half the job in breaking lectins down.

Lectins are an anti-nutrient and can cause leaky gut syndrome. Once lectins have wreaked enough havoc on your intestines, your intestinal wall may breach causing the contents of your intestines to leak into your bloodstream. This has been known to cause diseases such as arthritis, IBS, chronic fatigue syndrome, colitis, and Crohn’s disease, among others.

Source by Richard Silvers

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