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There's room for compromise between "adopt extreme diet" and "eat unhealthily". Paleo is one of the many philosophies I studied while I was developing my own ea

by unalone 14y ago

There's room for compromise between "adopt extreme diet" and "eat unhealthily". Paleo is one of the many philosophies I studied while I was developing my own eating behaviors, but there are plenty of foods I enjoy too much to fully stick to a plan that cuts happy things out of my life. The problem this solves, in my mind, is less "unhealthy food" and more "tiny, unhealthy food", and that's interesting to me. Food that packs a lot of calories into a small space can be hugely detrimental to a good diet plan, because you don't realize how much you're eating. Embiggening the food to make you think you're eating larger quantities is a completely silly but still interesting idea. Incidentally, anybody who finds this visualization cool and is also worrying about their own diet: you might find Picture Perfect Weight Loss worth a look. By comparing the calorie counts of similar foods, it does a great job highlighting which foods are shockingly worse for you than still-tasty, slightly-healthier counterparts. I own a copy and occasionally briefly skim through it, and simply having those visuals has helped train me into avoiding certain nasty cravings. Book preview at: http://www.amazon.com/Shapiros-Picture-Perfect-Weight-Loss/dp/0446691313 http://www.amazon.com/Shapiros-Picture-Perfect-Weight-Loss/d...

sj4nz 14y ago
I'm unsure how you mean "extreme diet." If you harvest seeds of wheat which we cannot eat normally (we're not birds!) and have to grind it up into a fine powder, then add water, leavening, and sometimes sugar to make it "palatable", which is the more extreme diet?
- indiecore 14y ago
  Do paleo people always treat their diet as some kind of religion? There isn't anything special about not eating carbs, I lost weight, got fit and did it just fine while still eating bread.
  - Adirael 14y ago
    A lot of people do. I did paleo for a few months and I lost weight and felt awesome almost all the time. My only problem with it was that I'm not a huge fan of veggies. It's also an expensive diet and it can be very boring if you don't have much time to cook. I also learned I can process wheat and lactose just fine, it's not the poison a lot of paleo people make it seem.
- unalone 14y ago
  By "extreme" I mean that paleo insists not only that certain foods will affect our bodies in certain ways, but that some foods are "natural" and some are "unnatural" using pretty iffy logic. It ultimately translates to "fewer carbs and less gluten" and that can be effective for some people, though I can process gluten problem-free and I find the occasional carb coma vastly enjoyable/not super detrimental to my long-term health. The pseudo-dogma that revolves around the diet is unnecessary. > If you harvest seeds of wheat which we cannot eat normally (we're not birds!) and have to grind it up into a fine powder, then add water, leavening, and sometimes sugar to make it "palatable", which is the more extreme diet? Is that more extreme than relying on specific animal species to eat and process foodstuffs we wouldn't find "palatable" on our own, then letting biological process transform that into material which we're capable of harvesting off their bones, cooking using an artificial heating process, and then putting into our bodies? I'm not saying that raising animals to kill them is particularly "extreme", I'm saying that if you want to, you can make any food process sound like it's much more "unnatural" than it is. I wouldn't eat chicken feed, but I'll sure as heck eat the eggs that chickens poop out. Or the things we squeeze out of a cow's udder – who saw udders and thought that was a normal thing to do?

by unalone 14y ago

sj4nz 14y ago

I'm unsure how you mean "extreme diet." If you harvest seeds of wheat which we cannot eat normally (we're not birds!) and have to grind it up into a fine powder, then add water, leavening, and sometimes sugar to make it "palatable", which is the more extreme diet?

indiecore 14y ago
Do paleo people always treat their diet as some kind of religion? There isn't anything special about not eating carbs, I lost weight, got fit and did it just fine while still eating bread.
- Adirael 14y ago
  A lot of people do. I did paleo for a few months and I lost weight and felt awesome almost all the time. My only problem with it was that I'm not a huge fan of veggies. It's also an expensive diet and it can be very boring if you don't have much time to cook. I also learned I can process wheat and lactose just fine, it's not the poison a lot of paleo people make it seem.
unalone 14y ago
By "extreme" I mean that paleo insists not only that certain foods will affect our bodies in certain ways, but that some foods are "natural" and some are "unnatural" using pretty iffy logic. It ultimately translates to "fewer carbs and less gluten" and that can be effective for some people, though I can process gluten problem-free and I find the occasional carb coma vastly enjoyable/not super detrimental to my long-term health. The pseudo-dogma that revolves around the diet is unnecessary. > If you harvest seeds of wheat which we cannot eat normally (we're not birds!) and have to grind it up into a fine powder, then add water, leavening, and sometimes sugar to make it "palatable", which is the more extreme diet? Is that more extreme than relying on specific animal species to eat and process foodstuffs we wouldn't find "palatable" on our own, then letting biological process transform that into material which we're capable of harvesting off their bones, cooking using an artificial heating process, and then putting into our bodies? I'm not saying that raising animals to kill them is particularly "extreme", I'm saying that if you want to, you can make any food process sound like it's much more "unnatural" than it is. I wouldn't eat chicken feed, but I'll sure as heck eat the eggs that chickens poop out. Or the things we squeeze out of a cow's udder – who saw udders and thought that was a normal thing to do?