Diet Principles
1) Eat a wide variety of things.
2) Don't follow each new diet fad: next year there will be a fad telling you to eat exactly the opposite of what this year's tells you. Following each one will give you a diet wildly swinging around.
3) It makes sense to look to evolution. But evolution happens much faster than the paleo people think it does. 95% of Northern Europeans are lactose tolerant. Those populations have fully adapted to a diet with a fair amount of dairy in it. On the other hand, only 2% of Southeast Asians can digest lactose.
So look at what your ancestors ate a couple of thousand years ago. You'll probably be fine eating a lot of that.
4) If something makes you really, really want to just keep eating or drinking it, you probably should resist that urge and seriously limit the amount of that substance you consume. At the extreme, you may want to remind yourself of things like, "Cocaine is really not a type of food at all."
5) If you weigh too much, step one is to eat less. Still weigh too much? Repeat step one. On the other hand, if you weigh too little, eat more.
2) Don't follow each new diet fad: next year there will be a fad telling you to eat exactly the opposite of what this year's tells you. Following each one will give you a diet wildly swinging around.
3) It makes sense to look to evolution. But evolution happens much faster than the paleo people think it does. 95% of Northern Europeans are lactose tolerant. Those populations have fully adapted to a diet with a fair amount of dairy in it. On the other hand, only 2% of Southeast Asians can digest lactose.
So look at what your ancestors ate a couple of thousand years ago. You'll probably be fine eating a lot of that.
4) If something makes you really, really want to just keep eating or drinking it, you probably should resist that urge and seriously limit the amount of that substance you consume. At the extreme, you may want to remind yourself of things like, "Cocaine is really not a type of food at all."
5) If you weigh too much, step one is to eat less. Still weigh too much? Repeat step one. On the other hand, if you weigh too little, eat more.
Within the parameters of eating less, the idea of achieving sufficient nutrition should be explored.
ReplyDeleteAugust: See point one.
DeleteVariety does not equal nutrition. One may manage nutrition indirectly via variety, but this isn't necessarily the case. You have to have some idea about where the nutrition actually is. You can take care of a lot of nutrition with a few ounces of liver. A lot of the nutrient dense foods also tend to be high in calories, so people tend to eschew them in favor of high-volume low calorie food. This results in a stomach that can expand very well, and a nutrient deficit. Under these conditions entire cheesecakes can be destroyed in moments of weakness.
ReplyDeleteAugust, the whole thing was fairly tongue-in-cheek.
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