The Caveman Diet

When starting stage three I wanted to expand my diet selection. So far, I’ve added a couple different meals to my repertoire but haven’t added any new snacks during the day. I’ve still just been snacking on almonds and berries, with the occasional clementine or orange thrown in. Jerky has been suggested on a number of sites and I enjoyed jerky growing up. However, most jerky today is over-seasoned, pressed, and full of sugar. Jerky was once used as a healthy snack for Native Americans and explorers, but has since been turned into little more than overcooked and dried meat. So, I decided I wanted to make my own jerky. A quick online search turned up a number of expensive dehydrators. So I searched for a cheap jerky drier and up came the Ten Dollar Jerky Maker, courtesy of Raw Paleolithic Diet & Lifestyle. An easy to use dehydrator that you can make yourself for less than twenty bucks. The heat source for this is just a 100-watt incandescent light bulb and the frame is a 12×12x12 packing box. The box was easy to assemble and for the meat I got a few pounds of eye of round at Costco as the pdf suggests. For seasoning, I used some black pepper, sea salt, and crushed red pepper for a little kick. To dry, just slice the meat up into thin slices and add the seasoning, put onto some skewers and hang in the box. Depending on the thickness of the strips of meat the jerky should be done drying in 48-72 hours.

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I found this delicious snack/dessert on Paleo Plan. Not quite like Mom used to make, but the taste does slightly resemble that of the classic sandwich.

Ingredients
Berries
Almond Butter

Instructions
Mix blueberries and almond butter in a bowl and enjoy. Experiment with how much you use of each to get the desired consistency. The blueberries can be swapped for any berry and one website I read even suggested mixing applesauce with almond butter.

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Grilled Salmon with Lemon

Ingredients
2-4 8 oz Salmon Fillets
2-4 tbs Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1-2 Teaspoon Lemon Juice (fresh lemons preferred)
Ground Black Pepper

Preparation
Mix olive oil, lemon juice, and pepper in a bowl. Pour over salmon fillets and cover. Let marinade for 15 minutes. If using a gas grill, set to medium heat. For a charcoal grill set up for direct heating and light the coals.

Cooking
Grill with lid closed for approximately four minutes per side, flipping only once.

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Stage three is the culmination of the Caveman Power diet. Sort of a combination of stages one and two, this stage is what a paleo diet is. During the day indulge any healthy cravings you may have, eating foods like nuts, seeds, vegetables, fish, lean meats, etc. The key is to eat light and drink plenty of water. At night, we continue our ritual of a daily feast. Eat the same foods as during stage two. The first two stages served to get our bodies acclimated to the diet and get us enjoying healthy foods. The hardest part is over if the foods we desire are healthy. Continuing to indulge the healthy cravings we have and avoiding unhealthy foods will further condition our bodies and make dieting easier.

So far, I’ve been keeping my meals simple to make things easier on myself. Going forward however I want to be a little more creative and add some variety. A quick Google search led me to a couple sites that appear to have some good recipes on them. PaleoFood.com has some interesting takes on both drinks and foods. Paleo Plan has a comprehensive plan that you can sign up for and provides shopping lists and menus for you. There are also a number of recipes on the site if you do not want to sign up. Recipezaar has a great search function you can use to find recipes. One recipe I found intriguing and plan on trying tonight is PB and J. No, not the sandwich we all had about a million of growing up. Combine almond butter and fruit in a bowl and enjoy.

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Diet
Stage two is a little more extreme with the diet. You eat nothing during the day. Being sure to drink plenty of water to stay hydrated. Once a day, you eat as much as you want provided it falls into the guidelines of the diet. Berries, roots, veggies, fruits, meats, poultry, and fish are all good foods. Grains, legumes, salt, sugar, dairy, etc., are to be avoided. I kept my diet simple, usually having meat, veggies, and fruit. For meats: Steak, Pork Chops, Chicken, Venison (steak and chops), Fish (walleye and pike). Veggies: asparagus, broccoli, green beans, and various mixed veggies. Fruits consisted of: strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, clementines, and pineapple. Occasionally I would also have some almonds with dinner. With the dietary restrictions I wanted to keep things simple to make sure I stayed true to the diet. To add a little variety, I would prepare the foods differently, for example having chicken with olive oil and black pepper or a little lemon juice.

Weight Loss
Weighed in at 172.4 for a stage weight loss of around 8 pounds and a total weight loss of 24 pounds over the course of a month on the diet. One key on any diet is to stay well hydrated and when on a diet where you have as few calories you do during the second stage of the caveman power diet. My weight loss gradually slowed down throughout the course of stage two which I would say is because I’m getting closer to a more natural body weight. As I get under 170 I’ll probably start adding muscle at roughly the same rate I lose fat so my weight should stay around the same.

Exercise
With the weather starting to warm up I just tried to get outside as much as possible. Played golf several times, which while golf doesn’t take much exertion; if you walk it is some good cardio. Also played tennis or baseball just about every day. Didn’t do much lifting, just sit ups and pushups.

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A couple weeks prior to starting the caveman diet I decided to quit drinking coffee. Coffee in moderation isn’t necessarily bad for you, and is a great way to start your morning. My problem is that I would drink a cup or two in the morning before work and then bring a thermos to work. Before the day was over I would have had around a dozen or so cups of coffee. And while coffee in moderation is okay, that much coffee is not good for you.

Not drinking coffee goes hand in hand with a caveman diet. While caffeine is a naturally ocurring chemical, I have hard time imagining paleolithic peoples intentionally consuming a lot of caffeine. Drinking coffee tends to be dehydrating and one of the main aspects of the caveman diet is to stay well hydrated. Staying well hydrated helps to keep the body moving and is especially important when having so few calories during the day.

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I’ve found working out on the Caveman Diet to be a little different than working out on my normal diet. For one thing I am consuming far fewer calories than I normally do. While I would think this would impact my stamina and energy while working out, however I have found that while I haven’t necessarily been able to lift as much I have had plenty of energy during workouts and more stamina than usual. Because of my schedule I haven’t gotten to the gym a whole lot so my experiences have been rather limited so far. The Caveman Power website has a couple interesting ideas for quick workouts. The different programs they suggest are the 15 minute workout, the 3 minute workout, the 1 minute workout, and the sneaky workout.

The 3 minute exercise is very simple: How many of one exercise can you do in 3 minutes. Just pick an exercise and go, do as many as you can in three minutes. You can go hard for 30 seconds, rest for 10, repeat; go steadily for the whole 3 minutes, or however you would like to break it up, just do as many as you can in three minutes. I’ve been tending to do situps or pushups either first thing in the morning or last thing at night before I go to bed. I want to start doing pullups but there isn’t a good place in my house to do it, going to get a pullup bar to put in my door frame soon though.

The 1 minute exercise is different than the 3 minute power in that it emphasizes power and strength more than stamina. The premise is the same however in that you just do as many of one exercise as you can in a minute. As with the 3 minute exercise I tend to do these first thing in the morning or last thing at night.

The sneaky workout is just that, sneaky. Pick an exercise, pick a number and try to do as many reps of that exercise as you can during the course of the day. This workout helps a lot for exercises you can not do as many reps on and helps to increase your stamina for that exercise. I’ve always struggled to do a lot of pull ups, so my plan is to do the sneaky workout with pull ups when I get a pull up bar for my door.

The 15 minute workout is interval or circuit training. Set up several different exercises in a circuit and do them at high intensity with no rest between stations. The idea is speed and intensity and you should vary the exercises so you’re working as much of your body as possible.

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When starting the Caveman Diet I decided to avoid diary. Not that I really thought dairy was unhealthy, just thought that when doing a paleolithic diet I should stick to a truly caveman diet. Like other mammals, we are breastfed milk when we are young. Unlike other mammals we continue to drink the milk of other animals. Genetically speaking we are born with a tolerance for lactose and lose it as we develop. Up until several thousand years ago just about all humans were lactose intolerant. As agriculture began to grow, milk was consumed on a more regular basis and humans began to develop a tolerance for milk that got passed on genetically through the generations. There are still many cultures that are predominantly lactose intolerant.

There are many good things about dairy in one’s diet. There is a lot of calcium in milk and cheese. Some milk has vitamin D added. Milk is high in protein, low in carbs, and tastes great. However there are a lot of people with allergies to milk and some people when going without dairy for a while lose their tolerance and get sick when introducing dairy back into their diets. My plan is to go without diet for the first couple months of the caveman diet and then trying to introduce it to my diet again to see if dairy is something my body is truly adapted to or if my body just tolerates it.

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Yesterday’s meal was Venison chops with mixed berries, green beans and some almonds. I’ve been coming down with a bit of a cold the last couple days and I’ve been wondering if my diet has had anything to do with my getting sick. On the one hand I’ve been consuming few calories and a lot of times on low calorie diets one may get sick. However, my energy levels have remained around the same. My nose is stuffy, my throat is a little sore, and I’m a little congested, but I’m not tired and I don’t have a headache or anything. The plan is to just drink a lot of water over the next couple days, drink some tea, and hope it gets better. With being sick, I didn’t have much of an appetite today and just had chicken, with lemon and carrots.

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Today was day one of stage two of the Caveman Power Diet. On stage two you eat nothing during the day, absolutely nothing. Eating nothing during the day sounds hard, but after two weeks of only having a limited amount of nuts and berries during the day, it’s not that big a transition. For day one at least, eating nothing wasn’t that hard.

There are some additional restrictions on the daily meal. You are still able to eat as much as you want, but the foods you are allowed to have are a little more limited. Meats, veggies, fruits, and nuts are okay. No potatoes, limit the fruit, and no processed foods. The idea behind stage two is to get you craving good foods. Eating nothing during the day, you build up quite the appetite and you’re meal is very satisfying when it comes around. Eventually you’ll begin to crave these foods and start to enjoy eating good, natural foods.

My meal today was a baked chicken, steamed brocolli, some carrots, a clementine, and some strawberries. Some olive oil was drizzled on the chicken, brocolli, and carrots along with some black pepper. I make a point to distinguish between cooking with olive oil and having my food with some olive oil added to it. Olive oil loses a lot of its nutritional value when heated past a certain point. It is a great oil for frying, so long as done on low heat since it’s smoking point but olive oil will lose a lot of its flavor when heated.

A combination of eating nothing during the day and knowing ahead of time what my meal for the day would be led me to start craving the chicken and veggies pretty early on in the afternoon. It was pretty satisfying when the time finally came around to eat and the chicken didn’t last very long.

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