Paleo 2.0

Kurt Harris over a PaNu (link later when off the iPad) coined the Paleo 2.0 term in his “Manifesto for Paleo 2.0” post. Whilst I am not very keen on the term itself for a number of reasons I decided I will go with it, in the hope that along the line someone somewhere will come up with a better one (UPDATE: more on that topic here). After all, there is a long history of giving work-in-progress a codename, and changing it once the product was nice and finsihed. So Longhorn became Vista, and Windows 7 became – ahem, forget about it… So lets move on to the more substantive points:

Comment for @CharlotteGFE on carbs

I spent a fair amount of time composing a comment over on @CharlotteGFE’s blog “The Great Fitness Experiment” (link later when off the iPad), so I thought I might as well reproduce it on my blog. Here we go

Delayed-onset carb flu???

I have been transitioning from Zone to Primal/Paleo a couple of weeks ago and I have been feeling remarkably fine – along the lines of “what is the carb-flu you are talking about?”.

Eat more fat to lose weight? – v2.0

Having had the time to read through Mark Sisson’s “Primal Blueprint” (ht Tim) I found that his recommendations are actually close enough to what I wanted to do in the previous post. So rather than updating the math, here the updated plan (with calorie restrictions added by me)

• Carbs 100g/day (with a view of reducing them gradually to 50g/day (400-200cals)
• Protein 150-200g/day (600-800cals)
• Fat to make up the balance to 2000-2500cals per day

Oh, almost forgot: no sugar, no grains, no legumes (ie lentils & friends). Lets see how this goes

Eat more fat to lose weight?

UPDATE: I am in process of updating this post as there were a number of mistakes – so if you find it confusing it is probably because it is. Will re-post once I got it down more clearly (v2.0 here)

Tim made some interesting remarks in the comments of one of my previous posts:

If you’re looking to lose weight, I would up the fat and lower the protein and further lower the carbs …. Dropping carbs to 20% or lower will really help

This got me thinking: from my limited knowledge of the bodies energy pathways the following nutritional strategy would actually make sense to me:

• Use fat for the majority of the body’s energy needs (more precisely: for all aerobic energy needs apart from the brain)
• Use carbs for – and only for – the anaerobic energy needs and for the brain as it can not use fat and/or proteins
• Avoid using protein for producing energy – it is meant to help you build your body, nothing else

How would this look in practice?