PaleoFlip

What do Paleo and low carb diets have in common?

Well –  low carbohydrates. If you are already eating Paleo, you might have by now figured out (and felt with the pain of sugar cravings during the first weeks) that paleo is by default a somewhat low carbohydrate diet. Without all those grains and sugar, your carbohydrate intake drops.

That being said, there is a huge difference between Paleo and most low carbohydrate diets out there, especially Atkins.

Guaranteed fat loss? Not so much.

Low Carb diets: What you will hear is that as long as you limit your carb intake you will still lose weight, no matter how much you eat. Not so fast. Unless you incorporate calorie restriction into your your low carb diet, you are not going to lose weight, and what’s worse – you may even end up with high LDL cholesterol levels. It’s eating only what we were supposed to eat and the right kinds of fats and wild caught protein that will bring the desired fat loss results without having to restrict your calories.

Learn your fats!

Low carb diets simply preach to  ’eat high fat, low carbohydrates’. They don’t care what kind of fat you eat. Bacon and eggs fried in vegetable oil, it’s all the same fat. Rigth??? Wrong.  And that’s the biggest problem with traditional low carb diets. There are monounsaturated (good), saturated (sometimes bad if it comes from the wrong source) and polyunsaturated fat (some good and some very bad) fats, and you need to learn which to be healthy and lean.

Low carb, meaning no fruits and vegetables?

Many low carb diets virtually eliminate fruits and  restrict vegetables. While fruits, as long as you eat a wide variety of vegetables, are somewhat optional, eating lots of vegetables is key to reaching optimal health. You can not be healthy and lean in the long term without eating your vegetables.

Osteoporosis much?

Low bone density, or osteoporosis, is the result of low calcium in your bones. Some assume that all that cheese and milk from low carb diet will help with calcium supply. Not really. According to Dr. Loren Cordain (The Paleo diet) – what you have to consider isn’t just calcium consumption, but also calcium retention.  Without potassium, present in fruits and vegetables, your body will excrete a lot of the calcium you have accumulated.

The omega 6 havoc.

Many people in low carb diets will over-consume omega 6 fatty acids (present in vegetable and seed oils) and reach high inflammatory status, putting themselves at higher rick of cardiovascular disease. Paleo is balanced in the Omega 3 and Omega 6 ratios.

I could get into what causes CVD, and that it’s inflammation caused by eating the kinds of foods our body isn’t genetically adapted to eating (such as grains or vegetable oils) and not atherosclerosis caused build up of cholesterol and calcium,  but this issue may deserve another blog posts some other time. If you are interested in learning more about this topic, I recommend another great book by Dr. Loren Cordain: The Paleo diet.

A lot has been written about the pros and cons of coffee, but there doesn’t seem to be a clear-cut answer here. We don’t want to force this issue at all – after you have eliminated all your grains and sugars, you can have your coffee.

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Why you shouldn’t sit all day, and how to get stuff done while on the move with an affordable treadmill desk

Walking crash course for busy people.

“You move like a caveman” – it’s the latest compliment in the Paleo community. I’m not talking about shuffling along, hunched over, dragging a club in one hand and a dead animal in the other. I’m talking about the recent healthy trend of high volume, low intensity exercise. In his recent article ,  Chris Kresser pointed out the ‘active couch potatoes’, a term that fits many of us. We sit all day long, then we get out and do an hour of vigorous exercise and call ourselves active. Well – wrong. That’s not active, that’s just being an extremist.

Let’s dig a little deeper and look at how our super healthy ancestors lived. For the most part, they were walking around, picking berries and plants and following migrating animal herds. They did some occasional sprint, either to kill an animal or run away from one, they occasionally climbed up trees,  picked up heavy rocks, or pushed things out of the way, but most of the time they were either walking slowly or resting.

Now look at us. We sit all day long, stare at our computer screens, then get out and do an hour of steady state high intensity running. Between working (sitting at a desk), running errands (sitting at a car), and relaxing (sitting in front of the TV) most “active couch potatoes” end up spending over 90% of their waking hours sitting. (In-active couch potatoes, of course, spend closer to 100% of their day sitting – I bet evolution never imagined that coming!)

To confirm the latest Paleo health trend, a recent study from ScienceDaily.com provides some data that points to big benefits for moving frequently at a slow pace. Hans Savelberg and his colleagues from Masstricht University in the Netherlands “recruited eighteen normal-weight 19 to 24-year-old participants for their study and asked them to follow three regimes. In the first, participants were instructed to sit for 14 hours each day and not indulge in any form of exercise; the second regime required participants to sit for 13 hours each day and exercise vigorously for 1 hour; and in the third, participants substituted six hours of sitting with four of walking and two hours standing.”

The authors found that the sedentary group burned less calories than the other groups (no surprise) while the two exercise groups burned about the same amounts of calories. Interestingly, cholesterol levels, lipid levels, and insulin sensitivity improved only modestly for the high intensity group, but improved significantly for the standing and walking group. The study concludes that when energy expenditure is equivalent, longer durations of low-intensity exercise may offer more benefits than shorter periods of intense activity.

If you are part of our 5 week program, then you already understand why keeping your hormones in check (including your insulin sensitivity) is your #1 goal for both health and regulating body fat. Yes, it is true you do that first and foremost by fixing your nutrition and getting rid of sugar addiction. But after you are on eating a sound Paleo diet, you next have to exercise SMART to improve your hormone function. And high volume low intensity exercise can be a great way to integrate SMART exercise into your lifestyle.

Ok enough about this ‘sitting too much is bad’, I know you get it. But you have a job to do, so how do you find time to walk an extra four hours every day? The answer is surprisingly simple: A treadmill desk. That’s right. As a blogger by night and corporate employee by day, I personally struggle getting off that chair because I am constantly tapping at my keyboard. Even finding an hour in my day to let go of my computer can often be a struggle, as much as I value exercise. The Treadmill desk has been life-changing for me.

Get a used treadmill on Craigslist.

The prices at Amazon or your local department store may scare you so much that you go back to your chair and think about saving up for a treadmill next year. Don’t. Go to your local Craigslist site (just go to craigslist.org and click on your city in the top right corner), and search for ‘treadmill’ in the search box on the left. (For you advanced Craigslist bargain-finders, I found the category search not to be a great tool for treadmills. The treadmills tend to be spread out over multiple categories, so you are better off using this generic search box.)

Look for a treadmill between $100 and $150. Most treadmills on Craigslist under $100 are either manual (that means you have to move it with your own feet, Flintstones-style – it’s tiring and just not sustainable for working at all day) or they are broken in some way. Bargains are out there, but you will probably be happier if you get one that looks relatively new and in good condition.

Give your craigslist search two weeks, and unless you live in a remote location you should see a treadmill under $150 pop up. This still may sound like a lot, but think about how much you used to pay (hopefully you aren’t any more) for group indoor cycling classes and other group exercise. Also keep in mind that a treadmill desk can be useful for the whole family – if you set it up in front of the TV then even that husband of yours may use it

Get the desk set up

You can invest hundreds of dollars into getting a nice desk set up. A mid range treadmill desk will cost you around $500, and prices go up from there.

Or you can invest $40 into the SurfShelf treadmill desk on Amazon:

I don’t own this solution so I can’t share my experience, but according to the users on Amazon this should work ok with most treadmills.

Or, you can do what I did. I found two metal book-end holders, and literally taped them to the front handlebar of the treadmill. I used some strong packaging tape and it is holding up OK so far. I just used what I had lying around to get started, so feel free to get creative if you are the do-it-yourself type.

Put your treadmill close to the window

Some people set up their desks in a basement or facing the wall. You need as much daylight as you can get.  If you do some of your work at home and will not be using this treadmill desk only in the evenings, move your treadmill facing the  window so that you get as much natural sunlight as possible.

Don’t watch TV.. unless you are walking.

Don’t turn on the TV unless you are hiking on your treadmill. Especially if you have a day job where you are required to sit and you can’t walk around during the day. Take advantage of that TV time and get your walking in. Most of the folks I talk to say ‘I don’t have time for TV’, but the statistics of the country as a whole are alarming. Americans spend around 35 hours a week watching TV. Given that this newsletter is a pretty progressive and health conscious group of folks, we’re hopefully averaging a lot less than 35 hours a week, but we still do some. So let’s use that time to increase our base fitness levels and improve our insulin sensitivity.

Don’t do all of your walking indoors.

You still need real sunlight, not just through the window. And you don’t  have time just to walk around your neighborhood without a purpose. What do you do?

 Audible is what you do.

Audible.com is the biggest library of audio books out there. You can listen to anything from 50 Shades Grey to self development literature, which is what I enjoy the most. My favorite titles for professional women (both business owners and women with corporate careers) include The Magic of Thinking Big, Finding Happiness, Stumbling Upon Happiness, Rule #1 of Investing, 7 habits of Highly Effective People, Start with Why, Entrepreleadership, Ductape Marketing, and many more. There aren’t very many audiobooks on the topic of Paleo, but Good Calories Bad Calories is a great (although really long) book that gives really good background on nutritional topics, as well as thoroughly debunking the saturated fat myth.

With good books, walking outside in the sun never feels like a waste of time.
Here’s how Audible works: you sign up either for subscription (around $7 a month) or pay as you go for the titles. You install the Audible app on your phone, get on wi-fi, and download all the titles that you purchased.

Then you play your books when you walk outside, when you go shopping, when you walk to work, or even when you are doing your laundry – if your family lets you. You can speed up the replay up to 3x and get through a good book in 3 or 4 hours. Or you can slow it down to 1.5x and enjoy every word.

I hope that sets you up with a nice big to-do list for healthy living. Go find your treadmill on Craigslist and get a couple audiobooks to get you started. Do you have other tips to help bust out of the sedentary life sentence? I’d love to hear from you. E-mail me at iva@paleoflip.com

This sounds like an intimidating topic, but it doesn’t have to be.

Let’s make it super simple.

First of all, if you follow the PaleoFlip diet as prescribed, and eliminate all dairy, legumes and carbs (including sugar, sweeteners, and alcohol), then you’ll have a great ratio of proteins, carbs, and fats.

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Body fat percentage is the weight of all the fat in your body, divided by your total body weight. Your ideal body fat percentage is up to you to decide, but if you’re not sure, some good numbers are 18% body fat for women, and around 12% for men (if you want to.) These numbers are just a hair above what is considered the minimum (although some, like pro athletes, go well below the “minimum value” – not recommended!)

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