Cheat Meals!

Hello Folks

At this point in time I am sitting on my bed Reeling from all the food I just ate. I am uncomfortably full and I love it.

Initially, when one decides to really commit themselves to improving their health and following a sound nutritional program, they may find that the hardest part is the will power required to pass on all the junk food constantly being consumed by the masses.

The Caveman2.0 lifestyle in no exception to this. In fact, The caveman2.0 diet may seem especially restrictive at first. After all Caveman2.0 does not include breads and grains which generally make up the bulk of the entire western diet.

Now I promise that with a little bit of patience, once you see how much better you feel once you get all the foods out of your system that aren't optimum for good health, you won't really miss them at all.  Before long, bread won't really be very appealing at all and when you do finally break down and try bread again (for an "open" meal) the accompanying gas and bloat associated will make you think twice about doing that again.

Once you get all the artificial flavors out of your system such as aspartame and msg, and you begin to taste natural food the way you were intended, you'll begin to cave the goodness of an apple or an avocado like you never thought possible. You won't feel the desire to coat your food with table salt anymore because you'll want to taste the flavors of your food and your taste buds will respond by tasting fruits and vegetables in  a way that you never have before.

But let's get to the main reason why I wrote this article. The "Cheat meal" (or "open meal") After following Caveman2.0 all week and being really good, (that means not cheating at all) I do recommend that you go out and reward yourself. Go out and get that one meal that you may very well have been craving all week. Myself, I don't get junk food cravings anymore but I do like to indulge in that one cheat meal a week where I can go out and have as much as I want of whatever I want.

One meal a week go out and indulge, enjoy, make it a real event, eat until you regret it and get right back on track as soon as you are done. The next day get up and start planning next week's excursion. It's that simple.

Now for an example:

On Monday of this week, some friends and I decided to go out for dinner. I had just finished a particularly intense workout and I thought a nice big juicy steak (very caveman!) with a double serving of steamed broccoli seemed like a great idea. When we got there we discovered that this particular restaurant was offering all you can eat ribs all day every day. I stuck with my steak while they all had multiple helpings of ribs. That's when I decided what I was going to have for my  cheat meal.

All week I planned for this meal and I got two of my friends in on it too. Let me tell you it was an event. I started with a full rack of beef ribs. They came with fries and cornbread which I didn't really touch. It wasn't because that they aren't caveman that I avoided them, but because I wanted to save room for the ribs (ribs are Caveman2.0 but the barbecue sauce that was on them most definitely wasn't) After three plates of ribs we had brownie sundaes for dessert. Now I am sitting in front of my laptop eating a bag of Reese's peanut butter balls about to slip into a junk food coma. The best part is I regret nothing.

In no way do I recommend over indulging the way I did this evening. The point I am trying to make is that if there is something you are truly craving, then don't deprive yourself. Make an event out of it and have your reward for being good all week. If you want  to overindulge the same way I did then go right ahead and don't feel bad about it at all, you've earned it. Just make sure that when it's all done and over with, when you wake up from your food coma, that you put your Caveman hat back on and get right back to achieving you weight loss and fitness goals.

The final point I am going to make is about the term cheat meal. I know lots of people don't like the term and prefer open meal because cheat  meal sound as though  they are doing something negative. Call it whatever you like because no matter how you label it it's still eating a lot of junk that is generally taboo. I like to call it my cheat meal  because to me that's exactly what it is. A chance to cheat on my diet once a week and enjoy every second of it. Tomorrow, when I wake up, I'll be right back on track and I'll start planning next weeks indulgence.

Enjoy! 

P.S. here's a pic of me holding up one the the massive ribs I got to chow down on

Not selling out

Ok when I created my blog I had the option to allow google to place ads on my site and I'd be paid on a pay per click basis. This means that I'd get a small amount of money every time somebody clicked on one of the ads.

This seemed like a good idea at the time but my wife clicked the ad not knowing what it was and it took her to a video containing information contradictory to the very post it was attached to. Now I can't, in good conscience, place an ad in my blog that contains the exact opposite of my message and expect to retain any credibility with my readers. As well the video itself looked as if it was something I purposefully embedded on the page.

I apologize if anybody clicked the link and thought that that video represented my views in any way.

Caveman Food

Caveman 2.0 is a modern "Urban Caveman". We do our best to remain cavemen in todays age even though the cellphone and briefcase have replaced the spear and club.

We are quite different from our Palaeolithic counterparts, however, our most basic physiological needs remain the same. We physically haven't changed much in the past 10 000 years and the foundation of what keeps us alive and healthy remains largely unchanged.

We now do the majority of our hunting and gathering in a supermarket. This in many cases can only give some added challenge to eating properly. The store shelves are stocked with convenient and cheap processed meats and grains, sugar laden dessert foods and prepackaged boxed goods.

Through all these temptations and conveniences it is imperative that we remain vigilant. Being urban cavemen doesn't mean you have to give up any of the foods you love, but you should keep it to occasional rewards for eating right the rest of the week. Ideally I recommend one meal a week when you can eat as much as you like of whatever you like. Get it all out of your system at once and then go back to eating healthy. It works great for me and you don't have to feel deprived. Although as you begin to see how great you feel on the Caveman2.0 lifestyle, you won't miss those foods much.

So what does Caveman2.0 eat?

Ok. Imagine you are sitting alone in the the woods. All you have about you is your spear and your wits. You have access to fire but no cooking pots, pans or utensils, and you're hungry because you haven't eaten in a couple of days... That means can eat pretty much anything you can club or spear, along with anything you can pick from the ground or a tree and eat raw.

The main staples of our diet were meat and fish with all of the vegetables we could gather. Fruit would have been scarce and seasonal at best. There would be plenty of berries but they wouldn't have been the gigantic overly sweet grocery store variety. Fruits and berries would be much smaller and much more tart or even sour than something you would pick up off a shelf. Nuts are fair game and would be eaten as much as possible but they are seasonal as well as regional so they were also a rare commodity in colder climates.

Our diet would have consisted mainly of Large amounts of meat and fish. Protein and fat. Most of our carbohydrate would have come from leafy green vegetables and although plentiful, the carb load would be negligible. It would take about twenty cups of chopped romaine to equal the amount of carbohydrate in one slice of whole wheat bread.

Bread and grains would have been unavailable at time. Bread would not have been invented yet and grains have to be milled and we wouldn't have had the means to process them. Grains are not at all healthy or caveman and I'll dedicate an entire post to grains shortly.

Legumes are in the same boat as grains, they have to be processed and cooked in order to break down the toxins and make them edible. This would have made them unavailable to us at that time.

Nothing processed. Nothing pre-packaged. Generally anything with an ingredients list would not be considered food. Stick to the outer perimeter of the grocery store, that's where the real, whole food can be found. I generally only venture into the inner aisles to find almond butter, coffee, or for an "open" meal.

Milk is a grey area. The debate about Milk rages on and on within health circles and even in the Paleo/Primal/Caveman world.

Milk would have only been available to nursing babies from their mothers. We would not have domesticated cattle at that time so we would have ceased to ingest any dairy after infancy.
Many people are lactose intolerant. This ranges from mild cramping and diarrhea to full blown leaky gut or severe allergic reactions.

I don't consider Milk to be caveman because it would not have been available to us. We are the only animals on the planet that regularly consume milk after infancy and we did not domesticate animals to get milk from in the Palaeolithic era.

However, I do drink milk. For those who can stomach it, milk is second to none as a workout supplement. I want to increase my strength and lean muscle mass and milk is wonderful for doing just that. It contains a near perfect balance of Protein, Fat and carbohydrate. It contains all the calories one needs to put on size and strength. An old school powerlifter trick is to drink a gallon of whole milk a day on (GOMAD) on top of the regular food they were eating during the day. This works wonders and many powerlifters boast wonderful gains from following GOMAD.

I don't recommend drinking that much milk daily unless you want to put on that kind of strength and size because you'd also put on a significant amount of body fat as well. But if that does interest you, eating Caveman2.0 style along with GOMAD and the proper lifting program would work miracles. Personally I like to down a liter of whole milk after I work out and my strength gains have been great.

If you are going to drink milk, stick to whole milk, preferably organic and preferably raw unpasturized milk. The closer you can get to it's most natural state, the easier it is for your body to process and the better it is for you. Don't worry about the fat in whole milk. A major part of Caveman2.0 involves a shift from high carbohydrate diet to a low carb high fat diet.

To put things into perspective, let's list the foods that are prefferable to the Caveman2.0 lifestyle.

Meat, poultry and fish: Real meat, nothing processed. Especially organ meats (yes that includes liver) Early Cavemen would have eaten primarily the organs of an animal as opposed to the muscle tissue which is commonly eaten today.

Eggs: Eat the whole egg. Yolks are natures powerhouse.

Vegetables: All the vegetables you want. Yum Yum!

Nuts and seeds: They are a great source of healthy fats and are calorically dense to they are filling and will hold you over for a while untill your next meal.
Fruit: Eat in moderation. Todays fruit is cultivated for sweetness and therefore has a much higher sugar content than what would have been found in the paleolithic era.
Whole milk: At your discretion. Not considered Paleo or Primal But good for the serious strength athlete.

Berries: a great source of vitamins and antioxidants. perfect as a desert.

Now for a list of foods to avoid:

Grains

Breads and Pastas

Rice

Potatoes

Legumes: Beans of all kinds, peas, snow peas.

Peanuts

Sugar: The root of all that is evil.

I'll get into why these foods should be avoided in a later post. In the meantime try to follow these basic rules for eating. Bt remember not to over think it. With a bit of practise it should become almost instinctive. Just remember to keep it simple, if it doesn't seem natural to you it probably isn't. Trust your gut feeling.

Welcome to caveman2.0!

By now you may have become aware of the growing trend towards emulating the diet and lifestyles of our paleolithic ancestors in order to maximise our health and longevity.

The basic Idea is that we are genetically programmed to eat and behave a certain way and modern living has removed us from our genetic roots. This has resulted in a host of diseases that are known as the diseases of modern civilization, including heart disease, diabetes, depression, ADD, Dementia, and a whole collection of others brought on by our modern diet and lifestyle.

Now there are already some very good blogs on this subject. fitnessspotlight.com and marksdailyapple.com are two incredible sites that I visit every day. They both contain a wealth of information and the authors themselves are quite personable. What makes my blog different from the others is that I plan to sift through the science and technical jargon out there and put it into terms even a caveman could understand.

My mission is to take all the available information and boil it down and show that the most effective way to optimal health and vitality is also the simplest way imaginable. Too many of us start on the path to fitness and only to become bogged down and confused by all the seeingly contradictory information out there so we get discouraged and don't even know where to begin.

Cavemen didn't know anything about science, or protein, fats or carbohydrates. They didn't think about if they had to eat breakfast or if they would get fat if they ate after 6 pm. All out primitive ancestors knew was to eat when hungry. If food was available they ate, if it wasn't available, they didn't eat. Their diet consisted of whatever could be picked from the ground or clubbed or speared.

These primitive civilizations lived in this manner and were all taller, leaner and stronger than we are. They were more fit than us and the previously named "diseases of modern civilization" were largely unknown to them.

I intend to show how easy it actually is to center our lifestyles in order to regain the health and well being that is imprinted in our genetic code. It is in our DNA to live healthy active lives and it does not require starvation diets or long gruelling workout sessions. It just requires that we get back in touch with our primitive selves.

Together I'll show you how to become a modern "Urban caveman" a Caveman2.0!