Hey Katie: Why do you Eat a Paleo Diet?

Our bodies are the same bodies we have had for hundreds of thousands of years (and boy does it feel like that sometimes) – joking aside,  our point is this: we know what fuels the body what makes it work well – that hasn’t changed.   What has changed is the world in which we live. 

Did somebody say choice?  More choice out there than any of us could possibly know what to do with.  Throw into the mix the fact that our bodies are programmed to like fat and sweet stuff (necessary for our ancestors to direct us toward the calorie dense foods to sustain us during the lean times) and on a kind of “get it while you can” type approach and well, some of us are in big trouble!

The food out there is crazy!    We grew up hardwired for lean times for times of scarcity for times when there was no food and we went hungry - that is evolution.  Now we are faced with the opposite.  A world of overabundance, a world stuffed full of every conceivable delight and it can be hard to fight against nature – remember we are hardwired for the taste of fat and sweetness to direct us to the calorie dense food that would sustain us during periods of food scarcity.  Can you see where we are going with this?

The food industry has created “food” more intensely stimulating than anything found in nature..oh the crunchy, salty, sugary deliciousness of over processed food.  This type of food hits the pleasure sensors in the brain and overwhelms us. Oh oh oh.(I’ll have what she’s having) and in the process creating a kind of food addiction which disables our ability to love and appreciate good honest FOOD.  We lose our taste for it and when that goes, we are in trouble.  Not only because we have knocked out that natural response but also because the “food” we are eating offers no nutrient content but lots and lots of calories.  So we are constantly hungry and malnourished at the same time as becoming hugely overweight.

Why then do we eat paleo.  It is quite simple to answer that question.  The paleo diet recreates the food environment our bodies evolved for.  Not in a re-enactment sense – nobody’s asking us to go out and hunt a woolly mammoth (good luck in Ilkley) or trap a rabbit (possible but time consuming) or gather fruits and berries from the hedgerow (actually that last one is good fun).  It’s much simpler than that. 

It’s so much simpler than that.