The Paleo Diet - Loren Cordain [39]
Everything I’m telling you about how the Paleo Diet will affect your body weight, health, and well-being is based on scientifically validated information that has been published in high-quality, peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals.
If you’re overweight, the Paleo Diet will normalize your weight. This means that you will steadily lose pounds, as long as you continue to follow the diet, until your weight approaches its ideal. Most people experience rapid weight loss within the first three to five days. This is mainly water loss, and it stabilizes fairly quickly. After that, how much weight you lose will depend on two things—how overweight you are to begin with and how many total “deficit” calories you accumulate. After the initial water loss, it takes a deficit of 3,500 calories to lose a pound of fat. It is not unusual for people who are obese (medically, this means people who have a body mass index (BMI) of greater than 30) to lose between 10 and 15 pounds each month.
Sharing Success Stories
Many people, in many countries, have adopted Paleo Diets to improve their health and to lose weight. You can read about their stories and triumphs at my Web address: www.thepaleodiet.com/success_stories/. You may also want to visit my blog (http://thepaleodiet.blogspot.com/), where Paleo dieters share experiences, offer support, and talk to one another about daily challenges, dietary issues, and health issues concerning the Paleo Diet lifestyle.
Losing 45 Pounds and Healing Crohn’s Disease: Sally’s Story
Sally is a manager for a large telecommunications company in Illinois. Her reasons for adopting the diet were primarily health-related. However, she also benefited from the diet’s remarkable ability to normalize excess body weight.
In the fall of 1986, I became severely ill. It started with several months of unshakable diarrhea, followed by gut-wrenching pain. It became so bad that I could not keep any food down. I lost 70 pounds in three months, and I was only thirteen years old. I barely made it through my classes at school, and then I’d go home and sleep. My best friends no longer came over, my mother was sick with worry, and my father thought I was anorexic. When my symptoms began, doctors could not find anything wrong except for “perhaps some allergies.” And when my symptoms grew worse, I was shuffled back and forth between doctors and specialists, each speculating on tumors, liver disease, and other life-threatening conditions. I was subjected to every conceivable test: MRI [magnetic resonance imaging], ultrasounds, upper/lower GIs [gastrointestinal studies], blood tests, stool samples, urine tests, X-rays, throat scopes, and others. It took almost nine months to reach the diagnosis of Crohn’s disease.
I was given large doses of prednisone [a steroid drug] and scheduled to have a portion of my bowels surgically removed if I didn’t respond to the medication. Within days of [taking] the steroids, I felt much better. Within weeks I was outside mowing the lawn and eating more in a day than I had eaten previously in a month. At the time, my medications were a miracle.
For most of my life I have been cycling between steroids, anti-inflammatory drugs, and immune suppressors. All of these medications alleviated the symptoms, but none treated the underlying disease. My overall health slowly deteriorated. I was severely depressed and powerless to stop my life from slowly wasting away. When questioning doctors, I was given unhelpful speculations: