The Paleo Diet - Loren Cordain [89]
That year I finished third at the U.S. national championship, with an excellent race, and qualified for the U.S. team for the World Championships. I had a stellar season, one of my best in years. This, of course, led to more questions of Dr. Cordain and my continued refining of the diet he recommended.
I was soon recommending it to the athletes I coached, including Ryan Bolton, who was on the U.S. Olympic Triathlon team. Since 1995 I have written four books on training for endurance athletes and have described and recommended the Paleo Diet in each of them. Many athletes have told me a story similar to mine: they have tried eating this way, somewhat skeptically at first, and then discovered that they also recovered faster and trained better.
“Exercise”: A Funny Idea to Hunter-Gatherers
In the late 1980s, the world community became increasingly alarmed at the shrinking tropical rain forest in the Amazon basin (due to clear-cut logging, mining, and industrialization). Politicians and environmentalists launched a host of programs to curb this deforestation and even brought native Amazon Indians to environmental conferences in New York City. At one such conference, a group of Indians came across joggers exercising in Central Park—and found this concept absolutely hilarious. That adults would run for no apparent reason was comically absurd to these practical hunters. In their tropical forest home, every movement had a function and a purpose. What could possibly be gained by running to no destination, with no predators or enemies to escape from, and with nothing to capture?
Physical Fitness: Naturally, and with No Exercise Programs
The mind-set of these Amazonian Indians was undoubtedly very similar to that of any of the world’s hunter-gatherers. They got plenty of exercise simply by carrying out the day’s basic activities—finding food and water, building shelters, making tools, and gathering wood. These activities were more than enough to allow them to develop superb physical fitness. Strength, stamina, and good muscle tone were the natural by-products of their daily routine.
Our Stone Age ancestors worked hard or they didn’t eat. Sustained labor wasn’t necessary every day; periods of intense exertion generally alternated with days of rest and relaxation. But the work was always there, an inevitable fact of life. There were no retirement plans, no vacations, and definitely no labor-saving devices. Everybody, except for the very young or the very old, helped out. And their daily efforts were astonishing. The amount of physical activity performed by an average hunter-gatherer would have been about four times greater than that of a sedentary office worker—and about three times greater than anybody needs to get the health benefits of exercise. An office worker who jogged 3 miles a day for a whole week would use less than half the energy of an average hunter-gatherer, such as the !Kung people of Africa. !Kung men on average walk 9.3 miles per day; the women average 5.7 miles per day. As you may expect, all this walking and regular physical activity pays off with high levels of physical fitness for everyone. In fact, my research team has shown that the average aerobic capacity of the world’s hunter-gatherers and less Westernized peoples is similar to that of today’s top athletes.
Exercise and Obesity
There are few physicians or health professionals who would argue that exercise shouldn’t accompany dietary programs.
Most of the scientific experiments that have monitored weight loss with and without exercise programs have shown that moderate exercise (20 to 60 minutes of walking or jogging five