Paleo Eating

"Paleo" diets are not uncommon among CR practitioners. One reason for this is that it's pretty easy to get high nutrition from paleo foods. What is a paleo diet? Here's a website that goes into detail. In general, paleo diets attempt to recreate the diets of our early ancestors - hunter/gatherers. They eat lean meats, fish, shellfish, eggs, vegetables, nuts, and fruits. They avoid foods like beans and potatoes that cannot be eaten raw. Lean meats are the only kind of meats that make sense, since fatty meats were not available to early humans. One of my favorite diet books is Neanderthin - which sounds silly, but is a well written book with interesting points.

This concept is related to eating traditional diets. I prefer eating cuisines with a long, long history of being eaten by people who are healthy. Ronald Schmid's book has an interesting discussion of this. You can rely on these diets - if you really eat them as the natives do - to provide reasonable balanced nutrition. However, they may provide way too many calories, since traditional diets are no doubt meant for peasant farmers or hunter gatherers, not desk sitting couch potatoes. So, one way to adapt them is to cut out the least nutritious elements of them. This means that you eat Asian food and skip most of the rice, eat Middle Eastern and skip the pitas.

Paleo diets don't really have this problem. They have virtually no high calorie elements with low nutritional value. Only nuts have the potential to push the calories too high if you avoid the fat in meats. If you focus on lean meats, fish, fruits and vegetables, you will find that fruits are needed to give you enough calories.