On Mar 08, 2007, at 10:57 pm, Paleo Phil wrote:
> As Todd mentioned, the sharp stick test doesn't apply to everything
> (peanuts
> can be eaten raw, for example).
Great, I ask one litle thing about tomatoes and end up losing the
only practical benchmark for deciding if I should eat a food! In
future I will keep my mouth shut :)
A guy I work with is going to try paleo for (hopefully) 6 weeks to
see if it can help him lose weight. I told him it's easiest to say
what you can't eat, but before I'd come out with "grains, dairy
foods, legumes, sugar and processed foods" (did I miss anything?)
he'd come back and said it's easy enough to list the things you can
eat - meat, veg, fruit, nuts (did he miss anything? - I'm counting
eggs as meat)
The problem is I now have no idea how to define vegetable, I'm not so
hot on fruit, and I'm fairly sure I could find something I call a nut
that is contentious. I think I'm safe with meat, although some of
the things I buy from Tesco make me question that. (And I'm not even
thinking about Bernard Matthews Turkey-Ham now.)
It's a fairly serious problem from the point of view of promoting
paleo. Another guy I work with once said "it all sounds a bit like
the Bible, you can interpret it any way you like". Now, while he
almost certainly said that as a way of avoiding giving it serious
consideration (and if I'd slogged my guts out for months on the
Testosterone Advantage Plan, I wouldn't be happy if someone told me I
could lose weight permanently with no effort), he does highlight an
issue.
I can't think of any way you can get someone to eat paleo without
them having to start thinking about what they eat. Now this would be
a Good Thing, if it was even remotely possible. But most people are
lazy, and expect every diet to give them a new number (or a few
numbers) to keep in a certain range. Grams of fat/carbs/cabbage,
hours between meals, number of meals, number of varieties of cabbage
in each meal, all of these are carefully prescribed by at least one
diet book. All diet books that either make you fat or would kill you
if you kept to them, but at least they increase your weight/speed of
passage to the underworld in a simple, easy-to-follow fashion.
I like to think that after 3 years eating paleo, and a lot of time
spent on this list and my own group, I know enough to show someone
how to eat paleo. I don't *really* of course - because I wouldn't
last a week if I was stranded somewhere with a (now retired from food
testing duties) sharp stick. But I know more about food than most
doctors, so hey, I must be good. Even now, it takes me days, weeks,
even months to explain paleo to people who show an interest.
Anyone got any ideas on how to sort out this mess? Should we try to
make paleo seem really simple in order to make it more accessible,
and risk it being reduced to Atkins? Or make more effort to explain
that it's really hard to know what to eat, and that it was once a
really important thing to learn, and risk having everyone ignore it?
Right now it's somewhere in the middle, and it's exposed to potshots
from opportunists like the guy I work with.
End rant, that took a bit longer than I thought :)
Ashley
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