Paleo nutrition - zowie!, training

First to training. This week is a "consolidation" week - lower hours and mileage. I'm not calling it a rest week, because it's not really rest. It's a good week for establishing and re-checking zones and speeds, such as they are. Easy one-hour spin on Tuesday. Went out for a hard, 30 min TT run last night with the goal of confirming HR for training zones. It's not uncommon for people to go out too hard, so guess what? I went out too hard and blew up! With warm-up I got in about 45 hard minutes running, but it'll have to be repeated on the weekend. No swimming yet this week.


Now, on to nutrition. The simple summary of "The Paleo Diet" is : everything you've ever read is wrong. Black is white, up is down, in is out and red is blue. I could have called this "blow up your kitchen", but given the title of my last post, two blow-ups in two successive posts could have had me branded a terrorist.

The paleo diet, in its simplest form is the "NO GBP" diet - no Grain, no Beans (including peanuts and all legumes) and no Potatoes. Stop and give that some thought. Take a look through your kitchen/pantry and eliminate all the food that falls into these categories. Oh yeah, there's another missing letter in GBP - no milk or milk products - cheese, yogurt, milk, ice cream.

At last count my kitchen and pantry have six boxes of various types of cereal, one loaf of bread, two bags of english muffins, a bag of bagels, two bags of flatbread, three boxes of pasta, two bags of rice, three bags of cookies, two boxes of crackers, green beans, a bag of potatoes, two bags of frozen potatoes - French fries and otherwise, a bag of milk, a tub of margarine, several containers of yogurt, one or two tubs of ice cream, one block and another pack of sliced cheese.



The diet boils down to this:

1. Eat all the lean meat you want (fish, turkey, wild game like venison, etc.) and lean cuts of the "traditional" meats - pork, chicken, beef. Avoid hotdogs, salami, bacon, and any other type of meat or food that is "processed" in any way.

2. Eat all the fresh fruits and vegetables that you like - no restrictions. Fresh is better than frozen is better than canned.



Now, The Paleo Diet for Endurance Athletes takes this one step further. In addition to the two allowances above it allows carbohydrate (pasta, rice) but only at specific times, i.e. carbs can be eaten right after training in order to replenish glycogen stores, in order to allow full energy availability for the next workout. Whew! I don't have to throw out all my groceries. Unfortunately, neither rendition of the diet makes allowances for beer - a serious shortcoming, in my opinion.

This diet would be a pretty dramatic change from what goes on in my, and probably in most other typical homes. With two kids I don't think I could survive for long if I suggested getting rid of the cereal and cookies. And don't even try to put your hands on my beer.

"Food" for thought, indeed.

Peace.