I had to stop at the grocery store this morning after my workout at the Y. As I was shopping for some bread, fruit, oatmeal and laundry supplies, I began thinking about how wonderful it was to have such a luxury as a grocery store in which to shop for every item of food necessary for existence. Then I began thinking “I wonder just how much of this food was available to the “cavemen”. I was only thinking of this because to my recollection, I do not recall ever having heard of a caveman being overweight. So, I came home and got on the internet to see just what cavemen ate. Not surprising, there is a wealth of information regarding “cavemen diets” and specifically on the cavemen and cavewomen and their lifestyles.
One particular article that I found interesting was http://www.alternet.org in which an article written by Jimmy Lee Shreeve entitled The Stone Age Diet: Why I Eat Like a Caveman. Here is a short excerpt from that article, which, by the way is the gist of most everyone else’s thoughts regarding the cavemen’s diets: He is writing about Dr. Art De Vany www.arthurdevany.com, who was in his sixties and looked better than most men at the age of 30.
” ………..What was De Vany’s secret? For nearly two decades, he’d been eating and exercising as humans did in Paleolithic times — the early Stone Age. He’d come across research suggesting that we should be eating like our hunter-gatherer forebears — lean meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, but no grains, or dairy. It had made sense, so he took it up.
As De Vany points out, the fossil record reveals that our cave ancestors were not only slim, lean, fit and healthy, but that they did not generally suffer from many of the diseases that plague us today, such as cancer, allergies and heart disease. What’s more, as long as they weren’t gored by a wild beast or struck down by infection, they lived as long as we do today. They stayed agile and vigorous until they dropped (no wheelchairs and care homes for them).”
As I read this article, I thought about the foods that I bought – cottage cheese (a no-no in this diet), yogurt (another no-no), high fiber bread (nope), grapes, bananas, apples (hey, these are o.k.), oatmeal (another no-no) – Guess I won’t be going on the Caveman diet today.
While there is great merit to this diet, just as there is to almost any good diet one goes on, can it be sustained? Of course it can – but, will the average person who likes to eat their breads, cheeses, sweets and their other dairy products stay with it? Probably not – because the desire is not great enough and it is much too far removed from the types of foods we in general are used to eating. So, here we are, right back where we started, sifting out the foods that we know have too many calories, too much fat, too many carbs, and wondering if we will ever find the right formula that will allow us to get the weight off and keep it off.
Ladies and gentlemen, food is not the cause of overweight! But the thought that food is the cause of overweight is the cause. It is how we think about food and what it can do or does to our body that makes us overweight. If we think food is going to make us gain weight – it will. We have trained ourselves to count calories, think about each bite in relation to how much we can have and when, and that training is so embedded in our everyday lives, that it cannot be ignored, But it can be changed, with some effort on our part. Every diet program that we have ever gone on that allows us to eat regular food at regular times has allowed us to reduce our weight – at least every one that I have been on did – but——- there was no program set up initially that would groom our thinking about our body and food as it could be and would be once the weight was released. Have you noticed that reducing the weight was the easiest part? The hard part was keeping the weight off for a long period of time – like for the rest of your life. If a new eating program is started out with the idea in mind that this is a lifetime project and will take some serious focusing on how you want to look, why you want to look that way and loving each and every part of your body as it is and as it will become. I reached my goal weight and have kept it down for an extended period of time doing just that – taking it one step at a time and keeping focused on my picture of myself at my desired body weight. Of course, there are a few more steps involved, but it is really just that simple. I firmly believe that if you pick the eating program that you can stay on, and make up your mind now, at the beginning, that you will have a “perfect weight body” just like you want for the rest of your life, and focus on that picture each and every time you sit down to eat you can achieve this goal or intention.
Think Thin Thoughts!
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