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PERSONAL TRAINING: NUTRITION 401: The Caveman Diet
The caveman diet is simple to follow, because the rules are inherently simple: if it walks, runs, swims, flies, or crawls on its belly, you may eat it. If you can pick it up off the ground, dust it off, and eat it, you may eat it. By applying the rules of food rotation to the caveman diet, you have the ultimate nutritional program for losing fat and building muscle mass.
Reasons for the Caveman Diet
When I have a client who wants to maximize the result of their personal training in the gym, or when I first begin with a new client, we always adopt a caveman diet for a period of fourteen days. The reasons for taking almost all carbohydrate sources other than vegetables out of the diet for fourteen days has several benefits:
- Provides the body with a chance to regenerate the enzymes that metabolize carbohydrates.
- Re-educates the palette. If, like most Americans, you have been eating the Gross National Product in sugar, you get a chance to learn what real food tastes like again.
- Forces you to begin to eat unrefined foods, as well as to get out of the “cereal and eggs are for breakfast” mindset.
- Allows for a cessation of alcohol ingestion, allowing the liver to come up for air and begin to detoxify itself.
- Helps you begin to manage your insulin levels.
- Requires that you eat more vegetables and less fruit; this is the exact opposite of what most people do, and as such, limits sugars and stabilizes insulin levels.
- Teaches your body to begin to use fat as a resource for energy rather than carbohydrates.
