This page discusses the caveman diet under normal conditions.
The author, of course, is far from normal, and is interested in
high intensity athletic activities. Consequently, while he is
not engaged in those ridiculous activities, he follows the advice
on this page (mostly).
But before, during and after hard exercise, the following
modifications for high intensity sports
are critical.
The Atkins diet, the Zone diet and the South Beach diet are all
a bit like my caveman diet, and there are lots of cookbooks
published for all of them. You can also find recipes tailored
to these diets on the web. The South Beach diet seems like the
best of the three to me, but none of them is bad. And if you
just page through cookbooks for those diets, some of the
recipes may not be suitable, but you'll surely find many good
candidates.
Try different lettuces, different berries, different fruits,
and so on. Don't just decide that since you like strawberries
best that they're all you'll eat. Have blueberries, gooseberries,
raspberries, and so on. If you experiment in this way, you'll
surely find some great new tastes.
I like those huge salad bars (there's a nice chain called "Fresh
Choice" that can be found at least in the San Francisco bay area,
but there's no doubt similar possibilities almost everywhere. But
each time I go, I try to put different things on my plate (avoiding,
of course the carbohydrate disasters that no doubt attract so many
people to eat there).
In most restaurants I've found that if you find a meal that looks
great except that it comes with mashed potatoes or rice or
french fries, you can ask the waiter if they could please replace
the starch with additional veggies.
Similarly, if you want dessert and all that appears on the menu
is sugar bombs, you can often just ask for a bowl of berries and
they'll accommodate you.
I'm not saying these are wrong, and in fact, I believe that many
foods do have wonderful healthful properties. So what I try to do
is to take all of them, but a little at a time. I do have all of
the foods above and many more, but not every one of them every day.
What you don't want to do is fall off too often. In the same
way that if you smoke one cigarette every month it's not great
for you, but your body has a whole month to recover, it certainly
wouldn't be a catastrophe compared to the guy who smokes three
packs a day. If you're out at your anniversary dinner, go ahead
and have that creme brulee if you feel like it!
Similarly, you often have to decide how to deal with invitations
to eat at friend's houses. At a restaurant, at least, you have
some choice, and can almost find something that's not bad, but
when you show up and your friend has cooked up a giant bowl of
pasta, what do you do?
I just eat it and don't say anything and figure that's one of the
times I fell off the wagon. You've probably told your good friends
about the diet and they'll often try to accommodate, but I, at least,
don't like to add any tension to a first meal with someone. You can
do what you want, of course. And even if there's some "bad" food
served, you can often put a little bit of the bad stuff on your
plate and a lot of the good stuff. Then you've just fallen a little
off the wagon.
A "high glycemic index" means that there are lots of carbohydrates
easily available for immediate digestion. If you are not doing
exercise basically at the same time you are eating, a large input of
high glycemic food will cause your insulin levels to surge as they are
digested. See the page on health benefits
for more information about this.
Foods with high glycemic indices include: wheat products like
bread, crackers and pasta, rice, potatoes, foods with a lot
of sugar (refined or not), cookies, sugared soft drinks, fruit
juice, dried fruits (raisins, dates, apricots, et cetera)
and modern, high-sugar fruits.
Milk contains the sugar lactose, so don't drink gallons of that,
either.
Read the labels on manufactured products to see how much sugar
is in them. Sugar tastes good, so many manufacturers of things
like salad dressing will add sugar to a product that if you made
it from scratch would not contain any.
The foods in the paragraph above account for a large percentage of
the carbohydrates that most of us eat today. If you remove them
from your diet, you're going to have to replace those carbohydrates
with something else, just to get back the calories you've lost.
To make up for those calories, you can or course eat a few more fats
and proteins, but you can get plenty of "good" carbohydrates from
sources like salads and vegetables, where we don't consider the potato
to be a vegetable.
Eat fruits, but try to eat more of them with low glycemic indices.
Berries are basically all very good, but melon are also low. You
don't need to be a fanatic, and an occasional orange won't hurt
you, but don't eat three per day.
For a listing of the relative merits of carbohydrate sources, see
the page on the glycemic index.
Also, some sources of fats include a high salt load, so even if
the fat's not hurting you, it's probably a good idea to try to
avoid the salt. Examples of salty fats include bacon and salted
nuts.
The main thing is not to go overboard. At least eat low-fat
meats a good percentage of the time (like chicken and fish), but
don't worry too much about the occasional steak.
There are also fats available in nuts, avocados, egg (the yolk),
cheese, and heavy cream.
In fact, protein is made of 20 different amino acids, some of
which are called "essential" because your body cannot manufacture
them from scratch. Thus those acids have to come from the protein
you eat, so it's not quite true that "protein is pretty much
protein". But if you eat, as I recommend, a huge variety of different
foods, it's almost certain that you'll get all the protein
building blocks that you need.
Make sure you get plenty of protein.
Notice that if you drink non-fat milk, removing the fat actually
increases the proportion of carbohydrates. I only have a little
milk every day that I foam to have with my cappuccino.
Eggs aren't exactly dairy, but they're often lumped in there, so
I will, too. They're got lots of protein and fat and almost
no carbohydrates, so they are not bad. The yolks have a lot
of cholesterol, and it's not clear how bad that is. I'm not
afraid of them and do eat them regularly, but not three every
day.
Return to Tom's home page.
General considerations
Don't get stuck in a rut! If you eat a wide variety of foods
that fit with the general caveman philosophy you'll be more
likely to get all the vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants, and
so on, that you need.
"Super foods"
If you just open your eyes, every day you see extravagant claims
made for one food or another. "Garlic prevents cancer." "Pomegranate
juice lowers cholesterol." "Honey prevents colds." And on, and on,
and on.
Falling off the wagon
Don't worry if you fall off the wagon every once in a while,
especially if you're near the weight you want to be. After all,
that caveman sometimes came across a honey tree and he gorged on
as much of that high-glycemic food as he could eat.
Avoid foods with a high glycemic index
One main difference between what is available to us and what was
available to the cavemen is that it is very easy for us to obtain
foods with a high glycemic index. Try to avoid those foods.
Fats
You can eat more fats; just don't go nuts, and avoid, when
possible, fats that are known to be bad, meaning that they're
composed of a lot of trans-fatty acids, or they're highly
unsaturated.
Protein
Protein is pretty much protein, but what you need to look for
is what comes with it. Lean meat will have little additional,
but corn-fed beef will have a lot of fat. Bacon has both fat
and salt. Beef jerky usually has salt. Nuts have fat and
sometimes salt. You get the idea.
Alcohol
I like alcohol, so it's part of my diet. I don't drink too much,
and I sort of count it as some not-so-good carbohydrates.
Salt
Don't eat too much. Read labels, since salt tastes good, it's
often a surprisingly large part of manufactured foods.
Fiber
If you eat a lot of the low glycemic veggies, you'll probably get
a lot of fiber. But if you want to be sure, fiber additives are
available, and eating a bit of that certainly can't hurt.
Dairy products and eggs
The caveman didn't have dairy products, but other than the lactose
(which is a sugar) in the milk, it's not bad for you and it does
provide pretty good protein and fat. A lot of cheeses get rid of
the lactose entirely, so they form a big part of my diet.
Vitamins and minerals
If you eat a wide enough variety of foods, you'll probably get
the vitamins you need. But it certainly won't hurt to add a
multivitamin each day. And if you're a devotee of Linus
Pauling, eat lots of vitamin C. In most cases, extra vitamins
that you eat will just be washed through your system, but if
you do decide to take mega-doses of some vitamin, check the
literature to see if there are adverse effects to that particular
one. You can overdo it with vitamin A, for example.
Coffee and stuff
I like coffee, so it's part of my diet. Again, I don't drink
10 cups per day. Just a cappuccino in the morning and one in
the afternoon. It affects different people in different ways,
so it might be worth running experiments where you avoid it for
a couple of weeks and see what happens to you. I tried that
and didn't feel much better, and I like the taste, so I drink
coffee.
Return to Main Cave Man Diet page.