The diets:
- The Zone Diet
- The Paleo Diet
- The Slow Carb Diet
I've followed all these diets, and they all are good, they all work. If you want to lose fat, and get fit you could quite easily spin the bottle for which one you want to follow and still achieve your goals.
They have their differences though, and what I've come to learn is that these differences will make the difference between sticking to it or not.
The word 'diet' has a poor connotation for what the reality of these diets are. They are how you're supposed to eat, the grain based paradigm that our current eating habits derive from is fatally flawed. Economically in the short run it feeds large populations for low cost, but, now our life expectancies are longer than forty years, we have to take care of the complications that arise from eating 'normal food' and ageing. These complications include obesity, diabetes and cancer.
Let's move onto the diets.
The Zone Diet
The Zone Diet
(affiliate link) was created by Barry Sears. Through his work he determined that the optimum macronutrient ratio is 40% carbs, 30% protein and 30% fat. You can eat what you want but you have to maintain the ratio and portion sizes, which depend on your gender and activity level.
Barry Sears created a unit of food called a block. 9 grams of digestible carbs is 1 block of carbs, the same for 7 grams of protein and 3 grams of fat.
According to the diet I was to be on 18 blocks a day, which I split up over three meals and two snacks. You quickly learn to push your carbs into mostly vegetables and fruit. Rice, bread, pasta and potatoes quickly take up your carb allowance leaving you with a tiny meal. So you can eat healthy or go hungry.
The big thing about the Zone Diet is to find out how much of a certain food you can eat, you have to weigh it. You only really need to be meticulous with this for a week, then you'll have an idea of how much 5 blocks of chicken is, how many almonds are in a block and so on.
This weighing and measuring, at first seems like a logistical nightmare, but the magical thing about it is you learn to evaluate what your eating accurately. It gets you in touch with what you're eating, it takes away guesswork and informs you what you need to eat verses simply what you want to eat.
The next big thing is adding fish oil supplements to the diet. The amount of long chain omega 3 fatty acids in a standard diet are way below what they had been determined to be in palaeolithic times. The health benefits are myriad, including its ability to aid in treatment of heart diseases, high cholesterol, depression, diabetes, inflammation, weight loss and many more.
(Side note: I dislocated my leg the other day at work and was in a fair bit of pain and couldn't walk properly. I took four grams of high strength fish oil every hour for five hours, the next day I was in a lot less pain and range of motion had significantly improved so much so that I was able to do a parachute descent and a full day of soldiering. Flax seed oil is also supposed to be as potent for rapid healing of this type of injury.)
When you buy a fish oil supplement, don't get suckered into buying the Omega 3+6+9 capsules that you can find, they don't contain the important long chain omega 3s. The bottle has to say 'fish oil'.
Next check the amount of EPA and DHA relative to the weight of each capsule. The EPA and DHA are the fatty acids that give you all these health benefits. You can find good high strength fish oil capsules with 70% EPA and DHA in health food shops. You also want to avoid the EPA enhanced capsules which are deficient in DHA. This is the brand I go for.
The Zone Diet is a real commitment, you are getting an education in food. Barry Sear's books have a lot of information and lots of references so you can go as far as you like down the rabbit hole. I recommend this diet if you really want to get a solid understanding of diet, nutrition and really being able to take responsibility for your food choices. This is nutrition bootcamp.
The next two diets have the same scientific background but have been broken down so they are easy to follow.
The Paleo Diet
The Paleo Diet has been around for years...hundreds of thousands of years. It was brought into the mainstream by Robb Wolf in his book The Paleo Solution
(affiliate link). Like the Zone Diet it's based on the diet of our hunter gatherer ancestors before the advent of agriculture.
It's really simple if it had or has a face you can eat it. If it was grown and can be gathered you can eat it.
So that's meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, seeds and nuts. Grasses that came into our diet recently are out such as rice, wheat and other grains. Legumes like peanuts and cashew nuts are out, as are potatoes and diary. And hopefully it goes without saying that all processed food is out. There are compelling reasons why these are omitted from the diet. But it's a long story, and that information is all in the book.
You can eat as much as you want, but it's really difficult to get fat sticking to this diet, unless you make yourself sick eating bags of nuts. Seriously try and make yourself fat on all you can eat chicken and broccoli.
I started this diet after reading the book, at the time I was a bit tubby from being out of the country for about six months and not really making great choices with my meals. The Paleo Diet stripped me of fat, and I was looking more ripped than I had in a long while.
I stayed with this diet strictly for three months, at which point I was seriously craving a giant greasy pizza and a litre of ice cream. This had been building up over a period of two or three weeks, now I have pretty good stores of will power and discipline but sometimes you have to give the body what it wants.
It wasn't until I learned about the next diet that this binge was not just an enjoyable indulgence but actually beneficial physically and psychologically.
The Slow Carb Diet
Tim Ferris introduced this diet in his second book The 4-Hour Body
(affiliate link). The Slow Carb Diet is actually a simplification of the cyclical ketogenic diet. It gives you five simple rules to follow that give you the maximum benefit without being mind boggling.
Tim has removed a massive barrier to adopting a diet, he took all the science and references to peer reviewed papers and condensed it into a few pages that anyone can understand and implement. This is such an important factor, one that the previous two diets don't take into account and that is compliance. The authors and the main audience of those books are already invested and motivated in following their prescriptions, but the greater cross section of people are not interested in weighing food, shopping for supplements and getting their head around all that science. It's off putting to non-nutrition geeks and can prevent people from starting, never mind continuing a diet.
What is even better about this prescription, is that there is advice on how you can make simple changes to improve your current diet so you can ease the transition to a full Slow Carb Diet. Tim recommends just changing your breakfast to having 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. That's such an easy change, especially as most people eat the same breakfast everyday. When you start seeing success from this small change you've built momentum and it's easier to make more changes for the better.
The foods you can eat on this diet are more or less the same as the Paleo Diet but fruit is out and legumes are in. Fruit is out because fructose makes you fat, and legumes are in to help you easily get to your carb requirements without resorting to kilograms of vegetables.
You stay strict with this regime for six days of the week, and on the seventh day you have a binge day where you can eat and drink whatever you want. This provides a hormonal reset and brings your body out of a ketogenic state. And apparently is better for fat loss than plowing through the weeks on a strict low carb diet.
I really like this diet, you can eat well and then the binge days are great fun. You can pick out the most horrendous meals you want and there is no guilt because it's going to be good for you! The attention to the audience, fostering compliance through small wins and keeping it simple is what makes the Slow Carb Diet so powerful.
Epilogue
Essentially all three diets end up in the same ball park but they've taken different routes to get there. Following all three over a period of years has been a real education in nutrition and has changed me and my attitude towards food irrevocably for the better. The Chinese have a long culture of healing and health maintenance through food, preferring dietary intervention over prescribing medicines. Whereas the west prefers to hide symptoms with drugs that may have deleterious side effects later on down the road. Taking control of your diet will have positive effects on every aspect of your life and is one of the most important actions you can take full stop. Knowledge is power!
These days I keep all this knowledge in my bat belt and use it to make good healthy homemade meals and better choices at the supermarket. My diet isn't strictly any of the above but more an amalgamation of all three. The reason for this is it's easier, that's it! If you make it easy for yourself, continuing isn't an issue.
There's always more to learn about food, one thread that particularly excites me is that countries with above average health and life expectancies eat a lot of fermented food. For example miso and natto are both popular fermented foods in Japan, where life expectancy is highest in the world. I've just scratched the surface with this topic by making my own yoghurt and trying out some new foods, and it's fascinating!
It's already introduced me to new flavours like a beautiful fermented miso paste that is still live, unlike the powders you can buy, and tastes amazing in any soup. Also I've gained a new appreciation for homemade foods, my homemade yoghurt isn't as smooth and creamy as Yeo Valley Yoghurt and sometimes it has a few lumps and other imperfections. But they don't affect the taste which is a much more vibrant and fresh product than what you can buy from a shop.
Nutrition is a subject you can constantly iterate through, learning more and living better. Eating healthily isn't difficult to do, in a physical sense. The main barriers are psychological, we were all brought up eating from the food pyramid, through repetition our food choices became habit as pervasive as any habit. Our cultures have a huge say on what is acceptable to eat and what is repulsive. Chickens feet are popular in China but a rare steak is considered disgusting.
I know some people will really struggle with getting over the psychological barriers that are involved in diet change, it requires reprogramming and a new fresh perspective on diet. I don't know of any magic bullets that can do this for you, the only thing I can recommend is knowledge. Finding interesting discussion on food that challenges the internal status quo you hold on food is the first step to trying something new and seeing where that takes you.
This post is nearly ten years of obsession condensed to just the main bullet points, I hope it will encourage you to learn more and take positive steps with your own food choices.
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