Is paleo SANE?

Jay: Jonathan, as you know CrossFit seems to be popping up everywhere. There are boxes opening up, it’s in the news, [indiscernible 00:09] CrossFit, most of the people that go to CrossFit become big fans of the Paleo diet. You and I talked about this a little bit before. There are a lot of similarities between Paleo diet as well as Smarter Science of Slim, but I want to just kind of make sure the distinctions are understood because I am going to be starting actually on a six-week Paleo challenge with our CrossFit box, but I don’t want to go off the reservation for what I am doing with the Smarter Science of Slim because the reason I tapped into it is because it is really for the rest of my life. It’s the way that I want to live. So, it’s almost like a training program that I can have in the interim.

I don’t have a problem with doing sometimes tricky things up little bit, but I like some advice to make sure that I am not doing something that really could screw up my metabolism, maybe it’s the short-term effect that could hurt me in the long run. So, what are your thoughts, advice for any of us that are doing CrossFit that are thinking about using Paleo as part of the program to complement what we may want to be doing for the long-term with Smarter Science of Slim. You know what’s going on, you got the science behind it. Let’s hear what you got to say. Thanks a lot.

Jonathan: Hey Jay, good news. A Paleo/hunter-gatherer/primal diet is absolutely SANE, absolutely. It focuses on the elimination of grains which is a super SANE thing to do, the elimination of sugars which is a super SANE thing to do and the elimination of seed oils, again very, very SANE and we replace those with non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense proteins and whole food natural fats, really doesn’t get more SANE than that and from a high level, looking at nutrition through an evolutionary template is so brilliant.

One of my favorite examples of this logic is calorie counting. We have all been led to believe that we need to manually balance calories. Jay, before the early 1800s, nobody knew what a calorie was, that’s when we started using that term and discovered what a calorie was. So, how did we stay slim and how did we stay free of obesity for the hundreds of thousands of years of human existence before we even knew what a calorie was, let alone counted them. So, clearly the solution isn’t to count calories, we didn’t count calories before and we were slimmer, we were healthier and we don’t need to count calories now to be slimmer and to be healthier.

We simply need to eat more, but smarter and a Paleolithic diet is a super way to do that. It’s extremely SANE and the key thing to keep in mind right is that SANE eating is just a [indiscernible 02:40] criteria we can apply to evaluate the quality of food. So, you could be SANE Paleo or you could even be SANE vegetarian or you could be SANE low carb or SANE South Beach or SANE Zone.

The point is whatever lifestyle works for you, just look at the food and say “Is it satisfying, is it unagressive, is it nutritious, and is it inefficient?” If the answer is yes, eating it will make you happier and healthier and once again Paleo brilliant, I totally support it, it’s extremely SANE.