Stuff White People Like needs a new entry on its illustrious blog: Going Primal. Yes, the wave of the future is going back… all the way to the Paleolithic. Trendy white status whores have jumped on the Primal bandwagon, as evidence mounts that our pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer lifestyle was healthier for us. In a complete reversal of SWPL values, vegetarianism is out and meat-eating is in. Chuck Taylors are out and barefoot running is in. Sex with condoms is out and raw dogging is in. (Ok, I made up that last one. Someday the world will catch up to me.)
For the past four months I’ve been on the primal diet — low on grain carbs, high on meat, fat, and evolutionary harmony. I will now tell you my results on this diet.
First, the main changes I made:
I stopped eating bread, french fries, baked potatoes, pasta, donuts, pastries, cereal (mostly), cakes, and pretty much anything else wheat- or potato-based. Rice consumption was limited.
I radically cut back on my sugar consumption. This was more difficult than it sounds, because the Standard American Diet is full of sugar, usually in the form of high fructose corn syrup. If you don’t believe me, try walking down the cereal aisle at Safeway and finding a box of cereal that doesn’t have sugar or HFCS as one of the first three ingredients. Sugar, if you’ve been living in a closet the past five years, is incredibly bad for you in anything more than the quantities you would find in a single fruit. It spikes your insulin and causes your body to store calories as fat. It ages you. It enervates you. There’s no upside to sugar.
I started eating bigger lunches and smaller dinners. In fact, I skipped dinner entirely a couple days each week.
I intermittently fasted, sort of. A day every other week I would barely eat anything.
I started eating more nuts and more fish in the low mercury, fisheries friendly form of sardines and wild salmon. I actually like sardines so this was not a challenge for me. A big problem with the modern diet is that our omega 6-omega 3 ratio is completely out of whack. Fish, flax, and nuts are high in omega 3s and eating them restores the balance.
I drank a glass of red wine and ate a small square of 90% dark chocolate every day.
I substituted the bread I used to eat with more veggies. Broc, brussel sprouts, red pepper, eggplant, squash, cauliflower, grape tomatoes, leek, cucumber, asparagus.
Berries were in, big time. Frozen blueberries are best. They eat like candy.
Since I was still unsure of the health merits of the primal diet’s high fat recommendations, I didn’t go crazy with the bacon, beef, or butter. I didn’t want my LDL cholesterol to go through the roof. I did add more Irish Gold butter and saturated fat to my diet, but I generally tried to eat fish and nuts for the bulk of my fat calories. Vegetable oil was out (way out) and extra virgin olive oil was in (way in).
Dairy was tricky. The primal guidelines are circumspect on the health of dairy, but since I am of the heritage that evolved centrally located to the spread of the lactase persistence gene, I figured milk, butter, yogurt, and cheese (glorious smelly cheese!) would do me no harm. I continued indulging.
Beer: Though beer is grain-based I couldn’t give it up. Sacrifice beer for immortality? Tough call.
A sample breakfast:
Two hard boiled eggs and watered down grape juice. A lump of cheese.
A sample lunch:
Salmon fillet, veggie, brown rice.
A sample dinner:
Sardines, cucumber drizzled with olive oil and garlic, cheese on sliced tomato, glass of red wine, handful of walnuts, dark chocolate.
I also supplemented with a variety of OTC (and some not-so-OTC) life extending drugs that I call my arsenal of immortality.
Some other changes I made while following the primal diet/lifestyle:
Wind sprints in place of long distance running (with my Vibram Fivefingers, the lady catchers!).
20 minutes of afternoon sun. On cloudy days I popped a few vitamin D + K2 pills.
Circuit training. There are a bunch of exercise stations in the park down from where I live where I go to do chin-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups. I can crank out twice as many pull-ups when a cute girl walks by.
My results on the primal diet:
I’m more constipated. My poops are harder and darker, like Chic Noir’s lovers (you go girl!). Luckily, the stool is small and pellet-shaped, so evacuating is not a painful process. On the toilet I feel like a rabbit with a rectal machine gun. Rat-a-tat-tat!
I fart and burp less. I consider this an unwelcome development.
My skin is smoother and more flushed. There is more oil in my facial skin, but fewer blemishes.
My libido is up. Morning wood is a regular occurrence, as are sex dreams involving two or more women. My juice is thick and milky. My erections pierce the heavens.
When I cut myself on the hand, I noticed the wound healed faster than my cuts used to before going primal.
My hair is darker, and in the biggest surprise my few gray hairs appear to have reversed color. My hair also grows faster, and my pubes are a dense canopy of velcro. Rock on, hippie.
My hand temperature fluctuates wildly. Weird, but maybe it’s related to the changing season?
I sleep better (more REM dreaming) but I can’t say I have more energy. Energy level change: Inconclusive.
My mood is, I think, worse. I dunno, but whole wheat bread and pasta seems to pick me up.
No change to my game.
In a couple of months I will have blood work done. I’ll let you know if the primal diet has significantly altered my lipid profile.
The final verdict: Jury is out. Theoretically, the primal diet, based as it is on mimicking how humans used to eat for millions of years before grain agriculture rotted their teeth out, has a lot going for it. The thinking goes that our digestive system has not evolved as much or as quickly as, for example, our skin color or brains have, so the best living is the lifestyle that closely matches what we ate for most of our evolutionary history. But there are arguments against a one-size-fits-all primal diet, as succinctly relayed to me by Randall Parker:
Okay, we’ve evolved a number of adaptations to dietary changes. For example, upregulation of lactase into adulthood. Very important for the spread of humans in some (though not all) parts of the world. Similarly, Mediterranean peoples are much better adapted to alcohol than northern Europeans. Northern Europeans are better adapted to alcohol than East Asians with their facial flush reaction to alcohol.
Grains: Obviously populations that adopted grain farming experienced local selective pressures that other populations didn’t experience. Hunter-gatherer types are going to have different allele frequencies for digestion and metabolism than, say, populations that were already doing grain farming a few thousand years ago.
I am confident that some people have genes that make the paleo diet more beneficial to them. Ditto for other diets for other people. We aren’t all at equal genetic risk of adult onset diabetes or obesity. This is due to local selective pressures. e.g. eskimo genes must be different due to their high meat and high fat diets. Ditto genes in people living in areas with lots of fruits.
Some people really do benefit from eating like an ape man. I think absent genetic tests we’ve got to each try diets and see what works for us. Parenthetically, Steve [Sailer] sees it the same way:
What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie? asks an important article in the NYT Magazine. For decades, the medical profession has been trying to stomp out heretics like Dr. Atkins who question the orthodoxy that the only way to control your weight is to eat a lot of carbohydrates and very little fat. I tried the low-fat plan and gained 40 pounds because I was hungry all the time. I shifted to a less extreme version of Atkins’s diet (to be honest, it was Suzanne Somers’ anti-starch and anti-sugar version, which emphasizes vegetables as well as meat) and lost it all in an easy year. (Over the last three years, I’ve gained half of it back because it’s hard to stay on it when you are away from home, although the market is starting too supply more prepared foods appropriate for this diet.)
Here’s my theory on why doctors got obsessed with high-carb diets. Around 1970, they started seeing a lot of East Asians in the medical profession. They were mostly all skinny. How did they do it? They ate rice! If starch is good for East Asians, it must be good for everybody else, right? If you don’t believe that, then you must be some kind of racist who thinks there are biological differences between people from different parts of the world, you scum.
So, it was high-carb East Asian diets for everybody! But what if your ancestors hadn’t been evolving for the last few hundred generations on a high starch diet? What if you still had caveman genes for processing foods? Hunter-gatherers eat meat and vegetables. Perhaps, the East Asian ability to thrive on rice was a recent evolutionary adaptation.
We know that different metabolic responses to diet can evolve quickly. For example, milking domestic animals was only invented about 10,000 years ago, but the gene mutation giving lactose tolerance spread to up to 97% of Danes, while remaining virtually zero among East Asians, whose population was too dense to afford dairy cows. We know that hunter-gatherers like Eskimos have a terrible time when they switch from an all meat to a starch and sugar rich diet – they get horrible tooth decay and diabetes (not to mention alcoholism).
Europeans over the last 10,000 years have varied greatly in diet. About one fifth of European genes come from Middle Eastern grain farmers, while four fifths come from indigenous hunter-gatherers, many of whom made the transition over the last few thousand years to cow and pig farmers. Thus, whites in America tend to be highly diverse in terms of what diets are best for them. All you can do is try different diets to find what your body needs.
At this point I’m keeping an open mind and an eye on the latest research. Nevertheless, I predict that “going primal” will be the newest SWPL fad of the next ten years. At parties, pretentious SWPLs will ask “Is your beef grass fed?” instead of “Is your veggie burger low salt?” Anyone caught eating a burger in a bun will be quickly and mercilessly ostracized.
What?
does this also mean that scores of anemic, wann SWPL’s with bad posture and bored disaffected looks will slowly return to the world of the living?
will weight training and wind sprints replace yoga and long distance running?
what’s going to happen to the skinny jean industry?
Hahahahahahaha
Hope no one tells Jeremy Rifkin about this.
damn border jumpers!! gonna have to build another fence
If I walk into a
“Pottery Barn Kids”
does my soul
go to
hell?
Roissy,
You should get out “Eat Stop Eat” re: intermittent fasting. Also, try doing some real strength training. You look pretty soft in photos.
I’d also drop all supplements save for vitamin D and fish-oil. Waste of money and possibly harmful.
I think Sisson’s “The Primal Blueprint” has a lot to recommend to it. Since I’ve bought the book, cut out sugars, cut carbs way down, and generally followed the “Primal” plan my energy level has risen, I sleep better, and I feel better generally. Weight hasn’t decreased that much (didn’t drink a lot of carbination to begin with, which is some of it) but I’m going to stay within the guidelines. (And it’s not a “strict” plan, which I appreciate.)
Fad or no, the evolutionary arguments make a lot of sense.
Oh, and Dave From Hawaii has some related thoughts here.
http://hawaiianlibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/11/sickle-hammer-diet.html
at a really primal level…….nothing more boring than someone’s new diet of the year.
The hair, body temperature, and sleep may be more affected by the weather than diet.
I’ve seen many studies linking sleeping patterns to seasonal weather.
I’ve never read any studies on seasonal changes in hair but it obviously happens to other mammals.
A quick internet search points to evidence that androgen-dependent hair (the kind that can go bald) grows faster in the summer than winter.
Everyone should read Ayn Rand’s “Return of the Primitive.” Of course it’s good to have a healthy diet, but it seems “primal” is a higher priority than “healthy” to some people. I think this has to do with neo-Luddites saying that technology is bad for society and that we were all better off in “simpler times.” Didn’t the people of primal times die in their 30s? Life was “nasty, brutish and short” to quote Hobbes.
Rand also predicted the left’s obsession with soy in “Atlas Shrugged,” a book published in 1957.
Typical Clalifornia diet, hence the high concentration of “beautiful people” out here in comparison to other parts of the country, such as the Midwest and the South, where the typical fare is stuff like deep fried lard custard with chocolate syrup gravy and uncoincidentally serve as breeding grounds for the aesthetically chalenged.
Roissy,
This is an admirable synopsis of the cost/benefit ratio and unanswered questions of the paleo diet.
I’ve been eating this way – not very strictly – for several years now, and my experiences largely reflect yours. Here are my most salient recommendations and observations:
1. Carbs, even grains, aren’t as bad as sweet carbs specifically. If it’s sweet, and it’s not fruit, honey, or fruit juice, I don’t consume it. Therefore, I don’t consume artificially sweetened stuff. Some of the most salient revelations of low-carbing are not only the addictiveness of sweets, and the ubiquity of sugar, as you mention, but the ubiquity of all things sweet. Big Ag, I believe, makes sure virtually everything that can be sweetened is sweetened, “naturally” or not, in order to keep us addicted. Also,I believe, but cannot prove, that sweet flavor is an effeminizing property on its own.
2. Constipation, on such a diet, can be caused by some combination of caffeine dependency, eating excessively large meals (regardless of content, but especially those heavy in meat) and dairy. Try eliminating one or more of those factors.
3. While dairy is less problematic for Old World-descended people, it’s a wholly unnecessary food source, and fairly easily deleted from your diet. Given that it’s oft-cited as a contributor to indigestion, irregularity, the risks of consuming it may for you outweigh the benefits.
We know that different metabolic responses to diet can evolve quickly. For example, milking domestic animals was only invented about 10,000 years ago, but the gene mutation giving lactose tolerance spread to up to 97% of Danes, while remaining virtually zero among East Asians, whose population was too dense to afford dairy cows. We know that hunter-gatherers like Eskimos have a terrible time when they switch from an all meat to a starch and sugar rich diet – they get horrible tooth decay and diabetes (not to mention alcoholism).
So…
What happens to those mixed breed people (hapas)?
I’m half white (scandinavian) half japanese… i’m fucked, arent i?
Two years now on paleo, (age 53), I could have written this blog entry, as it mirrors my experience to a tee.
The rabbit pellet turds lasted a while, but digestion returned to normal after a few months.
I lost my fear of sat fat; yes my LDL is way up, but so what? So is HDL up, and triglycerides are down.
No more acne, no more heartburn, no more weight problems.
GK
I guess dreamfields pasta would work for you since its carbs are protected from digestion.
Grey hairs can’t reverse color.
It’s awesome, having a genetic disposition to handle alcohol better than other peoples!
How does it feel though, doing what you can stop mankind’s evolutionary decline into effete urban hipster d-bags?
sparks 123:
Didn’t the people of primal times die in their 30s?
Many paleo advocates will argue that the short average life span of hunter-gatherers is skewed downward by the high rate of mortality among toddlers, and those younger, due to environmental factors like predators, parasites, and exposure. Numerous studies show plenty of these people living into their seventies, unburdened by diseases of civilization like tooth decay, diabetes, and hypertension.
“Chuck Taylors are out and barefoot running is in.”
Chuck Taylors, being flat-soled, are a progressive choice toward barefootedness when doing the power lifts. If etiquette and hygiene mandate a shoe choice, you could do worse.
i go to nike town
i tell em “wipe me down”
Bitch. That’s a 2000 calorie diet. Get yourself some slabs of steak.
[…] a big fan of Roissy in DC — who isn’t? — but someone should tell him that he’s got the alpha-beta stuff all […]
FWIW, I see significant weight loss on a paleo-style diet. Lots of eggs, beef, chicken, fish, green veggies and I’ll drop pounds (and more importantly, waist-size) quickly. My ancestry is all european, which may add to the effectiveness.
Sticking with a paleo/primal diet is truly a challenge though, since advertisers and media incessantly beat the drum of processed carb-laden crap. Billboards, bus ads, commercials, fast food places, it’s everywhere. Willpower is a must for this diet, as giving into the poor food choices will cause you to backslide quickly.
The benefits are many, and as one of the main promoters of paleo/primal nobody binges on steak and eggs.
The diet advice I’ve heard is to eat fruits and vegetables when they’re in season; grains and meat more in the winter, less during the rest of the year. Basic as that.
The SWPL types will never go really primal, because it involves too much meat, and vegetarianism is too important to them. (Even the ones who aren’t vegetarian admire those who are.) Our ancestors didn’t get the bulk of their energy from nuts any more than they got it from grains; they got it from killing whatever moved.
More saturated fat may raise your LDL a little, but it will raise your HDL and lower your triglycerides a lot more, and the HDL/LDL and HDL/tri ratio are the important numbers. I get 60-70% of my calories from fat–most of that from meat, eggs, and cheese–and my lipid numbers are excellent.
Extra fat will also help with constipation. Since you’re not getting lots of fiber anymore (and we’re starting to learn fiber may not be so hot), you need to grease the chute, so to speak.
On mood, the thing I notice is that my mood is level. Carbs stimulate extra production of dopamine and other “happy” chemicals, so without a lot of carbs, you don’t get the same ups and downs. Sometimes I miss the highs, but I can’t say I miss the lows that inevitably followed them.
Roissy – “My mood is, I think, worse. I dunno, but whole wheat bread and pasta seems to pick me up.”
I lose a lot of weight on low carb diets, but my natural tendency towards depression makes me miserable after a couple of weeks. Its different from hunger, just a pure negativity. I’m not sure its the lack of carbs or the weight loss.
I have more success in a low calorie diet where I just ration my calories and get some moderate exercise. I like English Muffins and Oatmeal.
The three most boring things in the world people talk about:
1) Their feelings
2) The kinds of food they eat
3) The kinds of exercise they do
The Specimen
Typical Clalifornia diet, hence the high concentration of “beautiful people” out here in comparison to other parts of the country, such as the Midwest and the South, where the typical fare is stuff like deep fried lard custard with chocolate syrup gravy and uncoincidentally serve as breeding grounds for the aesthetically chalenged
Damn right. Never see fat people in the stands at the Dodgers. Or, when the Angels lost to the Yankees. Even the Lakers stands are only full of hotbodies.
Unless you actually meant
“Claliflornlia”
cuz I never heard
of that place.
Glad you had the pack of Marlboro’s in your supplements.
Cigarettes are the corner stone to physical, mental, spiritual and social health.
That is something the surgeon general has never understood.
– MPM
“Typical Clalifornia diet, hence the high concentration of “beautiful people” out here”
California is full of fat f#cks, same as everywhere else.
They just get more snotty than most when you spark up a smoke.
Or as Firepower said:
“Unless you actually meant
“Claliflornlia”
cuz I never heard
of that place.” either.
– MPM
interesting.
I’m glad to see our malevolent host
has capitulated to embrace his
dietary, SWPL roots
– good to see he’s laying off the
Marlboro Reds
in lieu of a healthier alternative
it’s nice
keeping him around longer
when Virginia Slim time
rolls around
[ala the DC milieu]
David A will sport
morning dew
so, uh, what about weight variance? Gains? Losses?
Going low-carb makes me cranky. I guess that’s why so many people jump to bacon when they try low carb because bacon makes people happy.
You need to eat more, and get to a real gym for some low rep lifting. Nothing wrong with the foods in a paleo diet, but you don’t need to reproduce their fast/famine eating schedule too. And there’s nothing wrong with saturated fat. Do you think cavemen trimmed the fat off of their sabre-tooth tiger steaks?
You should be having at least a fist-sized amount of meat with every meal, and you should be eating 5 or 6x per day.
BB just eats her young.
Typical Clalifornia diet, hence the high concentration of “beautiful people” out here
Rule Number 1 of Generalizations About California:
When people talk about Californians, they are talking about white Californians. You’re not supposed to notice all the short fat brown people, or the ghetto blacks.
I grew up in LA, and LA can’t touch NYC’s women. Middle-upper class ones that is.
Great picture with the Marlboro lights and the wine bottle!
Basil Ransom
When people talk about Californians, they are talking about white Californians. You’re not supposed to notice all the short fat brown people, or the ghetto blacks.
dude. fuck them
they just pay
the taxes
Roissy wrote:
“My results on the primal diet:
I’m more constipated. My poops are harder and darker, ……….Luckily, the stool is small and pellet-shaped, so evacuating is not a painful process”
“My hair is darker”
————————————————————————
That has been my experience the past few months also.
Ive had to go paleo by default ( I developed gluten intolerance; so pizza, bread, pasta and beer are no-no’s for me now as they literally will make me quite sick if I eat them) .
————————————————————————-
I have taken some supplementation tips from various bloggers I whose nutritional advice I respect. Im trying N-Acetyl-Cysteine, Resveratrol, Arginine, fish oil, and Curcumin for now*. Ive taken some milk thistle also, because it ups glutithioine levels in the liver.
Im considering “experimenting” with rapamycin or metaformin (because Im pretty sure I know a place that I might be able to get my grubby hands on them w/out a prescript), but wouldn’t advise anyone else to do so. They have been shown to dramatically increase the lifespan of labratory animals—-as has resveratrol.
Welcome.
But I’m surprised you say your mood is negatively affected. While carbs can pick you up and elevate your mood, I always notice a crash afterwards such that I’m worse off than before. So, dropping the carbs leaves me feeling steadier, less up and down, and, therefore, a lot happier overall.
After a while though, I confess to missing the rush from a heavy dose of carbs. To address this, I recommend a scheduled cheat meal. Read that again: a “SCHEDULED” meal–and not a haphazard binge that happens to strike you in the donut aisle.
Roissy, Drinking a gallon of water a day will help the constipation. Cutting way back on the carbs “dries” you out and dehydration can be an issue.
“Similarly, Mediterranean peoples are much better adapted to alcohol than northern Europeans.”
Ahh. That explains why Russians and Poles can’t hold their liquor.
Well I am even into foraging so the rest of the world has a long way to go. I eat things in the park where people look at me funny. I condemned sugar a very long time ago. I read “Eat to Win -Dr Robert Haas” and became very lean. He was for complex carbs but not simple. Too bad it ended my G. I. Joe happy childhood and I started attracting nut job women when I had no idea how it worked.
The california thing is BS. The FUPAs run free and wild here, just like the rest of the country. Car centric culture, less walking places, lots of “healthy” trendy stuff like jamba juice, starbucks, and low-fat everything.
End result: fat bitches all over, with a high %FUPA. Women who look like melons walking on popsicle sticks. No good. You do see the occasional morbidly obese guy, but it seems like most of the people rolling “Grimace” style are women.
This is basically the Atkins diet that dates from the late 60s / early 70s. It might be trendy and called “primal” today, but in essence it’s exactly the same as Atkins, South Beach, etc.
One note on the NYT piece apparently referenced by Sailer: it came out in 2002 and was an endorsement of Atkins and a very strong criticism of the AMA’s resistence to it. Here’s the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/07FAT.html
The article pretty clearly states that it was the AMA’s concern/obsession with heart disease that led to its strong recommendations on low fat/high carb. Not their envy of thin Asian doctors. That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read. It shows the danger of letting crypto-racist HBD thinking take up too much space in your head: it crowds out facts and other ideas and becomes a lens through which you see everything in the world.
I try to stick to this diet but have trouble doing it consistently. It’s actually hard, and expensive, to eat like this all the time.
@GMan- do you remember the joke from the future in “Sleeper” ? The doctor says, “It’s tobacco! It’s the best possible thing for your body!!”
@ Anonymous
Oh Yeah. Add American Indians too. Sugar and alcohol messed them up real nice. They hit back with tobacco.
@Dues Ex Machina
Yes. I think glycogen is stored with 3 parts water.
Eat fruits and raw vegetables any time you can, and, if you can afford it, eat organic cereals, snacks, etc…
90% dark chocolate
A self permitted indulgence exception, or some claimed health benefit?
BTW—-COMPLEX carbs lead to a slower release of energy throughout the day.
Eat an apple in the morning or at lunch, and you will have energy throughout the day and not merely a half-hour sugar rush.
One other tip: drinking tea (regular tea, not green tea), has been shown to suppress cortisol levels and help with stress, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/media/library/, and also increase testosterone levels in male rats
Doug 1,
There is some resveratrol in dark chocolate. Its also higher in anti-oxidants than other forms of chocolate.
Hard alcohol has a lot fewer carbs than beer. Less calories per buzz, unless you drink it with a sugary mixer. Whiskey, single malt Scotch or dirty martinis.
Beer is a real gut expander especially starting in your 30s or mid 30s.
Four months is not logn enough…as far as energy boost goes. You are on the right track, and when you body gets “used” to this primal diet then your energy levels will start to rise.
To aid constipation, more leafy greens, and / or psyllium husk powder.
Grains and anything white are responsible for the skyrocketing obesity levels in the western world (and even sub-continent / asia). Basically anything “white” (and therefore highly refined) should be done away with.
Having said all this, a “cheat” day every week or two is no problem.
One of the pre-eminent authors on low-carb diets is Lyle McDonald. http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/
He knows his stuff.
I’ve been following his UD2 (Ultimate Diet 2) for the past four months, and have totally transformed my body. Lots of hard work in the weight room too of course.
I too still manaage a few beers, and, uh, the odd cigarette. Still have to “live it up” sometimes, or you’ll go nuts.
in before p90x new years resolution
Did anyone notice that the Williams Sonoma Home logo looks like the Nazi Eagle holding the swastika?
Wow. This might be your best. Post. Ever.
Seriously dude, the vitriol towards my gender is easier to take when interspersed with N.N. ( Nutritional Nuggets) such as these.
but I digress,
I will have to try this diet, to see if it is as effective for a female.
Thanks, as always, for making my day just a bit more interesting 🙂
California is full of fat f#cks, same as everywhere else.
They just get more snotty than most when you spark up a smoke.
The vast majority of the fat people in Cali reside in places where nobody wants to live.. Places with abundant trailer parks and meth labs such as Tracy, Modesto, Fresno, Bakersfield. Indeed people out here are a bunch of nazi’s when it comes to smoking (tobacco), but pot is de facto legal, and good shit is readily available at bargain basement prices, so that makes up for it.
Fore more fiber in the diet, get some Ground Flax Seed (nature’s bounty makes a great one) it comes in a big can you keep in the fridge. Take a spoonful with the big meal of the day.
I also like quinoa, you can get a 10 lb bag at Costco.
For a great fish oil that tastes great, get Carlson’s Liquid lemon fish oil. Tastes good (not like fish.)
Another good food is chia seeds. Take a spoonful with lots of water.
Those bottles of diet substitutes and Marlboro Light look lethal without beer.
All diets work to a point and none of them are magic. The best diet is one on can stick with.
And it is fun reading low carb forums and seeing the zealots at work. Thermodynamics be damned… It’s Magic!!!
i love smoking. too much. a reminder to those in (around) dc, virginia goes non smoking a week from today.
Well, Dues Ex Machina, y’all just tell them lardarses lining up at McDonalds each day, that “hey – all diets work, so you just keep right on eating your three square MacMeals a day”……
Zunder’s just mad because Mickey D’s bought his sex toy bessie and made her into a quarter pounder with cheese.
Zunder preferred when he was pounding her.
Roissy – I take it you were in shape before you started the whole kit. I cut 40 pounds of fat off my frame eating very similar to your diet. I’m 6’0″ and started off at 220 pounds, with a goal of getting to 195. Six months later I’ve passed the 180 pound mark, and relapses to 185 seem heavy.
Jimmy John’s unwiches are a life saver (they also sell pickles) as fast food can be tough, though you can always get a monster burger at Hardees and chuck the buns.
Get your Iron levels checked as well. I have been following something similar, but I am not so strict on the carbs. I totally avoid sugar, but do eat whole grain carbs.
My most recent blood test indicated a higher than recommended Iron level. Fish, nuts, red meat are all high in Iron content.
High Iron levels can be dangerous, and is thought to be one of the major contributors to increased cancer. The cancer cells grow and feed off the iron in your body.
When people talk about Californians, they are talking about white Californians. You’re not supposed to notice all the short fat brown people, or the ghetto blacks.
I grew up in LA, and LA can’t touch NYC’s women. Middle-upper class ones that is.
From your comment I’d guess that you’re really from somewhere in the valley, northern OC, or some other 2nd rate suburb where residents try to pass themselves off as authentic angelinos.
Being from So Cal, I think you’d agree that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else in the country where people are more image conscious. Chicks out here get nose jobs like they’re going to the dentist, and using steroids for cosmetic purposes is also pretty widespread.
And by beautiful people I’m talking about the multiracial people who’s ethnicity you can never put your finger on. The exotic looking white/mexicans, black/armenians, fijian/persians a la Jessica Alba. I don’t think Cali has more 9′s and 10′s, but I do think that a 5 out here would be a 6.5-7.0 most other places (exceptions for NYC and Miami).
Chi-town
Well I am even into foraging so the rest of the world has a long way to go. I eat things in the park where people look at me funny.
If they want to make fun of you
for crawling around on the lawn
rooting for roots and tubers –
the hell with them
You just keep on being ‘you.’
There is nothing “primal” about this diet because the original primal diet was raw meat, from a long-gone time period, in a totally different world. Essentially the moment you cook your meat at all, you have cooked out the good…..and poisoned the rest anyhow.
The dairy thing? Bad. Unless you are milking that cow yourself, you’re pumping yourself full of weird hormones that aren’t good in excess.
Eventually this sort of diet (if you get all extreme) will lead to signs of low-energy and mental fatigue.
That’s some High-Rise shit right there.
Firepower
dude
you
kill me
Dairy is a major cause of acne, as are insulin spikes caused by processed sugars (HFCS).
As previously mentioned, studies were undertaken in both Papua New Guinea and Eastern Paraguay with results indicating that the participants, who partake of a diet consisting of unprocessed, low-fat foods, have a complete lack of acne.
Other studies seem to conclusively prove the same facts. In South Africa, a study was conducted to determine the incidence of acne among the adolescents within the region. The results of the study indicated that the incidence of acne among the participants of the study was only 16%. This percentage is much lower than the incidence of acne among American teenagers, which ranges from 79% to 95%. Surprisingly, the incidence of acne among Bantu teens is also lower than the incidence of acne among white teens in Africa, who suffer from acne at a rate of 45%.
the diet is too disciplined leaving little room for correcting systematic errors. in other words, if primal diet is discovered bad, roissy would be in trouble.
Up your fat, fiber and water intake, it helps with the constipation. And grape juice is almost pure glucose. Have a whole fruit with some fiber in it instead.
Fat provides the building blocks of most sex hormones. You wonder what cutting out all the fat does to all those “snackwells” women? Yep. Bye bye libido.
I’ve been eating mostly this way for the past decade. It works.
Besides all the good foods the one thing missing from this recipe was plain old H2O. Something our ancestors drank in abundance since he was sans iced tea, lemonade and Pepsi. Hydration from plain old water can be a major elixir. I suffered from acid reflux for years. Ate Tums, Prilosec and Nexium for snacks. It turned out my problems all stemmed from chronic dehydration. Just upped the water intake on a daily basis and the problem virtually disappeared. Water also has been shown in some studies to be great in fighting bad cholesterol. And the shit is free.
Evolution is not a slow crawling process.
It is more like no change at all for most of the time, then a series of rapid changes in response to radical change in environment. Think of a city where all the buildings remain the same for decades, then an earthquake shakes most of them down. The ones that remain become the models of how to build in the future. That’s the moment of evolution.
Our guts are not the same as all our predecessors. Many before us wouldn’t have been able to thrive on our current diets, and would have died before reproducing (adult milk intolerance amongst Chinese is one small example).
Thinking we have the same digestion as our predecessors, and then feeding on what we imagine our predecessors ate is not high in logic (though admittedly interesting to try).
what ASDF said…
then let’s see you try to adapt this regime to an alpha activity you seem to have neglected- weightlifting.
“I’m more constipated.”
Use line seed.
you should go hook up some ground flax. not the pill kind, but real flax. this will help your turd cutting abilities.
also, i wouldn’t worry about putting some whole gain break in your gut. maybe not in copious amounts but a few slices here or there will prolly do you some good.
it is time i ramp my diet back into gear as well. gl noganooch!
I have started the low-carb diet too. The energy level is a real concern. I get tired quicker than I did when I was eating carbs.
I have been doing the “starting strength” too. Low-carbs doesn’t hurt the weightlifting, only aerobic exercise.
Try some natural sauerkraut, yogurt or other probiotic food to assist in getting your gut in order. Better to use Now Brand vitamin D capsules (in olive oil) rather than the vitamin D and K2 combination in tablet form – much greater absorption.
Also don’t be a primal or paleo pussy – see Richard’s take http://freetheanimal.com/2009/11/paleo-pussies.html
“Since I was still unsure of the health merits of the primal diet’s high fat recommendations, I didn’t go crazy with the bacon, beef, or butter”
Pussy. When I came to your realization, I ate breakfast consisting of bacon and eggs and I started cooking in pure lard. MMMMmmmm….lard.
BTW, extra virgin olive oils sucks. Lard or coconut oil is what you should be using.
Nothing a man can do is more Alpha than maintaining his primal man-ificence by hunting wild (but, or course, organically grown) Arrugula and Cimionopotetl seeds at Whole Foods Market.
Supplementing one’s primal prostate health(r) with oxy-albuminerols through fastidious, alert shopping habits at GNC is a close second.
**My poops are harder and darker, like Chic Noir’s lovers (you go girl!).**
So you’ve been thinking about having something hard and dark up your ass?
(I hate it when closeted white guys try to pick me up.)
<My results on the primal diet I’m more constipated<
Mr Roissy,
In addition to my work as a personal trainer, Im also a Personal Chef. If you want better much better results, please follow.
1. Acquire a taste for raw fish. (yea..Im a sushi chef and woman will do almost anything for Peruvian sashimi served by a personal chef) Sushi is the wonder drug. If you cant handle it then step down to lots of ceviche. Its cooked and it taste great.
2. Drink Ginger tea. Totally underrated.
3. Must have in the fridge: A picture of ACAI juice with fresh squeezed lemon. Just one glass a day will do wonders for you.
4. any other questions, feel free to ask.
Um, gross.
@ Firepower
“If they want to make fun of you
for crawling around on the lawn
rooting for roots and tubers –
the hell with them
You just keep on being ‘you.’”
Some of them look like they could help me find those truffles.
””””’One note on the NYT piece apparently referenced by Sailer: it came out in 2002 and was an endorsement of Atkins and a very strong criticism of the AMA’s resistence to it. Here’s the link:”””””
Just remember what happened to atkins he slipped fell and died lol
”””’kam
i love smoking. too much. a reminder to those in (around) dc, virginia goes non smoking a week from today.
”””””””””’
Like no smoking outside?
Yea roissy buying kids furniture there goes the neighborhood.
… and cigarettes are a natural source of nicotine!
Been back on a high protein/moderate fat/low carb diet with a 4-5 day a week heavy weight training schedule for about 3 months now.
When you change your eating habits it allows you to see the forest for the trees when it comes to what the typical American eats. You HAVE to cook at home to get the right nutritional mix. It takes a lot of planning and effort to eat right. You begin to realize just how heavily the typical diet relies on carbs (especially refined shit).
It’s really no wonder so many people are fat tubs of lard. You could practically snort 1500 calories worth of carbs, but try eating the equivalent amount of fat or especially protein. With whole foods it’s nearly impossible in one sitting. With protein shakes it’s doable, but nowhere near as easy as it is do down a shitload of calories with pasta, bread, and potatoes.
Another thing I noticed is that you really have nooooo idea how much what you eat effects your body until you start eating 5-6 meals a day and then MISS one or two.
I missed my evening meal one night last weekend, then I had to get up at 7am to meet up with my family. Sitting at IHOP at 10:30 in the morning after not having eaten since 8pm the night before I thought I was going to fucking DIE. My head was spinning, my stomach was in knots, I was shaking. I had to steal a sip of my niece’s apple juice to keep from passing out. Within about 60 seconds of my first bite of steak and eggs I felt fine.
There is something wrong with you. I fart more. But that might have to do with the cup of prune juice I drink every morning in response to the rat turd issue.
I surprised raw dogging hasn’t gotten back in (heh). WHO stats clearly show AIDS isn’t a SWPL disease and there is a correlation between unprotected sex and less of the one of the womanly cancers (cervical or mammary?).
A diet of fruit, nuts, and meat is pretty easy to just fall into. Its a bit painful when you are traveling though. OTOH when traveling I find it easy to continue to work out if you develop a set of exercises you do when you roll out of bed every morning.
@str8up
When I started foraging I really got it. When I eat such things find my self grazing a lot because you just can’t stuff yourself. Just getting around seeds slows it all down. A bag of white flour may as well have come from planet X. Even our whole foods have been bred to be sweeter. Our metabolism was not built for this crap. I look at the typical American diet more and more like drug addiction. We sure look like hell.
If you’re more constipated, that probably means you aren’t getting enough fiber, which isn’t good for your health. Taking a fiber supplement would relieve that problem.
I have been following the Pussy Diet for quite some time now. My mood has increased drastically,as i go thru the day with a big smile on my face. People ask me why I am so happy,and I just smile to meself. What am i sposed to say? “I am on the Pussy Diet”???? My program is to eat as much pussy as I can every day. My HDL? My LDL? My triglycerides? Fuck if I know–who craes about all that shit? I am just happy,and happy to follow…the Pussy Diet!!
A hard, rabbit-pellet stool is not ideal. Look up herbalist Dr. Richard Schulze’s writings/lectures on bowel health. Add more water and fish oil to your diet as others have suggested to remedy this.
*big smile @jasper*
darn shame we don’t know what or how to eat in this country. We gotta go pay folks 30 bucks to read a book to tell us how to eat.
smh
Marlboro Lights?
What are you? A woman?
Get some Lucky Strikes and I’ll think about returning your “Man Card”.
> Northern Europeans are better adapted to alcohol than East Asians with their facial flush reaction to alcohol.
Randall’s a great read all the time, but he missed on this one point. The various bad reactions some East Asians have to alcohol are a fitness-enhancing adaptation to alcohol — specifically, causing them not to drink it, and particularly not to drink a whole bunch of it all the time. Which is something that can take the place, partially or completely, of chasing tail, doing work, stuff like that. Alcohol is very common in americans and it would be very fitness-reducing in a pre-1800 (pre-industrial) environment featuring Malthusian competition for survival.
‘Sex with condoms is out and raw dogging is in. (Ok, I made up that last one. Someday the world will catch up to me.)’
yeah, but not before a nasty little STD or seven. as fun as it is, why bother with a healthy diet when completely disregarding sexual safety, that’s just plain fucking stupid
lol, the marlboro lights was a nice touch
I don’t think going paleo will be embraced by SWPLs because:
a) If done well, it involves cooking with animal fats such as lard or tallow.
b) If done well, it involves eating organ meats (offal).
c) Several primal dieters snack on jerky. We all know that jerky is definitely not SWPL.
d) There’s just too much meat involved.
e) Most importantly, the “right kind” of ethnic foods that SWPLs love are all shunned: can’t eat sushi (no rice, although sashimi is ok), can’t eat Indian food, can’t eat Ethiopian food, can’t eat Persian food, etc. The only allowable ethnic food is Brazilian barbecue and that’s not particularly SWPL.
What Mark Sisson from Mark’s daily apple did, with his Primal Blueprint, is making the lifestyle more palatable to SWPLs by focusing away from all the animal fats and organ meat and tolerating some SWPL staples such as wine and cheese. Maybe his version will be embraced by SWPLs.
””””’Jasper
I have been following the Pussy Diet for quite some time now. My mood has increased drastically,as i go thru the day with a big smile on my face. People ask me why I am so happy,and I just smile to meself. What am i sposed to say? “I am on the Pussy Diet”???? My program is to eat as much pussy as I can every day. My HDL? My LDL? My triglycerides? Fuck if I know–who craes about all that shit? I am just happy,and happy to follow…the Pussy Diet!!
””””””””
That is the diet I am switching to soon. Yea only problem is finding the right one with the right balance of nutrients and pure goodness that tastes like heaven. Luckily I have one available just not here. Will have to travel halfway around world for this diet he he he
I wonder if it will rejuvenate me and help me live forever only time will tell.
Roissy, What blood type are you?
I hear that these dietary changes have different effects related to blood type.
I’ve been doing something similar, but I allow indulgences on occasions. A lot of brown rice as well.
Have you started to lift? I can’t imagine this would sustain someone who lifts seriously.
If drastic changes in ones diet really caused a large change in body function it should not be so hard to detect.
Here is a thought: If a large scale, double blinded clinical trial (for efficacy) is done to completion there is nothing to the treatment being tested. The break-thrus in Medicine that have really mattered were not so hard to appreciate and they were not with-held to “control groups” for very long. Retro-virals for HIV, for example, just plainly worked and trials were aborted that required placebo/un-treated cohorts. There are many examples of this.
imho
Sugar, beyond a little is clearly bad. Foods that stress the insulin axis are a burden on your body. Hydrogenated trans-fats suck ass. Saturated natural fats are probably OK for most people but people do vary in this regard. Vit D is apparently a great idea. Other vitamins/supplements just turn your piss orange.
> Thermodynamics be damned… It’s Magic!!!
You dont understand it at all. The claim is that those foods, via hormones whose levels they affect, make you less hungry and/or more active, so that you dont have to struggle to keep your energy intake balanced with your expenditure.
If you had superstrong will power, obviously this would not be necessary. You could balance your energy budget regardless of what hunger or discomfort you might face. But that doesnt happen, that is not what experience shows, at least not for the average westerner.
Anyway, thats the *claim*. I dont believe or disbelieve it, personally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Fingers_shoes.jpg
These things scream “HERB”! Just buy some Nike Frees.
Fascinating post.
I’m on the paleo diet, except with a lot of beer thrown in, and I have never enjoyed food so much or looked better.
Evolution is the key to understanding basically fucking everything.
Primal works not because it is more “in tune” with our paleo selves, but becasue it reduces the intake of items that we, culturally, overeat: Sugar, Bread, Cheese, French Fries and Pasta, Mayo.
If you want to call it paleo, that’s fine, but it’s just a diet that guards against the overindulgences you are offered everyday and thereby reduces calories: Swapping out veggies for fries in Roissy’s example.
r My poops are harder and darker, like Chic Noir’s lovers
ha ha ha!!!!
I knew I knew it I knew it. You’ve been in love with me since my very first comment.
You keep me on your mind. I believe this is your third post where you’ve given me a sly wink. Allow me to exit your dreams and allow Jamila to take my place.
(you go girl!)
so 1995
i’ve been eating paleo (high fat) for the last three years. i’m more cut, have more energy, have no more carb highs and lows, and feel like a healthy smug animal.
trust me, it works.
>>>Chic Noir said: darn shame we don’t know what or how to eat in this country. We gotta go pay folks 30 bucks to read a book to tell us how to eat>>>
Well, when nearly all of the packaged food in the supermarket contains high fructose corn syrup, MSG, aspartame, soy protein isolate, partially hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, etc. etc….
…and you don’t know what any of this is, or what it does to your body…
…and you don’t realize that NONE of this was in our food supply 25 years ago….
…then yeah, you need to be told how to eat.
holy shit… are you (hypo)manic or something right now?
never tried eating the berries straight out frozen though… not bad
your arsenal is suspicious, looks like some friendly fire issues nopunintended
nicotine, acutely, is a cognitive enhancer.
you had to cleanse yourself from economic subterfuge, but whole grains are money
way to hide the creatine label.
Welcome to the club. I’ve been more or less “primal” going on 4 years now.
I lost 35 lbs. within the first 6 months, and have effortlessly kept it off.
Some tips Roissy –
Your constipation is because you’re eating more protein and not enough saturated fat. Eat your bacon and eggs everyday. Fry your eggs in the bacon grease. Don’t soak up the excess grease from your bacon…let it cool down and eat it up. If you haven’t made enough grease from your bacon to fry up your eggs, than add a healthy pat of grade A butter.
Don’t worry about your ldl. In short, eating primal will boost your overall cholesterol levels…because cholesterol is vital for your body to produce all of the hormones and tissue production. This is why people who go Primal experience a surge in testosterone and energy levels…they are eating foods that make it easier for their bodies to produce those hormones that increase your libido.
The key for going primal is that your hdl cholesterol will be a significant portion of your total cholesterol…as the higher hdl ration will more than compensate for your higher ldl level.
As for the dairy – the real problem is the processing that many dairy products go through. Pasteurization, homogenization and fortification…destroys the pro-biotic bacteria in the milk that helps you digest it, and damages the proteins making it even harder to digest. Couple that with the “low-fat” and “non-fat” craze, and you actually rob your body of Vitamin D, A and K because your body has to use it’s stores of those vitamins to process the de-vitalized dairy.
I repeat: your body requires those essential vitamins to be able to process the proteins in the dairy. If you eat low fat or non-fat dairy, you’re DEPLETING your vitamins in your body! Couple that with the fortification of synthetic vitamin D in the milk is a recipe for severe Vitamin D malnourishment.
Look into obtaining raw milk from grass fed dairy cows. Try and buy any and all dairy products that come from grass fed dairy cows…and you can also find a lot of cheeses that are made from cultured milk rather than pasteurized milk – especially imported European gourmet cheeses.
Avoid all non-fat/low-fat yogurt. Only get whole milk, plain yogurt, and eat it with your fruit. The pro-biotics found in Organic, whole milk, unsweetened yogurt will also help your digestion.
I’m in the process of writing an extensive article for the Spearhead covering how and why the entire cholesterol scare is nothing more than a scam to promote people eating all of the grains produced by Big Agricultural Corporations. I hope to have it done and submitted before tomorrow…
Oh, and one more thing – you’ve noticed a lot of changes in your body since you’ve started eating like this – here’s another thing you might notice: unless you go on an absolutely crazy bender where you drink all sorts of beverages in a single night, I’ve noticed that I almost never get hangovers anymore. Whether I drink 8 beers or have 8 drams of whiskey….I can almost always drink to the point of a heavy buzz, and wake up the following morning without a single symptom of a hangover.
I believe if your body has enough vital nutrients and vitamins from your diet, it can certainly handle alcohol poisoning a lot better!
[editor: thanks man this is good advice. i drink 2% milk right now, but i’ll bump up to whole.]
@defcon -Actually, I’ve mentioned the evils of the crap they put into our food. Any American who has traveled outside of this country should notice how different foods that we eat here, taste very different in other parts of the world. It’s not due to seasoning and spices either.
The best thing you and I can do is too use little pre prepared foods. Cook from scratch like Grandma does. It takes a lot longer but the food tastes better and you won’t get a funky after taste from the preservatives, food coloring, fake flavoring etc..
“Nevertheless, I predict that “going primal” will be the newest SWPL fad of the next ten years.”
Will never happen. SWPL’s consider meat eating the sole domain of lunk headed conservatives. And they actually strive to maintain the emaciated, hipster look (anything opposite those evil norms of patriarchal defined gender is good!) by eating veggie burgers and tofu.
crack for PA
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1230422/Supermodel-Erin-OConnor-reveals-pressures-fashion-industry.html
just like a board son.
Just making sure, but SWPL = Stuff White People Like, correct?
Dave from Hawaii,
You are a jewel man. Great stuff. Thanks
I’ve eaten ZC or VLC for a very long time. Nice summary of the paleodiet but you’re obviously too influenced by Cordain and his sticking to the (bogus) lipid hypothesis.
Saturated fat is great for you, as is monounsaturated fat. PUFAs aren’t (as you know) except in very small quantities and balanced about 1:1 omega-6/omega-3.
You shouldn’t have constipation. You need to up your fat intake substantially – between 50-80% by energy.
MY diet consists of fried parakeets.
Very high in megas, and enzymes too.
If you don’t like it, then goddamn it, sneak up on me the next time I’m buying bolts for my ’92.
Don’t be constipated. After you have examined a few hundred colon resections with diverticulosis/diverticulitis, you come to respect that condition. They used to claim that high meat diets were associated with colon cancer, a very common cancer. Maybe they still do.
I find apples are an easy why to avoid constipation.
Avoid any food sold in a package. Such foods contain mainly junk. And, you are paying for the package.
BTW, white people, use your eyes and brains. Most gray hair is directly associated with sun damaged skin. Not a lack of pigment in your skin. Women hide their gray hair. Men are a very good specimen to examine in this regard.
Smoking? You have got to be kidding. Worse thing you can do for you body. Although most doctors argue about diets, almost no doctor smokes cigarettes these days. Wonder why?
BTW, your worse enemies in your fight to eat properly are your family, friends, and coworkers.
the real question is: what kind of diet will allow me to shoot the biggest peter north load, a goddamn frozen rope that could stay the mast of a mid-size schooner?
zinc? cod liver? celery? banana creme muscle milk?
Maurice wrote:
“The article pretty clearly states that it was the AMA’s concern/obsession with heart disease that led to its strong recommendations on low fat/high carb. Not their envy of thin Asian doctors. That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read. It shows the danger of letting crypto-racist HBD thinking take up too much space in your head: it crowds out facts and other ideas and becomes a lens through which you see everything in the world.”
Yeah, Sailer often manages to make assertions that are not founded by any evidence. As someone who lacks a solid scientific background, or even one respected book published (please don’t cite that Obama reader), this is par for the course for someone relatively unaccomplished.
Envy of thin Asian doctors… ROFL. Yeah, that’s a plausible explanation.
Since Sailer is so fat, his recommendations on the topic of nutrition should be ignored.
It doesn’t make sense to just eat a H/G diet while living in a post industrial labor specialized society .. ah, but why listen to reason .. the whole shithouse is going up in smokes soon anyways!
Holy shit, as Dave from Hawaii pointed out, he doesn’t get hangovers any more.
Either do I!
It just dawned on me that the last three or four times I got shitfaced, I woke up fine. Maybe slightly thirsty, but more or less fine.
I’ve been on this paleo diet for about 3 months.
I have a question:
Should I cut down on fruit? I eat loads of it – and that’s a lot of sugar. Supposedly, this doesn’t go very well with a high fat diet.
Although my skin, before doing paleo was awful, full of blemishes, it’s now very much improved though not perfect – I think removing the large quantities of sugar that I currently consume with fruit is the next step.
One more thing – psyllium husks are very good for sorting out the constipation problem.
Cannon’s Canon
the real question is: what kind of diet will allow me to shoot the biggest peter north load
that’s not diet linked… that visual stimulation. Peter North did male on male movies for pay.
Jay – even if you are trying to get “ripped to shreds” like a bodybuilder would then limit fruit, but during a “normal” phase, fruit is fine…but you need to eat it on its own with an empty stomach. This will ensure excellent digestion without that “fruit bloat” and the enzymes in fruit will give your skin a real “glow”.
Contrary to what many people beleive – fruit eaten raw without any of the other food groups will NOT raise triglyceride levels. Wait a half hour after eating fruit, then eat your normal meal/s.
maurice try to stick to this diet but have trouble doing it consistently. It’s actually hard, and expensive, to eat like this all the time.
when you say hard, do you mean hard because of cravings or convenience?
Fully agree, but kiwifruit are a must. High in Vit.C and laxative action, and great taste. Gold (Zespri) are my favourite. 3/day.
Paleo Diet, Evolutionary Fitness, Primal Living, Crossfit, Kettlebells, Sandbag Training, Heavy Rope Training, etc. aren’t the newest acquisitions by SWPL Mono-Culture.
Quite the contrary — They are a direct challenge to the omni-emasculating effects subscription and participation to SWPL Mono-Culture causes.
One could even say that the only goal that adapting these lifestyles to one’s own has is quite literally maximizing Mystery’s three prime life imperatives: Health [Functional & High Testosterone], Wealth [Significant Money Saved in Longterm Health] and Love [Even Roissy Said It — Increased Libido].
Look at Arthur De Vany and Mark Sisson — Primal O.G.s with bodies like Superman’s grandpa.
Nah Jay, you can still get a hangover if you get way out of hand. On Halloween I had about 6 beers, 6 drams of whiskey and than someone pulled out a jug of Sangria. Against my better judegment, I had about 3 big glasses of it.
Needless to say, I was pretty hungover. But other than that night of drunken idiocy, I haven’t had a hangover in probably 2 years.
Oh, and psyllium husks? Garbage. Up the saturated fat consumed and you’ll have no problems.
Look…the whole “fiber” thing is another dietary lie. And in fact, if you look at Roissy’s list of foods he’s been eating, there’s a lot of vegetables and fruits and nuts…all “fibrous.”
“(Broc, brussel sprouts, red pepper, eggplant, squash, cauliflower, grape tomatoes, leek, cucumber, asparagus.)”
Yet he’s still constipated.
It’s because he’s upped the protein but not the fat.
Don’t trim the fat off the meat. Avoid anything that is “lite” or non-fat or low fat. Saute your vegetables in butter. Drown ‘em in butter.
Oh, one more thing – one of the best fats you can eat is extra virgin coconut oil. It’s fully saturated and does not oxidize from relatively high heat exposure, and is one of the few foods rich in lauric acid. You can literally fill up a deep fat fryer with it and re-use it over and over again without it going rancid.
Paleo Diet, Evolutionary Fitness, Primal Living, Crossfit, Kettlebells, Sandbag Training, Heavy Rope Training, etc. aren’t the newest acquisitions by SWPL Mono-Culture.
Quite the contrary — They are a direct challenge to the omni-emasculating effects subscription and participation to SWPL Mono-Culture causes.
One could even say that the only goal that adapting these lifestyles to one’s own has is quite literally maximizing Mystery’s three prime life imperatives: Health [Functional & High Testosterone], Wealth [Significant Money Saved in Longterm Health] and Love [Even Roissy Said It — Increased Libido].
Look at Arthur De Vany and Mark Sisson — Primal O.G.s with bodies like Superman’s grandpa.
My regimen consists of:
1) LEF Mix – 6 capsules daily
2) CoQ10 – 100mg daily
3) Resveratrol – 250mg daily
4) Super (LEF version) Carnosine – 500mg daily
5) Melatonin – 3mg before going to bed
Stuff I plan to take starting next year will be:
1) TMG
2) Acetyl-L-carnitine
3) N-acetyl-cysteine
Also, I have been chelating with ALA (Mercury removal) and will continue this for about another year.
My diet is mostly standard Japanese fare, as my wife is Japanese and we both prefer Japanese food.
I noticed someone here harshing out on soy (tofu) and green tea. I eat and drink copious amounts of both and have done so since first moved to Japan in ’91. Tofu is one of my favorite foods and green tea has a very calming and relaxing effect on me. I think the idea these two have feminization effects is bogus. The link I saw here some months ago purporting this was to some crazy religious right site that made this claim.
I enjoy my beer and nihonshu (sake) as well.
There is a very good forum on supplements on the Immortality Institute website (www.imminst.org). There is lots of good information there.
Ableard…there is a lot more out there regarding the estrogenic effects of tofu (or any unfermented soy).
Try http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/
No religion there.
To Abelard Lindsey –
How about an article on the feminizing health effects of soy from a top line Men’s Issues magazine?
http://www.menshealth.com/cda/article.do?site=MensHealth&channel=nutrition&category=food.for.fitness&conitem=0ad3803313651210VgnVCM10000013281eac____&page=1
Other essential supplements for men: Probiotics, Selenium & Cod Liver Oil
By Grok, never forget the Cod Liver Oil!
Going Paleo is the way to go
once scientists discover
how to avoid that nasty
“croaking by age 40″ characteristic.
“I find apples are an easy why to avoid constipation”
I agree with this. With or without skin, doesn’t matter.
Roissy,
I started doing something similar around the same time as you and I gotta say I love how I feel. I don’t use as many supplements as you, just a multivitamin every day. Fish, Pork, low amounts of Beef, and Chicken with a simple salad and just like you I round out the snacking with fruit, nuts and berries. I have almost completely eliminated bread (as i love peanut butter and jelly) and pasta, as for rice I cant think of the last time I ate it.
I wish I could say that I read something to get me this way but it just came down to breaking up with a girl and realising she was making me fat with her cooking. Once I got away from her it just seemed like common sense to eat this way to me.
Most women I bring over are shocked at, one how good my meals are and two there made by scratch. I cant remember the last meal from a woman that didn’t involve a box; to be honest most women today don’t eat really healthy these days anyway. Just my two cents.
If you want to add more healthy fat to your diet you should include olive oil and take fish oil capsules. Also eating 6 small meals a day is healthier and more “mimicking a caveman diet.”
Great diet though helped me again like 30-40 pounds since I moved to the states. No I am not fat.
Before: 5’11 150 lbs 15-18% BFP. Weak pussy.
Now: 6’2 210 lbs 4-6% BFP. Normal.
Are you trying to argue cigarettes are healthful?!?!
“BTW, your worse enemies in your fight to eat properly are your family, friends, and coworkers.”
The truth.
Roissy’s new diet regime is pretty much what is covered in the great book by Mark Hyman M.D. – Ultrametabolism: The Simple Plan for Automatic Weight Loss
Amazon.com: Ultrametabolism: The Simple Plan for Automatic Weight Loss (9780743272568): Mark M.D. Hyman: Books
Gil….There are women picking Olives in Greece into their nineties that are not seen without a rolled cigarette pursed between their lips.
Smoking’s danger is that it accelerates a pre-existing cancerous condition. If you do not have pre-cancerous blood cells then smoking will not “cause” cancer.
Problem is, with the unbelievably unhealthy western diet, most westerners who have eaten junk half their life DO have pre-cancerous cells floating in their blood – so if they smoke on top of their crap diet, then the smoking will accelerate it into full blown cancer at some stage….unless they die of a heart-attack or stroke first.
Zunder – that sounds spot on. I first heard about eating fruit on an empty stomach in a book called Fit for Life, by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, and though much was incorrect in that book, they seemed to be right about that.
Dave from Hawaii – hmmm… that’s a lot of fat to be taking in. I have faith in the empiricism and dedicated high-quality scholarship of Lorren Cordain, the author of The Paleo Diet, and he maintains that we should trim off the visible fat.
But you could be absolutely right, and I might give it a go soon.
Ultimately, I want to clear my skin us as best as I possibly can. I also have slight issues with sinuses.
Let me just say again:
There is NO convincing evidence that changing the mix of the usual components in our diet (carbohydrates, sugar, fat, protein) will have ANY consistent effect on weight loss. Search PubMed (it’s easy!)
Just eat less. And stop droning on about what kind of f-cking food you eat….”ohmigod, i gave up sugar and now i’m just SO much better…”
@Anonymous,
“They are a direct challenge to the omni-emasculating effects subscription and participation to SWPL Mono-Culture causes ”
Ah the romance of the past …What is the ideal diet for current times .. anything that enhances your ability to not act like a H/G .. except in the arena of short term mating of course where H/G does rule …
@Anton – The mix of macros will affect your fat loss. It’s true that “calories in versus calories out” is god, but if you don’t take in enough protein you’ll lose more lean body mass than you should. You really want to lose fat, not weight.
G Manifesto: “Cigarettes are the corner stone to physical, mental, spiritual and social health.”
I used to smoke ciggies. While all great thinking men require nicotine to concentrate the powers of the mind. But, in my opinion, there are better forms of the stuff. Here are some ideas:
http://www.arthurshall.com/x_2006_tobacco.shtml
I rocked the snuff for a couple of years: it’s the best stuff there is. Unfortunately, my nose don’t agree any more, so now I’m into snus and the occasional pipe.
Also: women shouldn’t use tobacco for all the same reasons they shouldn’t hoover a mile of dick.
“as Dave from Hawaii pointed out, he doesn’t get hangovers any more (on the paleo diet).”
Yep; it’s a side effect of higher growth hormone. When men sleep, a giant pulse of growth hormone is released in REM sleep (women don’t get this). Unless you have a bunch of glucose in your blood. Paleo diets raise GH, unless you pig out on a bunch of fat before you sleep. Higher GH = lower hangovers. Which is why you never got hung over when you were a teenager.
I have to admit, I’m more or less the demographic here. I can also deadlift a Buick, so thinking about diet is kind of necessary. The good thing about the SWPL obsession with useless luxury food like grass fed beef: it makes the regular grain-fed, antibiotic laden, steroid laced beef that much cheaper. Regular ground beef is awesome once you wash the fat off it (and yes, you should mostly wash the fat away). Plus, if you want a steak that tastes like beef, rather than corn grease, now you can get one. Still, as a dietary staple it is completely worthless. If you really want to jack your omega-3′s, you need to eat organ meats: brains, liver, kidneys. That’s how the cavemen did it. Something tells me you’re not going to see yuppies eating healthy peasant food like scrambled eggs and pork brains.
Also, while I’m ranting: crossfit sucks. It makes women look like men, and it makes men look like … SWPL types with a little muscle tone.
Seriously, who thinks/talks/worries about their diet like this? Eat what you want, when you want, as long as it’s in moderation. Easy.
Why all the weird diets these days? Booo, I’d rather die at 45 than worry about everything and live to be 90. You guys are wayyyyy too serious about ……everything.
I doubt more fat will turn Roissy’s dry rabbit droppings into big steamy wet cow turds. I drink lashings of whole milk, do fry-ups in a delightfully tasty greasefest of butter and duck fat, use high-fat coconut milk in everything from jellies to custard pudding … but the stool is still pellet-like.
Also, don’t bet on primal becoming SWPL fashion. The big fad for low-carb (esp. Atkins) happened a few years ago (2003 was it?).
Molecular cuisine, sous vide cooking and so on, now there’s a SWPL trend to look for.
Who knew that in Chateau Roissy edacious treats were also to be found? Truly it is a house of many rooms. But primal eating and game do indeed share an attitude of “evolutionary harmony.” In harmony with man’s evolved nature. If low-carb is primal eats, game is primal sex. And being realistic about human nature is primal politics.
I think the primal diet might be more attractive to men than women: males seem to relish the protein and the fat. Perhaps it is because in primal times man hunted the meat and woman dug for the tuber or picked the berries.
Coupla things.
First, Roissy:
There’s no upside to sugar
While this is mostly true, sugar can be invaluable when taken in moderate quantities directly before a weight workout. Ironically given today’s topic, the value of such “targeted carb” intakes is hugely amplified if the lifter is otherwise on a paleo (low carb) or ketogenic (~0 carb) diet.
Second, Dave:
Don’t worry about your ldl. In short, eating primal will boost your overall cholesterol levels…because cholesterol is vital for your body to produce all of the hormones and tissue production. This is why people who go Primal experience a surge in testosterone and energy levels…they are eating foods that make it easier for their bodies to produce those hormones that increase your libido
Damn straight.
Also, if you’re taking oral steroids or prohormones, a paleo-type diet will hugely increase their effectiveness (since steroid compounds are fat-soluble).
ugh, oral steroids. a nice 21 gauge in the cheeks is the “primal” way to go.
All of these diets are just fads; meant to be consumed just any other consumer item. Did you buy a book on it? Good for you. You just made someone rich.
Is it just me, or does roissy seem to be repeating himself a great, great deal? I mean the photos so many times I swear I’ve seen them before on this miserable blog site and I’ve been commenting on this site under various alias’ for a very long time I hate to admit.
@attention whore,
“Is it just me, or does roissy seem to be repeating himself a great, great deal? I mean the photos so many times I swear I’ve seen them before on this miserable blog site and I’ve been commenting on this site under various alias’ for a very long time I hate to admit.”
You see, having written shit loads of posts, it is quite likely that he repeats once in a while .. but thank you detective dipshit, for policing it for us ..
Anton, you terrible cunt. Please troll elsewhere.
Wendy Schwartz,
There is nothing “primal” about this diet because the original primal diet was raw meat, from a long-gone time period, in a totally different world. Essentially the moment you cook your meat at all, you have cooked out the good…..and poisoned the rest anyhow.
Wendy Schwartz, that stupid fucking cunt is wrong as usual: “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human”
Damn it to hell! If this catches on among the SWPL crowd and I have to pay more for grass fed beef and put up with hipsters hogging the squat rack I might just go on a murder spree.
“Wendy Schwartz, that stupid fucking cunt is wrong as usual”.
Lmfao! Oh god….epic.
Roissy,
A couple of tips from someone who has tried this type of diet. Take metamucil or some other fiber supplement along with plenty of water. If your daily calorie consumption (use fitday dot com to keep track) is 15% or less carbs, you may want to throw in a high carb day to improve your mood.
I have moved on from the very low carb diets and now eat ~30% of my calories from carbs. Still very low compared to most Westerners and hopefully enough to avoid the diabetes prevalent in my family. A bowl of oatmeal in the morning and various fruits throughout the day provide the rest, except on lifting days. After lifting I drink a shake that contains pure whey and 150 kcals worth of dextrose. My brain functions better when carbs aren’t too low and keeping my brain at 100% is very important for my job. I still drink like a sailor though.
i’ve been on this diet all my life, that is way too many vitamins though, and i would never give up on getting my carbs in winter…thats how you freeze to death. evolution teaches us that as man ate more animals he increased his capacity to grow more complex brain structure. there is definetly a positive corelation between high IQ and getting blown.
Mr Bateman, what do you do that requires 100% cognitive performance, if you don’t mind me asking?
In the hardcore fitness underground the whole paleodiet/vibrams/sprinting/crossfit meme is soooo 2007. Read some stuff on T-nation. Wouldn’t surprise me if it becomes the new SWPL fad though.
My mood is, I think, worse. I dunno, but whole wheat bread and pasta seems to pick me up.
IIRC, there’s a lot of tryptophan in those. You could try supplementing with 5-HTP maybe? It’s what ravers use for the MDMA hangover.
Also, got some tips on sarging below 18 girls? It’s legal here in Sweden. Talking about 16 year olds and such, not kindergarten hehe :p
Harmonious Jim:
Also, don’t bet on primal becoming SWPL fashion. The big fad for low-carb (esp. Atkins) happened a few years ago (2003 was it?).
Don’t be naive, Jim. A product doesn’t have to be new to seem new; all you have to do is throw it into a new package.
For instance, the big fad for dandyism was arguably in France in the late 19th century, but that doesn’t preclude the success of “peacocking” today, in a brand new package.
The Atkins diet was (and is) marketed primarily, indeed almost exclusively, as a weight-loss tool, to the point where non-fat people barely even took notice of it. So, even though “primal” is Atkins Lite, it’s in a totally different package (“for the general public!!”) and can, and probably will, become a new fad in its own right.
Molecular cuisine, sous vide cooking and so on, now there’s a SWPL trend to look for.
Sous vide? Nah.
SWPL types enjoy litigation too much for sous vide to gain any traction. The first time some pretentious shithead gets botulism from those 3 air molecules that crept into the bag, or gets sick because the water was two degrees too cold, sous vide will be litigated out of existence (at least in American restaurants).
What’s in right now: a mix of “functional” (not as in Bosu balls though) and bodybuilding training, eating carbs but timing them (insulin is highly anabolic), steady state cardio (body can’t handle sprinting too much, even Olympians only do 2-3 sprint sessions a week, plus EPOC turned out to not be so great after all), autoregulating your training aka cybernetic periodization, learning to improve the repetition (the basic unit if training) through neural ramping. This is what T-Nation is going to deliver in their I Bodybuilder program. I consider them be trendmakers in the fitness industry.
@ Eric Johnson
“You dont understand it at all. The claim is that those foods, via hormones whose levels they affect, make you less hungry and/or more active, so that you dont have to struggle to keep your energy intake balanced with your expenditure.
If you had superstrong will power, obviously this would not be necessary. You could balance your energy budget regardless of what hunger or discomfort you might face. But that doesnt happen, that is not what experience shows, at least not for the average westerner.
Anyway, thats the *claim*. I dont believe or disbelieve it, personally.”
I was refering to the Gary Taubes dumbfucks who believe that you could eat as many calories as you want too as long as you dont have carbs. They seem to think that the creating a more benifical hormonal environment trumps thermodynamics when in all actuality all your doing is creating a hormonal effect that naturally blunts hunger to the point where you are no longer consuming as many calories.
Dont get me wrong, I am a huge fan of this diet style and it works well for me but I know that calories are still important. Some low carb zealots cant grasp that concept.
Maurice:
“It shows the danger of letting crypto-racist HBD thinking take up too much space in your head”
Sailer is never “crypto” anything, that´s his strength. And your statement is true per definition, which is always something of a cop-out.
“it crowds out facts and other ideas and becomes a lens through which you see everything in the world.”
The harm of throwing the idea out there for debate is negligible. I doubt Sailer is adamant about it. And, not incidentally, “but thin east asians eat loads of rice!” is one of the most common actual arguments I see advanced in favour of high-carb weight loss.
After all, as you point out, the actual reason for high-carb recommendations for weight loss doesn’t make any sense in open debate, so substitutes are needed. And thin east asians is probably the best argument there is.
So pointing out the potential for genetic variability could very well be important. Or it might not. But bringing it up will hardly worsen the quality of the discussion.
roissy
you are over-optimizing and getting superstitious.. the key thing is more raw veggies/fruits and less of the carb/sugary stuff. smaller portions will do the trick.. if you add 2 spoons of psyllium husk with banana to your morning cereal you will have a very satisfying and fibrous crap..
as for supplements, other than fish oil and vitamin D..and the occasional B complex.. I dont see the need for others; a waste of money and there could be unknown negatives..
“I was refering to the Gary Taubes dumbfucks who believe that you could eat as many calories as you want too as long as you dont have carbs.* They seem to think that the creating a more benifical hormonal environment trumps thermodynamics when in all actuality all your doing is creating a hormonal effect that naturally blunts hunger to the point where you are no longer consuming as many calories.”
1. I agree with you (mostly) with regards to the whole metabolic advantage debate – on average, calories seem to be what matters, although there also seems to be significant individual variability in weight-calory intake relationship even in controlled environments (I.e in a metabolic ward).
Also, the controlled metabolic studies I have seen have been rather small, so there should be room for better research on the topic.
2. However, people who refer the the “laws of thermodynamics” to state their case in that particular debate should be dragged out and shot in the head for acute stupidity.
3. You don’t create a hormonal effect that blunts hunger, you avoid creating a hormonal effect that supercharges hunger.
4. Calling the guy who wrote the best and most extensive book on the topic a “dumbfuck” over disagreeing with him on a non-critical issue makes you a dumbfuck, not him. Especially as you haven´t even grasped his actual argument in any coherent fashion. Especially as Taubes also makes the exact argument that you are making in parallell to his other arguments.
“Dont get me wrong, I am a huge fan of this diet style and it works well for me but I know that calories are still important. Some low carb zealots cant grasp that concept.”
* Note that I am generous enough to make a reasonable interpretation of your statement here. (See below)
5. Dunno if calories are important, even if they are the primary determinant of weight. See, if you eat right, they are no longer an important instrumental variable – simply eat until you are full. Amazingly, our body seems to have a pretty good weight regulation mechanism that works fine if we eat in a non-crazy fashion. It´s called “apetite”. I never count calories, unless I eat shitty food and need to compensate. Calorie counting is a crutch for maintaining a shitty diet.
“the key thing is more raw veggies/fruits and less of the carb/sugary stuff.”
Fruits are pretty much sugar + water + vitamin C. Better than candy, but hardly a staple food.
Vegetables are nice, but they contain tiny amounts of calories. Hence, you need fat to cancel out the calory loss from cutting out refined carbs.
PS.
Roissy – the Lipid Hypothesis Supertanker is turning, but slowly. In short, you shouldn´t really worry about the saturates, even though the WHO still hedge their bets a bit (after first concluding that there doesn´t really appear to be any relationship between saturated fat intake and heart disease).
http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=ShowPDF&ArtikelNr=229002&Ausgabe=250361&ProduktNr=223977&filename=229002.pdf
A “primal” type of diet has been pushed since the 1800′s. For someone to claim this is “Atkins Lite” shows a complete lack of knowledge on the subject. They should probably STFU.
You could make zillions for cigarette companies Zunder. They would love to have more people showing everyone else that smoking is healthful (“herbs are healthful to eat and drink so it’s safe to inhale them as well”). They could even start advertising on TV again. Then again you’d think it be easy for them to advertise to women since smoking helps women stay thin and women know they’ll get fat as soon as they quit.
On the other hand, isn’t it Alpha to die young and leave a good-looking corpse?
Things you must, must give up:
– smoking (top cancer killer by a huge margin is lung cancer. Chances of lung cancer 10x with cigarettes. That’s a separate consequence from smoker’s lung — COPD — which is very disabling and common. Also general cardiovascular disease: heart attacks 2x risk with cigarettes. Also increases risk of stroke.)
– overdoing sugar (diabetes and obesity. diabetes + cigarettes = loss of limbs at young age).
How easy is it:
– stopping smoking: very difficult, people often relapse and rationalise. Saves you a lot of money and easier to do on nicotine replacement plus cessation strategies.
– avoiding sugar: okay if you have reasonable levels of willpower and check labels carefully. Costs you money.
How ugly they make you:
– smoking: tar stains on your hands and teeth, prematurely ageing skin, distinctive smell, ongoing cough, lower tolerance for exercise and wheeze.
– overdoing sugar: aside from many other consequences, you’re fat.
Basically, it amazes me that anyone who remotely aspires for health would smoke as a regular habit. I took the cigarette packet above as a joke, because there is just no way you can be doing so much research and care about your health while still smoking.
Do you guys on a lot of supplements watch your kidney and liver in the bloodwork?
””””’I was refering to the Gary Taubes dumbfucks who believe that you could eat as many calories as you want too as long as you dont have carbs. ”””””
If you run ten miles a day I swear you can eat whatever the fuck you want and won’t get fat.
Pizza with sour cream on it a half inch thick. No problem.
“Lady” Raine–
There is nothing “primal” about this diet because the original primal diet was raw meat, from a long-gone time period, in a totally different world. Essentially the moment you cook your meat at all, you have cooked out the good…..and poisoned the rest anyhow.
As usual you don’t know what you’re talking about. As usual as well that doesn’t stop you from making fully authoritative statements – which are garbage.
Cooking is VERY ancient in hominid evolution. It seems to have developed as homo erectus was evolving from earlier homonid forms such as australopithecus , around 1.9 million years ago.
I.e. cooking is post monkey but pre fully human. Certainly pre our big brains. Cooking helped us get big brains. Humans got taller in response to cooking. Cooking allows more, rather than less, nutrients to be absorbed into the human body, overall. We’ve had plenty of time to fully adapt to it.
That doesn’t mean the Brit practice of leaching out all the nutrients of veggies by boiling them and throwing out the water is a good cooking practice.
In fact cooking may have helped lead to pair bonding as the primary human mating arrangement.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/08/990810064914.htm
Cooking is central to being human. Sharing cooked or certainly processed food (e.g. fermented milk, which lasts longer without spoiling and yogurts among steppe horsemen) is a core human ritual in ALL human societies.
Jay,
Grad student in theoretical physics. Couple years away from the Ph.D., then off to whore myself to the highest bidder on Wall Street, the business world or other quant analysis fields.
Aren’t you supplementing with fish oils roissy?
shut up roissy you’re a faggot
This is a joke, right? I can just imagine the scenario. Roissy and a friend (or whatever he uses in place of friends) are talking.
R: They lap up everything I write.
F : Right….
R : No seriously, the marks are so far up my ass I bet I can get them to discuss the products of my poopenschaft.
F : I’ll take that bet
Bateman
My brain functions better when carbs aren’t too low and keeping my brain at 100% is very important for my job. I still drink like a sailor though.
Way to go. All that drinking is going to make you start smelling real, real bad. All whey aside, you’re in a downward trend, while trying to appear superior. News flash. You’re not.
Constipation? Fer chrissake, eat yer vegetables! With every meal.
The staple of the caveman diet is leaves. That’s what your primate ancestors ate every single day, several times a day. And your grocery store offers tender, juicy, fiber- and vitamin-packed leaves that would make a caveman drool with desire. Spinach, packaged “spring mix,” Romaine, etc. Awesome leaves.
My approach to every meal of the day: What am I going to have with my leaves? And every one of my shits is an easy-exiting, tan, buoyant work of art.
Leaves or other green vegetables. With every meal. If your constipation doesn’t go away, I’ll eat my hat.
fyi, I’m writing a book ya’ll. As soon as I decide on the most manly-masculine (but healthy!) title in the world.
Alpha At 80:
One MAN’S Macrobiotic Journey
Through Macho Milieus
of Organic Tofu
to Ultimate Prostatic Health
I think some 70′s granola hippies beat me to it,
but I’m still Googling
Circuit training. There are a bunch of exercise stations in the park down from where I live where I go to do chin-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups. I can crank out twice as many pull-ups when a cute girl walks by.
This explains the surge in this behavior amongst 120 lb weaklings at the gym (not saying that’s you).
This fad has some good ideas (upping fat, cutting carbs), but as usual with SWPL themes, takes it way too far.
You need a lot of simple carbs after lifting weights to spike your insulin and start anabolism. The catabolic cycle after a weight workout lasts several hours and can seriously retard your gains.
I guess, though, if you’re most people in the gym, you’re not doing any real damage to your muscles in the first place to necessitate post-workout nutrition. Circuit training doesn’t really progressively overload your muscles to cause the stress/adaptation/supercompensation cycle necessary for muscle gains.
I watched several guys in the gym do this this summer. One of them was decently muscled, though he admittedly didn’t get there through circuit training. None of them made physique improvements. Thankfully, they generally steered clear of the squat rack.
I agree that HFCS should be avoided – it completely screws up the liver’s processing of fructose.
Your diet seems low in protein for gains. Besides the vit D and omega 3s, I’d sh-t-can the rest of those supps.
The only thing a normal adult needs to do is the obvious things like:
– avoid anything fried or cooked in actual grease
-baked goods
-red meat
-pork
Anything else is just ridiculous obsession.
Pure rubbish Roissy.
Enjoying food is one of the prime sensual experiences in life.
Dieting is for women and homosexuals.
Dave from Hawaii, Primal Pundit,
I read the articles from your links. Perhaps this is individual specific. That is, some people experience these things, others do not.
As I said before, I lived in Japan for 10 years and am married to a Japanese lady and, by virtue of that, have eaten truck-loads of tofu and drunk tanker-loads of green tea. I have not noticed any feminization effects on my body and mind. I am a (non-competitive) body builder and my mind is very masculine. If I was feminizing, the first thing that would happen is that I would loose my map reading ability and my interest in “guy things” like transhumanism. To this day, I retain these things.
Bhetti: “Basically, it amazes me that anyone who remotely aspires for health would smoke as a regular habit.”
Visit an Alzheimer’s ward some time. I used to think I’d be immune (I probably am; nobody in my family got it) from all the braining I do. Then I found out that’s what slowly killed Claude Shannon.
Anyway, I don’t smoke either, but I don’t blame people who do. Life is fatal.
Fred,
You’ve take this thread to its logical conclusion. Please post pictures of your fecal products…..
””’ Life is fatal.””’
Exactly.
They seem to think that the creating a more benifical hormonal environment trumps thermodynamics
This is where anyone that calls Taubes and those of us that have read his work and applied the principles he researched and wrote about “dumbfucks” shows utter ignorance and.
The law of Thermodynamics does NOT apply to the human digestive system.
The simplistic “burn more calories than you eat” is the biggest piece of fraud ever foisted on the mainstream consciousness.
First of all, the whole “caloric counting” idea is based on burning food in a freaking vacuum test tube and measuring how many degrees in temperature it raises the water in a chamber above the burnt food.
Now THAT is certainly an application of the laws of thermodynamics.
Burn a cheeseburger, it raises the temp of the water in vaccum tube so many degrees, than it must have 3000 calories.
Guess what…YOUR STOMACH IS NOT A VACCUM TUBE BUNSON BURNER.
Your body digests, metabolizes and utilizes carbs, fats and protein in different ways.
All calories are NOT consumed and used in an equal manner.
This is why too much carbs causes metabolic slowdown, excessive insulin production and the accumulation of adipose fat tissue.
I concur with Dave. Your body can choose to store excess calories, pass them through, expel them via sweat (at least alcohol molecules), or even burn more (or less) calories. The object for the weight loss enthusiast is to trick your body into either passing the calories through the system (e.g., dreamfield’s protected carbs) or getting your body to burn more calories (more muscle mass, higher body temp, etc.).
“I was refering to the Gary Taubes dumbfucks who believe that you could eat as many calories as you want too as long as you dont have carbs. They seem to think that the creating a more benifical hormonal environment trumps thermodynamics when in all actuality all your doing is creating a hormonal effect that naturally blunts hunger to the point where you are no longer consuming as many calories.”
Your an idiot. I assume your talking about the first law which states that energy is conserved. Taubes never says anything trumps the first law. In fact his argument is identical to yours: namely that hormones regulate weight and by eating less carbs, you eat less calories. But anyways the argument is a lot more complicated then you think. Lets start with the first law
Energy In – Energy Out = Energy stored
Energy In = Food
Energy Out = energy expeditures during exercise + energy expenditures during rest periods (including sleep).
The naive believe is that if food intake decreases and exercise increases then Energy In goes down and Energy Out goes up so therefore you have a caloric deficit and you lose weight. But what about energy expenditures while resting? People ignore that part. The body can regulate weight by lowering your resting metabolism and getting you to sleep more.
The point of Taubes is that ultimately the body controls your weight and it does this using a homeostatic mechanism. Thus the low-carb metabolic advantage is that it doesn’t screw up your bodies homeostatic mechanism.
The stupid conceit of most people is that you can control your weight. Its a really ridiculous idea. The reason is simple – over a longer period if you add up all the energy ins and all the energy outs you get an enormous number. Just a small daily difference between energy in and energy out can lead to enormous weight gain. Only a homeostatic mechanism can maintain balance and this cannot be conscious because it would require a lot of calculations and small changes in behavior that people just don’t do (when was the last time you monitored your heart rate, respiration etc while sleeping and tried to calculate the number of calories you burned)
Its interesting because global warming is exactly identical to the idea of weight gain. The idea that humans could control the climate or even carbon dioxide levels is ridiculous. Its obvious that it must be a homeostatic mechanism because just like food its true that for carbon dioxide, both C02 Sources and C02 Sinks and their yearly variations are massive when compared to the difference between them. Only a homeostatic mechanism could ensure balance between the two over the long term.
the greatest problem with Taubes and Sisson is that they completely absolve obese people from their obesity. they are borderlinedemagogues in blaming big business, orthodoxy, and so on.
obesity, at least for me, should also be considered a moral defect. Most of the stereotypes of obese people being lazy and weak-willed are true, and there should be, in any society, a strong moral condemnation of obesity.
anyway, Taubes is an author that everyone should read. and my experiences with the primal diet are exactly like Roissy’s
Roissy, if your constipation bothers you, why not eat a small portion of Kellogg’s All-Bran Plus or something similar for breakfast in addition to the eggs and stuff? That way, you get a lot of fiber but little carbs.
for the ladies,
weigh yourself everyday. Believe me, that will help you keep things in check. If you eat too much crap on Monday, eat less on Tuesday.
ladies, you will not destroy your metabolism for ever and ever if you cut back one day after overeating the day before.
attention whore
All of these diets are just fads; meant to be consumed just any other consumer item. Did you buy a book on it? Good for you. You just made someone rich.
TRUTH!!!
Oh, and avoid drinking calories. One of the things I noticed will traveling abroad, Euroepans* don’t drink 1000 calories per day folks.
“A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that brain chemicals linked to addiction are in play with a high-sugar diet, and a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that a high-carb diet had lasting mood-elevation effects.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=diet-and-the-brain-09-11-10
Energy In – Energy Out = Energy stored
Energy In = Food
Energy Out = energy expeditures during exercise + energy expenditures during rest periods (including sleep).
The naive believe is that if food intake decreases and exercise increases then Energy In goes down and Energy Out goes up so therefore you have a caloric deficit and you lose weight. But what about energy expenditures while resting? People ignore that part. The body can regulate weight by lowering your resting metabolism and getting you to sleep more.
So what about resting energy expenditure?
You just include that as a part of your “energy out”.
You think your body fights THAT hard when you are dieting that it will drop your resting energy expenditure to the point where you cannot lose weight?
Just beyond moronic.
This is why too much carbs causes metabolic slowdown, excessive insulin production and the accumulation of adipose fat tissue.
How do you explain all the rail thin people in Asia who subsist off of a diet of mostly white rice?
How come all teh bad insulinez is not making them uber fatties?
Most of the supplements in Roissy’s photo have their labels turned away.
So, young man , what exactly have you been taking ?
Please provide a list ?
I have been taking a supplement called Testoroid.
Don’t let the name fool you , it is legal , natural and contains no steroids.
Its ingredients are:
Trigonella foenum graecum (Testofen)
Urtica dioica (Stinging Nettle)
Dulacia inopiflora (Potency Wood)
Avena sativa (Oats)
Magnesium Aspartate
Zinc Amino Acid Chelate
Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B6)
Now , let me tell you guys , I have found that this stuff works !
Check it out for yourselves.
You already look 45 Wendy Schwartz, so about time you got your free entry to the pearly gates then?
I have been taking a supplement called Testoroid.
That’s a good waste of money.
Now , let me tell you guys , I have found that this stuff works !
Check it out for yourselves.
Placebo effect FTW!
Lupo: You can’t protect yourself from everything. I’m definitely not of that school of thought. However, if your obsessive goal is health, smoking does not compute.
The effects of smoking are pretty much immediate, aren’t they? You can feel your lung function going down, down, down…
I can understand enjoying life. I can understand having a nice shisha session or an occasional cigar, or enjoying an exquisite special blend now and then.
I lived with smokers. Dad, friends. There’s no joy in the actual habit.There’s no joy in having a constant craving that needs compulsive relief and a habit that controls you. Picture stuffing yourself with 20 bars of cheap chocolate every day. Not sure what you mean by blaming; I realise its ridiculously addictive. It’s just difficult to understand and definitely the first priority to address if your goal is health.
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/11/more-on-testosterone-levels-driving-a-porsche-vs-toyota-camry.html
Roissy,
LC is good to raise T and morning wood but sell the Camry and get yourself a Porsche, if you are serious.
Maybe Roissy reckons there nothing more Alpha for breaking in your woman when she willing pushes your piles back into your date after a brick-laying session. Which will cause Roissy to start eating more roughage: sitting sideways even on a soft chair or seeing blood on the toilet paper?
Carl Sagan , this placebo effect will come in handy when Im boning your girlfriend for the fourth time in one night.
“the greatest problem with Taubes and Sisson is that they completely absolve obese people from their obesity. they are borderlinedemagogues in blaming big business, orthodoxy, and so on.”
No they don’t. They provide actual advice that is likely to be helpful to the obese. Railing on about how the fat are lazy, stupid, etc. sure doesn’t seem to have done much good over the last 30 years or so.
“obesity, at least for me, should also be considered a moral defect. Most of the stereotypes of obese people being lazy and weak-willed are true, and there should be, in any society, a strong moral condemnation of obesity.”
The problem of a sugar-refined carb diet is (in part) that it actually makes you “weak-willed”. “Willpower” is not an independent variable.
“Willpower” is not an independent variable.
you are among those rare people that should read more self help books
Hello, Professor DeVany. Don’t forget your glutathione.
“You think your body fights THAT hard when you are dieting that it will drop your resting energy expenditure to the point where you cannot lose weight?
Just beyond moronic.”
Why shouldn’t it fight that hard? Its a survival machine. And I don’t think it fights that hard I KNOW IT FIGHTs THAT hard because people have done actual studies on it. Taubes documents the studies. . Read page 254 of Good Calories, Bad Calories:
“But weight loss, once again, was not the only physiological response to the diet….Pulse rates were markedly reduced, as was resting or basal metabolism…reflexes slowed as did most voluntary movements…as starvation progressed, fewer and fewer things could stimulate the men to overt action. They described their increasing weakness, loss of ambition, narrowing of interests, depression, irritability, as a pattern characteristic of growing old ”
http://books.google.com/books?id=Xdm40JUD9HwC&pg=PA256&lpg=PA256&dq=taubes+starvation+diets&source=bl&ots=aLriL6GEzc&sig=n3kCTw8NKOAdDDmj6lTm-oe4hIM&hl=en&ei=M6QOS9-nAtTFlAeFtunRDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CAsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=&f=false
The basic finding is that on all starvation diets most weight is lost at the beginning and after that it becomes increasingly difficult to lose any weight. And when the starvation period ends all subjects regain all their weight and then some.
If you don’t believe Taubes, then read Victor Frankel’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”. He documents the effects of starvation that he witnessed first hand in Nazi death camps. Everything he writes about corroborates with Taubes. And Victor Frankel, as should be evident from the title of the book has no concern at all with dieting.
Roissy,
If you add gin and subtract the supplements, you would have nailed my diet. I’ve done all right with it too. Lost 50 pounds, and gained the attention of women (and gay men – which kind of freaks me out, but a compliment is still a compliment).
Any reason for gin in particular, GP?
(As opposed to other drinks, like beer or vodka)
Refined sugar is death.
Roissy:”My mood is, I think, worse. I dunno, but whole wheat bread and pasta seems to pick me up.”
Yes, a high-carb diet does improve the mood levels – it is because it keeps the blood sugar constantly high and thus gives a person more energy: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2009/11/highcarb-diets-may-put-dieters-in-better-moods.html
The problem with ‘going primal’ (or trying to recreate a pre-agricultural Paleolithic diet/lifestyle) is that almost all Europeans except for the Basques are overwhelmingly descended from the agriculturalists who settled Europe about 10,000-12,000 years ago — these farmers immigrated to Europe and eventually overcame and absorbed the European hunter-gatherers except in very small pockets (Basque country); they were the “wheat and beef people” as described in a good 2004 article in Harper’s:
“The wheat-beef people swept across the western European plains in less than 300 years, a conquest some archaeologists refer to as a “blitzkrieg.” A different race of humans, the Cro-Magnons—hunter-gatherers, not farmers—lived on those plains at the time. Their cave art at places such as Lascaux testifies to their sophistication and profound connection to wildlife. They probably did most of their hunting and gathering in uplands and river bottoms, places the wheat farmers didn’t need, suggesting the possibility of coexistence. That’s not what happened, however. Both genetic and linguistic evidence say that the farmers killed the hunters. The Basque people are probably the lone remnant descendants of Cro-Magnons, the only trace.” – http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915
So, as the above article says, if you are a White European you are likely descended almost entirely from the wheat/beef agriculturalists and not from hunter-gatherers, though some hunter-gatherer genes of course remain from the H-G women which the farmers absorbed. Actually, the original “wheat and beef people” are what are often referred to as “Aryans” who founded various high civilizations all the way from Europe to the Middle East to Iran and in to modern Pakistan/India.
Settled agriculture is the basis of higher forms of civilization — barring a major worldwide catastrophe, we obviously aren’t going back to hunting-gathering because nowadays there just isn’t enough land or resources for that due to the fact that billions of humans now inhabit this Earth. In fact, settled agriculture spurred the development of higher forms of civilization, intellect, and culture as is described in the book THE 10,000 YEAR EXPLOSION — humans in Europe and elsewhere started to evolve much more rapidly mentally and culturally once we abandoned primitive hunting-gathering and settled down to agriculture because that settledness allowed for more learning, culture, and technology to develop and, again, this actually made us evolve more quickly. Some individuals might be a bit personally unhealthier because of settled agriculture, but humanity as a whole has advanced a lot from their Paleolithic hunting-gathering days of living in caves, scarfing down berries, occasionally hunting down some meat (most “hunter-gatherers” actually scavenged most of their meat), and drawing primitive pictures of animals in cave walls. We modern humans do though make up for lost vigor/health via much longer lifespans though.
I see no problem with trying to mimic or recreate a hunting-gathering or primal/Paleolithic type of lifestyle (I’ve tried doing this myself a bit), though do realize that if you are a White European you likely only have a smattering of actual hunter-gatherer genes because the “wheat and beef” farming Neolithic peoples almost entirely displaced the hunter-gatherers about 10,000-12,000 years ago (again, unless you are a Basque). Thus your physiology is likely much more in tune with settled agriculture rather than hunting-gathering.
As for good carbs, I much prefer lentils and oats to wheat/bread (though I could just really like oats because I am mostly of Scottish heritage, and oats are ubiquitous in Scotland). Oats actually have quite a bit of natural lipids in them, the most of any grain aside from corn. They also digest and metabolize more slowly than other carbs, giving more constant/steady energy. If you try to go primal (low-carb, high-fat), I recommend that at least 25-33% of your diet remains good carbs otherwise you aren’t going to have very much energy at all and your mood will probably remain constantly low.
The Specimen:”Typical California diet, hence the high concentration of “beautiful people” out here in comparison to other parts of the country…”
Is that why California is totally bankrupt and is increasingly a 2nd worldish with a soon-to-be Hispanic majority?
If you are trying to quit smoking cigarettes, try using snus instead to get your nicotine fix — snus is MUCH better for you than cigarettes, obviously.
Camel Snus, the ‘Mellow’ flavor, is pretty good and it is sold in most American convenience stores – http://tobaccoproducts.org/index.php/Camel_Snus
There is no elevated cancer risk associated with using snus.
Jay,
“Any reason for gin in particular, GP?
(As opposed to other drinks, like beer or vodka)”
No beer – at least not on a regular basis. I drink alcoholic drinks for the alcohol and beer has too many calories per unit of alcohol.
I happen to like gin and tonics with a splash of lime juice, but the key is calories per unit of alcohol, so any high proof liquor with a low calorie mixer would be equivalent.
Also, drinking gin leads to drinking martinis and martini dates are as Roissy might say “vag lube”.
About the tofu/green tea feminization issue.
If this is indeed the case, how can one explain the fact that Japanese and Chinese men have been consuming these for several thousand years and, yet, have proven formidable opponents in war in recent history? The Japanese were quite vicious in WWII, you know.
Simply consuming lots of meat is not a genuine paleo diet. It’s just a high protein diet. It’s not healthy.
If you really want to go primitive, eat the whole carcass. Leave nothing out. That’s real paleo – and healthier if you’re gonna go all meat.
@Alebard
1. Asian people have different genes than white people
2. Western women aren’t particularly fond of Asian men
But it’s probably not the tofu anyways. It’s the plastic and Bisphenol A
One more question, to anyone who might know:
Why is vegetable oil not just “out” – but “way out”?
I was just about to grab a handful of raisins and I see that the ingredients include vegetable oil
Pupu left DC nine days ago looking like a cheeta, now she is a bulldog turning into a St. Bernard. The price of happy eating can be hefty.
About the tofu/green tea feminization issue.
If this is indeed the case, how can one explain the fact that Japanese and Chinese men have been consuming these for several thousand years and, yet, have proven formidable opponents in war in recent history? The Japanese were quite vicious in WWII, you know.
You don’t think females can be vicious??? “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
@ Markku:
Women are far more vicious and vindictive than men could ever dream. They are also capable of a deeper hatred than most men will ever feel. And this hatred is easier come and easier go than it is for men.
for the ladies,
weigh yourself everyday. Believe me, that will help you keep things in check. If you eat too much crap on Monday, eat less on Tuesday.
ladies, you will not destroy your metabolism for ever and ever if you cut back one day after overeating the day before.
WHaaaaaat? Seriously, Chic? Weigh yourself? Pffft. Useless. A woman who is “in great shape” can weigh far more than a woman who’s “thin but flabby” for the obvious reasons that muscle weighs more than fat.
However, I do agree with your “eat less” the day before or after. Usually if you have a half decent metabolism it’s enough to knock off the few pounds you put on.
Beer in itself does not contain that many colories (less than skim milk from what I’ve read).
What tends to make beer drinkers put on weight is what they eat with their beer.
Also , beer tends to have an effect of stimulating the appetite, not good if you want to lose weight.
As far as asian men go , what amazes me is how entire species have come close to being wiped out in order to satisfy the appetite of asian men for products that will supposedly increase their “virility” or “potency”.
Rhino horns , Tiger penises, Bear gall bladders , Shark finns and so on.
Would this happen if asian men on a whole had penises as large as the typical Western male ?
It seems like a whole lot of overcompensation is going on.
I dunno, but whole wheat bread and pasta seems to pick me up.
Insulin inhibits the passage of most amino-acids across the blood brain barrier. Not Tryptophan, however. Because of reduced competition more tryptophan crosses the barrier. And tryptophan is the precursor of seratonin.
This is why carbs are comfort food.
Mr. C,
“Beer in itself does not contain that many colories (less than skim milk from what I’ve read).”
How many calories vs skim milk or horse piss is irrelevant. Each 12oz beer is about 150 calories. That adds up quick.
Like anything , beer should be consumed in moderation.
I generally do not drink alcohol during the week and only drink when I go out or am socialising.
You also have to watch the mixed drinks … Scotch and Coke , all that sugar !
Soda water with a slice of lemon or two is a great alternative , and will keep you sober and your bank balance healthy as well.
Coming late to the discussion (sorry). Okay. If you decide to eat like a nomad hunter, you ought to make sure you exercise like one too. And that means walking, around three miles a day, every day. (on top of any other, er, adrenaline raising activities). Actually it’s not difficult. Maybe an hour’s worth in total. Ten minute walks to the bus stop, library, etc all count towards the aggregate. But – it is the basic operating level of activity that our bodies are designed to run at, and you neglect it at your peril. As many of the people in the Walmart photographs are now doubtless reflecting.
Mr. C,
– Men have always sought after aphrodisiacs to increase virility. It has nothing to do with anyone’s penis size. Herbal remedies were the ancient equivalent of Viagra.
– Is 100 calories of whole grain pasta the equivalent of 100 calories of sugar? No. The body reacts to them diferently.
That’s the truth — http://secularright.org/wordpress/?p=3421&cpage=1
Look here Roissy … what punks like you with bad boys , sexual conquests , looking hot or whatever do don’t know is that you are not Alpha
Alpha = Power
Alpha = Strength
Alpha = Father (Family)
” Masculinity is supposed to connect men to honour, to pride, to courage, to strength of character, to integrity, to perseverance, to protectiveness, to patriotism etc.
It shows, I think, just how much masculinity has been erased from within Western culture that we no longer readily identify these qualities as higher expressions of masculinity ”
Masculinity has been SO disconnected from Western culture and it’s sad
I just hope that conservatives in America are able to fix this
I ain’t talking about the neo conservatives
I ain’t talking about the liberals that have infiltrated and destroyed conservatism
Paleo conservatism , classical liberalism ( NOT modern liberalism ) and renaissance type of Christianity ( instead of the sick extremist or too liberal type ) — meaning mixture of Ancient Greece , Ancient Rome and Christianity — need to come back
The Democrats and the Republicans have ruined the USA and liberalism has destroyed Western culture
I’m a foreign woman whom LOVES Western civilization )=
Alpha is just not sexual conquest
Stop being so primitive
But then again you are primitive
And that’s what so sad
LOVE the recipes
They’re yummy!
🙂
I’ve noticed a decrease in libido on the primal diet. Not good!
Could it be the reduced carbs, or the reduced calories?
(I’m 25.)
[…] quinoa, cereal, carrots and trail mix. For a vegetarian, I rarely saw her eat truly outstanding (and paleo-approved) vegetables like broccoli and kale. Although she had a nice figure from running and biking all the […]
[…] quinoa, cereal, carrots and trail mix. For a vegetarian, I rarely saw her eat truly outstanding (and paleo-approved) vegetables like broccoli and kale. Although she had a nice figure from running and biking all the […]
@Wendy – you’re wrong. Humans discoverd and harnessed fire for cooking about 200,000 years ago. Cooking and other pre-processing makes food esp. meat easier to digest. Which is very likely why humans have shorter guts than other apes of similar size / diet (e.g. chimps – yes, they hunt and eat meat). Fire / cooking is probably the killer app they provided enough calories to support large human brains.