As I mentioned in my profile, I'm a Registered Dietitian in Canada. I have counselled thousands of people in fat loss and weight management and helped them succeed in achieving their goals.
Through constant modification of approaches and nutritional & fitness strategies, I eventually found a strategy that worked for most people....
THE PALEO DIET
Now, I didn't call it this, I basically just followed the research on insulin management, inflammatory vs. anti-inflammatory foods, and foods that tended to cause people to overconsume and found my way to a diet consisting primarily of low carb vegetables and high quality proteins and fats & oils with starchy vegetables and/or fruits added in after intense workouts! Sound familiar? I thought so.
Anyway, over the last year or so, I've refined my understanding of this and really delved into the research and well structured work of Dr. Loren Cordain, Robb Wolf and Mark Sisson. I am also ravenously reading the literature recommended by all of them. I am a scientist first and a clinical practioner second. Therefore, I've always felt odd that as a Dietitian I was to take the word of my profs as to the fact that a particular diet plan/food group was good and that it contained nutritional benefits. I've always been skeptical and I think that Paleo and particularly the scientific research and logical approach outlined by Dr. Cordain and esepecially by Robb Wolf has helped me determine the reason for my previous discomfort. Conventional wisdom/ Western medicine is great at acute treatment but lacks sorely when it comes to prevention and reversal of chronic conditions. It makes perfect sense in retrospect, and seems so obvious, hindsight is truly 20/20!
Traditional nutritional strategies (and medicine) are missing a scientific unifying theory, much like the ones that have been used in physics (i.e. String or Quantum theory). I believe that Paleo nails this one by using Ancestoral/Paleo/Primal as its unifying theory for determing the optimal nutrition, exercise and even other lifestyle strategies for humans today! I'm not saying we should ditch the Hugo Boss & dawn the loin cloths and move out of our dream homes in favor of a cave in the mountains, BUT that theory can provide a solid foundation and guiding principal against which new scientific discoveries should be applied and compared to determine their effectiveness and validitiy to humans in general because they're compared to our evolutionary biology.
This is exciting & I am stoked to be able to contribute to the testing of various Paleo hypotheses and globally implementing these strategies for health, performance & longevity!
I look forward to continuing to post on this more in the future.
Take care and have an awesome day!
Dietitian Dan T
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