Review: The New Evolution Diet by Arthur De Vany

"There is no failure, only feedback."
--Arthur De Vany

Readers, I'd like to recommend an extremely useful and insightful book to you: The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us about Weight Loss, Fitness, and Aging by Art De Vany.

I'll start with the author's three central dietary and fitness principles:

1) Do not count or restrict calories.
2) Do not starve yourself, but do go hungry episodically, for brief periods.
3) Exercise less, not more, but with greater playfulness and intensity.

Interesting. Now granted, I know people who have had exceptional success counting calories. And I've seen (and have myself followed) advice to do extended exercise, particularly extended cardio workouts like distance running.

The thing is, most of us hate doing these things. Which is why a book that suggests you do neither is pretty intriguing.

Early on in his book, De Vany offers what I consider to be one of the best brief explanations I've ever read of why we humans are literally built to overeat and underexercise:

"We humans evolved when food was scarce and life was full of arduous physical activity. Hence, our bodies instruct us to eat everything we can lay our hands on and to exert ourselves as little as possible.

That's right. We are, in essence, hardwired to be lazy overeaters.

This was a perfect strategy for success thousands of years ago. No human could survive in 40,000 BC unless he or she ate anytime food was available. Our ancestors knew that famine was always close at hand--feast now or suffer tomorrow. They were also careful to expend as little energy as possible, because burning more calories than absolutely necessary was a threat to survival."

In short, the human body was designed for an insecure food environment. Which is why it's so easy to get fat today, when we're constantly surrounded by an abundance of delicious, tempting and high-calorie food. And it's not like we need to chase down any of this food either! In the mechanized, modern era you can go your whole life without intense exercise. It's easy to see why obesity is our primary health problem.

Thus when De Vany turns the standard diet/fitness advice on its head, it's with full awareness of this critical concept: our bodies are not designed for the modern era. Therefore, we need to imitate--as much as is practicable in modern day-to-day life--the food and fitness environment we are designed for. This is the central thinking behind paleo living. Not just paleo eating--but paleo exercising too.

De Vany tells you to mix your exercise routine up so you won't get bored, and to challenge your body in new and different ways to avoid repetitive stress injuries. Boring, repetitive exercise isn't a recipe for getting in better shape: it's a recipe for, well, getting bored. And quitting.

And De Vany's notion of avoiding boredom extends to eating too. Just as Mother Nature never intended us to exercise on a fixed, rigid schedule, she never intended us to eat on a fixed, rigid schedule either. The human body craves--and benefits significantly from--variation and randomness.

Which is why this book calls for a widely varied diet, not some self-parodying low-carb diet of slabs of meat and bacon. Carbs aren't forbidden: they're okay in moderation--usually in the form of fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables. The author also suggests experimenting with brief and intermittent periods of fasting: "just remind yourself that your ancestors endured many episodes of hunger and that your metabolism is designed to handle brief fasts."

And while junk foods like processed chips, sugary cereals and soda are generally off limits, even the author himself indulges in a once-a-month piece of cheesecake. This flexibility and allowance for enjoyment is the central strength of De Vany's eating style. As De Vany says: "We are not trying to literally live in the Ice Age, just to emulate aspects of that diet."

Finally, The New Evolution Diet offers readers striking insights and new, healthier paradigms for how to think about food, fitness and the human body. Ideas like:

1) Focusing on building muscle instead of dropping pounds.

2) Using the 80/20 Rule and other non-linear paradigms (e.g., cascade effects, butterfly effects, even outright randomness) to think about the body and how it functions.

3) Adding "kurtosis" in various forms to your life. This might mean adding significant randomness to your workout routine, or varying your diet significantly. As we mentioned before, the human body craves variation. This is the kind of stuff that can make life fun, unpredictable and--most importantly--healthier.

Readers, I strongly recommend this book. It’s rational, practical, thought-provoking and an easy read. Have a look at it and let me know what you think!

Finally, a few things I'm planning to add to my life after reading this book:

1) Add some light exercise before dinner to raise my insulin sensitivity. De Vany explains that this helps train your body to turn food into fuel rather than fat.

2) Make my exercise routines much more varied and unpredictable. I'm the kind of person who craves steady routine, so this may be a challenge for me.

3) Add a few specific foods to my diet: canned salmon and canned shellfish. Both are great sources of lean protein, vitamins, minerals and essential oils.

4) I'm going to try some small personal experiments with intermittent fasting and see what the effects are.

Share your thoughts!





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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

30 Grams of Protein Within 30 Minutes of Waking Up

I know I've been kind of hard on Tim Ferriss in the past here at Casual Kitchen, but there's one idea that I got from him that changed my mornings forever:

Eat 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up.

It's a great dietary rule of thumb because it's simple, flexible, and easy to remember. And this easy-to-employ diet hack drives three significant benefits:

1) You'll have a steady blood sugar level for hours after eating, which helps keep you in a calm, focused mental state. This is the ideal state for creative or knowledge work, and it's helped my writing immensely.

2) 30 grams of protein will give you complete satiety for up to 3-4 hours. You won't feel hungry and you won't need to eat.

3) Finally, this is an extremely flexible rule. The world won't come to an end if you eat 24 grams of protein one hour after waking up. You'll still capture all the benefits.

Contrast this with a more typical breakfast of fruit, or worse, starchy, sugary branded boxed cereal. These foods merely put you on a hunger roller coaster, leaving you craving still more carb-rich food within an hour or two of eating. Result? You eat twice as many calories and twice as often, yet you still feel hungry. Pointless.

What kinds of foods can you eat to achieve 30 grams of protein? Here are some ideas:

A dollop or two of peanut butter (7 level Tablespoons yields about 30g protein)
2-3 fried or boiled eggs (about 6-8g protein per egg, depending on size)
3-4 handfuls of nuts (almonds, walnuts, peanuts, cashews, etc.)
A few pieces of good quality breakfast sausage
1 can of tuna (about 40g protein)
A whey- or soy-based protein shake (a typical serving size contains 30g protein)
Canadian-style bacon or ham (5-6 oz yields about 30g protein)
Cottage cheese (½ cup yields about 15g protein)
Hard cheeses (yield: roughly 10g protein per ounce)
Unsweetened yogurt (roughly 10g protein per cup)

Obviously you can mix, match and combine any of the above. Best of all, none of these food items costs very much money--in stark contrast to branded boxed cereal, which is far more expensive, far less healthy and far less filling.

This protein-based meal technique is easy to remember and it easily solves the "what do I want for breakfast?" problem. Try it, and let me know what your results are!

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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Why It's REALLY Worth Weaning Yourself Away From Sugar

Today's 650-word post could save you tens of thousands of empty calories per year.

My lovely wife Laura is training for her first marathon, so she's carefully evaluating what she eats with an eye toward eliminating some of the lower-quality inputs into her diet.

It led her to a truly shocking discovery. She discovered she was eating more sugar than she realized. A lot more. And it was all just hiding there in a couple of innocuous daily beverages she hardly even thought about.

First of all, every morning she'd have one or two cups of half-coffee/half-milk, each with two spoonfuls of sugar. And then, on most evenings, she'd have a big mug of hot cocoa--with another two spoonfuls of sugar.

Hey, she's got a sweet tooth, and that's okay. I'm a black coffee guy and I've always thought sweetened coffee was kind of girly, but hey, that's just me. Vive la différence.

Of course, logically, Laura could easily see that the idea of pouring five or six spoonfuls of sugar down her throat every day wasn't exactly healthy (especially when you phrase it that way).

So the first thing she did was mentally reclassify her evening hot cocoa as an infrequent "special treat" rather than a less-than-special daily habit. Then, she cut back to just one cup of coffee per day. Then, she (actually me, since I fix her coffee most mornings) weaned herself away from so much sugar in her daily coffee.

How? Simple: I just gradually cut down on the sugar I added to her coffee. I worked down from two rounded spoonfuls to a spoonful plus a little. She never even noticed. Then I worked down to just a spoonful. She still never noticed. Then a little less than a spoonful.

Well, at this point, she noticed. But within a few days she got used to it.

Now, after a short couple of weeks, she's happily drinking her coffee with less than a full rounded spoonful of sugar. She likes it exactly the same as before, and she's experiencing no feelings of deprivation whatsoever.

And yet she's eliminated more than four rounded spoonfuls of sugar a day from her diet.

What we found was that your palate can be conditioned away from sugar just like it can be conditioned away from salt. Given time, you can teach your mind and your taste buds to not want quite so much sugar.

Okay. Here's the important part. Laura knew that it would be a good idea to cut this incremental sugar out of her diet. But then we did the caloric math. This is where it got disturbing.

Geek that I am, I actually weighed the amount of sugar in a "rounded spoonful" of the spoons in our kitchen, using my trusty EatSmart Precision Pro Digital Kitchen Scale. We have typical, medium-sized spoons in our kitchen--not baby-sized, but not ginormous IKEA spoons either. And a "rounded spoonful" of sugar worked out to exactly 8 grams.

So here's the (mortifying) math: at 8 grams per spoonful, Laura's daily coffee/hot cocoa habit added up to 32 grams of unnecessary sugar per day. That's 960 grams (or 2.1 pounds) of sugar a month. Or an astonishing 25 pounds of sugar a year.

Expressed in caloric terms, the math is even more astonishing. Start with the fact that a gram of table sugar contains about four calories. Doesn't sound too bad, right? Until you realize that eating 960 grams of sugar per month works out to 3,840 calories. Nearly two full day's worth of excess calories every month, assuming an average woman's 2,000 daily caloric intake.

Just wait. 32 grams a day x 365 days works out to 11,680 grams. Which means this annual excess sugar intake works out to 46,720 calories per year.

Forty-six thousand seven hundred and twenty incremental and largely unnecessary calories per year. That's nearly twenty-four days' worth of unnecessary calories.*

All in the form of a couple of easily forgettable daily beverages.

Readers, where do you think your empty calories hide? Share your thoughts below!


* A quick footnote: As I was working through the caloric math in this post, I simply couldn't believe the total sums I was arriving at. It didn't seem possible that I could come up with over 46,000 excess calories from what seemed like such a small, innocuous daily habit.

I checked and rechecked (and even had Laura check) the math, and I even reduced some of the assumptions too (e.g.: Laura actually cut more like five rounded spoonfuls a day out of her diet, not four, but I used four spoonfuls in the calculations above to be more conservative, and because the evening hot cocoa was a nearly-every-day habit, not an every-day-without-fail habit).

But I guess the conclusion here is that the little things really add up. I mean really add up. And if you have a daily soda, frappuccino or other sweetened beverage habit, you may be ingesting way, way more pointless calories than you realize over the course of months and years.


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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Make Your Diet Into a Flexible Tool

After all my years of pontificating about cutting back your meat intake and embracing part-time vegetarianism, after all of my posts about leafy green vegetables and how good they are for you, and after all of the other discussion of healthy eating here at Casual Kitchen, I have a terrible confession to make:

For the past few weeks, every single morning, I've been having a truly unhealthy breakfast: two eggs, sunnyside, and four or five good sized slabs of high-fat, high-protein, artery-obstructing, Portuguese sausage.


(The fact that this sausage is made in Hawaii--the one state where SPAM is considered a delicacy--tells you all you need to know about its fat content.)

I'll happily admit that this kind of food will kill you if you eat it to excess. But there are instances where this kind of diet actually serves your body's purposes. And in my particular case, I'm in recovery mode from being seriously ill. I need to rebuild muscle, increase my weight (yes, I know, a perfect problem to have...) and try to increase my strength and endurance.

So I've been starting off each day with a breakfast just like this, combined with a pretty aggressive exercise schedule. And since I've applied this diet, I've had deeper energy reserves, I've returned to my normal fighting weight and I've been able to do increasingly difficult workouts from week to week.

So, what, you ask, is my point? My point is that too often we think of our diets as fixed and rigid things. They shouldn't be. Instead, I want you to think of your diet as a flexible and powerful tool.

There are times in your life that you might need to bias your diet towards healthy, cleaner foods, and there are times when you might need to bias your diet towards more energy-dense foods. You change it up as your body requires it.

Let's say you have your annual physical, and your bloodwork tests show that your cholesterol levels are running a bit high. Well, then bias your diet to oatmeal, fresh fruits and veggies, and cut back on, uh, exactly the kind of food I've been eating lately. You might be surprised by the results. And, of course, results achieved this way are certainly preferable to the expense and potential long-term side effects of taking Pravachol or Lipitor.

Let's say your blood pressure is on the high side. You can choose to relentlessly remove salt from your diet and start up an exercise program. If you're on blood pressure meds, perhaps this can lessen--or even eliminate--your reliance on them.

If you're trying to improve your fitness and lose some weight, you can increase your intake of lean protein (chicken breasts, turkey breasts, lean beef, etc) and antioxidants (kale, swiss chard and other leafy greens). You'll replenish your body and fend off potential free radical damage.

Don't think of your diet as a rigid set of rules that can never be broken. Think of it as a license to experiment--with different foods, different components, different routines. You can tweak things here and there, or you can make aggressive wholesale changes. You'll find that your diet can help you achieve a wide range of goals, and it can be as powerful a tool as any pharmacological solution.

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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

How to Make Your Own Inexpensive Sports Drink

I'd be remiss, after all of my diet and athletic training essays, if I didn't share this easy and inexpensive sports drink recipe from my Eat to Win guru, Robert Haas.

This recipe has served us very well over the years, even after the most grueling hot-weather workouts.

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Quickfix
Modified slightly from Robert Haas' Eat To Win.

Combine:
8 ounces orange juice
8 ounces cold water
1/2 teaspoon salt

Stir well and drink.
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Compared to Gatorade or Powerade at $2.00 to $2.50 for a 32-ounce bottle, this recipe is just as healthy at a fraction of the cost. Enjoy!

When High-Carb Diets Don't Work: Diet and Athletic Training Part 3

This is Part 3 of a three part series on diet and athletic training.
Part 1
Part 2

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Laura: "Remember when you ran your first marathon? You looked emaciated back then."

Following our last post on the advantages of a high-carb/low-fat diet, we're going to talk today about a primary disadvantage of this diet: it tends to fail when used along with a heavy-duty training regimen.

Like I said last week, I took the Eat to Win lifestyle to heart while I was training for my first marathon. And during the first few months of training, when I was ramping from very light mileage to perhaps 20 miles a week, this diet worked fantastically. I had never felt better.

Moreover, this was back in my broke grad student days too, so the cost of the diet (or lack thereof) resonated with me as well. I was eating my quasi-vegetarian diet and having modest portions of meat perhaps once or twice a week. Normally this wouldn’t be a big problem if I had been overweight or was undertaking light to moderate exercise.

But I was not overweight to begin with, and I was training for a marathon. I was getting a little bit carried away with the pasta, quite frankly, and I wan't eating enough protein or fat. But why should I? I had never felt this fit before.

Unfortunately, things began to break down as I went above the 25 miles per week mileage level (this is the realm of medium-to-heavy distance training for a first-time novice marathoner). I simply didn’t respect the fact that I wasn’t taking in enough protein and fat for my body to maintain muscle mass and rebuild itself from training.

Don’t get me wrong, I was still fit. My body fat levels were lower than ever before, my resting pulse was 48 beats a minute, and my blood pressure numbers would typically be something like 107/57.

But I started to find myself struggling through runs. I had some training injuries, including a badly pulled calf muscle, and I was much more susceptible to getting sick. I caught a cold in September, and I came down with a bad case of bronchitis a week or two after finishing the marathon itself.

And therein is the primary “con” argument against high-carb/low-fat diets, especially when taken to an extreme, like I did: You just can’t cut your fat and protein intake down to a bare minimum while you’re under an aggressive endurance training regimen.

Because I too rigidly embraced a complex carbohydrate-based diet, my body wasn’t able to restore itself, and it wasn’t able to protect itself from injuries. You’ve got to replace what your body breaks down. When you are doing heavy, strenuous, and long term physical training, your body will be breaking down its fat cells and muscle cells. You have to ingest more protein--and yes, fat too--in order to replenish what your body is burning off.

This doesn’t mean you should head back to the junk food aisle and pick up a dozen bags of Doritos, but it does mean that you can and should take in more lean meats, perfectly boiled eggs, and even consider an occasional Polish kielbasa breakfast like the one we discussed the other day. During my heaviest training weeks for my second and third marathons, I actually drank soy- and whey-based protein shakes every day. This made an enormous difference in my overall strength, endurance and health--although I was kind of disappointed that I somehow never developed a body quite like the musclebound guy on the cover of the protein mix box.

The real lesson here is that everything (diet-wise or otherwise) must be done in moderation. For me, that meant listening to my body and thinking about my diet in the context of of the intensity of my exercise routine.

And that's the great thing about exercise, whether you do moderate workouts three times a week or if you’re doing heavy endurance training 5-6 days a week. It teaches you to pay attention to your body and give it what it needs, rather than shoveling food in first and asking questions later.

The Pros and Cons of a High-Carb/Low-Fat Diet: Diet and Athletic Training Part 2

This is Part 2 of a three part series on diet and athletic training.
Part 1
Part 3

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We continue our series on diet and athletic training with today's post, which focuses on high-carb/low fat diets. I’ll talk about why this kind of diet is absolutely optimal for people undertaking moderate levels of physical exercise.

Like most people, when I was in my teens and twenties, I paid absolutely no attention to my diet (one of the luxuries of youth!). But at around age 22-23 I began running seriously, and I decided I’d like to try to train for and run a marathon. Of course, being the type-A corporate tool that I am, I started studying books on distance training as well as books on optimal diets for runners.

And I happily fell under the influence of Dr. Robert Haas’ book, Eat To Win. Haas made his name in the early 80s as one of the key people behind Martina Navratilova’s dominance of professional tennis at that time. His highly useful and readable book advocates coupling exercise with a diet low in fat and rich in complex carbohydrates. His slogan "fat burns in the flame of carbohydrate” pretty much says it all. I started dramatically cutting back on my junk food intake (yes, even dark chocolate), and I paid very close attention to, and ruthlessly limited, how much fat I ingested. And I ate a lot more pasta.

Furthermore, I started paying much closer attention to how well I ran under various dietary circumstances. I started to put more effort into noticing* how my body handled itself during my runs after a few days of excessive high-fat eating, compared to days when I ate more healthily.

I had never really paid that much attention to my body's physical performance in the context of my diet. But once I started noticing, the conclusions were obvious: runs after “bad diet days” were universally awful compared to runs after “good diet days.”

Elsewhere in this blog, I’ve talked about how if you exercise regularly and eat energy-dense foods sparingly, you will experience profound changes in your body. You'll begin to feel better, you'll begin to sleep better, you'll have more energy, and you'll feel lighter on your feet. You will begin to metabolize your excess body fat.

Granted, when you exercise, your appetite increases also. But the ironic secret of this diet is this: you don't really need to eat that much less food! As long as you exercise regularly and reduce the fat content and overall energy-density of your diet, you will see results.

Moreover, many people who embark on this diet and exercise combination even find that their body simply stops craving high-fat foods. That bag of Doritos just doesn't look as appetizing when you think about how it will clog up your cardiovascular system during your run tomorrow morning.

And this is where an amazing virtuous cycle begins. Your improved diet leads you to feel better, which leads you to have better and better workouts, which leads you to crave fewer high-fat foods, which leads you to feel even better, which leads you to have even better workouts, which accelerates the metabolization of even more body fat. Rinse and repeat.

That, in a nutshell, is the primary “pro” argument for a high-carb/low-fat diet and exercise combination. You will be astounded at the improvements in your physical fitness after just a few weeks of maintaining an Eat to Win-type diet combined with light to moderate exercise.

What I did, however, was take this diet to an extreme. We'll discuss the "cons" of this diet in the next post in this series.

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* NB: I've talked very briefly about the concept of “noticing” (some psychologists use the term "attention") in Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating. This is a powerful concept that has applications in life far beyond the scope of this blog, but I hope to return to it in a cooking context. You can find a powerful, although non-food related, introduction to this concept in Timothy Miller's mind-opening book How To Want What You Have.

When High-Fat Food Can Actually Be Healthy For You: Diet and Athletic Training Part 1

Dan: Should we cook the whole thing? Let's cook the whole thing. Life is short.

Laura: Yep. Let's make it even shorter.

*********************************
Thus began our breakfast from the other day, consisting of three-quarters of a pound (split between us) of delicious polski kiełbasa from one of our town's local Polish delicatessens. Cost? $3.49. Calories? I don't want to know. Grams of fat? No comment.

Preparing this breakfast was a snap. Slice up the sausage both crosswise and lengthwise into manageable chunks, and fry in a nonstick pan for three or four minutes per side on medium-high heat.

The purpose of today's post is to begin a discussion about energy-dense food, and to explain why it’s actually okay, on occasion, to eat food like today’s Polish sausage, especially for breakfast. This delicious sausage might be pretty high in fat and protein, but that does not mean it is by definition unhealthy. It’s only unhealthy if you're sedentary and you eat this kind of food to excess.

I know this will sound heretical to those readers conditioned by the food industry to believe "fat is bad." But on a typical Sunday, where our afternoon plans might include a five-mile run, a long hike, or two hours on the local tennis courts, we've found that modest portions of a protein-rich (and yes, a relatively fat-rich) food like this actually makes for a nearly perfect energy-dense breakfast.

What does the term "energy-dense" mean? It simply means you get a lot of calories, and thus fuel for your body, in a relatively small volume of food. Note that you'll need to watch your portion size carefully with these kinds of foods. Just a few bites can fuel your body for a surprisingly long time.

And certainly, no energy-dense meal can be good for you if you don't exercise and ultimately burn all of the calories you take in. And if you run out there immediately after a meal like this, you won’t play your best (although you will barf your best). But a modest-sized breakfast of Polish sausage (or perhaps two perfectly boiled eggs), eaten an hour or two before heavy physical activity, will provide you with a far superior fuel than any typical sugar-laden breakfast cereal.

Once again, the key issue is: you need to burn the fuel. If you flatly refuse to exercise and cling to a sedentary lifestyle, then quite frankly you should avoid energy-dense foods as much as possible. It's simply too easy for your body to convert fuel-rich food like this into body fat.

I'll be returning to the subject of food energy-density shortly, where I'll cover other issues related to diet and athletic training, including the pros and cons of a high-carb/low-fat diet, and what kind of diet will help you do heavy athletic training without compromising your muscle mass and immune system.

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This is Part 1 of a three part series on diet and athletic training. Please see:
Part 2: The Pros and Cons of a High-Carb/Low-Fat Diet, and
Part 3: When High-Carb Diets Don't Work.

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