The Paleo Diet (27 page)

In a medium-size bowl, stir all ingredients together. Cover and chill for up to 6 hours. Makes 2 cups.

Combine all ingredients in blender. Pour into a cruet, and shake well before each use. Makes 5 cups.

Put all ingredients in a blender, and blend until smooth. Makes 1 cup.

Heat oil in a heavy skillet, and sauté onion and chili for about ten minutes. Add catsup, mustard, and cayenne, and heat until simmering. Add raspberries, and simmer for an additional ten minutes. Remove from heat and let cool. Pour into blender, and blend until smooth. Makes about 1½ cups.

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl, and whisk until well blended. Use to marinate beef, chicken, pork, or fish when barbecuing. Makes about 1 cup.

 

Mince garlic, and place in blender. Add remaining ingredients, and blend until well mixed. Use to brush on vegetables, chicken, or meat before and during grilling or broiling. Makes one-half cup.

In a large pot, combine water, chicken, garlic, onion, bay leaf, and pepper. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for about two hours or until chicken is tender. Remove bay leaf and discard. Add remaining ingredients, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and cover. Simmer for about twenty minutes or until vegetables are tender. Serves six.

Blend all ingredients in a blender or food processor until vegetables are small but not pureed. Serves two.

Source: Cooking Healthy with One Foot Out the Door
by Polly Pritchford and Delia Quigley. Summertown, TN: The Book Publishing Company, 1995.

Heat olive oil, and sauté onion and garlic. Bring water to a boil, and add sautéed onion and garlic, meat, basil, parsley, thyme, and pepper. Lower heat, and simmer for one hour. One hour before eating, add carrots and celery. One-half hour before eating, add zucchini. Ten minutes before eating, add chopped tomatoes and fresh parsley. Serves six.

Combine all ingredients in a large soup pot, and cook on low heat for one hour. Serves six.

Mix the apple, carrot, and raisins in a bowl, and sprinkle cinnamon over the top. Serves one.

Mash bananas with fork or potato masher in a bowl, and thoroughly stir in vanilla. Put mixture in freezer for twenty to thirty minutes, until it is thick but not frozen solid. Serves three to four.

Core, peel, and slice apples. Combine with lemon juice in blender until smooth. Sprinkle with cinnamon and serve. Serves two.

Combine all nuts and fruits in a large serving bowl. Mix in lemon juice and cinnamon. Serve in small bowls. Serves four.

Heat oven to 375 degrees. Core and pierce apples with a fork in several places around the center, to prevent them from bursting. Mix raisins, nuts, cinnamon, and vanilla in a small bowl. Fill center of each apple with this mixture. Place in a glass baking dish, and pour water into pan. Cover with foil, and bake for about thirty minutes or until tender. Serves four.

Wash the peaches, and cut each one into eight sections. Mix with the almonds and dates, and drizzle with vanilla; sprinkle cinnamon on top. Serves two.

Cut cantaloupe in half (using a serrated knife), and scoop out seeds. Fill each cavity with blackberries and pecans. Garnish with mint or spearmint leaves. Serves two.

Mix the strawberries, blueberries, and tangerine sections in a bowl. Drip with orange juice and vanilla, and sprinkle with nutmeg. Serve chilled and garnished with mint. Serves three.

—Hippocrates

 

 

Regular physical activity is every bit as important as diet in achieving good health and permanent weight loss. Regular exercise can:

Here again, we need to follow the example set by our hunter-gatherer ancestors and use their activity levels as a guide for our own.

I must tell you that when asked to choose between doing long, hard, repetitive work and simply relaxing, or having fun, huntergatherers—just like their modern descendants—invariably would have opted for the latter two choices. In fact, the idea of exercise itself would have baffled these people. After all, no reasonable hunter-gatherers would have lifted heavy stones or run in circles for the mere sake of getting a “workout.” Convincing them to continue these boring activities—or to develop a fitness plan—would have been impossible.

The huge difference between Paleolithic people and us is that they had no choice but to do hard manual labor on a regular basis. Their lives depended on it. Most of ours do not.

Joe Friel is an internationally known expert on fitness who has coached Olympic triathletes and is the author of a number of best-selling books for triathletes and cyclists. Here are his experiences with Paleo diets:

In the late 1980s, the world community became increasingly alarmed at the shrinking tropical rain forest in the Amazon basin (due to clear-cut logging, mining, and industrialization). Politicians and environmentalists launched a host of programs to curb this deforestation and even brought native Amazon Indians to environmental conferences in New York City. At one such conference, a group of Indians came across joggers exercising in Central Park—and found this concept absolutely hilarious. That adults would run for no apparent reason was comically absurd to these practical hunters. In their tropical forest home, every movement had a function and a purpose. What could possibly be gained by running to no destination, with no predators or enemies to escape from, and with nothing to capture?

The mind-set of these Amazonian Indians was undoubtedly very similar to that of any of the world’s hunter-gatherers. They got plenty of exercise simply by carrying out the day’s basic activities—finding food and water, building shelters, making tools, and gathering wood. These activities were more than enough to allow them to develop superb physical fitness. Strength, stamina, and good muscle tone were the natural by-products of their daily routine.

Our Stone Age ancestors worked hard or they didn’t eat. Sustained labor wasn’t necessary every day; periods of intense exertion generally alternated with days of rest and relaxation. But the work was always there, an inevitable fact of life. There were no retirement plans, no vacations, and definitely no labor-saving devices. Everybody, except for the very young or the very old, helped out. And their daily efforts were astonishing. The amount of physical activity performed by an average hunter-gatherer would have been about four times greater than that of a sedentary office worker—and about three times greater than anybody needs to get the health benefits of exercise. An office worker who jogged 3 miles a day for a whole week would use less than half the energy of an average hunter-gatherer, such as the !Kung people of Africa. !Kung men on average walk 9.3 miles per day; the women average 5.7 miles per day. As you may expect, all this walking and regular physical activity pays off with high levels of physical fitness for everyone. In fact, my research team has shown that the average aerobic capacity of the world’s hunter-gatherers and less Westernized peoples is similar to that of today’s top athletes.