Hiya-
Some of Barnaby's comments got me thinking so I read "Good Calories, Bad Calories", "Trick and Treat", and "Protein Power". I started a zero carb diet about a month ago while continuing to commute by bicycle 30 miles per day. I like to push the envelope to see what happens so I've been eating zero carb Fast-5. My poor wife... :)
As I believe in eating Paleo, I thought it would be a good idea to try a zero carb diet in the winter at a time when fruits and vegetation probably wouldn't have been available to ancient humans from northern European climates.
So, on to the gruesome details...
After the first few days, I noticed that I was getting VERY cut in the abs. At the same time, I stopped having BMs. So my weight started to go up. I have read that a life of high fiber dieting will weaken the peristaltic motion of your intestines but they will strengthen in time as your body adapts to no fiber... and they have. BM is now every two or three days, but I don't feel bloated anymore like I did in the beginning. My weight got up to 175 before gradually coming back down to 168. Now however, I'm at 168 and have very little fat on my belly and the remaining fat on my lower back and legs has gone down quite a bit. I can wear my 30" waist slacks now.
Food choices are somewhat limited as it's challenging to find whole foods that supply fat and protein but have no carbs. So I eat lots of eggs, tuna, beef, low sodium bacon with no nitrites/nitrates, sardines, whole rotisserie chickens with livers, bone broth, lard, and butter for cooking, etc. LOTS of water. Tuna and egg salad has olives.
I REALLY have no desire for vegetation yet. But during this experiment, I've come to see spices and herbs as really important to this way of eating. First for taste, but second as a really big source of nutrients. For instance, according to Mercola.com, "the potency of oregano ranks supreme: Oregano has 42 times more antioxidant activity than apples, 30 times more than potatoes, 12 times more than oranges and 4 times more than blueberries." And here's an interesting article along the same lines, http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=news&dbid=35 .
I was concerned about vitamin C as humans cannot make it on their own which makes it an essential nutrient. However as it turns out, if we don't eat carbs, the body needs much less of it because a large amount of vitamin C is used to process grains and other carbs. Meats do contain small amounts of vitamin C. I need to research this more but until I find some answers, I'm taking a daily multi-vitamin pack.
Sugar in the diet is a MAJOR hindrance to the immune system. So part of this experiment is to see if I catch any colds or other airborne illnesses this year. So far, so good.
One article that really got me interested in this whole idea can be found here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128849908 . It's about how we are so different from chimps and Australopithecus afarensis. You can see from the photo at the top of the article that a combination of eating meat, using tools to hunt, and cooking our food has TOTALLY changed our teeth. If our ancestors had continued to eat large amounts of vegetation like gorillas and chimps, our molars wouldn't have gotten so small in comparison and we'd still have much longer intestines like other primates.
I know there's a lot here and I'm sort of skimming over a lot, but I wanted to share my experiences so far with the group.
-Rick
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