The term diet has been spun into something that it is not.  More often than not if one says 'Diet' it is seen as a temporary or fad like thing in order to lose weight or augment your lifestyle for temporary gain.  Diet in its definition means the continual eating habits of a creature.  So, we know cows mostly eat grass and that is their diet.  Predators are carnivores and subsist mostly on meats.  Somehow a diet has become misconstrued over the years as something else.  It is now a marketable term and not true to its meaning.  So, with trepidation, I often say I am on the Paleo diet and it is misunderstood as something akin to the Atkins diet for meat eaters or that I only consume what cavemen ate which is wholly untrue and often leads to crooked eyebrows or being told I don't need to be on a diet, that eating red meats will kill me, or some other myth perpetuated by misguided information.  This mental programming of the word diet along with the 'diets' in question is part of the problem with health and nutrition.  Diet is part of your lifestyle and what you can handle ingesting on a continual basis and what your body should be fed habitually.

We as humans don't really have a solidified diet per se according to nature.  There are things which we should and should not eat but we have a very robust system that allows us both meats and vegetables and some in-between items.  There are a lot of things that we cannot adapt to though and should be removed from the body altogether in order to achieve optimal energy levels and ease digestion.  We can eat and pass pennies but that doesn't mean it is good for our body and you may or may not have adverse affects from doing so.   The same can be said for gluten, legumes, dairy, sugar etc. all of which can have adverse affects, hidden or visible.

I'm sure the first few questions in mind are: What is the Paleo diet? Why should I pursue such a thing? The USDA outlines a solid diet, why should I change that?

The Paleo diet is eating as closely to what paleolithic man consumed but taking into consideration modern life. This includes the removal of the following items from your daily life:

• All Processed Foods
• All Grains (gluten especially)
• Legumes (including peanuts)
• Most dairy products (ghee, clarified butter, and some hard cheese are ok in moderation)
• Processed sweeteners (refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup etc.)
• Soy (it is a neurotoxin)
• Unsafe Oils (canola, peanut, or most plant based refined oils)

You would replace those items with whole foods (fresh vegetables), quality meats (grass fed and finished and/or pastured), animal fats, limited fruit and nuts.

The USDA pyramid should be banished and drawn up from scratch according to what our body needs and not mostly derived from grains and cereals or dairy.  Grains have been shown over and over to cause numerous issues within the body so why should that be the major category from which we get nutrients?  It shouldn't.  Any doctor that tells you that whole grains are highly nutritious should be ignored.  They obviously know little about how our body handles grains or the bio-availability of these nutrients.  Food should be our gateway to health and most doctors only have about 6 months of their entire time in medical school dedicated to nutrition.  Even so, the nutrition that they're given is the same tripe we've been handed for the past 50+ years.  We need to re-program not only ourselves but our medical professionals.

I am often confronted (yes nearly confrontational at times) with questions regarding the way I eat or why I choose to disregard a fluffy sugar-laden piece of cake or some fabulous crusty bread that is offered to me. I simply smile and say I don't eat that. It's not that I can not or would not; I just do not. I have chosen to only take in what I deem as beneficial to my system. People over the years have neglected the purpose of food. It is a fuel and only items worthy of being fuel should be acceptable for your body to run optimally.

I didn't begin this way magically, nor was I raised to consider this thinking toward food. I ate because I was hungry and I tended to eat what tasted good to me. I cared not what was actually going in me as long as that little nagging notion in my belly was satisfied with what I put in there and my mouth was happy for that nanosecond of pleasure for tasting good! This is where we all go downhill and quite quickly I might add.