Via Kottke, The Way We Eat Now is a fantastic look at the current collision of our modern lifestyle with our "ancient" bodies that evolved for endurance activities. It's a particularly refreshing look at diet and nutrition in light of the grip low carb/high protein diets are taking on our nation. An excerpt:
The old order Amish of Ontario, Canada, have escaped much of that advertising, and the TV viewing as well. They have an obesity rate of 4 percent, less than one-seventh the U.S. norm. Yet the Amish eat heartily, and not all health food: pancakes, ham, cake, and milk—but also ample amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables. It seems that the secret to the "Amish paradox" is their low-technology lifestyle, which entails vastly more physical activity than its modern correlate. David R. Bassett, a professor of exercise science at the University of Tennessee, gave pedometers to 98 of these Amish adults and found that the men averaged 18,000 steps per day, the women 14,000—about nine miles and seven miles, respectively. The Amish men averaged 10 hours a week of vigorous activities like shoveling or tossing bales of hay (women, 3.5 hours) and 43 hours of moderate exertion like gardening or doing laundry (women, 39 hours).
"The Amish are not freaks," says professor of anthropology Daniel Lieberman, a skeletal biologist. "They are just anachronisms. Human beings are adapted for endurance exercise. We evolved to be long-distance runners—running a marathon is not a freak activity. We can outrun just about any other creature."
Though only a few pockets of hunter-gatherers remain on Earth, for the first couple of million years of our species' evolution—99.5 percent of the human experience—all people sustained themselves by hunting animals and gathering food from wild plants. Agriculture arose only 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, permitting more stable settlements and food supplies. Hunter-gatherers spend much of every day traveling: "Who ever heard of a sedentary hunter-gatherer?" asks Lieberman, laughing. (There were a few sedentary hunter-gatherers, he notes—in the Pacific Northwest where salmon ran plentifully.) But although humans are designed to be highly active, the chronic ailments of sedentary life and obesity, like diabetes and heart disease, typically turn fatal only when people are past reproductive age. Thus, natural selection doesn't weed out couch potatoes.
Related, today a 13-member panel commissioned to update the Dietary Guidelines for Americans -- the government's tipsheet for healthful eating -- said Americans need to balance food intake with their activity level to avoid gaining weight. "Increasingly overweight Americans should turn off the TV, get some exercise and eat "a wide variety of foods," a panel of dietary experts said on Wednesday, giving a cold shoulder to the craze for high-protein diets."
The secret to long term weight loss is no secret, it's simple common sense. If you want to lose weight the first thing you ought to do is turn off your tv, step away from your computer, and simply move your body! Exercise is good for the body, mind, and soul. Once you get in the habit, you won't want to stop. But like all habits, it'll probably take 60 days to develop into one, so stick with it.
Next, cut out all the junk food and sugary beverages in your diet and replace them with tasty fruits, vegetables, and nuts. If you don't buy it, you can't eat it. Avoid simple carbohydrates, and replace them with complex carbohydrates. Oprah does this by avoiding "white foods" -- white bread, rice, potatoes.
Once you've lost the weight, keep moving and eat with common sense! It really is that simple.
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