Are you weighing yourself? Is that really helping you look/feel/perform better, or is it making you crazy? Too much weight loss, not enough weight loss, no weight loss, WEIGHT GAIN!?!?!?!!?!

If weighing yourself isn’t making you look/feel/perform better, than why do it?

Read “The Weighting Game“.

Sometimes athletes get into Ketosis and sometimes they don’t. I don’t think that Ketosis is necessary for significant weight loss, nor do I think it should be the goal of the Paleo Diet.

If it happens it happens, if it doesn’t it doesn’t.

Read “Metabolism and Ketosis.”

A machine wears down under stress until it needs to be repaired or replaced. An organism grows stronger from stress, as nature understands it. An organism grows weaker from stress that is unnatural.

Read “The Relationship Between Exercise and Inflammation.”

“It’s a way of living, not a diet, so you have to have fun with it.” Read more from the Summer 2010 Paleo Challenge Champion, Maureen K.

Has the Paleo Challenge changed the way you think about why we get fat?

Is this weekend better than last? Are you able to handle social situations better?

Day 14

I don’t think any of our Paleo Challenge athletes should weigh and measure their food. I think a vast majority shouldn’t keep a food log.

The reason for this is the same reason why we don’t prescribe bicep curls or jumping on one leg while you rub your belly: the clinical evidence we’ve observed shows no improvement in how an athlete looks, feels, or performs, and in the majority of cases (including this one) this technique is detrimental.

After spending years pushing people to weigh/measure and log their food the vast majority didn’t see any significant increase in their health or fitness and many displayed neurotic behavior that led to a decline in their fitness and significant stress in their lives.

You, the human animal, knows how to eat. Somewhere down there in your psyche is an omnivore that knows how to survive, and what to eat to ensure that survival.

We have to draw it out of you by teaching and by pack behavior, but it’s there. And I don’t think that paleolithic ancestor used FitDay.com.

Another great meeting last night, thanks for all those that showed in person and online. To view the video and chat log, click here.

Cross Posted from PCF:

One of the hardest things to explain to people on the Paleo Diet is that you can actually enjoy eating. Most people associate “dieting” with suffering. Folks seem to want an extremely ascetic experience.

We have constantly tweaked our approach to the Paleo Diet to influence the “middle 80%” of the curve. There’s going to be 10% that just totally don’t get anything we tell them and are going to punish themselves and try to eat the same thing every day, low fat meats, and avoid fats in general.

There’s going to be 10% at the top of the curve that just kill it. They get the framework of the Paleo Diet, they do research on their own but know what to keep and what to throw away, and they have fun with the diet.

The middle 80% of the curve is a mixed bag. Some folks are going to do relatively well with minimal effort, some folks are going to just run into walls daily.

We try to provide as many ways to get that middle 80% solid results. We know that the bottom 10% isn’t going to listen, and the top 10% has got it cold from day one. It might take some folks in the middle 80% several Paleo Challenges and several years to finally get all the way there, but just like anything: if it was easy, everybody would do it.

A big part of the Paleo Diet is performance: we want to make better Crossfit Athletes.

We also want weightloss, and general improvement in health biomarkers, to include decreased inflammation.

“Inflammation is one of those words that people use without really thinking about its actual meaning. So today we’re going to take a bit of a break from the blood lipid series to cover inflammation. In later posts, I’ll dig deeper into how the inflammatory response works with stuff like exercise and heart disease, but for now, I’ll just get the basics out there.”

Read more at Mark’s Daily Apple.