Nora T. Gedgaudas

Based on my last review which was also a Primal living book, you may have deduced that I either have or might want to make some changes in my life. You’d be right. As of this writing, I have been processed-food-, grain- and sugar-free for 30 days. I feel like a million bucks and have continued to lose inches off my waist, hips and thighs. I am not starving. I am not killing myself with exercise. I am not counting calories. I am not rigidly weighing and measuring portion control. I do not buy special shakes, meals or drugs. I am eating whole food. I am eating until I am satisfied. I am exercising intelligently. It’s great.

Because I’m basically a nerd with a curiosity for science, I sought out some books to read after The Primal Blueprint so I could find out the underlying reasons why our Standard American Diet fails us and keeps us fat and sick and why a Primal or Paleo diet will not only make you feel better, but can actually reverse or eliminate certain conditions, diseases and ilnesses. After listening to Nora Gedgaudas’s podcast a few times and realizing her approach was a fact-based, evaluative one, I chose her book and I’m so happy I did. Everyone is getting a copy for Christmas this year. Maybe even earlier. Normally I’m not a terribly emotional person, but the information in this book made me nearly cry with the realization that I’m not going to destroy my body or my health any longer. I get teary thinking of the years, no, decades I wasted getting more and more unhealthy. I think of my family and the conditions and diseases they have and I can’t wait for them to have the same epiphany as I did after reading this book. Conventional wisdom and the Standard American Diet is killing us, but there is hope.

So anyway, let’s get into the book itself. The writing is pretty good. Superior to TPB in the sense that I think Nora really gets sentence structure, grammar, and punctuation. Also she writes with a clarity and non-repetitiveness that is very easy to read. Yes, she puts a LOT of science and scientific terminology into it, but it’s necessary and she explains things well. From biomechanics to hormones to the chemistry of digestion; she gets into the way the body should work and how eating a SAD will screw you up in 100s of ways. Ways you think are just by-products of getting old, or your genes or just the way you are. Probably you won’t have to put up with feeling so shitty if you change the way you fuel your body; you need to nourish your body, something so few people ever do. I truly understand now how absolutely nutrition controls function and gene expression. The research Nora has read and vetted is NEW research for the most part and that is important to me, knowing she’s keeping up with the very latest in nutritional research. Her lists of recommended reading and references are many pages long. I spotted a few typos like plethera instead of plethora (which was spelled correctly elsewhere), mewly instead of newly, but they are few.

I learned SO MUCH from this book that it would be my longest blog post ever if I tried to regurgitate all of it. I will give you some gems though, and hopefully you’ll be curious and pick up the book yourself. It will change your life.

Why excessive carbohydrates make you fat -

“Insulin is known as the fat-storage hormone. It is regulated by leptin, though the same dietary influences impact insulin and leptin much the same way, and people can become resistant to the messages of both insulin and leptin in the same way. Again, they are birds of a feather. Carbohydrates such as sugar and starch - as opposed to moderate dietary protein and fat - are the primary dietary macronutrients that stimulate insulin release and generate unhealthy leptin surges, which disrupt healthy communication and encourage hormonal resistance.

Ultimately, most unwanted body fat is made from dietary sugar and starch. The hormone glucagon is required for the mobilization of fat stores and allows them to be burned for energy. Glucagon does not operate in the presence of insulin. If one consumes enough carbohydrates to stimulate insulin secretion, glucagon cannot function and body fat cannot be burned.

Body fat cannot be burned as long as insulin is present!”
p.139

Here’s another one from the chapter on weight management -

"With brief, intense anaerobic training, however, there is a residual fat-burning effect that can last up to two days! In the first couple of minutes of any intense exercise, your body uses pure adenosine triphosphate (known as ATP), and immediately after that's exhausted, your body uses its glycogen stores. It takes a good fifteen to twenty minutes to burn off the glycogen and start using fat. If you maximize your efforts within that twenty-minute window, your body actually learns to store energy increasingly in your muscles as glycogen instead of layered on your waist and thighs (and who knows where else) as unwanted body fat.

There is an aftereffect with this interval approach to exercise that is known as excess postexercise oxygen consumption, or EPOC (a sort of afterburn), that in effect ramps up the weight loss for extended periods of time - even while you're sleeping! Your body has to work hard to repair and restore spent energy levels after an intense workout, and this takes a lot of calories. It can take up to a full day for a full recovery. Think of it as a bonus calorie-burning workout within a workout. A scientific study that was done by Laval University in Quebec, Canada, proved that short, intense workouts burn up to nine times more fat than traditional aerobic training (Tremblay et al. 1994). In another study, at Colorado State University, subjects exercised for twenty minutes in sets of two-minute intervals, followed by one full minute of rest in between. Even at rest, their rate of fat oxidation was up 62 percent, and they continued to burn fat for a full sixteen hours following the exercise (Osterberg and Melby, 2000)!" p157-158

I could go on all day, but I won’t. This book should make my top 10 easy. Thank you Nora Gedgaudas for your dedication and talent in making this information available to us all.… (altro)

An eyeopener on the disadvantages of the standard 'modern' diet, i.e., the past 10,000 years. The basic premise of the paleolithic diet (in a nutshell) is that 300-500 generations of human development is insufficient for the human genome to have adapted sufficiently to the dietary changes/challenges posed by the agricultural revolution, i.e. the influx of grains and legumes during the neolithic period. If you have food allergies, this is probably why - not to mention the crazy amount of food additives and sugar in nearly everything. Prior to the advent of agriculture, the homo sapien diet is thought to have consisted of mostly meats and animal fats, foraged nuts, vegetables and fruits. It is challenging, but not overly difficult to simulate this diet today (and yes, you get to cook your food. . . ) One of the most comprehensive treatments of the paleolithic dietary theory to date.… (altro)