Paleo diet in practice

[machinehead]

www.ironcompany.com/blog/alone-diet/

"The premise of the show Alone, and this article we refer to as the "Alone Diet", on the History Channel is simple: strand ten people in the wilderness with no tools, devices, gadgets, electricity, or guns. Participants can take ten items, other than a sleeping bag and some heavy clothes. Usually they take a sharp axe, a bow and arrows (each arrow counts as an item,) some sort of big-ass knife, a steel fire-starter as no matches or lighters are allowed, snares for game, a gill net for catching fish. They walk into the woods with what they have in their backpack. Whoever lasts the longest wins $500,000. Let the suffering begin.

The Alone show is profound for a lot of unintended and unintentional reasons. Alone has created a seven-year, 70 participant, highly controlled dietary experiment on how best to shed body fat. All Alone contestants get ripped within two months on the "Alone Diet". The snide response is “Yeah? Well anyone can get ripped when they starve.”"

Also...

"The Alone participant are all survivalist pros, people with serious credentials and years of experience. The survivalist women are most particularly bad ass. Whereas the guys alpha it out, exerting and overcoming, the beta women flow with nature, earth mothers that gather exotic fauna and berries, make tea and cry when they snare “bunnies.”

Two beautiful earth mother women finished 2nd and 3rd in the most recent Alone season, a 100-day challenge with a $1,000,000 prize. The ladies were barely outlasted by an uber-alpha SEAL-type lifelong woodsman, a man that (on this show) stabbed a 600-pound musk ox to death with a Bowie knife.

They should have just stopped the show right then and there and given him the million dollars when he killed the beast on day 67. Naturally, he won. While the others were starving and eating kelp, he was roasting bison haunches over the stone fireplace he had installed in his cold-proof shelter. I love this man. This is the seventh season of the show and as a fitness professional, profundities abound."

I'll have to check to see if they have musk ox at Sam's Club next time I go.

[captkronos]

That looks like an awesome show. I think my strategy going in would be to get as fat as possible before Day 1. Starting off skinny or thin would be a disadvantage.

[vegetus25]

I read the article, but have not watched the show. Here are some thoughts on the show and paleo in general.

1. Of course, I am opposed to killing animals for some TV show. True NEED is different.

2. "strand ten people in the wilderness with no tools, devices, gadgets, electricity, or guns. Participants can take ten items, other than a sleeping bag and some heavy clothes. Usually they take a sharp axe, a bow and arrows (each arrow counts as an item,) some sort of big-ass knife, a steel fire-starter as no matches or lighters are allowed, snares for game, a gill net for catching fish." So axes, bows/arrows, knives, etc. are not tools?? If we are going to do this paleo thing, let's do this paleo thing. Drop them off without any of the above. Let them find what they can and make their own clothes, knives, etc.

Typical modern man..."Look at me, I am eating like the cavemen". Also, modern man, "Hey, honey, we are out of Charmin".

3. From my understanding the diet of our predecessors varied and depended on where they lived and what was available in that area. Some ate higher carb than others.

4. I wonder what shape the contestants would be in after a year instead of a few months?

5. Some people can do well without carbs, others can't.

6. Depending on starting body fat levels it is not hard to get ripped in a couple months (low carb or not). One look at Clarence Bass proves that one does not need to eat low carb to get ripped. He eats a diet containing around 60% carbs.

[Michael]

Vegetus, I just wanted to comment on numbers 5 and 6. Number 5, I'm one of the people who don't do well without carbs. Number 6, The Clarence Bass based diet is how I went from 220lbs to 170lbs.

[captkronos]

I maintain a pretty consistent 170lbs at 5'10", but I have never been able to lose weight AND eat carbs. I will drop weight easily if I go keto or carnivore for a week. The scarcity of food in the wild, especially edible vegetation in enough abundance to sustain a person is enough to convince me we have always been meat eaters.  I also believe cannibalism of enemy tribes and such was much more common than we know.  We probably ate Neanderthals into extinction.  At one time the largest source of protein in the  Aztec diet was human meat.  Something I read recently suggested to go out into the woods a look around, what fruits and vegetables do you find in abundance? At best some roots and leaves that probably aren't even digestible. All the diet talk in the world sounds great in theory until I'm hungry and there's a McDonald's in front of me. The only thing that saves me from my weakness with food is a habit of rarely eating dinner now. If I never eat dinner, I'll never get fat. I may not get a six pack with that alone, but it's a simple rule of thumb.

[BigBruvOfEnglandUK]

Oct 10, 2020 17:42:24 GMT vegetus25 said:

 If we are going to do this paleo thing, let's do this paleo thing. Drop them off without any of the above. Let them find what they can and make their own clothes, knives, etc.

That wouldn't be the paleo thing. People back then didn't just start off with nothing. They had tools and clothing and they replaced them when needed.
Other hominins had been using tools previously too.
You could do a show where people start off with nothing but that would be more like being shipwrecked when you were naked. I don't know if it's been done but that would be incredibly hard.

[BigBruvOfEnglandUK]

This reminds me of that tv show "Survivor". A bunch of people are dumped on an uninhabited island with just a few tools and their own clothes and have to fend for themselves. They always struggle finding enough food.
Many years ago Mrs BigBruvOfEnglandUK sailed around Indonesia etc for months with her then husband. She knows how to survive on what you can take from the sea and on land in that area. She said that the reason the islands they use in Survivor are uninhabited is because nobody can actually survive on them.

[mr potatohead]

Oct 11, 2020 1:29:59 GMT BigBruvOfEnglandUK said:

.... She said that the reason the islands they use in Survivor are uninhabited is because nobody can actually survive on them.

[vegetus25]

Best show I ever saw along these lines was, Dude, You're Screwed.

www.imdb.com/title/tt3431238/

These guys would kidnap each other. The kidnapped guy would be dropped off somewhere (jungle, desert, etc.) with the clothes on his back. The other guys would search the dropped off guy to make sure he was not hiding anything that could help him. Had to find way out within 100 hours. It was a kick.