Paleo diet extremely popular amongst CrossFit community & athletes all over the world

A newly emerging dieting system has pushed more boundaries in dietary then being vegetarian or vegan. The Paleo diet works on a simple method suggesting that we must only eat what our Palaeolithic ancestor ate thousands of years ago before humans invented fast food and even the introduction of farming.

The Paleo advocates suggest eating whole foods such as healthy fats, lean meat fruits vegetables, seeds and nuts. The aim is to return to a hunter-gatherer diet in order to stay fit overall and keep body’s chemical intake under watch by avoiding processed food at all costs. Thus Paleo diet proponents rely on primal eating habits and avoid processed carbs, dairy, grains and even booze; this approach to nutrition focused diet has become extremely popular amongst CrossFit community and athletes all over the world.

The impact of Palaeolithic approach towards diet on body composition is undoubtedly overwhelming as it significantly accelerates the rate of fat loss if you are aiming to lose weight. Other than this obvious impact Paleo diet helps reduce inflammation in the body that causes various disease and facilitates fat storage.

By helping to stabilise the blood sugar for less erratic energy boosts throughout the day, Paleo diet makes your body insulin sensitive to handle carbs. This combination of factors also puts the very long term health risks of modern diseases such as diabetes and heart problems on halt.

Paleo eating habits mean that you are essentially training your body to burn its fats more efficiently as fuel, instead of having rely on carbs, which is great practice if you are an endurance athlete such as a marathon runner or triathlete.

But there is a huge caveat that one must consider before plunging into a whole Palaeolithic diet plan. In case you are a hard trainer and your discipline is more like weightlifting and anaerobic sports then a purely paleo diet could make you suffer both physically and consequently performance wise as well.

A study into high-fat low carb diet suggests that anaerobic performance is effectively limited by the low levels of muscle glycogen that low carb diet or Ketogenic diet can cause. This factor alone is sufficient to hinder an athlete’s ability to perform to their best as there is not sufficiency energy produced to meet the requirements.

According to Todd Miller who is the Associate Professor of Exercise Science at the George Washington University Department of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, the human body is designed as such to convert fat and other carbs from the bloodstream and then turn into energy that fuels our body during workouts. However, this energy path way is excruciatingly slow, says Mr Miller, therefore, is most likely to be useful during low-intensity workouts such as walking and jogging.

But for high-intensity exercises, this pathway simply does not produce enough energy to fuel the process hence an alternative energy producing system is required to fuel the anaerobic exercises. So the bottom line is this that if you are not taking enough fats and carbs that are later going to be used to produce energy to meet your high-intensity workouts, you are essentially relying on a painfully slow energy source which will reflect badly on your performance scale.