Salad Month might have been a bit of a bust (at least as far as me posting about it), but what’s a month without a theme?

This month it seems as though Fletch and I are tackling the “Hunter Gatherer” diet (not to be confused with the Hunger Games Diet). I wish this was an April Fools joke. Sadly, it is not. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to try and simplify our diet, and I always love a new challenge. My worry is that it won’t leave me with much to post about!

We have to eat though, and I refuse to let my food be boring. I’ll either come up with some interesting recipes, or finally get around to posting everything I’ve been meaning to.

Fletch got this idea from a presentation in one of his classes that explained about a women with a degenerative disease who switched to a HG diet and was later able to compete in a triathalon, from previously being confined to a hospital bed. If eating nuts and berries can do that, well then it can certainly help Fletch and I deal with our “winter bloat”, and make getting up those hills on our bikes a little easier (I swear some on the hills in this city were smaller last Fall!).

I have a suspicion that this is just Fletcher’s way of stopping me from baking, but I’ll just take that as a compliment, because I know he can’t resist eating whatever I make.

I still have a bit of a learning curve, but, from what I “gather” (teehee), this diet is just about eliminating processed foods, and eating a more natural diet. One website I looked at likened it to animals in a zoo. The zookeeper aims to feed the animal a diet that replicates what it would eat in it’s natural habitat. Basically, we should do the same for ourselves. Sounds reasonable to me! Especially because if we’re going by species, “humans” have a pretty freakin’ huge habitat.

Proponents of this way of eating claim that cavemen (my friend Meg compared eating gluten-free to a caveman diet, now I get it!) were tall, lean, strong and healthy, and that they often died young as a result of violence, infection, etc., but never because of “modern” diseases such diabetes, heart disease, and obeisity. If we combine the modern conveniences of shelter, healthcare, and access to food with a caveman diet, we should have the best of both worlds.

This diet is very controversial, from what I can tell, mostly because people can’t seem to agree on what exactly it should be. Humans have lived all over the world, in different climates, and habitats, and the types of foods they have eaten have varied accordingly. From Alaskan Nunamiut people who are said to consume up to 99% of their calories from animals, to the Gwi in Africa, who only get 25% of their calories from animals. It is easy to see how there could be a variety of interpretations of the “right” way to eat a hunter gatherer diet.

Fortunately for Fletch and I, we aren’t trying to prove anything. We just like to try new things. We’re going to do our own interpretation of the diet, so basically lots of greens, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, berries, and protein. We’ll probably have some yogurt, and maybe once and awhile throw in some whole grains.
Basically, we’re taking a note from Michael Pollan (if you haven’t read his books In Defense of Food, and The Omnivore’s Dillema, you should, even if you don’t agree with them, they are still good reads).

“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

We started out this morning with some nuts, seeds, dried fruit, and strawberries, with a tiny bit of yogurt. Baby steps :)