The Standard American Diet is Not Going to Promote Weight Loss

Super size it!  Give me a size large!  I will take a Big Mac, or a Whooper!  Just listen to some of the things that are stated as the norm in our society when it comes to food now.  All of these statements suggest an increase in the portion size of the food consumed.  The more there is the better, correct?  Not likely.  Along with this increase in food portion size has also been an increase in waist size.  Needless to say, if we are going to talk about weight loss, we are not going to be talking about the standard American diet unless we are referring to what not to do.

The Problems with the Standard American Diet

There are so many problems with the standard American diet that it is almost difficult to find a starting point.  Foremost, let’s take a look at what we call food.  Food should have sufficient nutrient content and health promoting qualities.  This makes sense.  We consume food to nourish our bodies.  Most of what the average American diet is made up of does not meet these criteria.  Foods that are refined, boxed and packaged do not have life sustaining qualities about them.  Rather, they have been stripped of these qualities.  Therefore, if you are eating a substance that does not provide you with nutrients and health promoting qualities, how can you expect to promote health?  You cannot.  In short, this food is taking the life from you to help process and metabolize it.  You are literally losing more nutrients to try to process this food in your body than you are deriving from it.

The Correlation between the Standard American Diet and Weight Gain

Weight gain does not happen without explanation.  It is a culmination of things that collide to create a state of dysfunction in the body.  Weight gain is the symptom.  The dysfunction is the problem that needs to be addressed.  To do so, means that you have to start with the standard American diet.  If this is not the central focus, weight loss will not take place.  The standard American diet promotes weight gain because we are literally starving ourselves of the nutrients that we need to create an optimal metabolism to burn fat.  Fat burning does not happen with the standard American diet due to the fact that the foods included as a part of it create hormone dysfunction, highlighted by blood sugar problems, result in multiple nutrient deficiencies that often go uncorrected, and lead to a severe state of inflammation that is at the root of nearly every chronic disease.

How to Accelerate Weight Loss

Just as weight gain does not happen by accident, weight loss only takes place with the right actions.  Most importantly this means dumping your dietary habits that are part of the standard American diet and following a primal caveman diet as part of the paleo lifestyle.  The primal caveman diet, what many think of as the paleo diet, is almost the opposite of the average American diet.  It is full of high quality nutrients that help charge our metabolism and reduce inflammation.  This reduction in inflammation coupled with the inherent hormone balancing effects that the primal caveman diet offers makes it the optimal choice to promote weight loss.

The protocol to weight loss is simple.  It begins and ends with abandoning the ideas that have become commonly accepted as to what makes up a reasonable diet (and I use the term reasonable very loosely here!) and transitioning into the paleo diet as the foundation of a healthy lifestyle, aka, the Paleo lifestyle.