The Paleo Diet for Athletes: A Nutritional Formula for Peak Athletic Performance

Not “low carb” – ancestral
This is a great book for serious athletes and also recreational athletes.One of the problems I have with all the “low carb” books is that they all focus on “high fat diets”. Well… according to the nutrition books I’ve read and a dietitian I was sent to – vegetables and fruits are carbohydrates and necessary. And the more active you are, the more you need. are. For optimum health when active, it isn’t the elimination of carbohydrates (unless you are of inuit descent where they’ve adapted) it is ancestral health.What is ancestral health? It is what our bodies have adapted to after tens of thousands of years of evolution. See… the whole idea of packaged foods, year round access to all foods, sedentary lifestyle, etc… are all too recent for our bodies to evolve. For dozens of centuries we didn’t have packaged foods. For dozens of centuries, we didn’t have year round access to all foods. For dozens of centuries, we didn’t have desk jobs – so we weren’t athletes – but we were always active. Since both authors have advanced degrees (Loren Cordain has a PhD in Exercise Physiology and Friel a M.S. in Exercise Science), it is heavy on science. The authors base their claims on numerous sources, and reference these sources throughout.Cordain (and Friel) do have a slight twist in the adaptation to the endurance athlete. Yet… I’d guess that our ancestors were low intensity endurance athletes. The focus of the book is essentially what did our ancestral heritage have available. They didn’t have simple sugars – yet they also didn’t run all out marathons. Having said that, the book does allow for some minor adjustments for training for endurance events. It talks about what types of food to eat and when.

Same Book, Different Cover
If you didn’t buy the 1st Paleo Diet Book, then this book is great. It goes over why our body doesn’t function correctly by eating processed foods like the first book. There are certain elements and key points the author goes over that should be part of an athlete’s diet. I felt many points were mentioned in the 1st book and the Paleo Diet for Athletes book. The Athlete book was just a regurgitation. There are so many foods that are listed that aren’t good for our bodies. I now hesitate to eat anything off the supermarket shelves. I stick to the fruit and vegetable aisles though not every kind of “fresh fruit and vegetables” are good for you.

A Book for Marathon Runners
This book is thorough and provides a way for proactive athletes to maximize their performance while staying true (mostly) to the Paleo diet. I purchased this book because I would get free shipping due to going over some set cost on Amazon and it just didn’t make sense not to.It’s not one of my favorite Paleo books due to the fact I am not yet a marathon runner and I don’t work too hard in the exercise/exertion department, BUT I have learned a lot from it that I can still apply to my lazy Paleo-eating lifestyle. If I were a marathon runner, triathelete, college sports player, etc. this would be amazing.Overall, I’m happy with my purchase. It was basically a free book and I’m smarter now. It’s not a book I really sat down and just read. It’s very science-y compared to other books I read.

great ”know how to do” book to optimize nutrition before, during and after workouts…their is also some great quick recipes that are smart and low fat…recommend for everybody that want to reach another level in their training.

At first glance I was a little disappointed as I immediately looked for the daily / weekly diet plan. There’s a wee bit of work to be done with this book, you actually have to read it through. You can skip the rather in depth chapter 5, which gets right down to the molecular structures of fatty acids, and go back to it later :)What you may want to do though is make up your own diet plan using the wealth of information provided and dependent on the amount of training you are doing.The Paleo Diet For Athletes is split into five stages. Stage 5 is essentially the Paleo Diet which I assume gets well covered in the other book. The other stages may well already be familiar to athletes who are up to date with the latest training techniques the whole thing is knitted neatly together with each stage explained fully.The book is a sensible and apparently very well researched piece of work which should appeal to anyone interested in living a healthy lifestyle.

Well written book about the original human diet and its applicability to endurance training and competing. The premise is that by following the original diet of man, prior to the agricultural revolution, we can reduce or reverse the effects of western diseases such as inflamation, cancers, diabetes etc, etc, but also optimise performance.I bought this book to get some idea of how it applies to sports and to get some of the basics of the Paleo Diet. Became interested when I read about this diets positive effects on inflammatory diseases (I’m 36 yrs old and have rheumatoid arthritis and spondylitis so thought it was something I needed to try). If it could only cure my male pattern baldness I’d be ecstatic !Cant compare it to any other books on the subject, but having read this book, and having kept up to date with podcasts on the topic from Robb Wolf, I feel that I know the basics, are applying them, and am having reasonable success from a disease standpoint, good success from the standpoint of body composition.Would point you towards the original paleo diet book by the same author if you just want to know about the diet. Would also point you towards the iminent Robb Wolf book (The Paleo Solution) if you’re more interested in the diets applicability to weight training and power events.