Book Recommendation: The Paleo Diet for Athletes

If you’re an athlete, especially the type that trains for endurance, then you must check out this book. This is the first book of its kind that goes into great detail about enhancing your diet and exercise to be similar to those of our Stone Age ancestors. These were the days before food was easily accessible and filled to the brim with hormones and preservatives.

This book is backed by a powerhouse of research and it can get very technical. If you have little knowledge of how we train, or how our digestive system works, then you might be referencing the web a lot to know what the book talks about. The Paleo Diet for Athletes discusses reasons why simple sugars and starches are only beneficial for our bodies in a post workout period, how glycemic load and acid-base balance impacts performance during training or competition, and most importantly, why the “typical athlete diet” is bad for recovery, performance, and health. Throughout the book, the authors reference the lives of the caveman to compare how we live our lives today and how we used to live thousands of years ago. Not to mention, it debunks some of the diet choices that many athletes adhere to today.

Who should read this book?

This is a must-read for any athlete. A large part of the book is dedicated to endurance running, but nothing that cannot be applied to athletes of a different type, such as boxers, hockey players, and cyclists. If you compete, then this is a must if you are looking for gains in speed and endurance. Some chapters in this book detail what you should be eating during competitions, whether they last 1 hour or 8 hours.

The Paleo Diet for Athletes is also a must read for personal trainers. If you’re a certified personal trainer, then you already have the knowledge to easily understand what is presented in this book. You can apply some, or all, of the diet outlines in this book to help your clients achieve what they want to achieve.

Can I read this book to learn how to lose weight?

Yes. Even if you are not an athlete (for the sake of this article, a non-athlete would be anyone who does not dedicated a large amount of time during the week to training), this book can be incredibly beneficial. Later chapters of the book layout exactly what caveman foods you can eat, and what you should not eat and how these foods effect your body.

To reference some of the older articles on this site, this is not a “fad diet” book. When we say diet here, we mean an entire lifestyle of eating. This does not mean cutting out chocolate and soda for a month and seeing what happens. If you eat like a caveman, day in and day out, then you will be as fit as you can possibly be.

There is an earlier version of this book titled “The Paleo Diet”. I have not read that one, but I guess it is geared towards the average Joe than the athlete. You can probably pick up both copies for a discounted price at Amazon.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Book Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.