by Karen Lirio

I have a lot of people asking me what I eat during my competition preparation because let's face it, we would all love to have that degree of control over our bodies even if we have no intention of standing on stage in front of hundreds of people and in nothing but a bikini.

Unfortunately, a lot of the things we do in preparation for competitions are not ideal as long term practices and we want the results of all our hard work to be long term. As a wonderful substitute I love the main principles behind the Paleo or Caveman Diet.

Like most "Diets", the Caveman Diet is a little extreme if followed to the letter but it is basically a whole foods diet that, combined with a few other healthy eating principles, has all the good things of a competition preparation diet but without the pit falls.

Following is a basic outline of the Caveman Diet, blended with some of the best comp prep principles, the government's more readily accepted good nutrition guidelines, and a little artistic license.

The main principle of the Caveman Diet is that you only eat those things that would have been available to Cavemen, which are basically whole foods consumed as close as possible to the way nature has provided them.The first thing to go with this style of eating is of course anything highly processed, which we already know have a tendency to be high in undesirable refined sugars and saturated fats. The most obvious of these are cakes, biscuits, pastries, sweets and soft drinks. Not so obvious things that would also fall into this category are bread, pasta, manufactured cereals and even white rice.

Shopping for a Caveman Diet should allow you to skip most of the middle isles of the supermarket leaving you with a shopping trolley full of fresh and frozen vegetables, fruit, lean meats, eggs, low fat dairy and a few cupboard stables like brown rice, oats, and raw nuts.

While brown rice, oats and low fat dairy are not technically part of the Caveman Diet they are accepted additions. The first two are also used very successfully in comp prep diets as a quality source of slow burning carbohydrates, and there is simply no avoiding the fact that low fat dairy products are the best way to get your daily calcium requirements.

Concerned about how you are going to remember all this? This is where the fun begins and a little imagination comes in handy.

The Caveman Diet is a simple "in" or "out" diet.

"In" are forgeable whole foods such as meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, tree nuts, vegetables, roots, fruit, berries, mushrooms etc.

"Out" is anything that resulted from the agriculture and animal husbandry revolution such as highly processed foods, refined sugar, extracted and refined oils, most grains, and large quantities of beans/legumes, potatoes and dairy.

There are no strict serving sizes for each food group in the Caveman Diet, but common sense dictates that our ancestors would have eaten the largest quantities of foods that were easy to hunt and gather, moderate quantities of foods that were harder to gather and/or required some manually processing, and only small quantities of foods that were hard to come by. If like me you prefer to use standard and/or recommended serving sizes, you will find that the above principle works with these very well.

Let's play with some examples. A medium sized animal carcass might provide a family with small serves of red meat for a couple of days which could then supplemented with a catch of fresh fish and a wild scrub hen or two. Green leafy vegetables would have been easy to gather in large quantities so would feature predominantly in your diet but root vegetables require a little more work to gather and prepare so might be consumed more sparingly. Fruits would have been seasonal and harder to come by, and therefore eaten in small quantities and as a treat. Fats and oils would have been consumed in very small quantities and obtained whole from things like olives and avocados, tree nuts, seeds, and meat sources (I can't imagine Caveman being motivated enough to extract the oil from these foods and fry their food in it!).

The use of salt and spices is generally accepted when following a Caveman Diet but be careful with the quantities of these. Try to image how practical it would have been to collect and hand process these things before deciding how much to tip all over your food. Your taste buds will adjust to not having these things and you will be pleasantly surprised at how good food tastes without them. The same goes for sweeteners. Highly processed white sugar is definitely out. Honey and Maple Syrup would be more logical Caveman options but again you need to envisage how difficult these things would have been to come by when determining how much you should use.

Arguably the only truly Caveman beverage is water. If you want juice you will need to waste a considerable amount of your precious fruit to extract enough of it, and it wouldn't be anywhere near as filling as consuming the fruit whole. If you want caffeine then green tea would be the most likely option but if you also want milk in that you will need to chase some poor lactating animal around to get it!

The inclusion of alcohol in a Caveman Diet is controversial but I figure that our ancestors would have OCCASIONALLY come upon and eaten fermented fruit. I remember once seeing drunk Cockatoos flopping around our backyard after discovering a fermented banana.

Whole foods are naturally nutrient dense so supplementation shouldn't be needed, but listen to your body on this one. A lot of people believe that our soils let us down. Poor nutrients in the soil equals poor nutrients in the food that grows there and that feeds off what grows there. To make your Caveman diet even more nutritious try wild game meats and fish, and organic everything wherever you can.

As for when to eat, the Caveman Diet advocates that food should be eaten when hungry rather than at set times of the day or after set periods of time. This is based on the understanding that food was gathered in response to hunger pains. If this is true then I don't think much of our ancestors' intelligence! Who wants to get caught out hungry!!! Hunt in advance, prepare and pack all of your food in advance, and eat small quantities every three to four hours to keep your blood sugar on an even keel and your metabolism kicking. These are readily accepted principles of both competition preparation and healthy eating guidelines. I also, personally, like to eat by the clock otherwise I'd simply eat all day.

I truly believe that following the Caveman Diet principles can be a lot of fun, tastes great, and will leave you with a too hot to handle and disgustingly healthy body to boot.