Review: Evolutionary Fitness

by Mike

www.ArthurDeVany.com

One-Liner

More science than an undergrad course, but simple and easy-to-apply principles make this a superb all-around diet/fitness system. May not be ideal for high-level athletes though.

Overview

The Evolutionary Fitness system encompasses both diet and exercise to work your body in a way that is consistent with it's evolutionary history. Like other Paleo diets, De Vany wants to eliminate modern foods (including grains, beans and dairy) and work out according to how a hunter-gatherer would have worked (short, intense bursts of activity).

The basics of the diet are pretty simple - eat nutritionally dense foods, stay away from grains, sugars and other foods that promote inflammation or have otherwise detrimental effects on the body and try to even out insulin spikes. A big sticking point for a lot of people will be the no supplements (De Vany does take an antioxidant supp).

On the exercise side, things are equally simple: short, intense workouts one to two times per week (both the day of the workout and the exercises in the workout should be randomized to a degree); intense work to limit oxidative stress and promote anabolic hormone release.

Easy enough, right?

In my personal experience, I went from heavy lifting and a diet pretty close to what was in the Grappler's Guide to Nutrition and hit a plateau at 195# (my goal was to get to 205# - I'd never been heavier than 195# in my life). From there, I injured my shoulder, stopped lifting and started eating in an EvFit manner (to be sure, I kept my normal class load at the gym). Within about six weeks, I had dropped about 10#, was noticeably leaner had more energy than before. Though I had stopped lifting, I had instructors notice the difference and ask what sort of lifting program I was working.

These four docs/posts from Art's blog will get you up to speed, after digesting (as it were), you can go through the rest of the Evolutionary Fitness posts for more background.

• The original Evolutionary Fitness essay (pdf file)
  
  
• Chapter One of the book - lays out some guidelines and background (pdf file)
  
  
• Sample workout
  
  
• "The Best Workout"
  

The Good

• Once you understand the basic principles, it really is easy to follow
  
  
• You'll become a much better cook, trying to work with essentially fewer ingredients
  
  
• The workouts are short, challenging and fun, even for people who don't like slinging iron
  
  
• I think this is the most comprehensive and useful diet/workout got all-round health. However, see the last point under "The Bad"
  
  
• Art's OK with drinking beer
  

The Bad

• I'm pretty sure the book is never coming out. Fortunately, aside from more science I don't know what else he's going to put in there.
  
  
• One big turnoff that's going to get to people is the "your body knows what it wants"/"do what you feel is right." This leads to the standard comeback, "if you knew what your body needed, you wouldn't be such a fatass in the first place." I can see this to a degree, but even in a rigidly monitored diet, there's still a lot of trial-and-error, so I'm not sure that there's a problem past a given diet guru's own biases. If keeping a journal helps you, keep a journal. If you don't have the discipline to stick to a diet of any regimentation, keeping a journal or not won't matter.
  
  
• No deadlifts? No bicep curls? No bench press? DeVany uses machines on occasion? Don't worry, it's OK, but these may be reasons for some to pass this workout by.
  
  
• This diet is for optimizing the human body, not sport-specific training. As such, I don't know that it's the best plan for martial artists competing at high (or even intermediate) levels of competition - Grappling/MMA requires you to be in some very strange positions, positions that DeVany wouldn't suggest to anyone (those with a high amount of shear forces on the spine). Neglecting to train those is asking for injury.
  
  Also, the daily, intense practice required, even for just skills training, is phenomenal and a full-time job for many pro fighters. This is vastly different than the "1-2 workouts a week, do something fun in between" that DeVany ultimate proposes.
  
  Then, there's the issue of supplements which are almost necessary to aid in recovery (if nothing else) for most athletes.
  
  That's not even getting into the diet and the difficulty of trying to stuff all those calories and macronutrients into not-six-meals-a-day.
  

Recommendation

Despite falling off of the EvFit way due to laziness, I was really happy with my energy levels and etc. while on it. Art's not a big fan of martial arts (from the perspective of keeping everything in line with what it's supposed to do, not necessarily what you can do with it), or at least considers it suboptimal, the training and diet methodologies make the most sense to me of anything I've read and combined with better results from this, I'm definitely a fan and recommend giving it a try if you're looking for something new. Just be sure to give yourself enough time to make sure you've got it and can gauge the results.

Updated 2/16/08 - totally forgot about the beer thing