True dat…
30 days or so ago, I awoke from yet another wine-carb-junkfood hangover and thought “enough”. Inspired by a posting from a fellow blogette, I thought to myself that finally I might have stumbled on a sensible, healthy program that didn’t make me want to ridicule its proponents till they cried, for adhering to faddish, precious rules that made no scientific sense to me. That program is called “Paleo”.
I’m not going to bore you with an in-depth recounting of what Paleo is all about (I will, though, list relevant links in a future post so you can check out if you are interested); in a nutshell, don’t eat any processed food, grains of any kind including corn, rice, wheat or any of those so-called “healthy” ones like spelt or amaranth, and buy organic high quality produce instead or factory/mass farmed crap. Some people who eat this way also turn away from cow juice, but I decided since a blood test showed I have no intolerance to it I would include small amounts of raw dairy such as kefir, goat’s cheese, etc. but steer away from cow milk anyway since it is pumped full of antibiotics which mess up your natural hormone levels. I also now have almond or hazelnut milk in my single morning coffee.
So What Can you Eat?
- I ate tons of food: when you take out one staple food group like grains, there is far more scope for the healthy stuff. Lots of meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds, etc. In the last month I went from someone who would spit on any apple that came into my line of vision to someone who finally empties the fruit bowl into my intestines before it has a chance to turn into a rotting mass of fructose and mold, and crawls itself to the bin. You are also encouraged to eat fat like extra virgin olive oil and butter instead of fake hydrogenated crap. I have always agreed that good quality fat won’t make you overweight, and other more scientifically credible sites will explain how you need fats to catalyze other nutrients which your body otherwise cannot absorb.
But really, what did you eat?
- Ok, so I kept a food diary the first weeks, mainly to give me ideas and get me through the “shit, what on earth can I eat now” panic that set in when I couldn’t just reach for the makings of a sandwich. So in case you are curious, the kind of things I now eat are:
Breakfast: Bacon or smoked salmon and eggs, or kefir/raw yoghurt with berries and honey, or fruit smoothies, or the paleo version of banana bread or blueberry muffins.
This morning’s new, better breakfast: Kefir, blueberries, honey and a dose of attitude…
Lunch: Salads with salmon and broccoli, Tuna and avocado salad, lettuce wraps with ginger pork, a big mushroom and courgette omelette, that sort of thing.
Dinner: Baked sweet potato with lamb chops, roast beef with a mixed veggie roast, chicken breasts marinaded in garlic, lemon and rosemary grilled and served with a Greek salad, barbecued pork skewers with asparagus. And so on.
Snacks: I snacked on fresh and dried fruit, olives, unsalted nuts, and the occasional Paleo brownie.
A very tasty brownie with no sugar or flour, this one clearly tried to escape the jaws of death while in the oven, but my belly had other plans…
The Benefits!
Oh my God I feel superhuman. All these vitamins and minerals, amino acids and other magical compounds of mother nature make me wake up and bounce out of bed each morning instead of repeatedly thumping the snooze button for that extra half hour in dark exhaustion. My skin has never been clearer, no dark circles under my eyes, and I am energetic and less moody. In short, it’s as if a superior life-form has taken over my body and I feel really well. I think this is how we are meant to feel. During the month, I stuck fairly closely to the prescribed diet outlined above, and yesterday as an experiment, ate some crappy white bread to see if there really was anything to this new regime. I immediately broke out in hives. Not cute. Previously a blood test revealed my body produces antibodies to gluten, so though I am not coeliac, it seems my digestive system is happier without bread.
Previously, my liquid intake during the day went like this: coffee, coffee, small glass of water, tea, tea, tea, wine, maybe one more small glass of water if I ran that day. Bad, right? Now I am a dedicated water glugger and actually enjoy this mysteriously transparent but refreshing liquid despite the fact that creatures multiply in it.
Weight Loss
Did you skip down to read this part first? Shame on you! 
Firstly, I didn’t start out with any weight problem, and despite my defensive years of eating of junk food in case it all runs out, haven’t been truly fat since years ago, when in my young, misguided though well-intended version of girl-wisdom I decided to get the baby thing out of my system; (yes, there was once a live human in my abdomen, stealing all my food. This freaks me out too). It helps being on the taller side of average (5″ 7) and that none of my ancestors had a chance to supersize our gene pool; I’m Irish and we’ve had potato famines and slavery to get over, neither of which have a reputation for making anyone fat. My reason for doing this was because I was sick of feeling like crap, having gross digestive problems and itchy, sneezy allergies, and a doctor told me I should be avoiding gluten if I wanted to stop feeling this way.
So, despite the fact that I fried everything in butter and oil, and eating plenty, I lost seven pounds. In fact, extremely weirdly I lost most of those seven pounds all in the first five days and was sure it was just water loss, but no, it stayed off never to be seen again. I imagine if I had refrained from inhaling nuts and fruit in vast quantities, I may have even lost more but I think such picky carefulness veers into the territory of obsessive skinny-itis which is bad for a girl’s general happiness. Plus, tits like two wet tea-bags and a flat, quintessentially white-girl ass is not a look I am aiming for.
Christina knows what I’m talking about: guys don’t make passes at girls with flat asses…
The Downsides…
Of course there were some cons to this way of eating. Before I went into this, I read up on the various ins and outs but nobody particularly mentioned that it was a low carb programme. To preface, I have always thought Atkins is a stupid, stupid diet that will make you die of heart disease, strangling your heart and other organs with saturated fat and furry arteries. That’s why I thought Paleo would be better, because it doesn’t ask you to weigh or measure anything, absolutely no calorie counting and certainly no bullshitty ‘don’t eat this type of fruit or that type of vegetable because it’s starchy/carby and will make you fat”. However, with all the meat and having cut out the major carb sources inadvertently, the first two weeks I plunged into “low carb flu” hell. This is because your body stores all the glucose from your quick-release carbs in your muscles, and when you stop consuming them, has to now learn to convert energy from fat and protein, which sends you into a temporary spiral of energy-less hell that eventually passes. I made a note of how shitty that feels, which went as follows: “can’t run for crap, no energy, constantly thirsty, nauseous, fatigued, wiped out, oh god can I die now”. Also, I will tell you a disgusting fact about myself in the name of full disclosure: all the ketones from the meat and eggs irritated my bladder and I was constantly on the loo for an alarming few days there. I run thrice weekly, and during those early weeks was a pathetic embarrassment to myself. I decided to keep exercising but scale it back slightly, and add some sweet potato and banana into my diet. Eventually, the feeling of running through sludge passed and I’m back to being a mediocre but happy runner. And back to feeling superhuman.
The other downside: my grocery bill for the past month has been up 30% more than usual. I can take the hit, but it still pisses me off. I could be buying shoes with that extra dough. But whatever, at least I will look fabulouser in all the many, many shoes I already own. Oh, and you spend a lot of time cooking and shopping. This is fine by me since I do a certain amount of that anyway.
Will I Keep it Up?
- Certainly. I love how I feel, and I don’t crave junk any more or even miss bread at all. Believe me, for someone whose usual daily intake revolved around bread (really: toast for breakfast, sandwich for lunch and bread for snacks and maybe with dinner too) replacing it with fruit and vegetables has been way less hard than I thought. The hardest thing was acclimatizing my mental roster of “what can I eat” to new food ideas, but a month of trying this out has made those choices easy peasy. I don’t intend to morph into a revirginized eater completely or bore people with my diet zealotry, I’m sure the odd mouthful of ice-cream or movie popcorn with pass my lips occasionally (certainly the red wine and chocolate has still made appearances) but I feel like a new woman. I would recommend this to anyone.
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