Late Paleo Challenge Entry
The rest of my CrossFit gym started a month-long paleo diet last week. I didn’t want to try to go strict paleo while restricted to soft food, so my month started yesterday. Naturally, there’s a penalty for straying: 100 burpee pullups (as unpleasant as you might think).
The basics of the “paleo” diet are: no sugar, no processed foods, no beans, no grains. Meat, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and fruit are all fine. Coconut water, thankfully, is fine.
There’s a schism over dairy, and I’m firmly in the pro-dairy camp. Life without cheese just isn’t something I want to face.
I was on the same diet before Sectionals this year. Two parts of it were especially hard: no bread, and limited snack foods.
It’s very hard for me to cut bread out of my diet. I like it, it’s in lots of things I like, and it’s incredibly convenient. No burger buns, no sandwiches, no bread and cheese. Those are tough to give up.
The snack food problem is different. I seem to have gotten very tired of almonds (which are a paleo diet staple). Another issue is that convenience is a critical part of snack food for me, and most paleo-conforming food is less convenient than typical snack food. It’s unquestionably good for me to alter my snacking, but it’s the hardest adjustment as I generally snack on things at my lowest ebb.
All that said, I don’t think it’ll be too hard to stick to it for a month.
22 Jun 2010 at 22:37
Naturally gluten free!
23 Jun 2010 at 06:11
At last! I saw Niall posting obsessively about his ‘paleo’ diet on Facebook; I made a wisecrack about if he was restricting his diet to fossilised Protoceratops eggs but it didn’t hit the mark, clearly. Now I understand. It’s the ancestral European ‘Hunter/Gatherer’ diet, which to me makes a great deal of sense, but I believe that it does depend a bit on your ancestry and a bit of common sense. It’s logical though.
I can imagine that eating nothing but meat, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and fruit could get to be hard going from time to time. I hope you take the odd break and enjoy the fruits of the last 7,000 years of human food engineering – such as bread! Bread, I think, is up there with the wheel as a triumph of human engineering. Maybe moreso. The wheel was inevitable, you can’t help but notice it, but bread? That took research and study.
By the way, I’m sure that there is a difference between dairy, as milk, and dairy, as cheese and other further (processed) forms of dairy-based food. What about goat’s milk and goat’s cheese?
25 Jun 2010 at 22:42
snack foods:
Cheese and salami. I just discovered Halloumi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloumi
grill in a pan real quick before you serve it. zomg! Try it with strawberries.
which brings me to: Berries. Stock up.
Fruit. Nectarines are low glycemic-ish.
Bacon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Uncured bacon, center cut. cooks fast, tastes good with everything. I cook absolutely everything in bacon fat now. Just fry it up first, cook your meal in the fat, then throw the bacon back on there. (wait, do you eat pork?)
If you get tired of almonds, trader joes sells almonds that have lemon and tabasco…way better!
Good luck with the paleo challenge. I am on day 17. So far, thats just a few weeks without beer but whatever.
26 Jun 2010 at 10:43
Clay: Yup, that’s one of the key aspects of it!
Kev: Hopefully no common sense deficiency will diminish the effectiveness of the diet (maybe I should take supplements). No breaks for a month—that’s the point of the challenge. As for the cheese, yes, goat’s cheese and milk are preferred, but I’m not restricting myself on that front.
Zac: Thanks for the tips! I’d forgotten about Halloumi. I always stock up on berries, and yes, I certainly eat pork, so bacon is a staple.
28 Jun 2010 at 06:23
It would be great to see you in a loin cloth, spear in hand, in San Francisco treking a lone Racoon.