Anyone who knows me well knows that I am not a healthy eater. I eat like a 5 year old. I am talking junk food and more junk are my staples. I feel like I should pause for a minute and talk about little bit about the foods I usually eat. I NEVER look at fat content, and I never ever eat fruit. I have not in the last 5 years worried about or stopped to even think about whether what I was putting into my mouth and body was good for me. This is why in the last 5 years I have gained 65 pounds. Normal foods for me have included krystal burgers at least once a week. You could open any drawer in my desk at work (when I worked) and you would find boxes of candy and junk. When Eric would stop at the store to buy snacks for me he would buy boxes of nerds 10 at a time and bags of chips and cookies. For dinner, I would make homemade pizza and calzones at least twice a week and on other nights we would have fried chicken and other horrible things. I NEVER thought about what I was putting into my body. That is until the day that I weighed and realized that I weighed 5 pounds less than I did when Jordan was born. That was a huge wake up call and I knew that I had to do something.
A few months ago my husband came to me with a crazy idea. He wanted to try a new eating plan. He wanted to try eating like a caveman…. He wanted to try the Paleo Diet. I took a look at the literature he printed for me (if you know my husband, you know he is all about the literature) I didn’t really read it I just set it aside. The truth is I wasn’t interested. The part that got me was that in this diet you have to eat fruit and vegetables, and you can’t dairy, grain or other junk. It sounded a little bit over the top to me. So, I did what I always do when Eric mentions something that I have no interest…. I smiled, I acknowledged him…. And I moved on. I honestly didn’t think anything else about it. About a month ago Eric brought it up again. I realized that this wasn’t just something that he had mentioned in passing, he was serious about it and that meant that I had to take another closer look at this, for him…. For us.
I started doing some research on this whole “Paleo Diet”. I tried to keep an open mind. On first glance I noticed something. I could eat all the meat that I wanted to eat. I like meat. My whole life I have always said that if there was ever a diet that I could be on where I could eat meat…. All that I wanted …. I might could lose weight. So, I talked to Eric and we decided that was as good of a place to start as any, so we went to the store and bought enough meat for the week. The other good part of this diet is that we can eat eggs. I like eggs. We bought eggs and sausage for breakfast…. And we bought meat for dinner. All I can say is that during that first week our food selections were pretty boring…. We had meat and no side items at all. We didn’t really know what kind of snacks to buy or eat… so we didn’t. I drank a lot of water and we ate whatever meat was left over as snacks. We also had a bag of beef jerky (which is totally Paleo and allowed). I was hungry almost all the time, but I didn’t cheat. Not once.
The first thing that I noticed was that I felt better, a lot better. Another part of this whole “Paleo” thing is that you cut out all dairy and grains…. Which gets rid of the gluten from your diet. Gluten and Dairy are very hard on your system , who knew.
OK… so the skeptic in me from the beginning said “How can I eat eggs and sausage every morning for breakfast…. Chow down on jerky and all other meat and lost weight”. I do have to say that at the end of that first week I stepped on the scale and I had lost almost 5 pounds. I didn’t exercise…. I didn’t “do without” or “starve” myself. We ate good…. Very good. I really missed my junk… and saying NO to nerds and other candy was really hard. BUT we did it and we lost weight. Eric and Katheryn (my 16 year old daughter) had very similar weight loss results too.
