About two years ago, under the advice of my husband's personal trainer, before Paleo became popular and cool (yep, I'm a trendsetter), I tried the Paleo diet. It was the best thing that has ever happened to me. I'm serious, but not for the reasons you are expecting.
There wasn't really anything wrong with my weight, I had a healthy BMI, but my diet was appalling. Breakfast consisted of a cup of coffee guzzled as I struggled with eight flailing arms and legs with one hand, holding onto my dogs collar with the other so he didn't lick the table that the kids had rubbed their breakfasts' into.
My next meal was anywhere between as-soon-as-I-dropped-the-kids-at-school, and sometime-before-I-picked-them-up-again. On a good day, lunch was a bar of chocolate. On a bad day, lunch was a large block of chocolate. I was hungry but I was time poor and lazy, not necessarily in that order. Then there was some grazing that happened while I made the kids their dinner, followed by dinner with my husband after the kids were tucked away in their bed. Less than ideal.
Fast forward past the boring details, I purged my pantry and my life of all things not eaten by cavemen. It was hard at first. REALLY hard because I loved chocolate. Some of my closest friends remember the good ol' days when it was not unusual to find me, a jar of Nutella and a spoon up close and personal. But after a few weeks eating Paleo, I felt fantastic. I was no longer tired all the time. I even lost some of my squishy bits left over from having my two children. I had energy and I no longer found myself ravenously stuffing my face with chocolate. I ate meals. Sometimes I snacked. And all of the things that I ate were wonderful fresh whole foods. I was a new woman and could have definitely been posting before and after shots on Paleo Pete's Facebook page so that his tribe could pat me on the back and tell me how wonderful I looked. But like I said, Paleo wasn't cool yet so there was no tribe to preach to.
"So what's your point?" I hear you say. "I thought you weren't into diets, let alone fad diets", I hear you say.
Let us compare the foods I was eating before, with the foods I was eating after:
BEFORE:
Chocolate, coffee, the same baby spinach, tomato and avocado salad pretty much every night, eggs, bread, pasta, meat, fish, dairy.
AFTER
No more chocolate, a variety of fruit and vegetables, nuts, seeds, eggs, meat, fish, dairy
Do you see the pattern?
The Paleo diet worked on me because my baseline was so terrible that anything at all would have been better than what I was eating before. My diet was 70% rubbish and became more like 10% rubbish.
The take-home message here isn't to bad-mouth any particular diet. I say what I said above, partly tongue in cheek because Paleo has gotten way out of control and become highly polarising. I want you to think critically when you see celebrities, friends, family members, self-proclaimed experts touting their diet as the cure to all modern diseases. When they start posting miracle stories about how they cured autism, diabetes, cancer etc, ask yourself what these people were eating before they went on their miracle diets. Were they eating poorly before and therefore anything was an improvement? Or were they people who were already eating healthily who still cured all of their ailments by adopting their miracle diet?
