6 days on this paleo diet has taught me more than the last three years trying to cut calories and eat healthier. No lie, I'm learning some good lessons.
Last night I finally made it to the grocery store and did a massive shop for a variety of things I can make throughout the week for lunches and dinners, as well as stuff for snacks inbetween. I got home and made dinner (a fried egg, cauliflower puree with sauteed spinach, mushrooms, onions and sausage) and tried my first attempt at paleo-baking. The dinner situation was delicious, the bread situation, not so much.
I figured it's been five days since I've had real bread, a paleo knock off will be a welcome substitute and stand in, right? Wrong. Valuable lesson number one: when it comes to bread, pastries, etc I won't be satisfied unless its the "real" deal which is obviously off the table for now, so for the next 23 days, I shall remain breadless. I'm not saying all paleo bread and baked goods are bad, I'm just saying I'm bad at making them and enjoying them and will therefore be refraining from them all together. And, most surprising of all, I don't really miss grains that much. Except for this, this I want in my stomach and around me at all times.
The second lesson I learned is that my attempts at portion control were stupid. The whole smaller sized portion, more frequent meal situation I was originally attempting was basically reduced to non-stop eating throughout the day, but never to satiety. My constant eating was the human equivalent to chumming the waters--me and Dr. Brody were both just asking for trouble by awakening the beast. But a friend suggested that I up the amount of fat I'm eating to help feel fuller longer, so for the last couple days, breakfast has been a whole avocado, mashed up with some lemon juice, salt and pepper and a green juice. It's a calorie bomb, which I'd have regretted immediately back in the good ol' days of calorie counting.
And this brings me to my third lesson, which I guess is something I knew but didn't really understand until I saw it first hand. I know calorie counting goes against the cornerstones of the paleo program, but I've been doing it anyway, just to get a sense of how differently processed foods are handled by your body.
Back then (which, i know was only 6 days ago) I'd be consuming roughly 1,900-2,100 calories a day, and aiming to burn anywhere between 500-800. So on my best days, I'd be taking in like 1,300 calories a day. To maintain my current weight, I should be netting 1,835 calories a day. So for a week the 500 calorie deficit would lead to a weight loss of one pound (3,500 calories). Not bad.
But with this paleo diet, I'm consuming around 1,500-2,000 calories a day, still aiming to burn between 500-800, and I've lost 4.5 pounds in the last six days. It's proof positive of everything that's said here, and it makes it that much easier to not miss the bread and the pasta.
My next step in this process is to start scaling back on the amount of coffee I'm ingesting, but that's a topic for another day.
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