This is part one of a two part series in which I discuss my journey into eating a more holistic and natural diet. I am hoping this will inspire more people to consider changing their diet positively. This post covers my personal journey into paleo eating for those that may not have come across the diet before and an introduction to what I eat on a daily basis. Part two will be a much more practical take on how to adapt it to wilderness travel.
What is the paleo diet/lifestyle?
For those that don’t know, the paleo diet is a diet based on restricting certain foods that are damaging to our health and wellbeing. It is loosely based on what hunter gatherers (i.e. Palaeolithic man) would eat before the dawn of agriculture and typically restricts or eliminates processed food and focuses on wholefoods such as meat, vegetables and fish. The theory is that we as a homo sapiens have only been eating grains, legumes and and sugar rich foods in large quantities in relatively recent times (last 9-10,000 years), whereas meat, fish, vegetables and fruit have been around since the dawn of our species (between 200,000-300,000 years ago). Therefore, our bodies and brains are better set up to run on high amounts of fat and protein and comparatively fewer carbohydrates, without many of the additives and by-products that are a part of modern food.
In concrete terms, people on the paleo diet avoid inflammatory foods such as grains, dairy, vegetable oils and legumes, as well as high sugar or processed foods that spike insulin (blood sugar), in favour of foods that require little or no preparation such as meat, fish, eggs, nuts, vegetables, fruit and saturated fats. People do get quite hung up on the ‘paleo’ tag, but it is probably better to think of it simply as a diet that reduces fast and processed foods and replaces them with healthy whole foods.
My journey into simple eating
I started eating paleo nearly 8 years ago now and I feel healthier than I have ever been. I grew up with and spent most of my teenage years with massive upper back pain, a persistently blocked/running nose, chronically low energy and periodic colds that would last weeks. It was only when I started working as a swim teacher and had severe throat problems to the point of losing my voice that prompted me to start rethinking my diet/lifestyle (long hours in cold water shouting at the top of voice probably didn’t help). My mother – who trained as a herbalist – was the first to suggest removing milk from my diet as milk is often associated with mucus build-up in nose and throat. One month without milk and I my throat was healing up nicely, I also started cutting back massively on sugar mostly because I no longer drank tea (black tea with no milk was a step too far). As I started looking up sugar and milk free recipes, I came across the paleo diet. Giving up gluten was all to easy as I had already got rid of most baked and processed foods from my diet to avoid dairy, however, sugar was quite a bit harder as over the course of three months I went from 3! sugars in my tea and a constant stream of cakes and pastries to no sugar at all. If you’ve never tried it before, going sugar free is pretty rough as you are essentially breaking an addiction, but the experience is well worth having.
It took me about a year to settle into the diet to the point where I could see someone eating a pizza, ice cream or cake and not feel cravings or envy. Other people will often focus on ‘cheat days’ and substitutions for their favourite food, but I have always been all or nothing and so I adapted to an entirely different lifestyle. I will say that it was rather more rough on my family than me as they had to adjust the most to avoid cooking me Bolognese, buying me cakes or inadvertently putting milk in my tea. More distant family members and friends took some training and more than once I just had to accept their kindness and deal with the consequences later. The graphic below was a great aid to be able to send people to stick to their fridge when catering for me.
While it took me a year to get used to it and begin developing a recipe base, eating pattern and training methods for friends and family, I began to see the results about eight months in. The first thing to improve when I removed gluten was the back pain I had always been told was merely growing pains. I could suddenly carry a backpack for more than an hour without near crippling pain and the chronic stiffness in my shoulders almost disappeared completely. Also, without gluten and lactose in my diet my nose suddenly started to clear up. This was a borderline epiphany for me as for my entire life I had not been able to smell things that other people take for granted; the perfume of a rose, the petrichor of a rainy afternoon or even the scent of freshly brewed coffee (admittedly this has now opened me up to assault from all sorts of deodorants and perfumes).
It was at that point that I became hooked on self-improvement, I realised that I don’t have to just accept the way I am but I can continue working towards becoming the ideal version of myself. Cue many years of lifestyle shifts and forays into barefoot walking, blue light blocking glasses, yoga, meditation and more, as I tackled my low energy, lack of strength and set out to stay illness free. I also, after some initial hesitation, started massively increasing the amount of saturated fat and reducing carbohydrates (particularly from fruit), this really helped keep my energy levels stable and has had some really positive side-effects (such as increased resistance to sunburn). However, other than that, the core of what I eat has changed very little in that time, it is only as I have started experimenting with a mostly carnivore diet in the last couple of months that I have shifted away from vegetables and fruit a bit more and emphasised meat more heavily, but that is another story.
What I eat in a day
Breakfast – I typically try and avoid any carbohydrates at all before 11am and instead try and get as much fat and protein in as possible to get me through the morning (as I get up at 5am it can be a while before lunch), so this usually means three eggs (fried or scrambled) and an accompanying meat such us sausages, bacon, steak or hamburger patties. I also try and get two servings of fish in a week, rotating between salmon, sea bream, mackerel and haddock. My current goal is to introduce more organ meats such as liver, kidney and heart into my breakfast rotation but they can be a pain to keep fresh and cook right.
Drinks – I usually have my one and only coffee of the day about mid morning, typically black with butter and collagen powder blended in. Otherwise, for the rest of the day I either drink filtered water or herbal teas, depending on whether hot water is available or not.
Snacks – Most of the time, I try to avoid snacking but if there is a particularly large gap between meals I sometimes grab some nuts, make myself some tuna mayonnaise or eat some salami. After long and stressful days, I may also have some fruit and/or nut butters after supper in the evening.
Lunch/Supper – For the most part, what I eat for for lunch and supper is essentially the same. I batch cook meals three times a week getting roughly five portions out of each. I first choose whether I want to cook a roast, traybake, curry, slow cooker meal or pan meal. Then I choose a protein source, varying between poultry (chicken/turkey), red meat (venison/beef/ lamb) and pork. Finally, I aim for three different types of vegetables and cook in a saturated fat such as lard, beef tallow, ghee, duck fat or coconut oil.
So for one meal I might have a sausage traybake with sweet potato, courgette and red onion roasted in lard. While the next could be a venison curry with carrot, leek and ginger served on rice and cooked in coconut oil. These are then portioned out and put in the fridge/freezer and eaten over the course of the week.
Conclusion
Changing my diet and the lifestyle around is still one of the best choices I have ever made. It does often mean more work and planning ahead as you can’t just pop into a sandwich shop or service station for a quick bite and navigating restaurant menus and dealing with waiters can be a pain, not to mention explaining yourself over and over can be draining. However, I never feel that I am depriving myself, but rather I feel like I have been given the opportunity to explore the simple flavours of food without the numbing effects of vast amounts of sweetness. Changing your diet and eating completely differently is tough but if I can continue to enjoy life to my fullest well into my 80s, I’m willing to say no to that apple crumble.
If you are interested in better health, lower weight and more energy, I’d really recommend giving the paleo diet a try. Even if you only try it for 1-3 months, you will at least learn what different foods do to you and be able to make choices fully informed of the consequences and who knows, it may just benefit you and the people around you in ways you could not have imagined.
Resources
- Beginners guide to the Paleo Diet – One of the better articles out there, but like with everything, should be taken with a grain of salt.
- Paleoleap – My go-to recipe platform when I first started.
- Mark’s Daily Apple – Great intro articles on paleo/primal eating
- Practical Paleo Book – The most comprehensive book on paleo that I have found, includes a large section on why the paleo diet works including research on the topic.
I hope you got something out of this long ramble on diets. I realise that it is a bit of a departure from my usual content, but it is something that I feel very strongly about and think would benefit others. I am also currently looking at making all of the workshops and sessions I run paleo-friendly and having a what and why post may be helpful for that. If you enjoyed this post or have any further questions, let me know and keep a look out for part two.