Recently I’ve been reading a lot about the Paleo Diet, which essentially promotes cutting out grains, all processed sugars, and dairy. I first heard about the paleo/primal lifestyle through the blogosphere and initially thought of it as a restrictive hoax. But the more I research, the more it makes sense to me. I’ll explain my reason why later.
To supplement the research I do online, I bought The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson and am seriously considering this “diet” of sorts as a lifestyle change. Now, I’m not jumping right into anything; I’d like to do more research first and consider how changing my diet will affect my life. But just to see what a day of paleo life would look like, I stuck to 90% paleo eats yesterday. No grains, no added sugars, but I did eat some dairy.
For breakfast, I scrambled two eggs with onion and tomato. On the side I had some coffee and blueberries! I now know that I don’t like tomato in my eggs; too mushy. Otherwise, I didn’t feel very full after this meal.
For lunch I threw together a salad composed of greens, assorted olive bar items, and 1.5 salmon cakes. I simply added some chopped onion, red bell pepper, an egg and spices to a can of wild caught salmon and fried the mixture in a pan. The whole mixture made three salmon cakes, so I have some leftovers. The cakes were surprisingly tasty and I enjoyed them much more than salmon salad. I finished off the meal with some unpictured raw cashews.
I was pretty hungry by the time dinner rolled around so I helped Kelly out by marinading chicken in orange juice, lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper. I also topped some fresh asparagus with Tessemae’s Lemon Garlic dressing, sliced mushrooms, salt, pepper and Parmesan cheese and roasted it in the oven. We also had a salad on the side. I was absolutely stuffed after this meal but felt good enough to eat again only two hours later.
For dessert, I whipped up a recipe from Mark’s Daily Apple: Sweet & Tart Rhubarb and Berry Dessert Sauce. I had only blueberries on hand and no vanilla, but it turned out delicious, regardless. I used full fat Greek yogurt in place of whipped cream and tried to make my dessert pretty like the picture, but it just wasn’t happening. For some reason, I could barely finish this but I knew I needed the calories so I eventually ate the whole thing.
Overall, I think I need to really give myself more time to get used to the idea of not eating grains. I still have some oats and granola that I want to use up, and I also have some sunbutter that has added sugar in it. I don’t want that all to go to waste. Just from yesterday, I realized that SO MANY things contain added sugar. Things like dijon mustard and even salsa. My hunger/fullness cues were definitely affected by the lack of grains. I would feel pretty full and satisfied after eating and then an hour later I’d be ready to eat again. I definitely think I need to add more calories from fat and even carbs (fruits/vegetables) to my daily diet if I plan to eat paleo. In the meantime, I’ll be finishing off some steel cut oats and the last of my Michelle’s Granola!
Have a great Wednesday!
