Photo by Graeme Churchard/CC
I’m not an alternative medicine or diet kind of gal, but in the middle of my despair I decided to try to follow the paleo diet. Why? Because this diet consists of healthy food. In a paleo diet, you just have to rule out grains, dairy, sugar and processed foods. If you are doing the autoimmune protocol it’s a lot harder and you must stop eating a lot of things, although you end up reintroducing them into your diet.
As it was my first time dieting I decided if I went too extreme I wouldn’t end up sticking to it, so I decided to leave the autoimmune protocol for later. Another problem was that I couldn’t lose weight, I was already too skinny so I tried to find out how you could put on weight, or maintain it, when following the paleo diet. I found out that people that didn’t want to lose weight kept eating sweet potatoes and, occasionally even the other types of potatoes and they also kept eating white rice. So, I did this and I ate so much while on this diet that I put on couple of pounds (I have a healthy weight now).
How did the diet go?
I FAILED! I couldn’t maintain the diet, it’s hard to eat paleo at every single meal especially when you are the only one in your family doing it. Therefore, after 3 weeks, I gave up and went back to eating normally. But I did find out that I eat very healthily because I didn’t have to give up on much, except the occasional bread and hot chocolate with lactose-free milk (lactose and I don’t get along very well). Also, all the cakes I eat are home made as are some of the cookies. When it comes to vegetables, fruit and soup, I eat plenty.
Apart from helping me put on weight, the paleo diet didn’t really help. After failing drastically, I did some research, to check if I should try it again, and found out that these restrictive diets don’t work for everyone. For these to work you must have a “trigger food” and be able to find it, which is very hard. Therefore, now I just focus on eating healthy and not on following a specific diet. I eat an increased the variety of vegetables, fruits and fish and, also, I try not to eat processed foods. To this, I try to add regular exercise and lots of fresh air.
Have a great painless week!
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(Any opinions expressed in Eduarda’s blog are not necessarily shared by Arthur’s Place. Nothing that you read in Eduarda’s blog constitutes medical advice.)
