The Paleo Diet - Our Thoughts and Experience

Well - my week *trying* to eat Paleo was not very successful, and I think there are some ways I could have made it more so. Andrew did much better.

Like Laura said in her guest post, eating Paleo forces you to be more prepared - and I wasn't.  I didn't have a meal plan at the start of the week, and I hadn't stocked up on Paleo friendly groceries.  So as it was there were many nights when I had no idea what to make for dinner, and didn't have the necessary ingredients anyway.  We ended up eating out more than we normally would.

Also, somehow we basically ate chicken the whole week.  This was, again, due to my lack of planning, and I am sure that had we had more variety of meats I would have felt more satisfied - both physically and emotionally.

Those two things aside, I found this way of eating very hard to stick too.  Maybe it's my first trimester state, feeling nauseous half the time and ravenous the other!

Breakfasts weren't too bad - I've never had so much bacon in a week - although some questioned the healthiness of that.  The smoothies we made tasted different than our usual ones, but they were still very delicious. 

Lunch also was pretty good.  We started making these amazing salads with avocado, hard boiled eggs, chicken and other veggies.  I usually don't really enjoy salad but these were really good!

For snack time we started eating a lot of almond butter with various fruits, and I found it was especially nice with peaches.  As I'm writing this I'm seeing that a lot of good did come out of this week! :)

That said, even though we were eating yummy food - it seemed that they never really filled me up.  That was the hardest thing - I never felt satisfyingly full!  Mid-week I went out for lunch with my parents and though I tried to order a Paleo-friendly salad (spinach, beets, walnuts, red onions and balsamic vinaigrette), my parents ordered a bunch of appetizers to share.  Next think you know I was filling up on baked brie, coconut shrimp, and the most amazing quesadillas.  Also a Godiva triple chocolate cheesecake...  At first I thought "Ugh. I feel so full (in a gross way)".  But within fifteen minutes I was feeling satisfyingly full and the feeling stayed around for hours into the afternoon!  It was that feeling of "fullness" that I missed the most. 


Besides the above mentioned meals we had, one recipe we tried we really loved was Paleo Chicken Lo-Mein.  Also one night we had bun-less homemade burgers with sauteed mushrooms, onions and avacado and they were very yummy.