The Dinosaur Diet

So I hesitate to say this – because I spend my professional life debunking gimmicky weird diets, and because personally I loathe them – but I’m doing the paleo diet and dare I say it’s working?

I know, I know. What could be wrong with beans or hummus or peanut butter all of the other often-arbitrary things the paleo diet says you cannot eat? My answer to that is: Nothing. I’m not doing super-strict paleo. I don’t care if I have paleo-accepted carbs (sweet potatoes, bananas) at every meal (something I'm pretty sure is against the rules), and if I eat peanut butter instead of almond butter one day, so what?

But what I am being strict about is avoiding any kind of bread, grain, or pasta – and for now, dairy. I’ve tried this diet a few times in the past couple of months, and didn’t get very far, because it’s super-unpleasant at the start. Like, you feel like you have the low-carb flu, or at least, I did. And it is tremendously unforgiving, in that if you slip, all you can think about it how miserable it’s going to be to repeat nearly two weeks of feeling pretty crap to borderline crummy.

But this time I have pushed on through to Day 18 and I’m feeling a lot better. And perhaps more importantly, I’m feeling a huge difference in my hunger. I don’t wake up starving. And when the hunger does come, it is different – somehow it gnaws less. It’s quieter. And I don’t think (much) about eating forbidden carbs. Like, the other day I was walking by a bakery I used to binge at and nearly forgot it was there.

I haven’t been weighing myself so I can’t speak to its general effectiveness in that department. But it’s making me hopeful again, and for now, that’s enough.

Day 18 without a binge.