Four Month results… expected, and otherwise

We’ve now been on the Primal/Paleo journey as a family for four months, and it is a great opportunity to size up where we are as we look to the future.  It has been an amazing ride, one that has constantly reinforced itself as a permanent change by the sheer magnitude of the impacts it has had on us.  Some changes have been expected, but many have not been anticipated.  And all of them have been positive.  So here is a run down of the expected results:

1) I have dropped 25 pounds.  I knew I would lose weight, and probably lose it pretty quickly.  I guess I didn’t anticipate how easy it would be, and how much it would seem to “melt” off.  And keep in mind, I have been far from perfect.  There are more days than I would like to admit where my 20% exceptions have been much more than 20%.  If I had been more rigorous, this loss would certainly have been higher.  But I am happy with it and my pace is sustainable.

2) My blood work has improved.  My “good” cholesterol is up and my bad cholesterol is down.  My blood pressure is the lowest I can remember it being since I was a teenager, although admittedly mine wasn’t too bad to begin with.  My triglycerides are down, and my blood sugar is looking great.

3) I have substantially more energy.  This is to an almost ridiculous degree.  Maybe two or three nights in the last four months I have plugged my girls into a movie and napped on the couch after work.  It used to be far, far more common of an occurrence.  I also no longer feel totally drained and exhausted in the afternoon at work.  My mental and physical stamina is up.

4) The girls have a greater attention span, and their moods do not swing as much.  They are still little, so the effects aren’t huge.  But they are noticeable, and they help.  Most importantly, Mary has stopped complaining of her stomach hurting after almost every meal.  Clearly, she was significantly gluten intolerant just as we suspected.

Most of these results were expected, based on the most basic understanding of the why and how of the primal diet that I had aquired before beginning this journey.  Since then, of course, my knowledge base has expanded, so many of the impacts I will list as unexpected really shouldn’t have been unexpected.  They are mirrored by many, many other testimonials.  Nevertheless…

1) My skin is clearer and less dry.  Less often am I tormented by very oily face or too dry, itchy feet and legs.  I have dry skin, and that will always be so, but the extreme dry is gone.  I am much more comfortable in my own skin.

2) My hypoglycemia is GONE.  It was gone in less than a week and it has never returned.  I am no longer controlled by my need to eat every two hours or get severely sick.  I used to be totally driven by the nausea and lightheaded feeling I would get if I skipped a meal or went too long between meals.  Now I can choose when and if I am going to eat, and occasionally have to even remind myself to do so.  If there are no good food alternatives around, I simply fast.  No big deal.

3) My hormones seem to be more under control.  Mood swings seem to be a thing of the past.  My husband is grateful, I am sure.  Aside from those, overall I feel like a more emotionally stable person.

4) I seem to be more sun-resistant.  I know this sounds crazy, but I do not burn as easily.  And considering how pale my skin is, that is really saying something.  My body seems to be able to handle the natural environment around it better.

5) I sleep so much more soundly, I rarely remember anything about the hours I am sleeping at all.  I wake up much more refreshed.  My body is more persistent in demanding that bedtimes be obeyed.  It rewards me with the best sleep I’ve had in years.

6) All sorts of minor stomach issues I never really noticed, or thought were normal, have totally vanished.  They weren’t normal.  Why did I ever believe they were?

7) I can actually, well and truly, keep up with my kids.  And oh my goodness, do they love that!

8) Everything about the way I see the world has changed.

Ok, so what does that last one mean?  It means that I no longer take it for granted that we are supposed to get more and more tired, more and more sick as we age and move towards the ends of our life.  I no longer believe that I am supposed to feel much more exhausted all the time in my 30s than I did in my 20s.  Because now I don’t.  We were created to exist on this world, and we weren’t created to be sick and weary and diseased and broken.  We were created to live and thrive.  After all, for however long we lived before technology, even before agriculture, we did manage to not only exist but thrive.  Thrive to the point that we are here in the billions now, able to create and consume our technology.  Why is it suddenly ok that a quarter of our population needs a psych medication to survive?  What did we do before those medicines existed?

The way I contextualize everything I see has changed.  My whole perspective on the world around me has altered irrevocably.  I never thought that was going to happen.

Finding the right doctor

Going paleo/primal is hard enough, in some ways, without having to do battle with your own physician.  After we went primal, I dreaded what seemed like it would be an inevitable confrontation with my existing doctor.  It wasn’t just about saturated fat and heart unhealthy whole grains, but suddenly it was about antibiotics and every other aspect of the management of my health care.  Once I started to realize that my body wasn’t broken, that it wasn’t supposed to be weak and sick all the time, and once I started to experience how I was supposed to feel, suddenly everything else I had ever been taught came into question.

I knew I wouldn’t have to do battle with our pediatrician, thank God.  We had already switched pediatricians, because we were sick of them trying to force our children into strict timelines of development despite the fact that we knew there was nothing wrong with our children and they were fine.  (We were right, by the way).  Our current pediatrician understands that parents should be the primary arbiters of health care decisions for their children.  He is there to provide information and expertise, but not to make the final decision.  He is incredibly respectful of our convictions and our choices about how we raise and feed our children.  He provides the kind of support a parent needs from a doctor.

And I knew I needed that same kind of support from my own doctor.  So I found a doctor listed in the paleo physicians network who was accepting new patients in my area and also took my insurance.  Despite his listing in the directory, I was still extremely nervous about how all of it was going to go.  Most of my experience with doctors has been pretty neutral–mainly the general assembly line, pill prescribing type.  But what a difference a good doctor can make.  My first visit with my new doctor was a radical shift from what I was used to experiencing.  First of all, he actually knew more about nutrition than I did.  Can you imagine?  A medical doctor who understands the importance of what we eat and take into our bodies?  It just shouldn’t be that radical or amazing, but it really was.  To have someone who knew what I knew, plus more, plus all of the medical knowledge I would never know on top of it all… this was truly amazing.  Even the best doctors I had ever had up until this point still couldn’t touch my level of knowledge on nutrition, for the most part.

And he also understood hormones, and how our bodies work with them, and how they can be out of whack.  He ordered a blood test for a hormone that is probably too high in my body, and which we may be able to fix.  If this turns out to be true, it will be the first time in my life someone has been able to offer me hope for a chronic condition I have dealt with almost my whole life that, unfortunately, diet alone could not fix.  Just the thought that there might even possibly be a solution is enough to make me feel as if a miracle had occurred.  And I realize that there are hundreds of other conditions out there that diet does cure and yet are treated by doctors just the same way–as though there is no hope or possibility for cure.  They are just to be “managed.”  Or medicated, of course…

Finding a doctor who understands the primal journey, understands what it can do for your life and is not only supportive, but encouraging… this is a great and wonderful asset.  They understand, as have all who have really embraced the primal way of living, that human life has so much more to offer than we think.  That we are supposed to be strong, healthy, energetic and full of vitality.  That something is deeply wrong with our society and the way it accepts illness and depression and stress as normative.  They understand that our bodies and are lives are supposed to be truly alive.

Being THAT customer…

I hate to admit it, but going primal has has turned me into that customer.  The one with the laundry list of I special requests, the series of cooking questions, the meticulous examiner of ingredient lists.  Suddenly, I am the lady at the restaurant who can’t just order something, for heaven’s sake, without tuning it into a major production.

The truth is that for me, going primal is reasonably easy at the grocery store, and it would never be the least bit difficult if I never left my house, but when I occasionally find myself at a restaurant I find myself at a crossroads of difficult and treacherous decisions to make.  How much can I even know from the menu? Sure, it includes a basic list of ingredients, but certainly some industrial seed oils of significant quantity are going to find themselves used in the production of the final meal.  And, of course, more likely than not the vegetables, fruits and meat used to make this meal are not ideal.  But even if I can chock all that up to the inevitable 20% cheat, my order still ends up a lengthy list of substitutions.

Rarely I run across someone who truly understands, some restaurant or employee who gets it.  Maybe they have family with Celiacs or other food allergies, or maybe they are just more aware of what is going on in the world of nutrition, but these rare encounters make eating out momentarily bearable.  It’s nice to have that rare employee not look at me with repressed eye-rolling.  It’s not as if I don’t try to be nice and understanding about it, realizing that I’m being difficult.  I am not one of those people who takes immense joy in the inherent self-definition of being counter-cultural.  I wish the whole culture was going with me on this, or that I didn’t have to be so radically different about my food choices.  But I can’t ignore what I’ve learned, I can’t unlearn it, and I can’t pretend I don’t know anymore.  I have to make the choices I make, I am totally compelled by the total sense of well-being and energy and healthfulness my new lifestyle has brought to me.  But I still wish it wasn’t so difficult sometimes.

I read blogs all the time where it was an effortless transition, but I am not that person.  I still stare at the junk food aisles in the gas station with some small amount of craving.  I still have to explain to myself for a moment why eating myself into a total sick stupor on milk chocolate and Skittles would be a very, very bad idea.  The dessert menu at a restaurant is still a significant battle I have to face with myself.  Oh, sure, I can skip the gluten with no question, but skipping the sugary ice-cream sundae or strawberry milk shake?  That is an entirely different issue.  Again, if I never left my house, none of this would be an issue.  Readily available, delectable and satiating foods are always available there.  It is no big deal, and even a big pleasure, to cook up something amazing that is entirely primal-approved.

Maybe that’s why I go through more agony over being “that” customer than others seem to experience.  But I am slowly learning to embrace it–to see it as a sign that I am heading in the right direction even if it sometimes feels as if no one around me is coming along for the ride.  We are fighting the tide, and it probably isn’t going to get much easier.  After all, in the next few years my children will start school.  Then I have to figure out how to explain to their teachers what they can and cannot eat and why it is that way.  My oldest will probably fight that battle mostly by herself, with little intervention needed from me.  She is the one who asked grandma why the lettuce was “white” on her restaurant salad (totally confused at the absence of spinach or dark green spring mix) and also told grandma that she didn’t want a cookie because it has gluten, and we don’t eat that stuff.  As she gets older, she will be the one who takes great pride and joy in ordering everything a la carte, everything specially prepared, everything with substitutions or exceptions.  She is just the sort of person to embrace the difference in a way I struggle with.  I admire her for it, and I’m hoping that as she grows older, I will become more like her.  Eventually,  I will learn to love being “that” customer.

The End of the World…

Going vegetarian?  Perfectly normal… Vegan?  Oh, make sure to get enough protein.  Skipping GRAINS?  What?!  But what will you eat??!!

Going primal with my family has been an interesting transition.  Oh, the transition in our foods has been easy enough–we were halfway there already.  The transition into a smaller size I haven’t worn in six years, that was pretty easy, too.  It has been explaining it to everyone else that has been the big challenge.  My mother asked me how we would get enough Vitamin A… I am still not sure how to respond to that question.  Many people have figured that it made perfect sense, but of course we would keep our children on a balanced diet.  Balanced according to whom?  Monsanto?  My favorite reoccurring question, though, is always along the lines of this:

But… what will you eat?

My answers have gotten shorter each time this question has been asked.  In the beginning it was a long-winded explanation about the human genome not changing much in 10,000 years, etc. etc.  Somewhere at the mid-way point of the last month and a  half I was saying something along the lines of, “only things you can kill or gather.”  Now, like the cavemen who ate my diet, I simply grunt out, “Plants.  Animals. Water.”

In all of this there is a sort of strange twilight zone, that somehow cutting out grains, processed seed oils and legumes is like THE END OF THE WORLD!!  Oh sure, everybody eventually nods their head and says it, “makes sense.”  After all, everyone these days seems to know that gluten is bad for “some people” and cutting carbs will cut your waistline, but, wait… you didn’t mean you planned on doing this FOREVER?  Surely not!  And you couldn’t possibly mean to deprive your children of all of the essential nutrients and phytonutrients contained in GMO corn, could you?

I guess once you see behind the wizard’s curtain, you also begin to see how deep the cultural deception really is.  The marketing of our American diet has been so successful, it has so perfectly entrenched in the consciousness of Americans the way they should eat, that it is almost inconceivable to some individuals that you would deprive yourself of so much grain-filled bounty.  My mother has taken to continuously seeking my affirmation that she “does all right, really,” despite her total unwillingness to listen to the truth.  The evidence in my changing figure, extra energy, and overall glow of health somehow is just not enough to overcome a lifetime of eating habits.  And yet, she does still ask me to affirm her, as though if I agree with her it will change the truth and she will magically lose the same fifteen pounds I have lost in the last month.  The longer I am on this path, and the more positive results I see in my own life, the harder it is not to become a serious missionary to those unreached people who have never heard of Primal or Paleo.  Somehow, by changing what I put in my mouth, everything else has changed, too.

I can see the many upcoming battles ahead–trying to get teachers and other parents and everyone else around us to understand that I know what I am doing, and my children are fine without the processed junk.  That they really are getting all the nutrients they need, and it is no coincidence that they have energy, vitality and good concentration.  But somehow, I suspect, the strange questions will never completely go away, and to some people this will always be the end of the world…

Discovering a new way to be

Three weeks ago our family went primal.  No more grains, no more processed foods, no more seed oils (vegetable oil, canola oil, etc.), more sleep, more simplicity, more of a return to the rhythms of our bodies.  At first, it was a total shock to everyone, including us.  I was probably hit the hardest as I detoxed off of the simple sugars and processed carbohydrates my body was used to consuming.  But I quickly adapted, and grew used to having more energy and more “joie de vivre”.  So much so that it was obvious we could never go back.  How do you go back once you have tasted a sample of how your body is supposed to work?

Three weeks later and everything has changed.  I’m not exaggerating–absolutely everything has changed.  It is as if I was asleep and now I am awake.  After six days, I had lost six pounds, noticed a difference in my body shape, a difference in my skin, I felt more energetic and had better focus.  After two weeks I had dropped nearly a full pant size and was now trying to burn off the extra energy I felt during the day that sometimes made it a bit challenging to fall asleep.  I noticed I no longer felt on the verge of coming down with cold every day.

And now, three weeks into this change, the differences are piling up for our whole family:

1) Every item of clothing I own fits dramatically different–all of my pants are looser, all of my shirts fit better… I am beginning to see the edges of the figure I used to have in the mirror (as opposed to the figure I’ve carried the last five and a half years).

2) I am no longer controlled by my body–my hypoglycemic tendencies have vanished and I can now control when I eat and what I eat with no blood sugar swings, nausea or dizziness.  Food is no longer a constant intake, but is dependent upon my will to eat or not eat at that moment.  It is fast becoming almost an afterthought–something that fuels me instead of something that rules me.

3) My children behave better.  They fight less, they go crazy less, they are more peaceful and seem to have better concentration.  They seem more… stable?

4) I am keeping up better with my housework, my husband, my work, and my children.  I don’t feel as if I am dragging myself throughout the day to get everything done.  I feel more alive, more energized and more capable.  I feel strong.

It is amazing to realize how far I have come in such a short time.  I am finding this to be the easiest lifestyle change I have ever made–whatever physical cravings I may have for certain foods are easily overruled by my joy in the new sense of wellness I feel.  For example, a week and a half ago I decided to treat myself to an old favorite–Easter cream filled chocolate candies–and I thought I was going to be sick.  My body wants so badly to be well that it will not even allow me to cheat.  And I am thrilled with that.

Better yet, my children have adapted with amazing speed, and I have even gotten to listen to my oldest daughter tell Grandma that “bread isn’t good for you,” with a small chuckle.  They are diving into their food with a relish that they previously only showed for candy or ice cream.  Suddenly the elaborate salads, bacon and eggs or other meals are rapidly disappearing off of plates and into little bellies.

I am so excited for the future now.  I feel as if the clock is turning back a bit–I felt so old and worn down before and now I feel alive and young and energetic.  Going primal has given me a second chance at the life I should have, rather than the life I was going to have.  It is amazing how much depends upon the simple choice of what we eat.  Our bodies weren’t designed for the foods we are taught to eat.  Our bodies were designed to consume animals and plants.  Giving our bodies what they have wanted all along is allowing them to repair themselves and return to the state they belongs in. It doesn’t make sense for us to be sick all the time–how would that serve any purpose in allowing our species to survive?  It doesn’t make sense for us to be weary and exhausted just because we have little children–how could we have gone out and fed ourselves and them if we were not able to get through the day with a few little ones to watch over?  So much of how we feel in this modern existence doesn’t make sense.  I am beginning to believe that so much of it is tied to our nutrition.

So for us, it is back to avoiding foods that didn’t exist when our bodies were designed, back to respecting our bodies to tell us what they need and giving them the fuel they need to do what we ask them to do.   It is back to being primal…