RE: So what exactly is the PALEO diet? Should we care?
Good post Deb,
I'm pretty ketovangelisic, as you may have noticed (due mostly to the whole diabetes thing), and pretty hateful of grains, sugars and starches in particular.
If I could give anyone a place to start it would be to stop having cereal for breakfast, and start having real foods instead, maybe some eggs, maybe some fresh salads with olive oil, or a simple cow-milk-free smoothie. I think this is a good easy starter step, and it's not a hard sell at all and quite yummy.
My next step would be to drop the bread from our lunches, pack a bento box or something instead. I liked to mix up a cream cheese and avocado dip and pack it with some cut vegetables. This is slightly harder as it requires a little more prep work each day, but you can put most of what you would have in your sandwiches (if they're already quite healthy) into your bento box.
The final big step I'd recommend, and possibly the biggest for some I'd say is to cut out the sodas or soft-drinks, these are a big portion of a lot of people's daily intake of refined sugars, but this one is going to have a backlash as a lot of people are sugar addicted. I would probably put this as step 1 except I know that this one is a super hard habit to kick.
But as you say, absolutely anything people can do in their daily lives to increase their consumption of real foods and decrease that processed rubbish is going to have a dramatic effect on their long term health and vitality.
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Thanks for adding in some practical steps. I hope people will be interested enough to check out some of my recipes. Most of them are not keto, but are Paleo, so good to get people started.
I've found for myself, now I'm a bit older, I can't do VLC any more. I still need to avoid grains and starches, but need a certain level of carbs.
Keto is reasonably hard-mode, but other low carb (not no-carb) real food diets still have a massive beneficial aspect.
And even if you can just cut the grains, sugars and starches (in that order, not a lot of people realise that most of our grain based foods actually have a much higher GI than even raw sugar) a little, you're still miles ahead of the rest.
Even on keto, you need to be really careful that you're eating enough carbs to get your required nutrients. You can (and should) actually have a lot more carbs than I think a lot of people do when they try keto, and that's possibly why a lot of people fail keto when they naively try to do it without researching, they think it's all bacon and eggs and then when they crash, they give up.