Diets

Women know it all too well, and men know by sitting by and watching females endlessly fret. Diet. There are many different motivations to starting a diet. People start diets to lose weight, lower cholesterol, stabilize blood sugar, all kinds of things. In my opinion, that's why a lot of 'diets' fail. Most people look at diets as temporary, when to really affect long term change. Then there's the whole genre of 'crash' and 'fad' diets, short sprints of depriving yourself of essential nutrients and calories to expedite short term results. When many people consider diets, they don't think about lifelong change.

I'm no saint in any of this... I've adhered to the traditional american diet almost all of my life and, due to a luck of the draw genetically and a fairly active lifestyle, have managed to stay pretty small in size. Now that I'm in my twenties, the affects of what you put in your body are actually a tangible concept. It goes so much deeper than eating more vegetables, or counting calories. Everyone knows: You are what you eat. In that case, how can you know what you are if you have no idea what's in your food, where it comes from, and what it's doing to your body? Now, this isn't an entry ranting about diets or organics, and the downfalls of modern agriculture... Goodness knows there's enough of those resources out there. This is more of a declaration of starting a new facet of my own nutritional evolution.

Something that I've been hearing a lot about lately is something called Paleo. For a brief overview, check out this site: http://hunter-gatherer.com/blog/get-ready-2011-paleo-challenge . A lot of the concepts behind it are concepts that I've come to really support, and have already integrated into my life. Tomorrow, June first, eill mark the start of an official switch over to Paleo. The hardest part for me will be cutting out grains I suppose, because it's insane how many things grains and grain derivatives are used in. Everything else should be pretty straight forward. After the first month, I may make a few changes, because I have a feeling that when July rolls around, I will be sorely missing cheese. I've been looking, and there are a lot of ways to make bread out of almond and coconut flour(two products I've never even heard of, but cannot WAIT to try!). There are so many new avenues of cooking and some fun ways of recreating dishes that I'm excited to learn.

Overall, I think I'm most excited to see how I feel after a month of this. I'm excited to make a shift that makes sense on every base level of my understanding and beliefs in nutrition. There's no doubt in my mind that this will be hard. I'm going to get frustrated, and I'm going to want to cave. Hopefully I can find some delicious new recipes to help keep me distracted. Take this as a little bit of a disclaimer... Food will be a common subject I touch on in entries over the next month, so I apologize ahead of time... Bear with me :-) I promise to only talk about food and complain about cravings at the end of posts with awesome content about hiking, skydiving, and maybe even a little rock climbing! Later gators.

-Steph