Primal

About three weeks ago my husband looked at me and said, "I want abs like Gerard Butler had in 300. We're going Paleo."

Being me, I has some serious misgivings at first. How was I going to find time to hunt, skin and butcher food? We live in a city, how was I going to forage? OMG, would I have to quit my job for my husband's abs? What about chocolate? I love chocolate too much to live without it. I thought this change was going to kill me. Little did I know, my existing eating habits were probably already taking that liberty away from me.

For those not in the know, Paleo isn't really about hunting and foraging (although you can do that too), it is about eating more naturally and cutting out grains and dairy. There is evidence that suggests that grains cause gastrointestinal inflammation and that dairy (because most dairy animals are grain fed) also causes gastrointestinal inflammation.

So, in an effort to support my husband's quest for a supremely amazing body, over my fall break I pitched everything that wasn't paleo. This was an immense amount of food and took 4 trips to the dumpster. Goodbye five different kinds of flour, goodbye cereal, goodbye random processed foods. So after the purge, I was left with honey and a bunch of spices. Because rice is sometimes allowed on this diet (as a cheat, the diet is technically lower carb) and because I like seeing rice in the cupboard, I kept the rice. We haven't actually touched the rice since we made the change. It is just some weird psychological thing for me.

On the day before we made the change, we had a little celebration meal that included bread and cheesecake. Bread being my husband's beloved nemesis and cheesecake being mine. I think I might have had a stomach bug of some kind or maybe my body had finally decided that the inflammation in my stomach was too much to bear because the cheesecake came back up...back up in a way that looked like my body had put it back together and chucked it up my esophagus. Weird. Needless to say, I felt like hell for the next two days. Fortunately for me, we weren't eating inflammation causing food anymore.

After three days, I noticed that my stomach didn't hurt in the mornings and that my hideous acid reflux was on vacation. I also began to notice that my joints weren't sore all the time. Freakishly during those three days, I spent a huge amount of time urinating. I mean way more than could be accounted for by what I was drinking. I started to think that I had diabetes insipidus. Fortunately, after about four days, my body wasn't waking me up every two hours to urinate. After five days, my joint pain was almost completely gone and I had a bounce to my step.

Since I'm a little bit OCD, a little bit ADD, a little bit chronically depressed, and slightly aggressive to begin with, I typically have little awareness of some of my milder moods (btw, the hubs says that they are not mild and neither does my mom...moving on). After a week, my mom called and visited with my husband (they adore each other and sometimes my family calls just to talk to him...he is a really amazing person). While they spoke, I overheard him say, "It is like she a totally different person! I had no idea my wife was this sweet and personable. She is even nice in the mornings. If I didn't like it, I would be afraid that pod people took my wife and left me with a nicer one." Apparently my mom agreed.

So, being me, I got kind of mad. My grandmother came from Irish stock so my temper can be decidedly reactive. Once I calmed myself down (3 minutes later instead of the usual 3-7 hours), I figured that they were probably right. I still have a temper but it is more manageable. I also don't light up all the time and the littlest thing. After exploring potential reasons for my more manageable temper, I figured that it was probably because I was not in chronic pain anymore. I was not in chronic pain because my esophagus was no longer attacked by my stomach acid; my stomach and intestines were no longer processing mucus instead of nutrients; and my joints were no longer inflamed like I had arthritis.

Zero gluten + zero dairy = happy, pain free me.

So far this diet is totally sustainable. I will keep you posted on the results.