The End of the Paleo Diet Experiment

Looking back, I’m not even sure what possessed me to do this. I am NOT a dieter. I have never done South Beach, Atkins, The Zone, etc. I *did* do Weight Watchers in 2006 after I put on some post-college desk job weight and it worked well for me—I lost 20 lbs. and after gaining just a couple of pounds back shortly after quitting, I have been maintaining my weight pretty successfully ever since.

The difference between Weight Watchers and the other “fad diets” I listed is that it’s not restrictive. At all. It’s about portion control and balancing your unhealthy choices with healthy ones. No one told me I couldn’t have a giant brownie or two slices of pizza if I wanted them, so as far as diets go, it was something I could do. I also felt it was the best choice for long term. Nothing was being taken away. And that balance—that mindset—is largely how I’ve been eating for the past nine years, even if I’m no longer counting points.

Exercise has always been harder for me. It was always something I had to MAKE myself do, and then once I had Nora, I fell off the exercise wagon big time and I didn’t pick up anything I was able to stick with until I started CrossFit almost seven months ago now. Since I had my weight under control, I figured that if I wanted to look better, all I had to do was get the exercise part in order. Build some muscle, some definition. Tone up, slim down. I haven’t been overly unhappy with my body. I have my insecurities, sure, and I wish I felt more confident in a bathing suit on the few occasions I wear one but overall… I’m cool with myself.

I’ve noticed results from CrossFit, but nothing earth shattering. And after starting CrossFit three days a week, I found that I actually GAINED a few pounds. The scale was a little disheartening, actually, because like I said before—prior to this, I had been maintaining my weight within a pound or two for eight freaking years. I start CrossFit and then suddenly the scale goes UP?! What? I know, I know, “muscle weighs more than fat” and all of that, but still.

Before the holidays, a good friend and fellow CrossFitter put a bug in my ear about doing an upcoming nutrition challenge. “Diet made a huge difference for me,” she said. “Just wait. You’ll do it and slim down so much that you will want to eat like this [paleo] all the time.” I suddenly found myself feeling like maybe I should give it a shot. Even if it went against everything I stand for. LOL. I talked to Michael about it and he was on board. I figured we had to do it together if we were going to be successful, so once he was in, we were doing it. We anxiously awaited January 19, the start of the next challenge.

Our challenge was through Lurong Living. They organize big nutrition challenges several times a year and CrossFit gyms across the nation organize teams to participate. Our gym always puts together a team and this time, there were 22 of us. The basics are that you eat a clean, paleo diet. Lurong has resources on its site for participants—a food search (to see whether or not certain foods are “legal”), recipes, a diet plan should you want to follow it, etc. Every day, we logged our nutrition based on their scale. We scored our meals as Elite, Pro, Starter, or Cheat. The cleaner you eat (Elite), the better, and the more points you earn. We also had a benchmark WOD (workout of the day, for you non-CrossFitters) we performed during Week 1, then again during Week 5. The idea is, obviously, to see whether or not your change in diet positively impacts your performance in the gym. Lurong also assigned us “mini WODs” each week, which we performed in addition to our normal WODs for extra points. Our coach/owner of our gym took our weight and measurements at the beginning (January 19) and at the end (this morning), too, because we earn points based on weight loss and lost inches as well.

I signed up for this craziness. I was mostly just curious. I wanted to do it as an experiment.

So, Week 1 was rough. I posted about it back in January. I was really hungry for a few days, then that gave way to huge amounts of rage on Day 5. I have a friend who told me then, “When my husband and I did the paleo challenge for the first time last January, days 4-5 were so awful! I was cranky, had massive cravings and wanted to punch my husband in the face!” Yes, that. Except for maybe punching Michael, because I never blamed him for this mess. IT WAS ALL ME. :) But I could’ve punched SOMEONE, that’s for sure.

I was going to say that Weeks 2 and 3 were probably the “easiest” of the five, but I realized that’s not really true. The thing is—this whole experience was a rollercoaster. There were days when I felt like I pretty much sailed through without any issues, and there were days when I felt like the end could not come soon enough.

I had several really bad days, or at least stretches of hours. There were a few times when I contemplated quitting. I knew I couldn’t keep up this level of diet restriction long term, and I didn’t feel like I was seeing results (I was weighing myself at home, couldn’t help it). Or, at least, the results I was seeing were not enough for all of this freaking effort. The rewards were not outweighing the costs in my mind.

What were the costs? you might wonder. Well, aside from not being able to eat any sugar, carbs, legumes, dairy, etc…

The food prep was killer. Just killer. If I had someone to cook for me, I am fairly confident that I could eat like this at least 90% of the time (because hello, sometimes you really just NEED a cupcake. Or a sandwich). But as full-time working parents to two really young kids… no. Just no. Over the course of the last five weeks, I spent HOURS in the kitchen on Saturdays and Sundays. I would do anything and everything I could do to make meal prep easier during the week—chop veggies, pre-cook chicken, make sweet potato “rolls,” make salads, recipes for lunches, etc. Honestly, this was the part I was most pissed about. I get a limited amount of time with my girls, and with other stuff around my house, and I felt like I missed out on a lot of that because I was in the freaking kitchen so much. And the days when I was feeling particularly rage-y about the challenge were on the weekends, during major meal prep, or when we had not done enough to plan or prep and I was overwhelmed with just the thought of making dinner after work.

And meal PLANNING—something I do on a normal basis anyway—was a beast. Not having a repertoire of familiar and tried-and-true recipes was really hard. Every week, I was searching multiple sites, reading comments on recipes, making a huge grocery list, etc. It took forever. But it is KEY. Like I just said, the most difficult times of the challenge were when I had not planned or prepared enough.

Speaking of grocery lists… the trips to Wegmans were insane. Tons of stuff in the cart, tons of time to find new ingredients that I wasn’t familiar with. And the total at the cash register?! Wow. Our grocery bill for our family of four went from about $120 a week to $240 a week. One week, it was $275. Picture my eyes popping out of my head, because… yeah. I still maintain that in our “normal” lives, we eat pretty healthy. It’s pretty balanced. But if you REALLY clean up your act like we did for the challenge… eating this clean is EXPENSIVE. A huge family pack of meat that would typically last us 2-3 weeks was now only lasting a week. So every week we were buying meat, and when you add that on top of like $80 worth of fruits and vegetables plus the specialty/organic ingredients we were buying… it gets out of hand quickly. I do think it would’ve been cheaper for us to do this challenge during the summer months, when we could hit up the huge public market and get most (if not all) of our produce there. But then we would’ve had to trek down there every week, which is a feat and a commitment in and of itself. And this is not to sway anyone away from trying to make positive changes to their diet for budget reasons. It was just our reality during the challenge.

Cravings and such were okay, actually. I mean, my boss brought in donuts one day and I thought I might die because I wanted one so badly. I steered clear of the kitchen but I sat at my desk and literally could not stop thinking about them sitting in there. LOL. But most of the time, I really did all right. Don’t get me wrong—I wanted bread, I wanted cake, I wanted chocolate, etc.—but I also learned that my willpower is stronger than I ever thought it was.

I also learned that I like more foods than I thought. I was not at all fond of raisins before, but when one of my fellow challengers mentioned that they make a good “dessert” in place of chocolate or candy, I tried them and fell in love. I am the type of person who really wants a little taste of something sweet after lunch and dinner, and I found that eating a few raisins did the trick. I became really well acquainted with cauliflower—we made “rice” a lot. Brussel sprouts are another thing that grew on me. And pretty much the only packaged snack that is considered paleo legal is the Larabar (only certain flavors). I bought a few and tried Cashew Cookie first. It tasted like a piece of cardboard. I then tried Apple Pie and again, fell in love. It’s hysterical because my coworkers and mom have all been like “Those are gross, they taste too healthy/too plain/etc.” and I have been like “YES, but when you have not had sugar in weeks, they.are.glorious.” I actually remember trying a Larabar during my “no dairy” days when nursing Vivienne and I also thought they were nasty (although I can’t remember what flavor I tried at the time). Go figure. Your perspective and tastes change, that’s for sure.

Another big lifestyle change was a drop in the frequency/quantity of our drinking alcohol. I mean, please don’t take this the wrong way—we don’t go crazy. But we usually enjoy a couple of beers on a Friday night, and then might have a few more beers or a bottle of wine on Saturday night. On the challenge, we could only have ONE beer or a 6-ounce glass of wine per night. We rarely even bothered to take advantage. Honestly, as far as the challenge goes, this was one of the easier things for me to give up, simply because I’ve done it before. Twice. For NINE MONTHS. But still—yet another restriction to live with.

I’ve been thinking about this recap post for a few weeks now and I was all ready to come here and tell you all that I think that the diet is kind of a crock, because I followed it REALLY closely and ate REALLY cleanly for five weeks and I hardly lost any weight. And I don’t feel all that different, either. People swore I’d have a lot more energy, feel less bloated, etc. and I don’t feel that I’ve noticed many changes. BUT then this past week, I started to notice that my pants were maybe fitting a bit differently.

And then I had my measurements taken this morning.

And then I brought up my “before” picture and my “after” picture side by side in Photoshop.

Now I’m kind of eating my words. You know, before I ever even publish them.

The thing is—my results are definitely not drastic. Maybe people who are not me will not even notice the difference. But here is where I let it all hang out. Literally. Because yeah, I’ve decided to share my pics with you all. The pics that I took after rolling out of bed first thing in the morning, bleary eyed, no makeup, not showered, bedhead. Pasty white in the middle of winter. Half-nekkid. *DEEP BREATH* OHMYGOD HERE WE GO.

Yep. So there I am. *cringe* I better hit publish on this post before I chicken out.

Really, I only see a small difference in my abdomen. It’s perhaps a little more toned, and my tummy is perhaps just a teeny bit flatter. (By the way, is there anything worse than looking at straight-on photos of yourself? Haaaate that angle.)

Officially, I lost 8.6 pounds. Now, as I mentioned in my post about Week 1, this is kind of a farce. I ate like it was going out of style the weekend before the challenge began, so on Day 1—to my shock and horror—I was up 6-7 pounds from where I had been consistently weighing in before that. Not surprisingly, I was already down 6.5 pounds like two days into the challenge, so yeah… clearly it was bloat. So don’t be fooled. My REAL weight loss was only about 2-3 pounds. Which is why, you can imagine, I was getting so discouraged by the scale the last few weeks. Which is why I should’ve stayed off of it, but gah, I just couldn’t. But you’d be much better served if you did. BECAUSE…

My measurements this morning revealed that I lost a total of 8 inches. THAT was surprising to me, and was really what made me feel like an idiot for thinking poorly of this whole thing. I lost inches everywhere except for my arms (they stayed the same). I’m going to chalk that up to the fact that I’m lifting weights like a boss. LOL I’m just kidding. But really, I am working on toning them obviously, and arms are one of the areas where I’ve noticed the biggest changes from CrossFit alone.

As for my benchmark WOD performance… the workout was a 7-minute AMRAP (as many reps as possible in the 7 minutes), alternating between 5 front squats (with 65 lbs.) and 7 burpee bar-jumps (burpee + two-footed jump over your barbell). The first time, on Wednesday, January 21, I scored 63 reps. We repeated the WOD on Friday, February 20 and I scored 74 reps. So I saw improvement there, too. Although, I will say that everyone at the gym—even non-challenge participants—did this same WOD with us, and many of those who were not doing the challenge still saw improvement in their scores, so I’m a bit skeptical about the correlation between the diet and the WOD performance. Just for full disclosure.

So, am I glad I did the challenge? Yeah, I guess I am. It was really hard, and is typically not the type of diet I would ever subject myself to—but maybe that’s why it was good that I did it. I challenged myself, for real. It was not easy. But along the way, I did learn quite a few things about myself and about eating that I feel like I can carry forward into my “real” life.

Would I do it again? I don’t know. I don’t think so. For “maintenance,” my coach at the gym suggested we try to eat like this 80% of the time. I don’t know if I can do that, honestly. But maybe. Breakfasts and lunches were not as big of a deal as dinners. So maybe I can eat clean for most breakfasts and lunches and dinner is more “normal.” We’ll see. Now I’m curious to see what happens going forward. Can I maintain the progress I made without eating like a caveman? Time will tell. And if I ever feel like I want to commit myself to further slimming down, I think I would be more likely to use what I’ve learned to eat like this on my own—and potentially allow a few cheats, which I did NOT do until this past Saturday night. With a few cheats, I’m sure it would be more bearable. My friend—the one who encouraged me to do this in the first place—eats paleo in her normal life, but she has 1-2 days a week that she allows herself to cheat. It works for her and doesn’t affect her progress. So, just like Weight Watchers, I suppose it is about finding balance.

Now, I want to add that I feel like this—or Whole30—can be really great tools for people. Myself included, because like I said, I learned a lot. There are people from my team at the gym who lost 15-20 pounds or more. In five weeks! So clearly, this WORKS for people. And if I can do it, anyone can. It’s just 30 days (or five weeks, depending). You can do anything for that long (and that’s what I kept telling myself every time I was tempted to quit or cheat).

I hope this is helpful or somewhat interesting to those of you who wondered how I was doing along the way. And if you have been contemplating doing a challenge yourself, I do think it’s worth experimenting with. Different bodies react in different ways and yours might respond really well to this type of thing. So give it a shot. Report back. :)

I thought this whole thing would be a great opportunity for me to photograph, blog and share a bunch of new recipes on my blog but… nope. I never got around to photographing or blogging any of it except for a few iPhone pics thrown up on Instagram here and there. But I know people are always interested in paleo recipe resources, so I’m going to drop a few links here for some favorites that we’ve discovered. Most of these are totally being added to the meal rotation, even now that we’re done!

Paleo Pad Thai from Against All Grain
Paleo Chicken Pot Pie from Life Made Full
Paleo Chicken Fingers from The Healthy Foodie
Roast Chicken Soup with Vegetables from Against All Grain
Sweet Potato Buns from Predominantly Paleo
Fresh Balsamic Crockpot Chicken from Paleo Fresh
Buffalo Chicken Salad from PaleOMG
Foolproof Homemade Paleo Mayo from The Healthy Foodie
Sweet Smoky BBQ Sauce from Lexi’s Clean Kitchen

As of this morning’s weigh in, I was officially done. Today, I’ve had: my usual smoothie for a post-workout breakfast; a small handful of cashews for a mid-morning snack, veggies and hummus for lunch (hummus is not paleo, I missed it so much! but it’s also not bad for you, so… rock on!) with just a few pita chips (loved, but they tasted saltier than I remember!); and a small box of raisins. Tonight, though, we are having some pasta and meat sauce with a veggie for dinner, and I plan to indulge in a little bit of ice cream. Everything in moderation, right? At least I didn’t run out this morning and get a donut. One of the guys at the gym asked me if I had a cheeseburger stashed in my purse for after weigh-in. Noooo, but not a bad idea. :)

So I’m still trying to be good, but also celebrating being FREEEEEEEE! Happy Monday, my friends.