Goals and Changing Diets Again

                What are my dietary goals?  To find a way of eating where I can lose and keep the weight off forever.  I think that’s straightforward.  One of the problems is I want to get a few tons of weight off relatively quickly.  That requires radical eating changes.  Another problem is diets have broken me, so radical eating changes are nearly impossible.  Yeah, I know I sound a little overly dramatic, but I’ve been on diets for decades, and it’s hard for me to stay on any of them for very long.  I mean, look how well diets have worked for me.  I needed to lose 10 pounds to look great in my wedding dress.  I lost it, but gained it all back plus five.  Then I went on a diet to drop the 15.  Lost eight, but gained it all back, plus.  I think you get the picture.  I’ve dieted myself from a size 6 into a size 14.   Now I have all these deprivation and food-control issues.  It’s so tedious, I bore myself. 

                That’s why I flit from diet to diet, trying to find one I can live with.  I do eat a healthy diet, but it’s not enough.  If you followed that silly food pyramid, whichever one the government is promoting this week, that’s a lot of food to eat in one day.  So I keep looking, trying to find something that will keep me healthy and lose the weight. 

                I’ve found something new, and I like it, but I question my ability to stay on it.  I was looking for recipes to perk up the very dull Cycle 1 foods, and ran into some good recipes on Mark’s Daily Apple.  (If you want to take a look, the link is: http://www.marksdailyapple.com)  Then I started to look at the dietary information there.  He promotes a way of eating called the Primal Blueprint.  At first, I wanted to roll my eyes thinking it was one of those caveman eating diets.  You know where you eat bugs and raw meat or something.  This wasn’t that.  He can describe it a thousand times better than me.  But for me it boils down to eating meats, vegetables and fruits.  Healthy, but hard to imagine a life without grains, because that’s a big part of the eating plan—no grains, at all, and stay away from sugar.

                Since I felt so great after a few weeks of not eating any grains or sugars on the 17 Day Diet, I thought this might be an interesting way to live.  So many foods I eat are processed to the point of null nutrition value, and most of the processed foods are grain-based.  The Primal Blueprint is more of a way of thinking and therefore eating, rather than a list of approved and disapproved foods.  There’s a heck of a lot more variety eating this way than on Cycle 1.  But there’s more variety in Cycles 2, 3 and 4—so that’s not the real issue. 

                For me, it’s better than Atkins where I always go nuts after week two because I crave extra cups of salad, carrots and apples.  I get depressed on Atkins.  I need more carbs, and there are plenty of vegetable and fruit based carbs on the PB diet. 

                I was on the PB ‘diet’ for nearly a week and a half.  Then I got the flu.  I’ve been feeling off for days, but then the fever hit and my stomach went crazy.  Coincidence?  That I get a summer stomach flu after radically changing my diet?   Or did I catch it on vacation or from someone at the grocery store?  I have no idea.  On the second day of the fever, I had noodles with my kids, and have been eating processed carbs since.  I’ll go back and try it again.  I like the idea of it.  I’ll have to see how far I can go.