“Well hey, Dena,” you may be saying at this point. “While giving up all grains and beans and most dairy and alienating the better part of my family and friends with a diet they won’t understand and in which they’ll refuse to participate sure sounds swell, I may need just a little more convincing.”
I understand. But what you’re maybe not seeing is all the benefits that stem from a healthy way of eating. That’s why I’ve put together a quick glimpse of what a day in the life of a Paleo Vegetarian might look like. Take a good look—could this be you?
No Alarm Clock
Awakening based on your body’s inner cues is a pleasant way to begin any day. Although I aim to get up at roughly the same time very day, even if I get up 30 minutes earlier or later, I still wake up naturally ten minutes before my alarm goes off. (I still set my alarm because I’m paranoid, but I’ve probably only had to awaken to it a handful of times in the past year.) Chances are once you’re off the sugar/carb cycle, your body will do a better job of self-regulating and you’ll be able to wake up on your own versus to the jarring BZZZ! BZZZ! BZZZ! of an alarm.
Up and at ’Em
Don’t be surprised to find you have a lot more pep in your step in the morning, even if you’re not a morning person. PVers wake up feeling refreshed, with no residual bloating or carb coma that accompanies eating a bunch of pasta and rice and bread the night before. We also don’t wake up hungry, thanks to the fact that we are now fat-burning and not sugar-burning machines. Yay, us!
First Look in the Mirror
Bye-bye, puffy eyes. And puffy face, for that matter. After two weeks of clean PV eating, even if you haven’t lost a pound, you’re going to look thinner simply by virtue of not having the puffiness in place that accompanies a high-carb diet. It’s still amazing to me when I do eat a flour product, like a bagel, how I almost instantly swell up like a puffer fish. I remember waking up the morning of a marathon race when I’d eaten a prepaid spaghetti with garlic bread dinner the night before. Before I even got out of bed, I thought, “Oh, my.” My belly was solid and swollen and my face looked like I’d spent the night crying. It’s a treat to look in the mirror each morning on a PV diet and see ourselves for who we really are.
Getting Dressed
Even when I first started running and lost some weight, I still feared getting dressed in the morning. My body had a mind of its own and I never knew what it was planning. Would this be a thin day? A fat day? I kinda-sorta put together that what I ate the day before was influencing my body, but I thought it was more just a simple matter of “I pigged out” that was causing the bloat. Heads up folks—I’m a big eater and I “pig out” every day, only now I do it on healthy PV foods. And thanks to the sugar and carb moderation that implies, I never have to guess what size my body will be each day.
Breakfast
PVers turn things inside, upside, outside down, and this includes the way in which we eat our meals. You’re already breaking all the rules so why not push the envelope? My breakfasts these days resemble other people’s dinners—maybe some steamed salmon and roasted vegetables with a side of greens. In the winter I cozy up to a steaming bowl of chili or mug of hot soup with a side of asparagus. Every now and again I do the egg/omelet thing, but for some reason, eating “dinner” in the morning always makes me feel full and satisfied until lunch.
Work/Life
Once you’re eating a regular PV diet, you’re going to feel like someone pumped GO-juice into your veins. You’ll feel more energized and alert. If you’re eating PV to lose weight, I’ve also found the diet to be freeing in that I’m not sitting at my desk calculating calories and counting down the minutes until my next “allowed” snack. There is no calorie counting, and if you’re hungry, eat something. Just knowing you have the option to eat at any time offers you a huge psychological advantage. We’re each of us only equipped with a finite amount of willpower, which gets drained from us each day. Dieters required to use their willpower to follow a strict diet typically find they have limited energy left for home and work projects, and may find themselves procrastinating more than usual. You won’t have this problem, since you’re not denying yourself food or eating only small portions. Plus, eating healthy fat with each meal (nuts, avocado, coconut oil, egg yolks, etc.) is going to fill you up.
Lunch
I make a big-ass salad the night before and take it to work. And when I say big-ass, I mean behemoth. I start with a base of baby spinach and kale and go from there. Most of my salads have a bevy of roasted vegetables (like peppers, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, mushrooms) as well as zucchini and yellow squash, a sliced hard-boiled egg, olives, maybe a small handful of blueberries, and some slivered almonds or pistachios. If I’ve done a hard workout over lunch, I’ll add half of a small baked sweet potato on top. I stuff the salad into a large Tupperware container, but when I pour it onto a plate, I sometimes have to eat it in sections. Otherwise, it doesn’t fit. Often what I do is eat half of my big-ass salad for lunch and eat the other part as a snack throughout the day. And before you think, “Eh, salad,” let me assure you, this thing rocks. Coworkers see me eating it and start salivating and saying things like, “Oh my God, that looks incredible.” Salad power, baby.
Post-Lunch
While the majority of your coworkers stare slack-jawed at their computer screens, fighting off the urge to crawl under their desks for a nap, you, my PV friend, are going to find yourself just as awake and alert at 1 p.m. as you were when you hit the desk at 8 a.m. That’s because you haven’t sent your insulin levels lunging upward on a grain-based sugar high only to have them plummet and leave you feeling tired, drained, and—yes—hungry. Should you annoy coworkers with your “I’m so awake and happy and you’re not” buoyancy? I say you only live once so sure, why not?
Eat When You’re Hungry
It’s almost gospel diet advice that in order to lose weight, you need to eat five or six small meals throughout the day. The rationale is that doing so keeps your blood sugars level. As PV eaters, we know that if we avoid foods that spike the levels in the first place, there’s no need to eat five or six times a day to level them out. Can you eat that many meals a day? So long as you stick to PV-approved foods, sure. But I challenge you instead to start listening to your body. Most of us have been dieting for so long that the concept of eating when our body tells us it’s hungry is a foreign concept. Instead, we eat according to the clock, spacing our little meals out like soldiers on a battlefield in the fight against fat.
Give it a shot. Eat only when you’re hungry. If you’re not hungry until 10:52 a.m., then eat breakfast at 10:52 a.m. If you’re not hungry after that until 7:39 p.m., then eat at 7:39 p.m. Or if you find yourself hungry again at 11:31 a.m., eat at 11:31 a.m.
The fact is that most of us have no idea what real hunger feels like. I’m not saying that you should wait until you go into a swoon before eating, but I am suggesting that you make sure you’re eating based on hunger and not external clues. For example, we see our coworkers packing up their purse to head out to lunch or we smell the garlicky aroma of last night’s pasta dinner being heated up in the company microwave and we think, “Time to eat,” without ever really questioning if we’re hungry.
To reengage with your body I suggest you do the other piece of diet gospel advice and keep a journal. Just for a short while until you get into the groove of things. More important than tracking food (which I believe is helpful, but which, if I’m being honest, bores me to tears and I never last longer than three days) is tracking why you’re eating. Looking over my past food journals I find the same reasons appearing over and over again:
Joined coworkers for lunch
Bored
Ate because I knew I wouldn’t have a chance to eat later and didn’t want to risk getting hungry
Stressed about work
Bored
Wasn’t hungry for dinner but ate anyway knowing I have a big workout in the morning
Procrastinating on project—ate my lunch and snacks early instead
Bored
Stressed and bored
Had dinner plans with friends; not really hungry but ate a full meal
Wanted something to go with my coffee
Lunchtime
Bored, bored, bored
See a theme? You can even hear it in the way people talk to each other. “Do you want to eat now or later?” “Whenever. I’m not starving but I can always eat.”
It takes practice, but learning to pause before you push in that first mouthful to ask yourself “Why am I eating this?” will save you unwanted pounds—so long as you have the presence of mind to set the fork down if the answer isn’t “Because I’m hungry!”
Exercise
I’m going to share an insight with you that took me years to learn and embrace. Lean in, because this is important. Ready? Here it is: You don’t need to eat before a workout. Seriously. You’ll have plenty of energy on an empty stomach.
Perhaps it’s the runner in me, but I had it ingrained in my psyche that in order to perform—or even get through—a hard workout, I better damn well carb up in advance. Otherwise, I would run out of energy and then where would I be? So I spent years and years and years loading up on bagels and apples and bananas and peanut butter in the early mornings before a workout. And for almost a decade it was a given that Friday was pasta night at our house, given that I had a long run the next day. Didn’t matter if my “long” run was 5 miles or 25 miles, I ate pasta and breadsticks like a starved Italian.
It was only after I started eating Paleo and reading about it that I found the courage to try working out without a stomach full of bread or fruit. The result? Bing! My workouts didn’t suffer. At all. Let me qualify this and say this is for workouts that last under an hour. If you’re going to be doing a 90-minute or two-hour run, you’ll still find it helpful to eat something beforehand (more on this later). But on weekdays when most of us hit the gym at lunch or before work for a 50-minute spin class or 30 minutes of weight training, you can work out on an empty stomach. In fact, studies show that what’s called “fasted training” can actually improve performance. The key, it turns out, isn’t eating before you work out. It’s eating after to help aid muscle recovery. (More on this later, too.)
All of this is to say that if you are exercising, it’s okay to go to the gym first thing in the morning or before lunch or dinner without eating. Grab a small handful of nuts if you feel like you need something, but give working out on an empty stomach a try and see if you don’t pump those weights a little harder, row a little faster, or take an extra lap around the track.
Dinner
Mmmm…so much Paleo Vegetarian goodness from which to choose! If you like to cook, now is the time to experiment. However, if cooking isn’t your thing, there’s nothing wrong with keeping things simple and eating the same meals over and over again. Along with my “dinner for breakfast” bit, one of my favorite things to do is to swap it out and eat breakfast at night. At least three times a week, I’ll make a big veggie omelet or a simple plate of scrambled eggs and greens for dinner. Fills me up and I’m in and out of the kitchen in less than ten minutes. Give it a try.
Relaxing
On diets in the past, so much of my time was spent tied up thinking about my diet and what I could and couldn’t eat and when I could eat it, that I forgot to enjoy life. I hope you won’t let that happen on a PV diet. Family, friends, pets, and hobbies make a life. Food is a distant second.
PV is more than a way of eating. It’s closer to a mindset and a lifestyle, one in which you choose to be healthy, understanding that health is a multifaceted experience and the food we eat is only a small part of that. Now that you’re no longer feeling sluggish or manic from a diet heavy in carbs and sugar, you’ll have extra energy. So do what makes you happy. Go for a walk, read a book, snuggle with the kids on the couch for a movie, make over the spare bedroom, clean out the garage, paint a picture, write a book.
I have no scientific evidence to back this claim up, but speaking from personal experience I can tell you that when I feel in charge of my diet, I feel in charge of my life. I’m more motivated to plow through a to-do list or meet up with friends or tackle a project. Part of it is, I’m sure, the sustained energy that comes from clean eating. An equal or larger part, however, is mental. When I used to fail on diets, I felt like I was failing in life. So if I ate over calorie count—which I always did because I was hungry— I felt like I hadn’t just blown my diet, but the whole day. Maybe the whole week.
You’ll never feel like that on PV. If you slip one day, or one meal, you’ve got the 80/20 principle, so it will be okay. And this isn’t a diet of denial. You may get a little bored eating PV, but you should never be hungry. If you are, eat. What other diet tells you that?
Sweet Dreams
Adequate sleep is underrated as the foundational tool for weight loss. PVers who are serious about weight loss get plenty of sleep. Why the extra shut eye? Because a lack of sleep has been shown over and over again to cause an increase in hunger, leading to weight gain.
Why would lack of sleep make us hungry? Wouldn’t the extra time spent awake actually help us burn more calories?
Aw, that’s cute. You’re so tired you’re actually hallucinating.
Nope, it doesn’t work that way. Here’s how it does: When you skimp on the sleep, you’re stressing your body. To fight the stress, your body produces the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol is there to rev up your metabolism and give you energy, helping you through stressful periods. But cortisol also releases insulin, giving you that “fight-or-flight” kick in the pants that revs up your appetite for starchy, sugary, high-carbohydrate foods. So, less sleep equals more insulin, which equals more craving for carbs and sugar. More cravings for carbs and sugar equals hunger pangs. Hunger pangs typically lead to overeating sugary, high-carbohydrate foods, which leads to weight gain.
Take away: Get your shut eye. And plenty of it. What’s plenty? At least seven hours a night. A 2004 study reported on WebMD found that getting less than six hours of sleep a night made people 30 percent more likely to become obese when compared to people who were logging seven to nine hours a night.
Especially when it comes to weight loss, getting enough sleep isn’t just a luxury, it’s a necessity. Remember that.