Fat Girl Gone Healthy

Ladies and Gentlemen, Let’s get ready to rumble!

In the red corner, noshing on a juicy steak, we have the Paleo diet! And in the blue corner, sipping on a kale smoothie, we have the vegan diet! Meat or No Meat! This is the biggest showdown in diet history!

In my quest to healthier eating, I have been doing lots of research to help me figure out what I should be eating. It is amazing how strongly people feel about their particular diets; convinced it is the BEST and ONLY way to eat. Puhlease, it’s ridiculous. The quest to find the perfect diet that will magically make us svelte, lean, sexy, insert whatever vain adjective you can think of, has resulted in a bunch of people yo-yo dieting on fad diets. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that paleo or veganism are necessarily fads. I choose to talk about these diets because they are opposites. The point I want to make is that there is NO best diet.

I’ll admit that I don’t know a lot about the Paleo diet but I’ve been reading about it a lot in the news recently. What inspired my post are the following blog posts I recently read. This blogger (not vegan) posted an entry about why she is not paleo. Another blogger felt that he needed to defend his chosen diet and went to great lengths to dissect and disprove the original blogger’s opinion.

So, what’s my opinion? Quit the fighting and the bickering and realize that you have a lot of common ground to work from. We live in a society that has no idea how to eat because we are bombarded with lots of genious marketing that tells us to eat lots of yummy, unhealthy food; much of it masked as “healthy”.  As a society, we have no idea how to eat healthy.  If we worked within the common ground, we as a nation could be healthy! No diet is the perfect diet. I don’t think you can go with a one size fits all theory. Work within the common ground and experiment from there until you figure out what works for your body.

So you might be wondering what kind of diet I am following. I’m following my own diet. I haven’t excluded any food groups and follow the common ground column above with the exception of the “no dairy” rule. I eat cheese and I love every minute of it! I have switched to high quality, hormone free cheese. It’s even better if I get it locally from grass fed, pasture raised cows (once you’ve tried it, you won’t want to go back!). The hardest part has been processed food. I’m trying to go with a 80/20 rule. If I can eliminate highly processed foods 80% of the time then I think I’m doing pretty darn good. Most importantly, I feel REALLY GOOD.

My final thought on this topic….when you are trying to start a healthy diet, take baby steps! Change one thing at a time. When you conquer one thing then move onto the next. As you get better at making changes, you can change more things more often. Figure out what works for YOU. Do it for your health, mental and physical!

What kind of diets have you tried? What worked for you?