Post-Paleo life

My babies, my sweet lovely babies. I can't tell you how thrilled and heartened I am by the positive responses to my last blog. I send each and everyone of you a virtual open-mouthed kiss

Shall we continue where we last left off? Let's.

For the last 2.5-ish years, I've eaten relatively strict Paleo. I haven't cooked any non-Paleo food at home in that time frame, with the exception of occasionally adding cheese to a recipe. When eating out, unless I was on a round of Whole 30, I usually permit myself to eat whatever I wanted. But I don't eat out all that much because, like most of my fellow millennial Vancouverites, I'M ALWAYS FUCKING BROKE. For anyone not familiar with the Paleo diet (aka caveman/Paleolithic diet), the idea is you only eat foods that would have been available for preparation and consumption by Paleolithic humans. Anything you could easily harvest from the land or hunt, requiring little or no preparation other than cooking over fire, is permitted. Anything that would require processing or preparation that cavemen wouldn't have had available to them is out. Long story short, meat/veg/fruit = big opposable thumbs up. Refined sugars/grains/legumes/Doritos = hairy caveman frowny face (because supposedly he can't digest that stuff at all so he's probably constipated. I get super frowny when I'm constipated too.)

Really, it's not all that different from the Atkins jam I'd done back in my youth. The concept is pretty well the same, minus the prehistoric backstory - high protein/low carb. A significant difference between them, however, and why I think the Paleo movement works so well for people, is that Paleo/Whole 30 encourages you to base your meals around whole foods. Atkins, on the other hand, seemed to promote a lot of pseudo-foods to fill the place of what you're trying to give up, rather than training your mind and body not to crave them anymore. For example, chocolate bars sweetened with maltitol or xylitol that taste close enough to real chocolate that you almost feel satisfied as you shit your fucking brains out, because those sugar substitutes are also laxatives. Atkins also somewhat demonizes carbs, whereas Paleo encourages moderate consumption of nutrient-rich carbs, such yams. Anyway, I'm not a nutritionist or a caveman, so I'm going to stop explaining these diets before someone way smarter than me starts pointing out how many mistakes I've made. Suffice it to say, adapting to a Paleo-ish lifestyle taught me how to fill myself with quality, nutritious food, rather than just filling myself.

So, given that this diet has worked so well for me, why have I decided to change things up? The reasons are threefold, which I will attempt to lay out without boring the tits off of you (if your tits are, in fact, still attached to you thus far). The first thing that led me to start considering cutting down on my meat consumption was the environmental impact of the meat industry on our beautiful Earth, namely the carbon footprint of meat production and efficient use of land for food production. It's no secret that the animal agriculture is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, as well as global deforestation. Additionally, allotting land as grazing land for livestock has far less return on the amount of food produced than using it for growing crops. Again, I'll stop before I start rambling too deep about things I'm not thoroughly educated on, since, in addition to the roles I mentioned above, I am not a fucking scientist either. I just care about the Earth, and want to do whatever I can to make a positive impact on it, especially since people like that shit slinging fuckwit in the White House keep pretending climate change doesn't exist, and therefore don't promote positive global change from their positions of power.

Any fucking way, the next reason that has led me to this decision is health. While an animal protein aligned diet is what has helped me in getting to the healthiest I've been in my life, I want to maintain (or improve upon) this level of health by re-adapting to plant-based protein. Yes, like everyone and their dog, I recently watched the documentary What's The Health. It was enlightening and eye opening, and certainly reinforced ideas I'd been playing recently. The main instigator, however, in my starting to consider the health impact of an omnivorous vs herbivorous diet was my mum. A few months ago, she found out she had shockingly high cholesterol. Her doctor was like, "u in danger, girl" and wanted to put her on this bonkers medication that has some gnarly side effects. Not wanting to hop right on the pill train, she asked if there was any lifestyle change she could make to avoid having to take these meds. The doctor offered that she could try going vegan, but they didn't think it would work enough to get her cholesterol down to a safe level. Well, my dear mother, ever defiant of authority, proved them wrong by going h-core vegan, and now she feels better than ever. So, it struck us both that maybe with our genetic makeup, animal protein might not be the wisest dietary choice. Heart problems run on both sides of my family - thanks mum and dad - and since I can't afford a black market organ should mine explode, I figure it's best I do what I can to keep the one I have in good condition.

Finally, and don't think I was going to forget about this aspect of things, is animal welfare. I will start this part by saying that I do not have an moral problem with eating meat. However, any chump can see that most of the farmed meat industry is fuuuuuuuuuuucked up. I don't need to describe the horrendous environments some farms keep their animals in - you can go to YouTube for that. Grab your teddy-bear for comfort first. There are farmers out there rearing meat as ethically as possible, but those farms are few and far between. Hunters, who hunt their own meat (NOT for sport. Those festering scabs on humanity can rot in hell) and make every effort to utilize as much of the animal as possible, promote far less wastefulness than farmed meat. But, again, like with the environmental side, I want to consider what I can do in my part, however small, to promote positive change.

I am so not here to shit on meat eaters. That would be, like, ridonkulously hypocritical of me. These are simply my thoughts and reasons and feelings and what have you. As I feel with all parts of life, you do you, brothers and sisters. Just do it with intention and do it with love.

I don't intend to talk about any of the reasons I've decided to try going vegan after this post (though maybe I will end up eating those words sprinkled on a kale salad at some point down the road). The rest of this blog/journey is going to be about more personal stuff, like my relationship with food, as well as recipes, and who knows what else (no, not dick pics)!

PEACE OUT!

Me, with the only plant I've ever successfully not killed!