February 15: Healthy Eating

 Eleanor’s Lenten Resolutions

• Learn to say the Hail Mary

• Give away some toys

• No sweets

Tomorrow I’m starting a new month of healthy eating. I’m trying out the Paleo lifestyle: it’s slightly (very slightly) less restrictive than the Whole30 guidelines, it’s a better way of eating overall, and it’s sustainable in the long run. Last month, I was listening to “The Living Experiment” podcast, hosted by Dallas Hartwig (cofounder of the Whole30) and Pilar Gerasimo, when they were talking about how to encourage others around us to eat more healthfully. It was encouraging and enlightening to hear that it takes about 6 months of hard work and mindfulness to form the habit of healthy eating without thinking about it too much. Although that seemed like such a short period to them, it feels like a long time to me. However, it was encouraging because it explained why it’s been so hard for me to adopt a long term healthy eating goal: I definitely don’t follow through on new habits for 6 months!

I bought a book called Practical Paleo by Diane Sanfilippo. In it, she outlines more specific month-long paleo meal plans for other health problems, rather than the more general Whole30 guidelines. If nothing else, these meal plans will give me a break from extensive meal planning and even grocery shopping lists, since both of those are drawn up for me (including recipes) in one book. She encourages a general paleo diet to begin with, slowly filtering down to various subcategories as problems are solved. Because the Whole30 is more restrictive than her general plan, I’m skipping right to the next category: Blood Sugar Regulation. After this ends on March 17, I think I’ll spend the next month doing mostly general Paleo, using my favorite recipes and learning new ones until April 20, when I’m going to move on to her Fat Loss regimen. After that, who knows yet? I do know that I’ll be following this diet pretty strictly (with a few exceptions: Easter, my birthday, and an upcoming graduation come to mind) until the end of June at the very least, when hopefully my attention to food can relax a little.

I’m also considering giving up certain foods altogether. Gretchen Rubin believes that a lot of people, more than a person would think, are what she calls “Abstainers”. I know that I can moderate when I want to, but in times of need (depression, bad life circumstances, even just exhaustion), I binge on foods if they are in the house. I’d rather remove some of the worst offenders practically forever than take a chance that I’ll slip up and binge again, once more putting my health in jeopardy. I’ll keep that thought in the back of my mind over the next 41/2 months and give updates as I have them. It’s an intriguing idea, at the very least.