Today is day 10 on our 30 day Primal Diet experiment, and I’m feeling great. What surprising about that is the fact that I haven’t had anything to eat all day long. It’s currently 2:45 pm and all I’ve had today is some coffee and a couple liters of water. (We’re in south Texas and it’s hot!) That’s it.
“But don’t you need to eat?” you ask. I’ll most likely eat something today, but I find that the fewer carbs I eat, the easier it is to go without food. Before we tried out the Slow Carb diet last year, I used to eat carbs all morning. I’d have some GF Chex for breakfast, and by 10 or 10:30, I’d be hungry again. So I’d have a banana to tide me over until lunch. I did this every day, without fail.
That’s what, probably 40 to 50 grams of carbs before 11 am? Not surprisingly, I was overweight at the time, and my energy levels were tied to the amount of sugar I had in my system. When I got hungry, I also lost energy and had to eat something to perk myself back up again.
Once I started eating more protein and fat for breakfast – and more importantly, broke my carb addiction – I realized that I didn’t get so hungry before lunch. Before long, I was going until 1 pm before I was ready for lunch. That was a huge change for me.
A few weeks ago we decided to do this Primal experiment once we were in one place for a while, so we started eating pretty much whatever we wanted. Mary Frances was good about not eating too much (better than me at least), but I started pigging out on way too many carbs. Cokes, candy, chips, you name it.
After a few weeks of constant junk food and carb-overload, I found myself getting hungry every morning before lunch. It really didn’t matter how much I ate for breakfast. My body was getting carb-addicted again, and it was letting me know that it wanted more sugar. Needless to say, it was a tasty few weeks, but I felt pretty yucky.
Now after 10 days of limiting my carbs, I’m at the point again where I can go for hours without eating and not have any real side effects. Now that I’ve started thinking about food to write this article, I’m starting to get a little hungry, but it’s a different sensation than it used to be on my Chex and banana meal plan. I can ignore it if I want to, and since I don’t have any food on hand, I’m going to ignore it until dinner.
If you’ve never eaten a low-carb diet before, it’s most likely going to take you longer than 10 days to get to this point. I remember when we first went Slow Carb, the second week was incredibly tough. I’d plan on at least three weeks of difficulty before you break through. But once you get to that point, it’s pretty awesome.
What We’ve Been Eating
One of the Slow Carb ideas that we’ve hung on to on this Primal experiment is to make our meals easy and simple, and to eat the same meals over and over. This is especially evident at breakfast and lunch. Breakfast is one of three things: 1) eggs, 2) turkey meat, or 3) nothing. We either scramble or fry the eggs and eat them with salsa. The turkey meat is browned in a skillet and Mary puts some spices on it. Nothing is pretty quick and easy.
Lunch is usually a salad of some sort with either tuna or chicken on top. Quick, easy, and tasty.
Dinner is the only meal that we change up. It’s nice to relax in the evenings and not feel rushed, so we usually take our time, make something that sounds good to us, and enjoy the meal. We’ve had grilled chicken with greens, pork chops, and bunless hamburgers recently, and tonight we’re going to have larb with cabbage wraps. (Yum!)
I, too, have recently been following a version of the primal diet; although, I’ve basically just omitted gluten, dairy (with very, very, few, occasional exceptions), and legumes (again with the only exception being some occasional soy). I’ve limited my grain intake to only 1 -3 servings of rice or corn per week. I’m about 6 weeks into it and have lost almost 8% of my initial body weight.
What I find so interesting is that I’ve had the same experience you describe with the changed sensation of hunger. This was never described in the book I read just before starting the diet change (Robb Wolf’s Paleo Solution). I used to have major discomfort and irritability if I waited too long to eat and would still experience pain after eating if I hadn’t responded to my hunger quickly enough. Now I can go long stretches without eating and never feel irritability or discomfort. I began feeling this change immediately even though I went cold turkey off gluten, etc.
Good luck with the rest of your experiment! I’m looking forward to digging into your website to learn more about gluten-free living.