Eating Primal

When we first moved in to our new house, Hubbs and I decided to act on our plan to live well and eat healthily. We did months of research and eventually decided that eating Primal would be a good idea. Primal is basically "Paleo with Dairy". I love dairy, and if I was going to give up my delicious carbs cold turkey, dairy was going to stay. No processed foods. No added sugar. Grass-fed and pastured meats. No corn. No wheat. No soy. Rice and potatoes are a "sometimes food". Eat good fats (avocado, bacon, butter, etc). Basically eat whole food whenever possible.  

We found a local farm and bought ourselves one half of a grass-fed cow and a new freezer to go with it, we switched from 1% to whole milk, only good oils like Olive and Avocado, we use a whole lot of butter (grass fed when we can find it), and eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. We're working in finding pastured eggs, but they're hard to find around here. It's also hard scanning through the cheese and yogurt shelves trying to find the high fat stuff, EVERYTHING is low fat and it is supremely annoying. (Hello Noosa yogurt and hello Kerrygold butter and cheese)

Hubbs is obsessed with  Mark's Daily Apple and I bought him the cookbook for Father's Day this year. Eating Primal took a bit of a backseat while I was pregnant with Lumpy, but now we're getting back in to the swing of things.

Giving up delicious things was difficult in the beginning, we started making substitutions here and there. When you start, you're hungry all the time and feel like you're starving. Eventually, your body gets used to the idea that it's supposed to burn fat for energy and goes to work. After a while, you don't even miss the foods you gave up.

Since we started last August, Hubbs has lost 30 lbs, and I have lost 27. Granted, we haven't started exercising at all yet, and I was pregnant for 9 months of that. Overall we're pretty pleased. Hubbs is getting close to his goal weight, and I still have a bit to go. When I was pregnant, I pretty much ditched the diet and was eating garbage, so I'm hoping the numbers will continue to go down now. It's not all about weight though, we just felt better. We had more energy and felt less weighed down. We stopped hitting the snooze button and it was great to see our month-to-month progress. I'm really excited to get back to it and finally start being active again (Hello Roller Derby, oh how I've missed you).

How about all of you, have you ever made any life-changes to try to eat more healthfully or start an exercise regimen? What worked for you? What did you hate? What did you love?