I'm coming into this a bit
I'm coming into this a bit late, but I thought I ought to share my story.
Back aroun 2004 or 2005, Janine and I were considering going 100% vegetarian. We never cooked meat at home anyway, and we thought maybe it would be the humane option. But I was going into it with the idea that it was a sacrifice. I've always loved meat, and felt a pretty much constant level of hunger on a low-fat near-veg diet, even if I ate a huge amount of food.
I was having some health problems, though. Headaches, digestive trouble, sleep apnea, anxiety and short temper. Some of my friends were telling me I was lactose intolerant but I didn't want to believe it. Then one day my doctor told me that I shouldn't eat wheat - in fact probably nobody should eat wheat.
That was the best thing anyone ever told me for my health.
We'd been reading books that were slowly leading us toward eating less carbs and more meat. Several books on pregnancy and breastfeeding talked about the importance of adequate protein, and hinted that vegetable oil might actually be harmful, and animal fats could even be good for you. Then we got this amazing book by Nina Planck called "Real Food: What to Eat and Why" that blew apart everything we'd ever heard about animal fat, saturated fat and meat, especially organ meats... and clued us in to the dangers of grains and vegetable oils. Nina Planck was a follower of the Weston A. Price Foundation, which advocates raw milk and soaking and sprouting of grains. I got their book, "Nourishing Traditions" and learned a whole lot from it - including how to cook meat, make stock from meat and bones, and ferment vegetables. I also got "Wild Fermentation" by Sandor Katz, which is an even better book on fermenting vegetables, fruits and grains.
It was during this time that I experience the most dramatic improvements in my health. I went gluten-free and completely dairy-free. I discovered that it wasn't just lactose that causes problems for me, but casein - the protein found in milk. I'd been eating lactose-free cheese (parmesan is lactose-free, for example) but not experiencing any improvements. "I'll never give up cheese," I said, and then a week later, I did. My digestion improved, my sleep apnea went away, many minor health problems like acne, warts and athlete's foot disappeared, and best of all, my temper evened out. I also stopped being awkward and clumsy - enough that I could take trapeze classes.
There were still problems, though. I had an ice cream maker and kept trying to make substitutes for ice cream. Trying to replicate Rice Dream, which isn't gluten-free, I came up with my own "Millet Delusion," a horrible hard-as-rock abomination that gave me stomach cramps. Meanwhile, Janine was developing and allergy to rice. It started to look like there just weren't any grains that we could really tolerate well. Interestingly, our personal experience told us something that even Nourishing Traditions wouldn't quite admit: Refined grains are easier to tolerate than whole grains. All of the antinutrients and exorphins and omega-6 fats are in the bran and the germ, not in the starchy carbohydrate-rich endosperm. There's a good reason people choose white rice and white flour when they can, and I discovered much later that brown rice was never really a traditional food - people just used to polish their rice at home and consequently didn't eat as much of it.
At the same time, I was trying to find a sweetener I could tolerate. What was messing up my system? Corn syrup? Cane sugar? (you can chew sugar cane, by the way) Beet sugar? Molasses? Maple syrup? Honey? Apple juice? Grape juice? Bananas? Mangoes? I tried them all, and they all gave me varying levels of problems, either with blood sugar or digestion. Towards the end I bought a bottle of agave nectar, but I never ended up using it. I had finally come to the realization that no form of sugar was good for me - and it was actually possible to live without sugar, even the sugar from fruit.
That was when I started Atkins, the next big breakthrough for my health issues. I realized that Atkins Induction is the perfect "elimination diet" for food allergies and intolerances. After two weeks of that, I was champing at the bit to start eating nuts again... but then I discovered that nuts make me hungry like some kind of addictive drug. So the only nuts I ate were coconuts.
With that one simple addition, I discovered I could live quite happily on Atkins Induction and I stopped feeling the need to reintroduce foods. In fact, I started finding other foods I could eliminate. Chocolate, vinegar, coffee (never much of a coffee drinker), wine, one by one the little things went and I became more and more of a meat lover.
Eventually I learned about the Paleo diet, but by that time I was pretty much already doing it. It was a great feeling to have an explanation for why this way of eating made me feel best, and to find other people who ate the same way. I started getting more interested in organ meats - liver, heart, tongue, pig's ears and tails, chicken feet. I felt good about eating more of the animal, like I was honoring its life better by wasting less of it.
I'm still tweaking and experimenting. I learned recently that I don't tolerate poultry or pork as well as beef, bison and lamb. I switched to almost all beef and lost another 5 pounds - I'm 5' 5" and now I'm down to 130 pounds. I have a hard time finding pants that don't fall down!
