Alexandra on Paleo

For the last few weeks I’ve noticed a distinct fuzziness. In the last week it’s become really bad: at a symphony rehearsal last week I kept consistently mis-counting my measures and leading the section incorrectly. That simply doesn’t happen to me. The other day I accidentally hit the accelerator instead of the brake and lurched forward a few feet (fortunately into nothing) instead of slowing down.

I can’t really say I’ve been Paleo for the last few months. My trip to Japan interfered with a lot of my diet, and I tried to clean it back up when I returned in January, but the moment I needed to start driving for work again, I hit up the old fast-food joints and coffee drive-throughs. The stress of all this travel, and other personal stressors, have -- to put it colloquially -- driven me to drinking.

All in all, a bad recipe for health in general, and an even worse recipe for brain health.

I've been on Paleo roughly a month, with far from strict habits. The occasional pizza, beer, hamburger bun, and ice cream have all snuck in. Moreover, I'm poor enough where buying perfect meat hasn't been possible all the time. Until I get a chest freezer I won't be able to buy large amounts of good meat. The biggest thing I make sure to buy is preservative-free bacon. I tried some of the cheap stuff and couldn't get it down. But I can go through a pack of the good stuff (Open Nature brand) in a day.

So far, here's my list of improvements:

10 pounds down

generally stable energy levels

more easily pulling myself out of gloomy moods

no PMS

seasonal allergies not as bad as my yard full of dandelions would suggest

usually less swelling of ankles and wrists... but it's hard to tell because of the heat waves we've been having

sweets cravings more easily overcome

sleeping better

happier poops—this means no five-minutes-cleaning-up, no straining, and only rarely the occasional bout of diarrhea when I cheat

better heat tolerance (it's currently 90 outside where I'm writing this)

less easily sunburned

But really, the best thing is the stable energy levels and mood improvement. It could just be that I'm eliminating hormone-filled foods, but I don't think so. While I did switch to Paleo from a rather extreme fast-food-filled diet because of my travel schedule, before that horrible ten weeks I ate fairly well: pasta with red sauce, homemade burritos, oatmeal, omelettes, pizza with lots of veggies. It could also be that just eliminating gluten has helped—my sister has celiac and so I'm a likely candidate.

The worst thing about this diet is that my mother's boyfriend, who is a religiously fanatical lean-meats-and-whole-grains type, has apparently been telling my mother that I'm going to die doing this thing, and that she should intervene and stop me. Um, no. It's my life, it's my body, and I wasn't getting any healthier on a whole-grains-and-lean-meats diet.

I still feel concern about eating meat when there are so many environmental concerns even about sustainable farming, particularly when I find myself buying ground wild boar that was shipped from Australia. Where is the eco-consciousness in that?