My Week with Paleo

For the week leading up to my birthday, Nico and I followed the autoimmune paleo diet. It's quite extreme - meat, vegetables and fruit mainly, but we liked it. I even got used to burgers for breakfast!

There are many pros and cons. First to the positives:

• I felt really good. I think the diet could help me reduce my colitis medication.
• I got back into cooking. We picked up three new recipes that we'll be eating more often and I enjoyed being in the kitchen again.
• I lost a couple of kilos. This wasn't my reason for doing the diet but it was weight I can do without.
• The recipes were mainly ones where you can cook in bulk and freeze some for later.
• We started eating as a family at the kitchen table more often

The downsides:

• The diet takes quite some planning and until you build up some recipes, it can be repetetive.
• I'm not sure how healthy it would be long term - no carbs reminds me of Atkins which got a lot of bad press.
• By the end of the week, I started to get tired. It may have been the coffee ban or it may be that we need to work on portion sizes.

On the whole we enjoyed the experiment. We're going to be trying to do more of this in the long term and with some tweaking. 

If you have any kind of dietary difficulties, I'd really recommend giving this a try. It really helps me.