Day 9: Lost another pound!

Ok, I'm starting to feel like these moment-to-moment updates are pretty boring, even to my own mother.  Updating one's blog constantly without fresh material is sort of like periodically checking to see that you still have a belly button.  -Yup, it's still there!  Let me do a blog post about it!  haha. However, I do want to make a complete day by day account of what it was like to do 30 days of Paleo, and I can't skip a day whether it bores everyone or not!  So, let's do this.

Weight Loss - Oh yeah!

Today's my 9th day on the Paleo diet, and the weight (even though I didn't have much to lose, hehe) is still flying off left and right.  I looked at the scale again today and I lost another pound. Seriously? This is crazy!  Like I was saying, I am eating less calories than before, and I'm less hungry. At this rate I'll be back down to a 15% body fat in no time.  I don't even remember what it felt like to be that tiny.  This is the best diet EVER if I'm losing weight and I don't even feel hungry!  I feel stuffed!  But, I still have challenges, which leads me to my next point.  How do you not get bored on a diet that limits the foods you eat?

Combating Boredom on the Paleo Diet / Primal Lifestyle

As some of you might remember, on Day 7 I was complaining about getting bored.  That initial thought turned into a thought in the back of mind that I just couldn't scratch, and it's been nagging at me every day since.  Everyday, I thought, you know what, maybe I need to be on an 80/20 diet with gluten and sugar and everything.  Maybe I need to have a cheat day.  Maybe I'm just a person who needs more variety.  I just couldn't silence the inner nagging doubt starting to creep in.  Anyway, I think I may have thought of a way to keep that boredom at bay -- but first, let me explain how I had this epiphany.

You see, today I was telling somebody who is decidedly anti-diet and anti-health anything about the Paleo diet.  As I was talking, I realized that every meal I've made has been totally delicious.  It made me realize something.  It's not the food that's boring! It's the routine.  It's the cooking all my meals at home and never coloring outside the lines or being spontaneous that is getting boring.  How can you not get bored cooking at home day after day after day?  I'm a person who likes to go out to eat sometimes.  I also have extremely varied tastes in food that aren't always being met in 1 week's worth of grocery shopping (after all, I don't want to buy the whole store).  Some days I want Mexican, some days I want sushi, some days I want Indian food, some days I want Korean.  I just never know what it's going to be.

So I did some more thinking.  Eating out is great, but realistically, how often did I used to eat out?  Pre-Paleo days, I only ate out once or twice a week.  I didn't have this amazingly varied and exciting diet every single day.  Half of the time I'd just come home and have a bowl of cereal or something.  Twice a week seemed to be the magic amount which kept me from getting bored.  So I shouldn't have these huge expectations for the foods I'm eating just because I'm eating Paleo (and believe me, the foods are so tasty, it's hard NOT to have big expectations).  So instead of whining about being "bored", I decided I'm going to mix things up sometimes.   Two nights I week, I'm going to make it a point to either go out to eat for whatever I'm in the mood for (still avoiding bad food), or I'll go to the grocery store after work with the specific notion of cooking something spontaneous, or buying something tasty like kimchi.  Something that wasn't on the grocery list.  Two nights a week, NO LEFTOVERS ALLOWED!  

In fact, for extra spontaneity, I'm not even going to say what nights are going to be spontaneous.  I'm going to spontaneously decide when to be spontaneous.  And then I'm going to spontaneously update my blog about it too.