Paleo Running: Day One Reflections

I may not be cut out for dieting. Yesterday started off fine. Eggs with spinach for breakfast, then a salad for lunch, but by three o’clock I was having a really hard time concentrating, and in my line of work, concentrating is the name of the game. If you can’t think clearly, you can’t work and if you can’t work, shit goes off the rails fast. So I broke down and had a bag of chips from the vending machine. I know, I am not grok.

 

Immediately after I felt so much better. I knocked out the section of the brief I needed to get done and then met a friend for dinner where I cheated again and had some bread with my meat. Yesterday was a diet disaster. I’m going to try and do it again today, but honestly, I don’t have high hopes.

 

I know some of you are going to think “Sean just needs to tough it out; it’ll get better in a couple of days.” Maybe. But I don’t really have the luxury of being headachey and spacey for a couple of days. My job is pretty demanding on the brain and my boss doesn’t care that I am experimenting with some quack diet from the internet.

 

And why am I doing this anyway? Stephanie asked this in a comment to an earlier post. As I told her, the main reason is to lose weight. The secondary reason is answer the question of whether or not I can train on this type of diet.

 

I’ve no doubt I’d lose weight if I kept this up, but perhaps there are better ways to lose weight. Like running more and drinking less beer. And as for the question of running on this diet, I only did a stupid one mile run last night, but it sucked. If this suckiness keeps up through today and tonight’s eight miler, I’m just going to call this a bust and go back to eating bagels.

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  1. Jessica

    You are braver than I – I don’t know what I would do without bread!! If weight loss solid training is what you’re looking for, I’ve found that big salads with lots of fruit and chickpeas/other sources of iron for breakfast or dinner works wonders for me. Fewer calories, same or more of a full feeling, and your body has the carbs and other nutrients (and lots of water!) that it needs! This is purely anecdotal, and I’m interested to see how the rest of your paleo experiment goes!

    1. seanv2

      Thanks for the comment. Weight loss tricks are always anecdotal, aren’t they? We all know what it takes to lose weight (create a calorie deficit) but getting to that deficit is the hard part for everyone. Salad’s are definitely less calorically dense than say, the Italian sub I am craving right now… Guess I should go with the salad.

  2. Lisa

    Sadly, one’s body needs time to adjust to a dietary change. Maybe you could do a modified Paleo and have some bread/grains and slowly taper off the amount over time? I imagine you may still reap the benefits of weight loss, without too much of the side effects you’re experiencing.

    I’m trying to figure out a weight loss diet myself, and was toying around with more of a gluten-free approach. My personal experience with that is that I can concentrate fine (almost better, even), and I have a little less of a gut now, but I had, er, digestion issues. So I’ve modified my approach. Right now, I have maintained the same weight for a while, but haven’t had any significant loss after the initial water weight loss. We’ll see if I can sustain this, or whether I need to do something more drastic.

    1. seanv2

      Very sensible advice to tape them off, Lisa. I think that might be what happens here. That or I’ll give up on this thing all together and have beer and a a burrito for dinner.

  3. Greg

    I came to post approximately the same thing Lisa had to say — take your time and adjust gradually. My diet is pretty good these days but it’s taken me years to get to this point. I still have soft spots (I love me some Cheezits and Goldfish crackers!) but I never really deny myself anything I want. What I do is force myself to eat a good REAL food before eating bad stuff. 9/10 I forget about eating the bad stuff because the good stuff filled me up.

    Best of luck!