Most people when starting out on any diet begin with lots of motivation. They manage to stick with it for a couple of days, and all goes very well. After this lovely, motivated feel-good-about-yourself period however, most people will tend drop the diet altogether.
A Paleo diet does not include some of the more common ingredients, so you should expect new flavors in your meals. To help you with your meals, it is best you look for a Paleo cookbook that is now widely available thanks to the increasing popularity of the Paleo way of eating. Many give dieting up because they only have very limited choices when it comes to food and meals. So having a wide variety of meals to choose from will make you look forward to eating your new meals more often.
There are quite a few places where you can buy paleo friendly ingredients, but unless you’re very lucky, you won’t find them all in the same shop around the corner. Try to pick a fixed day every week, or every two weeks, where you can make time to go grocery shopping.
Setting one day for your shopping also makes sure that you do not forget an ingredient as you go about your busy life. Of course, make sure that you enjoy shopping around for your meals. It will make you love what you are doing and instead of feeling that you are sacrificing, you will realize that you are actually enjoying the transition.
Selecting your paleo meals for the week should be fun. Browsing through recipes, planning your paleo diet grocery list and buying the ingredients you need doesn’t have to be tedious. By going about this in an organized manner, you will turn your diet that started by motivation into a daily habit.
This is the key to success in the paleo diet.
Start with foods you know and like but don’t stay there. Gradually introduce new foods into your Paleo diet meal plan over time. Your first week should be only foods you know and love. Your second week, try to eat something new once per day. After that, try to incorporate something new and unusual into every meal. A key component to the Paleo diet is variety. Hunter-Gatherers didn’t have the luxury of a grocery store, or even a Paleo diet meal plan; they ate what was available. You need to intentionally branch out in the beginning because we have been conditioned to only eat certain types of food (cereal, bacon, eggs, and toast for breakfast; a turkey sandwich for lunch, pasta or casserole for dinner).
And if a friend does invite you over, and you find yourself in a restaurant where things are not looking very Paleo friendly, pick out the best thing you can find. You’ll feel a lot less guilty when you know that you can return to your Paleo friendly filled fridge next day.
The Paleo diet in the long run doesn’t get broken because people go to a restaurant every now and then – it gets broken because people don’t plan it into their daily lives.
Especially with Paleo, where many ingredients can be quite specific, planning your meals and recipes is key to enjoing the diet while leading a relaxing and healthy day to day life.