Nathan reenacting his displeasure of finding the pantry devoid of frosted flakes

This weekend our household had a hint of angryness to it.  My body is angry with me, as is Shannon’s.  Nathan, well, you haven’t seen angryness until you’ve taken away Nafe’s breakfast cereal.  We started something resembling the Paleo diet.  We’re going to try it for the month of December. So last Friday night, Mommy cleaned out the house of things that were not gathered and hunted up by our ancestors. Sort of.  The children aren’t really going to be doing it, except for Benny, who we think may benefit from an altered diet.  Because, quite frankly, nothing else has helped.

So gone are the frosted flakes, candy bars, and big blocks of sugar lying about everywhere.  The children will be eating mostly good or better than before foods.  The house now has ample supplies of fruit, sunflower seed butter, beef, veggies, and other nice things.  The children will be able to eat things like oatmeal and … other things Mommy has determined to be of value.  I will keep you updated as to how it all works out.

For now, as I said, my body is very angry.  It seems like going from eating pie and birthday cake for a week straight to eating unprocessed and healthy foods isn’t a fun thing.  But I still am here to type, so I can say going without sugar hasn’t killed me.  Who knew?

As I read up on the Paleo diet I kept reading these bizarre books about how much healthier our hunter and gatherer ancestors were and how they ate.  What I read was inconsistent, and it is my opinion that when those who write these books try to figure out what these people ate thousands of years ago and how healthy they were, well, they are really making stuff up.  It may be true, but really, they’ll totally change their minds if some new discovery is made.  We chose this eating plan because it just sounds good.  It seems to make sense knowing our biological make up.  So we’re going to give it a whirl.

Now for those ancestors.  If they can come up with things about what they ate, well I can, too.  So my ancestors  in their ancient village would roam the fields, and… oh wait.  They didn’t have  a village.  Strike that.  So my ancestors would crawl out from under their well furnished rocks and grab their coin-shaped rocks and meet with the Guy With A Spear and get lots of meat.  Guy With A Spear was good at collecting a wide variety of meat and loved coin-shaped rocks, which my family had in abundance.  Later they would roam around until they found a random lettuce patch, right next to a patch of carrots, and a tomato plant.  Onions grew everywhere, as did green peppers.  My hunter gatherer ancestors were smart, so they put onions and green peppers in everything.  Olive Oil Trees were close at hand, so they could cook some good omlettes.  (Oh, free range chickens were everywhere).  The highlight of the place where my ancestors lived was the Tree of Mons Ros.   They both loved and hated the tree.  They would siphon its beautiful sweet nectar and add it to carbonated water (from the nearby carbonated springs).  Yes.  My ancestors had the Mountain Dew Tree.  And if was good enough for them, well, you know what I’ll not be changing in my diet.

Now my ancestors were not your ancestors. Well, probably some of them.  But I’ve gotta follow my family’s roots.  My “Paleo” diet probably isn’t going to look like yours.

As we examine some of the things that Benny can eat, we have found over and over many things that Cause Benny Problems.  Foods are absorbed differently.  I’m pretty sure there’s something in that blood-brain-barrier that isn’t quite the same as most of us.  Because of this, we already have Benny avoid lots of things… dairy, red and yellow food coloring, anything but the minimal amounts of sugar. Really we- that’s We The Parents- are fed up with food coloring in everything we eat from cereal to tea and everything in between.  Really?  I need food coloring in my yogurt?  So we’re going all out.  Processed foods are out for us and him. (Except that dew.)  Dairy and Grains are out.  (Except for that sugarless cappuccino.)  (My ancestors gathered a lot of caffeine containing natural substances.)
We won’t do it perfectly (OBVIOUSLY) but it’s a step in the right direction.  Yes, I’ll be eating Christmas cookies (at Christmas parties) and I will enjoy some sort of pie with Cool Whip on Christmas.  But those will be the exception, not the daily rule as it has been in the past.   Our bodies will get over it soon, and I’m pretty sure our bodies will like it.