The Paleo Diet - Loren Cordain [69]
Food Availability and Preparation Issues
One of the keys to making this diet work is ensuring that your modern Paleo food is always available. Many of us have schedules away from home or at our jobs, where it is impossible to prepare or buy fresh, unadulterated fruits, veggies, and lean meats. This means you will need to prepare some of your food at home and bring it with you. But this isn’t a problem. For most people, lunch is the most common meal away from home, and “brown-bagging” lunch is the norm for many working people.
You don’t have to prepare three separate Paleo meals from scratch every single day. What works best for most people is to simply double or triple the size of the evening meal and then bring the leftovers for lunch. Put parts of your salad and main dish in a sealed container that night and take them with you the next morning. Toss in a piece of fresh fruit, and you’ve got a terrific lunch! You can also cook two or more main dishes in the evening, use one, and immediately refrigerate the other for use later in the week.
This same principle works for your condiments (salad dressings, salsas, marinades, dips, etc.). Mix up a big batch on the weekend or in the evening, put it in a container, and store it in the refrigerator until you need it. Nothing could be simpler.
Most supermarkets now stock precut, washed salad vegetables and mixes of lettuces. Completely mixed salads (spinach, Caesar, etc.) in sealed plastic bags without added dressing are also commonly available. These packaged veggies are great for people on the go who want to eat fresh foods but don’t have time to prepare them. So if time is of the essence, you can make a wonderful, healthful salad by simply opening a bag of cut, washed, and mixed salad greens. Try tossing in some cold shrimp, shredded crabmeat, and olive oil or dressing that you have made beforehand, and you’ve got another instant Paleo lunch.
Dining Out, Travel, and Peer Pressure
You’re invited over to a close friend’s house for dinner, and it’s spaghetti and meatballs. That’s okay, just this once. Your daughter baked you a triple-chocolate birthday cake and would be devastated if you didn’t eat at least a piece. That’s okay, just this once. Things happen—and a few occasional and minor dietary indiscretions won’t make much difference to your overall health if you follow the diet the rest of the time. However, if these indiscretions become the rule and not the exception, you will increasingly lose the healthful benefits and weight-loss effects of the Paleo Diet.
Dining Out
How can you make the Paleo Diet work in the real world? Do the best you can. When you dine out, it can be a challenge—or downright impossible—to follow the Paleo Diet to a T. In the real world, many restaurants build their menu around most of the foods you’re trying not to eat. Even though many restaurants now offer low-fat or vegetarian meals, few restaurants sponsor Paleo cuisine. In the best situations, you’ll be able to stick pretty close to the Paleo Diet; in the worst cases, you may have to throw in the towel.
However, most of the time, you should be able to pull it off with just a few transgressions. The key is “triage.” Assign your priorities based on urgency:
1. Your number one concern is to get a main dish that is not a starch-based food. Avoid pancakes for breakfast, for example, sandwiches for lunch, and pasta for dinner.
2. Try to choose lean meat or seafood, cooked in a simple manner—by baking, broiling, sautéing, roasting, poaching, or steaming—without added starches and fats.
3. Always try to get some fresh fruit or a nonstarchy vegetable at every meal.
4. Keep the meal as simple as you can; the fewer ingredients, the better.
Breakfast
Most breakfast restaurants serve fresh fruit and some form of eggs. Because fried and scrambled eggs are usually cooked with trans fat-containing margarine or shortening, order your eggs poached or hard-boiled. Or have an omelet filled with veggies—hold the cheese and skip the