… which is good advice in general, but especially if you’re trying to do something that requires willpower, or changing long-formed habits. In my case, I’ve been trying to:

• Do another Whole 30, this time learning more recipes.
• Start my son eating more healthily too.
• Figure out how to do a Whole 30 with minimal meat. (Not zero meat. But I’d rather eat less meat, on environmental grounds.)

I haven’t broken the Whole 30, but I haven’t made much progress on the recipes either. I’ve just realised that I can’t do all three at once. The less-meat experimenting needs to wait until this Whole 30 is over.

On the other two: I bought Well Fed, by Melissa Joulwan, and it’s fantastic! It has the same template-recipe-with-variations format that I loved from It Starts With Food. And I flicked through it with my son, and he liked the look of most of the recipes! (Small miracle, he’s veg-averse). Of course, I don’t know if he’ll like the taste yet, but I’m optimistic.

However, before I decided to postpone the slightly-more-veggie-paleo, I did some research and found quite a few interesting things. This article from PaleoLeap is a great summary of some of the options for veggies to make their diet a little more paleo (without stopping being veggies). In particular, it was interesting that using legumes and (non-gluten-containing) grains is not so bad if they’re prepared properly: soaked, sprouted or fermented. The soaking sounds fairly easy, but is the least effective of the three options, the other two I like the sound of but need to do some more looking up recipes. Which I will postpone until I’ve learned some of the recipes from Well Fed, and finished this Whole 30.

The other thing that cropped up in my reading is that most health experts seem to agree(*) that the more-vegs-and-no-processed-food part of the Paleo diet is healthy – but there are definite debates about eating a lot of red meat. And many Paleo recipes include a LOT of red meat. (The one quibble I have with Well Fed is the idea that 4-6oz of meat per meal is a sensible portion size. That’s up to half a kilo of meat per day!). It seems like it would be sensible for me to make sure red meat is limited and I include a lot of fish, eggs, white meat, and vegetable fats like coconut and avocado.

(*) There’s so much controversy drifting around that I’m not even going to try to provide references for that, it’s just my own interpretation of my reading. But for an interesting take on this, have a look at this article where some of the controversies are covered. 

Basically, I’m going to have to try coconut oil again. Maybe I’ll like it this time… (fingers crossed). So tonight will be spent pulling together a meal plan and shopping list for the week from Well Fed, and tomorrow will be spent making lots of the sauces – wow they look good! I’m really looking forward to eating healthily! 🙂