Some Potential Pitfalls of Going Paleo With Your Diet

In the 80s and 90s there was "The Bread Diet", and "The Chocolate Diet". In the 2000s there was "The Atkins Diet" and "The Mediterranean Diet".

Now as the new decade presses forward, "eating clean" or "Paleo" is where it's at.Basically, one of the more comprehensive programs for the Paleo eating approach can be found in the book "Primal Blueprint" by Mark Sisson. Mr. Sisson is a nutritionist, blogger, and owner of the company Primal Nutrition, Inc.

The book gets into a total lifestyle approach that emphasizes eating and exercising like our forefathers the cavemen. The game changer in Primal Blueprint is the advice on eating. Simply put, Mark advises the user to forego eating processed foods of any kind and to focus in on plants and animals.

On your garden variety plate you would get rid of the bread and white potatoes and eat all you want of the meat and vegetables.Snacks are now fruits and nuts, rather than low-fat or whole grain processed boxed or bagged items.

When I undertook these changes, I noticed immediate benefits. I felt more light and less bloated. My weight stopped fluctuating so wildly and seemed to settle into a range that wouldn't deviate too much either way no matter how much I ate. This all served to simplify things in my mind so I could focus in on my work outs.

In retrospect, there are some things I would have done differently. The fact is when you make such drastic changes away from a core group of foods that you have become so used to over time, it's bound to complicate things at first.Some of the pitfalls you will encounter when adopting the approach laid out in Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson are:

--The ever-lurking problem of too much too soon. I am a huge advocate of trying to be 80% compliant to a new nutrition or health direction and then building slowly from there. I jumped right in the deep end because the book got me so excited. Many times when you take this approach, you end up burning yourself out.

--Overcomplicating the simple. If you visit Mark's website at http://marksdailyapple.com, you will see so much valuable information on the subject of eating well and correctly, that you could start overloading yourself and over analyzing. It comes down to this: eat out of the ground and animals that eat out of the ground. If the food you are considering eating isn't clearly in those two camps, investigate it more closely.

--Overdoing a good thing. Make sure to have that bowl of ice cream once a week and pick a time every few weeks to go have that fried chicken dinner if you just can't give it up.

One of the tenants of "The Primal Blueprint" is to have fun. If eating something rich and more processed is your fun, make it really fun, but just do it less often.