Everyone has a story behind their decision to do something radical and new. Changing the way we eat can sometimes be considered radical, especially when it involves cutting out so many favorites and staples of the typical American diet. But for me, it wasn't really all that radical, as you can read here.
(If you're unfamiliar with the Paleo Diet, read a very nice summary by The Paleo Mom here.)
Already Half-way Paleo as a Nursing Mom
I'll start with the baby and me: I'm a nursing mom and third time around I feel I'm a little more in tune with baby and how my diet affects the baby. I automatically cut all dairy out of my diet from day one, with the exception of butter. I can't drink cow's milk because I'm so sensitive to it, but seem to handle yogurt and cheese fine. But, knowing my other two kiddos had milk issues as babies, I thought I'd save myself from the trouble of learning my third baby also has a milk sensitivity. I figured a little butter on my toast in the morning would be fine. I mean, that's such a negligible amount, it really can't be that bad, right? Wrong. It took me a few weeks, but I did discover that that tiny amount of butter made him very gassy and crabby (and he is normally a VERY happy and calm baby). So no dairy. Got it.
Next I discovered I couldn't eat soy. I LOVE drinking soy shakes for breakfast to start my day full of protein. I find that eating that, instead of a bunch of carbs, helps me eat less the rest of the day because I'm more satisfied and don't end up grazing all day. The first time I drank a soy shake after the baby was born I had also gone for a long walk in the hot summer weather, so I assumed that I was dehydrated and he was upset that afternoon because there wasn't enough milk. But a week or so later, I had another soy shake for breakfast, didn't go for a walk, and the baby was miserable that afternoon/evening. I stopped drinking soy, and he wasn't gassy and fussy. That was HUGE! My hubby had left for a month when the baby was just a week old because his father had a severe stroke. That left me home to take care of a newborn, a three year old and a five year old, all at the start of the school year with new schools and a new schedule. Having a happy newborn was critical in maintaining my sanity. So, I stopped eating soy. In reality, I wasn't too shocked soy bothered him. I had a hard time drinking the soy shakes while I was pregnant with him. In fact, I had a hard time eating dairy too - I felt so incredibly nauseous after eating soy shakes and greek yogurt, I gave it up until the last trimester, when I pushed through the nausea because I craved the protein.
The last thing I found I had to stop eating while nursing was peanuts. No surprise here either. My mom has a severe allergy to them, so I guess it runs in the family. I've had times where I get a scratchy/sore throat after eating peanuts, but it also was when I had a hard time with allergies in general (living in Houston with terrible air quality and a carpeted apartment on the ground floor in a very humid climate made me have constant headaches and post nasal drainage that caused nausea). I don't normally like to eat peanut butter, but my hubby likes it, as do the kids, so it's usually in the pantry. When I ran out of almond butter, I started using peanut butter on my toast and the baby's response was painful gas and hours of crabbiness in the evening. He would be so gassy, it would take hours to get him to nurse to sleep. Again, in the interest of keeping my sanity and not making my baby suffer, I stopped eating peanuts.
Already Cooking Paleo
One thing my family and friends know about me is that I LOVE to bake. Cook, not so much. I leave that to my hubby. When he's home, that is. Cooking for toddlers, as any parent knows, is always a chore. There are two ways to tackle their picky tastebuds (that crave carbs) and their willpower to be independent. One is to be a short order cook to ensure they eat something. The other, which I prefer, is to serve one meal, that we ALL eat and if they decide they don't like it, they can wait until the next meal to eat. They obviously aren't that hungry. So when you combine the whininess factor, trying to come up with kid-approved meals, and throw in that I'm not a huge fan of cooking daily meals, oh, and that most every night of the year I get little to no help with preparation or cleanup because hubby is either deployed or working nights, cooking anything other mac and cheese or making sandwiches was a big deal. Then I discovered E-meals. When I tried it a few years ago, it helped, but I didn't like that everything was made from a can or some prepackaged food from the middle aisles of the store. Everything was fast to make, but it was too salty and too processed for my taste buds. Then last fall, they released a new meal plan: Paleo. I signed up immediately.
After my hubby deployed last fall, and the new meal plan came out, I started cooking Paleo for dinner. The kids loved almost every single meal. After the holidays, I started to use it almost every night and found that cooking wasn't nearly as bad as I thought. My distaste of cooking slowly melted away and was replaced with an eagerness to try something new. It wasn't that hard; someone else came up with the meal plan and grocery list and I could pick and choose which meals I thought my kids would eat. We were eating Paleo dinners for about a month when I decided to go 100% Paleo.
New Chronic Fatigue and Soreness
A major reason, if not the most important one, for changing my diet was how I had been feeling for several months. After the birth of my third baby, I had a horrible time getting my energy levels back. Every morning I'd wake up and feel like the world was sitting on my shoulders and each step I took felt like my feet were made of lead. When I picked up my baby, he didn't feel like he was only 10 lb or 15 lb; my arms were so fatigued, many times I felt like I would drop him. Of course, I had some weight to lose, I'd gained more total weight this time around than I did with the other two, but within a couple months, I was back down to my body's postpartum "happy" weight. Which means I still had another 20-25lb to lose to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight, along with regaining all of the muscle that melted away into oblivion the first trimester. Oh, what we mothers go through to bring these bundles of joy into the world. But I digress...
This overwhelming feeling of having a fatigued body was new to me. Not that I felt like a million bucks after having the first two kids, but to have all parts of my body feel completly exhausted, no matter early I went to bed, and to have achy-ness all over that wasn't painful, but rather annoying, was a constant reminder of how I could feel. How I used to feel. Then I thought about my mom. How, in her early thirties, she started having chronic pain, and how over the past 20 something years, she's been to the doctor almost every week for something. Either pain, a rib out of place, a never-ending migraine, a sore hip, you name, she probably had it. I thought about how she has been diagnosed with fibromyalgia (before it even became a popular enough disease that you see commercials about it), and then later rheumatoid arthritis. Basically, she has chronic pain and has been on prescription medicine for years, all the while trying to tackle it with natural supplements. (She has, in the past five years, found a natural supplement that works so well she's been off the meds completely). But I still remember her dependency on them and I REFUSE to ever take one dose. EVER. Her whole family has some sort of chronic pain, between her mom, sister, and brothers. It's definitely in my genes. But I'm in complete denial that I will ever be diagnosed or live with chronic pain. It's just not an option. There are too many things I enjoy doing and I haven't even begun exploring the world like I want to!
The Critical Event
The deciding factor was my daughter. One Saturday morning, she had a complete and horrible meltdown, after being crabby from the minute she woke up. She had eaten homemade 100% whole wheat toast with Nutella (her FAVORITE), then had some greek yogurt and later a soy protein shake made with soy milk. I had had enough. I figured maybe if if we tried changing her diet, she might feel better. It was worth a try anyway. Anything would be better than listening to her scream over everything and trying to stay a sane parent in the meantime. So I made a decision right then and there we were going to try eating Paleo for a month and see what happens. Minutes after watching her sulk off to her room, crying and upset, I turned to her brother and said "What do you think about trying a new diet if it helps your sister not act like this? It would mean we can't eat a lot of foods, like yogurt and bread and goldfish crackers. We can try it for a month and see how we all feel. I think we will feel better in the end, but it will be hard. Are you okay with that?" He responded with a very confident "Yes, I don't like it when she screams so much."
I had bought The Paleo Diet book by Loren Cordain over a year ago, but between pregnancy and a new baby, didn't really have the time to sit down and read it. So, with this new found interest, I started reading up on all the benefits of the diet. Up to this point, I just knew that it was a really healthy way to eat, but I didn't have the background of why. It was like a veil had been removed from my eyes. Everything started making sense, from my family history of pain, my fatigue and soreness, my daughter's crabbiness and refusal to eat anything but bread, crackers and yogurt; it all just clicked.
The Noticeable Improvements
It's worth mentioning now, that to this point, as a nursing mom, my favorite breakfast item was homemade 100% whole wheat bread. Craving carbs is an understatement. I lived for them. I would eat this bread for breakfast, lunch AND dinner. Not so much because I really wanted to, but because I was hungry, I was tired, and I needed a quick fix. A crying baby, a screaming preschooler, me about to pass out from exhaustion. You get the picture. Cutting bread and slathering on some almond butter solved the problem immediately. I could nurse and eat at the same time and when my three year old was eating, she wasn't screaming or whining. I should also mention that I started making this bread shortly after my hubby deployed and was making a new loaf every two days. It was a staple item in our house. And coffee once again entered my diet because too many people were asking me if I was okay because I looked so tired.
That's when the baby started spitting up ridiculous amounts after every feeding. I automatically assumed it was the coffee and new intake of caffeine (I had given up black tea too after he was born), but I couldn't bring myself to stop drinking it. I needed that extra oomph in the morning to get me going and stay going until bedtime. Otherwise, I was a walking zombie.
When I stopped eating the bread, the baby stopped spitting up within a week. Seriously. Maybe here and there he'd spit up some with a burp, but nothing like he had been. And he started gaining weight again at a faster pace. So it makes me believe that either A) he's gluten intolerant, B) eating the bread in combination with the coffee made my body highly acidic and therefore my milk acidic, which made him spit up, or C) a combination of A and B. Whatever it is, I will not go back to eating bread anytime soon, if ever. (As a side note, when I do "cheat" a little and eat something with gluten in it, the baby is noticeably more cranky and spitting up a lot more the next day or two.)
I also noticed that my energy level improved significantly, as did the fatigued muscles. There were still days I was utterly exhausted, but it wasn't every single day. And as I gain muscle mass back and start getting into better shape, my energy level and patience improve. I feel like I'm a better mom now too, able to keep up with my kids, have the patience to handle their independent and strong-willed personalities and just feel happier in general. If for no other reason, this is good enough for me.
And so, that's my story and why I feel eating Paleo isn't just following some fad diet, but rather a very necessary lifestyle change for myself. If it weren't for my baby and family history, I probably would still be eating the way I was a year ago, but after living through such an improvement in our family and our daily life, I don't see how I can go back. I share all this with you because I don't believe I'm the only person that struggles with the same issues at home and I'm a firm believer that our diet is foundational to our well being.
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