I know this is sorta an older post....
Anyway, as I said in my intro, I was raised as an ovo/lacto vegetarian in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere...no fast food joints anywhere. My mother and grandmother stayed at home with us, runing an antique store out of our barn. We usually ate raw veggies right from the vine when we were out in the garden, gathered millions of pecans from our grove, picked wild dewberries all summer etc. We ate fresh eggs and had a raw milk source. I never crave fast foods...never. At the grocery store I head straight to the produce section and fill up my cart, now I also head to the local butcher shop etc. I skip all the sections in between...where all the boxes are. Easy peasy for me. Now that I'm switching from paleo to raw paleo it doesn't seem to be very hard at all. Learning "the rules" has been the hardest. The food part is easy.
My best friend in the whole world, on the other hand was raised in the city on a typical suburban diet, fast foods, white bread sandwiches, pizza, meatloaf and pasta laden casseroles. As an adult she got fast food every single day for lunch and made rice a roni for dinner b/c she never learned or cared to learn how to cook. She was a (young and thin) runner and never had to worry about her figure...until a few years ago, it all caught up with her...poochy tummy, junk in the trunk and even a double chin.
She was running 6 miles everyday and doing strength training, nothing helped as far as exercise was concerned. (Not kidding, every damn day!) So she turned to me for help with her diet. At that time, I was a big Weston A. Price follower...12 servings of veggies 1/2 cooked, 1/2 raw; grass fed meats; pastured butter, coconut oil and fermented veggies, kombucha and kefir. She went cold turkey to the WAP type of diet. OMG!!! She had such a difficult time of this, like someone trying to quit a drug. She got headaches and body/joint aches, sick to her stomach, her face broke out, crabby and irrational. She missed work too, something she never does. (Oh, and her fast food cravings were horrible.)
Anyway, the point being after about 2 weeks she started to feel better and she eventually lost most of the weight she had put on. I'm not saying go cold turkey, I'm just saying yes, it is very hard but you can do it. She is living proof.
Now we are both 100% paleo, headed into raw paleo. (Sorry I don't know the abbreviations for it, but the raw omnivore diet is where we are going to start.) Both of us are thin and more healthy than we have been in years...thanks to the regular paleo diet. Going raw or mostly raw sems like the logical "next step". On the WAP diet, we couldn't shed the last few pounds...too many "properly prepared legumes and grains", and gluten in the form of sourdough, me thinks.
One thing that helped her go straight (non raw) paleo was to make food that tricked her, like taco lettuce wraps, using her own homemade taco seasoning, spaghetti squash spaghetti, protabello bun-ed hamburgers etc.)
Soon you will see and feel the results, in the form of a flatter tummy, cut arms and clear skin. You will have more energy than ever and you will have to 'remember to eat'. And as soon as you do see/feel these results, you will be so motivated to continue on your journey.
Best of luck to you!!
