The Last Supper!

It's July 15th!

Do you know what that means??

I'm DONE!

FREEDOM! Burrito time! Nom nom paleo nom nom! Good heavens, I miss burritos... It's all I can think about for the past week... like a CNN ticker in my brain... "burrito burrito burrito"...

So, I did the whole day today also, just as extra penance for my GoRuck training sins. But I didn't suffer. Check out my last Paleo supper:

Not bad, eh?


Oh, delicious steak on a bed of amazing salad... yeah, cry for me.




Now that the 30 days is up, I find that I don't really want to change that much. I'll be relaxing the rules a bit on burritos, I guess, but that's pretty much it.

I really like this way of eating. I am a Paleo convert. Not in everything, mind you. I've done more reading on rice and some grains, and though maybe they're not the easiest things to digest, they are really not the evil that hard-core paleo fiends will tell you they are. And that's fine, everyone is free to make their choice and judgments.

But I remember many times when I had an achy tummy and a bowl of oatmeal helped. (Note: I'm not talking about that processed natural-flavors stuff, I'm talking about "Ingredients: Oats" oatmeal.)

And I remember how warm and soothing a fresh bowl of rice with a bit of butter and sugar felt after a long day of shoveling snow in the wintertime. (Note: If you haven't tried rice with sugar and butter mixed in, you're missing out.)

So no. I won't cut them out of my life completely. I believe they are fine in moderation.

The thing is, I have a re-calibrated sense of what "moderation" means.

I think bread and rice and grains are WAY too predominant in people's diets. Folks don't eat their vegetables anymore! Kids grow up thinking fruit is something your mom torments you into having instead of the freezer pops and instant pizza that are in constant supply in the fridge at home.

I feel like I don't really miss bread, beans, milk, beer, and so on, that much. I do like them, yes. But now that I know more about them, and I've actually had to live without them, I think I will continue to limit how often I have them and I will be more than okay :-)

One switch that has forever flipped is that all processed stuff is out of my life forever.

I just can't look at a wall of text on a label anymore and justify putting all that weird science into my shopping cart. I am now always going to ask "but what does 'natural flavor' mean? and why isn't what's in this flavorful enough?"

I was in a meeting at work today. Big group of people. There were cookies. The topic of why I wasn't having one came up. I was a bit shy about it, ever fearful of being "That Guy", but I told them I was on the last day of the 30 day Paleo challenge. We had a nice chat about what that was and my crazy reasons for trying it. It was a fun and interesting chat and everyone was super awesome about it.

I read one of the packages on the table. There were boatloads of random things I couldn't pronounce in it. I just looked at the size of the paragraph and thought again to myself -- "you've worked so hard... why would you mess with the good clean feeling you get from healthier eating to have this periodic table in your colon now?"

I don't mean to be the critic of critics... some uppity food aristocrat.... and I know I'm going to have treats again in this lifetime. But this is one major life-changing result from this experiment that I believe in and am going to live by: If something on the label sounds more like the contents of a petri dish than a garden, I'm going to pass.

Sorry, Keebler Elves. Our relationship is over.

Now.

Where's that burrito?