Search Results for: leftovers

Sure, in principle kids should eat adult food just like adults do...

But have you ever tried switching a picky six-year-old from easy mac straight to liver and broccoli?

Everything tends to go much more easily if you can slide in slowly with some kid-friendly healthy alternatives. So in the spirit of tantrum-free dinners, here’s a week of kid-friendly dinner recipes, with lunchbox extras for five of the days (to make lunches for Monday through Friday).

All the meals include:

1. Animal protein
2. Sweeter or starchier "kid-friendly" side
3. Other vegetable

Depending on your kids and their tastes, you can get more or less insistent that they eat the other vegetable side.

The plan assumes that you’re feeding 2 adults and 2 kids.

Download the shopping list (PDF)

Sunday

For Dinner:

• BBQ Meatballs (tip: if your kids are picky about vegetables, puree some spinach and sneak it into the meatball mixture)
• Spicy sweet potato wedges
• Tomato soup

In Each Lunchbox for Tomorrow, Pack:

• A leftover serving of meatballs.
• Apple slices (sprinkle lemon juice on them so they don’t brown) with a sealed dip container or squeeze package of almond butter.
• Carrot sticks or baby carrots with your favorite dipping sauce.

Monday

For Dinner:

• Oven chicken fajita bake
• Butternut squash fries
• A quick tossed salad with greens, avocado, fresh tomatoes, and the spicy vinaigrette from this recipe.

In Each Lunchbox for Tomorrow, Pack:

• Leftover fajita chicken, shredded and mixed with a little mayonnaise and a splash of apple cider vinegar to make fajita chicken salad.
• Grapes or orange slices (or any other fruit)
• Kale chips

Tuesday

For Dinner:

• Pulled pork stuffed sweet potatoes (if you don’t have a slow-cooker, use this recipe to make the pork)
• Zucchini cakes

When you’re making the recipe, prepare half of it exactly as written. Half the pork and half the sweet potatoes are for lunch tomorrow – for these, do everything else but don’t stuff the potatoes. Instead, mash them with a little butter, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

In Each Lunchbox for Tomorrow, Pack:

• Leftover pulled pork.
• Cinnamon sweet potato mash (which you made with half the sweet
  potatoes from the dinner recipe)
• Bell pepper strips with your favorite dipping sauce.

Wednesday

For Dinner:

• Honey mustard drumsticks
• Roasted ambercup squash (or any squash)
• Roasted cauliflower with bacon

In Each Lunchbox for Tomorrow, Pack:

• Leftover drumsticks.
• A small cup of applesauce.
• Carrot sticks with your favorite dipping sauce.
• A few olives in a baggie.

Thursday

For Dinner:

• Portobello burgers
• Fruit salad
• Zucchini gremolata
• Also throw in a few beets to roast in the oven while you’re cooking (literally just poke some holes in them and throw them in, then take them out when they’re tender – no need for foil).

In Each Lunchbox for Tomorrow, Pack:

• 1 leftover burger patty with your favorite condiments (pickles, mayonnaise, ketchup, etc.) in sealed dipping containers.
• Leftover fruit salad.
• Roasted beets sliced and drizzled with olive oil and vinegar.

Friday

For Dinner:

• Sweet and sour chicken
• Baked Japanese sweet potatoes (these are the purple ones with white insides; you can substitute regular sweet potatoes if you can’t get them)
• Asian stir-fried Brussels sprouts

For Lunch Tomorrow:

• Pat yourself on the back – you’ve reached the weekend!

Saturday

For Dinner:

• Beanless chili
• Sweet potato bacon cakes
• Ratatouille stuffed zucchini

For Dessert:

• Banana ice cream!

For aspiring Paleo chefs, one big way to keep the cost of dinner down is to use all your leftovers, but reheating the same food again and again can get unappetizing pretty quickly, and it’s all too common to see a forest of Tupperware multiplying in the fridge, each half-full of a different leftover vegetable and none of them looking particularly appetizing. This is especially true for people who live alone and try to save money by cooking in bulk, only to realize that they don’t actually want to eat the same pork shoulder for five dinners in a row. Many people just end up throwing them all out in despair, which is a waste of good food and also good money!

To help save you from this trap, here are 17 quick and easy tips to save your leftovers from the trash can in easy, family-friendly, and appetizing ways.

Freezer meals

This is such a convenient way to use your leftovers that you might find yourself cooking extra on purpose so you can take advantage of it. If you have enough leftovers for an entire meal (or several) but don’t want to eat the same thing two days in a row, just freeze a meal-sized serving of everything in a separate container to take out later when you’re in a rush. It’s like a Paleo freezer dinner! You can also do this just with the meat portion of a meal, if you’ll have time to quickly throw together a salad but not enough time to cook the meat.

For homemade condiments, this is also a useful way of preserving a large batch you made for a recipe but never used up. Freeze extra ketchup, mustard, or mayonnaise in an ice cube tray, so when you want some more, you can just pop out and defrost as many cubes as you need.

Soup or broth

Soup is one of the most incredibly versatile options in any chef’s recipe book, and it can take just about any kind of leftovers you like. Some ideas:

• Leftover vegetables: just toss them all in, with or without meat. There are very few vegetables that don’t go well in soup (lettuce might not be the best choice), but it’s very hard to go wrong here. Another alternative is to puree harder vegetables (like squash or broccoli) for a creamier, richer soup on a cold winter afternoon.
• Leftover bones: perfect for making a delicious and nourishing bone broth. Chicken carcasses are just the right size for a pot of broth, but also use the leftover bones from ribs, drumsticks, or any other bone-in meat.
• Leftover meat: Save it in a separate container, and add it to a pot of soup at the very end of cooking to warm it up – if you cook it twice, it will get tough and unappetizing.

Stuffed peppers

Throw your leftover meat and vegetables inside a big bell pepper for an attractive fresh take on last night’s dinner. If you’re serving a crowd, get several different colors: peppers come in red, green, yellow, white, and even purple, so you can put together a whole rainbow on the table. They’re easy, too: just spoon in the filling, balance the peppers on a baking sheet, and bake in the oven until the flesh of the peppers is soft and the filling is warm all the way through. Some ideas:

• Thanksgiving peppers: leftover turkey, cauliflower “mashed potatoes,” and cranberry sauce to surprise your family with a new twist on holiday leftovers.
• Stuffed peppers, Italian-style: ground beef seasoned with basil and oregano, with tomato sauce and any leftover vegetables.
• Hawaiian pizza pepper: the rest of your chicken pineapple stir-fry, stuffed into a pepper – add ham or tomato sauce if you like.
• Breakfast in a pepper: your favorite pork or chicken sausage, with any leftover sweet potato or butternut squash.
• Ham “sandwich:” Leftover ham (or Dijon pork roast) with any vegetables you have; top with a smear of mustard when you pull it out of the oven.

Omelets or Frittatas

If you only have a little bit of something, an easy way to use it up is to just throw it into an egg dish. Get creative here: below are just a few ideas for how to transform some lunch or dinner leftovers into a mouthwatering omelet the next morning:

• Leftover meat from bulgogi: try an Asian-inspired omelet with the meat, some ginger, red pepper flakes, and green onions.
• Leftover lamb cutlets: slice the meat very thin, and add some olives and extra thyme if you have those left over as well.
• Leftover chicken masala or chicken curry: Southeast Asian flavors are perfect with eggs, especially if you beat the eggs for the omelet with a little leftover sauce.
• Leftover cream of tomato soup, pesto, or salsa verde: beat it into the eggs before you cook them, and add whatever vegetables you like.

Salad toppers

Salads can stretch to accommodate almost any kind of addition, so don’t be shy about experimenting. Lettuce is traditional, but you could also use cucumbers or spinach as the base, and add whatever other vegetables you want to use up. Throw in some olive oil and vinegar, and call it lunch! This is the perfect “five-minute meal” for those busy days when you don’t have time to cook anything, and it’s so endlessly variable that it’s hard to get bored.

Stir-Fries

Stir-fries are the king of leftovers because they’re so incredibly easy. They’re traditionally Asian dishes, but can adapt just as well to almost anything. This post gives you some quick and easy recipes; just remember that if your meat is already cooked, you don’t want to cook it again. Just cook the vegetables and then add the meat at the end to warm up. Also take a look at the ideas below for some examples of how you could transform dinner into stir-fry at the drop of a hat:

• Jerk Chicken: Caribbean-style stir-fry with peppers and onions. Add some pineapple if you have some, and serve with fried plantains.
• Lemon chicken kebabs: Fry with sugar snap peas, thinly sliced carrots, and whatever else you have to hand, plus an extra squeeze of lemon juice.
• Pork chops: Fry with onions and as many leafy green vegetables as you can cram into the pan – add in any extra sauce from the recipe for flavor.

Meatloaf

Most famous for hiding liver, meatloaf can be used to disguise almost anything you feel like putting into it. Vast amounts of spinach or other green leafy vegetables will disappear into a meatloaf as though they never existed (this is also perfect for getting picky eaters to finish their vegetables). Leftover roast vegetables of any kind will only add to the dish, and many sauces will add a surprisingly delicious twist – try some BBQ sauce in your meatloaf if you’re getting a little bored of the same old recipe.

The traditional meatloaf is made with beef and pork, but don’t be shy about experimenting with turkey or chicken meatloaf if that’s what you have. The taste will be a little different, but you might just find yourself discovering a new family favorite.

Salsa

Have you ever bought a bunch of parsley, basil, or other herbs for a recipe, and then been stuck with most of the bunch still sitting in your fridge the next day, threatening to go bad? Chop up a quick batch of salsa to give this problem a delicious and useful solution. Salsa is endlessly flexible; you can make it hearty with avocados, fruity with pineapple, or lighter with citrus. Then eat it plain as a snack, or top a simple grilled meat dish with it for an elegant, colorful dinner centerpiece.

Spaghetti squash pasta

Spaghetti squash “pasta” tossed with olive oil makes a blank slate that you can dress up with any leftover cooked meat and vegetables You can find the recipe for cooking the squash here if you’re not already familiar with this delicious substitute for unhealthy wheat noodles. Sure, it’s easy to add any vegetables you like to a basic marinara sauce, but there’s no need to stop there. Some recipes that lend themselves perfectly to tossing with pasta include:

• Spiced duck breast: this recipe has both meat and vegetables, so if you save a little of each, you’ll have a colorful and rich-flavored “pasta” recipe the next day for lunch.
• Mussels in white wine sauce: pasta with seafood is a classic; make it even better by saving a little of the sauce to drizzle over the finished product (if you’re out of sauce, you can just use butter).
• Roasted bell peppers with any meat you have handy: spaghetti squash can be a little bland on its own, but these peppers give it a very pleasant tang.
• Ratatouille: give your “pasta” side some color with this vibrant and full-bodied stew tossed in.

Chili

Chili is essentially a thicker, heartier version of soup; it’s usually made with beans but doesn’t have to be. The main difference between chili and soup is all in the spices – the heart of any chili is the deep heat of peppers permeating the meat. Any kind of leftover beef is perfect for making a hearty Paleo chili – just add some tomatoes or cans of tomato paste, peppers, onions, and seasonings, and heat it all up. Some chili recipes also call for turkey or chicken, if that’s what you have.

Of course, you can get more complicated than that if you like, and don’t be afraid to throw in whatever other vegetables you have to hand. Some adventurous cooks play around with ingredients as far out as pumpkin, shrimp, goat cheese, and eggplant in their chili, so do a quick search for whatever your ingredient is and you might be pleasantly surprised to find a recipe already waiting for you.

Loaded Baked Potatoes

Despite the entire article dedicated to explaining why white potatoes are nothing to fear, they’re still a controversial food, so if you’d rather use sweet potatoes for this recipe, they’ll do just as well. But there’s absolutely no reason to shun either type of potato from your diet, and they make a perfect vehicle for dressing up leftovers with this quick tip.

Making loaded baked potatoes is simple – just bake the potatoes, then scoop out the flesh, mix it with whatever fillings you’re using, and pop the potatoes back into the oven until everything is warm. Some ideas to get you started:

• Any meat seasoned with BBQ sauce would make for delicious Southwest-style sweet potatoes. Add Jalapeno peppers if you like it spicy.
• Another Thanksgiving leftover trick is turkey and cranberry sauce inside a baked potato.
• For a Polish twist, stuff your potatoes with bigos, and top them with more sauerkraut when you’re done.
• Vegetable-stuffed potatoes or sweet potatoes without any meat at all make an interesting side dish for your next main meal.
• Greek baked potatoes with tuna (or lamb) and olives would probably work best with white potatoes.

Meatballs

Got just a few bites of vegetables hanging around in the door of your fridge? Blend them up, and toss them into a batch of meatballs for a little extra nutrition. A few extra vitamins never hurt anyone’s meal, and like meatloaf, this is a fantastic vehicle for hiding vegetables in case you need to.

If you like, you can also add the extra ingredient to change the flavor of the meatballs on purpose. Try adding leftover mayonnaise to turkey meatballs for a fantastic creamy flavor, or make beef or pork even richer with extra tomato sauce. Or use spicy chili or curry sauce to dress up the meatballs with some extra flavor.

Appetizers

Not all of us have a need for appetizers on a regular basis, but if you do, try transforming your leftovers into a quick and simple first course. The point of an appetizer is to look pretty and taste good, but not be filling, so you don’t need a lot of food. Some suggestions:

• Spinach leaf mini-wraps with one slice of red pepper and one thin sliver of leftover steak inside each.
• Your favorite Paleo-friendly crackers (or thinly-sliced cucumbers), topped with homemade mayo and a bite of leftover salmon or tuna.
• Toothpick “skewers” with a cube of leftover chicken sandwiched between two olives.

Deviled Eggs

Dressed eggs, or deviled eggs, are as simple or as complicated as you want them to be. Since you only need a little of each ingredient, they’re perfect for that last little bit of food that won’t even make one serving. These BLT dressed eggs are one idea, but why stop there? What about using salad shrimp? Or spicy Cajun dressed eggs? Thai dressed eggs with coconut milk and leftover curry sauce? The possibilities are endless, and the results make for easy and popular snacks and appetizers anytime.

Cottage Pie

Cottage pie began as a way to use leftover meat, so using it this way is really just a return to tradition. This recipe gives you instructions for a cottage pie with lamb and sweet potatoes, but you can plug pretty much anything into the basic template of meat and spices covered with a crispy crust. You don’t even have to use potatoes – a puree of cauliflower, turnips, or another root vegetable would also be delicious. Some ideas to get the creative gears turning:

• Got extra eggplant cannelloni? Try an Italian-style filling, maybe with a cauliflower crust.
• Any kind of basic chicken and vegetable recipe (like this braised chicken with fennel) provides a perfect filling.
• A pork roast is also easy to work in, and delicious with just about any crust you care to spread over it.

Paleo Pizza

While re-creating your old favorite foods with Paleo ingredients isn’t always the best strategy for long-term success, sometimes a pizza is just what you want for dinner, and the toppings provide endless opportunities to make use of the odds and ends hanging around the fridge. This recipe gives you the crust; after that, it’s up to you to add any toppings that sound good to you. Look past the pepperoni and try something new – maybe a Greek-themed pizza with lamb and olives, or a BBQ pizza with leftover ribs and fried onions.

Curry

If you have any relatively plain meat, you can make a quick curry by sautéing some vegetables, adding coconut milk and spices, and heating it all up, and then tossing in the leftover meat at the end. This won’t work with any kind of meat, but if the seasoning already there doesn’t clash with curry powder, this simple trick can give last a pork shoulder or a chuck roast some new life.

For a double whammy, serve the curry over a “bed” of other vegetable leftovers (broccoli or cauliflower would be perfect for this). The spicy sauce will make the vegetables more interesting and help cover up any dry texture that may have developed from sitting in the fridge.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are almost infinite ways to use those leftovers, including any extra sauce you poured over the main event. So instead of just throwing them away or pouring them down the sink, see how you can use the extras to add something special to another meal further down the line. It doesn’t just save money and help keep your fridge cleaner; it might also help you discover a new favorite recipe that you never would have considered!

The end of December is a bizarre time of year. So many people are busily stuffing themselves with all the cake and candy they can manage, while making heartfelt plans to completely overhaul their diet and exercise routines as soon as January 1 rolls around. Paleo holidays don’t have to include the traditional sugar-fest, of course, but many people still like to join in the tradition of resolution-making.

It’s common to make fun of New Year’s resolutions as nothing but a meaningless tradition – starting a new diet in January only to quit after a month is almost a cliché. If something is important enough to change, why not change it immediately, instead of waiting for some arbitrary date? These are certainly legitimate criticisms, but on the other hand, many people see January 1 as a “fresh start,” that one final push they need to make a significant lifestyle change. Others like the social aspect – self-improvement is more fun with a group, even if it’s just a group of friends commiserating about how hard it is to keep their resolutions.

Regardless of the reason, there isn’t any particular reason why you shouldn’t make a resolution if you want to. But if you do plan to commit to change in the new year, make sure to set yourself up for success. The most popular New Year’s resolution by far is weight loss, but vaguely deciding to “lose some weight” (or worse yet, to “get healthy”) without a clear goal or a specific plan is a recipe for failure. Below, you’ll find some tips on how to make a resolution that sticks, as well as 10 ideas for Paleo-style self-improvement that don’t revolve around a number on the scale

Friends Don’t Let Friends make Bad Resolutions
Every regular gym-goer knows the “January Joiners.” These are the people who swear to “get in shape” on December 31, and then buy a gym membership full of good intentions. On January 1st, they arrive at the door with their brand new running shoes and earnestly set to work burning off the holiday season’s indulgences on the elliptical machine. They come for two weeks, maybe three – and then disappear back to the couch.

Joining a gym and then quitting can have several different reasons, but a huge number of people fall into this trap every year for the same reason: they make bad resolutions. Bad resolutions are very vague (“I want to lose some weight”), absurdly overambitious (“I want to run a marathon in February” – from an overweight diabetic recovering from knee surgery), and have no specific plan attached to them (“I want to eat healthy”). Bad resolutions are things you think you ought to change, not things you really want (“my mother says I should stop smoking, so I guess that’s my resolution”). Bad resolutions usually travel in packs (“I want to save money and eat right and get in shape and learn Japanese…”). Bad resolutions are all but impossible to keep – so don’t make them!

Good resolutions, in contrast, have several distinctive characteristics, no matter what they’re about. Whether you’re resolving to read more books or lose your spare tire, good resolutions have several things in common.

Want it

Your New Year’s resolutions aren’t about what your mom, or your grandmother, or your husband wants from you. If your resolutions all start with “I should,” chances are you’re feeling outside pressure to do something – you know you ought to do it even if you don’t want to, so you make a resolution and hope it sticks.

Unfortunately, it probably won’t stick. Making positive lifestyle changes is very hard, and involves fighting through a lot of challenges. Keeping your resolution on January 1 might be easy – it’s new and exciting, and you’re all fired up to change yourself. That’s great! Keeping your resolution on February 1 isn’t going to be that effortless. By then, you’ve lost that initial enthusiasm – you’re back on you’re your regular schedule after the holidays and realizing exactly how much effort is involved in sticking this out for the long haul. If you have no intrinsic motivation to keep to your resolution, this is when it will fall by the wayside because you “just don’t have time” or “can’t afford it,” or simply stop caring. You never really wanted it in the first place, so your drive to follow through falls apart at the first sign of a serious obstacle.

This isn’t a sign that you’re weak or lazy. It’s nothing but an illustration of basic human psychology – you can’t commit yourself to someone else’s goals. To avoid this trap, make sure that your resolutions are coming from you. Do you want it, or are you just doing it to make someone else happy? Do you care? Do you feel an inner drive to follow through? Why? Post notes or pictures in strategic places to remind you of your motivation at key moments. For example, if you really want to get your spending on track so you can save for a really fantastic summer trip, try taping a picture of your destination to your credit card, so every time you pull it out, you’re reminded of why you need to use it carefully.

Set Specific Goals

If you have a vague, shapeless resolution, it’s completely natural to start watering down your initial commitment, or justifying yourself for scaling back your effort. If your resolution is “I want to exercise more,” it’s easy to talk yourself into believing that cleaning the house counts as a workout so you don’t need to head to the gym. It’s easy to exercise on Monday and then leave it for the rest of the week (after all, you are exercising more, and you never specified how much more!). If your resolution is, “I will go to the gym 4 times a week” or “I will run at least 20 miles per week,” it’s much more difficult to make excuses for yourself. This keeps you accountable to your goal.

Specific goals also make it possible to track your progress accurately. Unless you have a quantifiable goal, how will you know when you’ve succeeded? How will you hold yourself accountable for “eating better” if you don’t have a specific diet plan that you’re trying to follow? Your resolution should almost certainly have some kind of number in it. As you work toward accomplishing the resolution, keep a written record of your progress toward that number (pounds lost, miles run, days worked out, etc.). This is not only a useful tool, it helps keep you encouraged it you have one bad day, because looking back at the long record of your achievements can really put a setback into perspective.

Make a Plan

Along with your specific goals, you should have a clear plan for reaching them. Just deciding to “go to the gym” doesn’t work. You need a specific rundown of exactly how you’re going to accomplish your goals – for example, instead of “I’m going to lose weight by going to the gym more,” you could say, “Tomorrow, I’ll go to the gym and buy a membership; I’ll pick up some running shoes and shorts at Target on my way home. I’ll go to the gym 4 days a week. I’ll do stronglifts programming on 3 days, and cardio interval training on the fourth. I’ll go Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after work, and then Saturday morning before book club. To make sure I make it on Monday, I’ll pack my gym bag and leave it in the car ready to go on Sunday night.”

Whatever your plan looks like, it should include what (specifically) you plan to do, when (specifically) you’ll do it, and how you’ll make sure it happens. Set yourself up to keep your resolutions by planning ahead for obstacles. This will also help you make sure your plan is actually doable. If you’re struggling to figure out how you could cram in two hours of yoga every day on December 31, imagine how tough it’ll be to actually make it happen in the midst of a hectic workweek. Making a specific plan will help you keep your resolutions reasonable.

One Thing at a Time

We all know the resolutioner who starts out every new year with a laundry list of things they want to change. This year, they’ll stop smoking and eat healthier and lose weight and be kinder to others and drive less and…

When you’re in a self-improving mood after Christmas, it’s tempting to try to change everything at once. But this is a bad plan for long-term success because it’s too overwhelming and dilutes your focus into a hundred little things. Instead of trying to change everything at once, pick one resolution – the one you care about most – and focus on that for a month. Then, if you feel settled and stable in your new routine, you can think about adding another change. If you don’t, it’s fine to keep focusing on your first goal. It’s better to change one thing for good than to change ten things for a week and give up on all of them!

Stay Accountable

Finding some way to hold yourself accountable for your resolutions is a great way to help yourself. Try finding a buddy interested in making the same resolution, so you can both check up on each other and keep each other on track. Even if you can’t find someone to jump in with you, tell your friends and family about your goals, and enlist them in helping you stay on track.

This harnesses the power of social pressure to help you. If you’re the only person who knows about your resolution, it’s all too easy to give up and distract yourself from feeling bad about it. But if you tell everyone you know, you’ll have to admit to all of them that you gave up, and the potential embarrassment of conceding defeat can help keep you on track when willpower alone won’t cut it. Your friends and family can also help you with positive support (for example, by not offering you foods you’re trying to cut back on). It’s hard enough to change any significant lifestyle factor; enlist all the help you can get.

Ten Paleo Resolutions

Weight loss is the traditional New Year’s goal, but many people have already lost the weight they wanted to lose, didn’t have any weight loss goals to begin with, or are just sick of making resolutions about it. The 10 Paleo resolutions below are weight loss-unrelated: try adopting one of them, or use the list as inspiration for your own.

1. I will switch to grass-fed meat

Grass-fed meat is not only a more ethical choice, but much better for your health and even more delicious. American factory farms (technically known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs) pack animals together under inhumane conditions. In such crowded living quarters, the animals need massive doses of antibiotics just to stay alive – antibiotics that then get passed down to anyone who eats them. The nutrient content of the meat is also lower from animals who eat human-engineered feed (designed to make them grow bigger, faster), rather than their natural diet.

Both of these problems make switching to grass-fed meat one of the best ways to improve an already solid Paleo diet. Exactly the same argument goes for wild-caught fish. If you can’t afford to switch entirely, try committing to a certain number of pounds per week, or a certain percentage of your weekly meat intake. Every little bit helps, so don’t feel discouraged if you can’t go all-out, all the time.

2. I will get ______ hours of sleep per night

Getting enough hours of quality sleep every night can make the difference between vibrant good health and a chronic case of the blahs. Sleep deprivation is a major contributing factor to chronic stress, insulin resistance, weight gain, depression, and overall misery. If you’re already eating Paleo but still not feeling your best, it might be time to take a long hard look at your sleeping habits: you can tweak your diet to perfection, but if you’re skating by on 5 hours a night, you still won’t feel as energetic and healthy as you could.

To make this resolution stick, make sure to give yourself an explicit bedtime. “I will get enough sleep” is vague, making it easy to convince yourself that you aren’t tired yet, so it’s OK to stay up another hour. Pick the time when you need to be in bed to get a solid 8 hours, and then commit to turning off all your screens (computer, TV, and phone) 1 hour before then.

3. I will try a new recipe every week

Even though Paleo allows for an almost infinite variety of meals, it’s definitely possible to get stuck in a rut. Especially if you don’t have a lot of time to cook, it’s much easier to just roast a big pork shoulder on Sunday and eat leftovers the rest of the week – who has time to cook a photogenic three-course meal every day?

This is time-efficient, but gets boring after a while, and when you’re bored with your diet, you’re much more likely to give in to the temptation to eat something off-plan. A new recipe doesn’t have to be a masterpiece of culinary perfection. Just putting a different mix of spices on your chicken, or preparing the same vegetable side in a different way can add an interesting twist to your meals and make Paleo more enjoyable to stick with in the long term. To help you stick to this resolution, try picking out a specific time for your experiments. Weekends are probably better for most people, but pick a day that fits into your schedule. It doesn’t have to be dinner, either: experimenting with Paleo breakfast ideas can be an interesting start to the day, or a series of new lunch recipes can liven up a workday afternoon with something tasty and new.

4. I will join a CSA

A CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) is exactly what it sounds like: a farm that allows local residents to buy directly from the farmers. In most CSAs, you buy a “share,” which entitles you to a certain amount of produce every week for an entire farm season. CSA shares vary widely in price, depending on the amount of vegetables and your location, but they’re almost always cheaper than organic produce from a grocery store, and usually even better in nutrient quality, because they’re local as well.

Many CSAs also allow members to work on the farm, which is a great way to meet other people who care about quality food, and to give kids a chance to see where their dinner comes from. Having an automatic veggie delivery can help you include more nutrients in your diet, and give you inspiration for all kinds of different recipes with veggies you’d never think to buy at the store.

5. I will reduce coffee to ______ cups per day

Coffee is a blessing and a curse to the modern world. On the one hand, it gives us that quick boost of energy we need to power through a tough Monday morning, or a late night of studying. On the other hand, the constant presence of stimulants like caffeine makes it easy to deprive ourselves of real rest and just rely on coffee to make up for the hours we didn’t spend in bed. Without caffeine, we wouldn’t be able to keep up with the modern culture of nonstop effort, but without caffeine, that culture couldn’t exist in the first place.

There isn’t any serious health danger from a cup of coffee, but if you’re consistently relying on a caffeine high to stagger through to the end of your workday, it’s time to take a step back and reassess. This can be quite unpleasant (caffeine is an addictive substance, and the withdrawal isn’t fun), but ultimately it’s much healthier to get enough sleep than to just hide your fatigue with coffee. Try cutting down slowly, one cup at a time, until you reach a sustainable, healthy level. To help you keep this resolution, you might want to stock up on tea to satisfy the desire for something warm and tasty to drink. You could also try saving all the money you would otherwise spend on your coffee fix, and then using it for something really fun at the end of a month or two.

6. I will start a recovery routine

Far from needing more exercise, many serious athletes are in danger of over-exercising – training too hard and recovering too little. If you expect your body to keep performing at a high level for years to come, you need to take care of it, and that doesn’t just mean stretching when you’re done with a workout. Recovery means a date with the foam roller twice a week, a commitment to icing and resting, mobility exercises, and all the other care your body needs to properly bounce back after you push yourself to the limit. Consistently committing to taking proper care of your body will help keep you performing at a high level and injury-free for the long term.

Like other resolutions, this one needs a specific goal – try committing to two 30-minute recovery sessions per week. Icing and stretching doesn’t have to demand all your attention: you can do it while you’re watching a movie, or turn it into social time with friends or family. Stretching and relaxing also makes a great wind-down activity at the end of the day, or as a brief break from a tense situation wherever you are.

7. I will spend more time in the sun.

Spending a little more time outside every day isn’t just relaxing. It also helps you get enough Vitamin D, an essential micronutrient that too many people are deficient in. While it’s possible to get some Vitamin D from food, the best source is sunlight. A brisk walk on your lunch break is doable even in cold weather, and the exercise can help get your blood pumping and wake you up for the rest of the afternoon.

As always, make sure to phrase this resolution as a specific, quantifiable goal. “I will go outside for a walk every day at 11am” is much more likely to succeed as a resolution than “I will get more sun.” Even if you can only commit to sun exposure on the weekends, it’s still a great habit to get into.

8. I will replace my household cleaners

Common household chemicals, like dish soap and odor removers, often contain all kinds of harmful environmental toxins, from dioxins to BPA. Replacing these dangerous chemicals with more human-friendly versions (or simply forgoing them altogether) can save your body from all kinds of damaging chemical exposure. This is especially important if you have pets or small children in the house.

For a specific action plan, you could resolve to do this in two different ways. Either you could slowly replace all your old products as you run out of them, or you could throw everything out all at once and start fresh. Which plan you make will depend on your financial situation and your own personal preferences. Either way, set yourself a timetable, and make a list of human-friendly cleaners to buy, so you aren’t stuck in the grocery store wondering what all the labels mean.

9. I will not drive one day a week

The personal automobile might be responsible for much of the high standard of living in the modern world, but it’s also responsible for countless hours of hunching over a wheel under fairly intense stress every day. From a Paleo point of view, this makes driving very dangerous in ways that have nothing to do with accidents: even if nothing goes wrong, you’re subjecting yourself to a kind of chronic stimulus that you just weren’t designed to handle.

Spending a whole day without driving anywhere might seem impossible, but this is just because most people are so used to driving that they never consider the alternatives. Look around your area for public transit, walk to and from the places that you need to go, or buy a $20 bike at a yard sale and enjoy getting to know your neighborhood in a different way. Driving is isolating and stressful; not driving can help you connect to the people around you and keep your body moving in the process - two substantial health benefits even before you factor in the heart attack at the price of gas.

10. I will hike the Grand Canyon

…or the Appalachian Trail. Or run a Tough Mudder. Or deadlift twice your bodyweight. Whatever it is, set an ambitious fitness goal that you’ll train for during the next year, and then decide on a few mini-goals to make sure you’re still on track as you work toward your grand finale. Maybe you could make a resolution to run a marathon by next December – and then enter yourself in a 5k in April and a 10K in September, to give yourself constant motivation to keep training and improving.

Having a bold, challenging goal will keep you motivated to work out by giving you an actual reason for doing it. Nobody cares about burpees for the sake of doing burpees, but those burpees get you closer to your goal of climbing Mount St. Helens, they suddenly become much more important. Set your goal, and then cook up a workout plan to get yourself there - and keep track of your progress throughout the year.

Conclusion

This year, don’t resolve to “get healthy” or “start eating right” or “be better with money.” Resolve to eat at least 4 servings of vegetables per day, try liver recipes until you find one you like, or save $50 per week. These specific, goal-oriented resolutions are much more likely to stick in the long term, especially if you enlist a buddy to keep you accountable and regularly track your progress to make sure you’re still on target. It’s fine to make only one resolution, instead of a whole list – in fact, it’s actually preferable, since this lets you focus on just the one change, rather than scattering your energy all over the place. It’s fine to not make a resolution at all, but if you do, pick your battle carefully, and commit to it in a way that will help you get there.

A Paleo diet can help you increase your fertility, but after conception comes a whole new set of diet questions and problems. From coping with bizarre cravings to choosing from the huge variety of prenatal supplements to interpreting the increasingly massive amount of literature on fish and mercury, gestational nutrition is a rollercoaster. In some ways, even conventional doctors support a more Paleo-style diet during pregnancy – for example, they often recommend women to eat more red meat, to avoid iron deficiency. On the other hand, they also commonly advise a diet high in whole grains, which won’t do anything to support a healthy mother or baby.

Sifting through the immense amount of information on pregnancy nutrition would be a daunting challenge for anyone – much less a woman fighting through the exhaustion and morning sickness of her first trimester. But a solid nutritional foundation is well worth the effort: a nutritious diet before and during these 9 months will support a woman through the physical challenges of pregnancy and birth, and set her baby up for a lifetime of good health.

Micronutrients for a Healthy Pregnancy

The most important element of good nutrition for pregnant women – just like for everyone else – is a diet of micronutrient-dense whole foods. No magic pill, supplement, or superfood can make up for a shaky foundation. Scientists are still debating what the healthiest pregnancy diet actually is, so even official recommendations are always subject to change. One study might suggest that extreme supplementation or restriction of some micronutrient is healthy, but the next week, this recommendation could be completely overturned. Thus, the safest and most moderate course is to eat a variety of whole foods: this doesn’t overload your body with anything it wasn’t designed to handle, so even if you don’t have perfectly optimal levels of every micronutrient in your diet, you won’t be in any danger.

Particularly important nutrients for pregnancy include fat-soluble vitamins like D, A, and K2, iron, and B vitamins. Vitamin A has a bad reputation among pregnant women – many doctors even recommend avoiding or restricting it because of the risk of birth defects. However, when consumed from whole foods rather than artificial supplements, this danger is almost negligible: if you aren’t eating liver for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, there’s nothing to worry about. Vitamin A is important for a pregnant woman and her developing fetus, especially the lungs, kidneys, and nervous system, as well as the eyes. Thus, while extreme supplementation is never advisable, artificially restricting Vitamin A during pregnancy can lead to serious problems.

Vitamin D is another crucial fat-soluble vitamin, especially in the third trimester. It helps the baby’s skeletal and immune systems develop properly, and recent research is also indicating benefits for the mother, such as a lower risk of pre-eclampsia. Vitamin D is so essential to prenatal development that if the mother doesn’t get enough for both, the growing fetus will rob her body of nutrients to get it. This is bad news for both mother and baby. Unfortunately, most people in the modern world (even on a Paleo diet) are seriously deficient in Vitamin D, because it doesn’t occur naturally in many foods – shockingly enough, even liver can’t give you everything! To make matters worse, doctors routinely recommend a much lower dose than their patients should probably be taking: the RDA is 200IU/day, but most people probably need much more than that, especially if they’re supporting a whole other human being as well as their own body. The best way to top up your Vitamin D levels is by absorbing it through sun exposure, but in the winter or if you have an indoor job, a Vitamin D supplement might be necessary.

Eating a wide variety of high-quality animal products will give you plenty of two other very important nutrients, B vitamins and iron. B vitamins include B6, B9 (folate), and B12; these crucial micronutrients support proper neurological function, so they’re very important for a baby’s developing brain and nervous system. Folate in particular is necessary for DNA reproduction. Every new cell in your body contains a complete copy of your DNA, so folate supports the healthy development of new cells. Accordingly, deficiency of folate is associated with neurological birth defects. Another B vitamin, choline, is also important to neural development. Fortunately for Paleo mothers-to-be, meat and fish are two excellent sources of B vitamins, so getting enough shouldn’t be a problem.

Eating plenty of meat and fish will also ensure that you get enough iron. Iron (found in red meat and some vegetables, although meat is by far the better source) is a very common deficiency in pregnant women. Iron deficiency is probably not as widespread on Paleo as it is in the general population, but it’s is still a potential risk even for women who eat plenty of animal products. Women who don’t get enough iron during pregnancy are at risk of developing a deficiency disease called anemia, which makes it harder for your body to fight off infections during pregnancy, and increases the risk of a premature delivery. Red meat and organ meats are excellent food sources of iron; you could also try cooking with cast-iron pans, which actually transfers some iron from the cookware to your food. Iron supplements are another option, but these can be very rough on the digestive system, so whole foods are usually preferable.

Calcium is also important for pregnant women because it helps the baby’s skeleton develop normally. As with Vitamin D, if a woman doesn’t get enough in her diet, the fetus will take calcium from her bones, causing a much higher risk of osteoporosis later in life. Calcium is often a special concern for many people on Paleo because they think the only way to get it is through dairy. This is a misconception, as there are actually plenty of non-dairy sources of calcium. Dark leafy green vegetables like spinach and kale contain significant amounts, as does bone broth or bone-in fish like salmon and sardines. If you tolerate dairy well, it also has plenty, but it’s hardly the only way – there’s no reason to force it down if it makes you sick.

As well as all of these healthy vitamins and minerals, you need to eat enough fat and cholesterol, so that your body can actually absorb them. Fortunately, many sources of healthy fats are also very nutrient-dense, so you can get both benefits from the same source. Pastured butter, eggs from free-range chickens, and bone marrow are three very nutrient-dense sources of fat and cholesterol - the butter contains vitamin K, the eggs have high levels of choline and other B vitamins, and bone marrow is highly prized by traditional cultures around the world for its nutrient content. Foods like liver pâté can bring out the best of both worlds: the fat in the butter helps you absorb the nutrients in the liver, and the delicious taste ensures that you’ll get plenty of both.

Wild-caught seafood is also a smart choice: it contains the essential fatty acids EPA and DHA, as well as a healthy dose of selenium and iodine. If you can get it, fish roe (fish eggs) is a particularly nutritious kind of seafood included in many traditional “pregnancy diets.” Many doctors strictly caution pregnant women to avoid seafood, fearing that the mercury levels will be particularly toxic to the fetus. This is misguided, however: the selenium in these fish binds to the mercury, negating its toxic effects in almost all cases – it’s not at all unsafe to eat fish, and it’s very nutritionally beneficial to do so.

Macronutrients and Pregnancy

As well as getting all the micronutrients you need, be aware that pregnancy probably isn’t the time to experiment with a very low carb diet. A moderate carb intake is actually very beneficial for fertility – and bland carbohydrates like potatoes and white rice can also be dietary lifesavers for women suffering from morning sickness or food aversions. They might not be the most nutrient-dense foods around, but sometimes bland carbs are all you can keep down, and Paleo-friendly starches are much better alternatives than the typically recommended saltine crackers or pretzels.

If you do decide to continue with a very low carb plan, you should at least make an exception for the days leading up to an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT). This is a test done to check for gestational diabetes: your doctor will give you a glucose tablet to take, and measure your blood sugar as your body responds to it. If you’ve been eating very low carb, your body won’t be ready for such a glucose bomb, and you’ll actually appear to be diabetic even though you aren’t. This can cause all kinds of problems, so it’s best avoided altogether: a few days before your OGTT, start introducing safe starches into your diet. It’s worth a few potatoes to avoid bombing the OGTT; you can go back to your low-carbing ways immediately afterward.

Protein needs also change during pregnancy: pregnant women should limit their protein intake to no more than 20% of calories (and possibly even lower). A very tasty way to do this is to choose the fattiest cuts of meat, or to make up some protein calories with a slightly higher carbohydrate intake.

To Supplement, or Not To Supplement?

Some women feel that they can get all the nutrients they need from whole foods – and they’re probably right. Theoretically, it is possible. However, modern soils are so nutrient-depleted that many vegetables aren’t as nutrient-rich as they ought to be. In practice, it’s also very difficult for modern humans leading modern lives to always eat only grass-fed, pasture-raised meat and organically grown produce. Especially during pregnancy, when nutrition is so important, prenatal vitamins can help make up for this. While it isn’t ideal, getting nutrients from a pill is better than not getting them at all. If you plan to take a prenatal find a clean brand that isn’t loaded down with artificial dyes and additives, and be careful to choose a brand that contains “folate” rather than “folic acid.” Folic acid is an artificial chemical that can be converted to folate, but this is less efficient than getting folate from food itself.

Whatever supplement you take, make sure to take it as an addition to a nutrient-dense diet, not a replacement for one. If you’re nervous about taking a commercially made pill but want to get some supplemental vitamins, certain whole foods can also be taken “medicinally.” Liver can be made into pills and then frozen, allowing you to get the health benefits without actually including liver in your daily diet. If you have a severe aversion to liver, you can even buy gelatin capsules at vitamin stores and freeze the liver in those to prevent any taste or smell when you take the pill. Cod liver oil is another natural food commonly recommended as a dietary supplement. It’s high in EPA, DHA, Vitamin A, and Vitamin D, as well as healthy fats. These options are great for women who aren’t comfortable taking a supplement, or who don’t have access to a high-quality brand.

Foods to Avoid…or Not

When many people think of pregnant women and food, the first thing that comes to their mind is actually a series of restrictions: don’t eat sushi, don’t eat fish, don’t eat soft cheese, don’t drink alcohol…the list of foods is long and usually accompanied by dire warnings about incurable birth defects. More often than not, this is served up with a healthy dose of judgment on the mother: anyone who even thinks about a cup of coffee is clearly a monster who doesn’t care about her baby. As pregnant women often find out, many people aren’t afraid to pass this kind of judgment even on total strangers in public, as though they really cared about the opinion of a random passer-by in Starbucks.

The shaming and guilt-trips are never necessary. Some of the recommendations for food to avoid, on the other hand, are legitimately useful. Excess alcohol and caffeine, for example, are dangerous because they can cross the placenta into the baby’s bloodstream. Reducing your toxin exposure is also always a good idea, especially because pregnancy is very hard on the immune system – adding more immune challenges in the form of lectins and gluten is just pouring gasoline on the fire.

On the other hand, some of the commonly repeated restrictions are pointless, or even harmful. As discussed above, the advice to restrict fish intake is based on misguided warnings about mercury content that ignore the protective effects of the selenium found in the same fish. It isn’t dangerous at all for pregnant women to eat as much fish as they like. Even the raw fish used in sushi has been previously flash-frozen, which destroys any parasites in the meat just as well as cooking does, so there isn’t a higher risk of getting sick from properly handled raw fish than from any other type of food. Avoiding fish can deprive you of several essential nutrients, so cutting it out can actually be harmful.

The warnings about alcohol and caffeine are also often taken to unnecessary extremes. Binge drinking and extreme caffeine ingestion are seriously harmful to anyone (pregnant or not), but that doesn’t mean that your baby will have two heads because you looked sideways at a glass of wine. For example, 200 milligrams is a commonly cited “safe upper limit” for caffeine during pregnancy, but this still allows for two 8-ounce cups of coffee, or around 4 8-ounce cups of tea per day. if you enjoy these drinks, there’s no evidence that you need to completely eliminate them from your diet.

Alcohol is even more stigmatized during pregnancy, but the medical panic over pregnant women drinking is driven at least as much by culture as by science. America has a uniquely uncomfortable cultural relationship to alcohol; this, rather than actual scientific evidence, probably accounts for much of the moral crusading over pregnancy and alcohol. Many European countries take a much more moderate approach, recognizing that a reasonable degree of caution on the mother’s part is perfectly sufficient. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is also strongly associated with poor nutritional status of the mother, so a woman following a nourishing Paleo diet would not be at such a high risk. Of course, alcohol is better enjoyed as an occasional indulgence for everyone, not just for pregnant women, and gluten-containing drinks like beer should be strictly avoided, but the occasional glass of wine isn’t any less acceptable during pregnancy than at any other time.

Cravings and Aversions

It’s easy to say, “get enough choline.” It’s easy to read and nod along with. It’s much more difficult to actually do when you can’t stand the smell or taste of eggs, and all you want to eat is chocolate fudge brownies.

Cravings for junk food can happen to anyone, but many people find that pregnancy kicks the intensity up to a whole new level. On top of this, a lot of people will actually encourage you to go wild during pregnancy, the one time when it’s culturally normal and acceptable for a woman to gain weight. It is normal and healthy to gain weight during pregnancy, even on a Paleo diet, but this should be because you’re eating a caloric surplus from clean, whole foods, not because you’re giving yourself carte blanche to have ice cream cake for all three meals every day.

For many women, a Paleo diet seems to help make cravings more manageable – possibly because your body is getting all the nutrients it needs, so it isn’t constantly driving you to eat more in hopes of getting some calcium or fat from a bowl of ice cream. Possibly, a Paleo diet simply reduces your taste for processed junk foods. Whatever the reason, cravings are often significantly reduced just by eating Paleo, but some women still experience them.

One way to handle cravings is by postponing them: if you can wait a few minutes for the immediacy to pass, you can often defeat the urge altogether. Simply avoiding these foods at the grocery store can also help – if you have to actually leave the house to get something, you’re much less likely to follow through on the urge to eat it. Also, make sure you do have plenty of convenient and quick Paleo options in your house at all times: try slow-cooking a large cut of meat and freezing the leftovers in individual containers. That way, a healthy snack is never further away than a quick zap in the microwave, so you won’t need to turn to cookies and crackers. A few hard-boiled eggs in the refrigerator can serve the same purpose. Buying pre-cut vegetables might make you feel lazy, but it’s by far better than not buying vegetables at all.

If you do give in to cravings, the best thing to do in the aftermath is move on. Don’t beat yourself up over it or guilt-trip yourself for “hurting your baby.” Realistically, one bad decision (or even two, or three, or a weekend full of them) won’t undo the cumulative effect of all your other hard work.

Cravings are one side of the food problems coin, but some women also have intense food aversions, when previously-delicious foods suddenly become vomit-inducing. Food aversions can ruin the most carefully laid plans to eat leafy green vegetables, bone marrow, or eggs – or anything at all. Morning sickness isn’t specific to any particular food, but it’s certainly miserable and can easily make you feel too sick to keep anything down. Try bone broth for a healthy dose of nutrients that’s easy on the stomach, or mixing coconut oil into whatever you can eat for a healthy dose of fat and calories. For added nutrition, you could make a mild soup with some bone broth and rice, and maybe a few well-cooked vegetables like carrots or broccoli, or some rice pudding with coconut milk.

Ginger tea can often help with nausea, especially if it’s more of an annoyance than a crippling problem. If your stomach is so upset that you’re vomiting regularly, you’ll also want to rehydrate and replenish your supply of electrolytes. Mixing some salt and lemon juice into a bottle of water will make a Paleo version of Gatorade that resupplies your body with sodium and potassium, two crucial minerals that are lost through sweating or vomiting.

Pregnancy and Weight Loss

Since so many people embark on a Paleo diet as a weight loss strategy, it’s reasonable to be curious about how pregnancy will affect your ultimate weight-loss goals. Obviously, in the short term you’ll gain weight: 6-9 pounds of baby at the very least, with most women also gaining between 5 and 30 pounds of their own. Eating a clean Paleo diet will prevent you from gaining an unreasonable amount of weight, but you will probably gain some – it’s metabolically healthy and perfectly normal. This makes perfect evolutionary sense if you think of women before the advent of the modern food system, who needed to top up their fat stores during pregnancy because food scarcity would be twice as dangerous as usual.

For a woman who just finished the struggle to lose all that weight, the thought of putting it back on again can be terrifying. The urge to push yourself through intense workouts even when you don’t feel like it, to restrict calories despite being hungry, and to focus on losing the “baby weight” from the moment you give birth can be very strong – and modern culture certainly doesn’t do anything to diminish it.

Unfortunately, a preoccupation with weight loss during pregnancy can lead to severe nutritional deficiencies if you don’t get enough to eat, and overexercising during pregnancy is both exhausting and potentially dangerous. Charging out of the delivery room onto the treadmill is also not ideal. Adjusting to life with a newborn in the house is difficult and stressful enough; most new mothers don’t get anything like enough sleep every night and many have trouble finding time to eat, much less work out. Pushing your body back into intense athletic training before you’re ready for it could result in serious injuries, as well as keeping your stress levels high (which in turn raises levels of cortisol, a hormone tied to weight gain).

Caloric restriction during breastfeeding can also deprive your body of nutrients it needs to rebuild itself after the challenge of pregnancy. Just like during pregnancy, your body will rob itself to feed the baby if your dietary intake isn’t high enough – not only of nutrients like calcium and Vitamin D, but also of muscle mass and lean tissue. This is both unhealthy and counterproductive to resuming your workouts post-partum. Ultimately, a pregnant woman’s first dietary priority should be nutrition – and eating a nutritious, whole-foods Paleo diet will not only prevent extreme weight gain during pregnancy but also help you lose the weight safely and healthily after the baby is born.

That said, exercise can be a wonderful part of a healthy pregnancy, as long as you make sure to adjust your workouts accordingly. Mild exercise can help improve circulation, reduce the risk of pregnancy-related diseases like gestational diabetes, and keep your body in peak physical condition in preparation for the physical demands of labor and caring for a young child. The key is not to overdo it. Excessive exercise is a huge stress on a body already struggling to handle a growing fetus – you won’t be setting any records on the squat rack, so don’t push yourself to dangerous extremes trying. Light bodyweight exercises, gentle walks, and stress-reducing physical activities like yoga or deep stretching are much healthier choices for a pregnant woman than very intense weight training or HIIT. Swimming is another fantastic option, especially since it doesn’t put any stress on the joints. Many pools even offer mommy/baby swim classes, so you can keep up your routine after the baby is born.

Help! My Wife is Pregnant!

For obvious reasons, most pregnancy advice is addressed to women, not their partners. In many ways, though, this does men a disservice – they might not be the one physically pregnant, but that doesn’t mean that their lives continue normally up until the baby is born. A partner’s pregnancy can be an exciting adventure, but that doesn’t mean it’s always (or ever) easy.

This is doubly challenging if only one partner is Paleo. Nutritional disagreements can be a source of tension at the best of times, and bringing a child into the picture can bring the argument to the forefront of your everyday life surprisingly strongly. A Paleo woman with a partner who doesn’t particularly care about nutrition can feel unsupported as she struggles to choose beef and coconut oil over Oreo cheesecake and Rice Krispies. On the other hand, a Paleo man with a wife or girlfriend who doesn’t share his nutritional commitment can feel frustrated or powerless to help his future children.

This is a very difficult situation: you want to make sure your child gets the best nutrition possible, but your partner is also an adult with the right to make her own food choices. There are no easy answers here: this is a problem that goes back to some of our most divisive cultural debates about feminism, personal autonomy, and gender relations. Trying to force or trick a non-Paleo partner into a Paleo diet will only backfire (imagine how you would react if she hid all your meat and vegetables and replaced them with “healthy” whole-wheat bread and lentils). Persuasion is always worth a shot, but ultimately you’ll need to find a compromise you can both live with, and it might not involve a total Paleo conversion. For example, she might be open to adding more Paleo-style foods like bone broth or organ meats even if she isn’t willing to cut out foods like bread and pasta. This kind of Paleo-supplemented diet isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better than the standard American diet by itself.

Pre-pregnancy communication can mitigate a lot of these pitfalls – ideally, both partners would sit down beforehand for an honest discussion (or a series of discussions) about pregnancy nutrition and how both of you can work together to get the best possible head start for the baby. In the real world, pregnancy often comes as a surprise, so it isn’t always possible to have this discussion beforehand. But late is better than never: the conflict won’t go away after the baby is born, so the earlier you can settle on a plan that works for both of you, the better.

Conclusion

Just like most other life situations, pregnancy shouldn’t require an overhaul of an already solid Paleo diet. It might be a challenge to keep eating enough nutrients and calories if you’re struggling with morning sickness, weird food aversions, or cravings for junk food, but the basic nutritional guidelines for a Paleo pregnancy are very similar to the recommendations for any other time of life. A little planning ahead and a lot of talking it over with your partner can help make for a healthy, peaceful pregnancy and a new baby with a great nutritional head start.

In theory, holidays are a time of joy and celebration. In practice, even the most superficial attention to health and nutrition can make the month-long festival of candy canes, chocolate Santas, and seasonal Starbucks drinks a challenge. At first, the idea of “surviving” the holidays seems silly: if they’re that unpleasant, why participate in the first place? But it’s not always possible to opt out of such an important cultural event, and besides, not everything about the holidays is irritating. With some smart planning ahead of time and a little ingenuity, it’s possible to enjoy the good parts of the season without compromising your health.

The holiday season presents two main types of challenges. The first one is the general seasonal stress that lasts from Thanksgiving (or even before!) to January 1. Stress reduction is an incredibly important part of the Paleo lifestyle, so just the shopping, cooking, and planning would be challenging enough, but the struggle doesn’t end there: the constant seasonal pressure to indulge in sugary desserts and candies can tempt the most committed of Paleo dieters. The holiday season often brings an intense sense of deprivation when everyone around you seems to be merrily enjoying the candy canes and sugar cookies that you can’t have, and the cultural pressure to experience holiday food as part of the festivities can make you feel socially isolated when you don’t join in.

The second kind of pressure is the acute stress of the big family feast. While the seasonal pressure builds up over a month or more, family dinners only last a few hours – but they’re much more intense. For Paleo dieters, traditional holiday dinners become a minefield of food temptations, offended relatives, and rude questions about “this weird new caveman diet.” This is especially true if you’re also travelling, without access to your own kitchen and a place to get away if you need a break.

Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a newcomer approaching your first Christmas without fruitcake, the holidays can be a challenging time to stay Paleo. But you don’t have to give up on your health to enjoy the season: these 12 tips can help you make the most of the holidays without compromising your Paleo goals.

Part I: Holiday Season Strategies

It’s important to remember that Paleo is about more than what you put in your mouth. Yes, candy canes are bad for you, but staying up until 4:30am wrapping presents isn’t doing your health any favors, either. The tips below are designed to help you cope with the entire holiday season and the lifestyle challenges that come with it. It might not seem obvious, but these are also crucial steps to surviving the bigger hurdles along the way. Think of sports: if an athlete exhausts himself overtraining in the week before a big game, he won’t perform nearly as well at crunch time. In the same way, if you wear yourself out at the beginning of December, you won’t have the energy and resilience you need for the family parties at the end.

1. Boost your Immune System

The holidays hard enough when you aren’t sick, but just when you least want to come down with that nasty winter cold, you’re in the ideal environment for it. During the weeks leading up to the holidays, most people spend more time than usual packing themselves into small indoor spaces like malls and shopping centers, sleeping at each other’s houses, or crowding into cars for road trips to Grandma’s. Colds, flus, and nastier bugs like pneumonia flourish in that kind of environment. Fortunately, a Paleo diet is a wonderful way to keep your immune system in peak condition – make sure to get plenty of Vitamin D (especially if you live somewhere cold and dark) and Vitamin C. It’s always tough to get enough sleep during the holidays, but sleep deprivation makes you much more vulnerable to disease, so try to get in at least 8 hours every night, or take a nap in the afternoon if you were up late.

2. Set December Exercise Goals

Regardless of whether or not you indulge in holiday desserts, sticking to your exercise plan will help you handle the stress of the season. Just maintaining your routine can bring an important little bit of sanity to an otherwise crazy time of year. Exercising also releases endorphins, natural mood boosters that help cheer you up on dark winter mornings. As a bonus, many people find that when they stagger out the gym after a hard workout, it’s much easier to make smart nutritional choices because they just aren’t interested in sugary junk food.

To keep yourself motivated during the holidays, try setting a personal exercise goal for December, and planning some kind of reward if you make it. Having a definite plan in mind will help you much more than the vague idea that you need to keep up with your workouts. Try shoveling out your driveway as fast as you can on December 1st, and then set an ambitious speed shoveling goal to make by the end of the month (this is also a great way to spread some holiday cheer to your elderly or housebound neighbors). Or get together a group of friends and start your New Year’s resolutions early – you’ll beat the January crowds at the gym, and help each other stay fit and active during the winter.

Even if you’re travelling for the holidays, you can still make time to move around. Your grandmother might not have a full set of Olympic lifting equipment tucked away in her basement, but a brisk walk in the snow before breakfast, or an energetic snowball fight will get your blood pumping just as well – if you’ve been pushing yourself athletically in the season leading up to the holidays, this can even function as a deload week, giving your muscles a welcome chance to relax and repair themselves. For a more intense workout, try a run around the neighborhood, or some bodyweight exercises that you can do anywhere: the Angry Birds workout from Nerd Fitness is easily scalable and can be done with only your bodyweight. Think of holiday visits as a beneficial challenge to your fitness routine, and take the opportunity to try something you don’t usually go in for – you might be surprised by how much you like it.

3. Make it Yours

Too often, people approach “surviving the holidays” as though they’re powerless to change anything about the season, and they just have to put their heads down and grit their teeth until January. But that doesn’t have to be the case! Sure, the modern holiday season revolves around sugar and candy, but there’s no reason why you can’t find the parts of the season that are actually meaningful to you, and develop your own Paleo-style celebration. The religious tradition of Christmas doesn’t require any kind of special food and a secular celebration of family, generosity, and goodwill definitely doesn’t have to depend on what you eat. Traditional Jewish food for Hanukkah can present more of a challenge, but even if you decide to prioritize religious observance over Paleo, you can still avoid the peripheral cakes, candies, and other non-Paleo desserts while celebrating the season with your loved ones.

The key to this is to be proactive about it. Instead of suffering mutely through the commercialized, sugar-laden version of December, try creating your own traditions. Go for a sleigh ride, have an epic snowball fight with all your relatives, or get together to create handmade paper ornaments instead of just throwing a box in your cart at Target These are traditions that appeal to everyone, no matter what kind of food they eat, and you might be surprised at how happy your relatives are to escape the typical Christmas visit activities.

4. Give Yourself a Break

Counterintuitively, one of the best ways to handle the holiday stress is just to acknowledge that it exists. The cultural pressure to feel constantly cheerful and merry during the entire month of December is stressful in itself, and dietary pressure is just icing on the cake (the cake you have to constantly resist eating). Almost everyone feels deprived and exhausted at some point. It’s tempting to surround yourself with tough love and white-knuckle it through December: food is nothing but fuel and you only feel so unhappy because wheat is addicting. But food is so much more than fuel. From the beginning of recorded human history, we’ve used food as a tool of cultural exchange – when you turn down the gingerbread at a party, you’re excluding yourself from a cultural connection, and that hurts. Give yourself permission to feel unhappy, lonely, and deprived at times, and those feelings will become much more manageable.

It’s also important not to expect perfection from yourself. In the middle of all the craziness, if you give up and just eat a bagel because it’s right there after a marathon shopping trip and you’re starving and exhausted and don’t have the energy to go home and cook, let it go. If you’ve spent the better part of a week fending off your grandmother’s gingerbread and you don’t have the patience to smile about it any longer so you eat it just to get her off your back, let it go. Beating yourself up about it won’t help. Try putting it in perspective: if you’ve stuck to your guns since before Thanksgiving, a few cookies on December 23rd won’t undo all your hard work.

Some people might even find it helpful to plan a “cheat” during the holidays. Obviously if you have a life-threatening allergy or intolerance to something, the fact that your mother made it over Christmas doesn’t matter. But if you’ve been eating Paleo long enough to heal your gut from the damage of the standard American diet, and you’re willing to accept the consequences of eating foods you normally wouldn’t, it might not be such a big deal to plan on enjoying some of the holiday goodies all around you.

This doesn’t mean that you should binge on everything in sight – pick your cheats carefully, and make sure they’re actually worth it. What’s “worth it” will depend on you – for some people, it might be their grandma’s traditional Belgian chocolate cake; for other people, it might be a well-savored bowl of Ben&Jerry’s. If Reese’s Pieces are really what you want, there’s no point “cheating” with homemade fruitcake and then having to suffer the health consequences even though you didn’t actually get what you were craving. If this sounds like a good way for you personally to maintain your sanity over the holidays, check out the Whole30's guide to nutritional off-roading for suggestions on how to “cheat” intelligently.

Part II: Dinner with Grandma

The stress might start after Thanksgiving, but holiday dinners are the time when the seasonal pressure really comes to a head. These visits often bring an intense dose of culturally required interaction with people you know just well enough to be irritated by, in the context of meals loaded down with emotional significance. In that situation, many people will seize on superficial differences as a topic of conversation, since they don’t know each other well enough to have any kind of meaningful discussion. Health-conscious dietary choices are obvious in the context of candy canes and gingerbread cake, so they make for an easy conversation topic (especially for groups trying to avoid touchier subjects like religion and politics).

Unless you’re very good at going undercover, chances are that your diet will draw attention at some point. But this doesn’t have to mean gritting your teeth for the next four hours while repeating your answers to the same questions about saturated fat and whole grains. With a little planning and some tactful conversation maneuvers, you can enjoy your meal despite the non-Paleo foods present and the people who might pressure you to eat them.

5. Understand what Food Pushers really want

Simply put, a food pusher is someone who pushes food on you – someone who won’t stop trying to make you eat something even though you’ve already politely refused. Chances are, if you have to attend any kind of holiday party, you’ll run into at least one food pusher. Ironically, the real issue behind a food pusher’s behavior often has nothing to do with food. It doesn’t seem obvious when Aunt Susan is waving her tray of pumpkin spice cookies under your nose, but food is often just a proxy. Sometimes, food pushers want assurance that you like and appreciate them. This often takes the form of a guilt trip: “What, you don’t even eat Christmas pudding now? But I made it just for you! You don’t like my cooking?” This person is using food because it’s the cultural language of choice during the holidays, but really, they just want emotional reassurance that you care. Fortunately, you can address their actual concerns just as well without eating (maybe by spending quality time with them during your visits, or just by letting them know you love them), and head off a battle before it starts.

Other food pushers really want to feel better about themselves – they see that you look and feel amazing, and they’re jealous, so they try to pull you down to their level. This is petty and low, but unfortunately, it’s very common. Some people just want to show off how much they know (or think they know) about nutrition by “proving” you wrong however they can to make themselves feel important. Other food ushers are genuinely concerned for you: they’re worried that if you aren’t eating dairy you might not be getting enough calcium, or they honestly think you’re missing important nutrients by giving up whole grains. Another kind of food pusher might feel bad for you – she thinks you’re depriving yourself, and wants you to have a good time like everyone else.

How you respond to someone pushing food on you will depend on why they’re really doing it – if they actually think you’ll enjoy a brownie, they’ll offer you the plate once and not make a big deal out of it when you refuse. But if they keep pushing it, there’s something bigger than the food itself at stake, and you can respond to it much more effectively if you understand what it is. By addressing the actual issue at hand, you can address their actual concern without eating something that makes you sick.

6. “No, thank you.”

When it comes to surviving holiday dinners, potluck parties, and almost every type of food pusher, “no, thank you” is one of the strongest weapons in your arsenal. You are an adult. You decide what you do and do not eat. You don’t need to justify anything; you don’t need to deliver a doctoral dissertation on the molecular structure of gluten or the role of lectins in autoimmune-related gut irritation. It doesn’t matter why. All that matters is that you’re an adult, and you choose to eat some things and not others, full stop.

At first, this seems like it shuts down debate – isn’t it good to discuss your life choices with people who disagree, to challenge your own beliefs instead of dogmatically clinging to your right to have your own opinions? Some of the time, yes. If you’re blessed with relatives who can discuss dietary differences of opinion in a calm and rational way, take full advantage of your good fortune. But it just isn’t always possible to have an honest and productive conversation about diet. Food pushers don’t care about your health; they just want to satisfy their own emotional needs by getting you to eat something. It has nothing to do with whether the food is healthy or not. When you try to argue with a food pusher on nutritional grounds, it’s like trying to explain to an avalanche why it shouldn’t hit you: you might as well save your breath. Don’t ruin your own evening by getting caught up in the argument.

7. Take the focus off yourself

A great combination move for “No, thank you” is “…but how do you like your new job?” Or “…but how’s your home renovation going?” or “…but I heard you’re going to Hawaii in the spring?” or any other kind of open-ended question that has nothing to do with your diet. If you try to justify your choices, or if you just leave it at “no, thank you,” you’re leaving the topic open for debate, as though it were ok for the other person to keep asking questions about it and try to persuade you that you’re wrong. That’s not the message you want to send. By bringing up a new topic (preferably something really juicy and interesting so they forget all about the cookies), you can deflect attention from the food and forestall an argument before it starts.

8. Deflect the Urge

Another way to handle people pushing food on you is to use the magic word: “later.” Claim that you’re completely stuffed, but you’d love to take home some leftovers. Then when you get home, you can just throw away whatever they sent you home with, avoiding a conflict while keeping your diet intact. In some ways, this seems like a sneaky, dishonest way out, since you’re deliberately misleading someone into believing that you’re going to eat their marshmallow pudding. Whether you feel comfortable with this as a “white lie” or not is up to you, but keep it in mind as a potential strategy for handling people who just won’t give up.

9. Make it Personal

Blanket statements that “[food x] is unhealthy” are likely to make other people very defensive. They’re inviting argument: if you claim that “grains are unhealthy” surrounded by a group of relatives munching dinner rolls and lasagna, you’re asking to start a big argument about whether or not grains are healthy in the abstract. Everyone else will naturally try to defend their dietary choices. Instead, try making it personal: “I don’t feel well when I eat gluten.” Nobody can argue with you about that. Nobody can claim that you’re wrong. Of course you know that you feel sick eating gluten because grains are unhealthy, but you don’t have to bring that up at the table.

10. Fake an Allergy

If a simple “[food x] makes me feel sick” doesn’t work, some people bring out the heavy artillery and pretend to have a life-threatening condition like Celiac Disease or a peanut allergy. Pretending to have a serious allergy when you don’t is a very controversial strategy, since many people feel that it’s “crying wolf,” making others less likely to believe people who actually do have life-threatening problems. On the other hand, it’s a very effective way to shut down debate and attempts to persuade you that “just a little bit won’t kill you” or “it’s the holidays; lighten up.” People respect a physical disability more than they respect the attempt to stay healthy; you shouldn’t have to pretend to be Celiac just to get out of eating cookies, but sometimes you do.

11. Plan Ahead, and Come Prepared

A lot of dinner-party pain is avoidable with some simple forethought. If you’re travelling at all for the season, it’s especially important to come prepared with everything you need, since you might not have the opportunity to find much Paleo food while you’re there. Plan ahead and stock up on jerky, trail mix, and other easily portable Paleo snacks so you won’t be stuck without a Paleo option when you’re hungry. If you’re going to help with the cooking, try bringing your own coconut oil or other cooking supplies: most people are perfectly happy to substitute coconut for canola (or another toxic vegetable oil). If you can work out menu details with your host, so much the better – try requesting eggs for breakfast, or lots of salad ingredients so you can whip up your own lunch in a pinch. Most hosts want their guests to feel welcomed and relaxed, and they’ll be happy to make these kinds of arrangements within reason.

If you’re hosting the festivities, you’re in luck: with all the advantages of your home turf and no need to lug coolers full of food from state to state, you can enjoy your own cooking without the fear of mystery oils or hidden gluten. If your guests aren’t Paleo, you might have to make some concessions to the food they’re used to eating, but if you don’t make a big deal out of your special diet, most people won’t object to omelets for breakfast, or lunches and dinners of hearty roasts accompanied by some safe starches like rice or potatoes.

You might even find that your guests are relieved at the healthy food, because it gives them less trouble in sticking to their own health and fitness goals. Many people worried about surviving the holiday season forget that others are also struggling to maintain healthy eating habits – if you were the only one, you wouldn’t be able to find nearly as many blog posts about it. If your relatives bring dessert foods (as many people do), you won’t even need to buy any; otherwise, try serving some Paleo chocolate pudding or berries with whipped cream. Even if you have to buy a few loaves of bread or some muffins for the picky eaters in the house, it’s easy enough for you to avoid the side dishes if the main meal is Paleo.

Mental preparation is also key to navigating the inevitable dinner-table comments about your “caveman diet.” Before you head off to your relatives’, brush up on the latest topics of interest so you’ll have a ready stash of subjects if you need to change the topic. Even if you don’t personally care about the Petraeus scandal or your uncle’s favorite football team, they’re more pleasant to hear about than how you’re killing yourself with all that saturated fat. It’s also helpful to decide in advance how far you’re willing to make dietary concessions. Have a strategy in place for what you’re going to eat and what you’re going to turn down; don’t wait to make your plans until everyone is waving pie and cake in your face and you’re already hungry. Planning your visit ahead of time – including when (if at all) you plan to deviate from a strict Paleo diet – will save you a lot of pain down the road.

12. Find a Buddy

Paleo dieters and vegans don’t generally have much in common, so the advice to stick together might seem ridiculous at first. But in the context of overly-nosy relatives, your vegan (or macrobiotic, or Kosher, or Atkins Diet) relatives are probably suffering from the same nosy comments and other annoyances that you are – which means they probably sympathize with your irritation, if not your plate full of ham. Try striking up a conversation about how annoying it is that everyone feels the need to comment on your food choices, and then finding something totally unrelated to talk about – which both of you will probably be longing for at that point.

Note that this tactic depends on the person in question – some vegans, just like some people of every other dietary persuasion, are passionate evangelicals and will simply seize the opportunity to lecture you about how unethical and unhealthy your Paleo diet is. But there are also a lot of vegans in the world who don’t approach their diet with near-religious fervor, and just want people to stop asking them why they won’t eat the turkey. Finding someone who shares your pain and engaging with them removes you from the people picking at your eating habits and might even lead you to a new friend.

Conclusion

It’s unrealistic to expect that the holiday season will go smoothly from start to finish. Even if you do everything right, something will inevitably happen that throws you off – maybe your in-laws turn Christmas dinner into a political clan war, or your kids bring home a nasty case of the flu from school and lay you out for a week. But taking care of your health with a Paleo diet will give you the energy to handle the rough spots, and appreciate what you do like about the season. And as a bonus, January 1 will be so much more pleasant when you’re already set in a healthy routine, instead of trying to get back on track after a month off.

Introduction: What Is IBS?

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is a frustratingly general disorder that can cause a wide range of digestive symptoms: constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloating, and general abdominal discomfort. In general, there are three basic types of IBS, classified according to the type of digestive problem involved. Patients with IBS-D suffer mostly from diarrhea; patients with IBS-C suffer mostly from constipation. IBS-M is a mixed type of IBS that includes both symptoms.

Although it’s incredibly common – approximately 1 in every 6 Americans has some IBS symptoms – scientists have not discovered any one clear cause or treatment, or even a reliable test for the problem. IBS is classified as a “functional disorder,” meaning that the symptoms aren’t obviously caused by any physical or metabolic abnormality. This makes diagnosis very frustrating: essentially, all doctors can do is rule out the possibility that you might have anything else. A doctor might test you for other digestive disorders with similar symptoms, like Celiac disease, Chron’s disease, or ulcerative colitis. Colon cancer is very rare but also a possibility. Anemia or other very severe nutrient deficiencies can cause digestive problems. You might also have an infection or a parasite – this might sound worse, but it’s actually not as bad: unlike IBS, infections and parasites are generally completely curable. If all of these tests come back negative, you’ll probably be diagnosed with IBS through process of elimination.

This lack of one clear cause implies that IBS is caused, not by any specific food or nutrient deficiency, but by a variety of interrelated diet and lifestyle factors that combine to do several types of damage to the digestive system. While treating such a vague problem can be frustrating and time-consuming, understanding your symptoms and learning about potentially problematic food groups can help you handle IBS without making your gut the center of your life.

Causes of IBS: Gut Flora Imbalances

There is no one cause of IBS. However, examining patients’ specific digestive problems can provide into the variety of different reactions and dysfunctions that can provoke IBS symptoms. One of these problems gut flora imbalance. Since gut flora play such an important role in healthy digestion, an altered or unhealthy pattern affecting these beneficial bacteria can cause severe digestive problems, and recent research has found that gut flora imbalances play an important role in all kinds of functional digestive disorders, including IBS.

Many different foods, lifestyle choices, and medications can disrupt your gut flora and create an imbalance. A healthy relationship with these bacteria goes all the way back to birth: babies born vaginally receive a starter colony of gut bacteria from their mothers, while babies born through C-section have no such advantage. Throughout your life, eating a diet free from toxins and high in nutrients will help your gut flora; eating junk food will harm them.

Another very common source of gut dysbiosis (the scientific name for gut flora imbalance) is antibiotic use. Antibiotics are commonly prescribed for everything from minor puncture wounds to tuberculosis; unfortunately, they’re also very dangerous to your gut. Although most antibiotics do a wonderful job of eliminating harmful bacteria, they aren’t choosy about what they attack, and they’re just as happy to kill the helpful gut flora that you need for normal digestion. Taking antibiotics reduces the number of strains of bacteria in your gut, and weakens the ones that survive. This can not only lead to the kind of gut flora imbalances that cause IBS, but can also leave you vulnerable to infection with even worse bacteria like C. difficile. Thus, antibiotics are another potential trigger for IBS symptoms, especially since your body is generally exposed to them when it’s already weakened by disease.

One particular imbalance strongly associated with IBS is Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO): this is a condition in which the bacteria in the small intestine grow too rapidly, causing general digestive symptoms like bloating, nutrient malabsorption, weight loss, and malnutrition. SIBO is found in 30-85% of patients with IBS symptoms; although scientists disagree about which condition is the cause and which is the effect, the two problems are clearly related, and treating one can only be helpful in treating the other.

Causes of IBS: Inflammation

Another digestive dysfunction strongly associated with IBS is systemic inflammation of the digestive tract. Inflammation is nothing but the body’s response to injury, so gut inflammation is a general sign that something is harming the lining of your intestines. This could be a certain type of food – for example, if you’re still eating products with gluten, or if you’re unknowingly eating something you’re allergic to, but gut inflammation can also be caused by injuries, diseases, stress, or any number of other factors.

Diseases can also cause this kind of inflammation, especially gastroenteritis. Gastroenteritis is an inflammation of the stomach and intestinal lining; it can be caused by a virus, a parasite, or a bacterial infection, and it produces symptoms similar to those of the stomach flu. After a bout of gastroenteritis, or any other inflammatory digestive disorder, you’re much more likely to develop IBS symptoms. Scientists speculate that the gut flora disruption and the systemic intestinal inflammation caused by acute gastroenteritis are to blame for this – and if you’re taking any kind of antibiotics to deal with the disease, that certainly won’t help. This development of IBS symptoms following an acute digestive illness is so common that doctors even have a special name for it: post-infectious IBS (PI-IBS).

Since the brain and the gut are so closely related, your mental health also has a huge effect on your gut function, and psychiatric illness is strongly correlated with IBS. Mental health problems don’t cause IBS on their own, but they can contribute to it. Specifically, elevated levels of cortisol (one of the major hormones produced by stress) interfere with a neurotransmitter called serotonin, which regulates not only feelings of happiness and depression, but also gut motility (how quickly you digest your food and how often you have bowel movements). People with IBS very often have abnormal levels of serotonin in the blood, indicating that chronic stress is a serious trigger not only for depression, but also for gut dysfunction. Since constantly feeling sick without a clear cause or treatment can be very stressful, having IBS can easily set off a chain of stress responses: chemical imbalances in the brain affect gut function, which causes gut inflammation, leading to inflammation and further hormonal problems in the brain.

Another common condition, leaky gut, causes both gut flora imbalance and gut inflammation at once; it’s strongly associated with IBS in general, and especially with IBS-D. If you have a leaky gut, your intestinal wall is abnormally permeable, meaning that molecules of food and other foreign substances can pass through the intestinal lining directly into your bloodstream. This provokes an inflammatory autoimmune response – your body knows that these molecules don’t belong in your blood, but in its attempts to get rid of the invaders, it also attacks itself. Scientists have found that this autoimmune response strongly contributes to intestinal inflammation and gut flora dysfunction, both conditions associated with IBS.

In general, anything that disturbs the balance of your gut flora or causes inflammation in the gut probably has something to do with IBS symptoms. While we would all love to know the precise relationships between all of these processes, we don’t need to know everything to understand what we can do about it: minimize anything that might cause leaky gut, inflammation, or unhealthy gut flora. A diet designed for overall gut health and recovery should be the first line of treatment against IBS – once you learn more about your particular symptoms, you can start modifying the diet to fit your situation.

Treating IBS Symptoms: Diet Recommendations

Since IBS symptoms have no one cause, it’s not particularly useful to embark on endless rounds of invasive tests and examinations to try to pinpoint the precise source of the problem. Instead, start by making a general effort to heal your gut from whatever problems are causing the gut flora imbalances and inflammation that lead to IBS. The wonderful advantage of this approach is that you can’t possibly go wrong: if one particular trial doesn’t eliminate your symptoms, you can rest assured that at least you haven’t done any harm and continue with your efforts. This is more than conventional doctors can say about antibiotics, antidepressants, and other conventionally prescribed IBS treatments!

First, cut out all the foods, medicines, and products that might be contributing to gut symptoms. Grains, legumes, and seed oils are harmful and inflammatory; for most people, so is dairy (even if you don’t think you have trouble with dairy, try eliminating it for a month as an experiment; if you don’t notice any improvement, you can add it back in). Some medication that you might be taking can also cause problems. NSAIDS (Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs) like Advil, Motrin, and Aleve prevent the stomach from protecting itself against the highly acidic digestive juices that it holds; this can cause bleeding in the stomach and digestive tract, and even ulcers. As discussed above, antibiotics can wreak havoc on your gut flora and general intestinal health. If at all possible, stop taking over-the-counter painkillers and antibiotics, and also make sure to get any antibiotic soaps and lotions out of your house.

The recommendations above would be useful for everyone, even people with a perfectly healthy digestive system, but some foods that are otherwise perfectly healthy and normal parts of Paleo can be harmful to people with chronic gut dysfunction. IBS can cause your digestive system to become hypersensitive, or intolerant to foods that otherwise wouldn’t cause any problems. While you’re in the first stages of gut recovery, try eliminating nuts and seeds, nightshades, and eggs. Nuts are inflammatory due to their high levels of Omega-6 PUFAs, nightshades (like eggplant, bell peppers, and tomatoes) can exacerbate autoimmune problems, and eggs (especially egg whites) can be irritating because they contain anti-microbial compounds as part of their natural defenses. These proteins are designed to protect the growing egg from microbes and viruses, but they can also harm your digestive system. Fruits are not normally dangerous, but if you have trouble with SIBO or other gut flora imbalances, the fructose they contain can provide a delicious food source for the bacteria that are already too numerous, making the problem even worse.

IBS can also cause you to react very poorly to a group of foods high in several varieties of carbohydrate known collectively as FODMAPs (Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides, and Polyols). Foods high in FODMAPs include several fruits and vegetables like apples, onions, and cauliflower. The problem with these foods isn’t that they’re naturally toxic; it’s that an unhealthy digestive system just isn’t up to them. FODMAPs aren’t easy to digest, so they linger in the small intestine while your gut flora ferment them. This extended digestive process can cause abdominal pain, gas, bloating, and constipation or diarrhea

Eating to cure digestive problems can seem like an endless list of foods to eliminate, but in fact, the foods you do eat are just as important as the foods you don’t. It’s crucial to get enough micronutrients while your body is healing itself, especially since malabsorptive digestive disorders like IBS often rob your body of nutrients. Make sure to get enough vegetables, preferably very well cooked (this makes them easier to digest). An easy way to do this is to just throw them into a slow-cooker with your meat for a delicious and tender meal that takes almost no time to prepare.

You’ll also want to eat plenty of bone broth at this stage: bone broth is very soothing to the digestive system, and it contains a wealth of vital nutrients extracted from the bones. Many people with IBS or related problems (like leaky gut, poor gut flora, or gut inflammation) find that bone broth is extremely helpful in restoring and maintaining normal gut function. Fermented foods will help restore your gut flora to healthy levels. A probiotic can also help – research into various types of therapy for the gut flora has indicated that both prebiotics and probiotics can be helpful, depending on the specific case. You might want to be cautious with your probiotic use if you have a problem related to overgrowth of gut flora (Candida or SIBO), though, since this might just feed the bacteria you don’t want. Some people find that taking digestive enzymes also helps relieve IBS symptoms.

It’s important to be very strict about your diet at first, to get the clearest possible picture of what you do and don’t react to, and to give your body the best possible change to recover. After your gut has healed, you can start experimenting with “grey area” foods that you may or may not have a problem with.

Treating IBS Symptoms: Healing the Gut

IBS is marked by two major physical problems: gut inflammation and an unhealthy pattern of gut flora. To treat the symptoms, you need to address both of these. Since inflammation is nothing but a response to injury, to heal your gut you need to stop injuring it: eat a clean, healthy diet as outlined in the last section, avoid toxins and stress as much as possible, and make sure to get plenty of micronutrients.

Eating a proper diet will avoid injuring your gut, and the inflammation will eventually subside, but healing your gut flora can take a more intensive effort. First you need to handle any bacterial overgrowth problems, like SIBO and Candida. This, unfortunately, can be harder than it seems. One of the reasons why bacteria are so resistant to your body’s natural defenses is that they have natural shields called biofilms, which protect them from your immune system. These biofilms are built from the same minerals that you eat to nourish yourself (especially iron, calcium, and magnesium), so they present you with a dilemma: if you starve the bad guys, you’re starving yourself along with them, but if you feed yourself, you’re feeding the bad guys, too.

In the case of iron, one way around this is to supplement with Lactoferrin or Apolactoferrrin, two proteins that bind to iron and help deliver it to your cells instead of to the bacteria that want to steal it. Limiting calcium in the short term won’t cause serious damage, as long as you make sure to eat a calcium-rich diet when your gut has healed. Magnesium is trickier: there is no equivalent of Lactoferrin or Apolactoferrin for magnesium, and intentionally creating a magnesium deficiency while attempting to heal your gut is a very poor strategy, since magnesium is one of the most important micronutrients for healthy digestion. Don’t go out of your way to take magnesium supplements, but the benefits of magnesium restriction are generally not worth the drawbacks.

A slightly more controversial therapy is chelation. This has mostly been tested in animal and test tube models, but it does show some promise for destroying the biofilms that protect bacteria from your own natural defenses. On the other hand, chelation therapy isn't without its risks: talk to your doctor before you decide one way or the other.

To supplement your body’s natural defenses, some mainstream doctors recommend antibiotics for gut flora imbalances, especially problems like Candida or SIBO, where you have too many of the wrong kind of bacteria. This is not an ideal treatment option, since antibiotics can actually contribute to gut flora imbalance and gut inflammation. Unless you have no alternative, stay away from antibiotics and focus on helping your own immune system handle the problem - or try more gentle antibacterial substances. For example, one of the most common natural antimicrobials is garlic, which is available almost anywhere and tastes delicious on all kinds of foods.

Another helpful natural treatment is peppermint oil; other herbal remedies include turmeric extract, Arrowroot, and artichoke leaf extract. It’s important not to go overboard with these supplements, though: if your diet is sound and you have your stress levels under control, you shouldn’t need a shelf full of pills in addition to your diet.

Treating IBS Symptoms: Mental Health

What you put in your mouth can go a long way towards healing your gut. But since the brain-gut axis is such a significant factor in the health of your digestive system, it’s important to also treat any mental health problems that might be causing IBS symptoms. Minimize stress and anxiety in your life as much as possible – if you can’t eliminate a stressor, make a plan for dealing with it productively, instead of allowing it to keep you worried and tense. Get 8 hours of sleep every night, and more if you need it: nothing will make you anxious and depressed like a chronic sleep debt. If you have more serious mental health concerns, consider finding a therapist or psychiatrist to help you work through the issue.

This connection between stress relief and fewer IBS symptoms isn’t just common knowledge: doctors studying treatments for IBS have found that an integrated mind-body approach typical of Eastern medicine can be very effective. Depending on your symptoms and personality, you might want to look into alternative mental health approaches like meditation, hypnosis, or cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). This type of treatment is especially useful because it doesn’t involve any invasive procedures or harsh drugs.

IBS-Friendly Recipes

When you have IBS, eating can seem like a minefield, with your gut ready to react at the slightest provocation. Every new study recommends that you avoid a different food or group of foods, and cooking is not much fun when a simple grocery trip requires an encyclopedic list of forbidden foods and precisely specified supplements.

While it can be a challenge to play meals around an ever-changing grocery list, living with IBS doesn’t mean that you have to subsist on nothing but ground beef and vegetables. You can eat a Paleo diet without eggs, FODMAPS, nightshades, or nuts, and still enjoy your meals! This pork roast recipe makes a delicious entrée with plenty of leftovers to grab for a quick breakfast or a cold lunch. For a lighter meal, try a shrimp and mango salad or cinnamon chicken (just leave out the onions if you’re eliminating FODMAPs foods). This tuna steak recipe even calls for garlic, a helpful natural antibacterial. For a rich side dish on long winter evenings, try some roasted acorn squash: this would be a delicious accompaniment to a roast chicken or a nice, juicy steak. Kale chips would make a great snack in the place of unhealthy crackers or cookies.

As you learn more about your specific triggers and intolerances, you’ll be able to add more different types of foods into your diet – after all, if you don’t react to something there’s no reason to avoid it. Everyone’s gut issues are unique: experiment in your own kitchen, and find a way of eating that works for you.

Conclusions

Although doctors continue to research potential treatments for IBS, so far it remains a vaguely defined collection of digestive symptoms classified by elimination: if it isn’t anything else that your doctor can recognize, it’s probably IBS. The very general nature of the problem demands a very general treatment: maximize your gut health as much as possible by reducing inflammation and healing your gut flora, and identify your trigger foods so you can avoid them in the future. Someday, you might wake up to a New York Times headline about the cure for IBS, but until then, healing and supporting your gut as well as you can is your best bet for controlling IBS symptoms, so you can look better, feel healthier, and move on with your life.

Biologically, a toxin is naturally occurring substance that harms other living organisms. Man-made chemicals are not technically “toxins,” but in practice, the term is also used to refer to artificial substances that are hazardous to human health. Followers of Paleo are familiar with food toxins like gluten, lectins, and phytic acid: these are all harmful parts of the modern diet and should be avoided whenever possible. Unfortunately, though, eating toxins is not the only way to ingest them. In the modern world, man-made toxins are everywhere. Megacorporations care as much about the environment as they do about human health: they don’t. Commercial agriculture and animal farming operations pump thousands of tons of pollutants into the water and soil every year; manufacturing plants cloud the skies with poisonous smoke and churn out plastics that leech chemicals into our food and water.

Living in the modern world forces all of us to cope with these environmental toxins to a greater or lesser degree. While it’s always a good idea to limit your exposure as much as possible, realistically, there’s no way to escape altogether. Under these less-than-ideal circumstances, a Paleo diet can help your body defend itself against the toxins that you will inevitably encounter, and also help you avoid contributing to the problem for future generations.

Environmental Toxins and Endocrine Disruption

Environmental toxins have a wide variety of effects, and attack the body in several different ways. Endocrine disruptors are toxins that disturb the normal function of the endocrine system, the network of glands that secrete and regulate your hormones. While the endocrine system is highly complex and involves many different hormones, one of the most worrisome targets for endocrine disruptors is the sex hormones, specifically estrogen.

Estrogen (also spelled oestrogen) is the most important sex hormone in women: it controls the menstrual cycle and regulates the development of female secondary sex characteristics (breasts, larger hips, and other typically “feminine” traits). In its natural state, estrogen is not only harmless, but necessary. Several toxic industrial chemicals, however, contain a type of endocrine disruptors called estrogenic endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EEDCs), which mimic the action of estradiol (the most important form of estrogen). EEDCs artificially magnify the amount of estrogen in the body, creating an imbalance in your sex hormones.

This imbalance has serious consequences for reproductive health and development. For girls, exposure to this unnatural influx of hormones can cause early puberty; for women, it can lead to all kinds of reproductive and fertility issues. Boys exposed to endocrine disruptors have higher rates of genital abnormalities, and men show decreased sperm count and quality. Endocrine disruptors also affect immune function, behavioral patterns, and brain health. They have also been linked with certain types of cancers, especially cancers of the reproductive system. The hormonal derangement that they cause also been linked to weight gain and diabetes. Since EEDCs are so closely related to developmental problems, they’re especially dangerous for children and pregnant women.

Clearly, EEDCs are best avoided. Unfortunately, they’re also very difficult to get away from. One way that many people are exposed to EEDCs is through plastic products, especially food packaging– EEDCs can leech from the packaging into the food, especially when the package is heated. One of the best-known hormone disruptors, Bisephenol-A (BPA), is found in various plastic substances; receipt tape also contains very high levels of BPA, in a form that might even be more dangerous (since it’s not bound up in a plastic molecule, the BPA in receipts gets directly onto your skin, and from there onto your food). Pthalates, another type of EEDCs, are commonly used to soften commercial plastic products (for example, to make plastic tubing, IV bags, and other products that need to be flexible). Many conventional beauty products, such as nail polish, shampoo, and hair spray, also contain phthalates.

As well as leeching out of plastic containers, some environmental estrogens lurk in the water supply. Prescription drug residue – from household and especially agricultural wastewater – is one source of these EEDCs. Birth control pills contain a type of synthetic estrogen called ethynyl-estradiol. While a woman is on the Pill, some of the hormones she ingests will inevitably pass out through her urine, eventually ending up in the water supply. But while birth control pills are an attention-grabbing headline topic for newspapers, wastewater from agricultural use of estrogen drugs in veterinary medicine is actually a more serious problem. Thus, while hormonal birth control pills often have serious negative consequences for individual women, conventional methods of animal husbandry are more to blame for the presence of estrogen-containing drugs in the general supply of drinking water.

Another water contaminant, industrial pesticides also have estrogenic properties. The best-known of these is DDT, which can disrupt normal estrogen activity so much that it causes breast cancer. DDT has been banned in the United States, but other pesticides also have the same harmful effects. These chemicals can leach into rivers, lakes, and streams from pesticides sprayed on crops, or float through the air to contaminate nearby areas.

Food is another source of EEDCs. Dioxins, created as byproducts from a variety of industrial processes, and occasionally also produced by natural events like volcanic eruptions, are one type of EEDC that many people ingest through food. These chemicals are classified as “persistent organic pollutants,” meaning that once they enter the body, they are very chemically stable and often get stored for long periods (up to around a decade) in fat tissues. Animals eat contaminated food, and the dioxins are stored in their tissue and passed on to the person who eats the meat. While acute exposure to very high levels of dioxins is possible (for example, in the event of a serious industrial accident), long-term exposure to low levels (eating dioxin-contaminated meat every day for several years) is more common. Closely related to dioxins are polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are not technically dioxins, but have very similar toxic effects.

Toxic Metals (also called heavy metals) are another serious source of environmental pollutants in the food supply. Although they are often necessary in very small amounts, these metals have estrogenic properties and can build up in the body over time, seriously damaging the endocrine system. Toxic metals include arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, lead, and mercury. These metals are often released into the air and water supply by mining operations; humans can then ingest them directly or by eating plants, fish, and other animals that lived in contaminated areas. Some heavy metals, like aluminum, are also ingredients in everyday products like deodorant and medications.

Even if EEDCs were the only environmental toxins in the world, we’d still have a job avoiding them: they’re everywhere! Unfortunately, endocrine disruptors are not the only contaminants polluting our air, water, and homes.

Other Environmental Toxins

Endocrine disruptors are the most common class of environmental toxins, but they’re far from the only one. Several other toxins also attack various other parts of your body. Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are used in all kinds of household products and cleaning chemicals like paint, solvents, preservatives, cleaning products, air fresheners, and craft supplies. One VOC that most people will recognize is formaldehyde, the strange-smelling liquid that anatomy teachers everywhere use to preserve dead rats as classroom decorations. For most people, formaldehyde only brings up memories of 3rd Period Biology, but it’s also a known carcinogen found in pressed-wood products like plywood, insulation products, and several different glues. The most harmful VOCs are methylene chloride, benzene, and perchloroethylene – if at all possible, avoid buying or using products containing these chemicals. VOCs first cause general irritation (weepy eyes, irritated nose and throat, skin rashes), nausea, fatigue, headaches and dizziness. Long-term exposure has been linked to certain kinds of cancer.

Another common household toxin, asbestos is a strong, easily woven, and heat-resistant mineral fiber that can cause serious illness if inhaled. Because it has such useful properties, it has been used for all kinds of manufacturing applications: roofing materials, tiles, insulation, and flame-retardant materials all commonly contain asbestos. Long-term exposure to asbestos can cause lung cancer and a lung disease called asbestosis, which has no known treatment.

Other flame retardant substances, such as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are also so highly toxic that, like dioxins, they are considered persistent organic pollutants. PBDEs are commonly found in several household products, including polyurethane foam (mattresses and furniture pads) and electronics.

Chlorine is another toxin that most of us are exposed to every day – it was actually used very effectively as a chemical weapon in the First World War, which ought to give us all a clue that this is a substance we don’t want to ingest. Unfortunately, in a much more diluted form, it’s used to kill bacteria in water. Like other anti-bacterial substances, though, chlorine can damage the helpful bacteria in your gut along with the bacteria that make you sick. Furthermore chlorine in the water supply can react with organic matter to form a poisonous chemical compound called chloroform. The amount of chloroform that you’re exposed to in the shower won’t kill you, but constant exposure can make you feel sick and run-down.

Avoiding Environmental Toxins

Avoiding environmental toxins is difficult because they’re literally everywhere: in the air, in the water, in the food supply, in your house, your clothes, and your belongings – it’s impossible to get away entirely. But there are prudent ways to reduce your exposure as much as possible.

First, cut down on your plastic use, especially for anything that comes into contact with your mouth. Many commercial plastic containers are currently marketed as BPA-free, but even these aren’t necessarily a safe bet, since they may contain other estrogenic compounds. Your best bet for avoiding these toxins is to steer clear of plastic food containers altogether – choose glass or stainless steel containers for refrigerating leftovers, packing lunches, and any other application that will bring them into contact with your food. To minimize your BPA exposure, also be cautious with your receipts – wash your hands after touching them, don’t give them to children, and throw them away as soon as possible.

Second, keep your diet as “clean” as possible: even healthy Paleo foods can be contaminated with toxins. Avoid chemical fertilizers and pesticides by choosing organic produce and free-range, grass-fed meat. If you can’t afford to buy everything organic, use the "dirty dozen" list to help prioritize your money. Also, be aware of the fish you buy: many species of fish and shellfish are contaminated with mercury, especially shark, swordfish, king mackerel, and tilefish. Be picky with your tuna: Skipjack Tuna has less mercury than Yellowfin or Albacore. Choose wild-caught fish instead of farmed fish if at all possible: farmed fish (especially farmed salmon) has very high levels of PCBs.

To reduce the damage from building materials and household products, make sure to take appropriate precautions when you’re doing home improvement projects. Use breath masks when appropriate, leave the windows open and run a fan to provide fresh air, never mix products, and throw away anything you don’t use. When you’re buying new furniture or carpets, look for a brand with minimal or no toxic flame retardants or preservatives. While there isn’t any need to throw out all your old furniture and bedding immediately, keep an eye out for any signs of wear and tear: if you start to notice foam poking through a cover, throw it out.

Take the same precautions with insulation, to avoid asbestos exposure. An expert inspection can determine whether or not your house actually contains any asbestos; if it does, be careful to check the asbestos-containing elements regularly; if they start showing signs of wear, you’ll need to have them either sealed off or replaced entirely. In general, before you embark on a new project, take a few minutes to research any chemicals or building materials you’ll be using and find the best options – paints, varnishes, and stains, for example, can be very toxic.

Also be aware of what household cleaners you use. Conventional dish soap, shampoo, furniture polish, laundry detergent, and other cleaning products can contain all kinds of VOCs and phthalates. Avoiding these toxins doesn’t mean that you have to spend three times as much on special organic Windex alternatives, though: cheap household ingredients like vinegar, baking soda, and lemon juice can clean almost anything.

Cosmetics are another area of concern. Choose a deodorant or antiperspirant that does not contain aluminum, and look for makeup and hygiene products that do not contain phthalates and parabens. Also be careful with sunscreens: if you’re just going outside for a few minutes, leave the sunscreen entirely and let your skin soak up the sun to produce Vitamin D. For longer periods of sun exposure, look for an all-natural sunscreen. Insect repellents commonly contain DEET and other potentially harmful chemicals; if possible, choose citronella candles or other methods of insect repellent that you don’t have to apply directly to your skin. If you’re hiking or camping somewhere that makes candles impractical, several companies now make a clip-on product that wafts insect repellent away from you, reducing contact with your skin.

Not all water companies use chlorine as a disinfectant, but those that don’t probably use some other kind of toxic chemical – call your water supplier to ask, and plan accordingly. Chlorine-filtering shower heads can help remove chlorine from your water supply – make sure to get them not only for your taps and faucets, but also for your shower. Whole-house water filters are the best way to remove as many contaminants as possible from your water supply, but these are expensive and laborious to install, and may not be an option if you live in an apartment building.

Removing toxic chemicals makes for a discouragingly long to-do list. Most of us are so used to these products that we don’t even think about using them, and suddenly there seems to be a new threat at every turn. There’s no need to rush out and spend hundreds of dollars updating your entire household, though – take the process one step at a time. Detoxifying any one room in your house would make a great weekend project; at that rate, after a couple months you’ll have a chemical-free home. The checklist below organizes problem areas by room, for a convenient guide.

Kitchen

• Canned foods (check to see if the lining contains BPA)
• Plastic containers (Tupperware, Gladware, etc.)
• Plastic utensils
• Foods in plastic packages (bottled water, etc.)
• Dish soap
• Cleaning chemicals (bleach, Comet, etc.)
• Plastic food bags (Ziploc bags, etc. – plastic garbage bags are fine, since they don’t touch anything you’ll be eating)
• Unfiltered taps
• Fish with high levels of mercury concentration
• Conventionally grown produce and factory farmed meat
• Old grocery receipts

Bathroom

• Soap, shampoo, and other personal hygiene items
• Cleaning chemicals (bleach, Comet, etc.)
• Makeup and makeup remover
• Shaving cream
• Lotions and moisturizers
• Sunscreen
• Bug repellent
• Hand soap
• Unfiltered taps

Bedroom

• Old or fraying mattresses and bedding
• Old or fraying chair and couch cushions
• Carpets

Closets

• Cleaning chemicals (bleach, Comet, etc.)
• Exposed or fraying insulation
• Old chemical products (paint thinner, varnishes, etc.)
• Air fresheners or odor removing sprays
• Laundry detergent and fabric softener

Living/Dining Room

• Carpets
• Old or fraying chair and couch cushions

Resisting Toxins on Paleo

Since nobody can completely eliminate their exposure to environmental toxins, it’s a good idea to give your body as much help as possible in handling them. The organ primarily responsible for this is the liver, which filters toxins out of your bloodstream. Unfortunately, since the liver plays such an important role in handling these toxins, it’s also one of the organs that they damage the most.

One way to keep your liver (and the rest of your body) healthy is to get enough antioxidants. Environmental toxins cause a kind of damage known as oxidative stress; antioxidants, as the name implies, protect against it. The best-known antioxidant is Vitamin C, but Vitamins A and E also have antioxidant properties, as do beta-carotene, lutein, lycopene, and selenium. Many commercial supplements claim to provide high levels of antioxidants, but on a micronutrient-rich Paleo diet, you should be able to get all the antioxidants you need from your food alone. Bone broth is also a great (and delicious) way to support your body against the damage of environmental pollution.

Protecting yourself this way also helps in a more long-term sense: it prevents you from contributing further to the levels of environmental toxins in your area. By supporting grass-fed meat and organic produce, you encourage farmers to find ways of producing food that don’t poison the air and water. By staying away from chemical cleaning products, you avoid flushing them down the toilet into the water supply. Everything you do to protect your own family from environmental toxins also has long-term benefits for future generations.

Conclusions

Toxins are everywhere. Many type of environmental pollutants disrupt the natural balance of sex hormones in the body, but others also harm you in different ways. Since environmental toxins are so many and so varied, trying to attack each one individually is a full-time job in itself. The unethical and destructive companies that pour these pollutants out into the atmosphere aren’t worth that much of your time and energy. Unless you have hours to spend every day on research and protection, focus on increasing your general resilience with a healthy Paleo diet and lifestyle, and resist the urge to panic over every bite of food and sip of water. Do your best for yourself, and rest assured that everything you can is helping to solve the problem for the future.

It’s 4 p.m., you haven’t eaten since breakfast, you’re hauling two oversized carry-on bags and a cranky toddler around an unfamiliar airport terminal, trying to find the new gate for a flight that just got delayed another hour, and you’re getting desperate. Somewhere, somehow, there has to be something you can eat. Sometimes there is, and sometimes you have make do with a bun-less McDonald’s patty and a $10 pile of wilted lettuce. But Paleo travel doesn’t have to be like this! Staying Paleo outside of your own kitchen is always a challenge, but with some strategic planning before your trip, you can minimize the stress and keep yourself sane.

The key to success here is preparation: a little planning ahead of time will save you a lot of pain and hunger down the road. Using your trip as an intermittent fasting window is always an option, but if you’re taking a longer trip or just prefer not to travel hungry, you can use a combination of food packed from home and meals at restaurants you looked up beforehand to make Paleo travel into much less of a nightmare for everyone involved.

Pack Your Own

Even if you plan to stop at restaurants along the way, you’ll probably want to pack at least some of your own food for snacks and emergencies. If you’re a veteran traveler, your first instinct is probably to grab a pile of granola bars: they keep well at any temperature, they’re quick to eat on the run, and they don’t make a mess. But most commercially available granola bars are just the standard American diet compressed into a travel-sized package: refined grains loaded with sugar, artificial sweeteners, and a laundry list of preservatives to prevent them from spoiling. Rather than relying on such terrible meal options, it’s possible to prepare the nutritional core of Paleo – meat – in a travel-friendly way.

One source of menu inspiration for this is history. Admiral Lord Nelson didn’t grab a quick PowerBar before the Battle of Trafalgar, and the Hudson’s Bay Company didn’t carry a rack of foil-wrapped packages for explorers to choose from. Throughout history, different groups have developed a variety of ways to preserve meat at room temperature. One method was to mix it with fat, which functions as a natural preservative. This process gave us pemmican, a traditional travel food for Native Americans. A delicious and energy-dense mix of equal parts meat and animal fat, pemmican can last for years without going bad. You can buy pemmican online, or make your own for a pre-trip project.

Removing the water from a piece of meat is another way to preserve it. Drying is a preservation method that’s very literally Paleo: Neanderthals used it to make mammoth jerky after a kill. Jerky doesn’t store quite as well as pemmican, but it provides a handy protein boost for slightly shorter journeys – and, more importantly, it’s easier to make at home. You can also get high-quality jerky (grass-fed meat and organic ingredients, with minimal chemicals) online, but be careful with commercially available jerky – it’s often loaded with nitrates, sugar, and soy sauce. Make sure to check the ingredients list carefully.

Traditionally, removing water also went hand in hand with another process: adding salt. Salt draws water out of the meat, restricting the growth of the bacteria that would otherwise cause it to spoil. Unless you’re restricting your salt intake – and you probably shouldn't be – salting your jerky is a perfectly healthful (and tasty!) way to make it keep for longer.

For the less historically inclined, canned meats also store and travel well and don’t require anything more laborious than a trip to the grocery store. All kinds of fish and other seafood (squid, shrimp, etc.) are commonly available canned; so is chicken. Some cans even have peel-top lids, for easy on-the-go snacking. Be sure to check the labels carefully, though – several brands of canned foods do contain soy sauce.

While meat is the heart of Paleo , most people like a little more variety in their meals. Especially on a longer trip, package after package of jerky gets very boring very fast. Fortunately, you also have plenty of non-meat options. Nuts are a classic Paleo travel food for a reason – they’re shelf-stable at room temperature, crunchy and delicious, and they’re one of the few Paleo foods that you can usually find at gas stations and rest stops. Single-serving packets of nut butters can also make a great emergency snack in the middle of a crowded airport line. Canned olives, like canned meat, keep forever and make a tasty snack on their own or a great addition to an uninspiring gas station salad. A small container of olive oil can also come in very handy for restaurants where the only salad dressing options are Ranch or Lite Ranch. LARABARS are energy bars made entirely from fruit and nuts, so they’re also a safe option. Save them for an emergency, though, because they’re based on dates and have a very high sugar content.

If you only need one meal (for example, if you have an 11am flight), you’re in luck: most cooked foods will keep for a few hours at room temperature without serious danger, especially in an air-conditioned environment. Hard-boiled eggs hold up very well, even outside the refrigerator. They’re not the food to keep for the final day of a week-long roadtrip, but they’re excellent for an airplane-friendly lunch. Many people don’t enjoy the taste of room-temperature meat, but if you don’t mind it, there’s nothing dangerous about packing up some leftovers before you leave the house and enjoying them a few hours later. This is also a great way to save money – instead of throwing out leftovers that will go bad by the time you go back, just bring them for lunch! Fresh veggies will also stay crisp and tasty for hours if you pack them properly (bring along a small container of guacamole for a filling snack), and most fruits will last several days.

If you’re travelling in a car and you have a cooler, you can extend the useful life of all of these foods for several hours or even a few days (especially if you keep topping off your cooler with ice from gas stations or hotels). Lettuce is also a great cooler addition for long car trips, since it’s crunchy and entertaining to munch on, and prevents you from getting dehydrated in the car. For a slightly stronger flavor, pack a small container of mustard to dip the lettuce in.

These travel-friendly foods might not be the most gourmet Paleo meal options, but you do have choices. An hour of prep the night before you leave can save you a huge amount of time and irritation, whether you’re packing a quick snack or a day’s menu.

Restaurants

You could always avoid restaurants altogether and eat only the food you brought from home. But especially on longer trips, most people like to have at least one hot meal. Restaurants sound tricky to handle, but in practice they’re fairly easy to work around as long as you’re comfortable being polite but firm about your diet. The best way to ensure a pleasant experience is to research beforehand: look up the places you’ll pass on the way, glance through the menus, and decide where you’ll eat before you have to make an instant decision on an empty stomach.

If you land in a steakhouse, a seafood restaurant, or another meat-centric place, you’re in luck: since meat is the main event, you’ll be able to enjoy most of the entrees with very little modification. Any restaurant with a buffet-style salad bar or custom salad options can also be very Paleo-friendly – at Chipotle or Subway, for example, you can get a vegetable salad topped with meat and guacamole.

Even if you have to settle for a restaurant that doesn’t have a lot of Paleo options on the menu, most of the time you’ll be able to simply order a cut of meat with a side of vegetables, prepared in a Paleo-friendly way. Grilling, roasting, poaching, and steaming lend themselves well to Paleo preparation; pan-frying can be fine, but make sure the cook knows to use an acceptable type of oil. If you’re a fan of safe starches, you could also order a baked potato or a side of plain rice. The key here is to be very polite to everyone involved: they are doing you a favor by cooking special food that meets your dietary requirements. Clearly and patiently explain what you do and don’t eat, and don’t expect them to make you something incredibly complicated and difficult.

For a hot meal on the road without the hassle of finding a restaurant, many health food stores have hot buffet lines that allow you to mix and match (and while you’re there, you can refill your cooler). Whole Foods, for example, has several Paleo-friendly options that you can sit down to eat in the attached café or pack in a travel container to take with you.

Guest Bedrooms and Hotel Rooms

Once you’re finally off the plane or out of the car, you’ll have a slightly easier time finding nutritious meal options, especially if you’ve planned ahead. Hotels aren’t the most Paleo-friendly environments, but they’re a lot better than airports! Some hotel rooms have full kitchenettes; if at all possible, try to get one with at least a mini-fridge. Before you leave, look up grocery stores near where you’ll be staying, so you can stock up right away: as well as the travel foods listed above, a rotisserie chicken is a convenient and fairly cheap way to get a hot meal the night you arrive, with enough leftovers for breakfast and snacks the next day.

Staying as somebody’s houseguest can be slightly more complicated if your hosts aren’t Paleo – even if you’re not trying to be rude, food is very personal and many people feel rejected or insulted if you refuse their cooking. You say, “I’m sure it’s delicious but I don’t eat ___________;” your host hears “your food isn’t good enough for me.” This is especially true if you’re staying with relatives: almost inevitably, you’ll have to field an endless stream of questions about your diet.

This can easily ruin your trip by turning every meal into an interrogation, and the stress and exhaustion of travelling only make it worse. Staying in someone else’s house leaves you very little privacy to unwind, which can make even a mildly irritating situation seem much worse. The best way to handle this is to prevent it before it starts. Before you leave, talk to your host about your diet. Explain what you do and don’t eat in a calm and nonjudgmental way. Present it as a personal choice (“this diet makes me feel better”) that you’re not trying to force on anyone else. Offer to pitch in for groceries and help with cooking. This also gives your host the chance to ask questions before you arrive, so your dinner conversation can revolve around something more interesting than your decision not to eat the bread. The key is mutual respect: you want your host to respect your diet, but you also have to respect theirs.

If you can’t come to a reasonable agreement with your host, seriously consider staying in a hotel: it might be expensive, but the chance to eat without a constant stream of judgmental commentary can be worth it.

When the subject comes up during your stay (and it inevitably will, even if you discuss it in advance or choose to sleep in a hotel), changing the subject is usually the path of least resistance. Rather than digging in your heels and getting into a barely civil argument over saturated fat or insulin resistance, politely stick to your preferred eating habits and change the subject: “No, thanks. Hey, what do you think of Susan’s new job?” You won’t win any grand Paleo victories this way, but you also won’t make any enemies, and you’ll be able to enjoy your visit without food battles getting in the way.

The Best of the Worst: What to Do When You’re Stuck

Even with the most careful planning, sometimes we all get stuck in a bind. Maybe the TSA got worried that you were going to hijack the plane with your jerky and confiscated your lovingly-packed spread of Paleo fare. Maybe you forgot your cooler at a rest stop, or someone broke into your car and grabbed it. Or maybe your trip was such an emergency that you didn’t have time to pack. Whatever the reason, it happens. But even if you’re stuck with food that isn’t strictly Paleo, you don’t have to give up completely and jump into the candy rack.

Your first choice should be “almost Paleo” foods: foods that probably won’t make you sick even though they aren’t on your usual diet plan. You might have to settle for meat that’s been cooked in seed oils (buying a fast-food burger and throwing away the bun can get you emergency protein in a pinch). Since many people don’t have immediate reactions to legumes and safe starches, you could go for a Mexican dish based on rice and beans, an Indian curry with lentils, sushi with white rice (but avoid the soy sauce, since it contains gluten), or mixed nuts that include peanuts. A smoothie with protein powder is also not technically Paleo, but it can carry you through for a few hours. If you can handle dairy fairly well, you could also try yogurt or string cheese.

If you can’t find anything “almost Paleo,” at least try to avoid gluten, added sugar, and anything that you react particularly poorly to. You can usually find at least one dish based on rice or potatoes instead of wheat. In this type of situation, accept that you have to eat something that might make you feel sick for a day or two, and try not to spend the whole meal beating yourself up for “cheating.” One meal won’t throw you completely off track if you don’t let it. The important part is to get back to eating Paleo as soon as possible, and to remember the situation so you can plan for it next time.

Travelling and the Paleo Lifestyle

Even with a carry-on or a trunk cooler full of Paleo edibles, travelling is a far cry from the active lifestyle that most people on Paleo try to maintain. Human beings just were not designed for the crowded, noisy, and sedentary world of modern travel. Sitting for most of the day can leave you stiff, store, and cranky; fighting through interstate traffic or airport security can send your stress levels through the roof.

One of the best ways to handle this is by making regular movement part of your travel routine. If you’re driving, stop every hour or two and get out of the car. Take a few minutes to walk around and stretch, then try some basic bodyweight exercises like push-ups or jumping jacks – even a few of these will get your blood pumping and bring up your energy levels. If you’re travelling with a friend, have a race to the bathroom, or find an unoccupied picnic table and see who can do the most box jumps in a minute. You don’t need to bust out the most extreme Crossfit WOD you know; just moving around a little is enough.

In an airport, your space and options are even more limited. Gentle stretching and yoga poses are a relaxing option that won’t disturb anyone else in the area; you could also take a brisk lap around the terminal. Some airports even have gyms built in (or a very short commute away); this is a great option if your flight is delayed or if you just have a very long layover.

Of course, if you’re exercising in any public place make sure you’re always considerate of everyone else who has to use it. Don’t crowd the kids out of a playground so you can do your pull-ups on the monkey bars, don’t practice your tabata sprints on the moving sidewalks, and bear in mind that you probably don’t want to get too sweaty unless you have somewhere to shower afterwards.

The Paleo Travel Checklist

Most of us forget at least one important thing on every trip we take, and return vowing to never forget it again…only to forget something else the next time. This Paleo travel checklist is designed to help you keep track of everything diet-related, so that even if you leave your toothbrush at home, at least you’ll have enough to eat. For a road trip grocery list, print out the checklist and simply cross out any foods you don’t intend to buy.

Food

• Jerky;
• Pemmican;
• Canned fish;
• Mixed nuts or trail mix;
• Nut butter packets;
• Canned olives;
• Small bottle of olive oil;
• Fruit;
• Vegetables;
• Guacamole;
• Hard-boiled eggs;
• Bottled water;
• Tea and/or coffee, if you drink it;
• Salt and pepper;

Non-Food

• List of restaurants and grocery stores along the way
• Utensils
• Napkins
• Hand sanitizer
• Tupperware (for storing restaurant leftovers)
• Allergy translation cards (if you’re travelling away from your native language)
• Any supplements that you take regularly
• Thermos bottle
• A sleep mask and a pair of earplugs

Travelling on Paleo can be tough – you’re thrown out into the world far from the safety of your own kitchen, and you have to make the best of it. But with some basic planning and preparation, you won’t have to sacrifice your health on the road.