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Prepping a big batch of something (chili, soup, pulled pork…) and then eating off it all week is a great way to save time, save money, and plan ahead for all the little emergencies that inevitably pop up during the week. You can make a week of breakfasts on the run and then just grab something from the fridge instead of worrying about cooking in the morning. Even if you don’t need to bring breakfast or lunch to work, it’s nice to have pre-cooked meat to quickly throw in a soup or stir-fry for an easy dinner.

But bulk food prep isn’t something everyone can just do intuitively. So here’s a guide to mastering the art of once-a-week batch cooking.

• What kinds of things can/should I make in batches? What about fragile things like salads?
• How can I avoid getting bored of eating the same thing all week?
• What kinds of tools and equipment do I need to do this?

What to Prep in Batches and How to Do It

If you think of a Paleo meal, it really has four parts:

• Required: meat or other animal protein (e.g. eggs)
• Required: fat (this might be provided by your protein source, e.g. bacon, but if you’re cooking lean protein you need to add some).
• Required: non-starchy vegetables.
• Optional: starchy vegetables, fruit, and/or nuts.

Typically, when you batch cook, you’ll be cooking one of these three parts. Many people only batch-cook protein – this doesn’t completely eliminate meal prep, but it makes everything a lot faster. Protein is typically the longest part of the meal to cook, so you’ll get the biggest time savings here.

You can eat the batch-cooked protein on its own, or throw it into soups, stir-fries, salads, and all kinds of other meals.

Other people batch prep vegetables as well. This can get tricky because you do have to make sure to use up all the vegetables before they go bad, but it’s definitely possible, especially if you choose wisely.

For a good batch-cooking recipe, you want something that’s easy to make in large quantities, keeps well for several days, and ideally tasty with a variety of different sides so you can mix it up.

Protein

If you only prep one thing ahead, make it your protein. Cooking a big batch of meat or eggs at the beginning of the week can save you incredible amounts of meal prep time. Here are some ideas:

• Eggs: hard-boiled eggs or mini frittatas.
• Meat: chili (pork or beef), shredded pork or beef, chicken breast, steak, any kind of roast, meatballs, or meatloaf.

Non-Starchy Vegetables

Non-starchy vegetables can get a little tricky to prep ahead because they can easily get slimy or gross – especially salads.

One great trick with salads is to keep the dressing separate. Wash your greens, chop them up, and mix all you like; just leave the dressing in a separate container until you’re ready to eat it. It also helps to layer your salads – put wetter things at the bottom so the juices don’t get all over the greens. Another tip is to prep salads for the beginning of the week and prep hardier vegetables for the end – or just have a second mini-prep day in the middle of the week where you make another batch of salads.

• Vegetables that keep for 1-3 days: fresh vegetable salad, fruity coleslaw, most steamed or roasted vegetables (e.g. broccoli, cauliflower, squash, etc.), most leafy salads if you keep the dressing separate.
• Vegetables that keep until the end of the week: roasted squash, cooked beets, chopped carrots or bell peppers. You may also have luck with coleslaw or other uncooked vegetables, depending on how fresh they were when you bought them.

Starchy Vegetables

If you’re batch-cooking breakfast, there’s a good chance that it’s because you need something to eat between the gym and the office – and in that case, you’ll want some starch with that. Here are some ideas for batch-cooking starchier foods:

• Mashed or roasted white or sweet potatoes (yes, white potatoes are Paleo).
• Sweet potato salads: one, two.

Or just add some starch to your protein, like these twice-baked sweet potatoes.

How to Keep it Interesting

You’ve cooked up enough pulled pork to feed the army with leftovers to spare. If the apocalypse happened tomorrow, you could subsist on pulled pork until you died of natural causes. But halfway through your week of pulled pork bounty, you realize that you’re so incredibly bored of it you don’t want to take another bite.

Oops.

Here are some strategies for preventing that in the first place or fixing it if you’re stuck there:

• Batch cook two main proteins and freeze half of each. Basically this puts you on a two-week batch cooking schedule instead of 1 week. So for example, instead of cooking just pulled pork, cook pulled pork and beef chili. Freeze half of each dish for next week. That way you’ll be able to rotate between them and you won’t feel like you’re eating the same thing every day.
• Use the protein as a base, not the final product. Put your batch-cooked protein in salads, stews, curries, or stuffed potatoes. Dress it up with different spices and seasonings. Chop it up and stir-fry it. Put an interesting sauce on it to add a new flavor. Here are 17 ideas to keep it interesting, and here are three soups that put a different twist on leftover meat: coconut lime chicken soup, ham and pumpkin soup, and winter vegetable soup.
• Rotate different proteins and side dishes together so you can get some variety on your plate even if you’re eating the same meat.

Useful Tools and Equipment

You don’t need a lot of special tools to get started with batch cooking. But it does help to have…

• Containers and a label system for storing the food once you make it. If you’re prepping grab-and-go meals, just put everything into meal-sized containers as soon as it’s done cooking for maximum convenience.
• A slow-cooker for cooking big cuts of meat painlessly while you do other things.

You can absolutely do batch cooking without a slow-cooker, though; you’ll just have to find a time when the oven is free.

Summing it Up

Batch cooking is an easy way to save yourself some time and make Paleo cooking possible for busy families. Some people cook all their breakfasts or lunches in advance for the whole week and just grab them out of the fridge as they go. Other people just cook their proteins and then use the cooked meat to make quick weeknight dinners like stir-fries and salads.

Either way, batch prep is a very useful shield against the lure of takeout and vending machines: find a recipe that looks tasty and give it a try!

Leftover turkey is great…for the first day or two. Then it starts getting a little blah, and re-creating the flavor profile of a Thanksgiving feast in different forms doesn’t help! So here are 5 ideas for jazzing up your leftovers, with a few recipes for each just to get you started.

1. Transform it into Curry

The generous amount of spices in most curry recipes gives the meat a completely different flavor and reduces the distinctive taste of the turkey itself.

Some recipes to help you spice it up:

• Leftover turkey yellow curry (Stupid Easy Paleo)
• Apple turkey curry on cauliflower rice (Fast Paleo)
• Taj Mahal turkey curry (The Clothes Make the Girl)
• Curried chicken (or turkey) salad (Chris Kresser)

2. Add Different Vegetables

Turkey can taste completely different if you pair it with vegetables that don’t typically make an appearance on the Thanksgiving table. Make it spicy, savory, or even sweet – just use the plants to add some interest to the same old turkey breast.

Some recipe ideas:

• Turkey chili (Paleo Leap) – tomatoes and bell peppers aren’t typical “Thanksgiving” vegetables, and adding a hint of the Southwest gives your taste buds a break from the flavors of all the foods that go with gravy.
• Turkey zucchini hash (Fluffy Chix Cook) – zucchini and mushrooms are also unlikely to be on the Thanksgiving menu, and who doesn't love a savory breakfast hash?
• Turkey Thai basil (Paleo Parents) – bok choy! Fish sauce! Okay, fish sauce isn’t technically a vegetable, but this recipe still perks up leftover turkey with a healthy dose of delicious greens, including the eponymous Thai basil.

3. Freeze it Properly

You don’t have to eat everything now. It’s perfectly fine to either freeze the turkey as-is, or to make something with it and then freeze it - then you can pull it out later when you're ready for turkey again. But if you’re going to go the freezer route, here are some quick tips:

• Do any carving before freezing. Who wants to try to carve a half-frozen breast off the bone? Nobody. Do your future self a favor and get the knife out now.
• Divide the meat into portions you’ll want to use. Cooking for one? Separate it into single servings before freezing. Then you can just take out however much you need at once, and more easily spread the meat out, instead of just delaying the problem of “half a bird to eat.”
• Use the proper containers, and seal them tightly (for plastic wrap, make sure it’s airtight). Freezer burn is nobody’s friend.

4. Add Another Meat

There’s no rule that once you’ve put turkey in a meal, your protein quota is filled and all other animals are barred from the plate! Why not mix it up by adding sausages to your leftover turkey soup. Or what about bacon? Everything’s better with bacon!

Some recipe ideas…

• Creole shrimp and turkey stir-fry (Paleo Periodical)
• Turkey sausage soup (On Sable Hill)
• Paleo turkey sweet potato hash (with bacon) (Conscious Eatery)

5. Switch up the Soup

Leftover turkey soup with turkey, celery, carrots, and onion? It’s good, but if you’re tired of turkey, it doesn’t really help, and just throwing in a bunch of kale doesn't always do the trick either. So here are some ways to make that soup pop:

• Thai coconut turkey soup (The Endless Meal) – just replace the soy sauce with coconut aminos.
• 
• Turkey-butternut squash soup with celery root (Everyone Eats Right)
• Spanish garlic soup with saffron and cumin (Eating the Scenery)

So…what’s your favorite way to make turkey leftovers interesting? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

You’re interested in the idea of Paleo. It makes sense. And it even sounds pretty tasty. But then it hits you: on Paleo, there’s no Lean Cuisine. There’s no Subway, no pizza delivery, not even slapping some turkey between two pieces of bread and calling it lunch. All those delicious-looking recipes were made by hand, from scratch.

Oh.

It’s true that there are such things as pre-made Paleo meal services, but they tend to be pretty pricey and they aren’t available everywhere. You’ll save a lot of money by learning to cook for yourself – and it’s really not impossible. Humans have literally been cooking since we could skewer things on sticks and hold them over a fire: if some unwashed troglodyte can do it, so can you! Here’s a guide to going Paleo even if don’t know how to cook a thing (or if you’ve long since given it up as hopeless)

Pinterest Lies.

An incredibly common mistake for beginner cooks is to start with some delicious but complicated recipe and turn cooking into a big event. Three hours later, the food is great and it looks beautiful, but who has time for that every night?

95% of people who cook meals from scratch every day do not cook like that. The goal of Paleo cooking is to put nutritious and tasty food on the table, not to create cookbook-worthy five-course meals.

That doesn’t mean your food won’t taste good; it just means that it might not look like something you’d see in a professional cookbook. You don’t have to cook a “recipe” for every meal. Hard-boiled eggs and a microwaved bag of frozen broccoli with a pat of butter melted over it is a fine Paleo meal from a nutritional standpoint, but that’s only a “recipe” in a very generous sense of the word. Eating leftovers is also perfectly normal and very common: most families who cook at home eat leftovers at least two or three nights a week.

So get rid of the idea that “cooking” has to mean anything you see on the Food Channel: it’s not. “Cooking” is using fresh ingredients to prepare tasty and nutritionally complete food – that’s all you have to do.

You also don’t have to find it profoundly joyful or meaningful or anything like that – it’s totally OK if cooking is just another item on the to-do list like walking the dogs. Maybe it works like that for you, and that’s great if it works like that for you, but not everyone is going to have a huge emotional connection to the kitchen and you’re not doing it wrong if your life isn’t transformed by scrambling eggs.

That still doesn’t tell you how to do it, though, so now on to the practical side.

How to Get Started

What You Will Need

• Basic kitchen tools. Cooking with the wrong tools can suck all the joy out of the process. Here’s a list of the very minimal kitchen equipment you will need.
• Either a friend who knows how to cook (best) or a good “beginner cookbook” (OK – just be aware that most of them are not Paleo-focused so you’ll have to wade through a lot of stuff about cooking with flour and avoiding fat). This will be a reference for you as you learn new recipes. If you choose the book, The Joy of Cooking is a classic but almost anything with positive reviews will be OK to start with.
• A positive attitude. You can’t learn anything if you don’t think you can learn it. And even if you don’t love cooking, you can still approach it cheerfully: it’s not a punishment!

Easing Into Cooking

Here's the good news: the hardest part about learning to cook is starting. Once you get into the habit and past the very first stage, you'll improve almost automatically. It's just the first couple weeks that trip so many people up.

If you’re a cooking beginner, you will be pretty slow at the beginning, and jumping right into the uncharted wilderness of cooking everything, all the time can get completely overwhelming.

Too many people rush in too fast. Then they get overwhelmed, because it’s all so new and exhausting, and the first unexpected time crunch or lousy day at work throws them completely for a loop. They eat something “wrong,” feel like a failure, and quit forever. Wouldn’t it be better in the long run to start slow, give yourself plenty of flexibility at the beginning, and gradually work up to cooking every meal?

Instead of jumping in with both feet, try this: start by making just one Paleo meal per day. A Paleo meal means at least one vegetable, at least one animal protein (meat or eggs), and some source of healthy fat (cooking fat, fatty meat, salad dressing, etc.). Cook and eat one Paleo meal per day. The other two meals can be whatever you want.

You can pick any easy recipes you like for this. If you have a friend to help you, ask for suggestions. If you don’t, here are three can’t-mess-it-up Paleo recipes:

• Breakfast: hard-boiled eggs with a piece of fruit. Take 3 eggs and put them in a pot of cold water. Turn on the heat. When the water starts bubbling, turn off the heat. Walk away for 7-8 minutes. Come back, peel the eggs, grab the fruit, and eat.
• Lunch: tuna salad. Dump a can of tuna over salad greens. Add olive oil and vinegar (or mayo, or guacamole – just make sure you get some fat in there). Toss and eat.
• Dinner: steak skillet with bell peppers.

Occasionally you will get kitchen disasters; that’s OK and it happens to all of us. Give yourself “credit” for cooking that meal anyway, eat whatever else you have in the house, and try again tomorrow.

Some convenience foods that may save your sanity during this stage:

• Steam-in-bag frozen vegetables. They’re just as nutritious as fresh, and if you can microwave a Hot Pocket, you can microwave broccoli.
• Pre-cut onions, carrots, peppers, and other vegetables. Save yourself some chopping; you’re worth it.
• Pre-bagged salad mix.
• Pre-cooked hard-boiled eggs or chicken breast.
• Canned fish that you can eat straight out of the can.

When you have the energy, try looking up new recipes and experimenting with them; when you don’t, fall back on the recipes you already know or ultra-easy "recipes" like scrambled eggs and microwave veggies tossed with butter. Keep cooking 1 meal per day until you have at least one or two recipes that you know how to cook in less than half an hour. Then you can move on to two Paleo meals per day, and finally go to all three. Before you know it, you’ll have a sizeable repertoire of healthy meals that you can cook in your sleep, and you’ll be eating Paleo all the time!

Cooking 102

Once you can cook at least most of your meals, it’s time to start thinking in terms of techniques instead of recipes. Here’s a good recipe for starting you off with that: try doing the same technique with chicken vs. fish, or with different seasoning blends. Look at recipes you like and notice the patterns: what goes into a roast (saute the onions and garlic, brown the meat, add the sauce, cover and roast)?

Starting with recipes will get you off the ground quickly, but using techniques will help you become a better cook in the long run.

FAQ

Where can I Find Recipes?

• Here’s the Paleo Leap recipe index (search for “easy”).
• There are a lot of Paleo boards on Pinterest.
• There are too many great recipe blogs to name; if you start searching for "Paleo ___________ recipe," you'll quickly find the ones that post recipes you're interested in.

Help! What Does _____________ Mean?

• For unfamiliar ingredients and tools, use the cook’s thesaurus.
• For unfamiliar techniques (blanch? Sautee? Braise?), here’s a list.

How do I do the Grocery Shopping?

• Here’s a guide to getting started with meal planning.
• Here’s a guide to saving time when you grocery shop.

What if I work during the day?

In that case, you’ll pack your lunch (and possibly breakfast) the night before. A very easy way to do it is to make extras for dinner and use them as one of your two packed meals. You can also hard-boil a bunch of eggs or make frittatas at the beginning of the week and eat them all week for breakfast.

What Other Tips Should I Know?

• How to use your leftovers.
• How to save time with Paleo cooking.
• How to make salad and eggs more interesting (salad and eggs are two of the easiest Paleo meals around, so you’ll be eating a lot of them.

Summing it Up

You can’t learn to cook by reading cookbooks. You can’t learn to cook by watching the Food Channel. You can only learn to cook by cooking. And the hardest part is just getting started.

Get the tools you need, a supportive friend or a good beginner cookbook, and dive in. A few months in, you’ll be wondering how you ever found it so intimidating!

Roasted chicken is a classic family recipe: it’s quick, it’s easy, and it even makes leftovers! And roasting a whole chicken is much, much more economical than buying just the breasts. But it’s also easy to get bored of chicken with nothing but garlic, salt, and pepper, maybe with a little basil thrown in. So in the spirit of trying something new, here are 20 recipes that do something different with a whole chicken.

International Seasonings

Who said chicken has to be served with gravy and green beans? Try these delicious recipes inspired by cuisines from around the world:

1. Paleo Indian spiced roasted chicken (Plaid and Paleo)

2. Whole roasted masala chicken (Things My Belly Likes)

3. Thai-flavored roast chicken (Lemon Squeezy)

4. Five spice maple chicken (The Primalist)

5. Spanish chicken with sherry and garlic (Spanish Food Blog)

6. African chicken (The Spice House)

7. Irish roast chicken (Erin Brighton) – note that the page also includes a carrot recipe which isn’t Paleo, but the chicken is.

Chicken With Friends…

Spice rubs are all very good, but another way to make chicken a little snazzier is to cook it with some friends. Either as stuffing or as a same-pan side dish, all of these recipes feature chicken with something else.

(Note that some of the recipes call for potatoes. You can leave them out if you like, but there’s nothing wrong with potatoes.)

8. Roasted apricot chicken with herbes de provence (Organic Kitchen)

9. Balsamic roast chicken with tomatoes and new potatoes (Naked Cuisine)

10. Pesto and avocado-stuffed chicken (Virginia is for Hunter-Gatherers)

11. Roast chicken with sausage stuffing (The Not-So Desperate Housewife)

12. The bacon chicken (Paleo Parents)

13. Roast chicken with persimmons and sage (Adventures in Cooking)

New Techniques

Ready to get a little experimental? Why not try these new and different techniques for making your bird shine?

14. Rock Salt Roasted Chicken (Primally Inspired) – Equipment needed: rock salt (ice cream salt), which you can find at any grocery store.

15. Brick Chicken (Serious Eats) – Equipment needed: either a brick and one cast-iron skillet or two cast-iron skillets and something very heavy and heat-proof to use as a weight.

16. “Beer can” Chicken (Paleo Parents) – Equipment needed: a vertical roaster

17. Slow-cooker roast chicken and gravy (Nom Nom Paleo) – Equipment needed: a slow-cooker.

Other Ideas

Sometimes, new and different cooking techniques don’t fit neatly into one category or another. So here’s a round-up of some excellent “miscellaneous” ideas: browse through and see what interests you!

18. Everything Chicken (Worth Cooking) – yes, like an everything bagel; it’s tastier than it sounds!

19. Country Captain (Saveur) – replace the canola oil with a Paleo-friendly fat, and leave off the rice and peanuts.

20. Porcini-rubbed roasted chicken (Food52) – the chicken itself is Paleo, but note that the pan sauce isn’t Paleo as written, although you could replace the flour with almond flour if you wanted.

So...what's next on your chicken-to-cook list? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

Bored of eggs but love the convenience of a quick omelet or frittata in the morning? You can get a lot more mileage out of your convenience meals with just a few seconds of extra time with the right spices and seasonings!

Here’s a list of 10 ways to add punch to your omelets, frittatas, and quiches with just one more ingredient. It only takes 10 seconds to throw in the pan, and the result tastes almost like a whole new dish.

1. Za’atar

What is it? Za’atar is a spice blend familiar from Middle Eastern foods. It has a pleasantly earthy or woodsy flavor with a slight tang, so it's delicious with the richer flavor of eggs. You can buy it pre-mixed, or get a recipe here (just ignore the chicken and go straight for the spice mix).

How to use it: beat it into eggs for an omelet or frittata, or sprinkle over fried eggs just like you would salt or pepper.

If you like that, try…ras el hanout (another spice blend; you can find instructions in this recipe)

2. Thyme

What is it? Thyme is an herb that adds a very sweet, pleasant taste to eggs without being overwhelming.

How to use it: Toss one pinch of dried thyme per 2-3 eggs into the pan along with your salt and pepper:

If you like that, try…rosemary, tarragon, oregano, chives, or herbes de provence. There's a whole world out there beyond salt and pepper!

3. Sriracha

What is it? Sriracha is a famously spicy hot sauce that goes pretty well with just about everything. Since eggs are so mild by themselves, the spicy hot sauce really gives them a special zip – it’s great for waking up in the morning. You can get a recipe for Paleo sriracha here.

How to use it: Beat it into scrambled eggs, or drizzle over an omelet or frittata.

If you like that, try…chili powder and/or paprika

(and a bonus tip: if you love your sriracha and want to make big batches to stock up, just freeze the rest in an ice-cube mold and then pop out the cubes so you have quick single-serving portions when you want them).

4. Garam masala

What is it? Garam masala is an Indian spice blend. It typically includes turmeric, cinnamon, cumin, cloves, and cardamom. You can buy it pre-mixed or mix your own. It has a delicious earthy warmth to it – it’s not mouth-searingly hot, but it’s not a flavor you ignore, either.

How to use it: beat it into eggs for an omelet or frittata, or sprinkle over fried eggs.

If you like that, try…just a little bit of hot pickle or chutney folded into an omelet.

5. Salsa verde

What is it? Salsa verde is a spicy Mexican creation made with tomatillos – those little green things next to the tomatoes in the grocery store. There’s a recipe here.

How to use it: Beat it into scrambled eggs, or drizzle over an omelet or frittata.

If you like that, try…chimichurri

6. Pesto

What is it? Pesto is a topping made from ground nuts and herbs with olive oil. It's rich and herbal, great for turning ordinary eggs into a truly decadent treat. There’s a recipe here if you can’t find a Paleo-friendly brand at the store.

How to use it: Fold it into an omelet or just throw a little into the pan with your scrambled eggs.

If you like that, try…asparagus pesto.

7. Gremolata

What is it? Gremolata (also spelled gremolada) is a condiment made with grated lemon zest, chopped garlic, and parsley. It’s a classic ingredient in Mediterranean food, where it adds a bright, tangy flavor to everything from fish to beef. If you're missing the citrus flavor of orange juice in the morning, gremolata in an omelet might be a perfect alternative. You can find a recipe here.

How to use it: Fold it into an omelet or use it as a garnish after the eggs leave the pan.

If you like that, try…cranberry sauce (no, really! Just try it!)

8. Roasted garlic

What is it? Roasting garlic tones down the pungency and turns each clove of garlic into an irresistible spread to smear on just about anything. You can get instructions for roasting garlic here (just ignore the rest of the instructions about adding sardines).

How to use it: add to egg muffins or frittatas, or serve on the side of an omelet. You can make the garlic ahead of time: roast some up for whatever else you want, and then use any leftovers in your eggs.

If you like that, try…herb butter or herb-infused oils for cooking.

9. Prosciutto

What is it? Prosciutto is a type of cured meat. It’s got that trademark salty-smoky-fatty appeal going for it in spades – like bacon, but a little more sophisticated. You can find it in stores with the salami and other cured meats.

How to use it: fold it into an omelet, or chop it into thin strips and add to a frittata.

If you like that, try…smoked salmon, or any other cured meat.

10. Kimchi

What is it? Kimchi is a spicy Asian condiment made of pickled cabbage. It’s a probiotic food, so it’s very healthy for your gut flora, and you can usually find a Paleo-friendly brand at the store if you’re not into home fermentation projects.

How to use it: serve on top of an omelet or frittata, or on the side of a plate of scrambled eggs. Some people like it heated to the same temperature as the eggs; other people eat it cold and enjoy the temperature contrast.

If you like that, try…pickled onions.

What’s your favorite omelet flavoring? Have you ever made anything that sounded weird but turned out delicious? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

“I’d love to go Paleo, but I could never give up _______________!”

Does this sound familiar? Or what about its close cousin, “I’m almost 100% Paleo, but I just can’t give up ___________”? Or its occasional sequel, “I finally went all-out Paleo, but I constantly miss ____________”?

Almost everyone has heard some variation on this theme – it’s probably one of the most common responses from people hearing about the concept of Paleo for the first time. So here are some suggestions for managing “I could never give up ___________” syndrome, depending on what the reason for it is.

“I don’t even know how to cook without ___________”

(Common culprits: bread, cheese, rice)

If one particular ingredient is a staple in your cooking, then it’s totally reasonable to feel lost at the thought of foregoing it. If you’ve grown up with Asian food, a meal without rice might sound insane – the same thing goes for Mexican food and corn, or standard American food and bread.

The solution to this one is to turn your recipe-hunting game up to 11 – and here’s the trick: don’t focus on replacing the missing ingredient!

In other words, if you’re struggling at the thought of a meal without bread, don’t drive yourself crazy trying to recreate the “perfect” Paleo bread with 15 different nut flours. Instead, look for Paleo meals that don’t need any bread in the first place. Look for recipes that roughly fit the following categories:

• Meat or egg-based main dishes.
• Vegetable-based side dishes.
• Starchy vegetables (potatoes, sweet potatoes, etc.)

One meal = 1 meat dish + 1 or more vegetable sides (optionally +) some starchy vegetables. Mix and match from your saved recipes until you get something tasty. Cook it up, and congratulations: you’ve got a Paleo meal!

As an occasional treat, there will always be room in the world for Paleo bread and Paleo tortillas, but they shouldn’t be the basis of your meal planning.

“I don’t know how to have a social life without _________”

(Common culprits: pizza, beer, other alcohol)

Who wants to be healthier if it means living like a hermit with your biodynamic kale and grass-fed beef liver? Nobody! And in fact, even if you were willing to do that, it probably wouldn’t be very good for you: a strong community is incredibly important for overall health. If eating healthy really did mean renouncing your social life, it might actually be healthier to eat junk and have friends!

But luckily for all of us, it’s perfectly possible to have your friends and your grass-fed beef liver at the same time! Food is one tool that we use to socialize, but it’s not the only one.

• Remember that you don’t have to eat at a party. You can just eat beforehand and go to talk to people. Nobody will think it’s weird if you don’t make a big deal out of it.
• The same goes for drinking at bars. It’s perfectly reasonable to order a club soda and just enjoy the company.
• Most restaurants have at least one dish that’s Paleo-friendly, so there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t go out to eat.
• For potlucks and similar events, bring a Paleo-friendly dish! You’ll get something healthy and delicious, and so will everyone else.
• Remember that you don’t have to be 100% Paleo, 100% of the time to get health benefits from it! Barring any severe allergies or intolerances, there is such a thing as deciding that a non-Paleo treat is worth it. If you eat healthy 90% of the week and then indulge on wing night with your friends, you’re still doing much better than eating junk all the time!

“I just love the taste of _________ too much!”/ “My mom always made __________ and I’d miss it too much!”

(Common culprits: chocolate, cake, cookies, pasta, candy, ice cream)

First things first: this is not just a problem of being whiny or needing to shut down your inner five-year-old! It’s perfectly reasonable to want to eat things that you enjoy the taste of. It’s perfectly reasonable to feel unhappy at the prospect of giving up something that brings you pleasure.

The problem isn’t getting rid of those feelings; it’s balancing them with your other goals (weight loss, better health, or whatever your goals with Paleo were in the first place). Some tips:

• Make sure you actually have to give something up before you get upset about giving it up! Potatoes, chocolate, butter, and bacon all have a place on Paleo – not necessarily as everyday staples, but there’s no call to give them up completely. There’s even some wiggle room with dairy, and rice, if you can tolerate them.
• Try a 30-day elimination with the promise that you can re-introduce whatever it is at 12:01 on Day 31. Temporarily giving up something is much easier than a blanket promise never to eat it again, and you might find that when you start eating healthier food, your taste buds change so much that your old favorite junk foods aren’t even tasty anymore. Sometimes, just noticing the bad reaction to eating junk after feeling so good can be enough to turn people off.
• Make Paleo as delicious as possible. A bland, penitential “healthy” diet is a sure way to send you running back to the chocolate cake, but if your new way of eating is even more delicious than before, it’s a lot easier to just forget about the unhealthy junk and focus on enjoying all the tasty food that’s good for you.
• Be cautious with Paleo imitations of old favorite foods. Sometimes they can be the perfect solution; sometimes they just set off cravings for the “real thing.”
• And as always, remember that there is such a thing as a worth-it exception. Be picky about which foods are really “worth it” to you, but if you’re “Paleo except for Grandma’s famous Snickerdoodles,” you’re not the only one!

“___________ is just too convenient!”

(Common culprits: sandwiches, breakfast cereal, protein powder)

Yes, convenience food is convenient. That’s what it was designed to be! Unfortunately, that “convenience” typically comes at the expense of health - and even worse, work and school schedules are now designed around the assumption that everyone is willing to make that trade-off. And that makes it hard to take a step back and fit home-cooked meals into a modern schedule.

The solution: make Paleo convenient. Cooking at home doesn’t have to be any more time-consuming than ordering in! Some tips:

• For breakfasts, here’s a list of make-ahead breakfasts that you can grab and go.
• To make easy brown-bag lunches, just cook double for dinner and pack up the leftovers as you’re washing up the dishes. Convenient and healthy, no sandwiches required.
• Even when you do cook, it doesn’t need to be a huge production. Here’s a complete guide to saving time in the kitchen, featuring everything from quick recipes to life-saving tools.

That covered a few of the most common reasons, but everyone has their own unique situation: is there something else that’s keeping you tied to some non-Paleo food? Why not share on Facebook or Google+ and see if anyone else has some helpful advice?

It’s one thing to spend money on good food as an investment in your own health. But it’s quite another thing to spend money on good food as a way of keeping your garbage man in business!

40% of food in the United States is wasted. Just to put that into perspective, that’s 1/13 of the total land area of the country, or 368,838,336 acres (576,312 square miles) of land dedicated to growing crops that will never be eaten (out of a total agricultural land area of 922,095,840 acres). That’s an area 3.5 times the size of California, dedicated entirely to growing things that end up in landfills.

This isn’t just an environmental disaster; it’s also a giant waste of money for everyone involved. Food is expensive enough without throwing almost half of it in the landfill! So to make your life a little easier on your pocketbook (not to mention your planet), here’s how to reduce the amount of food waste you create.

Learn Effective Storage and Preservation Techniques

All too often, food gets wasted simply because it goes bad before it gets eaten. It’s the half-bunch of cilantro that goes slimy and gross in the fridge before you need more salsa, or the head of lettuce that you discover in the crisper drawer, completely inedible, after you get back from vacation.

Here’s how to avoid that problem:

• Find a labeling system that works for you. Sometimes, all it takes is some masking tape and a sharpie to label the container. Other people are happier with a whiteboard on the fridge where everyone can keep a running tally of what’s in there. Either way, the easier it is to figure out what you’ve got, the more likely you’ll be to actually use it.
• Don’t make leftovers if you’re not going to eat them. Some people will cook up a huge pot of chili on Monday and then happily eat the leftovers all week, but not everyone is like that. If you know you won’t eat leftovers, just don’t make them!
• Be proactive about preserving food. If you’ve got a bunch of something that’s about to go bad, don’t wait until it’s gross and moldy! Eat it, freeze it, or cook it and then freeze that (especially good for things that don’t freeze well, like tomatoes). Or find some other way to preserve it (e.g. making sauerkraut out of cabbage).
• Clean out the fridge. Waste begets waste – if there’s already a huge clutter of Tupperware and plastic bags in the fridge, whatever you put in next is much more likely to get lost in the crush. Nobody likes giving up and throwing out all that food they’ve been “meaning to eat” for weeks, but think of it as catharsis: you’re chucking it now to avoid chucking any more in the future.

Learn to Use Odds and Ends

Have you ever given up and tossed the last few bites of dinner leftovers because there’s not enough to make a meal, but it’s also not really snack-y, so nobody really found a reason to eat it? Then you’ve fallen victim to the “odds and ends” problem! This also applies to the non-photogenic parts of vegetables, like the tops and ends of carrots, or the stems and leaves of cauliflower heads.

Here’s how to use those odds and ends to beef up your regular meals:

• Stick them in omelets. Omelets hold almost anything with panache. A few tablespoons of chili? Chicken curry? Leftover salsa? Just chuck it into an omelet (or a frittata, if you’d rather) and have at it.
• Use them for flavor. Vegetable odds and ends are perfect for flavoring soup and broth – just wrap them in a piece of cheesecloth or a nut milk bag so you can easily fish them out again. They’ll leach all their flavor and nutrients into the soup, giving you that delicious richness for free.
• Make stock with them. Any kind of bone-y or gristle-y bit of an animal is perfect for making gut-healing bone broth. This is an easy way to get all the nutrition out of the bones, plus it’s a delicious protein supplement. Save the carcasses from your chickens and use them!

Also take a look at this list of 17 ways to use your leftovers for even more ideas.

Rethink your Shopping List and Meal Plan

Just as an exercise, for a week, try this:

• Save your grocery receipt.
• Every time you throw something out, write down what it was and how much you chucked.
• When you’re all out of food, compare your “waste list” to your last grocery receipt (use the receipt, not your grocery list, to account for impulse purchases and things you didn’t bother to write down). Mark what you wasted on the receipt.

If you do this for a couple weeks in a row, you might start to notice patterns: maybe you always buy way more spinach than you need, or you’ve been paying for strawberries and then throwing half of them out for weeks. If you’ve got a regular money-waster on your hands, you could…

• Buy a smaller amount of it, even if the unit price is higher.
• Stop buying it entirely.
• Rethink your meal plan to incorporate the entire package, so you aren’t letting odds and ends go to waste all over the place.

Once you’re sitting there looking at the list of what you bought and the list of what got wasted side by side, it’s usually pretty obvious.

Another common trap is the “I bought it but didn’t know how to use it” problem: you want to try something new, but never get around to looking up a recipe before it goes bad. To get around this, you might set aside 15 or 20 minutes right after you get home for looking up recipes (or just make it a personal rule that you don’t buy anything unless you have a plan for it).

Summing it Up

Wasting food isn’t just an environmental problem; it’s a major money suck that you shouldn’t have to deal with. There’s no need to go fertilizing the landfill with your hard-won produce!

To avoid this trap, it helps to take a hard look at the list of what you actually do waste, compare it to your grocery receipt, and see what you could cut back on. Getting good at using up the odds and ends also helps, and so does storing everything properly in the first place: label it, keep track of it, and be proactive about using anything that’s about to go bad.

You’re old enough to take charge of your own health…but not quite old enough to have your own kitchen yet. Old enough to care…but not quite old enough to settle down with half a pastured cow and your very own fermentation crock. So how to stay Paleo as a college student?

In this article, you’ll get a look at some of the challenges that college students have to face when they’re trying to go Paleo, and how you can work around them.

Dining Halls

Believe it or not, it is possible to eat a more or less Paleo diet in a college dining hall. It just takes a lot of ingenuity. At the core, Paleo is about meat, fresh fruits and vegetables, healthy fats, and safe starches. So let’s see how you could hunt and gather all that from a typical dining hall…

• Meat: with luck, you’ll have a grill station where you can ask for just a burger without the bun (or even better, a lettuce bun). If there’s a self-serve deli counter, also try that; you might be able to snag some slices of turkey breast, ham, or chicken. Hot entrees are hit-or-miss: grilled barbecue ribs are perfect, but often your only options are breaded or deep-fried in junk oil.
• Eggs: many dining halls have omelets, or even a build-your-own omelet station. This can be an ideal source of quick protein without a lot of junk in it.
• Fresh fruit and vegetables: the salad bar will be your very best friend here. Load up a huge bowl of salad with everything you can find. Hot vegetable dishes might also be available, but watch out for breading, mystery oils, and giant globs of cheese on everything.
• Safe starches: baked or roasted potatoes are not hard to find, probably because they’re very cheap and easy to cook. If you can get your hands on some plain white rice, that’s also fine.
• Healthy fats: if you can get guacamole or olive oil on your salad, you’re home free. You could even consider bringing your own oils if you’re really worried about it.

Also, don’t neglect the soup options! Many dining halls will set out vegetable soup as a sad kind of concession to the vegan crowd, but typically it’s also relatively free of junk. Sometimes you’ll even get lucky and find “chicken vegetable” or something else with protein. Just make sure you’re not getting a bunch of noodles or soy sauce, and you should be fine.

It also helps to keep a stash of food in your room. If you can get a mini-fridge, so much the better. Otherwise, you can still stockpile canned fish, avocados, fresh fruit and vegetables, jerky, summer sausages, and raw nuts to grab for snacks.

Cooking For Yourself

OK, OK, but what if you’re living at home while you go to school? Or what if you have your own apartment? Suddenly, the dining hall stops being the problem; now it’s the need for super-quick (and preferably cheap) meals to keep you going through a long day of classes. Some tips on cooking for yourself as a busy, broke student:

• If you have a microwave on campus, you can cook up one big batch of soup or stew on the weekend, freeze it in individual servings, and pull out one serving per day. Lunch every day, for an hour of total prep time. And it’s hard to beat the price! Just make sure to add some kind of fat and protein (for example, coconut milk and chicken breast). If you throw it in your bag still frozen, the soup serves as its own ice pack, so you don’t even need a cooler.
• Hoard leftovers from dinner to throw in a lunchbox and bring to class. It doesn’t have to be fancy or special-looking, as long as it’s nutritious.
• Keep a snack around at all times. Student schedules are notoriously unpredictable; you never know when you’ll have to run to the library over lunch or stay late for a project. A bag of trail mix or a Larabar can make the difference between staying Paleo and giving in to the bagel counter.
• Hard-boiled eggs are fine to carry around at room temperature all day, and they make perfect quick lunches because you don’t even need utensils. Pack them up with some vegetables or a piece of fruit and you’re set.
• Invest in a slow-cooker, so you can leave your food to cook while you run off and do other things.

Managing Alcohol

Sometimes, the biggest challenge to your Paleo commitments isn’t eating. It’s drinking. And not the kind that you lead the horse to.

It’s easy to say “just don’t drink.” But a night on the porch with some good friends and a few beers can be an important part of college life, and who wants to be the healthiest hermit on campus?

There are as many solutions to this dilemma as people who have to solve it. You can go to parties and hang out with your friends, but just abstain from the drinking part. Or you can test it out to see if moderate drinking fits into your version of Paleo – social drinking actually fits very well into an overall healthy lifestyle as long as you know how to manage it.

It also helps to proactively suggest social activities that don’t revolve around alcohol (or food, for that matter). Try joining an intramural sports team, music group, book club, or some kind of activist organization that you care about. Invite your friends to walk around and explore places on campus with you. Drinking doesn’t have to be the default way of spending time together!

You might also find that as you keep making an effort to take care of yourself, you’re naturally drawn to other people who have the same priorities – people who won’t make you feel weird or out-of-the-loop because you choose to eat or drink a certain way. Then the problem is pretty much solved, and everyone’s happy.

Let go of Perfection

Let’s face it: trying to eat Paleo in college is never going to work out perfectly. No matter what kind of choices you make in the dining hall, you probably won’t be able to get grass-fed meat or organic produce. Cooking for yourself is a different animal, but it’s unrealistic to think that in four years of school, you won’t get stuck without a Paleo option at least a few times!

On top of all that, there’s the social aspect. A lot of your classmates simply won’t care about health, because they’re not seeing the consequences (yet). Making the most of your college years sometimes means choosing to eat something non-Paleo, and that’s OK.

The good news is that in college, while you’re young, you can typically “get away with” a whole lot more. Taking care of yourself most of the time will pay off down the line, but realistically, you do have more wiggle room at this age than you ever will again.

So if your friends invite you out for barbecue ribs…don’t say no because you’re afraid of sugar in the sauce. After all, it’s not just food that makes us healthy. Stressing over food can do just as much harm as the food itself. Strong social connections make us healthier in pretty much every possible way. Sometimes, splitting an Oreo sundae is the healthy choice, and as long as you’re Paleo most of the time, those occasional detours won’t do you much damage.

Summing it Up

If you’re a college student choosing to eat Paleo…congratulations! You’re miles ahead of the curve when it comes to taking care of your health. The benefits might not be obvious now, but you’ll start seeing them at 35 when everyone else is slowing down and you still feel great.

Whether you’re stuck with a meal plan or cooking for yourself, there are plenty of cheap and fast ways to get some food in your stomach and get back to the rest of your life. And just remember: you don’t have to be 100% perfect, 100% of the time. It is possible to find a level of strictness that keeps you feeling good without wrecking your social life; it just takes a little experimentation.

Do you start off eating Paleo, but can’t keep it up for more than a week or two at the most before you’re lured back into unhealthy food for one reason or another? Are you struggling to make it in the long run?

You’re not alone – it’s actually a very common issue. Whether it’s giving in to a craving (and then getting derailed for the next three days), getting stuck with nothing healthy to eat, or just having trouble making all the cooking work, plenty of people are good at going Paleo, but bad at staying that way. But the good news is that you don’t have to just live with it. Here are a few common reasons why people get stuck in the cycle of quitting and restarting, and some advice on how to overcome them.

You’re Not Eating Enough

One of the biggest reasons why so many people have trouble committing to Paleo is that when they try to eat Paleo they end up accidentally starving themselves. It’s very possible to do this without feeling hungry, so it might still be an issue even if your stomach isn’t rumbling.

For a few days, this might be fine, but eventually your body starts getting worried because it thinks there's a famine. This is a deeply ingrained survival mechanism, and it served us pretty well back in the day when "not enough food coming in" usually did mean "not enough food available to eat." Unfortunately, your body's response to this is to drive you inexorably towards the closest sources of easy calories it can find (read: junk food).

Most people will try to exercise willpower or self-control and not eat whatever it is, but you can only fight your own physiology for so long. The result is usually a period of increasingly strong cravings for calorie-dense junk food, before you give in to the chocolate cake for a few days and you’re back to Square 1.

This is not a sign of weakness or moral failure. Trying to overcome it with “willpower” is not the answer. If you want to try fighting several millennia of hard-wired evolutionary instincts with the desire to look good on the beach, go ahead, but you’ll probably lose.

So what to do instead? Avoid the whole mess in the first place by eating more Paleo food when you try to change your diet. How much more? That depends on you, but if the pattern above sounds awfully familiar, just start slowly increasing the size of your Paleo meals until the cravings go away. Add more healthy fats, more high-quality protein, and more safe starches. Remember that this isn’t a get-skinny-quick scheme; it’s a change for the long haul and there’s nothing wrong with taking it slow.

You’re Not Planning

Failing to plan is planning to fail – especially when it comes to food. Don’t let yourself keep coming home to an empty fridge, with no idea what you’re going to make for dinner: the temptation to blow it off and order takeout is just too great. Before you try going Paleo again, make sure you’ve planned for all of the following:

• Breakfasts: if you need breakfast on the go, either cook double for dinner and just bring leftovers, or set aside time on the weekend to make a big batch of mini frittatas or something else you can grab.
• Lunches: buy a lunchbox if you don’t have one, and leave reminders to yourself to pack up your lunch the day before – don’t try to do it while you’re running out the door!
• Snacks: carry something healthy with you all the time, just in case you get stuck and you’re hungry. A bag of trail mix, an apple, or a package of jerky would all be good.
• General meal planning: here’s how to get started. This will save you an unbelievable amount of pain, and completely put an end to the days of “there’s nothing to eat, and (like any reasonable human being) I don’t want to drive 45 minutes to the store and buy a bunch of ingredients and then come home and cook them when I’m already hungry, so I’ll just call for pizza.”
• Special events and occasions: make a plan going in, so you won’t feel helpless or overwhelmed during the actual event.

It’s easy to get swept up in the enthusiasm of a new diet change and forget about all the boring little details like making a grocery list or setting out your lunch beforehand – but ultimately you’re setting yourself up for failure this way.

You’re Expecting Miracles Too Fast

Reading through amazing success stories is inspiring, but don’t forget to look at the dates! With the “before” and “after” photos so close, it’s easy to forget that most of these transformations took months if not years to accomplish: it’s not going to happen in a week, no matter how amazing your diet is.

Unfortunately, a lot of people struggle with this: they want results yesterday, and if they haven’t lost 5 pounds in the first 24 hours, they assume that it’s not working and give up in despair for the next thing.

Don’t get discouraged and give up because you haven’t lost any weight after three days – three days is nothing. Sometimes your body needs to heal a little before it can lose weight (or do anything else) healthily. You can rush the process with crazy juice fasts or cleanses, but in the long run, that won’t get you where you want to be. Just be patient, give it a month or six weeks, and let your body take things at its own pace. After several solid weeks of Paleo, if the weight loss still isn’t happening, here are some tips to help you out.

Summing it Up

There are all kinds of other reasons why someone might keep starting and quitting Paleo, and it's rarely an issue of "not enough willpower." Some people just have trouble committing; other people keep getting derailed by life events that they can’t control. But not eating enough, not planning well, and expecting miracles too fast are three of the most common hangups that prevent too many people from really making Paleo work for them. If you can conquer those, you’ve got a much better chance of making it all stick in the long run – and that’s where the magic really happens.

Meal planning is one of the simplest ways you can cut your grocery bill, your time in the kitchen, and your gas expenses in one fell swoop. Here you’ll find some tips for getting started meal planning. Now it’s time for Meal Planning 201: tips and tricks to help you make the most of your planning efforts.

1. Use Theme Nights

If Friday is always taco night, then you always know what you’re making on Friday, and you don’t have to give it any more thought. It’ll get almost automatic to put the ingredients on your shopping list, and you’ll have one less meal to worry about.

Not big on tacos? Here are some other suggestions for classic dinners that you could serve once a week:

• Spaghetti
• Chili
• Breakfast for dinner
• Asian food

You can make a family tradition out of any meal that everyone likes: it doesn’t really matter what the recipe is.

2. Cook in Bulk (and Use the Leftovers)

There’s no reason why leftovers can’t be part of your meal plan! If you cook in bulk and plan to work the leftovers into your rotation (maybe as breakfasts or lunches), you’ll save a lot of time in the kitchen.

3. Plan Around your Schedule

Always busy on Thursdays? Then don’t plan a gourmet feast! Pencil in your fastest recipes for the nights when everyone is zooming from one activity to the next, and save anything time-consuming or experimental for the less hectic evenings.

4. Enlist Some Help

Even if it’s just washing the dishes or setting the table, almost anyone who can eat a meal can also help make it. That goes double if they want anything special made just for them. And if you have any picky eaters in the house, it’s also a good idea to have them come up with some recipes that they’ll eat, find the ingredients, and add it all to the list: this saves you time trying to hunt down meals that fit everyone’s taste.

5. Have a Backup Plan

No matter how perfect your shopping lists are, no matter how meticulous your spreadsheets look, no matter how nutritionally perfect your meals are…you will mess up at some point.

Maybe you’ll forget to buy something you need, or maybe you’ll buy something but it’ll turn out to be bad (rotten coconut, moldy carton of strawberries…). Maybe you’ll make something but end up hating it. Maybe your plans to go out for dinner will fall through and you’ll need a substitute meal in a hurry.

Whatever it is, eventually you will need a backup plan. So have one! Always have ingredients for at least one more meal than you plan to make – the easiest way to do this is to stash some extra frozen vegetables and canned or frozen meat. Then you can whip up a quick chili or stir-fry without too much fuss.

6. Make a List of Favorite Meals

This is especially true if you’re cooking for kids (or anyone who acts like a kid when it comes to food). If you have a master list of recipes everyone likes, you’ll have a great start when it comes to planning your meals for each week.

7. Set Aside Time to Plan

It’s part of human nature to prioritize the short term. Even though we know that half an hour of planning now will save hours of pain later, we still put it off or find excuses not to make time for it.

Avoid this by penciling in “meal planning” with everything else you have to do. Set aside a few minutes to sit down and get it done (preferably the day before you shop, so you have time for all those “oh no, I forgot about the ___________” moments to happen before you’re home with the groceries).

8. Make your Shopping List at the Same Time

You can’t cook all those meals if you don’t have the ingredients for them. The easiest way to make sure everything gets onto your shopping list is to write it all down as you put the meals on your calendar. Alternately, you could use an app or an online list – there are plenty out there, and some of them come with neat features like sharing (so anyone in the family can edit them).

Got any more tips that work for you? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

We’ve already published two lists of tips for saving money on Paleo food (here and here in case you missed them), but for some people the real challenge is not money but time. Maybe you have a job that pays you enough for all the grass-fed meat you want, but you don’t get home until 7 or 8 pm every evening and struggle to get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour before you collapse. Or maybe your evenings are a blur of piano lessons, soccer practice, and chess club, with precious little time left over for fiddling with new recipes.

It’s a familiar situation – in fact, the perpetual time crunch of the modern lifestyle is one reason why so many people turn to fast food in the first place. But busy people don’t have to give up on their healthy eating goals! Keep reading to see how even the most overloaded schedules can still squeeze in home-cooked meals.

Kitchen Efficiency

Inefficient kitchen habits eat up your time and make everything take so much longer than it should. Here are some tips to cut down on time-wasters in your shopping and cooking routines.

Let go of perfection.

“You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients.” – Julia Child

Your meals do not have to be 3-course fine dining experiences. It’s OK to eat something that looks less than photogenic; it’s OK to eat leftovers; it’s OK to eat your sardines out of the can. It’s OK to rely on frozen vegetables (they’re just as nutritious as fresh). If you’re making a salad, it’s perfectly fine to just toss spinach in a bowl with olive oil and balsamic, and then chop up some peppers and carrots on top. You don’t have to spend half an hour hunting down a new recipe and making dressing by hand.

Search out simple recipes (like coleslaw or lemon and thyme chicken). Or forget about recipes completely and learn very basic techniques, like tossing some vegetables on a pan, drizzling them with coconut oil, and roasting them until they’re nicely browned. It’s OK to make food that’s “just” nutritious and tasty; it doesn’t have to be something you’d serve the Queen.

Plan Ahead

Poor planning is the enemy of efficiency. Keep a grocery list on the fridge and write down what you need as you think of it – it’ll save you time running back and forth to the store for the little things you forgot. Meal planning (here's a guide to getting started) will also save you time in the long run, since you won’t be running back and forth in the store trying to decide what you want.

Stock up and minimize shopping.

You’ll save a lot of cooking time if you always have a few basic ingredients in your kitchen:

• Keep your spice collection well-stocked so you can try out new recipes without an extra trip to the store.
• Your cupboards should always have plenty of canned foods like tomato paste, olives, and coconut milk.
• Keep a can or two of fish in the cupboard at all times, for emergency protein in a pinch.
• Always have a bag of onions and a head of garlic on your countertop.

Basically, if it’s non-perishable, just buy it in advance; you’ll thank yourself later when you want to use it and don't have to dedicate 45 minutes to a grocery trip for one ingredient.

Also, even for perishable items you shouldn't have to go to the grocery store more than once a week! Here's a guide to maximizing your grocery efficiency with strategic use of shopping lists.

Prep ahead.

Some people like to chop all their vegetables for the week at once, so they only have one set of dishes to do afterwards. It doesn’t work for everyone – some people find that the vegetables go bad too quickly and they end up throwing them out. But you can chop at least one day ahead without fear of spoilage, and it’ll save you a lot of time the next day.

Another way to prep ahead is to deliberately make more food than you’ll eat at one meal, and freeze the rest (or just save it for the next day). This way, you can cook once and eat twice. It’s all about maximizing the amount of food you get for a given amount of prep.

Appliances to the rescue.

Don’t feel bad about relying on a slow-cooker (which cooks your dinner while you’re away at work) or a pressure cooker (which goes the opposite direction and gets everything cooked faster without sacrificing tenderness). No, cavemen didn’t have slow-cookers. They didn’t have time-sucking office emergencies, either.

Stick with it.

As frustrating as it might be for the first few weeks, cooking gets easier the longer you do it. Sometimes you just have to give yourself a few weeks to get used to this entirely new skill set that you’re trying to learn. After all, you wouldn’t expect to be a champion basketball player or skateboarder after just a few days of practice! The same goes for cooking, so give yourself some time to get into a good routine.

Master One Recipe

Pick one recipe, and make it every week until you can make it in your sleep. You should be able to cook this recipe in a blizzard of hungry piranhas while playing first violin in the London Symphony Orchestra with your other hand. By practicing so much, you’ll get really good at it, and you’ll always have a super-fast meal ready to throw on the table when minutes are precious.

Enlist Help

Who says one person has to do all the cooking? If you’re cooking for anyone besides yourself, get them to give you a hand! Even younger kids can wash produce, scrub dishes or load the dishwasher, wipe the table, or run across the store to get that one last thing you forgot. And if your teenagers are eating everything but the fridge door, surely they can help cook some of it, too!

Stop “Finding Time.”

The tips above can help you cut down your kitchen time. But you still do have to commit to something – what if finding even half an hour every day is just too much?

Here’s the secret, though: as long as you’re thinking about “finding time,” you’ll never find it. There is no secret 25^th hour in the day waiting under a rock somewhere for you to discover. You have to make time.

Making time means prioritizing healthy food over things that are less important to you. Some familiar – and unfamiliar – time sucks that you might consider cutting down on:

• TV. The average American spends 4 hours every day watching TV. It’s one thing to watch a show because you love it and care about the characters, but if you’re just turning on the TV in the evening because you can’t think of what else to do, then it’s not the best use of your time.
• Mindless browsing. It’s amazing how much time you can waste in a kind of Facebook-induced trance. It’s one thing to use social media because you really enjoy it, but ruthlessly get rid of the dazed tab-switching that just sucks up your life. Even little corners of time can add up: instead of checking Twitter while you're waiting for the bus, why not make your shopping list or look up recipes?
• Driving to the store. Most people in urban areas can now get groceries delivered, often for a very small fee (and sometimes that evens out considering the price of gas and impulse purchases at the register). Try a grocery delivery service and save an hour or two every week to cook and prep your food for the next few days.

Nobody’s asking you to cut out the things that really matter, like spending time with your family. But you can cut out things that don’t improve your life (whatever they may be) for the sake of things that do (like eating real food).

Summing it Up

Unless you have a personal chef, eating Paleo is going to take some investment of time to make it work. But it doesn't have to suck up your whole life. By maximizing efficiency in the kitchen and cutting back on time-wasters that aren't actually even enjoyable, most people can make (not find!) plenty of time to cook healthy, Paleo food.

In 2010, almost 30% of workers in the United States work “nontraditional” hours. This sometimes means working second or third shift; sometimes it means working 12 hours 4 days a week, or 26 hours 3 days a week, or 14 days on followed by 7 days off…the possibilities are endless.

Not surprisingly, this tends to make cooking more of a challenge, especially if you have to bring two or three meals to an extra-long shift without any refrigerator or microwave. But it’s still possible to make Paleo happen!

Cooking

If you work crazy hours, batch cooking will quickly become your very best friend. The basic idea is simple: instead of cooking for every meal, cook once and eat many times. You can cook on the days when you do have time for it, and build up a store of food in the fridge for the days when you don’t.

This makes it possible to eat home-cooked meals even on work days, because it gives you a steady supply of leftovers for pack lunches (or breakfasts, or dinners, or snacks, or all of the above).

You can batch cook pretty much anything that tastes good the next day. Some ideas…

• Balsamic roast beef or sirloin tip roast: save the leftovers to eat in salads or just with some mustard and mayonnaise in a lettuce wrap.
• Turkey chili: easy to make and perfect for stashing in the fridge or freezer.
• Honey-mustard drumsticks: drumsticks are tasty finger food and perfectly good cold.
• Any recipe for a whole roast chicken (like this one) is a sure hit for salad-friendly leftovers. For extra efficiency, cook two chickens at once: the extra work is negligible but you get twice the payoff.

The danger of this approach is that you’ll cook up a huge batch of something and then get bored of eating the same thing halfway through the week. To avoid this, separate your big recipe into serving-size containers as soon as it’s out of the pot. Stash a few in the fridge and a few in the freezer for long-term storage. Then you can pull them out in a few weeks, when you’re ready to have some more of the same recipe.

Pretty much the same principle applies to shopping. Instead of trying to shop when you’re busy and on shift, save it for your days off and stock up really well. Then just eat through your groceries starting with the most perishable stuff (lettuce, cucumbers, fresh berries…) and saving the hardier ones (squash, carrots, cauliflower…) for later.

Packing meals

Packing for longer shifts can be tough. With a typical office lunch, provided you aren’t bringing ceviche and steak tartare, you don’t even really need a fridge. But when your shift is longer, food safety starts to become an issue – not to mention what a pain in the neck it is to haul all that food around. Here are some suggestions:

• Bring a cooler. Have you ever seen construction workers eating lunch? They often have to lug their food around hot outdoor sites with no fridge for miles, so they carry coolers or insulated lunchboxes. If you get a good one, it’ll keep food cool for hours, and you can throw in an ice pack to extend that time even more.
• Bring a thermos. Got the opposite problem? A high-quality thermos will keep your lunch hot for several hours. It won’t stand up to a full shift, but if you’re on for 24 hours and you eat for the first time 6 hours in, a thermos could definitely make it at least that far.

What you pack in your cooler and/or thermos will depend on what you have available at work. If you’ve got a fridge or microwave, your options are almost unlimited – just bring any leftovers from your big batch cook-up, reheat them, and chow down.

No microwave? Plenty of Paleo foods are good cold. Try some potato salad, hard-boiled eggs, or a fresh vegetable salad with some leftover meat. Guacamole is always a hit; if you want something a little fancier, you could also roll yourself some sandwiches or whip out some pâté with vegetables.

Just because coolers won’t hold an infinite amount of food, it also helps to build meals around Paleo foods that keep at room temperature, with no need for refrigeration or reheating. Some suggestions…

Don’t forget liquids, either, especially if your job has you working out in the sun! Water is fine, but if you’re planning to get hot and sweaty, you could also try some coconut lemonade for an electrolyte boost.

Another trick is to consider fasting for part or all of your shift. Intermittent fasting isn’t for everyone, but it’s awfully convenient to avoid a third meal and just bring a cup of coffee (or nothing at all).

Sample Menu

Just to give you an idea, here’s a sample menu for someone working 16-hour shifts, with 3 meals to eat during that time:

In the cooler: 4 hard-boiled eggs, 1 sealed container of salad dressing, 1 Tupperware of salad greens, 1 serving of leftover roast chicken, 1 serving of leftover potato salad, 1 leftover burger patty, 1 sealed container of relish.

Out at room temp: 1 handful of trail mix (in a baggie), 1 banana.

Meal 1: 4 hard-boiled eggs and a banana.

Meal 2: salad with leftover chicken (pour the dressing on, add the meat, and shake it all up in the Tupperware).

Snack: trail mix

Meal 3: burger with relish; potato salad.

That’s all easy to throw together before you leave, even if you’re not quite awake yet. It’ll keep fine in the cooler, and you don’t even need to bring anything hot (although if you do have access to a microwave, you could warm up the burger).

It’s not easy or automatic to stay Paleo when your work schedule is going a little crazy, but it’s also not impossible by any means! You don’t have to rely on bags of chips or endless sandwiches, and you certainly don’t have to buy food every workday. It might take a few weeks to get a really good routine going, but it’s completely worth the initial effort to have real, home-cooked food to keep you feeling great through the long shifts.

They’re nature’s perfect food, a tiny repository of protein, fat, and important nutrients – but what if they also give you hives? Egg allergies are one of the most common dietary restrictions, affecting up to 1.7% of the US population (that’s around 5,423,000 people). And many more people are avoiding eggs as part of an autoimmune protocol.

Paleo without eggs can seem pretty rough, but it’s actually not that hard: you certainly don’t need to eat eggs to make delicious and healing Paleo meals.

Is it Really the Eggs?

Before swearing off eggs forever, it’s worth pinning down particularly what kind of problem you have:

• Egg allergy: rashes, throat swelling, vomiting, and other allergy-type symptoms that occur immediately after eating eggs (whites, yolks, or both). Very rarely, this can get as bad as serious anaphylaxis. With egg allergies, you’ll need to avoid eggs altogether.
• Egg white allergy: allergic reaction to egg whites only, not the yolks. It’s very common to react poorly to egg whites, but not the yolks. Depending on how severe your allergy is, you may be able to eat egg yolks without a problem, but most allergists advise avoiding the yolks as well, because of the potential for cross-contamination.
• Egg white intolerance: this is not an allergy; it’s really a kind of histamine intolerance, and symptoms can range from allergy-like reactions to nausea, bloating, brain fog, and more (you can read about histamine intolerance here). On the outside, it looks like an allergy, but there’s a slightly different process going on under the hood, and if you take a food allergy test, eggs won't show up on it.

An allergy to eggs will obviously require you to avoid them altogether. For egg white allergies, it's generally a good idea to avoid the yolks as well. But if you’re not allergic - if you have an intolerance instead - then the yolks may be just fine (for example, in some delicious Paleo mayonnaise) because the tiny amount of egg white that clings to the yolk usually doesn't cause problems. This will get you all the nutritional benefits of the egg (which are almost entirely in the yolk; whites are much less nutritious), without the reaction.

It’s also worth noting that most egg allergies occur in children who later grow out of them, so if it's a child you're worrying about, you may just have to wait a few years before the allergy disappears on its own.

But what about people who really are allergic to the whole egg? Or people who (understandably!) don’t want to take a risk by testing it out? It’s completely possible to do Paleo without any eggs at all. Take a look at some of the most common questions and how to handle them.

What do I Eat for Breakfast?

Anything you like! Really: there’s absolutely no reason why breakfast has to be chosen from some totally arbitrary list of “breakfast foods.” Why are eggs “breakfasty” but tuna isn’t? There’s no real reason for it, so stop letting yourself be limited by these meaningless categories.

Just think of breakfast as a meal like any other meal: meat and vegetables, maybe with some fruit or nuts thrown in on the side. Breakfast is not a magic exception because it’s the first meal of the day. If you’re not up for a lot of cooking, leftovers make a fast and convenient morning meal – what about some cold slices of roast beef with an apple and a smear of almond butter? Delicious, nutritious, and no cooking required.

If you’re not quite willing to let go of the “breakfast food” mold quite yet, what about…

• Sausages with some fried onions and mushrooms
• A breakfast skillet with ham and vegetables
• Bacon with spinach and mushrooms sauteed in the bacon fat
• A quick smoothie just to tide you over until lunchtime
• Smoked salmon with cucumber slices
• Nothing at all; you could always go the intermittent fasting route and just wait until noon to start eating.

What can I use as Binders?

A binder is the ingredient in a recipe that makes everything else stick together. For example, if you’re making chicken nuggets, the egg coating is the “glue” that holds the breading onto the meat.

Eggs don’t have any special magic binding properties, though. One great alternative is an egg replacement made of flax seeds (this is a vegan favorite). For each egg that you need to replace, combine 1 part ground flaxseed to 2 parts boiling water. Stir to combine and let it sit until it gets the texture of egg whites. Then use in your recipe wherever you would otherwise use eggs. If you tweak the recipe a little, you can even make mayo with it!

What can I use for Fast Protein?

Another reason that eggs are so great is their usefulness as quick protein in a pinch. They keep for weeks at a time in the fridge until that one rushed evening when you need dinner ready in 10 minutes, and then it’s eggs to the rescue! Just throw together a bunch of vegetables in a skillet and crack in a few eggs for a quick meal.

Fortunately, there are plenty of other fast protein options. Try keeping a pound or so of ground meat around in the freezer at all times. Or make sure you always have a can of salmon ready to transform into an emergency curry just by warming it up with some coconut milk and spices.

For quick snacks, instead of hard-boiled eggs, stock up on individual packets of tuna or cans of sardines. Another tasty and easy snack is chicken drumsticks: just cook up a big batch of your favorite recipe and keep those in the fridge where you’d normally keep hard-boiled eggs.

Will I be Deficient in Anything?

As well as their culinary uses, eggs are extremely nutritious. Here’s a list of nutrients in eggs, together with some non-egg sources to include in your diet:

• Healthy saturated fat: red meat or animal fat.
• Essential fatty acids (Omega-3s: EPA and DHA): fish and seafood.
• Vitamin A: liver or other organ meats; you can also get a precursor form called beta-carotene in any orange vegetable.
• Vitamin B2 (Riboflavin): spinach, dairy products (if you tolerate them well), mushrooms, and many other vegetables.
• Vitamin B12: any kind of red meat or other animal products.
• Vitamin K2: organ meat and pastured butter.
• Choline: any kind of meat, especially seafood and poultry.
• Phosphorus: red meat and dairy products.
• Selenium: fish or seafood; Brazil nuts.

There’s a lot of good stuff in an egg – but there’s nothing that’s only in eggs. If you’re eating whole foods, plenty of pasture-raised animal products, and enough vegetables, you shouldn’t have any trouble meeting your nutrient needs without an egg passing your lips.

Summing it Up

An egg allergy or intolerance adds an initial level of difficulty on top of the switch to Paleo. But there’s no nutritional reason why you have to eat eggs specifically, and there’s a workaround for everything – yes, even breakfast! So if an egg allergy is your concern, don’t let it stop you from enjoying the benefits of Paleo: scramble up some breakfast sausage and enjoy.

There’s a time and place to figure out what you’re having for dinner, and it’s not five minutes before dinner is scheduled to begin, while staring at an empty fridge, wondering how on earth you’re going to feed four people with half a leftover chicken breast, three zucchini, and a bottle of mustard.

Enter meal planning. This doesn’t have to mean spreadsheets and calendars and alphabetized collections of index cards: after all, the whole point is to save you time, not to turn your kitchen into some kind of culinary Library of Congress. Meal planning doesn’t have to be complicated, and you don’t have to be some kind of uber-organized kitchen prodigy to make it work.

Here’s how to start meal planning, in 3 steps.

Step 1: Assess

Before you can fix the problem, you have to know what the problem is. And you need to get a little more specific than “I don’t have time to cook.”

To make the most effective meal plan, the first step is to figure out your pain points. A “pain point” is the thing that always trips you up, the problem that destroys all your good intentions. Some examples:

• You don’t have a fridge at work, so you never know what to pack for lunch. You end up just getting fast food.
• You get home from work late and don’t know any recipes you can cook quickly, so dinner always takes forever and you end up just ordering takeout.
• You always forget things at the grocery store, so you spend way too much time running back and forth for just one or two things. Eventually you get sick of it and just go out to eat.

Think back on any times when you just couldn’t face the thought of cooking again so you gave up and ordered pizza. Why did you end up in that situation? Was it that you had no food in the fridge? Or the only recipe you had was too long and hard? Or that you didn’t feel confident about making it?

Try to focus on situations you can control, not reasons like “I was tired.” All of us get tired, and yet some people manage to stick to the plan while others stumble. The problem is not being tired; it’s that you didn’t plan for being tired. Takeout restaurants plan for that possibility very, very well: it’s their entire business model. So to beat the takeout demons, you’ll just have to plan better than they do.

Before you move on to Step 2, quickly jot down your top one or two (or more) pain points so you’ll have them for reference.

Step 2: Find your Style

Found your pain points? The next step is to find a style of planning that addresses those particular points. If your pain point is “I don’t know any recipes simple enough to cook in a rush,” then a meal plan full of complicated four-course dinners is not going to help! You need a style of meal planning that addresses your particular problem. Some suggestions…

The casual planner

Good for: “I’m fine with cooking; I just run out of food halfway through the week because I forget things at the grocery store,” “I’m single and I don’t want to spend too much time on this,” “I don’t mind cooking on the fly sometimes.”

You will need: paper and a pen.

How it works: Write down however many pounds of meat, servings of vegetables, servings of fruit, and servings of starch you eat in a week, plus any miscellaneous items (e.g. cooking fat, vinegar, spices/herbs, etc.). That’s your shopping list. It doesn’t matter what kind of meat you get; get whatever looks good or is on special. As long as you buy everything on the list, you’ll have enough food to tide you through the week.

When you eat what is up to you: that’s why this one is the casual planner! It’s great if you live alone and eat a lot of very simple meals, or if you have a knack for making a meal out of any random collection of ingredients, so long as there’s something in the fridge.

The money-saver

Good for: “I have time to cook but can’t afford to eat this way.”

You will need: the weekly flyer from your grocery store, a calendar or planner, a separate paper for your shopping list, and your computer, to look up recipes.

How it works: Every week, get your grocery store’s sales flyer. Pick out the Paleo foods on sale, and look up recipes based on those. Grab a calendar or weekly planner and write down what you’re having for breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day. As you write down each meal in your planner, put the ingredients on your shopping list. Head to the store before the sales end, stock up, and get cooking!

The time-saver

Good for: “I’m struggling to find time for shopping and cooking between everything else in my schedule”

You will need: your weekly planner or day organizer, a separate paper for your shopping list, and your computer, to look up recipes.

How it works: Every week, grab a calendar and write down any events that might interfere with cooking. Working around those events, pencil in the time that you’ll spend on meal prep, whether that’s all at once on the weekends or spread throughout the week. Then do some searching for quick and easy recipes, slow-cooker recipes, or recipes that make a lot of leftovers. Plan those into the schedule, and put the ingredients on your shopping list as you add meals to your calendar.

The low-effort plan

Good for: “I don’t know any Paleo recipes that I can cook in a hurry,” “I don’t feel confident cooking Paleo food,” “I’m always tired when I get home and don’t have energy to cook all this fancy food.”

You will need: a calendar or planner, a separate paper for your shopping list, and your computer, to look up recipes.

How it works: Every week, start by hunting through your favorite sources for Paleo recipes to find simple breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. It helps to find recipes that make multiple servings, so you can have some leftovers and not cook something new for every single meal. Write them down on your calendar, and as you write down each meal, add the ingredients for it to your shopping list. You’ll only have to shop once during the week, and you’ll always have something quick and easy to make.

The custom blend

None of the above sound quite right? Or are you struggling with a different problem? That’s OK; just experiment with methods until you find something that works. You can mix and match methods, or come up with something completely unique by starting with the “best match” and modifying it until it fits your life perfectly.

Step 3: Just do it!

Reading a list of tips on meal planning will not help you plan your meals. Only planning your meals will help you plan your meals. Instead of clicking back over to the next tab, grab your day planner right now and pencil in a time to sit down and work out a meal planning system. Or write an email to yourself, write it on your hand, put up a sticky note - whatever you like; just do it now before you can forget.

It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect the first time. Paleo is a lifestyle change, not a “diet” that you go off in two weeks, so you’ll have plenty of time to fine-tune your system. If you're still nervous about jumping with both feet, here's a sample 14-day meal plan for you to start with; copy it exactly or modify it to fit your needs. Or come up with something entirely original. Even if it's not perfect, it'll still probably be better than what you had before. Just go for it: you've got nothing to lose!

As a new set of college grads prepares to leave the dorms for the first time, it’s time to talk kitchen gear on a budget. The right kitchen equipment will make your meal prep and clean up dramatically easier – but most of us don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on Le Creuset and Japanese-forged chef’s knives.

To help you prioritize, here’s a list of 10 bare essentials. You won’t be able to open your own restaurant with just these 10 tools, but you will be able to put good food on the table without spending your whole life in front of the stove. As you grow into your own cooking style, you’ll figure out what else you want, and what you can skip.

1. Knives

A lousy knife is the most dangerous kitchen tool you’ll ever own. When even cutting an onion takes a lot of elbow grease, it’s easy to forget that even dull knives can take your finger off when they slip. But everyone respects a sharp knife, and you don’t need to jerk it around anyway since it slides right through whatever you’re cutting.

You don’t have to spend a huge amount of money on your kitchen knives (unless you want to). And you definitely don’t have to start out with one of those “knife blocks” that includes every blade pattern under the sun. In fact, skip those: they just make you pay for a bunch of junk you don’t need.

What you really need is one reasonably decent chef’s knife (you can get these for around $30) and a serviceable paring knife or two (cut corners on these rather than your chef’s knife if you have to). You won’t be able to shuck oysters or butcher a hog, but you’ll be able to cut just about anything else – with the important exception of your fingers!

2. Cast-iron skillet

A cast-iron skillet has a naturally non-stick bottom, heats evenly, adds a nice iron supplement to everything you cook, and will probably last longer than you do. For quick stir-fries, sautéing vegetables, searing meat, and cooking almost any kind of eggs, you'll want one of these.

To tempt you into buying one, have a look at this recipe for baked eggs with asparagus and leeks, where a cast-iron skillet lets you shuffle your eggs from stovetop to oven without getting another pan dirty. Can a cheapo rubber-handled frying pan do that?

3. Slow cooker

Slow-cookers are time-saving magic for busy cooks. Just throw in some chili, ribs, or stew when you head out in the morning, and come back to a house that smells delicious and a perfectly cooked dinner. Using very low heat over a long period of time, the slow-cooker is perfect for breaking down tougher cuts of meat like brisket or chuck roast.

With superpowers like that, you’d think a slow-cooker would cost an arm and a leg, but actually, you can buy a basic model for $25 or so.

Need some recipe inspiration? What about a big plate of fall-apart tender balsamic roast beef?

4. Roasting pans

A pan of roast vegetables is one of the fastest and easiest Paleo side dishes to make, and it tastes delicious every time. To make it happen, all you’ll need is a roasting pan: you can repurpose an old cookie sheet, or just go out and spend $5 on a big pan of your own (the bigger, the better).

Want a recipe for that? How about roasted cauliflower with bacon?

5. Cutting board

A good cutting board doesn’t just protect your counter from your shiny new chef’s knife. It also protects your knife from the counter. Plastic and wood are easiest on your knives; if you want to throw it in the dishwasher, get plastic. And make sure to get one big enough for your knife – no mini boards!

6. All-purpose pot (with lid)

Depending on how big your family is, your all-purpose pot could be big or small. Single cooks only really need a saucepan: the giant stockpots are overkill (especially if you also have a slow cooker for making bone broth).

This is where you’ll simmer soup, hard-boil eggs, render fat, blend sauces, and do a hundred different miscellaneous jobs. You don't need a fancy or expensive one; you just need something watertight that won't melt on the stove.

7. Oven-safe glass containers

These kitchen multitaskers do triple duty. Most obviously, they’re good for food storage: save your leftovers and avoid wasting anything by keeping it all organized for another day. You can reheat anything in them without worrying about plastics leaching into the food, and they’re even tough enough to travel with.

But that’s not all: you can also use them as cooking dishes. A deep rectangular Pyrex dish will work just fine for casseroles or for braising meats – and then you can just store any leftovers in the same container.

Circular bowls will also work second shift as mixing bowls: if you need to whisk together a sauce or mix a chicken salad, just haul them out.

Glass containers do cost more than the cheap plastic ones, but you get what you pay for, and the investment is definitely worth your money.

8. Utensils

Maybe it’s cheating to group a spatula and a ladle together as “utensils,” but then again, a lot of stores sell them as a set, so you might end up buying them together anyway. Here’s what you’ll need:

• A spatula: for flipping vegetables or eggs or stirring anything in the skillet.
• A ladle or wooden spoon: for stirring and serving soups or other liquid dishes.

Other utensils that are nice to have (and typically very cheap) include: a whisk, a slotted spoon, a pair of tongs, a vegetable peeler, and a grater. You can get by without them, but they’re typically helpful.

9. Measuring cup/prep bowl

A solid glass measuring cup doesn’t just measure. It also doubles as a small prep bowl – say, for scrambling eggs, or mixing up spice blends, sauces, and marinades. And in a budget-crunched kitchen, multitasking is always a plus.

Two cups is plenty for most single people; if you’re cooking for a family, you might prefer to get 3 or more.

10. Cloth towels

Even in the era of all things disposable, cloth towels are still worth their place in the kitchen, and not just for nostalgia’s sake. Cloth towels save you a bunch of money in the long run, since you don’t have to keep buying paper ones. And they do double duty as oven mitts (just fold the towel up several times). Plus, they never tear in the middle of mopping up a tough spill. If you’re trying to save time and money, paper towels are a false economy; pay upfront for the cloth ones, and you’ll save more in the long run.

Honorable Mention: a Blender

You can squeak by without this if you’re really that strapped for cash, but a blender is incredibly helpful for making smoothies, salad dressings, and pureed soups, and they’re pretty cheap (you can get a basic model for $20-25). If you’re into soup, an immersion blender might be more your style; if you’re more on the smoothie side of the spectrum, a traditional blender is probably a more useful tool.

What’s Yours?

Again, this list was a bare-bones guide to just the basics, for those times when the budget is tight. It’s not a comprehensive guide to everything you need in a three-star Michelin kitchen!

If you’re reading this far, and you’ve been cooking your own meals for a while, you’re probably bursting with the one crucial thing we forgot. So, spill the beans: what’s your must-have kitchen tool? The first thing you pick up and the last thing you put down? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

Cooking Paleo for a family is a challenge in itself, but cooking for one person raises a different set of issues. Sometimes it just doesn’t seem worth it to get out all the pots and pans just for one meal; it seems like cleaning everything up afterwards takes even longer than cooking. And a lot of the money-saving techniques like buying in bulk just don’t seem workable.

But cooking for one also has its bright sides. You don’t have to worry about making anything look particularly impressive unless you personally enjoy fiddling with the presentation. You can cook whatever you want, whenever you want it, and there’s no pressure to make something that other people will like.

To help you maximize the up sides and cut down on the problems, here’s a simple guide to Paleo cooking for just one person.

Rethink Bulk Meals

Some people don’t mind eating the same thing every day, but most of us don’t want to make a huge pot of chili and then eat the exact same chili for the rest of the week. That’s way too boring. But you can still use bulk meals to cut down on cooking time and food prices. Here’s how:

• Make a huge batch of something. A slow-cooker is the perfect tool for this.
• Divide it into individual containers, and label them clearly with the date and the contents.
• Freeze all the containers.

That way, instead of having chili every day for a week, you can put most of your batch in the freezer, and pull out one or two servings a week as you want them. It’s all the convenience of cooking in bulk, without the monotony of eating the exact same food over and over again.

If you really want to get fancy with this, you could make multiple different freezer meals (remember to label them all!), so you’ll always have a choice of microwaveable Paleo dinners ready to go.

Cut Down on Pans

When you’re cooking single servings of anything, the ratio of dirty dishes to food cooked is very high. For example, if you use a frying pan to cook something, you have to spend just as much time cleaning the pan whether you make one serving or five. This can dramatically add to your total kitchen time – you’re basically doing family-size dishes, without the family-size meals. Here’s how to cut it down:

• Buy versatile cookware. Glass and Pyrex can go from the oven to the fridge without a hitch, so you can store leftovers in the very same dish you used to cook in the first place. This saves you a lot of annoying, bulky pans and Tupperware to wash.
• Make one-pan meals. Stir-fries, scrambles, and other simple recipes make a complete meal without a lot of dishes.

Freeze Wisely

Freezing isn’t just limited to bulk meals. Your freezer is your best friend for anything that you go through slowly – and if you live alone and you’re cooking for one, that’s a lot of stuff. Try freezing…

• Homemade sauces and dressings. Freeze them in ice cube trays, and then pop them out of the tray into plastic bags once they’re frozen. They won’t go bad, and you’ll always have some when you need them.
• Bulk spices. They’re cheaper, but they can go stale if you keep them out at room temperature.
• Nut flours and meals. These go rancid easily left out on the shelf, but they’ll keep almost indefinitely in the freezer.
• Coconut milk or other half-used cans. Making a recipe for one and don’t need the whole huge can of coconut milk? Just freeze the other half.
• Herbs. Sick of buying a huge bunch of herbs and having most of it rot away into a slimy mess? Use this recipe for freezing them in olive oil.

Plan your Vegetables

It’s absolutely possible to shop once a week for one person; you just have to plan out your vegetables a little. Spinach, sprouts, and other fragile vegetables won’t last the whole 7 days, so aim to eat those first (or cook them into something that stores better, like a spinach quiche). Hardier specimens like squash and beets can wait until the end of the week; they’ll still be good.

Another strategy is to use frozen vegetables – they’re just as nutritious as fresh, and of course, there’s no danger that they’ll go bad.

Mix and Match

Who says you can’t have one egg, one sausage, the last half-bowl of vegetable soup, and some quick roasted cauliflower for dinner? The Japanese have mastered this for the midday meal – bento boxes are lunchboxes that serve small portions of many different foods, often with cute or creative presentations. It doesn’t have to feel like you’re just eating a random plate of leftovers all smushed together; with a few meals of practice, you’ll get the knack of putting together a single meal out of many smaller servings of food.

Let Go of Recipes

Not everything you cook has to come from a recipe book. If you’re finding that all the recipes you like make huge amounts of food, try looking at them as inspiration, rather than a set of one-size-fits-all directions. Then think of how you could adapt the recipe to a single serving. For example…

• If you see a great frittata recipe with a dozen eggs, why not reduce the ingredients and make it as mini-frittatas instead, so you can cook only as many as you want.
• Instead of roasting a whole chicken, why not use the same spices and other seasonings to roast just a single breast, or just a leg?

Even if you can’t just divide all the quantities in the recipe by 4 and expect it to work, there’s usually a way to adapt the same idea to a smaller execution.

Some Paleo Meals for One

And now to whet your appetite, a few examples of Paleo meals that already come in single servings or are easy to convert:

• Lemon thyme chicken: just use one chicken breast instead of 4.
• Egg and pesto stuffed tomatoes: just cut down the eggs to however many you’re hungry for.
• Roasted delicata squash. Delicata squashes come in all different sizes; just find one small enough that you can eat it all in one serving.

…And Yours!

What are your best tips for single-serving Paleo cooking? Do you have a favorite bulk recipe? Share with us on Facebook or Google+!

You go to the store on Saturday to stock up on groceries.

On Monday evening, you’re about to make some bone broth, but, you realize you forgot the celery and you have to go back for it. (When you return with your hard-won prize, you discover that you did have it after all; it was just hiding behind a big Tupperware of leftover potatoes. So now you have two bunches of celery, one of which you don’t need.)

On Tuesday just before bed, you remember that you don’t have the coconut aminos you’ll need for dinner tomorrow. You have to wake up 45 minutes early to run to the store before work.

On Wednesday afternoon, you’re all ready to head home from work – when you realize you have nothing for dinner, so you stop by the store in a post-work haze and take twice as long as usual to get ingredients just for one meal.

On Friday, you take inventory of your fridge and discover that the Tupperware of potatoes is now wasted food: it’s moldered into a disgusting, stale clump, and you have to throw it out.

Does this sound like you?

If that's what your week is like, then you are certifiably an inmate of the Grocery Jail. It's a very common problem for newbies, but anyone can fall into this trap - and it's definitely not fun. And worse, it's completely unsustainable: anyone in their right mind would eventually give up and resort to takeout. It's not because you're lazy or unmotivated; it's because spending hour after hour on grocery shopping really, really stinks!

The good news is that Paleo does not require being a prisoner of the grocery store. Here are some tips and tricks to help you shop once during the week, and then save your time for more important things. They're mostly aimed at newcomers to the Paleo lifestyle, but even experienced shoppers might learn a thing or two!

Revamp your grocery list.

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who know how to make good grocery lists, and people who waste way too much of their lives buying groceries. Don’t be in the second group! Here are two methods for making a time-saving grocery list:

Method 1: Weekly variations.

Use this list if you tend to eat a lot of different things every week.

• Step 1: plan your meals. Write down what you want to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. It does not have to be long or detailed. Here’s an example:

You may be able to skip this step once you get familiar with Paleo meal planning. Until then, it’s wise to include it; it will save you from forgetting a meal!

• Step 2: break the list down into “meat,” “produce,” and “center aisles.” To take the list above, now it looks like this:

Now you can head into the grocery store, with all your items conveniently organized by area of the store. You won’t forget half your list, and won’t waste time running back and forth across the store. The time you spend writing out the list will save you double that time in efficiency at the store; just try it and see!

 Method 2: the master list.

Use this method if you eat a lot of the same things every week.

• Step 1: On the computer, type up a list of everything you typically need at the store, organized according to where you’ll find it (meat department, center aisles, or produce). Print out a bunch of copies.
• Step 2: Every week, grab one copy, and just cross off what you don’t need or want for that trip. Voila: your grocery list is made!

Cut down on the number of stores you visit.

Even the most efficient grocery shopper can end up spending an entire morning “hunting and gathering” if she has to run to 5 different stores. Cutting down on the number of places you drive can make a major impact on your total grocery time. Here’s how to do it:

• Try online. You can get the vast majority of your supplements, spices, coffee, tea, baking staples, and other nonperishable goods online, usually for less money than you’d spend at the store. Many bigger sites (like Amazon) will let you set a monthly delivery that arrives automatically at your door. You shouldn’t have to go to a special health-food store just to get these things.
• Buy in bulk. Instead of going to the store every week to get a small amount of something, try buying it in bulk every two weeks or 1 month. It’s more expensive up front, but it saves time and money in the long run.
• Simplify your recipes. If you love the thrill of the hunt, and you want to spend time searching out the strangest new ingredients you can find, that’s great. But if you just want dinner on the table, focus on recipes you can make with ordinary ingredients and don’t set your heart on crazy or complicated meals.

Learn flexible meals.

So, you forgot an ingredient. Bummer. But wait! Before you waste an hour going to the grocery store, think:

• Can I modify this recipe using what I have on hand?
• Can I cook something else for this meal without making a special grocery run?

Your meal plan is not an immutable law of the universe. It can change. Unless there is some very specific reason why you absolutely have to make a particular dish on that particular day, sticking to your meal plan is not worth the wasted hour of extra shopping time.

Instead, get comfortable improvising with flexible meals like stir-fries or omelets. These are easy to modify according to whatever you have in the fridge, and very few recipes cannot be converted into a stir-fry with minimal fuss. For example, say you planned on beef satay, but you don’t have any almond butter. Not a problem: just stir-fry the beef with the spices you do have and any vegetables you can scrounge up.

Stock up on staples.

You should always have these things in your pantry:

• Salt and pepper
• Olive oil and coconut oil
• Balsamic vinegar
• Basic spices: cinnamon, basil, thyme, ginger, garlic, and chili powder at the very least.
• Cans of fish
• Cans of coconut milk
• 1 pound of ground beef per two people in your family (in the freezer)
• 1 bag of frozen vegetables per two people in your family (in the freezer)

With these staples always ready to hand, you’ll never have to make a last-minute grocery run because the fridge is totally empty and you have nothing to eat. You will always be able to improvise “something for dinner” – it might not be totally gourmet, but it will be hot and ready to eat.

Also, you should probably keep most of these things in your kitchen all the time:

• Lemons and/or limes
• Coconut aminos
• Cans of tomato paste
• A bigger repertoire of spices (oregano, cumin, curry powder, paprika, and rosemary come to mind)
• Eggs
• Homemade bone broth (make a big batch once and freeze it in individual containers).

These ingredients can make or break a recipe, but they’re very easy to forget until you reach for them and they aren’t there. Cut that off in its tracks by stocking up proactively. You can drastically cut down on last-minute grocery trips this way.

Plan for leftovers.

Letting food rot in the fridge is just throwing time and money right down the garbage. That’s food that you spent your precious time finding in the store, hauling home, cooking, and storing – so get a return on your investment by making sure you eat it! Some tips for using your leftovers instead of just letting them sit there:

• Build a few meals of leftovers into your week; this saves time cooking, and also ensures that you aren’t wasting any food.
• When you put something in the fridge, label and date it, and stick it at the front; don’t let it hide away in a corner. Then you’ll actually eat it, instead of letting it rot.
• Before you haul out fresh ingredients to cook something for a meal, check the fridge and see if you have any leftovers that need to be eaten. This is much easier if the leftovers are right there in front of the other food.

But all this planning is so complicated/time-consuming! Can’t I just go to the store?

If you could innately sense how much food your family would need every week, and if you could subconsciously fit it all into recipes for each day, and if you could just walk into the store and perfectly remember everything you need for all those recipes, then it would be easier to “just go to the store.”

Most of us cannot do those things.

For most of us, it’s actually faster to plan ahead. It only seems slower if you’re comparing it to some ideal of what you wish you could do. When you compare it to the reality of how most people actually operate, it’s a lot more efficient to make a list and plan meals in advance.

Still not convinced?

Why not just try it for two weeks. Give yourself one week to practice, and then take the second as a test run. What do you have to lose? If using these tips doesn’t save you any time, you won’t be any worse off. But if it does work, then you’ve gained a few hours of your life back, without sacrificing your health in the process.

We've also prepared a visual guide to histamine intolerance.

When you’re trying to heal your body from a lifetime’s worth of bad food, the worst symptoms are the vague ones. Headaches. Constipation. Fatigue. Maybe just a fuzzy sense of “not feeling great today.” This could be almost anything – how do you even know where to start?

Getting your Paleo basics in order (and giving the changes time to show, instead of trying the diet for a week and giving up) often cuts down on these nagging symptoms completely, but the magic doesn’t always happen quite so easily. For the people who still struggle with inexplicable symptoms, histamine intolerance is one problem that may (but may also not) finally give them an answer.

What Is Histamine Intolerance?

To answer that question, first you have to know what histamines are. In the most basic sense, histamines are chemicals produced during any allergic response. When an allergen triggers the immune system, mast cells (a type of white blood cells) release histamines as part of the inflammatory immune reaction. It’s this inflammation that gives you puffy, swollen eyes or a blistery skin rash. As well as being produced during the immune response, histamines can also be absorbed from histamine-containing foods, and produced by bacteria in the gut.

In healthy people, the production and ingestion of histamines is balanced out by an enzyme called diamine oxidase (DAO), which breaks down the histamines. Some processes create histamine; others destroy it, and overall the system balances out. But some people have a deficiency of DAO, so the histamines build up in their body, and cause a wide array of symptoms.

Many of these symptoms are familiar to allergy sufferers: rashes, hives, runny nose, swelling in the throat, and itching (with or without an accompanying rash). It’s basically the same old inflammatory allergic response, only without an allergen. But an overload of histamine can also cause an enormous constellation of problems, including migraines, digestive upset (constipation and/or diarrhea), nausea, and low blood pressure.

An important point to remember about this is that even though it sometimes feels like hayfever, histamine intolerance isn’t like a regular allergy where the allergic reaction is provoked by even a little bit of the substance. It’s the buildup that matters. Think of histamine like water pouring into a sink. Most people have an emergency drain (DAO) that prevents the sink from overflowing. But people with histamine intolerance don’t have that drain, so their sink eventually overflows.

Since the symptoms of histamine intolerance look like an allergy but aren’t, researchers tend to describe the problem as a “pseudoallergy:” all the symptoms of an allergic reaction, but without any allergen there to set them off. When your body is overwhelmed with too much histamine, or can’t clear histamine quickly enough, or both, you get an “allergic reaction” that isn’t actually an allergy, often manifesting as one or more of the incredibly vague symptoms that everyone hates trying to diagnose.

How can I tell if I’m Histamine Intolerant?

The symptoms listed for “histamine intolerance” are so incredibly broad that almost anyone could recognize at least one of them. But in fact, less than 1% of the population is actually histamine intolerant, so there’s a very good (99%, to be exact) chance that none of this even applies to you. Remember, these symptoms could be caused by an incredible variety of different problems: just because you have a headache after a glass of wine doesn’t mean you have a histamine intolerance! So how can you tell if histamine is really at the bottom of your problems?

Medically, you can have a DAO test done, to see if your DAO levels are normal. However, since other enzymes can also degrade histamine, this test isn’t a foolproof method of diagnosis. Another experimental but promising method of diagnosis is a skin prick test: it’s not perfect, but in one test study, 79% of histamine-intolerant subjects reacted to the skin prick, while only 19% of the non-intolerant subjects did. That’s better than random guessing, but still not particularly precise.

In women, the picture gets even more complicated. Like many other things, production of DAO fluctuates with the menstrual cycle: it’s higher during the luteal phase (starting roughly a week after your period ends, and lasting until the start of your next period) than during the follicular phase (the rest of the time). This means that histamine intolerance issues will likely be worse during the follicular phase (while you’re bleeding and then for a week afterwards), and show some improvement at other times, regardless of what you do or don’t eat. With this monthly fluctuation, it’s even harder to figure out what foods you might be reacting to.

DAO levels also increase during pregnancy, so many women notice a remission of their symptoms during pregnancy, only to see them reappear after the baby is born. In the whole slew of changes that occur during even a healthy pregnancy, it’s easy to miss out on the improvement of histamine intolerance symptoms, or to believe it has some other cause – after all, when you’re pregnant and everything else in your body is also going haywire, the last thing you’d suspect is a histamine problem.

Considering all the complications involved, the best method that doctors have for diagnosing histamine intolerance is an elimination diet. Four weeks without histamines, followed by a reintroduction challenge, is the most accurate way of determining whether or not a person is really reacting to the histamines in food. This is long enough to get an idea of a long-term trend, and for women, it’s also long enough to hit every phase in the menstrual cycle so you aren’t misled by temporary fluctuations.

Histamines and Food

If you want to try an elimination diet, the next thing to learn is what foods you’ll have to cut out. Remember from above that one of the ways to push your internal “sink” past the overflow point is by eating too many foods that contain a lot of histamine. Here’s the tricky part, though: for the most part, the biggest source of histamine in food isn’t the food itself. It’s bacteria on the food, which naturally produce histamine as part of their metabolic process. So anything aged or fermented will be big trouble for the histamine intolerant! Even leftovers can sometimes be “aged” enough to cause problems. Foods high in histamine include:

• (very high) Aged or fermented foods: kimchi, sauerkraut, yogurt or kefir, kombucha, aged cheese, alcohol of any kind, vinegar, and cured meat.
• (very high) Fish and seafood, especially canned or smoked fish.
• (medium) spinach, eggplant, mushrooms, tomatoes, canned vegetables, dried fruit, avocados, strawberries, papaya, pineapple, and leftovers.

If you want to get specific with the numbers, this chart shows a partial list of histamine-containing foods, together with the amounts found in them: as you can see, the results vary from study to study, sometimes drastically. So there’s no foolproof way to list foods from high to low histamine content, and your reaction to specific foods might vary widely: eating the fish in one restaurant might be fine, while the fish from the restaurant next door leaves you breaking out in hives.

Then there’s a second category of foods that don’t contain histamine themselves, but can cause your body to release more of it. These foods include:

• Fruits and vegetables: citrus fruit, papaya, strawberries, pineapple, tomatoes, spinach
• Meat: Fish, shellfish, and pork
• Other foods: Chocolate, nuts, and raw egg white

Individual sensitivities to these foods vary a lot. Most people only have trouble with the very high-histamine foods and don’t need to eliminate anything else from their diet. In this study, for example, a boy suffering from atopic dermatitis improved just by eliminating the foods highest in histamine and then making sure not to rely on moderate-histamine foods as his everyday staples.

Since there’s no reason to eliminate foods unless you have to, a good starting point for an elimination diet is to cut out the very high histamine foods, and then experiment with different tweaks once you can see whether it’s helping at all or not.

Eliminating Histamines from a Paleo Diet

If you’re interested in trying an elimination diet for histamines, the list of forbidden foods can seem incredibly daunting. After all, many of these foods are Paleo staples. Surprisingly enough, this is one problem where grains are largely innocent: wheat has many evils, but histamines are not among them!

It might seem like a low-histamine Paleo diet would be totally unworkable, given that so many sources of protein and fat are off the table, but like a low-FODMAPs diet, the key is planning. The Whole30 program has a special low-histamine shopping list to help you work a very strict Paleo diet around low-histamine guidelines, and you’ll find that once you get used to low-histamine cooking, it starts to get easier. For some recipe ideas, check out:

• Spiced duck breast
• Zucchini and sweet potato frittata
• Zucchini cakes
• Butternut squash soup

It may also help to make sure your meat is as absolutely fresh as possible, or was frozen as soon as possible after slaughter. The more the meat “ages,” the more histamine it accumulates. The best solution is to find a farmer you can get to know, and ask him or her about how the meat gets from the animal to you: how long between slaughter and freezing? What is the meat processing like?

If it’s really not possible for you to stay entirely Paleo while you’re trying a low-histamine diet, also take a look at the article on Paleo for vegetarians, which gives you some tips on preparing beans and other vegetarian staples to make them much less harmful. That still doesn’t make them healthy (just less bad), but it’s a lot better than giving up and going back to Wonderbread.

In the long term, there’s also hope that you won’t have to carry on this level of restriction forever. For example, as your gut heals, your ability to metabolize histamine increases, and you can include more of it in your diet without suffering symptoms. And many people don’t react at all to certain histamine-containing foods; they discover through an elimination diet that they only really need to cut out one or two big offenders to see results.

Other Sources of Histamine: Medications and Gut Flora

Food isn’t the only way of filling up your “histamine sink.” Some prescription drugs can also either release histamine or inhibit DAO. They include several different classes of drugs; the full list is here.

The biggest nonfood source of histamines in most people’s bodies, though, is their gut flora. Some kinds of bacteria produce histamines, while others degrade them. Too many histamine-producing bacteria can fill up your “sink” faster than DAO can empty it. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense: it’s the same reason why fermented foods are off the table, only the reaction is happening internally instead of externally.

The importance of gut flora in creating and destroying histamine can give rise to a sudden onset of histamine intolerance later in life, if you take antibiotics or make a drastic change to your diet. When the gut flora start growing back after this kind of trauma, the environment is ripe for bacterial overgrowth problems, and a predominance of histamine-producing bacteria might be just one of those issues. And in a cruel coincidence, the probiotic fermented foods that you eat to heal your gut are all high in histamine, so they only make the problem worse.

And the gut problems don’t stop there. DAO, the “emergency drain” in the histamine sink, is mainly produced by the mucous lining the intestinal wall. If the lining of the gut is irritated (by inflammatory foods like grains and legumes), DAO production decreases, and the symptoms of histamine overload only get worse.

To sum it all up, good gut health is just as important for histamine tolerance as it is for everything else. Unhealthy gut flora might even be able to create histamine intolerance problems in a person who would otherwise be completely healthy.

Living with Histamine Intolerance: Gut Healing

Since the gut flora are so important for histamine production and breakdown, one of the most important long-term steps to living with histamine intolerance is healing any gut dysfunction. By eliminating one source of excess histamine (dysregulated gut flora) and repairing your source of DAO (the gut lining), you can dramatically increase your body’s ability to handle histamines in food. This is like carving a new emergency drain into your “histamine sink:” it gives you a little more leeway to add water without overflowing.

Gut healing on a low-histamine diet seems like a paradox, because the fermented foods that you need to heal are the same foods that are causing the problem! It is possible to restore normal gut flora without sauerkraut, though:

• This is the perfect situation for a well-chosen probiotic supplement. In this study, a supplement with two strains of bifidobacterium actually suppressed histamine release. In another study, Lactobacillus rhamnosus helped suppress histamine receptors.
• If you’re not interested in micromanaging your probiotic strains, don’t worry: you have another option that might be even better. This new treatment is confusing, because it sounds almost the same: prebiotics are just one letter away from probiotics. Instead of a supplemental dose of gut flora in pill form, prebiotics deliver a tasty banquet of fiber to the flora that are already in your intestines. They’re basically a kind of carbohydrate indigestible to humans, but absolutely delicious to the bacteria.

Prebiotics require a little bit of caution: in people who have too few gut bacteria, they’re excellent, but in people who have too many, they’re just more fuel on the fire. That’s why some people react so poorly to FODMAPs-rich foods: the FODMAPs carbohydrates are all prebiotics, so in people with a pre-existing gut flora overgrowth problem, they’re poorly tolerated. The safest and cheapest way to find out whether prebiotics can help you is to try them. If you feel bloated, gassy, and constipated afterwards, they’re not for you. On the other hand, if you notice an improvement, keep going!

Living with Histamine Intolerance: Other Therapies

In terms of supplementation, there are also several options for you to try, although the results are very mixed. Nigella sativa (black cumin) is one spice that has shown some promise as a natural anti-histamine for treating seasonal allergies: in a study, for example, it was just as effective as a prescription drug at reducing symptoms. Quercetin is another common supplement – it can reduce the release of histamines from mast cells.

Some people find that DAO supplements (special enzymes that help your body break down histamines) brings them miraculous relief; others notice no change or even worse symptoms from taking them. The big downside to these supplements is the price. If you have only occasional problems and just need a supplement once in a while, they might be a good backup strategy, but otherwise they’re prohibitively expensive for long-term use.

Another point to consider is nutrition. Vitamin B6, copper, and Vitamin C are DAO cofactors, so make sure you’re getting enough. Good low-histamine sources of these nutrients include:

• Vitamin B6: chicken, turkey, and potatoes
• Copper: asparagus and liver
• Vitamin C: almost all fruits and vegetables

Since over-supplementation of Vitamin C is useless (it just goes straight into the toilet) and overdoses of Vitamin B6 and copper can actually cause serious problems, it’s better to get these nutrients from food rather than start megadosing on vitamin pills.

Conclusion

As always, the internet is no substitute for an actual medical professional to help you. It can be an exercise in frustration to talk to your doctor about these symptoms, because histamine intolerance is very rare, poorly understood, and difficult to treat. There aren’t even foolproof diagnosis criteria: many researchers simply use questionnaires or reports of symptoms. Here’s a good study (free full-text) that you could print out and bring with you to help convince a doctor that you aren’t making up your problem. If you go into the office armed with proof, you’re much more likely to get a helpful response.

The most important thing, though, is to keep it all in perspective. Very few people are actually histamine intolerant. Statistically, you’re unlikely to be one of them. If you don’t feel ill after eating fermented foods and have no reason to suspect a histamine intolerance, there’s absolutely no reason to be anxious about perfectly healthy foods like fish and spinach. Healthy people can metabolize the histamine found in foods without a problem, so go ahead and eat your sauerkraut: it’s good for you! It’s always frustrating to deal with nagging symptoms that won’t go away, but there’s also no point in constantly eliminating more and more foods when you know in your heart that it isn’t helping. Try it out, see if it works for you - and if it doesn't, move on.

In 2012, a 17-year-old girl from England collapsed at work and had to be rushed to the hospital because she was having severe difficulty breathing. The cause wasn’t hard to figure out – she was suffering from acute micronutrient deficiencies after eating nothing but chicken nuggets and occasionally French fries for the past 15 years. Without a more diverse mix of foods to supply all the micronutrients she needed, she was dangerously anemic, and had to be put on high-dose nutrient supplements to save her life.

This is an extreme example, but it illustrates the very real dangers of a diet based only on one or two foods. And on top of the health risks, a one-food diet is usually too boring to stick with – obsessed chicken-nugget fans excepted, very few of us can put up with that kind of monotony for long. As a result, the watchword of healthy eating has become “variety:” eat a wide range of different nutrient-dense foods every day to avoid deficiencies and keep things interesting.

Rarely does anyone seriously argue the other side – that reducing dietary variety might actually be useful. It seems like such an obviously silly idea that it doesn’t even need discussion. But take a closer look at the chicken nugget story. The diet wasn’t only monotonous, it was monotonously junk. And it was followed with no variation for an absurdly long time. If you take away these problems, there are actually some interesting potential benefits to explore.

Psychological Benefits of Less Variety

A temporary reduction in variety has important psychological benefits, especially for people who struggle with emotional eating, binge eating, or other forms of food addiction. For any other kind of addiction (alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, etc.), the answer is always complete abstinence: nobody suggests that an alcoholic should just “just drink in moderation,” because we all realize that it’s not going to work. But with food, complete abstinence simply isn’t a reasonable solution, so food addicts have to constantly struggle to “moderate” an addictive substance. No wonder so many fail!

While it isn’t perfect, a low-variety diet is psychologically very close to total abstinence (fasting), only it’s safer to do in the long-term without all the risks of extended fasts. Basically, it turns a major complaint about monotonous diets (they’re boring!) into a virtue. Getting bored with your food removes a lot of the reward that you get from eating. The urge to eat past the point of satisfying hunger fades, and meals become nothing more than a pit stop to refuel.

This kind of diet lets you practice the new food habits that you want to get into (eating only when hungry and not to hide emotions, for example) with low-variety training wheels on, and then slowly ease into the “real world” of less restricted food choices when you feel ready. If you’ve ever felt like you need a “reset” button for your relationship with food, an intentionally monotonous diet might be it.

The same psychological reaction makes a low-variety diet one of the many useful tools in the Paleo arsenal for effective weight loss. If food doesn’t taste good, it’s easy to eat just enough to sustain activity without overeating, because there’s no motivation to eat more. The perfect example of this is the Potato Diet, popularized by a man named Chris Voigt who ate nothing but potatoes for 2 months, and ended up having to deliberately stuff himself because he was losing weight too fast despite eating to satisfy his appetite at every meal.

From a more scientific perspective than one man’s self-experimentation, several studies have demonstrated the same principle. In one trial, researchers made a group of women work (by doing mouse-clicking tasks) to get portions of macaroni and cheese. Women who did this every day eventually stopped working for the food; they were sick of it and didn’t want any more. By contrast, women who only did the experiment once a week didn’t get bored with the food and kept working just as hard to get it.

Other Benefits of Less Variety

Less variety in the diet means less thinking about food. No time spent wondering “what’s for dinner;” no need to learn or cook new recipes; no worries about your weekly grocery list. After you get really good at cooking the few foods on your menu, the process of meal prep speeds up incredibly. Autopilot kicks in quickly, so you can save your energy for more important problems. A lot of very busy people adopt a monotonous diet for this reason alone; it just saves them from having to think about food unless they want to.

You’re also less likely to get sucked into stupid diet fads like goji or acai berries if you eat the same thing every day and don’t “browse” the supermarket. This saves a lot of money, and protects you from the potentially dangerous health consequences of relying too much on one “superfood.”

Strategies for Reducing Variety

In general, there are two main strategies for making your diet less various: either embark on a drastically reduced-variety diet in the short term as a kind of therapy, or integrate elements of a low-variety diet into your regular eating plan. The shorter the intervention, the more restrictive it can be without running any risks: for a week, you can get away with almost anything; for a month, it’s worth taking the trouble to plan as balanced a menu as you can.

The first way of reducing variety (an extreme dietary change as a temporary intervention) is probably more useful if you need a psychological break from food. The most extreme way to do it is a mono-food diet (eating only one kind of food). This works, but it does present quite a large risk of nutrient deficiency: you can only do it healthily for a very short time. An equally effective strategy for a longer period is to make a very nutritious stew from meat and vegetables, and eat only that: no different food preparations, no variety of raw vs. cooked food, and no variety in taste or texture. This lets you add multiple different kinds of vegetables without perceiving a large variety: you get all the physical benefits of a varied diet, but the psychological benefits of reduced variety.

One possible set of stew ingredients to support an adult for one day would be:

• 1.5 lbs grass-fed 85/15 ground beef
• Collard greens and spinach (2 cups of each, measured raw)
• ½ can tomato paste
• 2 medium potatoes, (if you feel better with some carbs in your diet; otherwise, just add a little more fat)
• 2 grams salt

Plugging this into Cronometer, it comes out to approximately 1900 calories, with roughly 50% fat, 30% protein, and 20% carbs. That’s a little high in protein, but you could always take out some of the ground beef and add coconut oil, olive oil, or another fat of your choice. And it blows the RDA out of the water for every single micronutrient except Vitamin B1 (69%), Vitamin D (which you don’t get from food anyway), Vitamin E (60%), and calcium (41%). For some additional calcium, a very easy tweak would just be to throw in some bones or seaweed.

Clearly, much more nutritious than a straight diet of potatoes! This stew still isn’t advisable as your only nourishment for the rest of your life (it’s a temporary therapeutic intervention, not a meal plan for the long run), but you could probably eat it for a month straight without danger, and a month is plenty of time to start working through some of the psychological issues that a low-variety diet can help with.

The mono-food/stew diet is the most extreme way of reducing variety without compromising nutrition. But it’s not that or nothing. If you’re not interested in going all the way, or if you're looking for something to continue in the long term, try out the second way: incorporate less intensive strategies for reducing variety into your everyday meal plan.

One technique is to pick just one meal and always eat the same thing for that meal. Most of us do this for breakfast anyway – we have one or two go-to recipes that we can make in a hurry. It’s not such a stretch to start doing the same for lunch, and leave the culinary experiments for the evening meal. This also saves a lot of time on meal prep and planning. An ultra-minimalist solution is just to buy 7 microwaveable bags of frozen vegetables and 7 cans of fish (or 7 pork chops, or 7 chicken legs – whatever meal-sized cut of meat you like), and eat one of each every day for lunch with some olive oil on the vegetables. Cook all the meat in one batch and refrigerate until needed for even faster prep.

Another way to use low-variety cooking to your advantage is to batch cook: make way more than you need when you do cook, and then eat the leftovers for the next few days. By cycling through different foods in your big cook-ups, you can reduce any risk of nutrient deficiency while still getting some of the psychological and time-saving benefits of a low-variety diet.

Another interesting option is to only eat what's seasonal. Look up what’s in season in your area, and limit yourself to that. If you live in New York, that means no blueberries in February, no apples in May, no cucumbers in December…this drastically reduces your vegetable choices, unless you live in a few areas where almost anything can be grown year-round.

Conclusion

Just like everything else, there are both benefits and drawbacks to reducing the variety of foods on your plate. Nutrient deficiency can be addressed using some of the strategies above, and boredom even becomes a good point if you’re using a low-variety diet for psychological or weight loss reasons, but the fact remains that food monotony just isn’t for everyone.

That’s perfectly fine – if you’re happy eating the rainbow every day, keep it up! But an extremely limited diet can be very useful as a kind of temporary therapy, and even adding a few low-variety tweaks into your regular meal rotation can help reduce shopping, cooking, and cleanup time. The really important thing is to find a way of eating that fits into your own lifestyle and goals, and not to automatically dismiss anything as “obviously” useless without even considering that it might have something to offer.

Maybe you’re just starting out and craving pizza something fierce, or maybe you’ve been Paleo for six months and you’re ready to shoot yourself before you eat another bowl of spinach. Either way, it’s a common complaint: a lot of people feel bored on Paleo. And even people who don’t feel bored themselves have to deal with everyone else in their life constantly pestering them: “aren’t you bored with just meat and vegetables? Don’t you want some real food?” – as though meat and vegetables somehow weren’t “real”!

For those of us who love the diet, this complaint is downright confusing. There’s such an incredible variety of flavors, textures, and recipes to be had in Paleo cooking. In fact, Robb Wolf even created a food matrix calculating the number of different Paleo meals at 81,000, not even counting different cooking methods. How could anyone possibly get bored with that?

The answer is pretty counterintuitive. Paleo itself isn’t boring, but that’s not the point, because feeling “bored with Paleo” isn’t really about the food. It’s still a big problem, but it says more about the person who’s bored than the food they’re bored with. So if it’s not actually about the diet itself, what is it about, and how can you change it?

Culprit #1: Withdrawal from Processed Junk

If you’re new to Paleo, this is a likely suspect. Processed junk foods are designed in labs by teams of crack nutritional scientists who know exactly how to tweak their products to make them maximally addictive. They put together chips and candy that overwhelm your taste buds, so you become desensitized to the natural flavors of ordinary foods.

These foods also encourage you to eat for entertainment, instead of for hunger. Processed junk food is hyperstimulating enough that it tastes good even when you aren’t actually hungry, so eating becomes a way of dealing with other kinds of boredom, like feeling stuck in a bad job, or having nothing to do on Sunday afternoon. The food isn’t a solution, but it does a pretty good job of hiding the problem.

Paleo meals can be a jarring change from this kind of modern food environment. Instead of being designed in a lab to get you to eat more, they activate your body’s natural hunger and satiety mechanisms, but if those natural systems are used to the extreme intensity of lab products, they might not pick up on the more subtle flavors and textures of real food. Since they don’t override your body’s built-in systems for regulating hunger and fullness, these foods also don’t work as entertainment to distract you from other kinds of boredom – the boredom isn’t caused by the Paleo food, but you notice it again now that you don’t have junk food to disguise it with.

This doesn’t mean that real food is boring. It just takes a little time to re-set your taste buds, and it requires you to find another way of coping with stress or boredom in the rest of your life. After a month or so without all the processed junk, you’ll be able to appreciate the richness of roasted broccoli, the sweetness of butternut squash, and the spicy crunch that raw onions bring to a salad. Commercial chocolate will start to taste waxy and overwhelmingly chemical in comparison. Just give your taste buds a few weeks to detox, and Paleo food will stop tasting bland or monotonous.

As for the inability to hide other kinds of emotions with food, think of it as a blessing. Drowning your feelings of dissatisfaction or incompleteness in chocolate cake might work as a Band-Aid, but in the long run, food is not the answer to those problems. Now that you’ve freed yourself of the addiction to chips and candy, you can see the problem for what it really is, and get to work on fixing it for good.

Culprit #2: Artificial Limits

After the first couple weeks, this is the most common reason for the complaint that Paleo is monotonous and has no variety. For whatever reason, a lot of people take “Paleo” to mean “whatever Paleo meals I happen to already know how to cook,” or “whatever Paleo meals I’ve already tried and know I like.” So their version of Paleo is artificially restricted to a tiny group of foods, and they never venture out into the wide variety of choices that Paleo actually offers. In other words, Paleo becomes a net loss of variety, because they cut out a bunch of foods they used to eat, without adding in any that they’ve never tried.

This is incredibly tedious! Who in their right mind would want meatloaf for dinner every single day? But there’s absolutely no reason that Paleo has to be like this. The cure is simple: expand your horizons. Try different vegetables, new spices, or strange cuts of meat. Experiment with organ meats. Maybe set yourself a challenge: each week you’ll learn to cook one new recipe, or use one new ingredient. If you’re eating only spinach and chicken breast day in and day out, it’s because you choose to eat that way, not because you have no other options.

Breakfast also deserves a special mention in this section, because this is one meal where people tend to limit themselves the most. Breakfast does not have to be bacon and eggs. It doesn’t have to be “breakfast food” at all. You can eat anything you like for breakfast: steak, soup, leftovers from last night’s dinner…or skip it altogether. There’s nothing wrong with eggs if you like them, but you have alternatives.

Culprit #3: Social Challenges

Sometimes, when people say they’re “tired of Paleo food,” what they really mean is that they’re tired of the social limits Paleo food puts on them. They would go out to eat with their friends, but there’s nothing Paleo at the restaurant. They would go out on Saturday night, but clubbing isn’t fun unless you’re drinking too. They would enjoy the office birthday parties, but they’re too busy feeling irritated that they can’t have any cake, so they end up staying at their desk instead of enjoying the celebration.

In this case, it’s not actually the food that’s the problem. It’s the loneliness. It’s feeling cut off from your friends and family. So focus on that issue, instead of blaming it on the food itself being bland or boring. It can take a little planning to integrate your new diet into your social life, but it’s not impossible. If you miss restaurant dinners, try taking everyone to a steakhouse (where you can usually request just a steak and potatoes), or over to your place for a home-cooked meal. Or just do the best you can at a restaurant, think of it as an occasional “cheat meal,” and move on: sometimes, spending time with your loved ones is more important than avoiding canola oil.

At parties where there’s a lot of cake and other junk food, you can try bringing your own Paleo-friendly treats, or just joining in the celebratory spirit without a piece of cake in your hand. After all, it’s really about the social connection and the event that’s being celebrated, not some cheap grocery-store sheet cake. If anyone comments on your cake-free socializing, the best way to answer is “no, thank you,” and then just change the subject: don’t try to justify your diet, just get their mind off it and move on.

With respect to drinking, it’s always possible to join in the social time with a glass of sparkling water, or just enjoy a moderate amount of alcohol and leave it at that. But if you’re still feeling isolated because you aren’t getting blackout drunk, it might be time to re-consider your social life. Do you really want to hang around with people who aren’t interested in you unless you’re totally wasted? Is that the way to respect yourself? Maybe it’s time to find a different hobby, and get to know people who share more of your values.

Culprit #4: Other Emotional Reasons

Sometimes, other emotional rough spots in your relationship with food can feel like boredom, even though they aren’t. Cravings or feelings of deprivation can make you feel like Paleo is the most boring diet in the world: “I just want some Fritos. God, I’m so sick of Paleo. I can’t have anything I like.” In this case, it’s not that Paleo doesn’t have enough variety overall; it’s that Paleo doesn’t include the specific food that you want. There could be an infinite variety of Paleo foods and it would still feel boring, because it’s not a bag of Fritos. There are many ways of dealing with cravings, from just white-knuckling it to making a Paleo version of whatever you’re jonesing for. But again, the problem is really the craving, not Paleo.

Then there’s that irritating aspect of human nature, that the grass is always greener on the other side. Maybe you remember having so much variety back in the old days – but did you really? Think about the way most people eat: a bagel or a bowl of cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch. Does anyone complain about being “tired of grains?” Not usually, because they don’t see it as restrictive. They’re fine with eating the same thing day in and day out, because from their point of view, they’re eating what they want.

The trick to having this attitude yourself is to focus on all the things you love about Paleo, and make sure to find and cook some recipes that you really enjoy. Don’t think about what you “can’t” have; think about what you can have, and all the ways to make it delicious. Dream up the most mouthwatering Paleo meal you possibly can and cook it up in style, even if it’s just for yourself.

It also helps to remember all the ways the standard American diet and lifestyle are tedious and restrictive. Chronic illness is boring. Living in a hospital room is boring. Missing time with the people you love because you’re tired and sick is boring. Spending hours of your life waiting around for doctors and driving back and forth for tests is boring. Paleo is sparing you that – there might be some restrictions on your diet, but in the end your life overall will be so much more interesting because you’ll be able to enjoy it to the fullest.

Conclusion

Paleo isn’t a penitential “diet” that restricts you to dull and bland food, unless you make it that way. Sometimes it does force you to confront uncomfortable issues surrounding your relationship with food, your relationships with other people, or your own mental health – but that’s not the same thing as the diet itself being boring. If you’re “bored of Paleo,” it’s probably about you, not about Paleo. Harsh, yes, but it also gives you the chance to really address the cause of the boredom in a constructive way. Whatever the real problem is, you can have better physical and mental health by focusing on that, not blaming your diet and giving up on your efforts to enjoy healthy food.