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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.

When they switch to Paleo, some people effortlessly dive right in to overflowing heaps of salad greens, massive piles of roast broccoli, and endless bowls of coleslaw. But not everyone finds it quite that easy, particularly if they’re coming from a low-vegetable diet, or if they’re trying to heal from pre-existing digestive problems like IBS. Feeling bloated or overstuffed is fairly common if you suddenly add a huge amount of roughage to your diet; some people also get gassy and constipated, or just feel “off” all the time.

If it’s still the first few weeks of Paleo for you, the first thing to try is very simple: cut back your vegetable intake to a comfortable level, and then slowly work your way back up (this should take 1-2 weeks, depending on how far back you had to cut in the first place). For the vast majority of people who don’t have serious gastrointestinal issues and just need to adjust, this will solve the problem without further ado.

If you’ve already tried that and it doesn’t help (or if it helped some, but didn’t get you all the way there), it’s probably a sign that there’s something more serious going on than “I’m not used to eating this many vegetables.” So here’s a guide to choosing and preparing vegetables to make them easier on the stomach.

Why can Vegetables be Hard on your Stomach?

In a word: fiber. Fiber is any kind of carbohydrate that you can’t break down and use for energy (although sometimes your gut flora can). And yes, even though it’s famously healthy in the abstract, it can still cause problems for certain people. This study goes over an exhaustive review of fiber and digestion, but here’s the short version:

Soluble Fiber

Soluble fiber is fiber that your gut flora can ferment. For most people, that’s perfectly fine and even very healthy: their gut flora get a tasty brunch and everything else keeps humming along as normal. The fermentation does produce some gas, but it’s not enough to cause any noticeable symptoms.

Some people are very sensitive to the effects of these fermentable carbohydrates, though, to the point that the gas produced causes bloating and other general discomfort. The most famous culprits for this are the short-chain carbohydrates called FODMAPs. FODMAPs carbohydrates can be the culprits behind almost anything from diarrhea to constipation to extreme bloating – some gastroenterologists even think that “Irritable Bowel Syndrome” is really just a FODMAPs sensitivity.

Insoluble Fiber

Insoluble fiber is not fermentable: you can’t use it, and neither can your gut flora. It just goes in your mouth and out the other end. The most famous result is an increase in stool bulk – this is one of the reasons why why insoluble fiber is often used as a laxative (e.g. in psyllium husk).

Insoluble fiber isn’t quite as infamous for causing digestive problems as soluble fiber, but there’s still at least some evidence that it’s not all good. For one thing, it works as a laxative by literally irritating the lining of the gut so much that the gut wall produces more mucus as a lubricant and increases peristalsis (movement of feces through the digestive tract) just to get the irritating fiber out of there.

How to Make Vegetables Easier on your Stomach

Choose the Right Ones

Choosing fruits and vegetables low in FODMAPs can go a long way towards improving your “gut reaction.” Onions and garlic are two vegetables very high in FODMAPs; some people get relief just by eliminating those two. Cruciferous vegetables (like broccoli, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts) are also common problem foods. Other people find it helpful to get even more involved: here’s a list of Paleo low-FODMAP foods if you want more.

Some good safe choices are:

• Carrots
• Zucchini and other summer squash
• Butternut, acorn, and other winter squash
• Lettuce, spinach, and other salad greens
• Eggplant
• Cucumbers
• Bananas

Cook them

Cooking vegetables helps break down the fibers they contain, which makes them easier on the digestive system because they’re already partly broken down. You don’t have to boil the life out of everything you eat; it’s fine to steam, sauté, or roast them so long as they’re well-done at the end.

Some tasty cooked vegetable recipes to try are:

• Spinach and sun-dried tomato pasta
• Roasted cauliflower with bacon
• Roasted ambercup squash
• Warm broccoli and carrot slaw

Mashed vegetables (potatoes – or carrots, sweet potatoes, or cauliflower) can also be a little easier to manage because they’re almost pre-digested by the mashing before they get to your plate.

If it’s really bad, you could also try eating vegetables only in soups, cooked so long that they’re almost falling apart. Normally, cooking vegetables in water for so long would be an issue because of nutrient loss, but in a soup, you’re eating the water as well: even though nutrients leach out into the broth, they still end up in your body anyway.

Eat Smaller Portions

Paleo is famous for the huge plates of vegetables: after all, why would bother getting out a separate bowl and taking only half the spinach when you could just dump your toppings into the clamshell and call it lunch? But if vegetables are causing you digestive trouble, this really isn’t the way to go.

Instead, try starting with small servings and working up gradually. Instead of digging into a massive pile of cabbage, start with a small plate of something gentler (like squash) and gradually work your way up. It may take a while to re-introduce, and some foods might never be “safe” in anything more than small amounts, but you might also find that after some gut healing time, you can digest a lot more than you thought you could.

Heal your Gut

Nobody wants to be on an elimination diet forever. It’s pretty monotonous – and in many cases, it shouldn’t even be necessary. The point of cutting out vegetables that irritate your gut isn’t to live without them forever; it’s to give everything a chance to heal so that ultimately you’ll be able to eat those foods again without fear.

Specific gut-healing protocols vary from person to person, but bone broth, probiotic foods (or supplements), plenty of sleep, and good stress management are always safe places to start.

Summing it Up

Vegetables are pretty wonderful foods, and most people feel great eating as many as they want. But if you keep finding that vegetables irritate your stomach, there is hope!

• It might just be the transition – if you’re still in the first few weeks, just cut back and ramp it up again slowly.
• Alternately, it might be a sensitivity to certain types of fibers – try reducing FODMAPs, cooking everything well, and paying special attention to healing the gut.
• In rare cases, it might be a vegetable allergy (yes, those exist!) or a different kind of vegetable trouble.

Often, vegetable sensitivities aren’t forever, or at least they get a lot better over time. And they certainly shouldn’t ever stand between you and Paleo.

We all know that lunches can get tricky on Paleo. With sandwiches being out of the question, it's easy to start thinking that the options are very limited, but it doesn't have to be like that. Using bento boxes makes it easy to pack fun, tasty and varied lunch options that can be enjoyed cold. They are good for all kinds of salads, leftover cooked meats, dips, condiments, roasted or raw vegetables, fruits, ...

We like to use the non-reactive stainless steel ones. They are great for kids and adults alike, and bound to make your coworkers jealous of your healthy lifestyle. Bring more than one if you have a large appetite or on very active days and try to keep them refrigerated when out for extended periods of time.

Here are 8 original Paleo lunch ideas in bento boxes to help you get inspired for you own lunches:

1. Grilled salmon with fresh dill and lemon slices, radishes, kiwi slices and blueberries:

2. Grilled chicken with kale and cranberry salad, almonds, macadamia nuts, cherry tomatoes and jerky:

3. Mini grass-fed beef burgers with olives, carrots and applesauce:

4. Hard boiled eggs, guacamole, salsa, grilled portobello mushrooms and red bell pepper slices:

5. Chicken salad, cucumber, pineapple, dried apricots and roasted chestnuts:

6. Natural cold cuts, pickles, homemade mayonnaise and peach slices:

7. Sardines with lemon and portobello mushroom slices, strawberries, almonds, sliced apple with almond butter:

8. Celery sticks with almond butter and raisins, cherries, chocolate pudding, broccoli, fried sweet potatoes with bacon:

Pop quiz: you’re trying to minimize your sugar intake, but you’re craving dessert – specifically, chocolate cake. You've been jonesing after it all day - it's so insistent you can almost taste it. Which of the following sounds like the best plan for you?

(A) Do something else to get your mind off sugar and wait to eat until your next meal.

(B)  Go out to your favorite cake shop and have a small slice of the very best they’ve got; as a once-in-a-while treat it’s not going to kill you. Or make yourself some truly decadent Paleo treat, and have just a little bit: if it’s really good, you’ll be fine with a taste.

(C)  Grab a big bowl of frozen berries: they’re pretty sweet, and you can eat a lot of them without racking up a bunch of sugar.

All 3 answers are equally “right.” The only “wrong” answer to this quiz is if you try to force yourself into a plan that doesn’t work for you – you know that you personally won’t be satisfied with just a taste, but you try to serve yourself a disappointingly tiny portion of chocolate ganache anyway because that’s what everyone else says they like, and then you just end up either feeling deprived and unhappy or eating the whole bowl.

The answers in the quiz all represent different types of eating styles, and knowing which one is right for you can help you adapt Paleo to your particular needs and goals.

Moderators vs. Abstainers

Gretchen Ruben famously distinguished between “moderators” and “abstainers” here.

If you’re a moderator, you…

• Picked (B) in the quiz above.
• Feel completely deprived and unhappy at the thought of never having [insert your favorite food here] again.
• Think the idea of “everything in moderation” makes perfect sense, and don’t understand why some people need to be so extreme.
• Would rather ease into things slowly and make small, sustainable changes.

If you’re an abstainer, you…

• Picked (A) (or possibly (C)) in the quiz above.
• Find it easier to just avoid a food completely instead of worrying about “portion control” or serving size.
• Find that the less you eat a food, the less you crave it – once you’re over the hump, the desire doesn’t come back.
• Would rather go cold turkey and jump into things with both feet.
• Don’t tend to do well with cheat days.

Neither of these two “types” is better or worse. They’re just different.

There is absolutely no point trying to force someone else to change their eating style. Moderators tend to waste a lot of energy trying to persuade abstainers that they’re being “too extreme” and they just need to “use moderation,” but for abstainers this is actually counterproductive – it’s easier to just say no. Abstainers tend to waste a lot of energy trying to persuade moderators that they’re not committed enough, but this is also counterproductive: for a moderator, “my way or the highway” just doesn’t work.

It's pointless (and very frustrating) to try to cram someone else into a mold that doesn't fit them; all you can do is figure out which type you are and then take steps appropriately.

For Paleo specifically…

• Moderators will probably do better with something like 80/20 or 90/10, where your regular Paleo menu (80 or 90% healthy) includes the occasional non-Paleo indulgence (10 or 20% of your diet) but it never gets you seriously off-track because the lion’s share of your diet is dialed in. Moderators prefer to get started by easing in slowly, rather than plunging headfirst.
• Abstainers often find it easier to just go 100%, at least for certain foods. Indulgences tend to throw them off more seriously, and it’s just not worth the effort of getting back in the driver’s seat. Jump-start programs like the Whole30 typically work better for abstainers than for moderators.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative eaters

On top of the moderator/abstainer division, many people also seem to fall into either a “qualitative” or a “quantitative” category:

If you’re a qualitative eater, you picked (B) in the quiz above. This is you if…

• You could eat endless amounts of M&Ms, but when you get a piece of really excellent dark chocolate, you only want a little square before you’re done.
• You would rather eat something really decadent and savor it slowly than eat a larger serving of something that doesn’t quite hit the spot.
• You can keep a jar of almond butter in the pantry and eat it in reasonable servings without a lot of angst and conscious self-discipline.
• You struggle to understand people who “can’t have just one bite” or who could eat a whole bar of Lindt 99% in one sitting.
• You can feel satisfied after even a small meal, and you may even dislike that feeling of being completely full.

If you’re a quantitative eater, you picked (C) in the quiz. This is you if…

• No matter how rich the dessert, you always want a big plate – none of this “fun-sized” nonsense.
• You would rather eat a big pile of carrot sticks for a snack than a tablespoon of almond butter – the carrots fill you up better, and with the almond butter you’re just constantly struggling to keep the servings reasonable.
• You struggle with overeating nuts, dried fruit, or Paleo treats.
• You’ve developed external self-control strategies like only making desserts in single servings (so you can’t go back for seconds because there are none).
• You don’t feel “full” after a meal unless there’s a lot of volume on the plate.

Again, neither of these two types is better or worse. They’re just different.

For Paleo specifically…

• Qualitative eaters will benefit most from looking at Paleo desserts and Paleo treats. Focusing on food quality makes these recipes perfect for the “just a few bites” type of treat.
• Quantitative eaters probably want to stay away from Paleoified desserts, and develop their vegetable-cooking skills to new heights of deliciousness. Huge fresh salads, piles of roasted cauliflower or broccoli, and heaping plates of spaghetti squash or zucchini noodles are your friends.

Not Everyone is the Same!

The stereotypical “healthy foodie” is the qualitative moderator. This is the person who can cheerfully proclaim that they didn’t have to “give up” any favorite foods because they just eat smaller servings as a special treat, not every day.

Talking to this person sells diet books really well, because they can promise that "you don't have to give up your favorite foods." But not everyone is, and there’s absolutely no reason to force yourself into that mold just because someone else thinks it’s the “best” way to eat or be. You're not necessarily being "extreme" or "unreasonable" because you prefer to avoid something entirely; it may just be an approach that works better for you than the much-vaunted "moderation."

Instead of trying to eat in a way that works for someone else, think about where you fall in the spectrum, and make decisions based on that. You can modify Paleo for any eating style, so don’t be afraid to experiment and find something that really makes you happy for the long run.

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.

So, you’re not so thrilled about the whole “red meat” deal but still want to give Paleo a try? Great! Paleo doesn’t have to be about wrapping your steak in bacon; it’s perfectly possible to do Paleo as a pescetarian: someone who eats fish, eggs, and optionally dairy, but not red meat, pork, or poultry. Whether you’re pescetarian for environmental, religious, or personal reasons, it’s absolutely possible to construct a very healthy Paleo diet without any red meat.

The Good

In fact, a pescetarian Paleo diet has a lot of advantages. First of all, it’s a lot better than a strict vegetarian (eggs and dairy, but no meat at all) diet. It’s possible to go Paleo as a strict vegetarian, but that many eggs all the time get boring! A pescetarian diet makes it easier to get all the nutrients you need without feeling like you’re eating omelets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

If you’re doing Paleo as a pescetarian, you’re also avoiding a lot of the pitfalls that plague Paleo beginners:

• No risk of iodine deficiency. Since seafood is so rich in iodine, you won’t lack for it even if you switch out your salt to non-iodized sea salt.
• Excellent Omega-3 levels. If fish is your primary protein source, your Omega-3 intake will be almost automatically dialed in.
• Lots of Vitamin D. Vitamin D is important for everything from weight loss to fertility, and most of us don’t get nearly enough of it, since we’re stuck inside all day and rarely get out in the sun. Some of the only food sources are fatty cold-water fish like salmon and sardines: if you’re eating a pescetarian Paleo diet, your dietary Vitamin D consumption is probably a lot higher than average. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go outside, but it definitely helps.

The (potentially) Bad

As amazing as seafood is, though the pescetarian Paleo life still deserves a few caveats. None of these are reasons not to try it; they’re just pitfalls to watch out for, so you can prevent them before they happen.

Boredom

A pescetarian Paleo diet doesn’t have to be boring any more than any other variation of Paleo. But the more restrictions you take on, the easier it is to start feeling bored and irritated by all the things you “aren’t allowed” to eat. To avoid feeling bored, make an effort from the beginning to try new recipes. Don’t just eat salmon fillets every single day. There’s a huge variety of seafood out there; experiment with crab, lobster, shrimp, tilapia, sardines, mackerel, tuna, octopus (calamari, anyone?), and oysters. Or try different ways of preparing your fish – raw in sashimi vs. pan-fried vs. grilled.

If you can tolerate dairy, it also helps a lot to add in yogurt or cheese as a supplemental source of fat and protein. If you eat eggs for breakfast, a big salad with nuts and cheese for lunch, and fish for dinner, you won’t have to repeat the same protein source twice in one day.

Nutrients in red meat

Far from the nutritional devil it’s made out to be, red meat is actually extremely nutritious. You can get almost all of its advantages from seafood, but there are just a few things you might be missing:

• Conjugated linoleic acid: this is a special type of saturated fat found in grass-fed (only grass-fed: there’s almost none in grain-fed) meat. CLA is particularly interesting from a Paleo perspective because it has interesting potential benefits for weight loss. As a pescetarian, you could get CLA from pastured butter or pastured egg yolks (although again: these must be from animals that lived happy lives outside).

• Vitamin K2: also found mostly in grass-fed meat and animal products. Pastured egg yolks are an easy workaround for this too though.
• Saturated fat: yes, this is a nutrient! But you can easily get it from eggs, butter, or coconut oil; you don't need meat.

Essentially, as long as you’re also eating yolks from pastured eggs every day, you’ll be all set for your nutrient needs. The only reason you’d need a supplement would be if you couldn’t eat eggs, or if you couldn’t get truly pastured eggs for some reason.

Protein overdose

Yes, there is such a thing! Protein should never make up more than 30% or so of your daily calories; your body can’t actually metabolize any more than that, so it’s just wasted money spent on nutrition you aren’t actually absorbing. And it can also make you feel really lousy, because your body is starving for calories but not actually getting them (this is also called “rabbit starvation” if you want to look it up).

Protein overload can happen to anyone, but pescetarians are particularly prone to it because many species of fish are so lean. If you look at the Nutrition Facts on a can of tuna, you’ll see that it’s almost entirely protein, with just a tiny amount of fat in the mix. The same goes for a lot of other fish, especially white fish (tilapia, swai, whitefish…) and bivalves like mussels and oysters. If you’re eating exclusively fish, it’s easy to get a lot of protein very fast, without enough fat to go with it.

Some warning signs that this may be affecting your health are:

• You feel constantly hungry even after eating large amounts of food (your body is starving for fat and/or carbs).
• You’re craving something but feel turned off or even nauseated by everything you try to eat. Nothing looks good…but you’re still hungry!
• You’re losing weight extremely fast, your hair is falling out, and you feel weak or shaky.
• You have no energy.

To fix this problem, just focus on adding more fat and starch to your meals. You can do this in any number of ways:

• Add avocados, nuts, or other plant fats.
• Cook with generous amounts of butter, coconut oil, olive oil, or other healthy cooking fats.
• Make curries with coconut milk (or full-fat dairy, if you tolerate dairy).
• Use fatty sauces and dressings, like pesto and mayonnaise.
• Eat more safe starches. There’s nothing wrong with carbs!

Summing it Up

There are a few downsides to going Paleo as a pescetarian, but there’s really not a lot of bad, and all the potential problems are completely fixable with some smart nutritional planning.

It’s worth mentioning that if you’re pescetarian for nutritional reasons, it might be worth revisiting those arguments from a Paleo perspective: red meat isn’t actually a nutritional demon any more than whole grains are an angel. Including other animal products in a Paleo diet can make it more interesting and nutritionally varied. Even if your reasons revolve around ethics, it might be worth a look at the difference between truly grass-fed meat and factory-farmed products to see if you can add the former to your diet in good conscience.

On the other hand, though, nobody’s saying you have to give up pescetarianism to go Paleo: you absolutely don’t! Especially if you tolerate dairy, but even if you don’t, there’s nothing wrong with eating a Paleo diet based mainly on fish and eggs. Enjoy some tasty Pad Thai or tuna burgers, and just make sure you’re getting plenty of egg yolks for the healthy fats and important nutrients.

Want to try Paleo but not quite sure what to cook first? We’ve got you covered! Here are 10 super-easy Paleo recipe ideas to help get you off the ground.

1. Frittatas

Eggs are one of the easiest Paleo foods to prepare, and frittatas take “simple but delicious” up to 11. The basic concept is simple: just beat some eggs and pour them into a pan with your favorite vegetables; then bake in the oven until it smells too good to resist!

Here’s a quick and easy recipe for an Italian-themed frittata to get you started. And if that’s not quite your style, try this zucchini and sweet potato frittata instead.

2. Crock-Pot Roasts

Roasts make it easy to stretch a tight budget (especially if you’re feeding a crowd). And slow-cookers make it easy to cram home cooking into even the busiest of schedules. Together, they’re a match made in heaven!

Here’s a quick recipe for balsamic roast beef, and if you’re not feeling the beef today, here’s one just as simple for a pork roast.

3. Roast Chicken

It’s a classic for a reason – affordable, low-effort, and delicious! Many people are intimidated at the thought of cooking a whole bird instead of just the breasts or drumsticks, but it's really not complicated or difficult. Once you do it for the first time, you'll be amazed that you were ever worried about it.

Here’s a very simple recipe for a whole roast chicken to get you started.

4. Baked Chicken

Don’t have a whole chicken handy? No problem: just grab whatever chicken parts you have and make a quick baked chicken recipe.

A few ideas: spice rubbed chicken is great for the heat-lovers, and lemon and thyme chicken has a slightly more delicate flavor, perfect for salads.

5. Chili

A big bowl of chili is just the thing to warm up a cold afternoon. It travels well; it freezes well; it reheats beautifully – is there anything it can’t do? You can adjust the spice level up or down, depending on your tastes, and you can throw in just about any kind of meat you can think of!

Here’s a classic chili with beef and tomatoes, here’s a spicy version with pork, and here’s a recipe for turkey chili (using leftover meat).

6. Coleslaw

Paleo isn’t just about huge hunks of meat all the time: your plate should be at least half-full of vegetables! Per serving, cabbage is one of the cheapest vegetables you can buy, and it’s also very easy to prepare. You can fry it, roast it, throw it in a soup…or make coleslaw out of it!

Here’s a recipe for fruity coleslaw, and here’s one for a buffalo ranch version.

7. Chicken soup

Chicken soup is “soul food” after a long day. It’s a time-honored home remedy for a sniffle or a flu, and it’s an ideal way to use up any vegetables loitering in your fridge about to go bad. Plus, it’s a perfect vehicle for bone broth.

Here’s a very basic chicken soup recipe that you can modify almost infinitely to suit your particular tastes.

8. Roasted Vegetables

The easiest way of dealing with almost any vegetable is to just toss it on a tray with some Paleo cooking fat and roast it until it’s soft and delicious. Roasting more assertive vegetables like broccoli or Brussels sprouts brings out their inner sweetness and makes them much more palatable for kids.

Here’s a basic recipe for oven-roasted cabbage to get you started, but remember: you can apply the same technique to almost anything!

9. Guacamole

Guacamole is a perfect vehicle for healthy fats and all the other good stuff that you’ll find in an avocado. It’s delicious scooped over a salad, used as a dip for raw vegetable slices, or simply eaten straight off the spoon.

Here’s a recipe for quick and easy guacamole.

10. Hamburgers

Burgers don’t have to come on a bun! They’re incredibly versatile and a guaranteed dinner favorite, so it’s well worth your time to find a Paleo recipe.

Here’s a basic recipe for Portobello burgers – with a mushroom stepping in as the bun. And just for fun, here are some fries to go with them.

Did we miss anything? What's your favorite super-simple beginner recipe? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

So…you’ve decided to go Paleo. You’ve read through the list of what foods are and aren’t allowed, and then read it again, just to make sure you’ve got it. And now you’re ready to head out to the store for your very first Paleo grocery trip. Here’s what to expect and how to manage some common stumbling blocks:

Before you Go

A successful grocery trip starts before you set foot in the store. Here’s what to do:

• Make a shopping list. Here’s a guide to doing this. A good shopping list will save you money and time in the end. Even if you can usually sweep through the store without a list in sight, making such a radical diet change has a way of throwing off your game.
• Set aside plenty of time to get through the store without rushing. This will probably be the most time-consuming grocery trip of your Paleo career, so give yourself lots of leeway.
• Eat before you go. Never grocery-shop hungry! And bring a water bottle.

Navigating the Grocery Store

You’ll spend most of your time around the outer edges of the store – some good stuff lurks in the middle aisles, but it’s rare. The majority of your time (and budget) should be spent on fresh produce, raw meat, and eggs, all of which you’ll find around the perimeter. Your cart should look like you bought up the entire produce section – that’s a sign that you’re doing it right! Remember that you’ll need 21 servings of produce (3 meals per day x 7 days per week) for each person; that’s a whole lot of green stuff!

On the other hand, you’ll need to venture into the middle aisles for staples like spices, coconut milk, vinegar, canned fish, cooking oils, and frozen vegetables, so don’t be afraid to go there. It’s not all bad! Just make sure you read labels very carefully. Which brings us to…

Managing Label Shock

Once you start looking, you will not believe the amount of junk added to products for apparently no reason at all. Why does every salad dressing have to have sugar, fake sugar, junk oils, or all three? Since when did trail mix become such a dumping ground for the candy with a side of raisins?

Every single time you pick up something that has an ingredients label on it, read the label out loud. Not the stickers on the front of the package. Not the shiny advertising displays. The boring, black-and-white, small-font ingredients label. And read it out loud so you can make sure you aren’t skipping over anything. Be on special alert for:

• Sugar in any form. Organic sugar is still sugar. “Cane juice” is sugar. Honey is basically sugar. Agave nectar is even worse than regular sugar. Just because it’s “natural” doesn’t make it any healthier.
• Soy (this will be conveniently bolded on the label because it’s a common allergen). Especially watch out for canned fish; any kind of “vegetable broth” often includes soy.
• Deceptive front-of-package claims. This includes “high in protein,” “low-calorie,” “all-natural,” “gluten-free,” and any kind of picture. All that stuff is advertising; it’s designed to get you spending money, not to help you make good decisions. Don’t rely on it as a measure of how healthy a food is. Ignore it and look at the ingredients label.

Managing (and Avoiding!) Sticker Shock

It’s also very common for Paleo newbies to get to the register and face the unpleasant fact that their grocery bill has officially tripled. But this is actually completely avoidable – you don’t have to spend a huge amount of money on Paleo food! Here are some common beginner traps to avoid:

• Buying tons of nuts. They’re very expensive and not the best thing you could be eating anyway.
• Buying tons of beef jerky, pre-marinated meat, pre-cooked meat, or other convenience protein. It’s much cheaper and not very time-consuming to cook your own!
• Buying a lot of prepackaged snack foods like kale chips, dehydrated fruit, Larabars, or other technically-Paleo processed foods. There’s nothing wrong with this stuff from a health perspective, but those $5 packages add up fast without contributing much to your main meals.
• Buying fruit out of season. Fresh fruit is great, but strawberries are expensive in December! Don’t blow your whole budget on luxuries like out-of-season produce; go for the basics and then come back to the treats later if you still have room left.

Also bear in mind that your first grocery trip may be the most expensive one you ever make, because you have to buy a bunch of staples all at once. A jar of coconut oil may be expensive now, but it’ll last you the month. The same goes for spices, bulk nuts, and other pantry staples. If you’re tight on money this month, try going for only one or two things that you’ll need right away and slowly accumulating a collection of Paleo staples, instead of trying to buy everything all at once.

What if I Mess Something Up?

Accidentally brought home a big brick of tofu? Stocked up on peanut butter and canola oil without really thinking? Missed some sugar, soy, or wheat on a label somewhere? If the food has a long shelf life, you can just save it for the inevitable moment when you have non-Paleo guests. Otherwise, just decide whether you want to donate it to a food pantry, give it to someone else, eat it yourself, or throw it out.

It’s perfectly normal to make mistakes at first; that’s how you learn. If you had to be 100% perfect right off the bat to go Paleo, none of us would make it past Day 2. Just learn from it and move on.

Sample Shopping List (1 person)

Just to give you a rough idea of some things you could buy with approximate quantities, here’s a sample shopping list for a single person for 1 week:

Meat

• 1 pound ground beef
• 1 can salmon
• 1 whole chicken
• 2 pounds chuck roast
• 1 dozen eggs

Produce

• 1 eggplant1 bunch Swiss chard1 bag spinach
• 1 head Romaine lettuce
• 2 green peppers
• 1 red pepper
• 2 cucumbers
• 1 head garlic
• 1 red onion
• 1 head cabbage
• 1 bunch beets, with tops
• 1 pound carrots
• 1 bag onions
• 3 large sweet potatoes
• 2 large white potatoes
• 4 apples
• 2 bananas
• 2 avocados

Other

• 1 jar coconut oil
• Spices: cinnamon, basil, oregano, thyme, paprika, chili powder, cumin
• 1 can coconut milk
• Balsamic vinegar
• Apple cider vinegar

That’s just a suggestion; your own list may be completely different. But it does give you an idea of what you could buy, and in approximately what quantities.

Your Turn!

After a certain point, the only way to learn is to do – just head out to the store and see how it goes. Do your best to stay mostly around the outer edge of the store, scour all the labels for non-Paleo ingredients, and avoid money-sucks, but remember that messing up a time or five is all part of the process. Eventually, you’ll be a grizzled Paleo veteran sweeping through the store with ease; for right now, the important thing is just to start.

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.

You’ve heard of spinach. And at this point we’re all aware that kale is going to make us immortal. But there’s a whole world of leafy greens out there beyond the usual suspects, and if you’re looking to switch up your salads, one of the less-popular choices might be the perfect option for you!

Adding different greens to your vegetable rotation ensures that you constantly have a good supply of calcium and other important nutrients: variety is one of the best ways to make sure your diet is nutritionally sound. So here are 10 tasty (and extremely nutritious) leafy greens you might be walking past every time you go grocery shopping, without even realizing what you’re missing.

1. Turnip Greens

How to find them: Turnip greens are large (a bunch is typically around the size of a bunch of kale) and bright green. They'll be either attached to the turnips, or sold in big bunches with the collards and other cooking greens.

Taste: like a very, very mild version of turnips; it’s really just a hint of turnip flavor. They’re great if you think the turnips themselves are a little too strong. Turnip greens bought at a farmers’ market tend to have a sharper flavor than greens bought at the grocery store, which are more watery.

Cooking tips: turnip greens are best cooked; stir-fry or sauté them in fat. Cook them just until they turn a brighter green; this removes any bitterness without making them bland and mushy.

Recipe inspiration: Stir-fried turnip greens.

2. Mustard Greens

How to find them: Mustard greens are bright and bushy (a bunch is about as tall as your forearm from elbow to hand). They should be with the collards and other cooking greens.

Taste: a little spicier and more assertive than lettuce.

Cooking tips: quickly pan-fry them with your favorite fat. Like turnip greens, mustard greens should be cooked just until they brighten up.

Recipe inspiration: Sarson ka Saag.

3. Dandelion Greens

How to find them: walk out into your backyard and pick some, or check in the leafy greens section of the supermarket.

Taste: they’re pretty bitter raw (although perfectly safe to eat, and great in a salad mix where you can balance out the bitterness with a milder leaf). If you’re not a fan of the sharp taste, cooking them tones it down a lot.

Cooking tips: Dandelion greens are definitely candidates for boiling or another more demanding cooking method, depending on how much bitterness you like in your leaves.

Recipe inspiration: Eggs in a nest.

4. Mesclun

How to find it: check the bagged or boxed salad mixes.

Taste: Mesclun varies in taste from one batch to the next, because it’s not a specific plant. Instead, it’s the name for a mix of young salad greens, typically including some new and exciting candidates like radicchio, oak leaf, and mizuma. As a rule, the taste will be more assertive than a pile of romaine or iceberg, but it might be slightly bitter, peppery, sharp, or bright – or all of the above!

Cooking tips: Don’t cook mesclun; it’s best used as a salad mix.

Recipe inspiration: Duck confit with fried potatoes, mushrooms, and mesclun.

5. Arugula

How to find it: arugula will be with the lettuce and the other salad greens. It looks a little like dandelion leaves.

Taste: arugula is typically described as “peppery:” this is definitely a green that knows its own mind! It’s sharp, and even a little stingy.

Cooking tips: arugula goes really well in omelets or paired with something else that’s rich and creamy, to balance out the sharpness. In a salad, it’s best as one leaf in a mix, not as the only green involved.

Recipe inspiration: Arugula salad with beets.

6. Beet greens

How to find them: either attached to a bunch of beets, or on their own with the cooking greens. Beet greens have dark red-purple stems and deep green leaves.

Taste: beet greens taste a lot like Swiss chard, if you can imagine Swiss chard with a slightly beety twist. They have a rich, full, and almost  sweet flavor.

Cooking tips: use them any time you would otherwise use chard: they’re particularly good pan-fried with a pinch of salt and some onions for crunch. Be aware that beet greens will turn everything else in the pan pink, just like beetroots would.

Recipe inspiration: Roasted beets and carrots with grapefruit glaze.

7. Kohlrabi

How to find it: this one’s easy: kohlrabi looks like Sputnik, if Sputnik decided to go organic. The bottom is a big globe, with leafy offshoots sprouting up from it. Look for it with the other green vegetables.

Taste: kohlrabi tastes very similar to broccoli; it has the same hardy, rooty taste when it’s raw, and the same mild sweetness when it’s cooked (especially if you roast it).

Cooking tips: Roast or bake kohlrabi to bring out its milder side.

Recipe inspiration: Beet and kohlrabi greens chips.

8. Curly Endive/Frisee

(sometimes incorrectly called chicory)

How to find it: Curly endive, also called frisee, should be with the salad greens. It’s white at the roots and medium-green at the tips, and looks distinctly frizzy.

Taste: sharp, with a crunchy, feathery texture.

Cooking tips: frisee is a love-it-or-hate-it green; it goes well as a counterpoint for sweeter toppings (like apples and raisins) or rich and savory choices like bacon.

Recipe inspiration: Orange endive salad.

9. Belgian endive

How to find it: this is the lumpy, white plant you’ll see stocked with the radishes and turnips. Despite the similar name, it’s actually a different species from endive.

Taste: Slightly bitter, and often described as “tangy.” The versions with the red-purple tips and green-yellow tips both taste about the same.

Cooking tips: Belgian endive is great raw as a “scoop” for dips or appetizers, but it’s also good braised low and slow to reduce any bitterness and mellow out the taste.

Recipe inspiration: Caraway chicken with Belgian endive.

10. Watercress

How to find it: watercress has small, round leaves: a bunch of watercress looks like a bunch of very tiny water lilies. Look with the baby salad greens or fresh herbs.

Taste: Watercress, like arugula, is sharp and assertive; it mellows out a lot when it’s cooked.

Cooking tips: Watercress is great for adding a bit more punch to soups and other milder foods that could otherwise be boring.

Recipe inspiration: Warm watercress and pine nut salad.

What's your favorite less-common leafy green? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

Welcome back to our 2-part series on olive oil! Part 1 went over all the health benefits of olive oil. This week, we’re covering the practical side: buying and cooking with this poster child for “healthy fat.”

Buying Olive Oil

Even if it doesn’t miraculously cure all your ills, olive oil is clearly pretty good for you – and it’s delicious, to boot. But not all olive oil is created equal. Before you buy, here’s what you should know:

The Types of Olive Oil

You’ll see four types of olive oil on the shelf at the store:

• Extra virgin: get this one. It’s the most expensive, but also has the highest polyphenol content and delivers that distinctive olive-oil taste.
• Virgin: a poor second, subject to harsher processing methods. Lower in polyphenols and not as tasty.
• Refined: extracted using chemical methods, not mechanical pressing. Skip it.
• Pure or “Light:” tasteless and boring. The only reason you'd buy this one is to make mayonnaise, if you want an oil without a pronounced olive-y taste. It’s also worth noting that the “light” refers to the color and flavor, not the calories – light olive oil has exactly as much fat and just as many calories as any other olive oil.

If you want the full benefits of the polyphenols and antioxidants, extra virgin olive oil from a high-quality supplier is particularly important. Polyphenol content of different oils naturally varies; estimates of polyphenol content in various studies have ranged from 50mg/kg to 800mg/kg – that’s huge! To get the 10 milligrams specified as the “useful dose” of polyphenols in this review, here’s what you’d have to eat:

• Low polyphenol content (50 mg/kg: old oil, lower quality oil, oil exposed to heat and/or light): 15 tablespoons per day (200 grams)
• Typical “high” polyphenol content as seen in most studies, around 350mg/kg: just over 2 tablespoons per day (30 grams)
• Highest measured polyphenol content (800mg/kg): ¾ of a tablespoon per day (10 grams)

It’s perfectly reasonable to get 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil in every day. Have a salad with a vinaigrette and you’re pretty much there! But 15 tablespoons is not so reasonable. So in order to make sure you really get the benefits of olive oil, you’ll want to get one with a high polyphenol content – and that means a fresh, high-quality, extra virgin oil.

Avoiding Olive Oil Fraud

Because it’s such a luxury product, olive oil is the subject of an amazing amount of fraud. You can read all about this – and how to avoid it – in the article on avoiding food fraud here. The short version: if you can’t afford the good stuff, don’t get it at all; stick with coconut oil (less likely to be contaminated) and animal fat.

Cooking with Olive Oil

It’s the eternal question: should you cook with olive oil? The concern here is that the monounsaturated fat in olive oil is less stable than the saturated fat found in, say, coconut oil (for more on this, go back to Part 1). Because it’s less stable, monounsaturated fat is more prone to oxidation, a kind of chemical damage that makes the fat rancid and inflammatory. Since one of the fastest ways to oxidize a fat is to heat it up, cooking seems like a definite “no” for olive oil.

On the other hand, monounsaturated fat is still fairly stable – it’s not nearly as unstable as the polyunsaturated fat found in unhealthy cooking oils like canola or soybean oil. Another point in favor of olive oil is its natural antioxidant content, which provides a built-in defense mechanism against oxidation.

That was the theory; now for the studies. In this study and this one, olive oil oxidized less easily than seed oils (sunflower and canola, respectively), but some damage was still apparent (and anyway, “better than canola oil” is not a terribly high bar to set!). Then again, these were very high temperatures and very long cooking times; few home cooks are going to subject their oil to an industrial fryer for 7+ hours!

Given the relative lack of studies with more real-world scenarios, it’s hard to say what the effect will be of sautéing vegetables or browning meat in olive oil. Hysterical warnings that the oil becomes “toxic” after cooking are almost certainly overblown – but on the other hand, there’s not much reason to use it as a cooking oil in the first place, considering the other options available.

Ultimately, it’s up to everyone’s judgment – but here’s what you can do to prevent oxidation whether or not you cook with the olive oil:

• Store your oil in an opaque jar. Never buy an olive oil that comes in a clear jar; that’s a sure sign of a low-quality (and probably fraudulent) product. Go for the ones in darker jars, to protect them from light. This is significant: in this study, for example, olive oil stored under simulated “domestic storage conditions” (clear, half-empty bottles) lost 20% of its Vitamin E content after 2 months, and 92% after a year.
• Store the oil in a cool place. If you buy it in bulk, that’s fine (it’s a great money-saver), but store the big container somewhere cool and dark, and siphon a cup or two at a time out into a smaller container to keep handy where you cook.

Regardless of whether or not you choose to cook with olive oil, treating it properly will help protect its antioxidant content and other nutritional benefits.

Summing it Up

When you take a look at all the evidence, olive oil might not deserve all the breathless praise that advocates of the “Mediterranean diet” shower on its head, but it’s clearly a healthy food that’s perfectly fine to eat. It has a superior fatty acid profile and some potential antioxidant benefits, and the fact that cavemen didn’t have olive presses just isn’t a valid point against it. Heating it might be detrimental to the quality of the fat, but the industrial deep-frying used in most studies doesn’t tell us much about the effects of an ordinary oven. And even if there is still damage, it’s a huge step ahead from cooking with Omega-6-rich seed oils like canola or soybean oil.

On the other hand, all of this deserves a very serious caveat: it only applies to real olive oil. Canola oil does not magically pick up antioxidant properties because someone stuck a picture of an olive on the bottle! So considering the rampant fraud in the industry, here’s the bottom line:

• If and only if you can get high-quality olive oil, (check out the article on food fraud for tips on how to do this) it’s safe, healthy, and delicious.
• If you can’t get high-quality olive oil, stick with coconut oil, animal fats, or other Paleo plant fats. These fats are still healthy, and much more likely to actually be what you're paying for.

Sure, it’s easy to focus on everything that’s wrong with the modern food system. The corn subsidies that make Coke and Doritos cheaper than tea and apples. The junk food industry that advertises sugar-coated sugar to our kids for breakfast. The research sponsored by food and beverage giants like Pepsi Co. All those things are serious problems. But keep it in perspective: we have plenty to be grateful for.

This spring was unusually cold and wet. But you didn’t have to worry that you’d end up going hungry because of it.

All the junk at the grocery store is annoying. But at least you know that if you’re hungry, there will be food available for you to buy, and you won’t have to stand in line all day to get it.

We take these things for granted. But this kind of food security wasn’t always available – and to many people on this planet, it still isn’t. So even though you might be (justifiably!) angry at the problems with the modern food system, here are 7 ways to help yourself keep it all in perspective and be grateful for what you have, even though it isn’t perfect.

1. Volunteer at a food bank

Hunger is not restricted to sub-Saharan Africa! Help out someone else and get a solid reality check on how fortunate you are by volunteering your time at a food bank, soup kitchen, or some similar organization. Not sure where to start? You can look up a food bank in your area here.

If you can’t find a food bank close to you, you can also just find someone in your community who could use a little help with making meals – maybe an older person who struggles to cook as much as they used to. Offer a ride to the grocery store, or an afternoon of your time to help cook up a big batch of chili or soup for the week.

2. Chat with a farmer

Good food takes an amazing amount of time and love to grow. It’s easy to forget that when food is so cheap, and when we can walk into any store and get whatever we want, whenever we want it. But talk to a farmer, and you’ll get the story of everything that has to happen before you can pick an apple up off the grocery store shelf. Ask about how your food is grown, what kinds of problems can pop up, or what the farmer has to do to make sure the food gets from seed to market intact.

Knowing the hidden worries and sleepless nights that go into your food will make you appreciate what an astonishing blessing it is to just waltz into the store and buy lunch.

3. Plant a garden

If you have space where you live, you can go one step further than talking to the person who grew your food: you can grow it yourself. Taking care of a plant from the seed to the table gives you a whole new perspective on how valuable and precious your food really is.

4. Volunteer on a farm

If you don’t have a garden of your own, you can often find volunteer opportunities at local farms, especially if the farm has a CSA program. It’s a great way to get out of the house, meet some new people, and get a whole new perspective on how much work it takes to bring fresh food to your table every day. After you’ve spent an afternoon yanking weeds out of the kale, you’ll never take your salad for granted again.

5. Eat a meal.

“But I already eat meals three times a day,” you say?

You put something in your mouth three times a day, chew it, and swallow it. And when you’re done, you’re no longer hungry. But is it really a meal? Do you actually sit down to eat mindfully and concentrate on your food? Do you share it with someone you love? Do you even close your email?

Eating a meal, with the focus on the food in front of you, can help you appreciate your food more. And if you have a loved one to share it with (or cook it for), even better.

6. Keep a food gratitude list

If you’re feeling sulky or irritated at Paleo or the world in general, writing down a “food gratitude” list is one of the quickest ways to break out of the funk. Just write down this sentence: “I’m glad I can eat this/these____________________ (fill in the name of the food here) because it _________________________ (fill in whatever health benefit you’re getting from the food).”

For example:

• I’m glad I can eat this sweet potato, because it gives me strength to lift heavy weights.
• I’m glad I can eat these eggs, because they give me energy to make it through the whole morning without a blood sugar crash.
• I’m glad I can eat this sauerkraut, because it helps me control my IBS symptoms so I can leave the house without worrying about my bowels.

7. Cook mindfully

Cooking is typically something we cram in around the rest of our lives. In the 20 minutes between work and the dentist, we’re zooming around the kitchen trying to throw together a salad for dinner. In the middle of the morning rush, we’re scrambling eggs with one hand and answering email with the other.

Some days, there’s just nothing for it: cooking has to squeeze into the gaps left by everything more important. But that shouldn’t be every day. Even if it’s only on the weekends, make the time at least occasionally to put on some relaxing music and take your time with a recipe. If you actually slow down and treat the cooking process as something to savor, it magically transforms from an annoying chore into a precious gift.

What’s your favorite way to slow down and appreciate what you have, even when the world isn’t always perfect? Let us know on Facebook or Google+.

Part 1 in this series took a good hard look at the idea that menopausal weight gain is just a fact of life – it’s not! But so many women struggle with extra pounds after menopause that it’s worth taking a closer look.

All of this assumes that you’re already eating Paleo. If you’re not, that’s the first step. But here’s what you can do to tweak Paleo specifically for weight loss or maintenance after menopause:

Re-Evaluate your Carbs

Menopause is associated with (not to be confused with “causes”) a decrease in insulin sensitivity. Insulin sensitivity is your body’s ability to use carbs for fuel, instead of storing them as fat. So reduced insulin sensitivity means that you’re more likely to stash those carbs on your hips. It’s not clear whether this is caused by aging (it also happens to men as they get older) or by menopause per se or by some combination of both, but in any case, it definitely happens.

One of the easiest ways to manage decreased insulin sensitivity and avoid the weight gain that comes with it (especially unhealthy visceral fat, the fat around organs) is to re-evaluate your carb tolerance and adjust your meals accordingly.

Some women become less tolerant of carbohydrates after menopause, while others notice no change at all. There’s no reason to suddenly start a low-carb diet if you’re doing fine, but if you’re noticing telltale signs like energy highs and crashes after eating starchy food, an experiment with lowering carb intake might help.

Do Weight-Bearing Exercise

Another way to improve insulin sensitivity is to exercise. Any kind of exercise will do (In this study, even walking improved insulin sensitivity), but weight training is the best of the best, for two reason:

• Weight training is the best thing you can do for your bones. It improves bone strength much better than calcium chews or other supplements (you can get the full story on bone strength and how to avoid osteoporosis here). Since bone loss is such a serious concern for women after menopause, this is definitely not a benefit to sneeze at.
• Weight training helps maintain muscle mass. During and after a hard workout, your muscles gulp down carbohydrates, storing them as fuel instead of fat. This helps maintain insulin sensitivity. More muscle mass also protects against the metabolic slowdown associated with aging and improves cardiovascular health.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with cardio either, or with a combination of the two. But for the optimal benefits of exercise, you’ll want to throw at least a little strength training into the mix.

Get Enough Red Meat and Fat

Saturated fat is the backbone of hormone production – this is one nutrient you don’t want to skimp on. Eat plenty of butter, coconut milk, coconut oil, palm oil, and grass-fed animal fat: it’s good for you!

As well as being an important source of saturated fat, red meat is packed with several nutrients that older adults are often lacking. This study, for example looked at anemia (more common in older people of both sexes), and found that the risk of anemia was strongly associated with inadequate dietary intake of protein, iron, B12, and folate – all nutrients present abundantly in a nice plate of chuck roast.

But doesn’t a high-fat diet cause breast cancer? Nope! Take a look at this study, which looked at nearly 50,000 postmenopausal women. Women were randomized either to a low-fat group or a control group. 8 years later, the low-fat group had just as much breast cancer as the controls. To quote the study:

Among postmenopausal women, a low-fat dietary pattern did not result in a statistically significant reduction in invasive breast cancer risk over an 8.1-year average follow-up period

When you take out confounding factors (like the people who eat a low-fat diet being richer and more likely to exercise), there’s no link between fat intake and breast cancer.

What about red meat and breast cancer? Again, there’s just no evidence for any risk. For example, this meta-analysis concluded that:

red meat and processed meat intake does not appear to be independently associated with increasing the risk of breast cancer

Full-fat animal foods are a rich source of healthy fats that your body needs for energy, hormone manufacturing, and other purposes. They won’t give you breast cancer, and in fact avoiding them may be dangerous since they’re so full of important nutrients.

What does this all have to do with weight loss? Everything! Weight loss is a symptom of health, not a cause. When are you more likely to head out to the gym: when you feel strong and energized, or when you feel weak and exhausted? When are you more likely to overeat or cave to a plate of cookies: when your body is running strong with all the nutrients it needs, or when a chronic nutrient inadequacy is keeping you hungry all the time?

The high-quality protein in fatty animal foods also helps keep your muscles going strong – remember that maintaining muscle mass is one of the quickest ways to improve insulin sensitivity and keep your metabolism up.

Eat More Vegetables

Vegetables can help address any lingering nutrient deficiencies that might be keeping your body hungry. They can also add bulk to your meals, so you feel full without eating a lot of extra calories. Even though there’s a huge hormonal component to weight loss, and even though calorie-counting generally backfires, calories still do count, and adding a big salad to your meals is a painless and tasty way to slightly decrease calories without going hungry or wasting your time tracking everything you eat.

A related strategy is to take a hard look at any sources of “empty calories” in your life: where are the calories that you don’t even enjoy eating? The ones that you wouldn’t miss, but eat anyway out of habit? Get rid of those, without even touching the food you really want, and you might find that weight loss or maintenance comes a lot easier.

Consider a Thyroid Issue

If you’re doing everything right but not seeing results, it might not actually be menopause at all. Hypothyroid problems have many symptoms that can look like menopause: stubborn weight gain, low energy, joint pain, irritability, and brain fog, to name a few. Just because something occurs at around the typical age for menopause doesn’t necessarily make it menopause-related.

This study also found that “menopause may modify the clinical expression of some thyroid diseases, particularly the autoimmune ones” – so if you had a thyroid condition that was under control pre-menopause, it may be worth revisiting to make sure everything is still going as planned.

What About the Other Symptoms?

A slightly increased risk of metabolic syndrome or weight gain sometime in the future is all very well, but what about the hot flashes that are keeping you up at night right now? Or the brain fog? Or the whole laundry list of other symptoms that aren’t as medically serious but might even be more significant for your quality of life?

Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot of evidence that diet has much to do with any of these woes – and there certainly haven’t been any studies comparing Paleo to any other diet. One piece of evidence that might reassure you is the fact that hunter-gatherer women typically do have much less severe symptoms of menopause, suggesting that the combination of a good diet and regular physical activity might just do the trick.

A special note about soy here: Japanese women have much lower rates of symptoms like hot flashes, and some researchers chalk this one up to their higher consumption of soy. Soy contains phytoestrogens (artificial estrogens that can bind to human estrogen receptors), providing a plausible link between soy consumption and a less painful set of symptoms. But an actual randomized, double-blind clinical study (which removes confounding factors like all the other differences between Japan and the United States) found no benefit for menopausal women from supplementing with soy isoflavones.

Summing it Up

There is no one diet that can completely prevent the changes of menopause – which is, after all, a perfectly normal part of aging and nothing to be afraid of. There’s nothing “wrong” with menopause; it’s not a disease, and there’s no reason why it should have to take over your life.

On the other hand, just like any other major life change, menopause does present a few special challenges – like lower insulin sensitivity, a greater tendency to gain weight, and a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. Fortunately, if you tweak Paleo a little, it’s an ideal eating plan for getting all the crucial nutrients that postmenopausal women need for good bone and cardiovascular health, while controlling weight gain and avoiding metabolic damage.

For some people, exercise is all about how long they can push themselves – but for other people, the question isn’t “how long” but “how hard”? It’s all about stretching the limits of their own endurance, even if it’s just for a few seconds at a time.

That’s high-intensity interval training, or HIIT for short. HIIT is all about power and intensity over short periods of time. It’s a sliding scale (there’s no magical point where the workout suddenly changes from “aerobics” to “HIIT”), but in general anything with work periods under about 1 minute is considered HIIT. Much longer than 1 minute, and you just can’t sustain the “high intensity” part of the name.

Within the general category of HIIT you’ll find all kinds of different programs. Just to name two popular examples:

• Tabata sprints: invented by a Japanese professor named Izumi Tabata, Tabata sprints call for 20 seconds of all-out effort, and then 10 seconds of rest, repeated for 4-8 minutes.
• Minute sprints: work as hard as you can for 60 seconds; then walk (or collapse) for 3-4 minutes; then work for 60 seconds again. Stop when you can no longer peel yourself off the ground for your work interval.

Running is the traditional exercise to do during the work intervals, but you can use any exercise that engages your whole body – bodyweight squats, burpees, jumping rope, or cycling are all fine. The only thing to avoid is an exercise that will hurt you badly if you fail a rep. No Tabata clean and jerks!

Completing one of these programs (or any similar HIIT program; there are several and no one is “best” for everyone) should leave you completely gassed. If you aren’t sweating buckets and shaking at the end, you weren’t pushing hard enough. Many people even get dizzy, woozy, and nauseous – not because they’re sick, but just because they were trying that hard.

Why would you ever put yourself through that? Maybe because you love the intensity of a challenge – or maybe because you think that HIIT will help you reach your fat loss or athletic goals better than traditional “cardio.”

Is HIIT Better than Cardio?

HIIT is generally touted as a better alternative to jogging or other forms of “cardio.” But in fact, it’s more complicated than that. The choice of “HIIT or cardio” is a false dichotomy. You can do both, or you can do neither.

The big advantage of HIIT is that it compresses your workout into a much shorter space of time; it’s basically a way to squeeze more effort (meaning more benefit) into every minute. For example, this study found that, over the course of the entire day, very short bouts of HIIT resulted in basically the same calorie burn as typical “cardio” training, only with a much shorter time in the gym. And this study found that HIIT helped improve endurance capacity in recreational athletes, even though HIIT itself is not an endurance exercise. There’s also some evidence that HIIT is better for losing more fat, while keeping your hard-earned muscle.

On the other hand, HIIT is a tool to be used sparingly. You cannot simply replace every jog with a set of Tabata sprints! For one thing, you’ll burn out in short order: exercising at that intensity every day is a terrible idea. So if you want to add volume to your routine, HIIT is not the answer, and there's still a place for slower-paced cardio work alongside your interval training. For another, the research into all of these benefits is still pretty conflicting – for example, some studies find that HIIT improves insulin sensitivity, while others don’t.

This article takes a helpful comprehensive approach, noting that HIIT alone does not an effective training program make. The trick is to work HIIT into your training routine in an intelligent way, not to go all-out and fall into the “more is better” trap. So it’s not necessarily a question of “HIIT or cardio,” but “how can I combine HIIT and cardio to get the results I want?”

The answer to that will depend on your goals. Used effectively and fueled appropriately (more on this below), HIIT can be useful to almost anyone.  But if it’s abused, it can also drive you straight into the ground.

What are the Dangers of HIIT?

HIIT is a powerful tool, but the power to help is also the power to harm. Abuse it, and that power will come back to bite you.

When you fight through a HIIT workout (assuming you’re really pushing it), you’re forcing your body through an extreme stimulus. There’s a reason why it hurts so bad: your body is warning you that you’re really pushing it. You can ignore that and keep going, but the fact remains that HIIT done right is a massive physical challenge, and very taxing to recover from.

Of course, that’s the whole point: to force your body to adapt to the challenge, so it bounces back stronger. But you don’t get stronger by doing the exercise. You get stronger by recovering from it.

Skimp on that recovery time, and you’re just beating yourself up again and again, with no chance to see the gain from all your pain. Eventually, you’ll simply overwhelm your body’s ability to keep going, and start noticing your performance go down the tubes.

Don’t let this be you! If you’re going to try HIIT, here are some tips for keeping it safe:

• More is not better. You should aim for the hardest workout that you can recover from adequately, not the hardest workout you can force yourself through with enough caffeine pills. Start with once a week (either replacing one cardio session or added in on a day when you aren't doing anything else), and then maybe – maybe – build up from there. HIIT is one part of an effective workout plan; it’s not the only thing you should be doing.
• Carbohydrates are not optional. HIIT burns through the glycogen in your muscles like nothing else; if you don’t refuel you will eventually lose your capacity to put out that kind of effort in the first place. And just to be clear: “carbohydrates” does not mean a side of carrot sticks with your salad. It means starchy tubers: potatoes, sweet potatoes, or something similar.
• Pay attention to injuries. Pounding out the burpees or squat jumps is hard on your knees. Running at that intensity is hard on your everything. When the workout is over so fast, it’s easy to get caught up in the adrenaline and not realize how bad it hurts, so do a thorough warm-up before you jump in and err on the side of caution.

All the warning about the potential dangers does sound a little doom-and-gloom, but that’s not intended to scare you off the whole concept of HIIT; it’s just to make sure you go in with your eyes open. HIIT is a great way to work out if you like your workouts short and sweet. Many people see a lot of success with HIIT for weight loss, especially to pare down those last few pounds. It’s a perfectly fine way to improve your metabolic conditioning and overall fitness, when it’s used in a sane and reasonable exercise program.

On the other hand, HIIT can easily go bad, the same way that you can hurt yourself more with a jackhammer than with a chisel. More does not mean better – and if you’re going to do Tabata, make sure you’re eating appropriately!

Ultimately, it’s all about finding a workout plan that makes you feel good. HIIT can be part of that, but it doesn’t have to be.

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+!

You asked; we answered! Whether you’re allergic to nuts, packing school lunches for a nut-free cafeteria, trying an autoimmune protocol, just not a fan of trail mix, you’ve come to the right spot.

Look on the Bright Side

In many ways, a nut intolerance or allergy is really a blessing in disguise when it comes to Paleo.

At least you won’t fall into the trap of trying to “eat Paleo” by re-creating all your favorite grain-based junk food with almond flour and convincing yourself that it’s “healthy” because it’s gluten-free.

Nuts are technically Paleo, but they aren’t the healthiest foods around. For one thing, they’re high in Omega-6 fats, which can be pro-inflammatory and undo all your hard work spent avoiding seed oils and junk fats. For another, they’re fairly high in phytic acid, which is an anti-nutrient which prevents you from absorbing the minerals in the nuts. This doesn’t mean anyone should eliminate them altogether – they’re fine in small doses – but you’re certainly not missing out on anything extremely nutritious.

But on the other hand, cutting out such a versatile food group from an already restrictive diet can make cooking tough. So take a look at the most common uses for nuts and how to replace them:

Snacks

It’s the quintessential Paleo snack: just grab a handful of nuts or trail mix! But when a quick scoop of almonds is off the menu, what can you do? Here are some snacks that keep well at room temperature, and don’t require a lot of fuss and preparation to eat.

• Olives. The idea behind 100-calorie packs is pretty silly, and counting calories isn’t necessary on Paleo, but 100-calorie packs of olives are incredibly convenient for Paleo snacking since they come pre-packaged in shelf-stable, snack-sized bags.
• Can of tuna. Many stores carry small cans with a peel-off top, so you don’t need to lug a can opener around with you. Toss a squeeze pack of mustard or hot sauce in your bag, and you’re good to go.
• Hard-boiled eggs. Unless you’ll be somewhere really hot, or out for longer than a day, hard-boiled eggs will keep just fine. Peel them before you leave so you don’t have to worry about the shells when snack time comes along.
• Piece of fruit. A banana is a great option here, since bananas are the only fruit with more starch than sugar. This makes them more filling, and easier on your system if you have trouble with fructose.
• Vegetables with mustard. Baby carrots are conveniently pre-cut, but you can chop up anything you get a hankering for.

Baked Goods (cookies, cakes, crackers, etc.)

Paleo baked goods should never be a staple of your diet, regardless if they’re made with nut flour or something else. But if you need a Paleo-friendly flour for a recipe, you do have nut-free options:

• Coconut flour. Despite the name, coconut is not related to peanuts or tree nuts, so most people with nut allergies can eat it without any problems. Just be aware that you can't substitute coconut flour in one-to-one; it's much more absorbent than almond flour, so you'll need to find a recipe written specifically for coconut flour.
• Tapioca starch. Tapioca is from a root, not a nut, so it should also be fine (unless you also happen to have an allergy to tapioca, which is rare).
• Potato starch.
• Arrowroot powder. Arrowroot, as the name implies, is a root and not a nut.
• Plantain flour. The plantain is a starchy fruit, not a nut, so plantain flour should be fine for nut allergies.

You could also just focus on treats that don’t involve any flour at all; what about some tapioca pudding or a fried banana with honey?

Salad Crunch

Nuts are a deliciously crunchy addition to a big pile of greens and some nice olive oil. But you have plenty of other options for adding that extra bit of pep. Why not try…

• Freeze-dried fruit, like blueberries or banana chips
• Matchstick-cut carrots or jicama
• Water chestnuts or bamboo shoots
• Bean sprouts

Nut Butters

Ah, but what to smear on your apples? What to dunk your carrot sticks in? Here’s a rundown of your non-nut options:

• Coconut butter is an option if you can handle coconut. Despite the name, coconut is not related to peanuts or tree nuts, so many people with nut allergies can eat it without any problems. Coconut butter also comes in several flavored variations if you can find them; it’s a great treat to enjoy with fruit or just eat off the spoon.
• Guacamole makes a delicious and creamy dipping sauce for all kinds of vegetables and crunchy things: it doesn’t quite have the same texture as nuts, but it’s equally tasty in its own way.
• Apple butter or peach butter are two yummy options if you’re hankering for something slightly more dessert-like. If you want to go even sweeter, you could also try some raw honey. Canadian honey is particularly good for this; it’s stiffer than American honey, so it has roughly the same texture and solidity as a typical nut butter.
• Mustard, mayonnaise, or salsa will work equally well as vegetable dips.

But Where will I get Vitamin E?

One of the fat-soluble vitamins, Vitamin E is important for skin health and fertility, among other things. Nuts are always mentioned as the Paleo source of Vitamin E, but you still have other options. You can also find it in…

• Avocado
• Spinach
• Broccoli
• Kiwi fruit
• Eggs (preferably pasture-raised)

You’ll also get smaller amounts from most other leafy green vegetables. Really, as long as you eat a diverse diet with a wide variety of plant and animal foods, you’ll be getting plenty of Vitamin E.

Summing it Up

If you want to go Paleo but you’re intimidated by all the nut-heavy recipes: don’t be! There’s no reason why anyone has to eat nuts, even on Paleo. They’re really more of a nice extra. Nut-based “desserts” get a lot of press because they’re often very creative (not to mention easy to take beautiful pictures of), but there’s nothing nutritionally special about nuts, and no reason why you can’t replace them in your cooking with other equally tasty foods. Avoiding nuts shouldn’t make it impossible – or even particularly difficult – to make Paleo work for you.

Sure, you could eat your meatballs plain if you really wanted to, but if you want Paleo noodles, you’ve got options! From linguini to lasagna, here’s a run-down of 7 reasonably easy options for Paleo-friendly noodles.

For many of these options, it really helps to have a spiralizer or a julienne peeler – or both. These gadgets help you create perfectly-shaped, even noodles out of all kinds of vegetables without having to spend all day in the kitchen. A julienne peeler is a little cheaper ($5-10 each), but it’ll require more elbow grease on your part, and if you find yourself reaching for the Paleo pasta every other night, a real spiralizer can be a great investment.

On the other hand, if you have no equipment, all is not lost. You can cut your noodles by hand, or just go for the options that don’t require it (these are marked in the list).

Zoodles

Raw or cooked? Either
Tools required: spiralizer or julienne peeler.
Pasta shapes: noodles (spaghetti-style) and ribbons (fettuccine-style)

They sound like something out of a Nickelodeon cartoon, but zoodles are zucchini noodles: they’re what you get when you take a spiralizer or a julienne peeler to a pile of zucchini.

Zoodles can be eaten raw, or gently warmed to go with a warm topping (like meatballs). They have a very mild, slightly sweet flavor that goes well with anything you’d otherwise put on top of pasta.

Recipes and cooking tips:

• If your zoodles are watery, try pressing them gently between two paper towels, or into the bottom of a colander; this will help them release the extra water.
• If you’re going to cook them, make it gentle. Don’t boil the life out of your zoodles; they’ll just fall apart. A very quick blanch or stir-fry is all they need.
• Here’s a recipe for kale pesto with zoodles.

Spaghetti squash

Raw or cooked? Cooked
Tools required: none.
Pasta shapes: noodles (spaghetti-style)

The classic gluten-free, low-carb “noodle” is the spaghetti squash. You’d never know from the outside, but the flesh of this particular squash breaks apart easily into long, thin threads once it’s been cooked.

Almost any grocery store will carry spaghetti squash. A good spaghetti squash is pale yellow, oval-shaped, and somewhere between the size of a grapefruit and a football. To make a basic “pasta,” all you have to do is poke a few holes in the flesh of the squash, and stick the entire squash in the oven for 45 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes (depending on size). It’s done when the outer skin is soft to the touch. Then cut it open, discard the seeds, and scrape out the strands of flesh with a fork.

Recipes and cooking tips:

• For an al dente texture, undercook the squash slightly; if you like your pasta very soft, overcook it a little.
• Before serving, it helps to leave your spaghetti squash in a colander and gently press it with a towel or paper towel; this gets rid of extra moisture and prevents a puddle in the bottom of your bowl.
• Here's a recipe for Paleo spaghetti to get you started.

Sweet potatoes

Raw or cooked? Cooked
Tools required: varies
Pasta shapes: noodles (spaghetti-style), ribbons (fettuccine-style), or sheets (lasagna-style)

If you get a big enough sweet potato, you can cut it into pretty much any shape you want, and the resulting noodles will be sturdy enough to hold up under a lot of heavy cooking. Take advantage of the versatility: try spiralizing them into tiny noodles, or slicing them into wider sheets to make dishes like lasagna. Or if you’re missing mac’n’cheese, why not cut sweet potatoes into chunkier, macaroni-like segments?

Recipes and cooking tips:

• Here’s a recipe for sweet potato noodles with bacon and pecans.
• Slicing up sweet potatoes into noodles isn’t the same thing as buying “sweet potato noodles” from an Asian market, but if you’ve got a package of those, here’s a recipe to play with

Other hardy vegetables

Raw or cooked? depends
Tools required: depends
Pasta shapes: noodles (spaghetti-style), ribbons (fettuccine-style), or sheets (lasagna-style)

Sweet potatoes aren’t the only root vegetables that make a mean noodle. You can go crazy with turnips, parsnips, carrots, squashes of all kinds…even try out apples or other fruits if you’re making something sweet. Here are a few recipes to get you excited:

• Garlic-ginger parsnip noodles.
• Butternut squash lasagna.
• Carrot "peanut" noodles (no actual peanuts involved).

Cucumbers

Raw or cooked? raw
Tools required: spiralizer/julienne peeler
Pasta shapes: noodles (spaghetti-style) or ribbons (fettuccine-style)

For those dishes where you want a cool, crunchy noodle instead of something pasta-like, cucumbers definitely deliver. They're ideal for salads, especially anything with an Asian flavor.

Recipes and cooking tips:

• Cucumber noodles are fairly delicate; sometimes it helps to seed the cucumber first.
• Here's a recipe to start you off: cucumber noodles with salmon.

Kelp

Raw or cooked? either
Tools required: none
Pasta shapes: noodles (spaghetti-style)

Before you skip this one: kelp noodles do not taste like seaweed! In fact, they don’t really taste like much of anything. They’ll very conveniently take on the flavor of whatever you cook them with.

With that said, the texture of kelp noodles does tend to go better with Asian-inspired dishes: they’re not great with a huge pile of tomato sauce and meatballs.

Recipes and cooking tips:

• Most kelp noodles come packaged in salty water to preserve them. Rinse this off when you take them out of the bag, and then just add salt to your own taste later.
• Here’s a recipe for Asian noodle salad to get you started.

Eggplant

Raw or cooked? cooked
Tools required: depends
Pasta shapes: sheets (lasagna-style)

Spaghetti squash will do you for the long, thin noodles – but what about the flatter, sheet-style noodles that you’d use to make lasagna? Eggplant to the rescue! Slice it from top to bottom into long, thin sheets, and eggplant is perfect for layering, wrapping, or any other noodle-centric job you can think of.

Cooking tips:

• Before cooking with them, lay out your eggplant slices on a paper towel or clean dishtowel, and sprinkle them with salt. Let them sit for 10-15 minutes; then brush off the salt and go on with your recipe. This helps draw out some of the moisture, so you won’t end up with a puddle in the bottom of your finished meal.
• Here’s a recipe for eggplant cannelloni; here’s one for eggplant lasagna

...And Yours!

Got a better idea? Something we missed? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

Yeah, yeah, if you eat enough coconut oil you’ll be able to lose fat while gaining muscle, fast until 4pm without hunger, and squat twice your bodyweight until you’re 150.* But even though coconut is an excellent source of healthy fat, some people just don’t react well to it – from rashes, to indigestion to everything in between. So here’s a practical guide to replacing all things coconut with other Paleo-friendly alternatives.

*Not really. Sorry.

Coconut oil (for cooking)

Coconut oil is the staple cooking fat for Paleo meals, but it’s far from your only choice. You have so many other Paleo choices for cooking fat that replacing coconut oil is a snap. Try…

• Animal fat (lard, tallow, schmaltz, etc.). Tallow, or beef fat, is particularly good for cooking at high heat because it’s very saturated, just like coconut oil.
• Butter
• Healthy plant fats (olive oil, avocado oil, macadamia nut oil, or red palm oil). Avocado oil is especially good if you want something without a strong taste of its own.

Your favorite of this list will depend on what you’re using it for, but there’s something for everyone in the non-coconut fat department.

Just as a point of trivia, red palm oil actually contains a respectable concentration of medium-chain triglycerides, the famously healthy fats that make coconut oil so fantastic. So if you’re looking specifically for an MCT substitute, then palm oil is your next-best choice.

Coconut oil (for beauty/cosmetic uses)

Coconut oil isn’t just for the table! It’s also used as a moisturizer, hair conditioner, mouth rinse…for any product you can buy at CVS, there’s probably a coconut-oil version of it somewhere. But even if your skin rebels at the thought of putting cheap moisturizer on it, you still have non-coconut options:

• Skin: jojoba oil, cocoa butter, avocado oil, or shea butter are all excellent choices for moisturizers and general Paleo skincare.
• Hair: if your skin is so sensitive that you can’t do any commercial products, look into the no-(sham)poo method. The most popular way to do no-poo is to rinse with baking soda, and condition with vinegar, but you also have plenty of other options as well.
• Teeth: toothpaste can be an issue with coconut allergies because sodium laurel sulfate (the ingredient that makes the toothpaste foam) is derived from coconut. But there are some brands without it; just look for “SLS-free” on the label. Alternately, if you’re into oil pulling, you can just replace coconut with sesame seed oil.

Coconut milk (and/or coconut cream)

This one’s a little tougher. So many Paleo recipes call for coconut milk to add a creamy texture to curries, sauces, and desserts. But you do have alternatives. For a substitution, why not try…

• Almond milk: tastes a little “nutty,” which not everyone likes, but it’s widely available.
• Cashew milk: slightly sweeter, and has a taste that most people find a little closer to cow’s milk.

Either would work well in a curry or drink recipe, or just as something to lighten your coffee with. If you’re struggling to get the texture right, a pinch of gelatin might also help thicken up a gravy and provide the same creaminess as coconut milk.

You can get both at grocery stories, but almost all grocery-store versions come with added sugar and flavorings along for the ride. A cheaper and healthier option is to make them yourself at home. Here’s a recipe for almond milk, and here’s one for cashew milk.

Coconut flour

Coconut flour is used in everything from Paleo cookies to the breading on your fried chicken. But with so many excellent grain-free flours out there, it’s not hard to find a substitute. Just beware: you cannot substitute coconut flour 1-to-1! Coconut flour sucks up a lot more water than just about anything else, so you can’t just chuck any old powdered thing in there and call it a day. If you’re not a master grain-free baker, it’s usually best to look for a recipe specifically calling for whatever flour you’re looking for, instead of trying to substitute one for another.

• For baking or breading, try: almond flour, hazelnut flour, or any other nut flour.
• For thickening sauces, try: tapioca starch or arrowroot powder.

Another option is to find recipes that don’t use any flour at all, like these flourless brownies.

It’s also worth mentioning that this shouldn’t really be a huge deal. If your “Paleo” diet is comprised mainly of “Paleo cookies” washed down with “Paleo bread” and “Paleo pizza,” then it’s not really Paleo; it’s a sad, second-rate imitation of standard American junk food. Any kind of flour replacement should be an occasional treat, not an everyday staple. But for those times when you do want a special treat, coconut flour is far from the only option.

Coconut flakes

Coconut flakes are mostly used to add that special touch of chewy sweetness to cookies, macaroons, or other treats. Sometimes they’re also sprinkled on top of a dish to add a crunch. Substitutions will vary depending on how you’re using them, but try…

• As a sweet, chewy ingredient: raisins, dried cranberries, or other dried fruit.
• For crunch on top of a salad: sunflower seeds, flax seeds, crumbled nut topping or dehydrated blueberries (or other berries).
• As a “crust” ingredient: see one of the non-coconut flours listed above.

Coconut aminos

Coconut aminos are the Paleo answer to soy sauce. They deliver the same salty tang, only with no soy and no wheat. Unfortunately, if you also struggle with coconut, then this isn’t exactly an ideal solution.

For a different option, here’s a recipe for a replacement with no soy, wheat, or coconut products. Let the stir-fries resume!

Coconut water

Found in bottles and juice boxes in the checkout line, coconut water is touted as an all-natural electrolyte replacement and energy drink, a little like Mother Nature’s Gatorade.

That’s all true enough: it does have electrolytes, and it is better for you than chugging down a bottle of bright blue food coloring. But you can also make your very own electrolyte drink by squeezing a lemon into a bottle of water and adding a pinch of salt. Shake it up and gulp away; no coconut required.

Coconut sap/coconut sugar

Let’s get this straight: coconut sugar is sugar. Sugar does not magically become healthy because it’s made from the sap of a tree that also produces coconuts! So the bad news is that there's nothing magical about "coconut sugar" that makes it healthier than any other kind of sugar. But the good news is that if it's not special, it's easy to replace. If you need a sweetener, you can substitute honey, molasses, or another Paleo-friendly sweetener, but bear in mind that no matter how “natural” it might be, you’re still essentially eating a spoonful of sugar. Keep it occasional and don’t try to fool yourself that it’s a health food.

Coconut: Optional, not Required

Coconut is a Paleo darling. And it is very good for you, but it’s certainly not required, and if it’s causing a bad reaction, then just skip it! Anything you can do with coconut, you can do with something else. From moisturizing your face to fueling your workout, there’s nothing that you have to rely on coconut for. So don't let this one food stand between you and Paleo; it just shouldn't be that big of an obstacle.

“Falling off the wagon” sounds so harsh – let’s just call it a “detour” off the straight and narrow. Maybe it was a planned detour and you don’t regret a minute: that’s completely fine. Sometimes an experience or a special occasion is important enough to make nutrition a lower priority – that’s a sign that you have a full and engaging life. Everyone should have something in their life that’s more important than avoiding sugar.  On the other hand, maybe your detour was a little less serendipitous and you’re waking up the morning after with a stomachache or worse. Either way, here’s how to manage it.

Let it go.

You cannot change anything you have already eaten, and beating yourself up over it just keeps you stuck in the past, with that food, instead of moving on to be present with a meal that’s actually in line with your goals.

The key to a successful re-entry into the Paleosphere is to avoid the crazy emotional rollercoaster of guilt. You know this one: first you try to do penance for your non-Paleo choices by restricting food or working out harder the next day; that makes you so miserable that you can’t stand it any longer and end up rebounding right into the arms of a chocolate-glazed donut, which of course just fuels the guilt and the promises to “make up for it” in even more miserable ways…

This is awful to go through, it doesn’t help you stick to Paleo choices in the long term, and it’s just not necessary. Don’t try to “atone” by exercising (and this should go completely without saying, but purging is 100% off the table). Take a deep breath, let go of the need to punish yourself, and get ready to move on.

Think big picture.

One weekend of bad choices is 2/365 of your year. That’s 0.5%. That’s nothing.

Even a whole week of vacation is still only 1/52 of the year, or about 2%. That’s still insignificant compared to the other 51/52!

When you take that weekend, or that week, in the context of your whole life, it gets even tinier, until it’s really not worth noticing at all. It’s your regular habits that determine 99% of your health, not the occasional indulgence. This is especially important if you’re feeling guilty or ashamed of whatever you ate: don’t let the bad feelings right now drown out the big picture.

Prepare, prepare, prepare.

No matter why you took a turn off the Paleo road, when you get back on, your first stop should be the grocery store. Stock up on all the Paleo staples, so the kitchen is full of healthy and delicious food just waiting to jump onto your plate. Throw away any non-Paleo food that’s left in the house, or if you can’t toss it, at least put it somewhere out of sight.

Eat the next time you get hungry.

No matter what you ate, no matter how guilty you might feel about it, and no matter how strong the urge to fast or starve yourself is, remember: you are letting this go, and you are moving on. “Moving on” means getting back to your normal, nourishing diet pronto – and a nourishing diet does not include going hungry to atone for some past sin.

The next time you feel hungry, eat as much as you’re hungry for. No sneaky tricks like trying to fill your stomach up with cucumbers or drinking coffee as an appetite suppressant. Just give yourself permission to eat normally, and get back to healthy eating habits right away.

Cook something extra delicious.

Don’t just eat the next time you feel hungry; cook yourself the most delicious Paleo meal you can dream up.  Even if you feel like you don’t deserve a treat, fake it till you make it and treat yourself like royalty: you might just find that when you act the way you want to feel, the feelings follow by themselves. Refusing to punish yourself helps you get past any lingering guilt, move on, and get back in the Paleo groove without the crazy emotional rollercoaster. And besides, it’s a great way to convince yourself that this whole Paleo thing can actually taste pretty good.

Don’t exercise in penance.

It’s fine to do a light workout – in fact, if it helps you mentally re-set, it can even be beneficial. But exercising to “burn calories” is futile in the first place, and it’s not a very loving way to treat yourself. And if you’re feeling sick or gross, don’t try to push yourself through some crazy high-intensity interval session: throwing up on the floor of the gym is not an auspicious way to re-start your Paleo journey!

Instead, try a long walk, a bike ride, or whatever else you feel up to at the moment. And if all you feel up to is some gentle stretching, that’s perfectly fine.

And now…what to eat

This is the part you probably thought was coming first, but in reality “what to eat” is a lot less important than “how to eat it.” If you’re eating Paleo food without guilt, judgment, or restriction, then you’re already well on the way back to life in the healthy lane regardless of whether that Paleo food is a steak or a smoothie. But in case you need some ideas, here you go:

If you feel bloated or uncomfortably full, but you’re still hungry (yes, this happens!)…

• Eat something with a relatively low volume: this is not the time to go for a massive raw salad.
• Don’t skip the vegetables, but go for the ones that cook down very small, like spinach or other leafy greens. You can get the nutrition, but without adding to your stomachache. Cooked vegetables are also gentler on the stomach than raw.

If you’re struggling with rebound sugar cravings…

• Some people find that sugar cravings disappear when they eat some healthy Paleo carbs, like a sweet potato. Other people have more success with a high-fat, low-carb meal. Only you can know which type you are.
• Resist the urge to nibble at dried fruit or Paleo treats. These foods won’t help you get back into the habit of eating healthy, balanced meals.
• If you want something sweet, eat it with a meal, not as a snack. For example, add a handful of blueberries to your salad or try some pork chops with peaches.

If you only want non-Paleo food and nothing healthy looks good…

• That’s OK. Healthy food will start looking good again when your body is hungry.
• If you feel nauseated or sick, it's OK to wait to eat until you feel better.
• Drink some water or tea, take a nap or do something to take your mind off food, and let the hunger come when it comes.

Summing it Up

When it comes to recovering after a non-Paleo adventure, the most important thing to do is to move on. Remember: one weekend, or even one vacation, of less than stellar eating is not going to derail your life unless you let it. Resist the urge to do penance for your nutritional transgressions by fasting or overexercising: food is not a religion, and punishing yourself will accomplish nothing.

Instead, take a trip to the grocery store, stock up on healthy food, and get right back into the swing of things even if you don’t feel like you “deserve to eat.” You deserve to eat by virtue of being alive; it’s not something you have to earn with good behavior, and it’s not a right you can forfeit with a bag of Oreos. Let it go, cook yourself something yummy, and get back in the driver’s seat to take charge of your health again.

You’ve thrown out the flour, sugar, and pasta. You’re all set with herbs, spices, oil, olive oil, and vinegar. And if the zombie apocalypse comes, you have enough cans of coconut milk to build a fortress with some left over to whip up a quick curry. But to make your Paleo meals as delicious as they can be, it really helps to stock up on a few more unusual items as well.

These aren’t things that you’ll see in most people’s kitchens, but they give you a much bigger freedom to experiment, and a wider range of flavors to try – and who doesn’t love that?

1. Gelatin

Why you want it: A little bit of gelatin will make a sauce velvety-smooth; a lot will give you homemade pudding or Jell-O in any flavor you like. Plus, it’s gut-healing and good for your joints.

Where to buy: look in your grocery store near the pie fillings, Jell-O, and other baking supplies.

Try it in… Everything! Here’s a massive roundup of 60 Paleo-friendly recipes with gelatin, from gummy snacks to smoothies to bread.

2. Almond Flour or Coconut Flour.

Why you want it: Even if you don’t go in for the Paleo baking, some kind of flour is very useful to have around for thickening sauces or breading crispy fried chicken.

Where to buy: Almost all grocery stores have some variety of nut flour at this point (typically shelved with the wheat flour), or you can get it online.

Try it in…Pumpkin banana bread - or check out this master list of almond-flour recipes from grain-free master baker Elana Amsterdam.

3. Nutritional Yeast

Why you want it: Do you ever miss cheese in your frittatas or quiches? Nutritional yeast to the rescue! It can’t replace a big block of cheddar, but it’s great for recipes.

Where to buy: health food stores (especially stores oriented towards vegans), or check online.

Try it in…Paleo cheese sauce – or just add a tablespoon or two to your omelet and enjoy!

4. Unsweetened Cocoa Powder

Why you want it: The delicious taste and all the health benefits of chocolate, but without the sugar that you’ll find in chocolate bars. Cocoa powder is great for making homemade treats, but it’s also surprisingly delicious in savory sauces.

Where to buy: In the baking aisle, by the baking chocolate. Make sure you don’t accidentally get hot cocoa; it’s not the same thing! Check the ingredients to make sure it’s just cocoa powder.

Try it in…Chocolate chili.

5. Fish Sauce

Why you want it: Fish sauce delivers that tangy, fermented taste that makes really good Asian food so delicious. Just a sprinkle can do wonders to perk up the flavors in your stir-fries, salad dressings, and soups.

Where to buy: Almost all grocery stores will carry it; check the ethnic foods aisle.

Try it in…Momofuku’s roasted Brussels sprouts.

6. Dried Seaweed

Why you want it: As well as providing a wealth of important minerals, seaweed is a quick and easy way to add flavor and body to any kind of broth, soup, or stew. And you can even use it to make your very own Paleo sushi!

Where to buy: Asian markets, health food stores, or online.

Try it in…Rice-free Paleo sushi rolls, if you’ve got dried nori (the thin sheets of sushi seaweed). If you have wakame, kombu, or something else that doesn’t look like sushi, just toss it in your bone broth.

7. Dried Mushrooms

Why you want them: Mushrooms are high in the amino acid glutamine, which gives them a hearty, meaty flavor. This just gets concentrated with the mushrooms are dried, creating little flavor bombs perfect for adding oomph to soups, stews, and stir-fries.

Where to buy: Grocery stores, usually with the Asian foods or sometimes in the spice aisle.

Try them in…Mushroom bisque or magic mushroom powder.

8. Coconut Aminos

Why you want them: Coconut aminos are a Paleo-friendly substitute for soy sauce. You’ll recognize the taste right away: it’s the same smoky, salty soy-sauce flavor, only hold the soy and the wheat!

Where to buy: Health food stores, Whole Foods, or online (available on Amazon). Or make your own.

Try them in… Asian cauliflower fried rice (or any other Asian-inspired recipe where the directions call for soy sauce).

Got another favorite pantry staple that you couldn’t live without? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

It’s hard enough to go Paleo if you’re doing it with a supportive group – maybe a friend, or a gym community, or just your family deciding to make it happen together. But what do you do when you’re the only person in the house who’s willing to take the plunge? What if your significant other (or roommate) is apathetic about the idea of diet change, and unwilling to even try it? Can you still take the Paleo leap all alone?

It’s a lot harder, there’s no getting around it. But by starting off right, using some strategic techniques for discussing and negotiating food issues, and sticking to your guns, you can help make it a lot easier for everyone.

Set Up Your Environment

There’s a reason why everyone advises you to throw out your old food when you change your diet: out of sight is out of mind, and out of mind is out of mouth.

We all want to believe that we can just use willpower to keep our hands out of the cookie jar, but willpower is limited and it wears out fast: a better strategy for long-term success is to set up your environment to avoid the need for willpower at all.

Unfortunately, sharing a kitchen with a non-Paleo family or roommates makes everything a lot more difficult, because you can’t just throw out everyone else’s food! But what you can do is ask them to help you make the change – not necessarily because they think Paleo is so great, but just as a personal favor to you. Would they be willing to do things like…

• Leave you one cabinet or fridge drawer just for Paleo food.
• Stash bags of chips (or whatever else is tempting you) in the cabinets where you don’t have to look at them.
• Put some healthy food that everyone can agree on (fruit is a good one) out in visible places, so it’s the first thing that comes to mind for snacks.

This isn’t quite as good as a Paleo-only household, but it’s a big help.

Your Choice = Your Effort

You already know that just descending out of the blue and imposing a diet makeover on everyone in the house is not going to end well. That’s disrespectful and completely counterproductive. How would you feel if someone else in the house decided to do the same with a vegan diet?

That’s why it’s important to always phrase this as your choice: you’re not trying to force Paleo on anyone else. And you have to mean it, too: don’t try to “convert” other people to your way of eating, or start giving them dirty looks when they reach for the breadbox.

It helps a lot to plan ahead for this. In particular, make sure that your choice isn’t creating a whole lot of extra work or sacrifice for everyone else.

• If you share a budget, work out a way to fit Paleo foods in without sacrificing everyone else’s favorite meals. (Sound impossible? See Part 1 and Part 2 of our money-saving tips.)
• If someone else does the household grocery shopping, take extra time to make finding the Paleo-friendly foods easy. (Need help with shopping? Try here!)

The pressure is on you to present Paleo as something that everyone can live with, especially if you’re living with your family and not just roommates. Unfortunately, this means that during the initial learning curve, you’ll be absorbing all the extra time it takes to figure out how you can make Paleo work for you – without complaining about it or letting the extra effort make you snappy to everyone else.

This isn’t fair: everyone deserves to be cut a little slack when they’re doing something as hard as changing their whole life. But if you’re constantly grumpy from the stress of fighting your sugar cravings, the take-home for the rest of the household will be: “Paleo is miserable.” The more pleasant and cheerful you can be, and the less extra work everyone else has to do to make Paleo possible, the more smoothly the whole transition will go over.

Cooking for a Mixed Household

It’s all very well to say “your choice, your effort” to a twentysomething living with roommates, but what about the parents who have to cook for their families, too? Who has time to cook two dinners when it’s so hard just to get one on the table?

Nobody, that’s who. And nobody should be expected to: home-cooked meals from Mom (or Dad!) are a rare and precious privilege, not a right. So how can you minimize the changes to everyone else, keep yourself on the Paleo straight and narrow, and have a life outside the kitchen?

Modular Meals

One great time-saving tip is to make “modular” meals. This sounds pretty science-fiction, but in practice it’s simple. If you break up a Paleo meal into parts, you’ll usually have:

• A meat
• A big pile of vegetables
• (optional) A safe starch
• (optional) Some fruit or nuts

If you break up a standard American meal into parts, you’ll get:

• A meat
• A grain product (bread, pasta, etc.)
• (optional) A vegetable
• (optional) Some fruit or nuts

You can cook the same meat and vegetable dish for everyone in the household. Make those Paleo-friendly. Then just adjust each person’s serving of the other items to account for their dietary preferences.

For example, say the kids want to have pasta and meatballs for dinner. Make:

• A pot of pasta
• A Paleo-friendly batch of meatballs and tomato sauce
• A big tray of roasted garlic cabbage
• One baked sweet potato

Everyone else gets pasta, meatballs, and cabbage; you get a sweet potato, a bigger helping of meatballs, and cabbage. The only extra effort required on top of the “normal” meal of spaghetti and meatballs is the 30 seconds it takes to poke a few holes in the potato and pop it in the microwave while the rest of the meal is cooking.

Stealth Paleo

Another option is to make “stealth Paleo” food. Vegans are familiar with this tip: if you tell someone you baked them a “vegan cake,” they’ll assume it’s disgusting, but if you give them a slice of the very same cake and tell them it’s just a cake, they’ll like it.

You can do exactly the same thing with Paleo. You didn’t make a “Paleo dinner;” you just made dinner. Dinner that happens to have no grains in it. What funny coincidence! A sample menu:

• Breakfast: tomato basil frittata with home fries.
• Lunch: beanless chili and fall vegetable salad.
• Dinner: sun-dried tomato chicken with pesto mashed potatoes and asparagus ribbons.

That’s practically a gourmet restaurant menu – probably better than the typical American family is used to eating. And it just so happens to be Paleo as well. Fancy that.

If you decide to go this route, don’t rely on Paleoified treats like Paleo cookies or Paleo cake. It probably won’t taste the same and it just highlights that you’re trying to change the family menu. Instead, just casually cook something healthy and don’t bother mentioning that it’s Paleo at all (the advice in this article on sneaking vegetables into other foods might also come in handy!).

It’s Not Easy

Going Paleo all by yourself isn’t a walk in the park, no matter how well you prepare for it or how supportive your non-Paleo family is. Learning how to navigate family food traditions, favorite restaurants, and social events while eating a completely new and different diet is hard, and it does have a learning curve. It's OK. Give yourself a break. Paleo success is about having generally good habits, not being perfect all the time; if you slip up sometimes, it's not the end of the world.

But then again, going Paleo isn’t easy even for people with complete control over their own kitchen. And there’s also a bright side to learning how to manage your own diet in a non-Paleo household: it’s great practice for traveling or any other time when you don’t have total control over your own food. By the time you have to manage the continental buffet on a business trip, you’ll be well versed in finding healthy options, avoiding temptations, and calmly carrying on with your own food choices even when other people are choosing something else.

You always had a pretty normal appetite – maybe even below average. But then you switched to Paleo, and suddenly, you’re ravenous all the time. Half an hour after eating, your stomach is growling for more. You put back huge heaps of food, but nothing seems to satisfy you: help!

Sound familiar? It’s pretty common, and it’s certainly frustrating. But even though it feels so alarming, it’s not actually a sign that you’re about to gain 50 pounds in the next week. Take a look at the reasons why you might feel constantly hungry after switching to Paleo, and what you can do:

You’re Not Eating Enough

The most basic reason why people get hungry is that they aren’t eating enough food.

But you’re eating mountains of food? That can actually be misleading: sheer volume on your plate is not a sign that your body is getting all the energy it needs. If your body needs 500 calories of energy, downing 7 cups (50 calories) of spinach will not do even though it’s a massive amount of food on the plate.

This might suddenly start being a problem on Paleo if you’re eating the same physical amount of food, but replacing energy-dense grains with energy-poor vegetables. Grains are dried out, meaning that they have very little water weight. This makes them easy to store without going bad, but it also means they pack a lot of calories into a very small space, since only a tiny amount of that space is water. Vegetables (even more energy-dense starchy vegetables like potatoes) have a whole lot more water weight, so they do not pack anything like the same amount of calories into the same space.

To illustrate this, think of one cup of flour. One cup of flour has the same number of calories as 4 cups of diced potatoes or nearly 15 cups of broccoli.

But wait…isn’t lower calorie density one of the main reasons why Paleo works so well for weight loss? Isn’t the availability of calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods one of the main reasons for weight gain? Yes – but there’s also a flip side. Having too large of a calorie deficit can also be unhelpful; for one thing, it makes you hungry all the time! For weight loss, it’s slower but more sustainable to make up a part of that deficit with Paleo foods, so you aren’t miserable and starving all the time.

The fix: when you switch to Paleo, you’ll have to revise your mental estimation of a “normal” plate full of food. When you get away from grains, you need to eat not only more vegetables, but also larger portions of energy-dense foods like meat. Instead of trying to eat 15 cups of broccoli at a sitting (which is a surefire recipe for a stomachache), most people feel best if they do some combination of the following:

• Increase portions of meat and eggs.
• Increase use of cooking fats and oils.

This gives your body fat and protein, the main sources of fuel it needs to run on. You might find that once you’re eating enough of these, your hunger simply disappears, because your body no longer needs to prompt you for more food.

Transition

But what if you really are eating enough meat and fat, but you’re still constantly ravenous? If you’re still in the first few weeks of your Paleo journey, the hunger may be just a part of the transition.

Think of it this way: if you were dying of thirst in the desert and someone came up to offer you a water bottle, you’d gulp it down and ask for more right away, right? The same thing can happen in your body with nutrients. If you ate a nutrient-poor diet before, you may have some built-up deficiencies. Now, suddenly, your body is getting all the foods it needs to fill those deficiencies. Its response: “yes, this is wonderful! More, please!” – and the signal for “more, please!” is that you feel hungry. Very hungry. All the time.

It might be frustrating, but it’s understandable. The good news is that it subsides once those deficiencies are filled. Try eating very nutrient-dense foods (like liver or other organ meats). If you’re craving one thing in particular, you might even be able to identify what exactly you’re missing, and then speed up the transition process with a well-chosen supplement.

Too Much Protein

But wait, isn’t protein supposed to make you feel full?

It absolutely does, up to a point. But there’s a catch: your body can only process about 30% of daily calories from protein. That number has some individual variation (one person may be able to handle 35% while the next can only manage 25%), but it’s a good average. Beyond approximately the 30% mark, the calories are going into your mouth, but they’re just going right back out the other end without doing you any good…and you’re still hungry.

This is called “rabbit starvation” (named after the horrible symptoms that the Inuit suffered whenever they had to rely on very lean rabbit meat without any added fat).

This may be you if your daily menu looks like this:

• Breakfast: skinless chicken breast with steamed broccoli.
• Lunch: can of tuna over salad greens with mustard and vinegar, and just one tablespoon of olive oil.
• Dinner: poached tilapia fillet with fresh tomato slices and cauliflower roasted in coconut oil.

This day of food is a jaw-dropping 48% protein! (Plus 39% fat and 13% carbs). That’s rabbit starvation waiting to happen. And on top of that, it doesn’t provide nearly enough calories for an adult.

The fix: adjust your macronutrient ratios to be less protein-centric, and get more healthy calories from fat and carbs. In the meal plan above, you could make the following changes:

• Breakfast: leave the skin on the chicken breast, and melt a tablespoon of butter over the broccoli.
• Lunch: add two hard-boiled eggs to the salad, and eat an apple with 2 tbsp. of almond butter on the side.
• Dinner: replace the tilapia with salmon, and add a baked or roasted sweet potato with butter.

That day of food is looking a little more reasonable at 27% protein (although that’s still quite a lot of protein!) and also is beginning to approach the daily calorie requirements for an active adult (although it’s still quite low).

Not Enough Carbs

Even independently of how much protein you’re eating, a low-carb diet is a common trigger for hunger and cravings. It’s a common myth that carbs make you hungry: that happens in people who already have metabolic impairment, but not in healthy people eating an appropriate amount of carbs for their needs. In these people, insulin (the hormone that you produce to digest carbs) is a powerful signal for satiety, or feeling full.

The fix: add some safe starches, like potatoes, sweet potatoes, plantains, winter squash, or other starchy Paleo foods.

Cravings

Cravings are not the same as hunger. Hunger comes from the body; cravings come from the brain. Hunger is when your stomach rumbles; cravings are when you have a bad day and your thoughts go straight to the ice cream freezer even though you just had dinner. But since both show up as the desire to eat, people often confuse them.

If you’re confusing hunger and cravings, you might be trying to satisfy a craving by eating healthy food. The thought process goes something like this: “Man, I’m so stressed. I really want a cookie right now. But I know that’s not good for me – I’ll have some hard-boiled eggs as a snack instead.”

The problem here is that you didn’t need “a snack;” you needed stress relief. Hard-boiled eggs are not comfort food: you will eat them and still want the cookie afterwards, because you have not actually solved the problem that drove you to eat in the first place. You can continue in this vein, eating more and more healthy food, and feeling like a bottomless pit because you’re never satisfied.

The fix: stop trying to fill non-food “hungers” with food. Learn to recognize when you’re physically hungry, and when you’re “hungry” for love, comfort, stress relief, attention, or something else.

Is that all?

Not by a long shot. There are all kinds of other causes of hunger (including growth spurts for teenagers, pregnancy, menstrual changes, temperature…); this was just an overview of some of the most common. But if you’re aching for food all day long, there’s probably a good reason behind it, and there’s probably something you can do.

It might be as simple as not eating enough, or it might be as emotionally messy as an unmet psychological need that you’re trying to fill by eating. But there is a cause – and typically there’s also a way to recognize and address that cause, so you aren’t just left scarfing down mountains of food without ever feeling full.

“I’m Paleo, except…” “I eat mostly Paleo, but…” – does this sound familiar?

You know you’d feel so much better if you could dive in 100%, but there’s just one little sticking point that you can’t find an answer for. Take a look at 5 common culprits, and and how to work around them.

5. What can I Bring for Lunch Without a Fridge?

Work lunches without a fridge can be tough, but they’re not impossible and you certainly don’t have to revert to PB&J. Some suggestions:

Get an insulated lunchbox: it’ll keep your lunch at a safe temperature until you’re ready to dig in. This series of posts from Nom Nom Paleo has some fantastic ideas for school lunches that keep safely in insulated lunchboxes and taste delicious (just scale them up from child-size to adult-size if you’re making lunch for a grown-up).

Get a thermos bottle and bring a hot soup or chili for lunch.

Pack a lunch that doesn’t require any refrigeration. Some foods that you might include:

• A can of fish, like sardines or salmon. If fish is getting boring, you can also get cans of chicken and ham; just watch the labels carefully for hidden soy.
• An avocado.
• A piece of fruit.
• Hard-boiled eggs (they’ll keep fine for half a day).
• Chopped fresh vegetables, like carrots or peppers, with a dip.

4. What do I Eat Post-Workout?

You know that protein powder isn’t great for you, and that it’s so much better to get protein from whole foods, but you don’t have an hour after every workout to lovingly prepare an omelet or a fillet of salmon!

Here’s the good news, though: getting in a huge whack of protein right after your workout isn’t as crucial as we used to think. It’s more important to get in enough protein over the course of the day, not all at once as you’re walking out of the gym. (If you want the science behind this, this article is a good place to start).

So for purposes of muscle growth, you actually don’t need to bring a special post-workout protein bomb. But if you just get ravenous right after, here’s a quick solution: at the beginning of the week, bake a big batch of chicken breasts (or hard-boil a dozen eggs) and whip up a batch of potato salad. Then just divide it all into separate containers and grab one for the gym bag every time you need a quick post-workout meal.

3. What's a Good Grab-and-go Breakfast?

No time to cook in the morning? No problem! The secret to easy Paleo breakfasts is to cook ahead. Half an hour on the weekend can get everything set for all the workdays to come, so that all you have to do is grab it out of the fridge. Here’s one suggestion: cook up a batch of mini frittatas (you can put different vegetables and meat in each cup, to keep it interesting). Stock up on 5 pieces of fruit, and throw as many mini-frittatas as you want into a tupperware with a piece of fruit. If you’re really that rushed, you can even eat these in the car, since it’s all finger food.

2. What can I Drink if I Hate Water?

Has your fluid intake slowed to a trickle since getting rid of sugary sodas? Just can’t stand to drink plain H2O? Here are some tips to help you out:

• Get seltzer water and add a squirt of lemon or lime (or your favorite flavoring)
• Try a Paleo lemonade (or maybe you like it with strawberries)
• Drink herbal tea (hot or iced)
• Eat more watery foods, like cucumbers or celery. Cucumbers are 95% water by weight, and it’s all the same to your body! A big crunchy cucumber salad for lunch can rehydrate you just as well as a glass of water.

1. What do I Put in My Coffee/Tea?

Coffee can be a precious morning ritual, a chance to sit down and slowly get ready to face the day. Or maybe it’s the little pick-me-up that gets you through the middle of a hard day of work.

Either way, coffee certainly arouses very strong preferences for taking it one way or the other – some people can’t stand anything but black; other people won’t touch it without sugar; others can’t stand any sweetener but won’t hear of a cup without some heavy cream.

Fortunately, there’s a Paleo option for all of the above:

The sweet tooth: you might find that after a few weeks of Paleo that sweet tooth dies down considerably, and your once-pleasant mug of sugar becomes cloying and sickly-sweet. But if you still want a little sweetener, you might consider Stevia or a sugar alcohol (xylitol or erythritol). Or alternately, just use a small amount of sugar: one teaspoon of sugar in a day is not going to hurt you if the rest of your diet is dialed in. Consider it the 5% non-Paleo indulgence that keeps you on the straight and narrow the rest of the time.

The milk-lover: some people can handle dairy just fine, but others aren't so lucky. Love the creamy flavor of a good latte but hate what it does to your stomach? Try…

• Bulletproof coffee (coffee blended with butter and/or coconut oil): it’s creamy and frothy, packed with healthy fats, and completely dairy-optional.
• Coconut milk: if you just want something to lighten your cup, a tablespoon or two of coconut milk is a stomach-friendly alternative.
• Dairy-free Paleo creamers: yes, they exist! Here’s a recipe for Paleo coffee creamer to get you started.

Got a problem that you didn’t see covered? Let us know what it is (and if you’ve found any fixes) 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.

Take a minute to think up all the “woman food” you know. Soy milk, low-fat yogurt, salad when you really wanted the hamburger, quinoa, cupcakes, smoothies, boneless skinless chicken breast…it’s about as far from Paleo as you can get. In our culture, women get bombarded with messages that this is what they should be eating: lots of low-fat food, lots of grains, and as few calories as you can possibly manage.

Growing up in that environment can make Paleo pretty far beyond many women’s comfort zones. It can feel uncomfortably “masculine” to be enjoying red meat as a nutritious staple food, or to start eating full-fat everything without apologizing for it. It doesn’t help that Paleo gets stereotyped in the media as a “man’s diet:” unwashed modern troglodytes scarfing down heaps of steak and bacon in between their deadlifts.

That stereotype is incredibly damaging though, because Paleo is human nutrition. It’s not just nutrition for men, or lumberjacks, or tough-as-nails elite athletes. It’s also nutrition for ballet dancers and midwives and preschool teachers. There’s nothing “un-feminine” about eating the food your body was designed to thrive on.

To prove this once and for all, take a look at what nutrients women need for healthy metabolic and reproductive function, and how Paleo can deliver them.

What Women Need: Energy

At the most basic level, food is energy: without enough calories, everything else is largely irrelevant. Women, like everyone else, need energy to live - and Paleo is a whole lot better at providing it than a steady diet of yogurt and flax seeds.

How much energy? Probably a lot more than you think. Most women need around 2400 calories a day – and that’s if they’re not particularly active. If you don’t believe this, you can plug your height, weight, and activity into the Health Calc and see for yourself.

Without enough energy, women are in danger of a whole laundry list of health problems secondary to simple undernutrition. From an evolutionary perspective, this is pretty obvious. Think about the differences in how men and women evolved: for men, reproduction is relatively quick and undemanding. But for women, pregnancy can be very dangerous and hard on the body. That difference in sex roles means that women’s bodies are very sensitive to any sign of famine or danger. If the female reproductive system gets put under too much stress, it just shuts down, and that has consequences for your whole body – it’s not just about your period!

In the medical literature, this usually gets classified as one of two things:

• Functional hypothalamic amenorrhea: loss of the menstrual cycle due to hormonal changes, with or without an eating disorder and with or without exercise. Often accompanied by osteoporosis.
• Female athlete triad: three symptoms (amenorrhea, osteoporosis, and disordered eating) seen in women who eat too little and work out too much.

Women who have lost their period due to undernutrition have fragile bones, suppressed thyroid function, sex hormones that are all out of order, and chronically elevated stress hormones. Lost periods are just a symptom: under the chronic stress of inadequate calorie intake, these women’s bodies are simply breaking down.

These problems are very common in women who work out too much and eat too little, with a heavy emphasis on the “eat too little.” Even the female “athlete” triad isn’t about athletic as much as it is about sheer calorie math. This study, for example, found that thyroid hormone dysfunction only occurred in exercising women who ate a calorie deficit. Women who were eating enough to support their activity had no problems at all, even when they trained at a high intensity.

Looking at the menstrual response to famine-level calorie restriction tells us that this is precisely what women shouldn’t be doing. And yet, if you think about the typical “woman foods,” they’re all designed to reduce energy intake as much as possible. They're low in fat (which has more energy per gram than protein or carbohydrate), or they're just low in total calories (like fruits and vegetables). The typical diet plan is 1200-1500 calories per day! That’s about half as many calories as an active woman needs. This kind of diet is incredibly harsh and stressful to your reproductive system (not to mention everything else), and it’s not healthful in the short-term or the long-term.

Just to be clear: you do need a calorie deficit to lose weight. But you don’t need the kind of extreme crash diet that will send your period running for the hills and your overall health down the drain. “Women’s health” doesn’t mean starving yourself into infertility! Instead, try the Paleo approach: don’t count calories and eat enough energy-dense foods to keep your body out of “famine mode” even if you’re trying to lose weight. Paleo is a better option for slower, sustainable weight loss (if you want to lose weight – not all women do!) while preserving reproductive and metabolic health.

What Women Need: Carbs

Restricting carbs or “earning your carbs” through exercise is another piece of bad advice women frequently have to put up with. Sometimes you’ll hear that women have a harder time losing weight than men, so they need to be ultra-strict with carbs to make it happen. But when we apply the litmus test of menstrual function, we can see that this is also potentially unhealthy. What a healthy menstrual cycle shows us is that most women do better with a moderate amount of carbs, neither too many nor too few.

Some Carbs are Good.

Like getting enough calories, getting enough carbs is a signal of plenty and safety. Insulin, the hormone produced in response to eating carbohydrates, sends a message to the reproductive system that “everything is fine; there’s enough food available for you to have a baby” (you can read more about this in this study).

This makes a very low-carb or zero-carb diet a bad idea for many (although not all) women: it causes a hormonal “famine response” very similar to calorie restriction.

Too Many Carbs are Problematic.

On the other hand, women also have more fat-burning adaptations than men. For example, when they exercise, they naturally burn more fat and fewer carbohydrates; this suggests that they might do better with a greater proportion of fat as a fuel source. Too many carbs can also be a problem: insulin overload (leading to insulin resistance) and obesity are major contributory factors to infertility diseases like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

In other words, looking at healthy menstrual function tells us that the demand to restrict carbs is just as wrongheaded as the demand to restrict calories. There seems to be an ideal range of carbohydrates for women that’s neither too low nor too high. On average (although there are exceptions), women do not do as well on a ketogenic diet as men do, but they also shouldn’t be eating so many carbs that they crowd out that other essential macronutrient, fat.

To get a moderate and flexible carb intake, Paleo is a lot better than the typical “woman food,” which is usually either extremely high in carbs (the vegan, brown-rice-heavy model of “healthy”) or extremely low in carbs (the protein-based crash diet). Instead of either of the extremes, Paleo provides moderate carbs from safe starches, at a level that’s easy to adjust depending on individual tolerance.

What Women Need: Fat

Low-fat yogurt. Low-fat cheese. Low-fat ranch dressing. Skinless chicken breast. Fat is another demonized source of calories for women, but it’s one of the most important. Going back to the menstrual cycle yet again, we can see fat restriction as an independent factor in amenorrhea (loss of normal cycles) even after taking calorie restriction into account. It’s not just any calories these women need; it’s calories from fat.

• This study identified “mild dieting, close to normal but prolonged and characterized by an important fat restriction” as a key driver of the hormonal dysfunction behind functional hypothalamic amenorrhea. Gee, does that sound like anyone you know?
• In this study, both inadequate calories (1768 compared to 2215) and inadequate fat intake (333 calories from fat vs 639) were associated with amenorrhea.
• In this study, women with hypothalamic amenorrhea consumed 50% less fat than control women of the same weight with regular menstrual cycles.

The lesson: women need fat. Even if you’re eating enough or close to enough calories, inadequate fat intake can still damage your health.

Saturated fat is particularly crucial for women, because it’s the backbone of all the sex hormones. From saturated fat comes testosterone (yes, women have testosterone too), and from testosterone comes estrogen. So for healthy hormones, you want enough saturated fat in your diet.

This has largely been studied in men, but take a look at this paper. Testosterone synthesis after exercise was highest in men who ate the most saturated and monounsaturated fat. A high ratio of PUFA to saturated fat was a predictor of lower testosterone response. Remember that testosterone is a precursor for estrogen: to get enough estrogen, you need enough testosterone first. And eating plenty of healthy saturated fat can help get you there.

Another type of fat to consider is Omega-3 PUFA. Omega-3s are important for just about everything, but in women, they have a special role. The composition of the fat in a woman’s diet affects the composition of the fat on her body – if she eats more Omega-3s, she’ll have more in the fat deposits around her hips and thighs. Now say that woman gives birth to a baby and starts breastfeeding. To help its brain grow and develop, that new baby needs plenty of fat, especially a type of Omega-3 fat called DHA. And that fat mostly comes from the mother’s pre-existing fat deposits – her diet while breastfeeding is a comparatively minor influence. If you ever want to have a baby, the Omega-3 fats you eat now are literally the baby’s “brain food” down the line.

Omega-3 fats are also important for other aspects of women’s health:

• This study found a correlation between a high O6:O3 ratio and the severity of endometriosis.
• In this study, a high ratio of O6:O3 was correlated with postpartum depression.
• Adequate Omega-3 fats may help with menstrual cramps.

To sum it all up, women should eat plenty of saturated fat and Omega-3s to stay in optimal hormonal and metabolic health. That makes Paleo far and away better than the typical “skim milk and fat-free salad dressing” diet that women usually try to eat to “get healthy.” Skip anything with “fat-free” on the label, and enjoy some real butter on your vegetables.

What Women Need: Micronutrients

On top of the macros, there are also a few important micronutrients that women should be aware of.

One of the biggest areas of concern is iron: 12 percent of reproductive-aged women in the United States are iron-deficient. For Black women, that number goes up to 19%, and for Hispanic women, it’s 22%. This is clearly an important health problem, since iron is so important for energy, athletic performance, and mental health.

So why are women so deficient in iron? Partly it’s because they lose more iron than men (through bleeding every month), but partly it’s because most iron-rich foods aren’t considered “feminine,” so a lot of women avoid them. There are two types of iron, heme and non-heme. Non-heme iron is found in plant foods. It’s nice, but it’s less absorbable than heme iron, found in animal foods. Heme iron is really what you want – and the richest source around is red meat. Any kind of red meat will do. So all those women who order the chicken salad when they really wanted the steak are really just depriving themselves of a vital nutrient!

The deficiency statistics for other nutrients aren’t quite as dire, but they still deserve a mention. Calcium is important for preventing osteoporosis (a problem that affects women at a much higher rate than men), particularly for older women. Women also need to take special care to get enough iodine: a deficiency in iodine can cause amenorrhea and infertility.

How does Paleo deliver all these important nutrients? Take a look:

• Calcium: turnip greens, collard greens, broccoli, bones/bone broth, bone-in fish, and dairy only if you tolerate it well.
• Iron: any kind of red meat.
• Iodine: any kind of fish or seafood, or pastured eggs.

As long as you’re eating enough food overall, you shouldn’t have a problem getting enough of these nutrients on Paleo. In fact, Paleo is a much richer in iron and iodine than the standard American “woman food,” so once again, Paleo comes out ahead.

What Women Don’t Need: Soy

Almost every woman gets told to eat more soy at some point in her life. Whether she has too little estrogen, too much estrogen, the wrong kind of estrogen, just enough estrogen…just one magical legume will apparently cure it all.

The magic behind these “benefits” is the phytoestrogen content of soybeans: phytoestrogens are plant compounds that look a little bit (but not entirely) like estrogen to the human body. They bind to estrogen receptors, but they don’t quite do all the things real estrogen does. Powerful, without a doubt, but do they actually help with any kind of hormonal condition?

• From this Cochrane review of soy and menopausal symptoms: “overall there was no indication that phytoestrogens worked any better than no treatment.”
• From this meta-analysis of soy and hormones: “In premenopausal women, meta-analysis suggested that soy or isoflavone consumption did not affect primary outcomes… In post-menopausal women, there were no statistically significant effects”
• This overall report about soy in general concluded that “The evidence does not support an effect of soy products on endocrine function, menstrual cycle length, or bone health.”

Not exactly a rousing chorus of support! It’s safe to say that the health effects of soy for women are debatable at best, and quite probably nonexistent. And since there are so many other problems with soy, the advice to eat it all the time is extremely over-hyped.

Conclusion

To put it in a nutshell, the nutritional advice often targeted at women is really the opposite of what most women ought to be doing. For maintaining optimal reproductive health (and all the metabolic and hormonal benefits that come with it), Paleo is a much better bet. Women need enough calories, enough fat (especially saturated fat), and adequate carbs. They need a regular source of Omega-3s, and a lot more iron than they’re currently getting. Women do not need to waste their precious lives in starving their bodies into submission, and soy products are ineffective at best.  As strange as it sounds, plenty of red meat and butter might actually be the “most feminine” diet around – if “most feminine” means “most likely to help a woman stay healthy, fertile, and strong.”

Liver isn't just something that you eat (although that's important too, and you can read about it here). It’s also something that you have, and your own liver is definitely an organ you want to take care of: it's responsible for crucial functions like cholesterol synthesis, detoxification, and fat metabolism. Without a healthy liver, none of us would last very long, so learn how to keep yours humming along smoothly.

One way of doing this is to think about problems you’d like to avoid. There are a few different types of liver problems:

• Alcoholic hepatitis: fat deposits on the liver and liver breakdown caused, as the name implies, by excessive alcohol consumption
• Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD): accumulation of fat deposits on the liver in people who don’t drink.
• Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH): a more severe form of NAFLD.
• Autoimmune hepatitis: liver inflammation caused by an autoimmune attack on liver cells.

Liver problems don’t get a lot of press, except as an occasional footnote on the complications of obesity or alcoholism, but that’s not because they don’t exist. This paper estimates the prevalence of NAFLD alone at 20-30% in developed countries! In the overweight and obese, rates are even higher. But these patients often fly under the radar because subclinical liver problems develop slowly and often show no symptoms until the disease is very far advanced.

The implication of this is that even if you don’t notice anything wrong, you might still be having liver trouble on the inside. So what causes all these inflammatory conditions, and how can diet affect them?

How does Fat Get in the Liver?

Fat can accumulate on the liver from 3 different sources:

• Release of fatty acids from body fat deposits
• Dietary fat that “sticks” to the liver
• Fat created in the liver itself (de novo lipogenesis)

Today, most scientists agree on a “two-hit” theory of liver disease.

First hit: insulin resistance leading to de novo lipogenesis (synthesis of fat in the liver), fat released from body fat deposits, and other metabolic problems cause fat accumulation in and around the liver (NAFLD). This stage can last for years and is often asymptomatic.

Second hit: a perfect storm of inflammation, oxidative stress, and other factors causes permanent damage known as NASH and potentially progressing to cirrhosis.

So what does diet have to do with any of this?

Diet and Liver Disease: Insulin

Insulin, the hormone needed to digest carbohydrates and use them for energy, has a very important effect on liver health. A quick review of insulin: it’s a hormone that transfers glucose (carbs) from your food into your muscles, where it’s used for energy. In healthy people, this process causes a brief spike in insulin levels after eating a meal containing carbohydrates, but in people with metabolic problems, the story looks a little different. To put it very briefly, eating a metabolically inappropriate amount of carbohydrates (too many or too few) can make the muscles insulin resistant: they no longer open the door when insulin comes knocking with the carbs. The carbs get sent to the liver and stored as fat, and blood levels of insulin stay high.

Basically, insulin resistance is a physiological inability to handle eating carbs. And although it’s not totally clear which one is the cause and which one is the effect, insulin resistance and NAFLD/NASH go  hand in hand. This study even described NAFLD as “the hepatic [liver-related] manifestation of the metabolic syndrome.” Patients with non-alcoholic liver problems are usually also insulin resistant if not outright diabetic, and often overweight as well (although not always: thin people can be insulin resistant too!).

Excess Carbs and Liver Problems

This study provided fairly dramatic proof of the theory that excess carbohydrates are important in the accumulation of liver fat: after 3 weeks of carbohydrate overfeeding (1000 calories/day of simple sugars), subjects’ weight increased only 2%, but their liver fat increased by 27%.

In this study, a very high-carb diet (75% of calories from carbs) elevated plasma triglycerides and decreased fat oxidation compared to a moderate-fat, moderate-carb (40% fat, 45% carbs) diet. In other words, the high-carb diet made the subjects store fat, rather than burning it. The study was a very short-term intervention (only 3 days), so it may not be relevant in the long term, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Is Very Low-Carb Better?

This might make you think that a ketogenic diet is the best possible remedy for liver problems: get rid of the carbs, and the liver fat will follow. This study seems to support that: a ketogenic diet had dramatic results on fatty liver (93% of patients improved, and 21% went into complete remission), but considering that it was a tiny study with only 14 subjects, it’s hard to draw solid conclusions. And there’s also some evidence that ketosis might not be the best idea:

• A lot of fascinating studies on mice have found that long-term ketosis is actually quite stressful to the liver, although it’s not completely clear whether this applies to humans (since, for example, inducing ketosis in mice requires restricting protein as well as carbs).
• It’s very plausible that ketosis is overkill: moderate-carb diets without ketogenic levels of restriction can be very effective for NAFLD/NASH. For example, in this study, subjects got either 60% carbs/25% fat or 40% carbs/45% fat; at the end of the study period, the hormonal benefit was noticeably greater for the lower-carb group.

On the whole, the evidence seems to support a low- to moderate-carb diet, with potential for ketosis to be even better. But as usual, more research is needed before anyone has conclusive proof one way or another.

Diet and Liver Disease: Fructose

A very misunderstood carbohydrate when it comes to fatty liver disease is fructose. Fructose is the carbohydrate found primarily in fruit and table sugar. Food that tastes “starchy” (like potatoes, rice, or bread) has carbs primarily from glucose, while food that tastes “sweet” (like fruit) has a substantial amount of fructose.

Unlike the starchy carbs found in grains and tubers, fructose does not get channeled by insulin into the muscles. Instead, it’s sent straight to the liver, making it much easier to turn into fat instead of store in the muscles.

This makes fructose a prime suspect for fatty liver disease – and there are two types of evidence that seem to support this. First of all, high fructose intake in humans is associated with greater rates of NAFLD. Second, evidence in mice and rats seems to agree: an easy way to make a mouse’s liver very, very sick is to feed it a lot of fructose.

Is Fructose Really That Bad?

But the mouse studies are a perfect example of why animal research isn’t always applicable to humans. These mice are often eating over half their daily calories from fructose: that’s a level of sugar consumption that very few humans ever reach. As for the association between fructose intake in humans and NAFLD? That’s simple: high fructose intake = high consumption of soft drinks and candy = calorie and carbohydrate surplus (often with an accompanying micronutrient deficiency). Carbohydrate excess from any source will be dangerous to the liver, but fructose specifically isn’t any worse than anything else.

We know this because, in controlled human trials, fructose only has this effect when it’s eaten as part of a calorie surplus. In this study, for example the researchers compared a high-fructose and a high-glucose diet. At an appropriate calorie level, neither diet was particularly bad. At a caloric excess, they were both dangerous to the liver, but to approximately the same degree. There’s nothing specifically bad about fructose that’s different from the problems with high carb intake overall or calorie intake that exceeds the body’s energy requirements.

Another reason to suspect the fructose-NAFLD link is that fructose only seems to harm mice when they’re also deficient in another vital nutrient, choline (more on this below). Since a Paleo diet is full of choline almost by default, fructose is less of an issue.

For people concerned about their liver, this means there’s no reason to avoid fructose from whole foods like fruit. Apples and oranges will not give you liver problems. Coke, on the other hand, is a prime suspect, because the nature of sugar-sweetened drinks is that they’re very easy to overconsume without noticing it. So steer clear of sugar in a can, but don’t worry about the fruit salad.

Diet and Liver Disease: Fats

As you might expect from the name, fatty liver disease is strongly influenced by dietary fat. But don’t rush out to throw away your butter just yet, because the different types of fat all have different effects. The literature on NAFLD likes to demonize “high-fat” diets, without considering that the different types of fats have demonstrably different effects on liver health and metabolic function, and talking about a “high-fat” diet is uselessly imprecise.

Saturated fat

There’s a lot of survey data that connects dietary saturated fat to fatty liver disease. But most of it is very lazy science: researchers look at the data about what people say they eat, notice that people who admit to eating more saturated fat also tend to have higher rates of liver disease, and conclude that the fat is to blame. But this is a classic case of the problems with epidemiological research. People who eat saturated fat today are mostly people who just don’t care about their health – they also smoke, drink, eat junk food, and don’t exercise. It’s impossible to just look at their fat intake alone and conclude that the fat is responsible for the liver disease.

What’s more, there’s actually evidence in both humans and animals that saturated fat does not cause fat accumulation in the liver in the absence of sugar overload:

• In this study, a low-carb, high-fat diet with nearly 40% of fat calories from saturated fat caused more significant improvement in liver fat deposits than a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet.
• This study in rats found that saturated fat did not cause fat accumulation in the liver, even when the rats ate a calorie surplus and gained weight.

If you get your saturated fat in the form of junk food, it probably comes with a hefty dose of sugar, and sugar does contribute to fatty liver. But the saturated fat is not to blame.

Monounsaturated fat

There’s not a huge amount of evidence for monounsaturated fat, but it seems to be beneficial. In this study, for example, subjects got either a high-carb diet (52% carbs, 18% protein, 30% fat) or a moderate-carb high-MUFA diet (40% carbs, 18% protein, 42% fat, and 28% MUFA). The high-MUFA subjects reduced liver fat noticeably more than the high-carb subjects.

Omega-6 fats

As Paleo veterans can probably guess, Omega-6 fats are bad news. On the most basic level, they’re inflammatory, and inflammation is one of the many drivers of insulin resistance and the metabolic syndrome in general. This paper also goes into some of the other evidence linking Omega-6 PUFA to liver trouble in particular: the short version is that they’re really not great for you, and it’s best to minimize the amount of Omega-6 PUFA in your diet by avoiding seed oils, choosing grass-fed or pastured meat rather than factory-farmed versions, and treating nuts as an occasional indulgence rather than an everyday staple.

Omega-3 fats

With Omega-3s, we finally have a clear effect: they’re beneficial. For one thing, they help improve the oxidation (burning for energy) of fat, so it doesn’t get stored in the liver. They’re also anti-inflammatory, and help counteract the damage of Omega-6s. The evidence in human trials supports this: in this study, for example, 1 year of supplementing with Omega-3 fats significantly improved the health of the patients’ livers.

To make a long story short, the evidence we have suggests that the right kind of fat isn’t dangerous at all to the liver. People with fatty liver disease often get told to eat a low-fat diet, but may actually be counterproductive, because on a low-fat diet, you’re almost guaranteed to be deficient in one crucial micronutrient strongly protective against fatty liver disease: choline.

Diet and Liver Disease: Choline

One of the major problems with many mouse studies of fatty liver disease is that they don’t account for micronutrients that also play a huge role in preventing (or causing) liver problems. All the micronutrients are important, but one of them is head and shoulders above the rest.

Choline is a water-soluble B-vitamin found abundantly in liver, other meat, and egg yolks. There’s also some in broccoli, cauliflower, and other cruciferous vegetables, but you’d have to eat a whole lot of broccoli to get the choline you need. Nutritionists originally thought that choline was an “optional” nutrient (since we have a metabolic pathway for making it), but considering the evidence that we have from patients on feeding tubes, we now know that isn’t the case.

This study dramatically demonstrates the role of choline in maintaining good liver health. Patients on feeding tubes are notorious for getting fatty liver disease. The researchers took four patients who had low blood levels of choline, and gave them a choline supplement for 6 weeks. Sure enough, their fatty liver disappeared completely with adequate dietary choline.

The amount of choline that an individual person needs depends partly on genetics and partly on sex. Some premenopausal women need less, because they have a gene that interacts with estrogen to make their body’s production of choline more efficient. But almost 40% of women don’t have this gene, and they need the same higher level of choline as men and postmenopausal women do: about 550 mg per day.

To put that requirement into perspective, it’s equivalent to roughly 6 ounces of raw beef liver or 5 egg yolks. If you wanted to get that choline from broccoli instead, you’d need to eat 3 pounds of broccoli, so animal foods are definitely a preferable source. This suggests that fatty animal foods don’t cause fatty liver disease; they help prevent it thanks to their high levels of choline! If you’re eating Paleo, you shouldn’t have a problem with getting enough choline – just enjoy the whole egg and don’t skimp on the organ meats. Ironically enough, eating foie gras could help your own liver get healthy!

Diet and Liver Disease: Gut Flora

This is a very new area of research, but there’s a growing body of evidence connecting NAFLD to imbalances in the gut flora.

This shouldn’t be surprising to the Paleo crowd: since gut flora are so heavily involved in the development of obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic disorders, it only stands to reason that they’d be important for NAFLD as well.

For one thing, the gut flora regulate the metabolism of choline, so how much choline you get depends on how happy your intestinal bacteria are. Gut barrier permeability (leaky gut) may also play a role: after an evaluation of several patients, this study concluded that NAFLD is associated with leaky gut, and also with the prevalence of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO). This one concurred: patients with fatty liver had much higher rates of SIBO than controls.

There are several other mechanisms that could really use some more research (this paper goes into more details if you’re curious), but the take-home is clear: unhappy gut flora make for a very unhappy liver as well.

Summing it Up

The good news about fatty liver: if you can catch it as NAFLD (before it gets to NASH), it’s reversible. And the evidence we have suggests that Paleo nutrition covers a lot of important bases: it’s high in Omega-3s, low in Omega-6s, rich in choline (and other vital nutrients) and easy adjustable to meet anyone’s carbohydrate requirements.  Probiotic supplements, bone broth, or fermented foods are also options to look into in terms of healing the gut flora.

A note on one common pitfall: if you do have fatty liver disease, you might notice a transient spike in cholesterol as your liver begins to heal. This is normal and nothing to worry about: it’s simply your body’s way of eliminating the cholesterol that used to be stuck around the liver. Your numbers will go back to normal once your liver is healed, and your arteries won’t be any the worse for it. It’s certainly no reason to panic and go back to a low-fat, choline-deficient diet!

Of course, none of this information is a substitute for medical advice. Diet is only one part of health; it's not a substitute for professional medical care. If you have fatty liver, you should talk to your doctor about diet and potentially medication: don't self-diagnose online and then start trying to treat yourself all alone! But hopefully this article will give you some information and references to bring with you into the doctor's office, so you can rest assured that Paleo is not making the problem worse!

“Delicious” isn’t really the first word that comes to mind when we think of medicinal plants. Most of us probably picture a stringy green blob of some no-doubt powerful herb, or an odd-smelling tincture of bark or roots. It might be worthwhile to choke them down for the sake of your health, but they certainly aren’t foods we’d choose to eat, given the option of something more appetizing.

This is actually a false assumption, though, since spices – which we deliberately add to our food to make it taste better – are some of the most powerful medicinal plants around. Some of the earliest folk remedies in ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine involved spices of one kind or another, and as it turns out, the old wives’ tales might actually have a grain of truth to them: spices are powerful medicines, and free of many of the side effects that make prescription medicines so dangerous.

These all-natural therapies have great benefits when they’re concentrated in pill form, but even better, some of them actually work even in the small amounts you’d ordinarily sprinkle on your food. Without even walking into a health-food store, take a look at what ordinary flavorings can do for you:

Blood Sugar Control

A quick overview of blood sugar (also called blood glucose; glucose is just a kind of sugar): when you eat a food containing carbohydrates, your body uses those carbs for fuel, especially for your muscles (that’s why athletes generally need more carbs than the rest of us). Insulin is the hormone that opens the door into the muscles, and lets the carbohydrates in. In a metabolically healthy person, this will result in a predictable pattern after a carbohydrate-rich meal: a temporary increase in blood sugar, and then a decrease as all that sugar leaves the blood and enters the muscles instead.

In diabetics on the other hand, blood sugar is chronically high, because diabetics either don’t produce enough insulin (Type 1) or their muscles aren’t getting the message from the insulin signaling (Type 2). Chronically high blood sugar is bad news: it sets off a vicious cycle of inflammatory reactions, and often ends up being stored as fat (the reason why diabetes and obesity are closely related).

To summarize very briefly, chronically high blood sugar is a serious problem, and blood sugar control is especially important for diabetics. So how can spices help with this?

First up to bat is cinnamon. It’s a delicious coincidence that cinnamon goes so perfectly with sweet potatoes, because from a health perspective, it’s the perfect accompaniment to everyone’s favorite safe starch.

In one study, 3 grams (just under 2 teaspoons) of cinnamon every day for eight weeks improved blood sugar control, lipid profile, and BMI in diabetic patients. Another study found important benefits for doses as low as 1 gram (less than a single teaspoon) daily.

Even healthy people can benefit from this. One study fed patients rice pudding, and found that pudding flavored with 3g cinnamon helped control the insulin response to the carbohydrate-rich meal (in other words, it helped them metabolize the carbohydrates better).

A less famous seasoning is fenugreek, a spice best known from Indian and Middle Eastern cuisine. In one study, fenugreek seeds at lunch and dinner improved blood sugar control and blood lipids in Type 1 diabetic patients. Fenugreek probably wouldn’t go well with your sweet potatoes, but why not roast up some white potatoes in butter or coconut oil, with a sprinkling of fenugreek and curry powder?

Blood Lipid Improvements

Blood lipids (triglycerides and cholesterol) are a topic of hot debate. There’s no real evidence to prove that dietary cholesterol raises blood cholesterol, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that blood cholesterol itself is harmless; it just proves that egg yolks are innocent of raising it. So even if you’re happily and healthily chowing down on butter, liver, and other extremely nutritious cholesterol-rich foods without a trace of guilt, blood lipid profiles are still something to keep an eye on.

A quick review of the acronyms:

• LDL Cholesterol: This is the “bad cholesterol” that most doctors agree you should reduce (although even this is much more complicated than it sounds).
• HDL Cholesterol: This is the “good cholesterol” that most doctors are fine with.
• Triglycerides: these are another kind of blood lipid associated with cardiovascular disease – interestingly enough, the best way to raise triglyceride levels is not eating fat, but rather eating a lot of refined carbohydrates!

Many of the same spices that help improve blood glucose control also help improve blood lipids (probably because insulin and blood sugar are very closely related to cardiovascular health). Several of the cinnamon studies, for example, noted that not only did cinnamon improve subjects’ blood sugar levels, but it also lowered their LDL cholesterol, and increased or did not change their HDL cholesterol. This means the subjects had an improved ratio of LDL to HDL, a pattern associated with a lower risk of heart disease.

Another study specifically on cholesterol found that fenugreek powder (also familiar from the blood sugar section), used as a flavoring in any dish the study subjects wanted to eat, lowered total cholesterol and LDL. Considering that poor blood lipid profiles are so closely associated with diabetes, and that both are signs of overall inflammation, it’s not surprising that the same anti-inflammatory spices provide benefits for both.

A third beneficial spice for blood lipid improvement is ginger. In a study in Iran, patients who got 3 grams (just under 2 teaspoons) of ginger every day had reduced triglycerides, total cholesterol, and LDL cholesterol compared to a placebo group.

Improve Blood Pressure

Hypertension (high blood pressure) doesn’t actually result from eating too much salt, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an issue to be aware of. Despite how little we actually know about the causes of hypertension, it’s probably a safe bet to aim for a normal blood pressure. Amazingly enough, cinnamon comes to the rescue again here: after 2 grams of cinnamon per day for 12 weeks, a group of Type 2 diabetics showed lower blood pressure compared to controls.

Food Preservation

Spices don’t just act as antioxidants within the human body; they also help to prevent the nutritional degradation of food during storage. In one study, for example, annatto and coriander were extremely effective at preserving the valuable Omega-3 fatty acids in meatballs during storage. Although Omega-3s are very good for you, they are still a type of PUFA and accordingly they’re quite fragile and prone to oxidation and going rancid. The spices in this study helped to prevent that, keeping the fats intact and healthy rather than oxidized and inflammatory.

Preventing the oxidation of these fragile fats helps avoid the creation of advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), which create oxidative stress and speed up the aging process. The best illustration of this is a recent test where researchers gave men with Type 2 Diabetes one of two types of burger patties. The first patty was seasoned with salt only. The second had salt and a spice mix containing cloves, cinnamon, oregano, rosemary, ginger, black pepper, paprika, and garlic powder.

Compared to the control group, the group eating the spiced patties had fewer markers of oxidative stress: the antioxidants in the spices protected the fats in the hamburger both during cooking and during digestion. The spiced burgers also helped improve the function of the endothelium, the cell layer that lines the inner surface of blood vessels. Impaired endothelial function is one major risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, so this represents a significant cardiovascular benefit.

This is a dramatic illustration of how spices can help make your food better for you by reducing these small problems that aren’t noticeable individually but add up over time. If you like to cook once a week and freeze the results for quick and easy dinners all week long, this is definitely a benefit to pay attention to.

Reduce DOMS

Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness (abbreviated DOMS) is familiar to any athlete who’s ever pushed it a little too hard in the gym and woken up the next day barely able to move. But did you know that your post-workout meal could save you some of that pain? In this study on female martial artists, one group of researchers found that 3 grams (slightly less than 2 teaspoons) of ginger effectively reduced muscle soreness.

Improve Gut Flora Function

As it turns out, our gut flora love spices just as much as we do, and they seem to be particularly fond of turmeric. A spice instantly recognizable for its bright golden-yellow color, turmeric is most frequently used in Indian and Southeast Asian cuisine.

In this study, subjects ate curry either with or without turmeric. After their meal, researchers tested the subjects’ breath to see how much hydrogen was in it. The turmeric group had more hydrogen in their breath, and the carbohydrates in the meal seemed to be moving through their small bowel faster. These are both signs of a healthy response from the gut flora.

Another study, which gave subjects 72-144mg/day (less than 1 teaspoon) of turmeric for 8 weeks reported that digestive symptoms were significantly improved in the intervention group compared to a placebo group. Interestingly enough, this study measured IBS symptoms, but in people without diagnosed cases of IBS, suggesting that turmeric is beneficial even for people without serious pre-existing problems.

Improve the Taste of Healthy Food

This might seem like a no-brainer (of course nobody wants to eat bland food, and obviously if your food tastes better, you’ll like it more and want to keep eating it), but it’s worth mentioning just in case Paleo is starting to feel a little boring. One of the best ways to keep yourself enthused about cooking and experimenting in the kitchen is to try a new spice, and anything that keeps you out of the clutches of delivery pizza or takeout Chinese definitely counts as a health benefit.

Prevent and Treat Nausea

It’s sometimes surprising how often traditional folk remedies actually turn out to be useful when we start studying them in a lab. Ginger has traditionally been prescribed to pregnant women as an antiemetic (an anti-nausea drug) to help treat morning sickness. And now we can tell from studies that it actually works. As well as being less expensive than prescription drugs, this also has safety benefits: unlike harsh pharmaceuticals (most famously thalidomide), ginger does not carry any risk of birth defects.

With the equipment in modern labs, we can now confirm that this old wives’ prescription is quite effective. After several smaller studies, a 2005 meta-analysis showed that 1-1.5 grams of ginger every day (about 1 teaspoon) was not only effective for nausea in pregnancy, but also free from potentially dangerous side effects. There haven’t been any studies specifically on ginger for other types of nausea, but if you always get bad motion sickness on planes or in cars, a cup of ginger tea is definitely worth a shot!

Stave Off Cravings

Capsaicin, the active ingredient in red pepper and hot peppers, gets a lot of press for its metabolism-boosting effects, but there are two big problems with this. First of all, the studies that show this effect rely on enormous quantities of red pepper, much more than anyone would ever want to eat unless they took it in a pill. And secondly, this miraculous metabolic effect only amounts to approximately 50 calories/day, even with such extreme doses. So sprinkling red pepper flakes on your salad unfortunately won’t get you very far in terms of increased calorie burn.

What it might do, though, is help prevent junk food cravings in the first place. One study gave subjects approximately 1 gram of red pepper flakes (as part of a meal, representing a normal food consumption of red pepper) and found that after eating a meal with the red peppers, subjects were less preoccupied with food, and had lower desire to eat fatty, salty, or sweet foods.  Interestingly enough, this effect was stronger among people who didn’t normally eat spicy foods, suggesting that spice-lovers eventually get used to the flavor and need to eat a little more to get the same effect.

Another study found that after a lunch flavored with chili peppers, subjects showed no sign of thermogenic benefits, but did have decreased levels of ghrelin (the hormone that tells you when you’re hungry). In other words, they felt fuller after eating. Another study confirmed this: after eating a bowl of red-pepper-flavored soup, subjects voluntarily ate less at the rest of the meal. In this study, though, the dose had to be high enough to register as “spicy,” suggesting that the taste of the red pepper is just as important as the other biochemical aspects.

Taking Care of your Spices

The chemical compounds in spices that account for their health-promoting effect (mainly phytonutrients) are sensitive to decay and oxidation, so if you want to get the most out of your spice collection, make the effort to take care of it properly. This doesn’t have to be time-consuming or difficult, but it does require a little bit of planning. In particular:

• Whenever possible, buy whole spices and grind them yourself. This ensures that the spices will be as fresh, flavorful, and nutritious as possible.
• Light, heat, and moisture are deadly to your spice collection. Store spices in opaque tins that seal tightly. As much as you can, try to keep them away from e oven and stove. If you want to store them for more than a few months, stick them in the freezer and defrost as necessary.
• Ethnic markets are usually better sources for spices than grocery stores, since they have a higher turnover, so the spices are likely to be fresher. They’re also usually much cheaper.
• Buying spices online often saves a lot of money, since you have the option of buying them in bags and re-using your own jars. Like ethnic food stores, online retailers will also often have fresher stock, because they sell out faster. The same goes for buying them in bulk at a health food store.

Another spice-buying tip: save your money by avoiding spice blends (pumpkin pie spice, for example). It’s a lot cheaper just to buy the ingredients and mix them up yourself.

Spice-Rich Recipes

Now comes the tasty part: cooking up all these delicious spices to enjoy the double benefit of a delicious dinner and better health. Take a look at some recipes you can use:

Cinnamon (for blood sugar, blood lipids oxidative stress, blood pressure, and cardiovascular health): cinnamon chicken, apple cinnamon fruit rolls, or baked apples. For an even simpler way to enjoy cinnamon, shake it over winter squash or sweet potatoes.

Hot peppers (for cravings): jerk chicken, spicy pork chili, spicy pulled pork, or spicy scallop salad.

Ginger (for nausea and DOMS): ginger-citrus roast chicken, sweet potato lime soup, or Thai coconut soup. Ginger is also delicious as ginger tea, which you can buy in teabags or simply make yourself by boiling some cut-up pieces of ginger in water for about 10 minutes.

Turmeric (for gut flora): green chicken masala, chicken tajine with apricots, or Moroccan-style roast chicken. Alternately, add it to some homemade mustard to get the bright-yellow effect that you’re used to.

Fenugreek (for blood sugar and blood lipids): add it to anything Indian or Middle Eastern, like curried shrimp and spinach or shakshuka. Or play around with it in recipes that can work with any combination of spices, like this warm broccoli slaw.

Other spices (for food preservation, reducing oxidative stress, and adding flavor): salad dressings and vinaigrettes often have a lot of spices already in them: use them as marinades to give your meat a flavorful health boost. Or use a dry rub (a mix of spices without oil or vinegar) to add punch to your meat before grilling or roasting. Alternately, it’s also beneficial to simply include more spices in your everyday cooking. Vegetable recipes are perfect for this – something very basic like oven-roasted cauliflower can become the base for any number of spicy additions.

What if I Don’t Like Spices?

Are you sitting here reading all about the benefits of hot peppers with a sinking heart because you just can’t stand the stuff? You’re not alone – plenty of people just aren’t spice people. But don’t feel guilty about it: nobody has to eat spices to be healthy. They’re more like a bonus on top of an already excellent diet. If you really can’t stand them, don’t force yourself to choke them down. The most important thing is to eat healthy food you enjoy, whether or not it’s full of turmeric or fenugreek.

Conclusion

Sometimes the healthy choice is also the tasty choice, and the numerous health benefits of common spices are the perfect example. And you’ll notice that all the research cited in this article used amounts that a person could reasonably eat in their food: these aren’t effects that come from injecting cinnamon into mouse livers or bathing test-tube cells with marinades. They’re real, significant, and delicious health benefits that you can get just by doing something that tastes better anyway: definitely a win-win for everyone concerned.

From cranberries to peppermint, holiday food is about the experience and the memories as much as the taste. During the Christmas season, you might choose to just relax and enjoy the traditional treats you remember loving – and that’s fine. But some people really need a Paleo option: they have Celiac, or they’re healing from an autoimmune disease, or for whatever other reason they know that “cheating” will have disastrous consequences.

For those people, and for the people who simply decide that the health consequences aren’t worth it, here’s a guide to enjoying all those holiday flavors as ingredients in Paleo recipes that aren’t pretending to be anything else. This is not a list of “Paleo cookies” and “Paleo fruitcakes;” it’s a way to take the base flavors and adapt them to a recipe that’s delicious in its own right. Scroll down for the full article, or go straight to whatever it is you’re hankering for:

I’m craving…

• Christmas spice
• Cranberries
• Peppermint
• Something pretty (because after an hour or so on Pinterest, who isn’t?)

Christmas spice

Christmas spice won’t win any contests with jerk chicken for sheer eye-stinging oomph, but there’s a subtle heat and an undeniable zing beneath the sweetness of a gingerbread cookie. The good news is that most of that flavor is just from ordinary spices – and the spices themselves are perfectly Paleo-friendly, so you have all kinds of options for incorporating them into your own cooking.

The seasonings that most people strongly associate with Christmas are:

• Cinnamon (warm and a little bit sweet all the way down)
• Ginger (background warmth with just a hint of tingle)
• Nutmeg (the spice that gives eggnog its distinctive flavor: deep and earthy, but still warm)
• Cloves (aromatic and flavorful, but a little stronger than cinnamon)
• Allspice (tastes almost like a mixture of cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg)
• Anise (has a bit of a bite; it tastes almost like licorice)

These spices are usually used in cakes, cookies, and other sugary foods to complement the sweetness so it’s a little more sophisticated and less overwhelming. So let’s take a look at the way these spices (all of which are completely Paleo) could fit into Paleo recipes:

Add them to Sweet Potatoes or Squash

Sweet potatoes with cinnamon is a classic. But there’s really no reason to stop there. Why not try mashed sweet potatoes with your favorite combination of “cookie spices,” like a cinnamon/ginger/nutmeg blend? Or simply toss them in spices and coconut oil and roast them. And don’t forget about winter squash, either. Some ideas:

• Here’s a recipe for acorn squash with nutmeg.
• Butternut squash roasted with ginger is perfect as a side, or pureed into soup.
• All kinds of squash are also good roasted with anise, especially if you’re liberal with the butter.

Cook them with Fruit

The most basic way to do this is to pick your fruit (apples or pears work well; bananas would also be good), slice it, sprinkle the slices with your favorite holiday spice blend, and then roast in the oven until tender. If you want to get a little more involved, these apple cinnamon fruit rolls are perfect for gifting and just the right balance of sweet and tart.

Bake them into Pancakes

You can make an ultra-quick Paleo pancake recipe with two ingredients: 1 banana and 1 egg. Mash them together (it helps to have a very ripe banana), and cook like a regular pancake. But this basic recipe is ideal for livening up with all kinds of spices, seasonings, and mix-ins. You could make pumpkin spice pancakes, gingerbread pancakes, sea salt and nutmeg pancakes…once you start considering fruit or chopped nuts as add-ins, there’s no limit to the spicy masterpieces you can create.

Bonus Baking Tip: if you’re roasting or baking anything with cinnamon, add just a pinch of salt as well – you’ll be amazed at the flavor boost!

Cranberries

They’re perky and festive threaded onto garlands and strung around the house, but they’re also delicious cooked into your favorite recipes – and cranberries are actually very healthy as well, with especially high levels of Vitamin C to keep those winter colds at bay.

To enjoy these tasty little treats in Paleo-friendly style, try adding them to meat – like this cranberry-stuffed pork loin. Or toss them into a salad (check out steak salad with cranberries). Alternately, serve up this cranberry relish (which even your vegan guests can enjoy), and let everyone at the table decide for themselves how to enjoy it. If you’re really hankering for something sweet and tart, what about a slice of chocolate cranberry pie?

Peppermint

Mint is an herb that gets paired so often with candy and chocolate because (like the traditional Christmas spices) it helps “cut” the sweet taste to make it a little less overwhelming. But like spices and cocoa powder, there’s nothing wrong with the mint itself, leaving you with plenty of Paleo choices.

If your mouth is watering at the candy canes or peppermints all around you, why not try some peppermint whipped cream with coconut milk? Refrigerate a can of full-fat coconut milk until the fat rises to the top, skim off the cream, and whip it as you would whip regular cream. Then just add a few drops of peppermint (or vanilla) extract, and serve plain or atop a pile of strawberries.

Another option is to forget about sweets altogether, and enjoy your mint in a savory dish instead:

• Cauliflower with mint and pomegranate: it even has the red/white/green color combination going on.
• Fish fillets with mint and pepper salsa: another red, white, and green recipe to grace the holiday table.
• Chicken with herb sauce
• Mint zucchini
• Mint pesto: make a batch of pesto, except instead of basil leaves, use mint. This goes perfectly with lamb, goose, duck, or other rich and fatty meats.

Yet another alternative is to brew yourself up a big pot of peppermint (or spearmint) tea. Some companies even make special Christmas-themed peppermint teas (but watch out for hidden sweeteners!). Peppermint is such an incredibly versatile herb that there really should be no trouble in coming up with a Paleo way to enjoy it.

Something Pretty

Not technically a taste, but if you’ve ever spent any time sighing over beautifully-arranged cupcakes and cookies on Pinterest, you know the allure of food that you just can’t stop looking at. Sometimes it seems like that’s half the point of conventional baking: the actual eating of the cupcakes is often an anticlimax.

In any case, Paleo food is full of proof that you don’t need sugar and food coloring to cook up something that’s gorgeous to look at. What about…

• Beet and Tomato Soup deep, rich red, with just a swirl of snow-white coconut milk. It’s almost like a candy cane in soup form.
• Veal stuffed bell peppers: make them with red and green peppers, and you’ll have a two-tone holiday color scheme ready to serve.
• Herb and prosciutto stuffed steak: just look at that swirl of red, white, and green inside the meat.
• Egg and pesto-stuffed tomatoes: red, white, and green again, with a golden yellow yolk in the center.
• Pomegranates: pomegranates have the best holiday color, and the seeds are versatile enough to sprinkle on everything from salad to ice cream.

Now go Cook Something!

Hopefully this big list of holiday-flavored Paleo recipes has got your mouth watering for something that’s not only delicious, but healthy as well. It can be really hard to feel like you’re missing out on a taste you remember so strongly from years past, but instead of spending all the time and energy to make “almond flour ________ cookies,” why not find a way to integrate that taste into your diet in a different way? It helps avoid many of the problems with eating too many “Paleo desserts,” and it helps keep the menu fresh and exciting. Who knows: if you share some with a friend, your variation might even become the new classic!

Welcome back to Part 2 of Paleo Diet Lifestyle’s Paleo for the Holidays series! In case you missed it, Part 1 (on avoiding holiday weight gain) was here. This week, we’re tackling all the ways you can celebrate the festive spirit without any food at all.

American holiday food culture is a unique form of self-inflicted stress. We all spend most of November and December worrying ourselves sick about the upcoming flurry of unhealthy food. We share tips and tricks for avoiding sugar, tactfully declining fruitcakes, and sticking to our guns in the face of pushy relatives. But each of us behaves as if we were the only person in the whole world who cared about these things! In between shoring up our motivation to avoid the cookies and candy, we’re baking them for everyone else – even though “everyone else” is probably just as stressed out by the junk-fest as we are (even if they don’t let on).

Think about it: wouldn’t it be amazing if everyone could realize that everyone else is just as worried about holiday junk food as they are? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all support each other in our diet and health goals, instead of brainstorming ways to “survive” parties and assuming we’ll have to constantly have to be on the defensive? Why should we have all tell each other white lies like “I’ll just take it home for later” (when you’re really going to throw it away or “I already ate” (when you really just want to stop being pressured about the fruitcake)? Couldn’t we all just be a little bit more honest and stress each other out a little bit less?

Of course, this isn’t going to happen in the real world, because it only works if everyone decides to do it – which they won’t. But you can create your own glorious little piece of this food-stress-free holiday world, simply by throwing a holiday get-together without any food at all.

You’d be surprised at how many people will appreciate this move. After all, Paleo isn’t the only diet that makes holiday eating stressful: anyone trying to take care of their health is probably feeling frazzled and guilty just at the thought of the upcoming “festivities.” Your vegan cousin, your macrobiotic friends, your whole-foods sister, and your calorie-counting aunt are all equally stressed out. Every time they get an invitation to another party full of sugar and candy, there’s that internal battle: should I go and resist the food and feel deprived, go and eat the food and feel guilty, or stay home and feel lonely? Even the people who don’t talk about it openly often feel this way on the inside.

By throwing a party that’s not about food, you can let everyone off the hook and free all that energy up for having fun instead of worrying about food all the time. After all, isn’t that supposed to be what holiday celebrations are about?

Throwing a Food-Free Holiday Party (That you’ll Actually Enjoy)

If you’re going to throw this kind of party, it takes a little social maneuvering because food is such a central part of the entertainment at most special occasions.

First of all, you’ll need to be very clear about what you’re planning, because otherwise your guests will come with the wrong expectations. Let people know what to expect, so they can count on a stress-free, junk-free option that they can actually enjoy. Ask them not to bring food or alcohol. Remind them to eat beforehand or afterward. If you can find a way to sneak in a second reminder somewhere, it will probably help.

If somebody does make a mistake and show up with wine or sugar cookies, don’t get angry at them – you can either just ask them to take it back to their car, or leave it in the kitchen away from the festivities (and then throw it out later, if you like). But don’t let one silly mistake sabotage your plans to enjoy a relaxing and fun occasion.

You’ll also want to do a little planning to replace food with other forms of entertainment. Some ideas:

• Food often gets used as “something to keep your hands busy.” This makes conversation easier and less awkward. So instead of snacks and drinks, lay out trays of Rubiks cubes, Play-dough, or other little finger toys – it accomplishes the same thing, and it’s a conversation starter, to boot. You’re not being a health nut; you’re being creative!
• Make water and cups readily available, the same way that you would lay out punch or other unhealthy drinks.
• Instead of candy for kids, distribute stickers, pencils, erasers, temporary tattoos, packs of crayons, coloring pages, or other non-food treats.
• Have a plan or some kind of structure for the “main event,” since it won’t be a meal (see below).

15 Nonfood Celebrations to Try

Now comes the fun part. Without a big meal as the centerpiece of the occasion, you’ll need something else to build your plans around. So check out these 15 ideas for having a joyful celebration, with no food required.

Board/Card Games

There’s a board game for every age, skill level, and time constraint, so this one is perfect for family gatherings where you have to account for both elderly relatives and young children. Settle in for an epic round of Risk with a close circle of friends, get together the word nerds for a Scrabble-off, or hold a checkers tournament with a larger group.

If you don’t really play board games and don’t know where to start, there’s an enormous list of popular choices here, which you can sort by age level, number of players, time to play, or overall ranking. Or try asking your guests to bring their own favorites and start up a conversation about how they discovered them.

Volunteering

Get together a group and head out into the community to give someone else a piece of holiday cheer. If you want to volunteer with an established program on Christmas day, you’ll need to register early (since these opportunities fill up fast), but lending a hand on less-popular days is just as useful to the people in need. Some ideas:

• Help an elderly neighbor with grocery shopping – the elderly often struggle to buy and prepare healthy food, so this is a great opportunity to give someone else the opportunity to improve their diet.
• Rake leaves or shovel snow for people who struggle to do it themselves.
• Make and deliver gift cards for children in a pediatric ward at your local hospital.
• Participate in a food drive or a collection effort for gently used winter clothes and boots.

Wreath Decorating

Instead of bringing food, have everyone bring a basic wreath or garland and one packet of fun art supplies (mini-ornaments, glittery pipe cleaners, pine cones, fake snow, tiny figurines, strings of cranberries, etc.). When the group gets together, you can share decorations and have fun creating your own holiday décor.

Tea Tasting

Tea is completely acceptable on any diet, and a big mug of something warm and sweet is the best way to perk up a winter afternoon. If each guest brings a box of their favorite seasonal tea, you’ll have quite a selection to explore. Alternately, you could get several sample packs from a specialty store, and take turns trying them out. To make this even better, get each guest a fun mini notepad to record their impressions of each type of tea, so they know which kinds to buy if they love something and want more of it.

Snow Hike

Hiking isn’t just for the summer: when there’s snow on the ground, you can see animal tracks much more clearly and enjoy a new perspective on a favorite park or nature preserve. Even walking through an ordinary neighborhood can feel magical at night with all the decorations up.

A variation on this is all heading out to a tree farm to pick up your Christmas trees together. Kids love this (especially on the farms that let you ride in a horse-drawn wagon out to the actual tree fields), and the resulting tree will make your living room smell beautiful and festive for the rest of the season.

Ice Skating

Get a group together, and head out to a local rink or pond. Sometimes, you’ll even find special holiday-themed skate nights with lights and carols. It’s a healthy way to get the whole family up and moving, or a romantic way for a couple to spend the evening together.

Love Bomb

Is there someone in your life who could use a little TLC over the holiday? Maybe someone who’s going through a tough time and feeling overwhelmed by the annual holiday stress on top of everything else? Plan a surprise “love bomb” for them: get together a group of mutual friends, and decide on something you can do to make their life easier. Some ideas:

• Shovel their walk and driveway.
• Sneak into their garage and fill it with winter supplies (salt for the driveway, windshield scraper, shovel, etc.)
• Cook them a week’s worth of healthy freezer meals.

Planning this kind of group secret is a lot of fun, and doing something for someone else is a quick way to make you feel awesome about yourself as well. Just make sure that whatever you do, you’re not accidentally creating more work for the recipient. For example, don’t get them something like a puppy, even if you think a puppy might help them feel better, because the inevitable time commitment might just be too much for them.

Pet Photos

If your extended “tribe” has a lot of pets, get all the humans and the animals together, and go crazy with the dress-up props! Several stores sell pet-sized Santa hats and beards, or elf shoes and other holiday-themed costumes, and if you’re sharing them all around it’s a lot less expensive. Have a contest to see who can get the most ridiculous holiday-themed pet photo (the resulting pictures make great seasonal greeting cards).

Learn to Knit

If you know a knitter or two, ask if they’d be willing to help teach a group. This is a perfect way to involve older relatives who might feel left out or isolated: ask them to be the expert for the day. Or just ask that everyone show up with their own supplies, find a how-to book, and have fun figuring it out on your own. Learning something new together can be a great way to connect with others (it’s one of the reasons why people make such fast friends in college). At the worst, you’ll end up with some strange wooly creations and an amusing memory; at best you’ll figure out the basics of a new and useful skill.

Go for a Run

The “turkey trot” (a 5k race on Thanksgiving Day) is pretty well known now, but the holiday season is actually full of 5k and 10k races for various charitable causes. If you don’t have one in your area, there’s no reason why you can’t set up your own. Not a runner? Most of them will also let you walk, and the vast majority of holiday-themed events also have some kind of kids’ race with an age-appropriate distance. And while you’re at it, don’t limit yourself to running; why not have a holiday burpee competition? Or a holiday deadlift challenge?

Decoration Treasure Hunt

A variation on simply taking a walk is a “treasure hunt” or “scavenger hunt” around your neighborhood. It works like this: one person plays the “mastermind,” and comes up with one or more tasks to complete or objects to find. The others compete to see who can complete the tasks the fastest (or the most creatively). For example:

• Find and photograph the most interesting seasonal decorations in a 1-mile radius. Winner is picked not only for finding the best decorations, but also for taking the most creative picture.
• Find and photograph all of the following: at least three different reindeer, five different Santas, two elves, and one snow fort (or whatever other items you choose).

This can be done individually or in teams. If you want to get really fancy, you could even do a treasure hunt with a series of holiday-themed clues. The possibilities are almost endless, and it’s a wonderful way to get out in the fresh air and notice something about your neighborhood that you never saw before.

Go to a Performance

Yes, the TV is convenient, but there’s something festive and exciting about actually dressing up and going out to watch live actors on a stage. The late-night performances, the bright costumes and stage lights, the shock of the cold air as you pour out of the theater into the crisp winter air: there’s something about being there in person that just isn’t replicated in your own living room. Around Christmastime, popular favorites like the Nutcracker ballet are often on (or if you’re sick and tired of Christmas music, look for something interesting but not seasonal at all).

Go Caroling

You don’t have to be a musical virtuoso to enjoy singing Christmas carols (especially if you’re in a group!). Some groups go door-to-door in their neighborhood, but another option is to call a local care home or retirement community to see whether the residents would appreciate visits by a group of Christmas carolers. Many people who live in these communities are very lonely and it would make their day to have someone come to visit them – they don’t care that you wouldn’t make it in Carnegie Hall.

Classic Movie Night

The holiday season is the one time you get to watch The Muppets Christmas Carol without judgment, so take advantage of it! Or pick whatever other favorite holiday movie you like, and get together your friends and family to cuddle under the blankets and enjoy a relaxing evening in. If you have a local independent cinema nearby, you could also check their showtimes to see if you can catch something on the big screen: often, they’ll offer seasonal classics that you might not have ever seen.

Decorate Together

You know what’s annoying? Getting all the way up the ladder to remember that you left the wreath at the bottom. Trying to wrestle a Christmas tree into the house by yourself. Detangling endless strings of tinsel while cursing your last-year self for not putting it away properly.

You know what’s more fun? Getting together with your friends to tackle each house in turn, as a group, while you chat and have a good time. Set aside a Saturday afternoon, and share your ladders, tools, and helping hands to get everything beautified quickly and painlessly.

But What’s Wrong with Just Serving Healthy Food?

Nothing. If you’re willing to serve healthy party food – like a veggie platter with homemade dip, hard-boiled eggs, fruit salad, or other Paleo-friendly fare – there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. Don’t do this without warning (serving broccoli when people are expecting cheesecake is a recipe for disappointed guests), but if you want to throw a “healthy food holiday party,” that’s a great alternative as well.

In fact, you can even compromise a little by combining healthy food with one of the activities above. Make the main focus of the event something non-edible, and then make sure that the food you do have is something you can eat in good conscience. This takes the pressure off your snack options to be the major source of entertainment, while still providing for guests who might get hungry.

Ultimately, of course, the choice of what you want to do at your own party is up to you. But hopefully this list of ideas can at least give you a start in thinking about some ideas to reduce holiday food stress for everyone involved, and actually let you enjoy spending time with people you like instead of having your evening be dominated by thinking about what you will or won’t eat. That’s the idea of a non-food (or a food-light) celebration – and it’s something all your friends will be able to appreciate, Paleo or not.

We all know the standard tips for saving money on Paleo (if you’re new, check out the quick and easy list here), but every new meal is a fresh chance to learn another useful strategy. So in honor of the 3-year anniversary of the original money saving tips list (published December of 2010), here’s a brand-new list of 25 more helpful tips and tricks for keeping the grocery budget down.

1. Buy spices online. McCormick or other grocery-store brands are amazingly overpriced. Sometimes you’ll pay upwards of $6 for a tiny little jar! You can make your food taste awesome without all that: most online retailers are far cheaper per ounce. You can save even more if you find an online source that ships the spices in ordinary plastic bags, since that way you don’t have to pay for the bottle.

2. Consider wild greens. Living in a rural area gives you the opportunity to hunt and fish, but even city-dwellers can forage for a surprising amount of food. For example, did you know that you can make a delicious salad out of dandelion leaves? Mint is also quite easy to find. There’s a whole wealth of edible wild plants out there – many of which are more nutritious than their domesticated versions – and many excellent guidebooks to help you identify them. Just make sure to be confident in your identification before you eat something!

3. Keep a price book. A price book is just your record of how much you paid for something and when. Write down your groceries in a price book, and after a few weeks you’ll have a good working knowledge of how much something usually costs. Then you’ll be able to spot which sales are truly awesome deals (meaning: stock up!) and which ones you can skip.

4. Frozen vegetables. Frozen vegetables are just as nutritious as fresh (sometimes more, since they’re picked at the peak of their season). They’re often cheaper, but make sure to check because sometimes the fresh version is more of a bargain. A tip though: skip the canned vegetables. They’re less tasty and less nutritious.

5. Bulk is not always better. Yes, you pay less per unit for bulk goods. But if you buy an enormous bunch of cilantro and then use only a tiny bit before it goes bad, it might actually be cheaper to just buy the smaller size.

6. Shop ethnic stores. These are astonishing and underappreciated sources for all kinds of cheaper things. Indian or Middle Eastern stores will have spices at a fraction of the cost of a standard grocery. Halal and kosher markets have humanely raised meat, often also much more cheaply than Whole Foods. Asian markets are full of fish you’ve never even seen before! Not only is it cheaper; it also helps mix things up and keep it interesting.

7. Cut back on nuts. High-quality nuts are very expensive and not all that good for you anyway. For example, 1 pound of bulk almonds typically costs around $7-10, depending on where you live. For that money, you could get a pound of grass-fed beef instead, with a whole lot more nutrition attached. If you have to buy nuts, at least try to buy whole nuts – you can make your own almond flour, almond butter, and almond milk from raw almonds at a considerable discount, so don’t pay someone else to process it for you. The same goes for coconut products like coconut milk and coconut flour.

8. Skip the cleaners. Laundry detergent, shampoo, toothpaste, window shiner, furniture polish, and other household cleaners are often extremely expensive. Make your own all-natural versions with cheap ingredients like baking soda, coconut oil, and lemon juice, and you’ll free up more money for food. Plus, it’s better for avoiding environmental toxins.

9. Ignore best-by dates. This really isn’t a health risk. There’s even been a study describing how completely random, non-standardized, and ultimately meaningless those dates are. They really just exist to make money for the grocery store (you think you need to throw something out, and then you have to buy more). Trust your nose, your tongue, and your gut – if it smells fine and tastes fine, it probably is.

10. Cut back on fruit. Fruit costs a lot more than vegetables (in most parts of the world), and you get less nutrition for your dollar. For example, a pint of blueberries can easily reach $5, and that will serve maybe 3 people. You could also buy three bunches of collard greens (or more) for that $5, and serve 6+ people.

11. Slow-cook, slow-cook, slow-cook. Here’s a fairy tale made in health-food heaven: once upon a time, there was a Paleo Fairy who wanted to help everyone in the world eat delicious and nutritious food. The Paleo Fairy cried tears of pure coconut oil every time someone had to serve a cheap cut of meat that was tough, stringy, chewy, or as dry as old shoe leather. So, in a fit of generosity and inspiration, the Paleo Fairy invented the slow-cooker, allowing time-crunched, budget-conscious Paleo dieters everywhere to actually enjoy tender and mouthwatering pot roasts and brisket. And you too can enjoy this amazing fairy gift, simply by picking up a slow-cooker of your very own. Fancy models can get pricey, but you can get one that works just fine for $20, or even less if you get it secondhand.

12. Buy as basic as possible. You don’t need jerky, pre-packaged freezer meals, or other foods that someone has already cooked for you. These things add up incredibly fast. Prioritize single-ingredient foods, and skip the kale chips, “gluten-free ________,” and snack bars. For example, say you went to the store and bought 2 Larabars for snacks. Each bar is around $1.50 so two would be approximately $3. For that same $3, you could buy 2 cans of olives (also around $1.50 each, if you get the store brand), which will give you get approximately 8 snacks for the same money. And they’re healthier snacks to boot: more fat, less sugar.

13. Critique your supplements. With an increasing number of news stories lately about unlabeled or fraudulent ingredients in supplements, these expensive bottles are looking like a worse and worse investment every day. Pick them very carefully, go for quality when you absolutely need a supplement, and cut out the rest. You shouldn’t need a lot of supplements if you’re eating a nutrient-dense diet.

14. Label. Not every bunch of celery needs a label, of course. But for example, if you’re stocking up on freezer dinners, take the extra 2 seconds to slap a sticker on the Tupperware and jot down what it is and when you put it in there. That way you’ll never be stuck reheating the wrong thing, or wondering what exactly that is in the back of the freezer and whether you shouldn’t just throw it out.

15. Become an Amazon Wizard. Did you know that Amazon has a program called Subscribe and Save, where you get a discount plus free shipping on products if you order a regular delivery? You can get time periods ranging from 1 month to 6 months. This is perfect for nonperishable items like coconut oil, canned fish, coffee, and other pantry staples.

16. Cure your own. Bacon from pastured pigs will run you approximately $10 (at least) per pound. Pork belly is typically closer to $2-3 per pound. Use this recipe to make your own bacon, so you can have a treat at a fraction of the cost. The same goes for making your own fermented foods (compare the price of a bag of real, probiotic sauerkraut to the price of a head of cabbage).

17. Reduce disposables. Paper towels, paper napkins, paper cups and plates, plastic forks and knives…they’re convenient, but you pay for it. Buying a package of cheap dishrags will save you a lot of money down the line when you don’t have to buy paper towels every week. The same goes for cloth napkins and proper cutlery. If you want to get really thrifty about it, you can even cut up old shirts to make dishrags: after all, they still absorb just fine!

18. Tea leaves beat tea bags. Tea bags are convenient, no doubt about it. But you also pay more per serving than you would for tea leaves – and the leaves are also better for you, with more of their antioxidant content intact. You can get a very simple tea ball for $1-2 at a grocery store online, and it’ll pay for itself quickly.

19. Easy on the protein. Of the three macronutrients (protein, carbs, and fat), protein is by far the most expensive. For optimal health, you don’t need more than 15-20% of your diet as protein at most: eating 30, 35, or even 40% protein is just throwing money down the drain without improving your health in anyway. Focus on cheap and healthy fats (like butter, coconut oil, and animal fat) and carbs (like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and other safe starches) and reduce protein where you can.

20. Stock up slowly. It can be tempting to rush out and buy all your pantry staples at once when you’re first getting started. But on your first grocery trip, you don’t even know if you’ll need or like half of these new and unfamiliar foods! What if you buy a huge jar of coconut oil only to discover that you can’t stand it? That’s an incredible waste of money. So just buy enough to get you started for one week, and then slowly start accumulating more pantry staples, starting with the smallest sized amount you can buy, and springing for the bulk version only after you’re sure you’ll actually like it.

21. Write down what you waste. Whatever is moldering away in your fridge at the end of the week, grab a pad of paper or a sticky note and jot it down before you chuck it. Attach the paper to your grocery list, so you won’t make the same mistake twice.

22. Modify recipes. Think of recipes as suggestions, not strict sets of rules that you have to follow at risk of burning down the house. Many of them will hold up to a lot of modification, depending on what you have available or what you can get for cheap. For example, you can often swap out different kinds of white fish for each other: if cod is $10/lb and swai is $5/lb, go with the swai. You can also substitute a lot of vegetables, especially in soups or stews.

23. Use the whole vegetable. We make a big deal out of using the whole animal – including bones for stock, skin, organs, and other “odd bits.” But the same applies to vegetables. Broccoli stalks are perfectly edible, delicious roasted, and taste just like the rest of the broccoli. Throwing them out is just throwing money in the trash. The same goes for cauliflower stems, apple cores, and many other parts that most people chuck without thinking about it. In fact, even the cauliflower leaves are edible, and quite tasty.

24. Don’t buy bottled drinks. Of course, Paleo cuts out the biggest money suck of all (soda and soft drinks), but you might still be tempted by stevia-sweetened sodas, kombucha, unsweetened tea, or other pre-bottled drinks. Buying these products is expensive for what you get, because you're paying the transportation costs for a bottle that's mostly water. Save money by buying your own tea bags or coffee grounds, and adding the water yourself at home. Or if you need it to go, buy a thermos: it’ll pay for itself in a week.

25. Ask for useful gifts. As we’re heading into Christmas season, why not ask your friends and family to get you useful presents – a gift certificate to a local farmers market, a big tub of coconut oil, or a starter kit of spices? It might get them thinking about their own diet a little more, in a low-pressure kind of way, and you can be sure you’ll get something you want!

25 more ways to keep your wallet happy – but the list certainly doesn’t end there! What’s your best money-saving tip that we missed? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!