Paleo Rules, Flour Drools!

I'd like to claim that I eat Primal/ Paleo about 98% of the time. My indiscretions include dairy, the occasional heirloom potato, rice or nut crackers and chocolate. I've completely give up beer, but wine and tequila still make the cut. Once a year, on my birthday, I treat my taste buds to cinnamon buns because they are one of my most favorite foods. Know what ties them as a favorite food? Oven roasted sweet potato with pastured butter and a crack of sea salt. Yea I know, I get made fun of for that, but it's true.

ANYhoo, yesterday was my Annual Cinnamon Bun Day and I did indulge, while they were delicious but they also helped remind me why it was that I choose to eat Primal the rest of the year.

Check it out, isn't that cute? My mom made it look like a birthday cake!

I had two cinnamon buns for "lunch", and calculated it to be roughly 650 calories and about 92 grams of carbohydrates. !!! Yes, that's crazy. Practically half of my day's calorie allowance AND more carbs than I typically eat in like, two days! Afterwards, feeling very full and sugared up, I went to the beach. Because isn't putting on a bikini exactly what you want to do after you've eaten two MASSIVE sugar bombs?

My blood sugar felt so erratic that I felt drunk. Literally. Drunk. Two beer buzz drunk. From sugar. Gross. I couldn't keep my eyes open after blood sugar crash and I fell asleep at the beach for awhile. I was wondering if I was even going to feel well enough to go to my birthday dinner! Haha, nah I'm tough, I can do it ;)

But here's the pisser. I ate, lets say, 40% of my daily calories at noon and was woozy and STARVING by 4. If I'd eaten 650 calories worth of chicken, avocado and cucumber I'd have been set until 7. At least 7! It's no wonder that folks eating Special K for breakfast are sad and hungry by mid-morning. Then the marketers of diet pills and diet snacks are encouraging you to eat another sugary snack while simultaneously suggesting that your will-power is wimpy. So now they're hungry AND degraded...what a great combo!

Thankfully my parents took me to a fantastic new restaurant in our area that specializes in local food (as in, from their garden out back) patured meats and really fresh seafood. It was an amazing place and I left slightly jealous that no matter how I will ever sauté my zucchini it will likely not taste as good as that which I'd just eaten. Just so you understand, this was my dinner:

That's pretty Paleo no matter how you slice it. So my two birthday meals were on opposite sides of the spectrum and the first made me realize just how lucky I am to have found Paleo when I did. One meal was mass-produced (though still organic it was still flour, sugar, butter etc.), tan and white and relatively "one note," as they say. My proper Paleo meal however satisfied me in more ways than the cinnamon buns did. I wasn't sick afterwards, the zucchini was picked literally 100' from the kitchen and the lobster was brought up from the piers that very morning. This meal was a rainbow of colors that had nothing to do with dyes; yellow squash, dark green and white zucchini, red onions, the red of the lobster and tannish of steamed clams, the fresh cucumber, lime green zebra tomatoes and red lettuce that was in my salad. I would take this over cinnamon buns any day of the week my friend!

Actually, I may just do the lobster next birthday and start a new tradition!

In summary, carbohydrates from flour and sugar at stupid, damaging, injurious and unsatisyfing. Meat, vegetables and fats however are delicious, pretty, satisfying and deliver mucho bang for your buck; proverbially, mentally, physically and financially.

Find your truth!

Michelle

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