This has been the summer that I took a really good, hard look at what I put in my body to nourish it, and I've come to some pretty interesting conclusions. I needed to get this out of my head, so here goes.

First, gone are the days when I could eat whatever I wanted and not gain a pound. In high school I lived on Pepsi and Fritos. Seriously. I never had a problem with my weight until my thyroid conked out on me, and it's been a struggle ever since. Even now, optimized on thyroid meds, I am physically a different person. I had to accept that and move on.

Second, we've had a rash of allergy testing in our family lately, and lo and behold—my sister is gluten-intolerant and so is my father-in-law (and he is also allergic to beef, the poor man). Now, my FIL is not biologically related to me, but it's interesting that these two people close to me found out they had food intolerances. I suspect that gluten intolerance is more prevalent than we think it is.

Third, I've never been one to accept what mainstream medicine and the media spout as gospel, and I am not going to start now, particularly when what I have experienced empirically does not mesh with what I am being told. The husband and I watched a documentary on Netflix a few months ago called Fathead. If you have Netflix, watch it. And then watch Science For Smart People and see if your paradigm doesn't start shifting a bit.

Two years ago, I did a 23-day round of the hCG diet to get rid of most of the weight I accumulated when my thyroid went south. An interesting thing has happened over the past two years, though: I started to gain weight again, and it didn't happen gradually. Last summer I suddenly (over the course of two weeks) gained 5 pounds, and this summer the same thing happened. Nothing about my diet changed, and yet all of a sudden I gained weight. And once I gained it, nothing I did would make it come off. In fact, the harder I tried, the harder it was to lose it. How is it possible to eat salads and hike and still gain weight (and not muscle weight, either). My doctor didn't have an answer, although he said I am not the only person experiencing this.

You might think that the easy answer was the way I was eating. That's partially true, as you'll see in a moment, but not totally. I cook almost everything from scratch. There are NO products with high fructose corn syrup or soybean oil in my house. I bake bread with Wheat Montana flour, eggs from our chickens, and honey from our pastor's bees. My daughter had friends over for dinner one night. I served spaghetti, and they raved about how good the sauce was—it consisted of tomato sauce seasoned with dried herbs from my garden. I was assiduous about watching what went into my mouth. And still I gained weight.

After we watched Fathead, I started doing some additional research, and ran across the Paleo/Primal diet. There is a ton of information out there (some of it better than others), so I will leave you to do your own exploring. In a nutshell, though, the Paleo/Primal movement is similar to Atkins in that it's low-carb. The reasoning goes that Grok (our Primal ancestor) didn't eat a lot of grains and subsisted mostly on animal flesh, veggies, and berries.

As with any movement, you will find those who are strident about adhering 100% to this diet, eschewing anything that they think Grok didn't eat (but really, how do we know? and also, just because Grok didn't eat grains doesn't mean that Grok was healthy). There are others, though, who take a more moderate view and are willing to eat cheese and drink wine. In any case, grains, legumes, rice, and potatoes (except sweet potatoes) are out.

I started eating mostly Primal at the beginning of the summer and was able to halt the weight gain, but contrary to the what the Primal proponents were saying, it didn't help me lose weight. Something is still out-of-whack with my body. At the end of July I went back to my doctor and asked him if I could do another round of hCG. He agreed.

The interesting thing about the hCG diet is that after the three weeks of taking hCG are over, you spend the next three weeks (the "stabilzation" phase) eating a LOT of food including good fats, but absolutely no carbs except those that come from veggies. In essence, then, that part of the program is very much like the Primal diet. Some of my friends who have done the hCG diet said that those three weeks were unadulterated hell and they couldn't wait to "eat normally" again. Interestingly enough, once they started "eating normally"—which usually meant adding carbs back in—they started to gain the weight back.

So I have looked at these past three weeks as a further experiment in Primal eating, paying close attention to how my body feels. Things I've noticed:

I don't get bloated after eating, even when I eat a lot of veggies.
My joints don't ache.
I need less sleep. This is so interesting to me. I always thought I was one of those people who had to have 9 hours of sleep every night. Apparently I don't. I can easily stay up now until 9:30 and still get up at 5:00 the next morning without an alarm clock, and I don't feel tired. Hmmm.
I can eat a fair bit of food, including butter and eggs, and my weight is quite stable.
I am full after eating and I stay that way for a long time. No snacking necessary, although a handful of almonds is good around 3 p.m.

So those are definite pros. The one con is that I seem to have more heartburn than I used to, and for that I am taking apple cider vinegar. It seems to help.

I suspect I would do even better if I cut out dairy products, but I am not quite ready to give up eating cheese and yogurt. I feel like I've given up so much already.

So here is my plan for the next 6 months, at least. I think it's important to stick with this for an extended period of time, although eventually I would like to be able to eat a piece of flourless chocolate cake once in a while without it showing up as a pound of weight gain the next day.

No wheat, no bread, no pasta.
No sugar (although I am not going to get totally neurotic about it; I know there is some added to the bleu cheese dressing I use, and I just deal with it).
No beans (that will be hard, as bean soup in many incarnations is one of my winter staples).
As many veggies as possible. Right now that's easy—I just walk to the garden and pick them. This may be more challenging in January.
Grass-fed beef, chicken, and pork. The chicken will be easy when we do our own. I have a friend whose kids do 4-H and she said they would raise a hog for us next year and the price was very reasonable. The grass-fed beef is a bit tougher, but I am working on it. This IS Montana, after all.

The husband is on board with this, although he pretty much doesn't care as long as the food tastes good and he doesn't have to cook it. Yesterday at noon I stuck a pork loin in the oven to roast and covered it with the spiced red cabbage I canned last fall (I've been trying to find a use for that cabbage and I finally hit on something). After cooking all afternoon, the pork was fork-tender and the cabbage was sweet and tangy. I paired it with some Yukon Gold potatoes out of the garden (for the husband, who never counts calories except to make sure he's getting enough) and a BIG garden salad. He said it was one of the best meals I'd ever made.

I've also found some great Primal recipe blogs, including Cavewoman Cafe (I want to try the Beet Pickled Eggs because I have beets and I have eggs).

So stay tuned. In Part 2 I want to put on my tinfoil hat and talk about some of the ways the government gets us to eat things that are bad for us (helped along by the medical establishment).