Our "Parisian Diet": One Week In

Last week, Mike had some dental work, which resulted in an extraction, which resulted in some nerve damage and some terrible pain.  He's anxiously awaiting a root canal, which I believe is happening sometime next week.  He had a rough time scheduling with his endontist.  In the meantime, while he was trying out different combinations of pain killers and antibiotics, he had a number of sleepless nights.




On one of those sleepless nights, he stayed up watching various Netflix documentaries, including "Fed Up".  This is a documentary outlining the physical and mental issues that stem from eating processed foods, and specifically foods with processed sugars.  The movie is fairly long (about 1 hour 40 minutes) and deals with a number of different issues, so I won't go into everything.  However, in the end, it does challenge individuals to try a 30 day "cleanse" or "detox".  I'm always very hesitant to use both of these words because it makes it sound like some sort of a fad.  It's not the same as a 10 day grapefruit juice cleanse.

While overweight, I'm generally healthy.  Mike has high blood pressure and has type 2 diabetes, so he decided we should give this a shot.  Let me give you a break down of what this looks like.


I call it our Parisian diet, because it reminds me a lot of what eating in France looked like.  There are a lot of fresh foods.

1.  Lots of fruits and vegetables




Obviously this a cornerstone of any healthy eating choice.

2.  No grains or starches.  :(

THIS is really hard.  Look at this picture.  Most of my favorite things are in this picture.  Even things we think of as "healthy" substitutes are straight out.  Corn?  no.  Rice?  no.  How about BROWN rice?  also no.  Beans and stuff are also verboten.  Breads, pastas, and of course, all of my favorite things --- cookies, cakes, etc.

3.  No sugar in any form.


This one is also pretty rough.  We aren't doing any white sugar, brown sugar, honey, or anything else - at least not in this first "phase".  There's a second phase after we do the "detox" part.  I don't know all the details of that part yet.  This also includes things like fruit sugars in juice where the sugar has no nutritional value (i.e. fiber) to justify it.

4.  Protein

I think as written, this would be difficult for a vegetarian, because there isn't a lot of room for protein substitutes.  We have been eating a lot of beef and chicken.  I'm eating some shrimp tonight.  I ate all veggies last night.  We do have protein shakes for breakfast - which are delicious.

5.  NO PROCESSED FOODS.

This is the key.  This is where things differ from any other diet you may have tried.  No processed foods of any type.  No weird chemical ingredients.  If it has more than a couple ingredients, or any ingredients you can't grow or butcher yourself, don't eat it.

6.  Exercise.

We walk a lot.  This is the other part that reminds me of Paris.  We made a pact not to buy anything we weren't willing to walk to get.  We live about 1.3 miles round trip from the grocery store and 1.5 miles round trip from the pharmacy.  We have made that walk every single day.



Results:

Mike says he "misses chips, cookies, and beer, in that order, but I feel good".  He has realized that arugula is not his favorite leafy green vegetable.  His blood sugar is way down, he's lost a couple pounds "depending on which scale I use, and which time of day I weigh myself, somewhere between four and seven pounds".

I mostly miss chocolate things - but I'm willing to power through the 30 days.  Like Mike, I don't love arugula.  I feel really good as well.  I was pretty exhausted the first couple of days, but I'm feeling much better now.  I only use one scale, so I can give a much more accurate picture of my weight.  I should have taken some measurements (I'll do some tonight for week 2), but I'm down a total of six pounds in the first week.

We both agree that the exercise has helped us sleep better and as a general rule, our food has been delicious.  We've discussed a couple of times that because we are only eating food and not a bunch of weird added stuff, we are actually just tasting the food.  It's very nice.

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