I was introduced to the paleo diet during my time at a local crossfit gym in Rockland, MA called Gut Check. The morning trainer and part owner, Tim Brown, is hands down the most motivating person I’ve had the pleasure of exercising with and he made it fun. At the gym, we had a pretty regular morning crew and sometimes on holidays we would go out for a nice, sweaty breakfast after working out. It was kind of like having a fun crossfit fam. If you ever need a little extra motivation to work out, especially at 5:30 in the morning, definitely go visit Tim Brown. You won’t be disappointed.

At the time, I went to Gut Check at 5:30 in the morning Monday-Friday before school. The more I got in shape, the more interested I became in learning about healthy eating habits. Eating paleo was popular at the gym but I had no idea what it was all about.

To explain it in the simplest terms, if you can’t hunt it or grow it, you can’t eat it. There are some restrictions within those guidelines that include cutting out dairy, legumes, potatoes, certain grains and yes, that’s right, no processed foods. Of course foods we buy in the grocery store are “processed” to a certain degree but what really counts as processed foods are things like chips, cookies, other similar snacks along with most premade meals.

I decided the best way to approach such a drastic change in my diet was to just do it all at once and not look back. It definitely wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had. When you stop eating processed foods and eat only whole foods your body has to adjust and detox accordingly. Fully detoxing took weeks. More than three to be exact because that’s when I threw in the towel and went for a bowl of pasta.

I didn’t give it up because I thought it was too hard, it actually made me feel so good every single day aside from no matter how much I slept, I was exhausted every single day. This probably happened because I wasn’t paying enough attention to the quantities of different nutrients I was consuming.

Eating paleo becomes more of a lifestyle than a diet when you start getting into meal prepping for people that are super busy and just committing to being much more aware of what you feed your body. Eating paleo made me feel better in general but even more so when I was working out. I also burned a lot more fat when exercising which helped with muscle definition.

Meal prepping became really important for me to do once a week since you’re not just grabbing prepackaged snacks out of the pantry before your busy day. I spent a couple of hours every Sunday cutting up fruits and vegetables, portioning them out for the week, and making lunches as well. Meal prepping helped to make me more aware of exactly how much food I was eating every day, which is important.

I would definitely say that everyone should try eating paleo at least once, I know I plan on returning to it soon, just to see the difference of how what you feed your body makes you feel like on a daily basis. Personally, I was really surprised mostly because I don’t tend to have terrible eating habits normally although there was definitely some occasional cake for the treat yourself kind of days.

It’s important for us to know what our bodies need to feel good and what that feels like to us. This is especially important today because of food products constantly becoming “more convenient” for the average, busy person and these convenient solutions aren’t always healthy ones.