Too Restricted or Just Right?

Why eat Paleo – Isn’t it really restrictive?  I get this question all the time.  My best answer...

By choosing to eat Paleo, you’re choosing to put limits on your own behavior, just like setting a budget. You’re eliminating several entire food groups (grains, legumes, and potentially dairy) that are dietary staples for everyone around you. You’re cutting out more foods (sugar, seed oils, most additives and preservatives) that are in almost everything at the supermarket. In the completely neutral, no-judgment-implied sense of the word, Paleo is indeed restrictive. It limits your options. That’s what restriction is.

But being restrictive in this purely technical sense does not mean that Paleo is “restrictive” in the deprivation-and-misery way that a 1,200-calorie diet is “restrictive.”

Yes, Paleo has restrictions. But think about the freedom that those restrictions give you. For the arthritis patient, maybe it’s the freedom to move without pain. For the athlete, maybe it’s the freedom from injuries that come with malnutrition. It might be freedom from the health consequences of obesity, freedom from acne, freedom from migraines, freedom from IBS…

If you ate a Standard American Diet, your food choices would be unrestricted. But would your life be restricted by chronic pain or joint issues? Would your time be sucked up by the medical requirements of a long-term disease? Would your social interactions be dominated by health issues?

Is Paleo an unbearably painful or monotonous starvation diet? Not at all. It’s a restriction that gives you more than it takes away. It’s a restriction that ends up making your life better than it was before, and that kind of “restriction” is definitely worth it.