Grain Free – not the life for me.

But Tony, you’re Italian! What are you doing? What about the pizza? The Pasta? The Bread?! There’s no way you can pull this off!

That’s what I thought when I started. Just two weeks, I told myself. You can do this! The first few days were absolute torture but I persevered and about four days in it was.. fine. It was compounded by my not eating sugar either so my dietary choices were somewhat limited as I don’t like seafood so I ate a lot of chicken, eggs, and beef. The funny thing about eating like a supposed ‘carnivore’ was that it was very filling and I found that my appetite was basically zeroed out and I had to force myself to eat sometimes as I just wasn’t hungry.

In fact the lack of variety ended up being a benefit as I just ate the same few things over and over making it easy to prepare and plan for – lots of scrambled eggs, burgers on almond buns, and sausage and peppers. In fact I went a bit stricter than what was called for as I also didn’t eat fruit to keep the sugars (even natural ones) low. It ended up being a low carb situation which is fine for managing hunger but it’s a real pain in the energy department. I tried playing basketball or hitting the gym and it was brutal. Since low carb means you shed water I ended up parched during workouts and guzzling water like a man who was lost in the desert for a week.

What did work? The weight loss. Now, I realize 50% of it was probably water but it still was pretty effective. So much so that I ended up doing it for 21 days preparing for my trip to Italy. That’s right baby I went low carb right before heading to the motherland of carbs.

So yeah,I gained 1/2 the weight back during my week in Italy but hey – la dolce vita, si? That being said, I really wasn’t doing it for weight loss only I wanted to see how I felt without grain in my diet and I will say that the biggest thing I noticed was my focus improved substantially. I was able to keep on task and keep things in my short term memory longer than before.

So overall I saw some benefits, but not enough to give up three of my favorite food groups (Pizzas, Pastas, Sandwiches). It was an interesting experiment and I’m glad I tried it but it’s really not something that is sustainable for me.