Keep it Real: Senior chooses to eat like a caveman
News Editor Kelly Foulk keeps life interesting. Don’t be surprised if she shows up at school with a penguin costume on (five minutes late, of course). She does what she wants when she wants to.
Do you ever start eating and eating and then eventually look to notice that the entire bag is gone? I do.
This weekend I ate an entire bag of carrots in a half hour. Yep, carrots. I am an avid carrot eater. I especially like to eat them while hopping around hiding Easter eggs for little children.
Just kidding.
Anyway, carrots are just one of the things I eat to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Since I was a child I’ve always eaten unusually healthy. At the grocery store, when my brothers begged for a king-sized bag of M&M’s, I would ask for a kiwi. Last December, I decided to take my healthy eating to another level so I began to model my eating style after the Paleo Diet.
People on the Paleo Diet pride themselves on being “modern-day cavemen.” In other words, they don’t eat anything that a caveman wouldn’t eat. In addition to ruling out McDonald’s, IHOP, and Chipotle, paleo dieters rule out entire food groups. Meat, vegetables, nuts and fruits are the only food groups that a paleo dieter will eat.
After reading nerdfitness, a website that promotes healthy living and the Paleo Diet, I decided to gradually limit my dairy, sugar and wheat intake, in addition to limiting all varieties of processed foods. I cut out processed foods from my diet entirely. By summer, I was following the Paleo Diet 96.78 percent of the time.
This was the best decision ever, and I would never go back to how I ate before. By cutting these food groups out of my life, I realized that they were holding me back in cross country. In senior year, I dropped over three minutes from my 5K time and earned a permanent varsity spot. The only difference from junior year was my eating habits. I did not practice any longer or any harder, I merely stopped eating most of the junk I ate previously.
After adjusting to my new eating habits, I rarely ever want to eat unhealthy foods. If someone offers me a cookie, I’m not even tempted to say yes because I honestly don’t want it. I love the energy and happiness I get by eating Paleo-style,and I rarely want to give that up for one bite of deliciousness.
Kelly Foulk is a News Editor for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.
