Primal Plan

Whenever someone has asked me about Primal Blueprint lately, they've always followed up with a "What's the eating plan like?" question. I'm sorry to break it to you, but there isn't one! And that is the real beauty of the Primal Blueprint - it can be tailored exactly to suit your goals and taste buds ;-p How many times have you read over a diet plan which gives you a daily eating schedule and thought, "I could never do that because I don't like eating (fill in the gap here)"... That issue is eliminated when following the Primal Blueprint because you can choose to eat what you like from the allowed foods list! If you're still unsure about the allowed foods, here's a run down:-
Eat:-
- vegetables;
- meat;
- fish;
- poultry;
- nuts & seeds;
- fruit;
- FAT!
Avoid:-
- grains;
- trans-fats;
- anything with an ingredients list ;-p
We also allow dairy in our eating plan. Mark recommends cutting it out if you know you have issues digesting it, but we, thankfully, seem to handle it well. Again with dairy, full fat is the only way to go, raw is even better but difficult to obtain (low fat means it's been heavily processed  - and seriously, how much better does full fat cheese, milk, yoghurt taste!)... But, as another example of making the eating plan work for you, if you don't feel 100% when eating it, don't!
Of course, people are still curious about what we eat during a day/week and so I thought I'd give you a look at our plan for the week...

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
1 x soft boiled egg Smoothie with hazelnut, banana, strawberries & greek yoghurt	Bacon & eggs with tomato, spinach & mushroom sautéed in garlic	Intermittent Fasting	1 x soft boiled egg Smoothie with hazelnut, banana, strawberries & greek yoghurt	Sausages with tomato, spinach & fetta frittata
Left over roast chicken and vegies	Fish cakes with BAS (big ass salad)	Grilled lamb, pumpkin & fetta greek salad	BAS with ham and avocado	Thai Lettuce wraps with roasted cashews
Salmon in creamy dill sauce with steamed vegies	Greek lamb cutlets with sautéed mediterranean vegetables	Beef ribs in blueberry sauce with roast sweet potato & spinach	Thai Lettuce wraps with roasted cashews	Cheat Meal (Katie travelling)

As you can see, we are eating quite well on this 'diet'. I do this plan up on a Friday before our weekly shop and it always works well. And just so you know, we plan to eat this way for the rest of our lives, focussing on the freshest fruit and vegetables, and best sources of meat (grass fed should be your aim). We have been eating like this for the past 2 months and I've lost over 7kg! And I've never felt like I'm missing out! To help you even more, over the coming weeks I'll post recipes for some of our favourite meals so you can try them out too (check out Salmon in Creamy Dill Sauce to get you started).
One thing you will notice is that there are no morning or afternoon snacks in there. Honestly, we've found that you don't need them when eating this way. Particularly after a breakfast filled with eggs and lots of fat, we stay full until lunch time. If we do feel the need to snack, our choices are nuts or fruit. Also, if we're feeling like we need something after dinner, we allow ourselves a square of dark (85%) chocolate with a cup of tea. Mark covers sensible vices quite nicely and dark chocolate definitely makes our list! Warning though, if you've never had 85% dark before, I recommend working up to it by starting at 70%... Initially, to our 'sweet tooth' 85% dark chocolate was quite bitter, but now after having cut out all sweet things, it tastes like pure gold to us! Apparently they can get 99% stuff in the States, so one day we might give that a go. I'll do a proper dark chocolate post at a later date.
So there you have it. I challenge anyone to claim that we are missing out on vital nutrition eating this way... Unlike many other diets, we don't feel restricted in our eating choices, and definitely feel FULL after eating every meal. We have more energy than ever before and that helps us when we're flexing our muscles at the gym. The variety in our food is amazing and we've discovered a love for many new vegetables (which, if we were told that we MUST eat for a diet plan we would probably dislike, but because we get to choose to eat them, we love them!).