Brenda Young wrote:
> ... The hardest thing for
> me is the planning, as I'm a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants type of 
> person, preferring to do what is easiest, not always the wisest, lol.  
> And throwing a sandwich together is usually easier than cooking stuff 
> up to eat  at work the next day.  Sigh.

Brenda, if you and your husband can both get on a Paleo or modified Paleo
diet, then it's much easier. Then the key is just not buying any of the
offending foods at the supermarket and getting rid of any of the bad stuff
that is in your fridge or pantry. If there's no bread in the house,
sandwiches become much less of a temptation. :-) Then you can limit cheating
to eating out at restaurants and friends' houses. 

The difficulty comes with entertaining. There I think the best thing is to
ask people to bring their favorite foods with them that you don't stock. I
find that once modern foods have been out of your house for a while, you
think about them much less, except when you see them on TV, at the
supermarket, restaurant or friend's house, and they stop looking like foods
and more like strange, artificial things.

Ginny wrote:
> On Jan 3, 2007, at 10:50 AM, Kristina K. Carlton wrote:
> 
> > What do you say to people that point out that there are
> many healthy,
> > normal-weight people in this world who DO eat grains? I
> never have an
> > argument for this one.
> 
> ...
> I have very high standards for health, and can shoot holes in almost
> anyone's :) But perhaps you can, too, if you get them to look at what
> is possible, rather than what is the norm. It's not too hard to  
> uncover allergies, digestive impairments, skin conditions, joint  
> pain, high blood sugar, high blood pressure - and also compulsions,  
> depression, poor temper, poor concentration, and the like. People  
> accept them and ignore them, and everyone wants to think he's 
> doing a  
> great job of caring for himself.
> 
> So I guess the bottom line in the argument is "How healthy?" And does 
> any such evidence of health in others make it okay for them to trust
> their genes alone, or would they rather hedge their bets in face of  
> all the research that shows what grains can do?
> 
> ginny

Ginny's right. I've never met a person who ate a lot of grains who didn't
have some health problems by middle age, but I have met some who think of
themselves as "healthy." They attribute their aches, pains, pudginess, bald
heads, nearsightedness, high cholesterol, etc. to "old age" or discount them
as minor problems that "everyone" has. And it seems like nearly every adult
in modern society does have at least one of the modern foods syndromes.

> That reminds me of the funniest thing I often hear from people who are
resisting switching to a species-appropriate diet for their family or for 
their pets:

"But except for the (cancer/diabetes/allergies/arthritis/whatever), he's
always been in perfect health!"

--Carrie

Yeah, I hear that too. Here's an example from a letter someone wrote [names
changed for anonymity]--Carl is 63 or 64 and Cathy is a little younger:

	"[Carl] is teaching ... a nutrition course .... Both Carl and Cathy
are experiencing some physical problems--bad knees, sore backs, joint
stiffness, too much weight....Sound familiar anyone? However, we are blessed
with overall good health, the ability to still bike, hike, walk, kayak,
camp, etc. and the desire to do so."

They assume that their health problems come naturally with aging and that
everyone else has similar problems at their age. Carl's frequent consumption
of pizza and other unhealthy modern foods is ironic given that he teaches a
nutrition course. His son Chaz is tremendously overweight and has had
seizures in the past that were attributed to idiopathic epilepsy. When Carl
and Cathy's children were young and at home they had a tradition of a pizza
night every week. Chaz still loves to eat pizza as an adult. Interestingly,
every family I know who had a pizza night tradition (with lots of pizza
consumed) had one or more family members become seriously unhealthy, and the
whole family eventually develops some sort of health problems.