Nom Nom Paleo: Food for Humans (4 page)

I moved to San Francisco to earn a doctorate in clinical pharmacy just as the Bay Area food scene exploded. My big sister moved back from southern California, too, and started her career as a chef, working in some of the most acclaimed kitchens in San Francisco.

Like my mom, Fiona is a culinary genius, with a talent for cobbling together shockingly good flavor combinations. With my sister cooking with some of the best chefs around, I finally had an “in.” I eagerly followed the openings and closings of local foodie hotspots. And when I'd fly back east to visit Henry (who was attending law school), we descended like vultures on restaurants in New York City. Forget seeing the sights; I was there to eat.

Fittingly, after Henry moved back to the Bay Area, he proposed to me in the middle of a lavish ten-course meal. It's the only tasting menu I don't recall eating. I was too busy hyperventilating.

After our wedding, we settled in San Francisco, where Henry toiled as a litigator in a downtown law firm, and I got a job working as a night shift hospital pharmacist. We almost never cooked at home. With two incomes and no kids, we continued to eat our way through the city. When we weren't breaking bread at restaurants with friends, we were chowing on take-out. And I'm not just talking about pizza and Chinese; in our food-crazed city, every conceivable cuisine was available to us, from Burmese to Moroccan and everything in between. I didn't hold back. Any money I didn't put in the bank was frittered away on food experiences and cookbooks. (I didn't cook from any of them, mind you; they were strictly for pleasure reading.)

Admittedly, it got a little nuts. For a while, my goal in life was to visit a particular sushi joint until I scored an invitation to sit at the VIP counter. And I didn't hesitate to book flights to faraway cities when I wanted to dine at Alinea in Chicago or taste the pies at Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix. We'd grab our passports and head off to Italy or Japan just so I could sample the
bollito misto
in Florence or experience a
shojin-ryori
meal in Kyoto. Exercise was reserved for the weekend, when we'd run or bike through the city—straight to our favorite bakery to gorge on pizza, muffins, scones, and cheese rolls.

It wasn't until after we had children and moved to the suburbs that I took notice of the muffin-top that was emerging from my waistband. Once our two boys were born, I was determined to get rid of the loose flesh—and get stronger, too. Carrying small, wriggly toddlers had left me with a bad case of Mommy Thumb, an inflammation of the tendons below my thumb, and I didn't want to live life with a brace permanently wrapped around my wrist.

So I did what any crazy-busy working mom would do: I subscribed to fitness magazines and ordered a bunch of home exercise DVDs. For well over a year, I did heart-pounding cardio moves in the garage by myself every night. I counted calories. I strapped a high-tech monitor around my sweaty arm and tracked my caloric expenditure. I lost weight.

But I was also starving and miserable and tired and cranky. I wasn't any stronger, and I was achy all the time. My gut felt terrible every time I worked night shifts. Worst of all, my muffin-top didn't go away.

In the meantime, my husband had embarked on a mission of his own to improve his health and fitness. After the birth of our second kid, Henry could no longer disappear to the neighborhood gym, so he bought a set of weights and began exercising in our garage. He logged his workouts online, and started digging into the various approaches to better health that he came across on the Internet.

And that's how we first stumbled upon Paleo eating.

When Henry first learned about the Paleo approach to nutrition, he and I shared a good laugh about it. No heart-healthy whole grains? No beans?
Ha!

But the more my husband looked into this real-food approach, the more he became convinced of its benefits. He soon transitioned to eating Paleo, while I sat back and scoffed. I figured that Henry's dalliance with this “caveman” thing wouldn't last long. After all, I'm the one with a nutrition degree, and the Paleo framework went against everything I'd learned. I was certain that all that protein and fat was going to send Henry to an early grave.

So naturally, I did my best to sabotage his diet.

I knew of my husband's weakness for pizza, so I made a point of regularly baking his favorite thin-crust pies. And if that didn't work, well
...
I guess I could take out a bigger life insurance policy on him.

But my husband can be stubborn. Henry stuck to his guns, and to my surprise, he didn't just survive eating Paleo—he
thrived
. Here I was, suffering through hour-long cardio workouts and obsessively recording my calories each night, and I didn't feel any healthier. Sure, my bathroom scale told me I'd shed some pounds, but my food cravings were off the charts.

Meanwhile, my husband had joined a local CrossFit gym, where he did high-intensity workouts just three times a week. He ate according to a Paleo template, and was in better shape than when he was in college. His blood work and body composition were excellent, and he was happily gobbling up all the stuff I secretly wanted to eat.

I had to give this Paleo thing a try.

In
2010
, while on a family trip to Alaska, I made the decision to go Paleo. Despite being on a cruise ship, I immediately cut out all grains, legumes, sugar, and processed food from my diet. (Seeing other passengers dragging their oxygen tanks to the buffet lines was more than a little motivating.)

When I got home, I went online and read everything I could about the science behind the Paleo framework. I vacuumed up every morsel of information from books and blogs. I quit doing all the crazy cardio and started going to CrossFit classes. I was all-in. I had joined the cult of Paleo.

And now, I'm the healthiest I've ever been.

I'd been mentally and physically lagging after a decade of working graveyard shifts, but once I changed my diet, my energy levels shot up, and my digestive problems disappeared entirely.

My moods were sunnier, too. I was a much nicer mommy. Paleo managed to both whittle down my midsection and fuel me with enough spunk to wrangle two small boys, hold down a full-time night shift job as a hospital pharmacist, cook for a houseful of hungry cavepeople, lift heavy(ish) stuff at the gym, develop a bestselling app, and maintain a blog.

Oh, right—the blog. I suppose I should say a few words about my little corner of the Internet.

Nom Nom Paleo
started on a whim. For years, I'd been a voracious consumer of food blogs. I was entranced by bloggers who posted tantalizing recipes and gorgeous photographs of their meals. Each site was unique and inspiring in its own way, but all of them made me want to cook. But having switched to a Paleo lifestyle, I found myself craving a food blog that reflected my new approach to eating.

One day, as I gazed at the food porn on my laptop screen, I mused: “I want to start a Paleo food blog.”

Henry glanced over at me. “Really? What would you call it?” he asked.

“Nom Nom Paleo.”

“Huh? What's a ‘Nom Nom'?”

“You know—the noise you make when you're eating something incredibly mind-blowing, and you're just scarfing it down. Like this!”

That night, my husband unveiled a blog he'd created for me called—you guessed it—Nom Nom Paleo. Henry knew I was much too lazy to launch a site on my own. “Jump right in,” he prodded. “Don't over-think it. Just put up content that you'd find useful if you were a reader.” He's such an enabler.

So I started blogging. I shot photographs of my meals and documented my culinary adventures. I discussed my Paleo (and Paleo-ish) meals around town. I offered kitchen shortcuts and reviewed my favorite cooking tools. I posted recipes, and did my best to make Paleo easy and accessible for obsessive gastrophiles and rookie cooks alike.

And I haven't looked back since.