Normal Blood Pressure
“Listening to your body” can be a double-edged sword! For one thing, we don’t always recognize what our body’s signals mean. Often we have to get dehydrated before we realize that we’re thirsty. Or we confuse thirst with hunger and end up snacking when we should be drinking a glass of water.
Then there are habits and cravings that we can easily mistake for signals that the body “requires” a certain food (chocolate? crusty white bread? corn chips?). Let’s face it, the body does not need chocolate or grains at all. If our desire for wheat or corn is a really just a plea for more carbs in our diet, then a piece of sweet potato will quieten that voice. Our body doesn’t crave any particular food, but it might need certain macro- or micro-nutrients. You will be hard-pressed to figure this out by listening to your body. Symptoms can: vary from day to day, overlap, be misleading, be masked by other variants, be very subtle. And so on.
The first few weeks of any new regime can be exhilarating or fraught with problems. When you go Paleo you are moving to a healthy, scientifically-proven diet, but your body may still rebel at first! We can make false assumptions based on our initial experience… good or bad! Once the adaptive phase is over, though, then you might be able to listen to your body a little more.
And don’t forget that when you go Paleo, you may still get sick now and then. Our Paleolithic ancestors got sick, just like we do. Infections and infectious diseases are mainly what killed them! They didn’t have any antibiotics. Animals in the wild get sick. It’s called “survival of the fittest,” something we’ve totally undermined with modern medicine. Now even the weakest of us can survive, procreate… and pass on our bad genes.
Be warned: your tendency might be to blame every illness on your new regime. But think about it… people who eat a Standard Ameican Diet (SAD), don’t blame every illness or ache and pain on their diet. Why would you do that on a Paleo diet?
Be careful of listening to your body when it doesn’t actually make sense to do so.
How do you know the difference? I don’t know for sure, but I think things like a blood pressure test and a comprehensive blood test can help us with some objective feedback. I think our energy level, our ability to get a full 8-9 hours of restful sleep and our ability to recover quickly when we do get sick can tell us what our body might be lying about when it’s whining for crusty white bread.
