Quote:
Originally Posted by Nora52
I am doing low carb, wheat free, grain free diet called Wheat Belly. Google it and find his Blog and books. The Diet aims for no more than 15g carbs a meal which is to keep the Blood Sugar levelled off with no Insulin spikes. Total of carbs per day something like 50g or less .
I have done Atkins and find this one much easier with LOTS of food to choose from. Two new Cookbooks have just been released - pizza, focaccia, sandwich breads. Its not exactly Paleo though ( no honey on WB
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Honey is not required or even encouraged on paleo, so Wheat Belly is entirely paleo (and paleo recipes can be used on Wheat Belly diet as long as you omit any honey that is in the rare recipe that contains it). Most paleo plans and to a lesser degree the cookbooks (because the cookbooks tend to assume you're already familiar with Paleo) make it very clear that high carb "paleo" foods like honey, wild rice and yam/sweet potato are not something to include in your diet frequently, especially if you are not thin, fit, and healthy. If you're trying to lose weight, you're encouraged to avoid these foods entirely or to use them in incredibly small amounts (usually fewer than 10g per serving - usually MUCH, MUCH less than 10g per serving, such as a teaspoon used in a recipe to serve 6).
15g of carbs per meal is actually much higher in carbs than most paleo meals (at least those for weight loss).
If you understand paleo and Wheat Belly, they're actually very compatible plans, with only small modifications. 90% of the recipes in each plan will work for the other (at least that's been my experience so far).
Also, if you read the paleo books (especially the earliest ones like Neanderthin and the Paleolithic Prescription) and Wheat Belly, you will see that both authors are using the same research to support their recommendations.
Wheat Belly is a paleo diet, it's just not the only paleo diet. If you read all the paleo diet books, and Wheat Belly, you'll find more agreement than disagreement. There are foods that Wheat Belly allows that some paleo diets do not, and there are some foods that Wheat belly forbids that some paleo diets allow. However, if you read all the paleo diet books, you'll find that they all agree far more than they disagree, and the 10% on which they disagree is mostly inconsequential - or applies to people who are already thin, fit, young, and healthy.
Many people skip over the important part of paleo (and probably Wheat Belly as well) the part that explains why foods are allowed and in what situations.
Honey for example wasn't a daily treat for paleo people's. You don't just walk up to a hive and get honey. It requires a lot of physical exertion - it's available only a short time during the year, and you only get a little bit of reward for all that hard work.
So to be truly "in the spirit" of paleo, if you're fat and sedentary - you don't get honey. And even if you're young and fit, you only get a little bit of honey after a whole lot of work. So to "earn" your honey, you have to spend a couple hours in the gym on the treadmill, and even then you don't get honey every time - just once in a very great while. Imagine what it took to GET honey in paleo times. Heck, imagine what it takes to get wild honey TODAY - wild bees don't provide a lot of honey, and the hive is inaccessible without a great deal of work AND pain. Humans gathering wild honey get stung - are you willing to be stung by six or eight bees to get your honey? If not, you don't get any.
It frustrates me to no end, people dismissing paleo because some (and in fact, very few) paleo diets alllow or encourage honey for weight loss, and when they do it's in the form of a few grams here and there.
Truly paleo diets are extremely low in carbs. There are a few wild carb sources, including wild roots and tubers, and some grass seeds like wild rice that paleo poeple ate - but virtually all of them were small parts of the diet and required a great deal of work to gather or make edible. If you want wild rice, that's great - walk to a marsh, gather it by hand, and then thresh it by hand - now you get to eat wild rice.
Sure if you weigh 125 lbs, are in excellent health, and run daily - then you can have the occasional high-carb food like sweet potatoes and a tiny bit of honey, but it's not supposed to be a frequent indulgence.
Wheat Belly and paleo plans have far more in common than they differ, and if you're familiar enough with your chosen plan, you have the advantage of being able to recognize plan-friendly recipes wherever you find them.
Because I know my paleo plan (which doesn't include any honey or maple syrup, and only includes sweet potato occasionally - as in once a month, occasionally, and only if I'm meeting my exercise goals), I can use any paleo or low-carb cookbook, including Atkins and Wheat Belly.
The differences in the plans are so small, that I've found that in most paleo and other low-carb cookbooks I can use 80 -90% of the recipes as is, and can usually modify most of the rest by omitting any ingredient (such as honey) that I don't eat. At most there's about 5% of the recipes that I can't use because it relies too heavily on foods I don't eat.
There are a few foods that various paleo plans including Wheat Belly disagree on - mainly dairy (and whether that dairy needs to be full-fat, low-fat, or cultured to remove some or all of the lactose and to provide necessary probiotics that we no longer get because we overwash our foods), honey, maple syrup, agave nectar, potatoes and sweet potatoes, legumes and the very high-protein, high-fiber grasses and pseudo grains (such as wild rice, quinoa, amaranth).
Sounds like a long list until you actually start eating this way, and you realize that you can easily avoid any or all of these foods, not just because of the plan you follow, but just because you want to.
I'm not philosophically opposed to small amounts of honey in recipes, but I don't eat any honey for another reason. I'm allergic. It may actually be a pollen I'm allergic to, since some honey (and especially raw honey) causes a worse reaction than others. When I was a kid, I thought honey gave everyone a scratchy throat, so I didn't understand why it was given as a medicine for sore throat. I can't eat wheat for a similar reason - it causes a very unpleasant and ugly face rash that hubby calls "face rot."
I've had to make accomodations to diets most of my life, and I've also been dieting for 40-some years, so maybe that makes it easier for me to see the commonalities in plans, but because every specific plan usually has only a handful of cookbooks (at best), it can be extremely limiting to exclude similar-but-not-identical plan cookbooks.
If you understand your plan, you can use any recipe that fits your plan. You also need to understand which foods are allowed, but not required, so that you can recognize which other plans are compatible with yours.
I know as a paleo follower that I can use most Wheat Belly recipes, virtually all Atkins recipes, and virtually all paleo cookbooks - but I do have to watch for ingredients that I don't use either because of my specific plan, or because of allergies and sensitivities.
It doesn't take much work to know your plan this well, and it opens up so many more resources. Even when I can only use half the recipes in a cookbook, I feel lucky to find it. I also know that I can read and respond in the other low-grain, low-carb threads on topics that apply equally to my diet as to theirs. I know not everyone wants to become familiar with a plan they aren't going to follow, but when there's 80-90% agreement between the plans, it just makes sense. It not only allows you access to more applicable resources, it also gives you more people to talk to.
Diet plans are like language, and some are dialects of the same language. I would argue that Wheat Belly is just a dialect of Paleo (and even the various paleo plans are just dialects of Paleo). When we share more similiarities than differences, it just makes sense (to me) to band together, or at least to communicate on the common ground.
Getting ideas to get started...
I was a Weight Watchers devotee for many years, and while I may still go back / use it for how it can help me, I have gotten more interested in the "Real Food" approach and and am starting to think that lowering carbs may really be where "it" is at. I don't think I could do Atkins - it's just a little too restrictive / different for me. And the same is true for going Paleo (which would be more of a health thing, than a weight loss thing) - I need to be a little closer to mainstream/gradual than that. 
Also trying to keep below 100g carbs per day a calorie counting. So i'll be listening closely to answers! 
