I went years without really eating bread... with the exception of a really good kaiser roll on the "perfect cheeseburger".

My own personal downfall was my love of deep fried potatoes and beer. Seriously, I would have lived on them forever were it not in my late 20's when I started getting severely sick constantly.

On top of that, I love (and still love, regrettably) the Southern Appalachian grub I grew up on, which is heavy on corn/hominy, beans, with tons of pork and little beef or fish (excluding cornmeal-fried catfish).

But I was never really healthy to begin with, I just started feeling it more, and literally felt like I woke up one day going from the low 200lb range, to over 430lbs - I know it was a very gradual change, but man did it seem to happen fast.

I remember getting suspended from class in the 3rd grade for frequent flatulence. No lie. My mom, horrified, started soaking beans for days before cooking with baking soda water rinses to make them easier to digest, to no avail. She made me start taking fiber (at 10 years old), which made things worse! I couldn't keep a job because of constant sick days from frequent diarrea and other stomach upset. My friends all joked about me up until my mid-20's when I discovered Paleo.

No one seems to even remember the old sick me anymore, just this annoying guy that keeps telling them to ditch their crappy food.

So unfortunately, not me.

Yeah, I had similar experiences. I was eating progressively more paleo because of having celiac, then had a lot of gluten-free non-paleo foods, and noticed differences. Never figured out why until I discovered paleo. Cutting out all of that plus some other stuff has made me much healthier.

Welcome to PaleoHacks. You'll find a lot of people with similar experiences here. We're all working on getting even better. =)

Yes, though I think the way I ate was closer to what Weston A. Price recommends, and what I see on websites such as Food Renegade

I'm Russian, and I grew up on a dacha - basically a country house with a large plot of land where we grew everything we ate. We got meat from a local guy who had cows, sheep & chickens, made all dairy produce ourselves (I still crave my gran's sour cream. You could stand a spoon in the stuff) and we didn't eat commercially produced food.

We ate grains, though something of note is that they were mainly non gluten grains (wheat was seen as an inferior grain in my family) but they were traditionally prepared - i.e. soaked in buttermilk, sprouted, and cooked. Actually, I ate mostly buckwheat, which is a botanically not a grain anyhow, but a pseudocereal; oats (unprocessed - i.e. the whole groat); and millet. Bread & anything using flour was also frowned upon, but we had sprouted borodinsky bread - very moist and black, made with rye. There was a lot of emphasis on bone-broth based soups (especially borsch - my grandmother always made yellow borsch because she hated beetroot, though!); lots of tubers, including potatoes (though my grandmother always preferred to serve me turnip instead of the latter).

Now this is a traditional Russian diet; it is carb-heavy, make no mistake of it. Take a look at pictures of Russian peasant women - working all day in the fields, and yet sporting a significant body fat percentage (though, I suspect, they had significant muscle, too). http://bibliotekar.ru/k94-Serebryakova/12.files/image002.jpg In fact, a healthy woman at that time was described as having "blood with milk" - being very robust, but definitely not obese in the way someone with modern metabolic syndrome is.

I, however, was a kid, and probably because I was also an extremely active kid (and we ate in moderation - I was never forced to clean my plate or eat if I didn't want to), that suited me fine. I was very healthy, and lean, until I moved into the city.

My health started declining particularly when my gran - who cooked most - got sick, and couldn't really cook for me much, so I started eating processed foods - and, especially, gluten grains that hadn't been properly prepared - and being more sedentary; I put on some weight (I wasn't significantly overweight, but I had put on weight nevertheless), but that wasn't the most notable health problem. I started getting sick more often, got acne, and a myriad digestion problems (which stopped the second I cut out grains).

I'm glad I have my health back too, Ryan :-)

Lots of Paleo love

Milla

Interestingly enough, I also had this experience. I was the kid who would choose a can of tuna out of the cabinet or leftover meatloaf or sliced beef out of the fridge for a snack. I generally hated breads and pasta (though I'd kill for eggplant parmagiano). Because of my background, I ate a LOT of dairy, preferred butter and olive oil to sugary sweets, but I was never a big fan of grains of any kind... However, my mother was TERRIFIED that I was going to be obese. She's the one who pushed me into vegetarianism, and eventually into veganism, where I languished, getting fatter and fatter and sicker and sicker for 30+ years. Returning to my childhood preferences has been a real boon to my health.

As a child, yes. I happily ate the fat on my meat and slathered my vegetables in butter. I wasn't a bread kid and I didn't like cake, although I did like toll house cookies.

Sadly for me, I joined the SAD as I grew up and suffered many complaints--most of which I didn't connect to diet--for 50 years until I went ancestral last April and all those complaints went away.

I think with the decades passed I probably have damage that won't completely heal but there's no doubt I feel great now and have stopped or slowed the deterioration.

I'm sad that my son, who already has more symptoms that I ever did, is deaf so far to the idea of eating ancestral. My grandson is about 60% ancestral but still eats cereal--I did coax him to switch from wheat to rice though--and a few SAD treats. So far, he's healthy and I intend to keep "expressing my opinion."

This totally happened to me! I didn't care much for bread. I like to eat slabs of meat. I would occasionally eat some side green stuff or other things, but overall I ate what I liked. I did eat a little bit of pasta, and that was the beginning of the downfall. Still, I was fine until I decided that it was time to 'eat healthy.' So I cut out most of the meat because 'meat is bad for you' and starting eating a bunch of rice and more pasta. I gained a lot of wait and my health declined. I developed some weird intestinal problems. I ate yogurt because it is 'healthy' and it's supposed to be good for the GI tract. Of course, it was also full of sugar. Anyway, looking back on it now, it's all so obvious, but at the time I thought I just suffered from a lack of self control with my eating portions. So I severely restricted my intake and did lose a lot of weight, but I was hungry and dizzy and tired all the time. I did that for years and they told me I was now 'healthy' hehe. FInally, I fell of the 'healthy' wagon and gained all the weight back and was no longer dizzy but still got sick a lot and was strangly moody. By then, I was eating a lot of pasta and starting to eat more just plain carb crap food like cake.

When out of desperation, I finally tried lowcarb, it probably saved my health and I saw a whole never much easier and more fun way to do it. Now I eat more balanced and sometimes have rice or often I have potato. I eat fresh fruits and vegetables whenever I feel like it which is intermittantly. My weight is under control and I never have to feel hungry. It's such a relief more than anything. I used to fear my weight and fear my ability to keep it down. Now I don't really think about it much. Seems like I like a bit of carb each day and meat for sure. I could go a day without carb without really noticing, but if I skip meat, I'll start craving it. I only really crave fruit or veggie if I skip for a few days or more. This is my 'new normal' and I love it!