Yes, an ideal diet would “just” consist of meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables. While that sounds extremely restrictive at first, it’s not at all once you realize how many different types of these foods are available to you.

If your meals aren’t satisfying you, adding more protein and/ or fat should help. High purine sources of meat, which are likely to also contain fat, such as grass fed beef or lamb or free range dark meat chicken with the skin are excellent choices. Game meats such as buffalo or venison are especially high in purine.

In addition, two excellent sources of high quality fat include coconut oil or ghee. You can even use butter since it doesn’t contain the casein or lactose from dairy that usually cause problems.

If you still feel that you need to increase your starches, you can get plenty from vegetables and fruit. Yes, potatoes are fine as long as you don’t feel that they affect your blood sugar. I suggest sweet potatoes over white potatoes because they’re more nutritious. Squash, zucchini, carrots, green beans, and peas are a few other vegetable sources of starch.

Any leftover portions from your meals can be used as snacks. Properly prepared raw nuts and nut butters, beef or turkey jerky, and fruits and vegetables that are easy to carry around such as apples, bananas, baby carrots, etc. are all excellent snacks as well. If you snack on fruit, it’s usually a good idea to have some protein and/or fat with it to balance the carbohydrates. For example, you can have apple slices dipped in a nut butter.

Here are two excellent books that contain a wealth of nutritional knowledge as well as recipes that should give you plenty of meal ideas.

Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon
The Garden of Eating by Rachel Albert-Matesz & Don Matesz

Finally, the line between eating grains and dairy and avoiding them completely doesn’t always have to be so strict. As long as you’re confident that you don’t have a sensitivity to either, then you should be able to do well with moderate amounts of them in your diet. It’s far better to follow a diet that consists mostly of meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables with some grain and dairy than to frustrate yourself with a completely grain and dairy free diet and end up going back to unhealthy eating habits. However, considering that grain and dairy are the two most common causes of food sensitivities, I think it’s safer to avoid them if you can manage. If you choose not to, organic whole grains that are soaked and sprouted and raw (unpasteurized) whole fat dairy are the best choices.

Based on the belief that grains weren’t much of a factor in our evolution, I avoid all of them except on rare occasion (as was the case with trying Uno’s gluten free pizza).

I think a more thorough analysis of the nutritional qualities of grains versus more traditional whole foods will be a great topic for a future article!

Stephen – I’m glad you learned something new. Thanks for your support!