feeling confused after friends went to Paleo diet..

I eat "Paleo"  90% of the time, but fail to understand how your friends can get in proper training without timing their simple carb intake around workouts.  Within my workout window (2hrs before and after a workout), I'll eat the standard gels, gatorade, powerbar and yes even grains and bread.  Once I pass 2 hours after a workout, it's only veggies, fruit and meat. 

You can eat healthy without being a slave to a specific diet book.  When I stopped eating dairy and grains I started feeling much better and had more energy, so I continued to do so.  However, it had nothing to do with buying in to a magic diet...

I certainly do!

If my "friends" were "shunning" what I ate, I probably wouldn't hang out with them anymore.

Wait.  You feel lonely because they eat differently than you?

Color me a bit confused.

Is it because you are interested in their diet and want to try?

And how does someone else shun your food?

they got into the Paleo diet, which basically "shuns" carbs...

I would say I'm interested to the point of understanding what the diet has to say, but leery of a potential "fad" diet.  So not really interested in changing because they did, so they eat their stuff, and I eat mine, but it's bothersome to have different mindsets when it comes to training/race nutrition. Just another thing to add to the complication I guess.

Here is a pretty detailed thread on BTers doing Paleo that might interest you.

I've been eating this way for nearly two months now and it agrees with me.  I thought I would miss dairy and cereal!! way more than I do, but I really don't.  The body fat that was stubbornly clinging to me (despite a pretty clean "regular" diet) is melting away.  I have more energy than I ever thought possible.  I was only going to try paleo for 4-6 weeks, but I'm committing to it for the year through several races and see how things go.

I eat almost 100%, but use Heed and Hammer Gels to supplement my training when needed.  I did a 50K bike ride on Sunday, which was my longest ever (and it was HOT and HUMID) and first long ride off the trainer.  I had a little soreness for about an hour right off the bike, but no DOMS which used to be fairly usual for me.  I used to need an extra day a week for recovery during training, but haven't needed to even though my training load is increasing.

But opposite of Metafizx, I'm the odd girl out.  And now I've become "THAT" girl at work and with my family.  You know the one - the "she's on some crazy diet," "she won't eat REAL food," (i.e. fast food, processed food, ice cream for heaven's sake!).  I've been pleasantly surprised when eating out that I can get a virtually paleo meal at most restaurants (not fast food, though, which I just won't eat anymore). And I get to try new things I wouldn't have considered otherwise. 

P.S.  I still will have an occasional beer (like after the ride Sunday it tasted SO GOOD!) or glass of wine with dinner, but now I can check the "Rarely" box.

My thought is that any diet based on lean meats, fruits and veggies is an awesome diet.  Any diet that cuts out processed foods and refined sugars (well, all sugars except sugar in fruit reall) is equally awesome.  The only issue I have with people who have gone Paleo or any other similiar diet and then claim that it works for them cause of the Paleo plan is well, how do you know it is cause of the Paleo plan?  How do you know it isn't cause you finally cut out the crap from your diet?  I'd like to hear from folks who already had a very clean diet and then went Paleo and found some big improvement.  Note, I am not crapping on Paleo.  I've read the book, tried the plan, and I think 80% of what it is based on is very solid and just plain old common sense. 

Now, where is my Cadbury Creme Egg....

Best thing I read in the whole thread.  I allow myself one a year. 

Well I doing more of that diet now but really I had such a bad diet that anything will bring me improvements. 

I did some like this diet and I lost a lot of weight but the key is not just find something that will help you lose weight but something you can enjoy that will keep it off.  Trouble is if your too restrictive you may find yourself binging.

The main argument I hear against dairy is that it's another animals milk and we are the only thing that does that.  I have no official thought process on it, but there sure are a lot of people who actually have legit issues with it.  So, can our bodies adjust to it or not?  Some clearly are not.  Some would say that really all of us aren't but the effects are so subtle you wouldn't know unless you stopped.  There is also something in cheese that is suppose to be as bad as heroin as far as addictiveness goes (so they say).  I forget what it is really.

As for yogurt, clearly all the above about milk, but, also, how many people you know eat plain yogurt?  If it's not plain then the amount of added sugar is through the roof.  To me that's the bigger issue with yogurt.

I am undecided about dairy.  The bigger mystery for me with Paleo is beans and grains (and how they poo poo it).  I don't buy the science behind what they are saying yet.  But I haven't done a lot of independant research on it.

According to the author, it increases the pH level of our body which actually encourages the loss of calcium.  Paleo man didn't eat/drink dairy after he stopped breast feeding since farm animals weren't around yet.  We supposedly stop making the proper enzymes to properly digest dairy after we're a few years old.

I don't know if any of that is true, but I do know that my stomach feels significantly better without dairy.

And here I thought I was being so healthy buying plain Greek yogurt today! Ha ha ha.

I should have just bought the licorice.

And really, in the end, that's all that counts.  I think people need to experiment and try things and see what works for them.  More often then not it will be a hybrid of plans.  You need your experiment to last long enough to really see if there is a benefit, but I venture to say that if you went to unprocessed foods and made the majority of your diet lean meats, fruits and veggies (or leave the meat out if your vegetarian) you'd feel better in a week.  Then it's fine tuning. 

I've been doing a Paleo-ish diet for over 2 years now.  A few times over that period, I've been undisciplined and eaten processed foods and dairy for about a month and will lose energy and feel like crap.  Once I buckle down and get back to eating clean, I feel better within 3-4 days; which includes better energy, better mood and much better 'digestive health'. 

Silk makes a dark chocolate almond milk that's incredibly yummy...my daughter's anaphylactic to dairy, and this is the 1st non-dairy chocolate milk that's safe for her that i really like, too....

Short answer:  Ignore them...unless you don't want to ignore them.  In which case, join them.

Longer answer (from someone who's been reading--purely out of recreational, not academic, interest--in human evolutionary studies for a lot of years):

Depending on who you are reading on "Paleo" (there are some scientists with a great deal more nuanced research supporting their positions than others), a lot of it (by no means all of it) is--from a genetic standpoint--nonsense (at least for most people of Western European descent).  We...quite literally...aren't cavemen and are no longer in a position where we can't tolerate dairy or grains; "Paleo" is largely based on a conventional wisdom in evolutionary biology (human beings have essentially stopped evolving) that's been overturned quite recently (we are, in fact, evolving quite rapidly in several respects)...plus a smattering of false assertions about early modern human diet.  Paleo involves some great dietary habits that I love to follow...and some completely pointless and trend-following ones.  But on a planetary scale, it is ultimately not sustainable...it's only workable in the context of hunter-gatherer societies ("Paleo" foodstuffs simply can't be produced on a high enough calories per acre basis to support the modern human population).