But Tony, you’re Italian! What are you doing? What about the pizza? The Pasta? The Bread?! There’s no way you can pull this off!

That’s what I thought when I started. Just two weeks, I told myself. You can do this! The first few days were absolute torture but I persevered and about four days in it was.. fine. It was compounded by my not eating sugar either so my dietary choices were somewhat limited as I don’t like seafood so I ate a lot of chicken, eggs, and beef. The funny thing about eating like a supposed ‘carnivore’ was that it was very filling and I found that my appetite was basically zeroed out and I had to force myself to eat sometimes as I just wasn’t hungry.

In fact the lack of variety ended up being a benefit as I just ate the same few things over and over making it easy to prepare and plan for – lots of scrambled eggs, burgers on almond buns, and sausage and peppers. In fact I went a bit stricter than what was called for as I also didn’t eat fruit to keep the sugars (even natural ones) low. It ended up being a low carb situation which is fine for managing hunger but it’s a real pain in the energy department. I tried playing basketball or hitting the gym and it was brutal. Since low carb means you shed water I ended up parched during workouts and guzzling water like a man who was lost in the desert for a week.

What did work? The weight loss. Now, I realize 50% of it was probably water but it still was pretty effective. So much so that I ended up doing it for 21 days preparing for my trip to Italy. That’s right baby I went low carb right before heading to the motherland of carbs.

So yeah,I gained 1/2 the weight back during my week in Italy but hey – la dolce vita, si? That being said, I really wasn’t doing it for weight loss only I wanted to see how I felt without grain in my diet and I will say that the biggest thing I noticed was my focus improved substantially. I was able to keep on task and keep things in my short term memory longer than before.

So overall I saw some benefits, but not enough to give up three of my favorite food groups (Pizzas, Pastas, Sandwiches). It was an interesting experiment and I’m glad I tried it but it’s really not something that is sustainable for me.