Happy hump day!  Very appropriate since I can’t sign onto facebook without reading something new about camel’s milk and also temporarily beat my insomnia by defriending the nutsack-previously-known-as-almonds (go, go  n=1 experiment!).

If you read about The Good Rice & The Bad Almond and are halfway interested in Paleo/Primal, you might be thinking there’s nothing left for us to eat unless we camp out next to cows, graze with them on grass, and then eat the cows when they’re not looking.   Sure, there are tons of tasty paleo recipes online like this piece of heaven but if you have POTS/OI,  fatigue, or other debilitating symptoms, the thought of prepping a meal makes you wanna slap all 10 steps of the recipe.  If so, without further ado, here are 4 quick & easy ways to get your Paleo Vice on:

1) Possibly The Last Protein Bar I’ll Ever Recommend

Diehard Paleo peeps might say that a Paleo protein bar is the equivalent of watching The Biggest Loser as part of your diet plan, but if you have some margin for minimal processing, the Paleo Bar by PaleoLife Foods is the closest I’ve seen to an organic low-carb, zero-sugar-alcohol, high-protein, dairy-free bar.  Summary of ingredients: organic rice protein, organic nuts & seeds, organic cocoa, organic honey, some spices & salt.  Money baby.  Update: The company just informed me the organic rice protein is from white rice (for why this is benefit read my post on antinutrients.

It’s so new to the market that it has only 1 review on Amazon, and their website isn’t even operational, but it has 1/3 of the sugar (6g) in the previous protein bar I recommended (18g sugar) with almost as much protein (17g).  This really isn’t that different from Mark Sisson’s recipe for making your own protein bars (note to the dairy-sensitive: Mark’s version includes Whey)

2) Crazy For Cacoa

Besides the well-established anti-inflammatory benefits of dark chocolate, unadulterated chocolate and coffee carry the distinction of being modern vices that are technically paleo legal.  (Read about Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof Coffee) Problem is: many patients with Candida issues can’t tolerate the sugar in the 70%-90% cacoa bars (i.e. the Fearless Raw Cacao bar I posted earlier), then find that munching a 100% cacoa bar turns an indulgence into a killjoy of blandness.   That’s when I say you need to fake it to make it: get some liquid stevia drops and put 2-3 drops on each square of chocolate, and feel the bitterness of your taste buds & soul melt away.  If it’s Friday night and you wanna go buck wild in your PJs, melt the baking bar with stevia and indulge properly with a spoon, or mix with some water to make hot cocoa.

Note: The higher the fat content, the closer to paleo but also the closer to poverty when you’re talking about cacao butter.  100% baking bars will say “100% unsweetened chocolate” but that’s an arbitrary mix of cacao butter & cocoa solids.  You can buy 100% cacao butter for about $24 a bar, but from an indulgence standpoint, there’s no need since the cocoa solids are responsible for the “chocolate-y” flavor.  Here’s the one I use:

3)  GrassFed, Non-Perishable, and Online?

The game has officially changed.  With the arrival of online suppliers like texasgrassfedbeef and US Wellness, hunter-gatherers can now be online-customers.  Keeping with our theme, this also means we have more snackable grassfed options.  This would’ve been especially helpful last night when I was researching Paleo snacks at midnight, drooling on my bib, and totally out of avocados.

Pemmican is a paleo-happy mixture of fat and protein from meat, invented by Native Americans.  Think jerky, but more fatty, and often cranberry-flavored.  Here are a few sources: US Wellness grassfed beef, The Buffalo Guys, and the widely available Tanka brand.

Pricewise, US Wellness is the most competitive at $2.89 / 2 oz.  Buffalo is a bit more expensive at around $4.52 / 2 oz from the Buffalo Guys, and $4.80 / 2 oz  from Tanka.  Nice thing about Tanka is it’s available from Amazon w/free shipping, but note that every flavor of Tanka has cranberry and 6g of sugar.

4) Gourmet: 3 Minutes Away From Fast Food

It wouldn’t be right to end this without some truly lazy ways to make Paleo and flavor coexist.

Sweet Potatoes, being part of the wild root vegetables & tuber category and lacking the antinutrients that plague grains & nuts, are paleo-legal so long as you keep them within doses which don’t crank up your insulin.  (Here’s a slow clap for you Idaho.)  One of my favorite renditions is heating up a sweet potato in the morning, cutting it up, and then drowning it in salsa.  If that doesn’t sound magnificent to you, you’ve obviously never had The Big Burrito from Northstar Cafein Columbus, one of my fave restaurants in the world.  Close your eyes when you’re eating this, and you might think you’re eating fries with ketchup, except you won’t be whipping yourself later out of guilt (or whipping yourself out of guilt:

The “Honey I’m Sorry” trick.  Remember that eggs make everything better, as long as you don’t take out the fatty yolk!  If you can’t tolerate even free-range, organic chicken eggs, you may want to try this with duck eggs.  One of my favorite tricks is buying a burrito bowl from Chipotle with carnitas & veggies, heating it up in a pan, at first sizzle drop in an egg or 2, then scramble it with all the contents.  Whatever the burrito bowl tasted like before, this is 10x better.  Whomever was mad at you before won’t stay mad for long after he/she tastes this gourmet hash.  Just make sure to burn all traces of the Chipotle bag!