I'm planning on starting this next week. Having come from slimming world and free foods, I'm trying to get my head around primal - though def think its the way forward. Can I ask (in case I've missed it) are there portion sizes or limits put on all foods? Should I be calorie counting too? And the fabulous recipes for muffins and granola etc - do you eat to satisfaction or do you measure ?
Sorry if I'm asking the obvious - I've read the book but can't seem to spot it!
Congrats on your great loss so far!
Assuming you have 'The Primal Blueprint'... Chapter 8 covers how to eat primal for weight loss. This entails keeping carbs within 50-100g per day, getting adequate protein (he includes a formula to calculate this) and making up the rest of your intake with fat. He also indicates that you calculate your calorie requirements (including your desired deficit for loss) and stick within these although he doesn't say so outright. Using MFP or similar will take care of the tracking for you but my personal experience is that it's better to calculate my own calorie requirement and edit my MFP profile (both calorie goal and protein/fat/carb ratio) to reflect this as MFP tends to lump a lot of women at 1200 cal/day which is considered low for primal/paleo. He also emphasises that if you have days where you go a little over or under something not to stress about it!
Re baked goods etc, personally I consider those treat foods and would portion them as such. IE I might have one muffin or a small portion of granola as a treat (making sure to have it with protein/fat foods too if it doesn't contain much) but not a heaping bowl of granola every morning or a muffin every afternoon with tea.
The bulk of your diet should be made up of whole natural foods, in my opinion the 'treat' foods are there to keep things a little bit more liveable - if you have a huge craving for toast, better to make a Paleo english muffin in the microwave and toast it than to cave and dive into a loaf of 'real' bread. Or if you need something sweet, a coconut crack bar or Paleo muffin will be better than a KitKat. Part of this is because the non-paleo foods are not as healthy and part of it is because they are very likely to set off cravings which make it more difficult to get back on track, whereas the paleo/primal treats do not have such a noticeable effect.
If you find tracking a real pain, you shouldn't have to do it forever (unless you want to of course). Although I tracked my food during weight loss, I stopped when I reached my goal weight and have been maintaining within a 3lb range since last autumn just by eating paleo/primal as desired. If I go to a restaurant or something where there isn't anything paleo-friendly on offer I still stick to gluten-free foods although they are things I wouldn't eat at home like GF pizza or toast. I managed a 3 week trip to NZ this way without gaining any weight despite eating out quite a lot and having many afternoon cakes etc. So whilst tracking during weight loss is helpful, primal/paleo is a very sustainable way to eat even after that.
