Food combining as Paleo?

A number of years ago, I found myself extremely overweight, at about 310 pounds. I had just moved back from Arizona and I was huge. I happened to come across a book titled "Food Combining For Health: Get Fit Eating Foods that Don't Fight" by Doris Grant and Jene Joice. This was the first time I had come across the idea of food combining, but it wouldn't be the last.

The premise seemed pretty straight forward. As the doctor, William Hay, who came up with this particular system wrote about 100 years ago, one should "eat only those things intended as food for man, in their natural state and only in the amount necessary for present need." So this cut out pretty much all processed foods, extra sugar and so forth.

The basics are simply that you do not eat concentrated carbohydrates with concentrated proteins in the same meal and meals of different character should be spaced out by about 4 hours or more. The book provided 3 columns of foods. You could eat column 1 and column 2 in the same meal or column 2 and column 3 in the same meal, but not column 1 and 3. So pretty easy.

The way I applied this system evolved into something of a routine that worked something like this:

"Breakfast" (usually around 11:00am)-
2 medium/small baked potatoes with heavy cream and butter in the skins
an ear of corn with butter
green beans
1 or 2 slices of whole wheat bread with butter
banana with raisins, sliced almonds and heavy cream

"Lunch" (around 4 or 5:00pm) -
1/3 lb of ground beef with cheddar cheese and ketchup
winter squash
garden peas
parsnips
maybe an apple or an orange

"Dinner" (around 9:00pm after work)
Large bowl of fruit - a whole grapefruit, an orange, an apple and about 5 ounces of grapes.

I plugged this typical day into FitDay and it gave me this:

Calories 2205
Grams Calories %-Cals
Fat 90.6 801 36
Carbohydrate 311.3 1160 53
Dietary Fiber 44
Protein 65.2 243 11
(Just a note that is is pretty close to the macro nutrient ratio for the Kitavan diet. A little low on carb and high on fat, but close.)

I pretty much always ate the fruit as my last meal of the day, but the other two meals tended to flip back and forth as to their character. This was because I would cook enough for "lunch" to have for "breakfast" the next day. So I'd cook 4 baked potatoes for example, eat 2 for "lunch" and the other two chopped up and cooked with onions in a pan with butter for "breakfast" the next day. In looking at the timing I was also doing something of an intermittent fast everyday, with 14 or so hours between "dinner" and "breakfast."

In looking at this from the perspective of my current lowish-carb paleo, I'm pretty horrified by the amount of carbs I was eating, not to mention the grains. Though because they are limited to one meal a day, I was eating quite a bit less of those than most folks would be. Most of the carbs were vegetables, fruit and potatoes. I didn't do anything to restrict seed oils or dairy and didn't eat a lot of fish, so my omega 3 to 6 ratio was probably pretty bad.

What were the results of eating like this? Believe it or not, over the course of 9 months I lost over 130 pounds, averaging half a pound per day during that time. I don't recall having any great hunger during this time either. I do recall periodic cheats, typically of ginger ale and potato chips eaten in the evening after a carbohydrate "lunch". All in all I felt great, was relatively fit from losing the weight and doing 30 minutes of tai chi like exercises everyday. (Well, I didn't start off at 30 minutes, more like 5, but I built up to it.) I recall becoming fairly active during that time.

I don't know what led to the rapid weight loss.
Was it the separating of concentrated proteins and starches?
Was it getting rid of added sugar and processed foods?
Was it limiting grain consumption?
Some mix of all of these?

Looking back on this has led me to wonder what the effect would be if you tackled food combining from a paleo-ish perspective. Get rid of the grains and seed oils and potato skins. Eat more fish for the omega 3 ratio fats. Eat more grass fed meat and or omega 3 rich eggs.

Frankly I am a little scared to even contemplate it at this point, but it does provide some interesting food for thought.