On the scariness factor of making such radical changes... I found that doing the 30-day "boot camp" so to speak did help me realize that for me, I could be satisfied with the food I was eating on the primal diet. Truly, for many people, once you get past the first week or two of cutting out the grains, legumes and (most) sugar, the carb-y sweet foods don't have nearly the draw that they once did. As a sidenote, I think two changes that wrought some of the biggest changes weren't necessarily specifically primal: one was stopping drinking sweetened drinks---whether juice or sugar or sugar-substitute sodas or coffee extravaganza drinks---and the other stopping going to fast-food restaurants.
(I do still drink black coffee almost daily along with my water, and we have several restaurants that serve healthier options when we want to eat out.)
Since I started I haven't been (or even tried) following the diet absolutely perfectly. I kind of adopted the thought that if I can eat "cleanly" at least 80 percent of the time or more, I'm doing well. I've been eating this way for almost a year and a half. This month I'm doing another 30-day boot camp, as some of the old sugar cravings have been creeping back. But I'm not coming at it from a feeling of failure, but rather a desire to bump my health back up a notch. I don't feel like this lifestyle is a life-sentence. It feels very do-able and even enjoyable to me.
Hope that is encouraging and not coming across as overly evangelistic... (seeing as I didn't speak to your original question
)
__________________
ANDREA
GLORY be to God for dappled things---
...
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
GERARD MANLY HOPKINS