While we're on chip, fries, pomme frites, or whatever it is our various language call them, I wrote a post about Chips on my paleo sibling blog Leaving the Ice Age: http://leavingtheiceage.pjgh.co.uk/2011/11/chips.html

Summary? Get some dripping! Fry small amounts to keep the carbohydrate load under your glucose requirement and return the fat to the fridge once cooled a little. Enjoy them a lot!

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Tania – you can make the switch without having to eat red meat. Having gone the first step to taking in quality macronutrients from fish and eggs, chicken is also useful, but do eat the skin. Can you try turkey, too? Shellfish?

Personally, I'd be quite happy to leave it there, too. I find red meat a little boring, but I do like some cuts long and slowly cooked.

Your next step should be to cut out all grains and beans, and perhaps dairy, but definitely grains and beans … for good. These actively distrupt you, block absorption of minerals, promote overgrowth of bad flora in your gut and strip it of good flora which can make full use of the vegetables you eat. I think this  crux of the problem with malabsorption and improper use of macronutrients. With a healed gut, packed with flourishing good flora, you can take full advantage of vegetables, digesting the parts which we cannot naturally digest not having fermenting stomachs, like cows or chimpanzees. Flora in the gut can break down those final parts of goodness.

Dairy is a useful source of fat energy and probiotics in yoghurt. If you are already a "real food" eater, I'd encourage you to complete the healing process with lots of probiotic yoghurt once grains and beans are gone. Youay want to remove it for a period of purging (30 days) and bring it back in afterwards yoghurt, cream, soured cream, kefir and skyr. Milk isn't much use when you have cream.

Remove the final traces of sugar, soy, industrial oils (that's all oils which are not cold pressed) and other such things foreign to a natural diet. Extra virgin olive oil, avocada oil and palm oil are fine, but keep them for salad dressings. Coconut oil has a superb profile. Fats should be gleaned naturally – from fish, meat and dairy if you keep it in your diet. Salmon, sardines, herring, mackerel are all excellent, and for you, chicken thighs, slow-cooked.

Do not be scared of fat – the majority of your calories should come from fat, but that happens naturally with paleo; no need to go gobbling down blocks of butter! If you have a meal with lean meat, eat it with something fatty – chicken breast and an avocado, for example. If you eat something predominantly starchy, couple it with fat to lower the glycemic load – mashed potato with butter and cream.

Eating like a predator is quite a foreign concept for a vegetarian, but it is a principle. We're not rabid carnivores with no conscience for the animals, far from it – we insist on the animals which have been naturally reared, eaten their natural food in the way that they should, free from steroids, antibiotics and bulking agents. Same for fish – wild and uncontaminated.

It is a principle which works and one which guides.

I think you could make the adjustments easily.There will be a purging and healing period and beyond that, I think paleo will be a natural diet for you.

Good macronutrients is the key – short chain natural fats, not thin industrial oils; starches, not sugars; protein from natural sources like meat, fish, shellfish and eggs, not manufactured sources like soy, quorn or seitan.