1 month of Paleo

Day 29 of the initial 30 day paleo challenge.

The reason I did this 30 day challenge is summed up here:


"..it will change your life. I cannot possibly put enough emphasis on this simple fact. This. Will. Change. Your. Life. It will change the way you think about food, it will change your tastes, it will change your habits and your cravings. It could, quite possibly, change the emotional relationship you have with food, and with your body. It has the potential to change the way you eat for the rest of your life."
http://www.byersgetsdiesel.com/2009/07/change-your-life-in-thirty-days.html

Two days before I started I figured out a few modifications that would make this trip a better fit for me but "moxyboss" above said "strict by the book paleo for 30 days" and I decided anything less would be selling the challenge short and I would never be able to say for sure what the results wold have been if done by the book. Now that I'm closing it up I am so glad that I played by the rules.

Did it change the way I think about food? Yes...very much.
Did it change my emotional relationship with food?...without a doubt.
Did it change my life forever..... Not sure yet but it's possible.

I learned some things about food I don't think I could have learned any other way than doing this challenge. Not all of them will necessarily be good "paleo" lessons. I won't know until I try to re-introduce things but one of the first things I will be trying to add back in is yogurt. If I discover that I don't have any negative reaction to eating it I will add back yogurt to my diet...it's something I feel would improve my overall eating strategy to include small amounts of yogurt. It may be that paleo people did not eat it but as soon as they figured out how to make it people DID start eating it and I think it's a very beneficial food (as long as you don't have issues with the dairy) and then there are goat milk options as well as coconut milk yogurts. So I intend to expand and improve on my new found base by experimenting with foods from a "clean slate" I could never have had before.

Sugar - My relationship with sugar has changed and we are on the outs. I don't know yet how we can re-negotiate any new terms to coexist or exactly how to proceed from here but the bloom is off the rose on sugar(s) for me now.

Grains - You tricky bastards. I think you might be ok actually and not the demon paleo makes you out to be but the US government and society have convinced us to take you on obsessive quantities. The food pyramid has you at what I now believe is a very unhealthy proportion.
Like sugar we are going to have to find a new relationship and I think for the next few months I will have VERY little room for you. When I started looking at nutritional data for things like oatmeal and bread I realized for the first time how devoid of real "food" some of these things are. They are mainly carb/fiber balls. There is not much nutrition at all in oatmeal.
I'm not going to get into the fiber thing right now but it's a straight up hoax if you ask me. Reading something about food is one thing and eating it for a month is another. I'll give my short un-gross version and say the things you read about people having 5#'s of undigested meat or something like that in their intestines if they don't' eat enough fiber to cleanse it out...I think it's total quackery at this point.
I feel almost certain you could eat nothing but red meat for 2 weeks and you would discover right away there is no problem with it gumming up the works. My month without them tells me grains are not all their cracked up to be. :(

Weight loss- I lost 14#s in the last 29 days and don't have anything to add to it other than next month will be key and I'll have a lot more to say then.

Moving forward - I plan to shift slightly towards Primal over Paleo because I think there are some holes in strict Paleo (for me anyway) that need to be filled. Perhaps "Paleo for athletes" addresses those deficiencies and maybe less active people would do better with strict paleo but I had a few crashes over the month and I think they were related to carb intake/glycogen stores/usage. I don't have any way to prove it but for starters I see myself eating sweet potatoes once a week next month to see what effect it has on my high workload sessions and make adjustments from there.

Overall - a fantastic challenge!

Moxy was correct in almost all of her assertions and possible all of them, I just don't have enough time in yet to say about the long term effects.

I would encourage anybody to try it that could use some help in dealing with food issues. Athletes should read more about that angle on things and read blogs by other paleo athletes but other than that I think it was overall a VERY positive experience and I'm excited to see where the next month brings me as I take some baby step modifications of the paleo plan to seek out what I hope will be the best eating plan I've ever had...more to follow.

3 weeks of Paleo

The third week of Paleo.....uneventful really.

I might have suffered some mental burn out feelings on "meat and vegetables" but it passed and we made some bomb-diggity taco salads last night that set things right.

I've been spending most of my time now looking at another branch of this lifestyle called Primal instead of Paleo. There are some things I don't like about it mainly there is what I consider too large of a liberty given to certain foods and behaviors like the 80/20 rule that gives you leeway for 20% of the time to go astray and eat that cheesecake. I don't argue with the concept but I do the ratios. If you are fit maybe 80/20 will work for you but if you are fat maybe 95/5 would be better or 90/10 if you just fell apart at the idea of avoiding some of those less healthy choices.

I'm pretty much on the 99/1 rule right now and for my initial 30 day challenge my resolve is set and I don't see anything changing that. After the first 30 days I may consider moving towards some of the Primal methods and modifying the areas I think are too generous or I do not agree with such as use of artificial sweeteners. As a kid I used to read that label on the back of the initial sweeteners they came out with saying it caused cancer in rats and I've never wanted to eat any of those substances. I just kicked a nasty sugar habit so I'll be trying to severely limit my sugar intake for the foreseeable future.

Anyhow the resources in the Primal community are far greater than strict paleo as best I can tell. That is a good thing and I've ordered the book Primal Blueprint to get more details.

The over view is here:

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/primal-blueprint-101/

Otherwise 3 weeks into this Paleo experiment and all I can say is it's going very good and I'm pleased with the results and changed in our eating habits and how they seem to be effecting out health.

Good Stuff!

2 weeks of paleo

2 weeks and I have to say I am really settling into the paleo diet.

I'm loosing weight, felling pretty good, starting to feel comfortable with organizing my foods... it's all good right now.

There are a few surprises for me so far and the biggest one might be how much I am loving vegetables. When I was a kid the only vegetable I ever wanted to eat was corn. I didn't know back then that corn isn't a vegetable so strictly speaking I liked zero vegetables. Growing up only made me more empowered to choose not eating vegetables and so mostly, I didn't eat them.

Right now I am LOVING vegetables. I just grilled my first zucchini on the pit and it's damn sure not going to be my last. That sucker was delicious!!!

Another surprise is the effect of getting refined sugars out of my life. I'm becoming aware now that a lot of food cravings from the past were never actually about food...it was about the sugar. I think I was a hard core sugar addict and even eliminating "sweets" from your diet isn't enough. There are plenty of other ways to get sugar via simple carbs and if you need to even more complex carbs.. Cutting out not only sugars but grains is like taking a sledge hammer to the pesky fly that is sugar addiction. It's very destructive to the addiction. As long as you watch the fruit intake you wind up doing a massive re-direct. There is a real "smoothing out" I'm finding by loosing all those sugar sources.

I'm excited to see how things look at the end of this 30 day challenge phase and what transitions will be in store next but unless something happens I'm not sure yet if this isn't the best way of eating I've ever prescribed to.

More in a few days....

One of my last food pics..

This exercise of posting my food pics has been alright but it's pretty played out I think. I got tired of posting eggs really fast and now with the dinners I think the visual is pretty clear...cook different types of meats with different types of vegetables. :)

To be strict Paleo I probably have too much fruit in this meal with the natural applesauce and pineapple but that's just how it worked out. I like applesauce with pork and because I've never cooked acorn squash before I just followed the recipe suggestion that didn't have brown sugar or other non Paleo items in it.

Lately what I've been doing is cruising the produce isle and just grabbing anything I've never cooked before. Bok choy, squashes, fruits, whatever. If I've never had it I'm grabbing it. To my surprise everything has been great. I should have been eating these things a long time ago. :)

There are plenty of more "chef like" paleo recipe websites around but I just wanted to document what I was doing with these more basic meals. I look for things to remain almost the same, ...probably more vegetables soon and if something really interesting comes up I'll post it but there are only so many pictures of meat and vegetables to remain interesting.

Paleo leftovers

Some of the best leftovers I remember having in a long time.

Saute yellow onion it coconut oil
Add some mushrooms
Add some chunked up leftover pork loin....throw lot's of it in there.
Add a rounded tsp of garlic chili sauce.
Add bok choy just long enough to soften a little.
Add an English cucumber just long enough to stir in.



It was good enough that I decided to make a post to look back on later. ;)

Day 6

Been feeling pretty good the last couple days as I settle into the program.

We had a risky situation come up last night..(several risks really) but managed to negotiate a favorable path that brought up the problem of needing to find something to eat FAST and it was getting late.

We wound up at Cafe' Express. It worked out alright by ordering a California turkey burger with a side of fruit and ditching the bun. Funny part was that I got a wheat bun even as I knew I was going to chunk it... I have not ordered a white bread bun in so long where there is an option that I didn't feel right about doing it. :)

Things are really smoothing out on Paleo and I don't have a whole lot to say about it right now other than the fog of days 2-3 has stayed gone and I'm glad for it. I'm feeling better and if that trend continues (or doesn't) I should have more to share next week.

Dinner today is roasted pork loin, natural apple sauce, and mashed cauliflower. I've been wanting to try mashing this stuff for a while but today was the first time we actually tried it. It's really good and everybody liked it.

Another Paleo dinner.

Meatball madness days 4-5

Grass fed beef, lamb, pork, yellow onion, roasted poblano peppers, and you mix it all up with some kale on the side.

It was good!


More running commentary to document my Paleo experiment....


I'm feeling pretty good at the start of day 5 and am interested to see what is going to happen next. I am loosing weight every day but that is to be expected at the start of any big diet shift. They say it's "water weight" but when I did a little looking I started to wonder if calling it water weight makes it sound insignificant. If you are carrying around pounds of excess water that is being retained in your tissue....isn't that a good thing to get rid of? What exactly is the difference in water weight and edema? :o
I don't know but my thought is that I do want to drink lots of good clean water and be fully hydrated to a healthy point but that's it. If I have excess water filling up my tissue like a saturated sponge that I don't need for anything good I prefer to shed that. Anyway, I don't really know what I'm talking about, just thinking out loud and I think I'm happy to loose excess weight from all the sources that it is truly "excess" be it fat or water.


Today I am having a grazing day to start off with. I might change by lunchtime or I might stick with it until dinner but the fact is I am not hungry at all for a full breakfast so I'm going to listen to my body and see what happens. I ate a handful of almonds and am halfway into a Bosc pear right now. That's pretty much all I want right now. It might be the BIG chicken on Wed and the meatballs last night that have me set but I'm just not in the mood for a big protein b-fast right now.

More in a day or 2...

First meal out on Paleo

I wondered what my first meal out paleo style was going to look like...

The waiting is over.



Asparagus, broccoli, and a massive hunk of roasted chicken....a half a freaking chicken. :) You can't tell by looking but it was BIG. I felt a bit nervous after eating it that I'd overdone it and sucked in a zillion calories or something but all in all I think it went according to plan. I half expected to gain 2lb's by the AM but it didn't happen. There might be something to this Paleo thing....

An hour after this came my biggest challenge so far to my Paleo experiment and that was the snack fest known at fight night. A time when normally snacks are eaten and a beer or two go down the hatch. I'm not having any beer currently and 99% of all typical fight snacks are very UN-Paleo. I opted for a big 1-liter bottle of Smart Water and I picked up a jar of macadamia nuts. I also grabbed chips for the boys and guess what? Everybody was going at the macadamias like hungry piranha. :) They got pounded before the chips ever got a chance.

I also took a pic of a Breakfast from a couple days ago but these pics leave me with mixed feelings. I think there is some value to showing how simple the food is and giving a visual but on the other hand a pic of turkey bacon an eggs is super boring. this will probably be my last b-fast pic until I do something interesting.

Nitrate free, hormone free, no antibiotic, etc.. peppered turkey bacon, omega free range eggs, a good clean salsa, cup of black coffee (El Salvador Los Planes) and a pear. Side note: When you cut out all refined sugar and eat otherwise low sugar too it's amazing how the sweetness of fruit jumps out at you. The pears, nectarines, oranges, and things are so juicy, sweet, and fantastic. Good stuff!





My summary so far is that day one was a cakewalk that gave me a false sense of security. Days 2-3 brought me dizziness, headaches, and some mental confusion. I think this was either detox or regulating blood sugar. Either way it was not comfy. Day 4 feels like I might have turned the first corner. No dizziness or anything and I feel better. Another update soon.

Day 1 of suffering Paleo

Day one and it's excruciating!

How will I ever make it.....what was I thinking??

I had no idea it would be this hard to deal with.

When you drop dairy and grains that really is most of the foods after all right? I mean no brown rice WTF? No beans, cheese, whole grain breads, quinoa, pasta, yogurt,...none of the basic building blocks of what meals are made of.

Well, I didn't come this far to quit in one day so I figured I'd make the best of a bad situation. Here is the crap I had to stuff down for breakfast and dinner today. :(


Turkey bacon, eggs, and spinach... I forgot to get the fresh pear in the pic but I had to eat that juicy bastard as well.



Dinner was worse.

I had to choke down some wild caught Alaskan salmon burgers with spicy brown mustard slathered on top, steamed cauliflower and yellow squash drizzled with Si Racha (how terrible) and sliced cucumbers dusted with course ground pepper.



An hour ago I even had to drink a straight espresso shot that was presenting almost all bakers chocolate and tobacco. Can you even imagine?

Well, I made it anyhow and I'll try to use all my willpower to go one more day tomorrow....one step at a time I guess. Wish me luck with the "struggle". ;)

And now Paleo is happening....

I've looked at the Paleo diet for about a year now and while I did think it was interesting it was clearly not something I was in the right time and place to consider adopting it.

In fact in that space I would have told you (correctly I think) that it is a bad approach for somebody with my goals and motivations at that time. I still believe that if somebody is significantly overweight any "diets" are not the best way to go. Learning how to eat clean healthy foods and making the mental shifts necessary to eat healthy and jettison all the terrible garbage from your diet is most important. A diet could bring you great weight loss success but if you did not pick up the tools necessary to be healthy as soon as that diet if over you are hosed....It's a fairly well established cycle and the "yo-yo" is pretty demoralizing as well.

But without contradicting myself I am in a different time and place right now with slightly different goals/motivations and the Paleo approach might be a good vehicle to get where I am going next. Once I am there the re-evaluation process will dictate.

I won't spend much time describing Paleo other than to say google it if you want and it's basically a diet of meats, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. It cuts dairy and grains because of factors like inflammation, digestion, and the idea that they were not foods around for us to eat WAY back in the day. Tons of controversy surrounds this diet as does tons of research. TONS of reading for anybody that wants to look under the hood.

Anyway, I'll be posting some food pics from time to time while I am on this leg of my journey and I can tell you that I'm very excited to spend the first 30 days with Paleo and see what my body tells me about it. As Always I'll share the good, bad, and ugly truth so no matter how it goes I will report on it.

Paleo Breakfast

Turkey bacon and eggs scramble with a peach.... how simple is that?





One BIG problem with the Paleo diet for me is the dairy as it relates to coffee. Lack of latte is lame. :( There are even schools of thought that say no coffee at all on Paleo but 1)I don't have any interest in living life without coffee. 2) If somebody seriously tried to stop me I would be like Joe Pesci in the bar scene of Casino.... For me a life worth living includes coffee and it's not negotiable.

Taking away my dairy makes me sad but you can still live... so for me coffee stays on the table no matter what diet plan is involved. ;)

Luckily the Italians figured out sometime around 1900 that a quick coffee made just for me would be a cool thing to invent....so they did and I will find a way to struggle and suffer past my lack of lattes the old fashioned way.

Oh man, how rough does this look?

Crazy injury report

Last week I had a perfect training week for where I wanted to be right now.

It went well and there were no complications...

Today I was sitting on the floor and for no reason I can figure my left ankle started to hurt. I thought it was strange because I wasn't putting any weight on it when it started to hurt. I went to get up and see if I could figure out what happened and it started crunching. It cracked about 8-9 times before it started to fold under and I realized I wasn't going to be able to stand up.

Once I made it back to the ground I felt a lot of anger along with the intense pain.

I was super pissed that I'd just damaged the hell out of my ankle somehow. It was tweaked in a sick way and I felt/heard a lot of stuff get crunched when I tried to put weight on it. My ankle has never made those types of noises before. :( I was also pretty worried because the last time I totally rolled my right ankle was about 12 years ago and it's never been 100% from that day on.

Realizing I was going to have to get up sooner or later I got up using the other leg. I tried to put some weight on the injured side and somehow or another....it was fixed. ?? The pain dropped down about 90%. As I type it's dropped off 95%.

I don't know what happened or why it's almost gone but it has me taking a day off and tomorrow we shall see how things are going.

Super weird.

Bum Rushed with conviction II

So it's happened to me again.

I never wanted to climb a 14er... I resisted knowing/learning enough about it to even think about doing it all the way up until I decided I HAD to do it. Looking back I suppose it's fear that tries to get me to veer away from the challenge I know deep down that I really do want to take.

Probably fear of failure is the biggie...makes me try to talk myself out of the thing before I have a chance to get obsessed with it.

So, on with the deal of the day...

I guess it was a few years ago I read a story about the Bataan Memorial death March. Some lunatics gather up each year and locomote their bodies across 26 miles of disastrous terrain in 50mph sand storm winds, fun elevation gains and such other things to commemorate the actual Bataan death march where a "forcible transfer of 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war" took place on a 60 mile death march that lived up to it's name. Thousands died on the march...here is the wiki

So these years ago I read the story about the Bataan Memorial and as I was reading the account the reporter gave of it I thought to myself "this is something I'd never want to do". She told all about the conditions of the course and the heat...everything she listed gave me yet another reason to think she was crazy and why I would not ever do this kind of event.

And then there was a paragraph in her report that gave me pause.

She tells it (I'll explain in my words) that somewhere along the trail she has stopped to deal with a nasty blister problem and somebody asks if she is ok. She says that the blister is killing her, blah, blah, blah, and looks up to realize she is complaining to one of the survivors of the actual death march. Not the march she is in where there are aid stations every few miles and 12 checkpoints where a friendly volunteer will hand you a Gatorade...he was in the march where if you move to slow from dehydration/starvation/injury they just bayoneted you to death. Well I think there was humiliation and tears welling up when she realized the gravity of it all and some handshakes happened and she managed to push past the blister problem...

Three seconds after reading that paragraph and I knew that I was going to do the Bataan Memorial Death March before too long. Last week I booked reservations on a cozy little cabin in Las Cruces 3/19 - 3/21 so I can toe the line for the next Bataan Memorial Death March

I've now officially become obsessed with it.

My 14er summit bid for this year has been put in the hands of chance. Training will pretty much run concurrent so I will be in shape to climb if I get a chance to go to Colorado but getting away from the business is hard. Getting away twice is VERY hard and that is the reason I didn't get to do this march last time. I could not get away so soon after the Colorado trip. I say I couldn't but obviously I could if I "HAD" to (gun to the head and all)so it's always a question of making things happen...but the fact is that it's very hard for me to leave.
I will be ecstatic if I can pull off both. I really want to but if I can't do both my next big event will be the Bataan and then I'll get back on my next 14er. I have summit fever right about now that isn't going to go away until I get at it but this Bataan thing is pulling me with great force. I know that I have to do it now when the survivors are still around because it's just something I feel compelled to do for them. Just to be a number out there on that one day a year is such a small thing compared to what they endured.... I have to do it now.

So there it is. This marks the second time I was smacked upside the head with something I clearly didn't want to do...and then all of sudden I knew I had to do it. I can't wait until that nest thing involves me becoming fabulously wealthy instead of pain/punishment but here we go. All systems are go Bataan.

Anybody wanna meet me out there.....you can ya know? ;)