US Wellness

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Ok, Ok, I fell behind posting.

So I really suck at keeping up with these posts apparently... At least by comparison to Erica. To make up for that, this one is a lil longer and more rambling!

Food has been good so far this week. I cooked up some eggs and a grass-fed polish sausage slider from us wellness yesterday. Lunch I made some pulled pork tacos using leftover pulled pork, lettuce as a shell, and tomatos and avocado. It was pretty damn good.

I have a hydrostatic body fat test today at noon so per their instructions, I was only allowed to eat meat for the 24 hr prior (fibrous foods like veggies can throw off the accuracy of the test  i guess??). So dinner last night before and after jiu jitsu was a baked seasoned chicken breast and some turkey jerky.

Breakfast today was a piece of chicken sausage and another polish sausage slider. They're actually quite tasty. I thought I would have preferred the italian sausage style but its pretty good too. So from 8 am til noon I am on water only for this test.

I kind of wish I could have taken this test in those first couple days of this paleo experiment. I stepped on the scale this morning at 159.8!! I haven't been that light in quite a while, possibly since 2010. I feel great, but I wonder if I've lost too much too fast?  I know that early morning weight is a combination of dehydration from sleep and probably still being dehydrated from jiu jitsu the night before. But even fully hydrated, I've lost probably 8+ lbs already. I didn't think it was that noticeable, but my mom called me out over the weekend (she knew we were going paleo) and Bill, the owner at Threshold made a comment last night too.

I remember when I used to cut weight for Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu, back when I would fight at 147 lbs in MT and 150 lbs for jiu jitsu, that i could shed some initial weight pretty fast by cleaning up my diet.  I usually felt like I was cutting too fast and had to re-tweak my diet so I didn't lose too much.  I am glad to see I can still do that, but it makes me curious what my ideal weight actually is. I feel like I am eating well enough for my activity level, at least currently, but am I really? I'm not sure how to tell. I feel like I"m recovering from workouts just fine so that seems to point towards yes, but if I want to progress in addition to recover, do I need to start adding additional calories via protein, fats, and some starchy carbs (i.e. sweet potatoes and squashes)? I don't have enough experience with this part to determine if the results I am currently seeing are normal, desired, or what?





I do want to be clear that neither I nor Erica are starving ourselves however... I know she got on a soapbox in an earlier post, but since I didn't get to contribute here is my piece of it. We are eating full meals. and by full I mean we eat til we are full. There is no portion control going on. All we are doing are eliminating foods that are damaging to the body. The idea is to look at quality of food and it's effect on our bodies.

Grains and Legumes both contain lectins which have been shown to cause gut inflammation and are a significant source of carbohydrates (which causes elevate insulin levels and leads to insulin resistance.  Sugars, for obvious reasons are just plain bad for you. It is added to an obscene amount of foods. Seriously... Go look at the labels of just about any food with a label... you will see either actual sugar or some chemically created variant (High Fructose Corn Syrup is an easy target here). Sugars = carbs, which again in the high amounts in the Standard American Diet can seriously overwork the pancreas. Even the fruit we eat has been bred to be bigger and sweeter than it ever used to be, hence it's recommended moderation. Dairy has more of a gray area than the rest... Some paleo people will argue that if you can tolerate it, it's ok. Quality is still important though... Raw from pastured cows being the optimal in this case. More processing is worse (Whole > Skim). Other paleo types completely shut off Dairy for good logic. Whole9's Dallas and Melissa push a completely dairy free approach since really... Dairy = Breast Milk for baby cows. Are we baby cows? what other animals continue to drink milk past early childhood? They have more scientific reasoning as well, including the large insulin response from milk and elevates the IGF-1 hormone (it's meant for growing baby cows remember!).

So we stay away from processed crap as well as the things mentioned above (which are most often found in said processed crap). We shop almost exclusively on the perimeter of the grocery store (where all the produce and meats are). We might not eat certain foods, but we still eat! You can see from some of our linked recipes that we end up making pretty damn good food too. Neither of us has complained that we were hungry or didn't eat enough yet. We have had some initial carb cravings (I have a terrbile terrible sweet tooth), but those subsided for the most part. The hardest part of it is just making sure to plan our meals because it can be tough to find good quality foods on the go (This is why I love my crock pot).

The paleo diet is a sort of misnomer/oversimplification. We aren't trying to explicitly copy a caveman's choice of foods, we're just paying attention to what evolution says we're most adapted to eating and trying to make that work in a modern environment. It's also not a diet, detox, or cleanse. Diets are fads that come and go... That you do for 90 days and then stop (and wonder why you ballooned back up). It's really meant to be a lifestyle adjustment. Choosing to eat foods that will make you healthier and avoiding ones that don't.

So if you're reading this... Try looking into Whole9's Whole 30 program or buy Robb Wolf's Paleo Solution and read up on some of this and give either one of them 30 days. See if you don't feel better, sleep better, and look better by the end of it.

Ok I'm off my soapbox...

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