Ah HA! and Happy Weekend

Cavemen did not do this.
But they wanted to.

Of course there was always lots of evidence of, or at least discussion of, the possibility that the Paleo diet wasn't all it was cracked up to be. For me, it definitely wasn't a good fit.

This piece refutes one of the central claims of Paleo-purveyors, which is that the reason Paleo dieting is good for you is that our bodies haven't had time to adapt to the grains that are now in our diets but weren't when we were cavemen. The article points out a number of examples in which adaptation happened extremely rapidly- much more rapidly than the 30,000 years or so that have elapsed since grains were cultivated agriculturally, ground up, and used to make delicious carb-y bread. Further, some foods, like tomatoes, weren't available to cavemen either, and Paleo diets don't outlaw those.

The author points out that this fact isn't to say that the Paleo diet won't help you lose weight. It's just that any restrictive eating plan where you cut out whole food groups and think intensively about what you're putting in your pie hole probably would.

I would only add to that that while we may have been eating grains for the last 30,000 years, it's really only in the last 30 years or so that we have started eating so many crazy, super-processed grain products. Because they are delicious, of course, but they are completely devoid of nutritional purpose, and they are making us fat. So while cutting out grains entirely probably isn't necessary (or even a good idea), getting rid of the junk carbs almost certainly is.

Happy weekend all!

Back to Basics

Only a 1 because 0 isn't an option.

As a general rule, I am a very stable person. If you created a disposition scale of 1-10, wherein 1 is totally despondent (Pippa getting a bath) and 10 is beyond thrilled (Pippa in the car after eating ice cream for the first time), I am typically around 7 or 8. 

Favorite toast? Marble rye- a little rye, a little pumpernickel.

Favorite ice cream? Late Night Snack- a little salty, a little sweet.

Favorite cocktail? Gin and tonic- a little tart, a little crisp. 

Wheeee!!! A perfect 10.

Which, I think, is why Paleo threw me for such a loop.

True, it did a pretty good job of meeting the criteria I set for diet acceptability. It was adaptable to different social situations, it's a diet that Ron was willing to try, and we didn't have to buy any weird new foods.

But just because we didn't have to add anything weird doesn't mean it wasn't weird to cut things out. I wrote a couple of times about how meals just felt strange- unbalanced- without a starch.

Like this. Except she's still super-awesome.

Also, because we were leaning so hard away from starches, we leaned way too far towards protein, especially meat. I felt slow, greasy, and off-keel.

When I called it quits a couple of weeks ago, I intended to launch right into research and experimentation with the Maker's Diet, aka the What Would Jesus Eat? Diet. Basically, it restricts your diet to what would have been available in biblical times.

When the time came, though, I found I really didn't want to do that. Like, at all. I needed a couple of weeks to eat normally and to regain my balance. 

I also needed to stop obsessing about what I was eating.

Diet plans like Weight Watchers recommend not making major changes to what you eat when you're trying to lose weight, and for me, that's key.

Maybe a little...no. Nope. Not a all.

Switching to a drastically different eating pattern like Paleo required a ton of mental energy, thinking through every bite I ate, researching recipes, and making multiple trips to the grocery store every week. What am I, a wizard? I have too much going on beyond what I'm eating to invest that much mental energy into every meal.

So, where does that leave me, and this experiment?

For now, I'm going back to basics. There have been a lot of really interesting articles recently, about organics, balanced eating, and exercise, and I'm going to spend some time thinking and writing about those. I'll also be trying out and sharing some new seasonal recipes. I'm going to restart my food diary, which has been a really useful tool for me in the past. Also, Ron and I signed up for the New Orleans marathon in February, so I'm going to get back into running and training regularly.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for topics, I'd love to hear them.

And maybe, after a little chance to regain my balance, I'll be ready to take on a new diet. As for now, I'm working my way back to an 8 on the diet disposition scale: Pippy on a sunny day.

Breaking Up Is (Not That Hard) To Do

It's official. I'm breaking up with Paleo.

I think we all saw this coming, no?

We had so much in common. Bacon. Flank steak. Salmon. Lamb. Bacon. I thought we could make it work. Paleo had most of the characteristics I was looking for in a diet.

First, Paleo got along well with my husband (and it can be so awkward when that relationship is strained). I didn't have to cook separate dinners or shop for two sets of groceries.

Ron missed being able to take sandwiches to work for lunch, and he missed yogurt with granola for breakfast, but fundamentally, he wasn't complaining about a meal plan that regularly included steak for dinner.

Also, I didn't have to buy anything weird. We could eat food, and not "food". Although some of the food fakery recommended on Paleo sites on the Web was a little silly, I discovered not one, but two, recipes that will remain in high rotation even now that we've broken up.

Recipe Success: Garlic Cauliflower "Mashed Potatoes"

I dunno. I just feel like
 something's missing.

One big challenge to Paleo eating is coming up with a meal that feels complete, and not like a bunch of groceries. Without a starch, the plate just seems a bit unbalanced to me.

In my search for ideas, I found the awesome website Nom Nom Paleo.  The author is a mom and a nurse, but she must have some sort of deal with the devil that allows her extra hours in the day, because she also blogs and takes gorgeous food porn photos.

Whatever she's doing, it's working.

Last night I tried one of her recipes, for Garlic Cauliflower "Mashed Potatoes", and it was perfect.  It was super-easy to make, cheap, delicious, and sufficiently "starchy" to make a Paleo dinner of chicken sausages and salad (for Ron), or a crab cake, tomato and avocado (for me), feel tied together and satisfying.

I'm baaaack!

Better than my usual commute.

Pop Quiz:

In which location is it most challenging to secure an Internet connection?

A. Lusaka, Zambia
B. Cranberry Lake, New York

OK, these set ups are always a little obvious. But still, it's a little surprising, right?

I spent the last week at my family's vacation place in the Adirondacks, in upper New York State. It's a 10 hour drive from DC, and our cabins are at the far end of the lake. There are no roads, no phones, no electricity, no indoor plumbing- and of course, no Internet. It is fabulous.

For the week at the lake, I didn't worry about Paleo. There is only one week a year when I eat s'mores, and I'm not going to skip them because cavemen were too dumb to figure out marshmallows.

I researched this extensively.

The 2 weeks in Zambia were also less than stellar, diet-wise. I posted about nshima, the staple of Zambian food. It is a tasty, slightly sticky corn pudding that is eaten at every Zambian lunch- and it is definitely not Paleo.

Nor was the delicious South African red wine I drank at dinner pretty much every night, for that matter.

I weighed myself this morning, and the damage was not as bad as it could have been.  I also went for my first run in 3 weeks, and felt pretty good.

And now, it's back on the bandwagon with Paleo. I'll report the findings after the end of this week- I'm hoping the little bump up is a result of these bad boys:

Sadly, totally not worth it.

Ron and I eat fast food exactly twice a year, on the way to and home from Cranberry Lake. This year, we made it a mission to consume these tacos, which have a shell made of Doritos and have given the foodie blogosphere a massive collective orgasm.

And... meh. They were salty, which is my favorite flavor. But, you know, they're still filled with Taco Bell meat (Ron corrected me- "meat").

A quick aside: a friend of ours told us once that she went into Taco Bell and ordered a taco, and the guy said they were out. So she ordered a burrito, and he said they were out of those as well. "How can you be out of tacos and burritos?" she asked. With a totally straight face, he said "Well, the meat hose is clogged."

Huh huh. Meat hose.

Anyway, I won't miss them between now and next August. And we noticed that Dunkin' Donuts was advertising Oreo donuts, so the mad geniuses are already work at next year's hideous/delicious Frankensnack.

I Fought Airplane Food, and I Won

1st rule of business: Know your customer

You guys, someone should alert the UN about the size of KLM's economy class seats. Someday we will look back on these days in the same way we look at the imprisonment of debtors and the mentally unwell- as a dark period of barbarity before enlightened thought triumphed.

After 24 hours of being kept in a stress position and deprived of sleep, I have arrived in Zambia.

There was plenty that didn't go right with the trip, but one thing that did go right was my snacking.

Me and My Salami Are Outta Here!

Thanks for checking in! I'm somewhere airborne at the moment, trying to avoid being murdered by my seat mate for eating hardboiled eggs and salami in an enclosed space. In the meantime, take a look at this cool infographic from PaleolithicDiet.com:

Source: infographic.paleolithicdiet.com via Rebecca on Pinterest

Paleo Week 2 Review

Sorry. Sometimes cute cat photos just say it best. 

Week 2 was a doozy- a major client report was due, and I am leaving for 3 weeks of travel, so getting prepared to get out of the office was a killer. 

OMG I can't believe I say things like that now. When did I get so old? Pass the Metamucil, would you?

Breaking (Paleo) Bad

I cooked up something preeeety special last night, guys.

This recipe coulda saved poor Walt so much heartache.

Paleo Is, Like, Superhard, Y'all

Duh, y'all. Dinner with no starch is like
 a short skirt with no panties. At first you're all
like, "Who'll even notice?' and then, like,
EVERYONE TOTALLY DOES.

So, remember 2 days ago when I said Paleo was pretty easy to work into your everyday life? I'd like to reconsider.

Two things:
1) If you don't grocery shop and do most of the cooking on the weekend, you are totally screwed. I intended to make a Paleo granola to eat for breakfast all week, which takes an hour plus to cook.

But I did the grocery shopping on Monday. By the time I got home from work, it was too late to cook. So we ordered Thai (very easy to do Paleo) and didn't cook the granola. Tonight, surprise dinner plans came up and again, no cooking.

I am holding out hope for tomorrow and the granola, but by then, Ron will have had 3 mornings of "Paleo" scones- which are like regular scones, in that they are actually just regular scones that he is calling Paleo.

The Results Are In! Paleo Week 1 Review

From cartoonstock.com

I was talking to a friend about this blog this weekend, and about FitBit and all of the tracking and measuring I'm doing. He summarized it as "data-driven decision making", which is exactly right. 

So, it's time to review the data from Week 1 of Paleo. Care to join me as I geek out?

Week 4 Round-Up

It's crazy to me that this blog is old enough to have traditions, so it's with great relish that I am going to break with the "traditional" format of my weekly round-up.

Instead of talking about a bunch of articles from this week (and there were a number of good ones) I want to focus on just one.

Scientific American, which is a real, legit news source in my book (sorry, Shape) ran a story this week in which the author looked at the rules of the Paleo Diet-type diets (also called primal eating, or ancestral) and compared them to what is really known about what people ate in the Paleolithic era.

This could not be more dead-on what this blog is about, so I'm going to devote the whole post to talking about it.

The Meat Sweats

Yesterday morning, I went for my usual little 3 mile run, and I felt absolutely, truly terrible the whole time.

I woke up tired- which is a super awesome feeling, by the way. Just love that one.

There's no mystery to it though- it's been a big week at work, so I've been working like crazy and staying up late.

On days like that, when it's so hard to get up, I make a little deal with myself. If I just get up and dressed and run for 10 minutes, if I'm still totally miserable, I can come home.

I have run a lot of really miserable miles in my life, and I have never come as close to quitting and heading home as I did yesterday. The only thing that kept me going was the fact that it was a gorgeous morning, and we're headed for another heatwave- there won't be another nice run day this week.

When I finally dragged myself home, I had a terribly sour stomach and a headache, and I felt awful all morning. When I pulled that damn casserole out of the fridge to pack it up for breakfast, I almost lost it.


I was officially suffering from the dreaded Meat Sweats. 

You Can't Food Shame the Shameless

Me too, buddy. Me too. 

You know, dieting is a lot of work. I spent 5 hours on Sunday grocery shopping and prepping our food for the week- cooking Chorizo and Sweet Potato casserole, grilling chicken sausage, hard-boiling eggs, washing and chopping veggies and fruit for salad and snacks.

And then Monday morning (Day 1), I remembered that I had planned to go to a book signing with a friend during lunch, and so I didn't bring any of the food I'd meticulously prepared the night before.

I went to work, heated up my casserole surprise, and opened up my calendar for the day to find...that the book signing is next Monday, which meant that I was now without lunch plans OR my Paleo lunch. Sigh.

Ode to Chorizo

Mise en place des hommes des cavernes

Pre-Paleo Diet, my typical weekday breakfast was either Kashi cereal with fruit and yogurt, or oatmeal- both a veritable Paleo catastrophe.

On the weekends we typically make scrambled eggs on at least one morning, but we barely get ourselves out the door with our pants on during the week. I shudder to think what might occur if we threw cooking into the mix.

Let the Games Begin

Thas a whole lotta meat.

First up, the meatathalon!

So it's FINALLY time to actually start the Paleo Diet and...what? You doubted me, didn't you? I am hurt.

Ron and I braved the P Street Whole Foods on Sunday afternoon and stocked up. I think the guy at the meat counter was a little weirded out- it's awkward to have to keep asking a stranger for little more of that sweet, spicy sausage- but I have a feeling we are going to be gooood friends by the end of this. 

To Meat, or Not to Meat

From washingtonpost.com

Did you know pigs wiggle and wag their tails like dogs when they're happy? This horrifying detail was mentioned in the first of a series of 3 articles in the Washington Post, about a couple in the DC area who is planning to raise, and then slaughter and eat, 3 piglets.

In the article, the woman who is raising the pigs describes getting their living area ready and then picking them out and bringing them home. She describes naming them and worrying about their well-being- clearly, this woman is taking good care of her pigs. The little piglet in the picture above is in fat piglet heaven- until November, when he will be divested of his mortal coil so that it might be turned into a delicious pork chop.

Comparing Apples to...Rib Roast

As I'm gearing up for this project, I thought it might be helpful to review the different diets' rules and restrictions, to make the comparison between them a little more straightforward. The table below lays out the 6 different diets I'm planning to test out, and their basic rules about various food categories. 

I didn't include fruits or vegetables as a category because consumption of these food groups is almost totally unrestricted in all of these diets. Some of the low-carb diets, like Paleo, caution against eating too much fruit, and dried fruit is meant to be limited, but otherwise, you're free to go to town. No one ever got fat eating too many carrots.

One caveat here: I haven't researched all of these diets in detail yet, so some may be off. If you see something that needs to be changed, please let me know and I'll fix it.

Diet Comparison Chart

These diets share some similarities- the chart below makes that a little easier to see. The green boxes show food categories that the diet doesn't restrict at all, yellow boxes show food categories that a diet allows with conditions, and the red boxes indicate food categories that the diet rules out entirely. Verbotin!