Sleep

I've been vaguely worried about the fact that I've been waking up in "the middle of the night." This morning it occurred to me to actually check the time - 4:50am, after having gone to bed at 10:00. I'm experimenting, now - I actually got up instead of trying to fall back asleep. We're going to find out if maybe I don't actually need 10+ hours a night.

A Week of Paleo

A friend asked my for an idea of what I was actually eating, and while I'm not tracking everything in detail, I was able to put together a list of stuff pretty easily. I figure I may want it for posterity, so here we go - my first week of Paleo meals, with commentary:

Breakfast: Usually eggs, scrambled with onions, mushrooms, or something green and served with salsa and/or avocado. (I get my eggs from a friend with a whole flock of backyard chickens, and they're fantastic.) Otherwise leftovers.

Lunch: Either cold roast beef or sliced turkey from CM, or leftovers.

Snack: Kale chips! Or some nuts and/or a piece of fruit. I actually haven't been snacking much - I find I'm not really hungry between reasonable meal times. Sometimes lunch turns into a series of disconnected snacks, but that's just because I can lounge on the couch and nibble on and off for three hours if I want to.

Dinners:
- Masaman curry with chicken:
I'm not 100% in love with this particular recipe, and the potatoes aren't strictly kosher. I like the dish as a whole, and I need to find a better and also more compliant version.)

- London Broil:
This was good, although I'd probably sub mushrooms and black olives for the green olives and sun-dried tomatoes. It was a little sharp-tasting for me.

- Chicken Adobo:
Again, not strictly kosher, although I use wheat-free tamari instead of regular soy sauce. It wasn't perfect - tamari has a stronger flavor, and I need to mess with the proportions to find a good balance - but it was tasty. I used drumsticks because I prefer dark meat and they were great.

- A generic crockpot beef stew with bison stew meat and sweet potatoes and a bunch of random spices.

- Chicken soup - no recipe, just broth, the HEB Caldo frozen vegetable blend minus the random chunks of corn-on-the-cob, and chopped-up chicken breast. This was perfect mid-week when I was freezing. (The veggie mix does have potatoes, which were kinda terrible - they were just mealy and not tasty.)

Upcoming: a shepherd's pie variant, Cocoa-toasted cauliflower, and something with bison liver.

All in all, I certainly can't complain. There was plenty of food, and all of it was tasty, and none of it was particularly fiddly to cook. Onward!

Lifting, take 2

I'm pretty sure I miscounted the weight on my overhead press last time. There was no earthly way it was getting above my nose this morning.

Otherwise, though, pretty good - added ten pounds to my deadlift and made a valiant attempt at adding ten to my squat - a nice, from-the-hole fail. If I'm going to fail at least I want to do it with good form.

One Month

I haven't been blogging much - I have found hand-writing notes more congenial - but I've got a fair bit to report on.

January

First of all, my joints have been in pretty good shape. I had a pair of spikes, both tied to sudden weather changes, and another, less-severe spike right around my last prednisone step-down. Otherwise, they've been good - not perfect, but good.

On the drug front, I'm now on an every-other-day schedule with the prednisone, and in another week or so (when the current winter storm passes over) I may try to drop it entirely. On the other hand, my doctor put me on Nexium for my recurrent acid reflux, which is apparently a common side-effect of prednisone. I'll take that for about a month and hopefully I'll be all done by March.

I haven't been to practice quite as much as I wanted - I was shooting for three days a week and hit two. But I'm reasonably satisfied with that, and I'll step it up as I continue to build stamina. Right now my feet and ankles are getting tired quicker than I'd like, and I'm trying not to push them harder than they'll take. I've also been running regularly, and until this week haven't missed a run. (Again, winter storm = unhappy joints.)

My eating habits are manifestly abysmal. Classic feast-or-famine behavior - I'll eat 1000 calories for three days running, then eat three times that. My weight stayed totally steady all month, which is excellent, but certainly not ideal. I'm not actually overeating, and I'm getting a reasonable amount of exercise, which suggests something else is going on. This brings me to this month's plan.

February

It's time to bite the bullet and go whole hog. It was the paleo folk that brought the possibility of a gluten intolerance to my attention, and that has helped a ton - now I'm going to follow the rest of their recommendations for thirty days and see what happens. It's obvious that I don't tolerate dairy well, as much as I like it, and if there's one grain sensitivity, there may well be more, so a full-bore elimination diet is not a bad idea.

Now, this isn't a weigh-and-measure diet, and I have no intention of adding that in. Like last month, I'm going to eat the way I'm naturally inclined to, with only the restrictions on type of food. I won't be avoiding the scale as recommended, though - I want to make sure I have that data. (I'm not setting weight-loss goals or anything, though - that's not at all the point.)

I'm going to continue running and going to practice, and I'm going to try to add in some body weight exercise as I feel well enough. No lifting yet - maybe next month! I also intend to do a fair bit of mobility work with the help of that excellent blog. I've got a 5k in a couple weeks, and hopefully that will go well - I have some work to do to feel confident about the full run, but I have time to do it.

That's it for now!