Round 2

After a lovely and totally successful birthday week-to-ten-days, I am feeling the need to tighten things up a bit again. I haven't been super bad, but I have had some cheese, and some tortilla chips, and some potato chips, and rather a lot of booze. Its also about time to do another caffeine detox. So back on the wagon I go, and we'll see where that puts me. I am going to do the Whole30 again, with pretty much the same terms as last time. I will endeavor to report in a bit more often this month.

Losing

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend time with a bunch of folks that I very rarely get to see. They were all at least marginally aware of my adventures in Paleo, and if they weren’t, my mom made sure they heard about it.

Of course, what everyone really wanted to hear about was not the RA remission but the weight loss. I’m totally a fan of that side effect, so I talked about my 25 pounds, and about finally discovering what being full felt like, and my mother invariably chimed in there with “It’s totally true! You should see it. She’s never eaten portions like these before!”

(A note, lest you get the wrong impression: My family is not neurotic about food. Rather the opposite - we LOVE food. We think about it, talk about it, and celebrate around it. None of us were more than average-American overweight before my little metabolic meltdown. Mom’s reaction was more surprise than approval. There was food left! Even after Dad finished! That never happens.)

And then, every time, something odd would happen. The people I was talking to would start to tell me why they couldn’t possibly do it. I’ve seen this almost every single time I’ve had this conversation. It’s not odd that people resist change. It’s not odd that people don’t want to give up beer and bread. But it’s odd that people think that this is a logical conversational gambit. I’m not a salesman. I’m not earning points for conversions. And in every case, I wasn’t the one to bring it up. (Although, to be fair, sometimes my mom was.)

So on the plane I started wondering about this. Why is “Oh I can’t do that, here’s why:” the response to “Hey I feel really good and have lost a bunch of weight with these guidelines.” And here’s my theory:

We get so many messages about eating being bad that we start to believe we can’t possibly be good

Think about it. Junk food is bad. Processed food is bad. GMO food is bad. Monoculture food is bad. Meat is bad. Carbs are bad. Fat is bad. Eggs are bad. Alcohol is bad. (And then we get to “bacon is bad” and the entire culture yells “Fuck it!” and orders more bacon.)

It’s this impossible weight to carry every time you put a bite of food in your mouth. Everything is wrong, bad, unhealthy, possibly immoral. Everyone who pays the least attention to these sorts of things (i.e. most American women) knows she’s doing the wrong thing every single time she eats. It’s almost impossible to avoid concluding that you’re just a bad person who does bad things and that’s the way it is.

And so when someone says, in effect, “Hey look, I’ve been a good person and you can see my reward!” (and yes, my jawline is totally a reward,) it would seem both unrealistic and arrogant to say “Oh wow, I’ll go be a good person too!” So they mutter and stammer and come up with excuses, because that huge weight of negativity makes it impossible to actually weigh a new diet on the merits.

I’ve spent years - most of my life, really - being interested in nutrition, educating myself, comparing claims and, recently, testing them. I don’t think about food in terms of “good” and “bad” - I just wonder what effect it will have on my body. But this is very much not a mainstream position, and I lost sight of that. So if I sound arrogant or sanctimonious about this stuff, I apologize. But I really do worry that moralizing about nutrition is making it emotionally impossible for people to try new things and find stuff that works for them.

Three Month Report

The biggest success of this whole adventure, I think, is that I've gone through three months with a couple of deviations here and there but I've never actually "fallen off the wagon" as such. I've discovered that I can have a little bit of milk or cheese here and there, but not a bunch. (Which is a shame, because I always want a bunch.) Corn chips won't kill me but they make me retain water like a son of a bitch and feel vaguely lethargic, and potato chips are fine but I am inevitably starving an hour later. But in general, as long as I actually make it to the grocery store regularly I'm pretty much ok eating home-cooked, high-quality meat and veggies all the time.

I've lost around 25 pounds since Feb 1, which is great. But now the interesting part begins - I'm at the low end of what's been "normal" since I put on all this weight in a hurry five years ago, and I've never been able to stay below it for more than about a week. Will I continue to lose weight now? That's the big question. I certainly hope so.

My joints are doing well. I'm still weather-sensitive, but my day-to-day stiffness and discomfort is basically gone. I've been lifting weights with no issues, and I'm back on a pretty regular karate schedule. (It was pretty striking to see what a difference that 25 pounds made, even though the better part of it was water. Pushups are much easier now!)

Other than my ongoing caffeine addiction, I feel pretty good about my current lifestyle and I'm eager to see where it goes from here on out.

Updates

So the last two weeks my diet has devolved into bacon-and-Red Bull. Which doesn't work quite as well. I'll post more soon - I mostly wanted to note this for posterity.

One Month of Paleo Eating

So I followed (more or less) the Whole 30 plan throughout February. Here are some stats and observations about the month as a whole.

Weight: 14 lbs lost. Now, I wasn't actually trying to lose weight, and was actively ignoring some of the more obvious suggestions (going deliberately low-carb is the standard one.) Most of this is water loss - I look and feel much less puffy, and my pants are distinctly looser, but this all came off in the first two weeks or so and I've been holding steady since.

Sleep: I sleep pretty well in general, and since I'm not on a fixed schedule it hasn't been much of an issue. I have pretty naturally moved back to a normal sleep-at-night, wake-in-the-morning schedule, though, which I hadn't been since November.

Blood Pressure: from 120/80 to 107/69. This is just a curiosity, since I happened to be scheduled to go to the doctor this morning. I don't have blood pressure problems as such - 120/80 is unusually high for me, actually - but it was interesting for sure.

Meds: I went off the prednisone after about 10 days, and have had no symptoms of acid reflux all month so I am not continuing the Nexium now that the initial prescription is done.

RA Symptoms: gone. No noticeable morning stiffness most days, no swelling, little to no pain. I'm running/hiking regularly, attending karate 2-4 hours a week, and starting a weightlifting program this month since my hands now feel up to it.

Overall: I'm pretty much sold. I feel terrific, have lots of energy, and suffered no ill effects. My carb cravings are nonexistent, and I haven't been seriously tempted to cheat all month. I don't even miss cheese all that much.

So! Onward and upward. In March I'm going to add in a nice, sensible linear-progression weightlifting program and probably start to keep a closer eye on my carbs. I have plenty of weight to lose, and it would be nice to keep it coming off, although I'd expect to see about half of what I lost this month. I don't have any desire to try to add anything back in as of yet.

I know a lot of folks were interested in this whole thing - if you have questions or want to chat about it, I'm more than happy to do so. I've done a ton of reading/podcast listening on these topics this month, and I like talking about my current obsessions.

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!