Thursday

I felt like I ate vast plates of food last night, and all for naught.  This is interesting, for reasons I'll get to in a minute.  I was at 143.8 this morning, so down more than a pound from yesterday, leg cramps and all - managed to keep a first one from manifesting, but not the second one.  It's weird; I don't think I'm eating that much different from the times when I wasn't cramping up, and yet, a) here they are, and b) I seem to be losing weight again.  Whatever.  I've said before that it's well worth the minor annoyance.

Here's yesterday's eating, as I recall it (meaning I will probably forget something):

• scrambled eggs
• bacon
• sausage
• tea with cream
• the usual supplements
• cheese
• leftover flank steak
• bone broth and wine reduction sauce with butter
• two twice-baked potato halves
• Southern-style green beans
• chocolate almonds
• walnuts
• more cheese

Okay, I'm fairly sure that was everything.  All I know is, I got up from the table still feeling hungry, and the walnuts didn't do it for me, so I went for the cheese (Kerrygold Dubliner - I'm reasonably sure it's pastured milk).  And that seemed to help.

So here's why this is interesting.  The potatoes are not considered strict paleo, and probably took me out of zero carb for the day, as did the beans and the chocolate almonds.  I ate the walnuts absolutely mindlessly - just shoveled them in and went back for more.  I would tend to think that their prompting that sort of reaction was a hint that they might be a high-reward food, sort of.  And they did not assuage my hunger, either, leading me to forage for the cheese.  Which I had 4-5 pieces of.  Yesterday, Gary Taubes put out a new blog post in answer to Guyenet's Food Reward Hypothesis, which he says is still bound by conventional wisdom - the old calories-in/calories-out argument of weight.  He seems to be making a good case for his arguments (disclaimer: I tend to be a Taubesian in this fight to start with), and I had a sort of flash while reading it that they may both be describing legitimate phenomena that are more or less orthogonal to each other - the Food Reward stuff pointing to my mindless walnut gorge, in that there may be some foods that act like a drug on the brain, leading to addictive consumption - and the body-rules/hormonal theory of obesity (Taubes' side) pointing to the possibility that some of those highly rewarding foods might be fattening, but that others might not.  And I commented on his post to that end.  Not that he took up my points and replied to them, but I thought I would at least get it out there.  Last night, for me, certainly seemed to lend credence to my thinking (n=1 and all that, obviously).  So it was interesting.