Thursday, March 31, 2011
Thursday
Now that Lee's back, we had a more traditional dinner of meat (whole roast chicken from the grocery store) and leaves (salad). I followed that up with some chocolate almonds - we found a new variety at Trader Joe's the last time we were there - Belgian dark (73%) chocolate - and they're quite tasty (no difference in carb levels, though). Also some walnuts and a square of 85% Lindt chocolate.
I wish I could say that I slept like a rock, but the sleep aspect of a Paleo life is eluding me at present. I know I listened to 2 different hours of old WWII news broadcasts at different times to get back to sleep, and it worked once and didn't work at all once. So I'm dragging a bit this morning. Heavy cream helps - a lot, most days. And we had eggs and turkey bacon and pork sausage for breakfast this morning, so I'm as fueled up as I can be.
141.8 this morning. I think I haven't seen the magical 141.4 (the full 50 pound loss from when I started eating this way a year ago) since the day I left for New Orleans. I don't mind, really. This is a good place to be.
I wish I could say that I slept like a rock, but the sleep aspect of a Paleo life is eluding me at present. I know I listened to 2 different hours of old WWII news broadcasts at different times to get back to sleep, and it worked once and didn't work at all once. So I'm dragging a bit this morning. Heavy cream helps - a lot, most days. And we had eggs and turkey bacon and pork sausage for breakfast this morning, so I'm as fueled up as I can be.
141.8 this morning. I think I haven't seen the magical 141.4 (the full 50 pound loss from when I started eating this way a year ago) since the day I left for New Orleans. I don't mind, really. This is a good place to be.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Wednesday
After my pizza post, I'm not sure there's much to add. It was wonderful, but should have been bigger, so I also ate cashews and cheese and some chocolate almonds last night. No change in weight from yesterday.
Liz is taking an anti-migraine medication that specifically cautions against low-carb eating. Bother. I gave her some suggestions about adding fruits and starchy veg and rice to her diet to make sure to avoid going into ketosis, and suggested getting some keto-stix to test if she's at all concerned. Apparently this medication with low-carb can cause metabolic acidosis, very similar to diabetic ketoacidosis, and potentially fatal. But another side-effect of the medication is weight loss, so it sounds like adding carbs won't hurt her in that way. I wonder, though. Does it work through some sort of insulin suppression mechanism? Probably not, but it's interesting that those two side-effects are coinciding there.
Several other paleo bloggers reported on the French vegans who inadvertently killed their baby by not having vital nutrients in the mother's breast milk. All I can say is how very sad that story is. Because I'm sure they thought they were doing the right thing for themselves and their child. I think we're doing the right thing by eating this way, but unless my daughter is careful to avoid ketosis, her migraine meds could kill her. Given that, I hope they don't face any criminal charges - they'll be living with this for the rest of their lives, and that's more than enough consequence, as far as I'm concerned.
Liz is taking an anti-migraine medication that specifically cautions against low-carb eating. Bother. I gave her some suggestions about adding fruits and starchy veg and rice to her diet to make sure to avoid going into ketosis, and suggested getting some keto-stix to test if she's at all concerned. Apparently this medication with low-carb can cause metabolic acidosis, very similar to diabetic ketoacidosis, and potentially fatal. But another side-effect of the medication is weight loss, so it sounds like adding carbs won't hurt her in that way. I wonder, though. Does it work through some sort of insulin suppression mechanism? Probably not, but it's interesting that those two side-effects are coinciding there.
Several other paleo bloggers reported on the French vegans who inadvertently killed their baby by not having vital nutrients in the mother's breast milk. All I can say is how very sad that story is. Because I'm sure they thought they were doing the right thing for themselves and their child. I think we're doing the right thing by eating this way, but unless my daughter is careful to avoid ketosis, her migraine meds could kill her. Given that, I hope they don't face any criminal charges - they'll be living with this for the rest of their lives, and that's more than enough consequence, as far as I'm concerned.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Okay, that did not suck!
Pizza.
I've missed it a good bit since going Paleo. Not, maybe, as much as I would have predicted, but enough to have me trying alternatives. A while back, we bought some large sliced pepperoni at the deli (unbeknownst to us, cased in plastic) and made a sort of lasagne with them standing in for the noodles. As we ate it, we found the plastic casings, so it was sort of a bust - but tasty enough that Lee wants me to try it again some time.
I've been meaning to make Meatza for a while now, but haven't yet. And I still will.
In the meantime, I was trying to figure out what to feed myself for a night on my own, and remembered that we have a new stock of 2" pepperoni slices in the fridge. So, I made experimental food.
- Preheat oven to 350.
- Overlap 9 slices of 2" pepperoni in an 8- or 9-inch square pan, so as to cover the bottom.
- Smear a fairly small amount (less than 2 Tbsp) of marinara over the pepperoni slices.
- Throw on a layer of mozzarella, to taste - mine was maybe 3/8" thick.
- Add chopped veggies of choice - in this case, a single button mushroom and some yellow bell pepper.
- Put pan on top rack of oven for approximately 15 minutes - check it after 10, and let it cook until the cheese gets a bit brown and bubbly.
In the finished state, I was able to use a standard metal spatula to transfer it to a plate - all but one corner piece. I then tried to eat it with a fork - kind of awkward, and ended eating with my fingers - less awkward, but messy.
It tasted like pizza. As I remember it - and as I've had it at office parties, peeling the toppings off and eating them, leaving the crust.
I will so do that again!
Tuesday
That's weird.
I thought I heard something this morning on the radio about a change in guidelines on whole milk for children - no substance, just a part of a headline, heard over the hum of the toothbrush. I checked Google just now - odd how it's become the source of all information these days - and see nothing with a recent date on it; stories from January about the USDA banning the substance from school lunches (idiots), but nothing more recent than that. So either our local radio station is way behind (and it might have been WSJ's news thing), or I was hallucinating. That seems unlikely, too. Maybe something will surface later.
We had a boffo dinner yesterday, although we both came away from it with some stomach symptoms, so it may have involved flour somewhere. I had an 11-oz sirloin, medium rare (interesting how eating Paleo makes you crave less-cooked meat), topped with sauteed mushrooms (may have been some flour involved there), a sweet potato with butter and sour cream, and country style green beans with bacon. Left me so satisfied that I didn't eat another bite until breakfast. The waitress was a bit surprised about what I wanted on my sweet potato - seems that if a vegetable is already a bit sweet, what you need to do is add sugar. Um, no. Fat - and plenty of it.
I was actually interested to see if eating that meal would have any effect on my getting to sleep last night - after reading Chris Masterjohn's blog on Getting Better Sleep, I wondered if adding carbs to dinner would help me. I was sleepy at bedtime, but once I hit horizontal, my mind went into overdrive, and I ended up resorting to my one-hour playlists on my iPod - old radio shows or historic news shows. They do work - and the change I made to set up playlists of just one hour seem to let me sleep better after - I used to put on my "WWII News" playlist - with a duration of 2-3 days - and let it go all night, and while it put me to sleep, the sleep was not so great.
Our current "bedroom" (the dining room, while we're redoing the master bath) is darker than our actual bedroom, which should be helping - and maybe it is. It's warmer, though, and doesn't have a ceiling fan, and that has been causing me problems at night. I am sleeping better than I was a few weeks ago, and darn grateful for it, but not as well as I slept last year. So I'm still working on that. Lee is trying to convince me to do full curtains for the bay window in the bedroom - I've had them only on the bottom 3/4 for years, in order to get the light cues from sunrise. I'm trying to figure out if we can get something that would close in the evening, then open itself around 4 am, very quietly. Probably not.
142.4 this morning, I believe, so some of the carb water has gone. Also of note regarding weight. I think I'm still shuffling body comp these days - I measured myself for some pants I ordered over the weekend (more clothes don't fit), and my hips have lost 1/2", I think. No weight change associated with it, they're just thinner. Fine by me.
I thought I heard something this morning on the radio about a change in guidelines on whole milk for children - no substance, just a part of a headline, heard over the hum of the toothbrush. I checked Google just now - odd how it's become the source of all information these days - and see nothing with a recent date on it; stories from January about the USDA banning the substance from school lunches (idiots), but nothing more recent than that. So either our local radio station is way behind (and it might have been WSJ's news thing), or I was hallucinating. That seems unlikely, too. Maybe something will surface later.
We had a boffo dinner yesterday, although we both came away from it with some stomach symptoms, so it may have involved flour somewhere. I had an 11-oz sirloin, medium rare (interesting how eating Paleo makes you crave less-cooked meat), topped with sauteed mushrooms (may have been some flour involved there), a sweet potato with butter and sour cream, and country style green beans with bacon. Left me so satisfied that I didn't eat another bite until breakfast. The waitress was a bit surprised about what I wanted on my sweet potato - seems that if a vegetable is already a bit sweet, what you need to do is add sugar. Um, no. Fat - and plenty of it.
I was actually interested to see if eating that meal would have any effect on my getting to sleep last night - after reading Chris Masterjohn's blog on Getting Better Sleep, I wondered if adding carbs to dinner would help me. I was sleepy at bedtime, but once I hit horizontal, my mind went into overdrive, and I ended up resorting to my one-hour playlists on my iPod - old radio shows or historic news shows. They do work - and the change I made to set up playlists of just one hour seem to let me sleep better after - I used to put on my "WWII News" playlist - with a duration of 2-3 days - and let it go all night, and while it put me to sleep, the sleep was not so great.
Our current "bedroom" (the dining room, while we're redoing the master bath) is darker than our actual bedroom, which should be helping - and maybe it is. It's warmer, though, and doesn't have a ceiling fan, and that has been causing me problems at night. I am sleeping better than I was a few weeks ago, and darn grateful for it, but not as well as I slept last year. So I'm still working on that. Lee is trying to convince me to do full curtains for the bay window in the bedroom - I've had them only on the bottom 3/4 for years, in order to get the light cues from sunrise. I'm trying to figure out if we can get something that would close in the evening, then open itself around 4 am, very quietly. Probably not.
142.4 this morning, I believe, so some of the carb water has gone. Also of note regarding weight. I think I'm still shuffling body comp these days - I measured myself for some pants I ordered over the weekend (more clothes don't fit), and my hips have lost 1/2", I think. No weight change associated with it, they're just thinner. Fine by me.
Monday, March 28, 2011
And, ... Monday!
Pretty good weekend, really. Restful, exactly what I needed. Slept in - twice, had lots of bacon at breakfast, snacked more than I should have, probably, finished with fire-laced green chile on cheese enchiladas, which was magnificent. Yesterday morning, I was down to 141.6 for some unfathomable reason; this morning, I'm at 143.0. Don't really understand that one, either.
Article in the paper this morning about two high school athletes who lost a bunch of weight by "exercising more, cutting out junk food, and reading labels." I'm sure that label-reading was the key; probably burned off loads of calories. I only read the picture captions and part of the intro; I just couldn't go any farther (that, and we were running pretty late this morning). Labels. The government is pushing to label everything; if they get their way, there won't be pictures in menus anymore (maybe no descriptions, either), just nutrition labels for every item on offer. Ugh. Have these dweebs failed to notice that there are no labels in nature? And yet, somehow, the wild animals - those noble, yet cranially-underendowed, creatures - they manage to stay slim, without reading a single label. Guess that's the nobility or something, right?
JUST. EAT. THE. EFFING. INGREDIENTS. In a natural state, or as close as you can get them. Avoid most things with nutrition labels. (I wish that were a good rule, but shoot - meat and milk and eggs are labeled, so it doesn't really work.) Lee and I were grocery shopping on Saturday, for parsley, lemons, olives, swiss cheese, and salami. And we realized that our shopping trips have become a bunch simpler since we changed how we eat. There are rafts of aisles we never venture down at all anymore. At Costco, we buy meat, laundry and paper goods, eggs, milk, dog treats, and bulk nuts, with occasional forays into the movies and books and clothing. Again, giant aisles we no longer bother with (always were, there - I don't think I've ever really spent time in the automotive area, or mattresses).
I'm a little worried about my dad, though. He's jumped on the bandwagon recently (sort of, anyway - they still eat some wheat, I know). Lost some weight - that's all good, although he's always been pretty lanky. Drove his total cholesterol down to 112, though - that's bad. I haven't noticed any mental degradation, but his doc still has him on a statin, for crying out loud. At this point, he needs to be inquiring about his inflammatory markers and getting off the dammed thing. And get his TC back up in the middle 100s somewhere, at least - maybe closer to 200. Maybe I can suggest Co-Q 10, at least.
Had a great dinner on Saturday - chicken thighs Provencal. Crock pot the thighs with a can of diced tomatoes, some cooked-together onions, garlic, tomato paste, oregano, and olive oil, and white wine. 6 hours later, you can barely pick them up whole, and you skim the fat, add some chopped up Nicoise (or Kalamata, in our case) olives and some parsley, and serve, with wedges of lemon to squeeze over the finished product (it improves it even further). Lee is planning to take the leftovers for lunch later in the week - but as a soup, he hopes. There was a lot of sauce left over.
Pork tenderloin tonight - Nature's fast food. They just don't come any easier.
Article in the paper this morning about two high school athletes who lost a bunch of weight by "exercising more, cutting out junk food, and reading labels." I'm sure that label-reading was the key; probably burned off loads of calories. I only read the picture captions and part of the intro; I just couldn't go any farther (that, and we were running pretty late this morning). Labels. The government is pushing to label everything; if they get their way, there won't be pictures in menus anymore (maybe no descriptions, either), just nutrition labels for every item on offer. Ugh. Have these dweebs failed to notice that there are no labels in nature? And yet, somehow, the wild animals - those noble, yet cranially-underendowed, creatures - they manage to stay slim, without reading a single label. Guess that's the nobility or something, right?
JUST. EAT. THE. EFFING. INGREDIENTS. In a natural state, or as close as you can get them. Avoid most things with nutrition labels. (I wish that were a good rule, but shoot - meat and milk and eggs are labeled, so it doesn't really work.) Lee and I were grocery shopping on Saturday, for parsley, lemons, olives, swiss cheese, and salami. And we realized that our shopping trips have become a bunch simpler since we changed how we eat. There are rafts of aisles we never venture down at all anymore. At Costco, we buy meat, laundry and paper goods, eggs, milk, dog treats, and bulk nuts, with occasional forays into the movies and books and clothing. Again, giant aisles we no longer bother with (always were, there - I don't think I've ever really spent time in the automotive area, or mattresses).
I'm a little worried about my dad, though. He's jumped on the bandwagon recently (sort of, anyway - they still eat some wheat, I know). Lost some weight - that's all good, although he's always been pretty lanky. Drove his total cholesterol down to 112, though - that's bad. I haven't noticed any mental degradation, but his doc still has him on a statin, for crying out loud. At this point, he needs to be inquiring about his inflammatory markers and getting off the dammed thing. And get his TC back up in the middle 100s somewhere, at least - maybe closer to 200. Maybe I can suggest Co-Q 10, at least.
Had a great dinner on Saturday - chicken thighs Provencal. Crock pot the thighs with a can of diced tomatoes, some cooked-together onions, garlic, tomato paste, oregano, and olive oil, and white wine. 6 hours later, you can barely pick them up whole, and you skim the fat, add some chopped up Nicoise (or Kalamata, in our case) olives and some parsley, and serve, with wedges of lemon to squeeze over the finished product (it improves it even further). Lee is planning to take the leftovers for lunch later in the week - but as a soup, he hopes. There was a lot of sauce left over.
Pork tenderloin tonight - Nature's fast food. They just don't come any easier.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Well, it was worth a shot.
It occurred to me not long ago, that I might be able to get the salt fix of a bag of potato chips without the seed oils by having Baked Lays. I finally got around to looking at their ingredients today, and, well, not so much. They are probably worse than potato chips.
Regular potato chips contain:
Baked Lays contain:
Blecch! Never mind.
Regular potato chips contain:
- Potatoes
- Sunflower or Corn Oil (or both)
- Salt
Baked Lays contain:
- Dried Potatoes
- Corn Starch
- Sugar
- Corn Oil
- Salt
- Soy Lecithin
- Corn Sugar
Blecch! Never mind.
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