Posts tagged diet

I got my measurements taken for the paleo challenge today, pretty exciting. I’m kind of excited about this because I’m really not unhappy with where I’m at now. Like yeaaahhh I could stand to cut some body fat, but ehhh I like the way I look, for the most part. So it will be interesting to see just exactly what I look like after this is all over. (And if I like the new me enough to maintain it!) 

Starting Stats:
Weight: 142#
Right quad: 20”
Left quad: 21” (must be compensating for my bad knee more than I thought!)
Hips (around the widest part of my butt, which is like…wide): 38 1/4”
Abdomen (below my belly button): 31 1/2”
Chest: 33 1/2” (busty, I know)
Right arm: 11 5/8”
Left arm: 11 1/2” 

So here we are at the start, we’ll see what the next two months bring. 

Also, I’m 5’6”, for reference :) 

So my $50 check for the 60 day paleo challenge starting tomorrow is on the coach’s desk and I am officially all in. 

Which means today I am going to eat everything greasy, sugary, fatty, salty, chocolately, and cheesy I can get my hands on. 

In part, this will be a fond farewell to all the delicious but disgustingly bad for you foods that I like, and in part, will hopefully disgust me so much that I don’t even want those foods anyway. 

The Fargo Fatass Foods Tour of 2012 has officially commenced! 

First stop, Caribou Coffee, for a mint chocolate mocha WITH whip. This is essentially dessert masquerading as coffee. Yum. 

The box is having a Paleo Challenge for December and I kind of want to do it.. I know I sort of hate paleo, but I’ve never done it with the support of a bunch of people or the incentive of an official challenge before. 

Should I do it?? 

My best friend, who is a smart ass lady at her fancy ass smart person college is smart (ya got that, she’s really effin’ smart, okay?!) She spends a significant amount of money to learn about all sorts of things that I would never even imagine knowing. But she doesn’t know jack shit about nutrition. 

I have kind of evolved my ideas about nutrition and I consider it to be a very personal thing; do what works for you and makes you feel good. However! I do believe that reducing the amount of sugar we consume is thee number one way to not only control our body weight, but greatly improve our over-all health. Excessive sugar consumption, and the inflammatory response associated with it, can be linked to basically every shiteous disease out there. Type II diabetes, heart disease, vascular diseases, gum disease, multiple kinds of cancer, and really a veritable host of other crappy things you don’t want are all found to be related to the excessive amounts of sugar in the Standard American Diet. 

Anyway, my BFF Jill (her name’s not really Jill…does anyone remember that commercial though?) was telling me about these healthy, vegan cookies her friend made her. She’s not a vegan but she thinks eggs are evil (they’re not ya’ll, eggs for everyone!) but again, nutrition=personal, you do you, whatever don’t eat eggs if you don’t want to. And then she said the best part was, they were sugar free!

Skeptical Carl was skeptical at this fact and inquired as to how the cookies didn’t taste totally like sawdust. She responds, “Agave!” 

Facepalm. 

AGAVE IS SUGAR! It is the sap from the matured agave plant that has been extracted from the fruit of the plant and then cooked down into a syrupy consistency. (Ahem, hear that, raw foodies- agave nectar isn’t raw!) The main difference between agave and table sugar is that agave is primarily fructose and table sugar is 50/50 sucrose and fructose, meaning agave is sweeter.(Also meaning agave is basically expensive high fructose corn syrup, albeit without the additional processing required to make HFCS) But guess what, fructose and sucrose (and glucose which is what your body is going to break either of these down to anyway) are both SUGAR. 

To be fair, one small advantage may be that you coulduse less agave nectar than traditional white sugar in a recipe since fructose is sweeter than sucrose, but that’s truly where the benefits end. It’s all the same shit and your body treats it the Exact. Same. Way. 

I get SO frustrated by this. So many people, even intelligent people like my friend, are fooled by “No added sugar!” bullshit all the time, while their ‘healthy’ products are filled with sweeteners in other forms. 

This became a rant like six paragraphs ago but for real people! Educate yourselves on what the actual fuck it is you are putting in your body! 

I fucking hate Paleo. 

I’ve tried and failed at it like 5 times over the past 6 months. 

It’s hard, I obsess over what I can and can’t eat, I have a headache all the time, and I’m constantly starving. 

Someone please tell me I’m not the only one! Has anyone else tried Paleo and totally hated it??

So I know I’m about 2 years late to the party on this one, but I just had cake pops and oh man, so worth the cheat. I also had chips, crackers, cheese, and dip at my cousin’s bridal shower. I was basically planning on this to be a cheat meal (these things constitute a meal, right?), since I’ve been quite honest with my Paleo efforts since we got back from vacation 13 ago. I do not regret my indulgence at all, although I’m quite sure I’ll be paying for it later…. 

Anyway, other than this afternoon I have basically been kicking ass at this paleo business. It feels too soon in my journey to preach this (I should at least make it through my first real month at this) but this time around has been awesome. I don’t have a goal weight or anything like that and I am fairly ambivalent about what I weigh. My interest in it is generally only to satisfy my geek brain’s curiosity. I like evidence.

I had a physical for nursing school the day we got back from vacation and I had to hop on the scale there. I weighed in at 143 which was about where I was at before surgery, although probably a bit different in composition. Again, since I like facts, I weighed myself at home once I got back from the clinic just to make sure it said the same thing as the doctor’s scale, which it did (continuity, people!). After 12 days of strict paleo, I got on the scale again and weighed in at 137. Five pounds gone in less than two weeks with literally zero exercise. This shit works you guys. Once I get back to Crossfit I’m sure my weight will go up again as I earn back all of that muscle I lost, and I’m not worried about the number, but it’s cool to get some validation that this hard work has been paying off. Also, I feel great, so there you go. 

In my convalescence I’ve had an excessive amount of time on my hands. In between a Say Yes to the Dress marathon, narcotic-induced narcoleptic incidents, pestering friends and family who were contributing to society and not sequestered in their basements, and battling the dog for couch space, I did some thinking. It may surprise you to know that despite my extreme preoccupation with having a decent bowel movement I managed to make some decisions about where to go from here on my paleo journey. 

For most of the month of June I haven’t been very strict about eating paleo. I was out of town for five days for my cousin’s wedding in Florida and I was mostly too tired and sick (I’m an incredibly unhappy flier) to trouble myself with much more than whatever was put in front of me. We ate out every single meal and while I tried to pick healthier options I didn’t fuss too much over it. Two days after I came home I had my surgery and for most of the rest of this week I haven’t eaten much of anything besides blueberries and toast. The meds do not agree with my tummy and toast was about the only thing that helped me keep it down. Pain meds don’t work well floating in the toilet with disagreeable scrambled eggs. Then last night was my cousin’s bachelorette party. We went to Rhombus Guys, which is an new-ish restaurant downtown that makes delicious gourmet pizza, so like…obviously. Plus you don’t go to a bachelorette party and pop your party bus cherry without drinking an exorbitant amount of girly adult beverages which I’m quite certain was not in your average cave-person’s diet. 

Anyway, now that I’m a lot more mobile this week, cooking and grocery shopping will be a lot easier. Which, I decided during my long, contemplative hours on the couch, doesn’t mean I’m going back to strict paleo. I will continue to stay low-carb, but I am going to add more dairy back into my diet. Our twenties and thirties are when we build bone density, something especially important for women. I hate soy milk and almond milk and I don’t believe in supplements so I am going to include yogurts and eat a little bit of cheese when the mood strikes me. Probably not a lot of milk since it actually has a ton of sugar in it, but I will have it occasionally. Also, having toast back in my life made me quite happy. I get the low-carb thing, and I guess I even buy the grains are bad for you thing, so I will eat bread sparingly. I read the blog 100 Days of Real Food (if you haven’t, check it out, she’s awesome! 100daysofrealfood.com) and she bakes and cooks with real, whole ingredients instead of choosing the store bought options and has experienced many of the benefits of the paleo diet but still includes dairy and wheat.

I feel like, at least for me,  paleo is not the perfect solution and not something that is realistic for my life. It honestly was causing me an undo amount of stress. I know people who really “live the lifestyle” don’t feel restricted or deprived but for me it just isn’t working. I felt like this could get weird and controlling and upsetting and it’s just not something I want to mess with anymore. So instead I’m just going to eat smart. The 100 Days blog says if it has less than five ingredients, and it’s a whole, natural food, go for it, so I’m going to. I’m still going to stay low-carb and I am going to try extra hard to focus on vegetables, but that’s it. Whole food is the only hard and fast rule. We’ll see how this goes!