Pay Now Live Later

Making the Most of Animals: Part 2 - Glorious Fat

2009-12-20T06:22:00.008Z

In part 1 I talked about the importance of eating the meat from animals that have been well treated. Quite apart from any ethical consideration, the fact is it's better for you.

I also mentioned the cost benefits of including offal in your carnivorous repertoire - first, because bought separately it's very cheap, and second because if you bought the whole animal in the first place, you are getting more food for your money.

The same arguments apply to another part of the animal people routinely squander - the fat.

For example, when you buy a lamb chop, very often there is a fairly thick rind of fat on it. This probably contains more calories than the meat (as most of you know, fat has 9 cals/g whereas carbs and protein has 4) - but how healthy that fat is depends very much on how the animal was reared.

Quality Matters

As I wrote in part 1, it's not wise to compromise to eat the fat from industrially farmed animals: they are fed with food like corn and wheat, and kept in unnatural conditions, as a result of which their fat contains more omega 6 and less omega 3 than wild or free-range animals. Eating the fat from such meat is probably not very good for you, though ironically this is not for the reasons the sat-fat-heart brigade claim.

Some Photos of My Fatty Meals

Pork scratchings

Chicken skin

Lamb fat

Duck skin

They key point: fat from free range, organic, or pastured animals is actually good for you.

Eating the Fat Makes the Meat Cheap

Another irony lies in people's tendency to avoid buying organic, pastured or free-range meat because of the cost. Very often these same people can be seen scraping the fatty offcuts into the bin after a meal or carefully separating the skin from a duck or chicken leg.

The point is that if they bought high quality food, and therefore were able to eat all of the serving, they would need a less to be satisfied because of the additional calories from the fat - and it would taste nicer too.

When Mrs M and I buy a small organic chicken, it makes up to four meals. There are all kinds of fatty parts to the animal, many of which become crispy if cooked properly. Personally, I am happy to guzzle the fatty parts whether crispy or not, so I can be satisfied by a much less meat than I would otherwise need.

A £10 organic bird therefore means £2.50 per meal. If we bought a crappy, industrially farmed bird for £5 we'd have no choice to but to avoid the fat, so the cost would be the same because we'd only get two meals out of it.

As an aside, I do appreciate some people may be getting their meals for £1.25 because they eat all of the chicken, in spite of the conditions it was raised in, and that for some this is the only way they can afford to live.

Conditioned Avoidance

We have been conditioned to cut the fat off our meat.

The diet-heart hypothesis - the idea that eating saturated fat leads to heart disease - is so thoroughly entrenched in the psyche of most people that there is an instinctive urge to avoid conspicuous animal fat.

I won't bore you with the science here, but regular readers of the blogs in my blog roll will know this is a notion that's being quietly and systematically demolished by authors, commentators and researchers, leaving an ever-dwindling group of establishment die-hards holding aloft a tattered flag.

Even Mrs M, now a fully paid up Paleo queen, cuts the fat off meat when it's not crispy or when there is what she perceives to be 'just too much of it.' As for my Mum and Dad, who themselves have been Paleo for some time, it took them quite a while to get used to the idea that fat is good.

The Power of Indoctrination

What gets me is that nobody wants to leave the crispy skin from a chicken breast. I don't know many people who'd pass up a pork scratching (albeit accompanied by ooh, I shouldn't) and the crispy fat from a lamb or beef steak is surely divine.

Yet the same people who seem unable to exercise the willpower necessary to stop eating sugar, cakes or chocolate, appear suddenly to have this iron resolve when it comes to animal fat. As I recall, I was just the same some years ago. I guess this is testament to the power of indoctrination. No one wants to die. You die of heart attacks. We are told fat gives you a heart attack. I don't remember anyone ever saying that about sugar, albeit that it may turn out to be true.

Paleo Subtleties

It would be remiss of me not to mention that there are differing opinions among advocates of Paleo/Primal eating about how much animal fat we should eat. Some say that wild animals are relatively lean and that our liking for fat was naturally regulated when we were evolving by its relative scarcity. Others say we should freely consume it.

I just wing it. For me, variety is the watchword. On some days I eat white fish or offal, which contain relatively little fat anyway - on these days I get most of my fat from olive or coconut oil. On days when I do eat fatty animals I eat the fat freely.

In part 3 - soups and bones. Yes I said bones - you can eat them. Really.

See Also:
Making the Most of Animals: Part 1 - Wonderful Offal

The Three-Day Binge Recovery Plan

2009-12-04T06:11:00.007Z

What I am about to tell you might be utter nonsense. My sole qualifications are that in recent months I have done a lot of binging and recovering. I certainly don’t advocate this, and I'm usually quite annoyed with myself when it happens; but given it does, one must be prepared.

The 3-day plan places structure and context around what I think are important principles, but I suggest you tailor your own strategy based on those principles, rather than assume the three-day timeline has any special meaning.

Less Illness?

Before I describe the plan, I will say this: my theory is that this approach makes illness less likely because it coaxes the body back to full strength rather than frog-marching it there. Being an obsessive, I have in the past worn the hair shirt on days following bad behaviour. In the past, a few binges close together have caused illness. This year, an unprecedented number of consecutive binges have not yielded illness. Anecdotal, but for me, powerful.

Day 0: The Binge

You drink too much alcohol. You probably also eat too much, some or all of which is junk – sugary food, salty food, and processed food – all the things you would normally avoid. The following day, recovery must start.

Day 1: Healthy Food and Fresh air

Eat healthy food: but don’t go hungry; eat as much as you need to satisfy. You may be worrying about all the excess calories you ate/drank the day before. Forget it – there will be an opportunity to compensate on days 2 and 3. Perhaps have some healthy treats. Plan to cook your favourite meal .The spectre of comfort eating will loom - if your binge included alcohol, the chances are your salt and sugar balances will be all over the place, so you may want to have more fruit than usual if you are craving sweetness.
Don’t try to fast: this will be a struggle if you have a hangover – better to provide your body with the nutrients it has been deprived of forced to give up in the last 24 hours.
Don’t go to the gym or exercise: it is tempting to go to the gym on day 1 - you will feel so much better afterwards. But resist this temptation – your body is at a low ebb and the risk of illness is probably greater later on if you kick it while it’s down. Feeling good in the short term does not mean it’s the best thing to do. Let your body recover first, then the benefits of the exercise will be most fully realised, and not at the expense of illness risk. ABOVE ALL, do not do some kind of long, hard cardio session – this will definitely knock back your immune system.
Get some air: you won’t get the same buzz as you would from a gym session, but you will feel better nevertheless. A good walk will make you feel better about the night before without hitting your body in any significant way.

Day 2: Fast

Fast / reduce your food intake. Today, this will be easier. If you already do intermittent fasting, it will come naturally; if you don’t, then just do whatever you can to reduce your calories and give your system a day of rest.
Still don’t go to the gym or do hard exercise! This will be getting tough, but you must continue to resist the temptation. One thing at a time. If you wait one more day then the chances are you won’t suffer a decline in performance as a result of the binge. Plus, if you are fasting or eating less, then the increased appetite from exercise might make it harder, give that you are still not fully ‘in balance’, appetite-wise.

Day 3: Gym/Exercise

Go to the gym or do some hard exercise: now you are ready. By now most of the garbage has worked its way through your system and you are restored to something approximating the day before your binge. As well as making you feel good afterwards, the stresses you apply during exercise will now also confer their usual benefits in the medium term. Short, interval-based intense exercise is better - but of course this applies at all times, not just post-binge.

Making the Most of Animals: Part 1 - Wonderful Offal

2009-11-26T07:15:00.006Z

Offal is not to everyone's liking; and photographs of it being dissected and prepared are probably to even fewer people's liking - so if you are squeamish about that sort of thing, you might want to duck out now.

For me this is not about morality. Treating an animal well and making the most of its body when you kill it is better for your health and better for your wallet, so it's a compelling case regardless of ethics.

Since we're on the topic, though, I would observe the following: our physiology has evolved more slowly than society has developed. Hardly surprising when you contrast the mechanism of natural selection with that of cultural development. Hence, vegetarianism - a perfectly reasonable concept borne of advanced cultural thinking, yet ill-suited to our bodies.

There is a point of view that a good carnivore at least shows respect for the animals he or she eats by ensuring they are well treated and using as much of the creature as possible. To me this makes sense - but I am not a table-thumping evangelist of animal rights; as I say, for me this is a health and finance no-brainer.

However, please note: eating every part of a badly fed/treated animal is not a wise compromise. Intensively farmed animals are likely to have an unfavourable fat profile and contain antibiotics.

My point about cost is this: given that eating well-treated animals is essential to ensure healthy meat, then the cheaper way to do this is by eating all of those animals.

Free Food

Mrs M and I have been buying most of our non-wild meat from Fordhall Farm in central England. This is how we ensure the animals have been treated well.

They run a delivery service, but we prefer to drive over in the summer, when it's possible to see the animals in the fields or enclosures and witness their freedom first hand. The team who run it have even featured on television, where we learned more about the lengths to which they go to ensure a natural existence for the animals.

Last year, I asked whether they had any offal for sale, other than the few parcels of liver in the frozen section. No, but we have some to give away, was the response. Why would you give it away, I wanted to know. Because otherwise it gets thrown away.

Healthy Food

That day, along with our usual purchases, we returned home with a cow's heart the size of a soccer ball, two lamb plucks (liver, heart and lungs all still joined together), a cow's tongue and two pig's kidneys:

Chopped up, this made a staggering 16 meals; and I mean man-sized meals. We are talking 300-400 grams of meat per meal. For zero cost.

What's more, this is the good stuff. Offal is packed with vitamins, minerals, healthy fats and probably much more besides. Our ancestors would have fought over these parts.

Squeamish

The trouble is, people are squeamish about offal. Mrs M is only now taking gentle steps towards eating the stuff. For the last year, I have been eating the offal on days when she is eating with friends or otherwise I make her an omelet or fish instead.

Part of me wants to shout about offal from the rooftops so that the world wakes up and stops shovelling this amazing food down the drain and can therefore use half as much land to provide the same amount of food. The other part of me wants to keep schtum so that the few of us who like the stuff continue to get it on the cheap.

Clearly the first part of me has triumphed, because I am writing this post.

Dealing with Offal

I'll show you how I deal with these parts of the animal when I get them home and how best to cook them; but don't expect recipes: this is about practicalities. I'll add links to recipe ideas on other blogs at the end.

This weekend, we came home with two lamb plucks as well as our usual haul: . I laid these on a couple of chopping boards, , then separated the liver, heart and lungs into individual pieces by severing then from the main windpipe of the lamb: . What remained was various pieces of fatty, between-organ tissue, bits of muscle and windpipe itself: .

In total, this lot made nine large meals: .

I took the bits and pieces and slow cooked them with onion, tomato and garlic (I forgot to photograph the garlic): . Five hours later, I put it into a container and into the freezer: .

Tongue

This is one of the toughest parts of the animal I have tried. In the early days I sliced it up and stir fried it. It was very tough. In fact I did this again recently because I had not thought ahead. It took be almost 2 hours to chew through the lot: .

Braising on low heat heat for up to 2 hours will tenderise the meat more and create a tasty, if thin, gravy...but the smart money is on slow cooking. We bought a slow cooker recently for £30 ($50) and have never looked back. After 5 hours, this piece of tongue was so tender I was able to peel the skin off with my hand: . It was as nice as any fillet steak I have ever had.

Heart

I've eaten lamb, pig and cow heart. The texture and flavour is rather like a toned down version of liver. Less tender, less piquant. Although you can cook heart by braising or even frying and find it just about tender enough to eat, it does benefit from longer cooking too. Hearts come with a 'crown' of fat around the top - this is delicious and it would be a crime to cut this off.

A cow's heart usually weighs about 2 kilos, from which I create about 5 portions - here's one I cut up recently (along with a tongue): .

This is a meal of one such portion, braised: . You can see the tasty fat 'bubbles' on the left of the piece of meat.

Kidney

Kidneys are happy being fried, so this is how I tend to cook them. They can be slightly rubbery, so you may prefer to cook them for longer in casseroles or just by themselves... but I am too lazy for that and in any case they really are reasonably tender when fried. The ammonia smell that sometimes emanates from cooking kidneys is not to everyone's taste. Here are some pig kidneys I recently made a meal of: .

Liver

This one's easy: just slice it and fry it. The composition of liver is such that it is tender by nature and in fact the only real danger to its palatability is overcooking, which can make it tough.

Lung

This is the one organ meat I hesitate to recommend unreservedly. It's not the taste, but the consistency which is a problem. Not surprisingly given its function, it's somewhat aerated, and so lacks density, which for me is main appeal of meat.

I have learned that slicing and frying lung is not the best approach. I have not tried slow cooking yet, but did discover that when I braised the whole piece for 90 minutes, the result had an acceptable tenderness, albeit that it still had that insubstantial, aerated quality.

Heads, Brains and Others...

There are some parts of the animal I have not mentioned because we have never tried them.

Heads: we were once offered a pig's head at the farm. I wasn't sure whether we were expected to cook it or put it on the bed of a rival gang member. In the end we said no, mainly because we figured out we did not have a pot big enough to cook it in. Apparently you make something called brawn using pigs' heads and other parts such as trotters and bones. I am sure the heads of other animals can be cooked in the same way.

Brains: you occasionally see brains on the menu in expensive restaurants. I have never been offered brains at the farm. It's a bit of a sensitive issue in the UK after the BSE debacle and perhaps the one thing people are most unsure about eating. That scene from Hannibal doesn't help.

Stomach: two dishes I am aware of are tripe, which is made from the stomach of the sheep and haggis, made from the stomachs of cows. I have tried neither, nor have we been offered the stomach of animals at the farm.

There are, I am sure, many others.

How to Make Offal Less Unappealing

Getting used to the idea of eating offal, or persuading someone you cook for to try it can be a challenge. Here are my tips:

Don't let them see it beforehand (if you are cooking for someone else)
Try to make it look as unlike its original form as possible
Casseroles or stews are a good way to disguise
Use plenty of herbs and spices like garlic - the smell of cooking will win you/them over
Follow a recipe: it will diminish that sense that it's 'not right'.

Recipes

If you want to see the eating of offal in action, follow me on twitter or keep and eye on the My Meals photo page on this blog. I post photos of my meals on most days, and eat offal about 3 times per week.

As Mrs M is not yet on board, I revert to plain preparation for offal dishes: at best, I use tomato, onion, garlic, perhaps coconut cream. If I am stir frying I use coconut or red palm oil. The latter is worth exploring because it can add a lovely bacon-like flavour.

At worst, I simply slow cook it in water.

For some better recipe ideas, search on Google. There are plenty out there. Mark Sisson has done a couple of good articles on offal and recipes for it:

Mark's Daily Apple: Organ meat recipes
Mark's Daily Apple: More detailed post about offal (including tripe and brains).

See Also:
Making the Most of Animals: Part 2 - Glorious Fat

Supplements - What I Take and Why

2009-11-13T13:30:00.016Z

Many people would like to take a single tablet each day that ensures optimal health. Thus was born the multi-vitamin. But you can't. It's not that simple.

Until recently, my Father required an entire cupboard in the kitchen to house the collection of tablets and potions from which his daily supplementation was administered. My relentless re-education campaign is paying off: we are now down to a single shelf.

Over the years I went from no supplementation to lots of supplementation then finally to judicious supplementation. I'd like to spare you the effort of making the same journey.

First of all, a couple of assumptions to make clear.

I eat a Paleo diet (most of the time.) Thus, the nutrient density of my food is high and well proportioned. My meat is mostly wild or organic / grass fed / free range. My fruit and veg is mostly organic. Yes, the nutrient density of modern fruit and vegetables, organic or otherwise, is lower than those our ancestors gathered; and yes, modern life throws at us additional toxins such as pollution. However, I doubt our ancestors had consistent access to the volume of fruits and vegetables we do. I believe this offsets the reduced nutrient content and additional toxin load.
I have no special requirements. I am not pregnant (and barring some kind of unwelcome miracle, never will be) and I am not aware of any congenital deficiencies. My research has been based on my requirements as a normal healthy male.

What Supplements do I Take?

Vitamin D

I have read a lot about this (see the articles in my bookmarks under the vitamin D tag.) There is a growing consensus that it's a crucial ingredient to our wellbeing, and one whose healthy levels have been underestimated. People mistook average levels for healthy levels. Modern man spends much less time in the sun, so our bodies are not able to make what they need; and since it's almost impossible to compensate for this via diet, we have a problem only supplementation or regular holidays can solve (unless you are lucky enough to live somewhere sunny.)

I have written about how I got tested, revealing a significant deficiency, then supplemented to achieve improved levels.

I buy this product.
Summer: 3000 iu per day when I do not sunbathe. Zero iu when I do.
Winter: 4000 iu each day.
I get tested every 6 months, and adjust supplementation accordingly. I am still learning.

Priobiotics

I don't agree with everything Mark Sisson says about supplementation, but there's no doubt he knows his stuff, and it's his views on probiotics in this post which have driven my policy. The key points I have learned are:

We need healthy bacteria in our guts.
Some things we do in our life kills the friendly bacteria (e.g. antibiotics, illness, stress.)
Unlike our forefathers, we are very hygienic. So the friendly bacteria does not tend to get replaced naturally.
Once re-introduced, friendly bacteria can grow and flourish by itself.

Based on this information I take a day's worth of acidophilus once a month, just to be sure. If I get an upset stomach now and again, or have a couple of days of stress, this will 're-seed' my friendly bacteria culture.

I buy this product (but not from this shop)
Once day per month: 36 mg Lactobacilli culture x 4.

Serrapeptase

I have my Mother to thank for this one. Several years ago she noted I was taking ibuprofen tablets like smarties. I was playing a lot of sport and constantly had sprains or muscular issues to combat.

Since then I have learned how bad Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs) - of which ibuprofen is one - can be. They mess with your stomach in a way which (to a layman like me) sounds a lot like the impact grains have.

What are the alternatives? Well, many of the healthy foods I am already consuming have anti-inflammatory effects. Omega 3 fatty acids, for a start; and apparently cherries have excellent anti-inflammatory effects - but how many jugs of cherry juice would I need to combat a sprained ankle?

Bottom line: serrapeptase is a naturally occurring substance with a long track record of largely side-effect-free use as a powerful anti-inflammatory. So when I am injured, I take that.

I buy this product (but not from this shop)
When injured, I take 60,000 or 120,000 iu 3 times per day. I have no real basis for this dosing other than the knowledge that side effects are rare even at high doses, and I have never experienced any.

What Supplements would I Consider Taking?

Omega 3 Oil

I have read a fair bit about this too, but don't seem to have bookmarked anything. The key point is that the ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 fatty acids in our diet is very important to health. As hunter gatherers this was not an issue. Wild food is high in omega 3. However, processed food and industrially farmed animals are high in omega 6. Supplementation with omega 3 can therefore be a good idea to combat the modern diet.

Nevertheless, I do not supplement with omega 3 because:

You can get omega 3 from foods. Oily fish is an excellent source. I eat sardines, mackerel and herring by the bucket load. These are small, wild-caught, oily fish. Size is important because small fish have not lived long enough for significant quantities of cancer-causing toxins to build up in their fatty tissue. I also eat tinned salmon.
As I mentioned, most of the time I don't eat modern or industrialised food anyway, so my omega 6 intake is generally low.
I don't like spending money I don't have to.

Why Won't I Take Anything Else?

I will preface my final point with the following statement: I am always learning and certainly do not know it all. A year ago I would have written this blog post and not even mentioned vitamin D. Next week I may read an article that convinces me I should supplement with something else. For now, my views on further supplementation are as follows:

Mankind barely even 'gets' the human body at the moment. We are about as good at knowing the full effects of a supplement as we are at predicting the weather beyond next week. This is a good analogy because like the body, the weather is an immensely complex system in which everything interacts with everything else.

We run crude tests where we change one variable out of billions, then draw our conclusions from a few measurements over a few months.

We evolved to receive our nutrients from food, which is also a complex combination of many substances. Yet we identify single molecules in that food and think that by supplementing just that molecule we can compensate for eating material that barely qualifies as food.

So I will continue to 'supplement' with real food, except in cases (like vitamin D) where I am convinced this is not possible and where I am willing to take the gamble of consuming an isolated substance that crudely approximates what nature intended.

Hunter Gatherer in Goat Herding Shame

2009-11-07T08:20:00.005Z

[Click on the small pictures in the main story to see larger images]

Okay, I admit it. I'm a fraud. While promoting the hunter gatherer lifestyle I was secretly herding and milking goats.

Now that I have come clean, let me tell you about our recent experiences as herders.

In July Mrs M and I stayed at a gîte in France, 3000 feet above sea level in the Pyrenees. The British couple who own the property live in an adjoining house and keep various animals, some as pets, others as a resource.

Mrs M and I would like, one day, to be self-sufficient. What better way to guarantee our food is not sullied by modern techniques? So in July we took a keen interest in the animals and what it took to look after them.

"You can't really go on holiday" was one of the key things we were told.

After the July holiday, Mrs M and I were so taken by what we'd seen that we offered to look after the animals if the family ever wanted to take a holiday.

"Yes please - how about October?" was the response...

Training

We arrived a couple of days before the family were due to go away. We needed to be trained.

The Animal Inventory

Here is the list of animals:

Goats - 4
Sheep - 2
Chickens - 20
Cats - 2
Dog - 1

The Delinquent Dog

The wild card in the menagerie was the dog, Tango (pronounced Tongo, since he is French!) In July he gave the impression of being well-intentioned but partially unhinged. Even once he knew who you were, he could do any of three things when he encountered you - bark repeatedly, ignore you, or press himself distractedly against you with a sort of offhand affection.

He was kept indoors when the postman came. We would need to establish some trust and authority or he could be trouble.

The Routine

As with many humans, animals are at their most stable and happy when they have a good routine. During the two days of training, I took these notes:

The routine was as follows:

First light:

Turn off the electric fence around the chicken houses
Give food and water to the five chicken enclosures
Open each chicken house and release the free-range hens from their shed
Let the sheep out of their enclosure

After Breakfast:

Prepare milking pots and food for the goats
Drive down to the goat shed
Milk Cordelia, who is currently pregnant, meanwhile giving straw to the other 3 goats
After milking, rope up the goats and take them to their enclosure
Check the electric fence and turn it on.
Check the water in the enclosure and replenish if necessary.
Take the milk back, filter it, and freeze it

Mid afternoon:

Corn for the chickens - the free rangers congregate by the garage for this, the others have it thrown over into their enclosures
A little more food for the young cockerels because one of the hens from another enclosure flies over and eats from their food tray
A little corn to the sheep from the hand, to retain their domesticity

Evening:

Shut the chickens away and turn on their electric fence
Shut the sheep away
Shut the goats away

The Perks

Of course there are some perks to all this work. Even though it was winter, one of the free range ladies did oblige us with a couple of eggs during our tenure, which I duly consumed with some leftover lamb:

In addition, how could we resist having a coffee each morning with raw, minute-fresh goat's milk?

Food and Meals

We had a number of fine evening meals. This was largely courtesy of Carfour supermarket's organic section rather than the local butcher, who was closed for the week:

As well as keeping animals, they also have a fairly large vegetable patch, in which she grows pumpkins and courgettes, amongst other things. Our hallway looked like this when we arrived:

Needless to say, we were invited to help ourselves.

While I was mooching around the grounds barefoot, I trod on a few hard lumps in the grass. On inspection, I discovered a number of buried sweet chestnuts. There is a large chestnut tree there and although there were almost no chestnuts remaining on the ground, it appeared the many squirrels had kindly set some aside for us earlier in the month ;-) We roasted these with one of our dinners.

I also found a buried walnut, but sadly was unable to locate the tree from which it had come.

We also ate at a couple of restaurants - the photos below are of (we think) a duck gizzards starter. The main course was duck breast in a rosemary sauce.

The Disappearing Hen

The first two days in charge went like clockwork. We felt like Dr and Mrs Doolittle.

But this was too good to be true. The thing about animals is that like humans, they have their own agenda, and it does not always tally with that of their keepers.

On the second evening, only five of the free range chickens reported for bed. We had shut away all the other chicken houses, the electric fence was on, and it was almost completely dark. Had the fox eaten her? This seemed highly unlikely, given we had been around all day, and being eaten by a fox is not something one would expect a chicken to do quietly.

So we rang Suzanne, who told us that this particular chicken occasionally roosted in a tree when it was mild. So, reluctantly, we closed the free range hen house for the night.

The following morning, with relief, we discovered the missing hen had rejoined the gang. This is her:

The Traumatised Mouse

On the third day, I found a mouse behind Tango's water bowl. It's eyes were closed and it appeared unable to move much. I was not sure whether it was a baby mouse from a large species whose eyes were not yet open or an adult mouse from a small species, potentially traumatised by one of the cats. The fact that it was hairy suggested the latter. I put the mouse somewhere safe and quiet to recover or die, whichever nature decided.

Goat Pandemonium

Also on the third day, Mrs M and I were relaxing on the patio after lunch . The sheep were grazing nearby, the free-range hens were grubbing around by the garage and Tango the dog was snoozing at our feet.

The sound of animal bells is a common one in the Pyrenees - there are sheep, cows and horses all around in the fields and hills, all wearing bells so they can be easily located. Our goats also had bells. So when we heard the faint sound of bells getting closer, we didn't think much of it.

But as the sound grew closer and more rythmic, Mrs M and I looked at each other. Was the farmer using our driveway to move his sheep? The sound got louder and louder and panic began to creep in. Whatever was wearing the bells was clearly about the make an appearance from behind the hedges.

When it did, pandemonium broke out. It was the goats, who had leapt over their electric fence and come trotting up the drive. A whirlwind of feathers erupted as they ploughed through the chickens. The sheep bolted. Tango did what any dog would do and barked loudly and incessantly. Meanwhile, two of the goats had mounted the patio table and were inspecting our lunch plates.

Mrs M managed to get Tango inside and I managed to get hold of the billy goat's collar and that of Miranda, the light brown girl goat. They did not like this, but one has to be firm. I led them back down the drive. The herd instinct compelled the other two to join us and once we were round the corner they all began trotting back. Goats are clever. They knew exactly what they were doing. Mrs M and I felt rather like stand-in teachers being taken advantage of by a rowdy class of pupils.

Wildlife

The wildlife in the Pyrenees is spectacular at this time of year. We have recently bought a new digital camera and were able to capture some of the flora and fauna we found:

Exercise

I did some great Paleo/Primal workouts in between all this, an account of which, including some videos, can be seen on Train Now Live Later: Hikes, Rope Climbing and Log Throwing in the Pyrenees.

The Menagerie Grows

The day after Mrs M and I left, the family bought three ducks. Their home will be in an enclave of the sheep enclosure. We hope, time permitting, to get the opportunity to do this again. We certainly feel very lucky to have been able to do it once.

How I Got My Vitamin D into the Sweet Spot

2009-10-20T14:47:00.015+01:00

Back in May, I posted about my vitamin D deficiency, having sent away for a test via the Grassroots Health organisation.

I discovered I was seriously deficient at 29 ng/ml. The healthy range recommended by the organisation is 40 - 60 ng/ml.

Six months later, I managed to persuade my haematology specialist to include serum vitamin D levels in the battery of tests he performs every 6 months or so.

The results came back this week and I wanted to share the improved result and what steps I took to get there. For an explanation on why I have these tests done at all, read here (hint: I don't think there's anything wrong with me.)

The advice of Grassroots Health was to supplement with 1000 ui of vitamin D for every 10 ng/ml of deficiency.

The Plan

With the British Summer just starting, I wanted to combine supplementation with some serious (but careful) sun worshipping. I had been reading that sun exposure without burning was perfectly safe and was looking forward to replacing my lily-white appearance borne of years of sun-phobia with a healthy tan.... not to mention replacing the evil sun tan cream with appropriately-timed donning of lightweight sleeves, scarves and hats.

The Result

The result of my latest test came back at 53 ng/ml - an increase of 24. This is nicely in the upper regions of their stated sweet spot, which is good news.

The specialist's letter informed me that this is in the 'normal' range of 10-60. To be fair, this in no way implies this is the healthy range - but I can't help thinking that a level of 20 would not have sounded alarm bells.

So what did I do in the 6 months between tests?

What I Did

I took 3000 ui of vitamin D3 on every day I did not sunbathe.

Over the summer in the UK and for one week on holiday in France I estimate I had 15 days of sunbathing in strong sun. I always avoided burning. On these days I did not supplement.

As my tan increased, the time I could spend in the sun increased - but a tan diminishes the manufacture of vitamin D by the skin, so I assume that by getting as much sun as I could safely get on any given day, I was getting as much vitamin D as my body could produce.

On sunbathing days, I always avoided washing all but the important parts with soap next time I showered (see this Dr Mercola Video for why).

Advice May Underestimate the Dose

I believe that for me, a little more than 1000 iu is required to increase the serum levels by 10 ng/ml - I consistently took 3000 iu on non sunbathing days and would expect the sunbathing days to have far exceeded that dose... yet my blood levels were increased by only 24 (not 30 as Grassroots' advice would suggest.)

Winter Plan

Over the summer I got a lot of incidental sun on the non-sunbathing days, simply by walking outside. This winter, any sun I get outside will be very weak and produce little or no vitamin D. On that basis, I plan to increase my daily dose to 4000 iu to compensate and hopefully maintaining my current level.

Stronger Immune System?

This year has seen me treat my health with less respect than the previous 3 years put together - for example, this and this :-(

...yet I have still not been ill. Previous years have taught me to know when I am pushing it too far. By those standards, by now I should have had a cold.

Conclusion

Two things have changed this year. First, the vitamin D. Second, I have been doing even fewer, even shorter, but still highly intense workout sessions. My failure to get ill could be due to one of these factors, the other, or both. Or neither. Such are the vagaries of anecdotal reporting.

I will get re-tested in 6 months and report back.

See Also:
My Yellow Skin Mystery
My Wheat Experiment
My Wheat Experiment Blood Test Update
My Vitamin D Defficiency

Scientific Breakthrough: 'The Roman Box' Allows you Eat Without Digesting

2009-10-17T12:10:00.000+01:00

Guest Post by A. Hack

A new scientific breakthrough may soon allow people to decide how much of each food type they digest, or even to digest none of the food they are eating.

A device being dubbed The Roman Box filters food as it passes into the stomach, applying a combination of chemical and electrical processes to change its composition. The device also has a discrete set of dials and an external outlet which allows the owner to configure their digestion and channel some or all of the food out of the body before it is digested, to be collected in a 'gastrostomy' bag.

The name Roman Box is a reference to the practice, said to be common among the rich in Roman times, of vomiting during a feast to allow more food to be eaten.

Peter Perkins, an engineer from Bedford, UK, says he has been working on the invention for several years but the product is now finally ready to go into production.

"This is the most significant breakthrough in dieting science there has ever been," he said yesterday."For the first time, we will be able to physically intervene in the process of digestion, allowing people to choose whether to digest the food they are eating and if so which type of nutrients to absorb."

"It came to me when I was deliberately throwing up after an especially large eating binge about 10 years ago," he explained. "I realised that if I could stop the food getting as far as the stomach in the first place, there would be no need for all that effort."

"Then, when I read about all these low carb, low fat, or high protein diets I decided what people also needed was to be able to separate the constraints on macronutrients from decisions on meal composition. If they could choose the meal they wanted to eat, while separately determining the percentages of fat, protein and carbohydrate that digested, then they would be in full control."

Yet attractive though this may sound, it raises profound questions about the implications for human eating behaviour.

Would party-goers turn their absorption down to zero and eat continuously all night? According to Mr Perkins, the only downside might be forgetting to empty your gastrostomy bag, since a full one will prevent the machine from working properly.

"I got so drunk one time that I forgot to empty my bag," he recalls. "I thought I was low carbing all my burgers but ended up gaining 5 lbs at a barbecue.

Critics argue the machine will encourages binge eating and ask what will stop a person from eating if their hunger is never sated. Whereas overeating a favourite food used to mean becoming full from eating it, now the prospect of instead becoming bored seems realistic; or might more physical factors come into play, such as the oesophagus eventually become painful or jaw ache?

Others warn that the widespread use of the Roman Box could cause a massive spike in food demand, as culinary decadence sweeps the globe.

"It's obscene," said a spokesman for Oxfam. "In fact I'm almost speechless with horror at the idea that while children starve in the developing world, people would see this as a good idea."

Mr Perkins' work has also provoked anger in the medical and nutrition world. Arnold Clamshell of the Centre for Medical Ethics said yesterday "This is a truly unfortunate development and an illustration that technological advances can nevertheless represent moral and ethical regression."

Anyone desperate to have a Roman Box fitted may have to wait, however. Mr Perkins, who is currently recovering from multiple organ failure in London Royal Infirmary, is sketchy when quizzed on the commercial status of his product.

"My mate Dave used to be a vet and my other mate, John, is in sales," he explains. "It's the perfect storm. My idea and their expertise. Within a few months we'll have this baby on the production line and I'll be choosing a yacht for my wife."

Mr Perkins' doctor is less sanguine.

"To be honest he's lucky to be alive," says Professor Legg, a senior surgeon at the hospital. "He appears to have allowed someone to fit a crude device between his oesophagus and his stomach which channels food out of his body via a puncture wound in his upper thorax."

"There were some dials attached to this device and externalised just above the sternum, apparently taken from an old radio. They appeared to regulate the release of liquids from bottles housed in the device and also change the voltage on a rusty electrode which extended into the stomach. Mr Perkins is not a well man."

A neighbour of Mr Perkins, who wishes to remain anonymous, says Mr Perkins and his friends had been drinking heavily on the day he was admitted to hospital and strange noises could be heard coming from his garage throughout the afternoon. "He has a history of mental illness," said the man. "I think that tells you all you need to know."

Exercise WILL Make you Thin - if You Really Want it to

2009-10-05T12:15:00.010+01:00

For years we thought you needed to exercise to lose weight. Don’t exercise, you get fat. Exercise, you get thin. Simple.

Then we realised this advice may be wrong. Studies showed that exercise increased the appetite, so people ate more. Books like Good Calories Bad Calories dismantled the calories-in-calories-out hypothesis. Respected commentators stated that getting the diet right is by far the most significant contributor to weight loss.

Recently, an article appeared in Time magazine article, Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin. It was widely commented on in the health and fitness blogging community and touted as evidence that the mainstream might finally be 'getting it.'

Yet, one such commenter, Rusty Moore on Fitness Black Book posted an analysis of the article which contained a single, important phrase, challenging this new doctrine:

The biggest flaw in the article is his notion that exercise gives you no choice but to over-eat.

Bingo.

Key questions of health and fitness almost always get polarised. People want simple – and the there are those who exploit that for their own gain. The subtleties are brushed aside in an orgy of gourd following a lá Life of Brian.

Two subtleties that do discussed in health and fitness circles are:

Intense, interval-based training may be more likely to create the conditions for weight loss without self-defeatingly stimulating appetite.
The effect on appetite of exercise may vary according to the type of food eaten and the metabolic state of the subject (i.e. are they adjusted to a low carbohydrate diet or riding the high carbohydrate merry-go-round.)

Rarely is psychological state discussed in any depth. How badly does a person want to lose weight? How strong is their will power and self discipline? The research appears to treat people as machines. Get hungry, eat food.

I believe that if someone really wants to lose weight with exercise, then they will, regardless of the type of exercise they are doing or food they are eating.

I will admit up front that I am far too lazy to delve into the full detail of all the studies on exercise and weight loss - scientific papers make my eyes bleed; but I did look at the methodology section of a study referenced by the Time article. This is what it said about how the subjects were recruited:

… 464 postmenopausal women within the age range of 45 to 75 years, who were sedentary (not exercising more than 20 minutes on 3 or more day a week, and [less than]8000 steps per day assessed over the course of one week), overweight or obese (BMI 25.0 to 43.0 kg/m2), and had a systolic blood pressure of 120.0 to 159.9 mm Hg were randomized to 1 of 3 exercise groups…

Notice that the criteria here are mostly physiological. Machines. Get hungry, eat food.

Two things I would have wanted to know about the subjects:

What was their attitude to weight loss? Did they want to lose weight? We cannot assume that just because they were overweight or obese that they wanted to lose weight.
How strong was their willpower?

I am not pretending that either of these is easy to measure – but equally I think we can assume that the psychometric testing industry has successfully tackled them at some point.

The attitude to weight loss is especially important. The implicit point of studies like this is to evaluate how effective exercise is as a weight loss tool… a tool which one assumes would mainly be used by people who want to lose weight. So there’s not much point studying people who don’t want to lose weight, right?

I have not examined the results section of the study. For the sake of my eyes, I did not delve beyond the methodology; but what we can assume is that the average weight loss for the exercise group was no greater than the average weight loss for the non-exercise group.

Yet by the laws of natural variation there must have been exercisers who did lose more weight than the average non-exerciser.

In other words, for whatever reason, at least some people must have lost more weight through exercise. Why?

In my experiment, the subjects would be tested for attitude and personality characteristics:

Do they want to lose weight? How badly?
How much will power and self-discipline do they have?

We would then look for a link between these factors and weight loss. If there is a link, is it more pronounced amongst the exercisers? Perhaps people with willpower and self-discipline can lose weight through exercise.

Moreover, could actually knowing that exercise affects your appetite make a difference to the result? In a follow up study we might tell one group of subjects that exercise will increase their appetite and sabotage the weight loss benefits. Could that knowledge elevate those with less will power to a position where they, too, can lose weight though exercise?

Anecdotally, I know this to be possible. A few years ago I lost several pounds by religiously sticking to the types and amounts of food I consumed daily while increasing my weekly running mileage by 15 miles; and I witnessed my gym partner drop nearly a stone in weight over 3 months by the addition 30 minutes of post-weights cardio and a determination not to eat more food than usual.

I’ve nothing against people who want to issue advice that’s most likely to lead to success for everyone – after all, I advocate the Paleo diet, which takes the lowest common denominator approach to nutrition.

So if you have to chisel something onto a stone tablet, then yes,

Exercise is not the key to weight loss: it’s mostly about what you eat

…would be the best thing.

However, it would be nice to see more recognition by both commentators and researchers that humans can apply free will in this matter.

Recipe Video: Butternut Squash Chips/Fries

2009-10-03T19:10:00.008+01:00

This is a nice way to get that potato-like taste (but sweeter) with a Paleo/Primal-friendly vegetable and with a similar shape and texture to normal chips/fries. If you manage to get yours to be crispy, let me know how you did it. Personally I prefer them soggy anyway, but I know most people like them crispy.

Okay, I admit this barely counts as a recipe. I am guessing that by definition there needs to be more than one ingredient for it to be a recipe. It's more of an idea.

For those in the US, chips is what we call fries in the UK.

How Nostalgia Shapes our Food Fantasies

2009-09-26T17:45:00.002+01:00

I love McDonalds. Seriously.

These days I’d rather boil my head in a vat of engine oil than actually eat the food - but it’s not just the food I am talking about. It’s the idea of McDonalds I love.

McDonalds reminds me of times when I was younger, cared less about my health, less about my wallet and frankly less about everything. It reminds of days when watching morning TV, visiting the ‘drive thru’ and then adjourning to the local pub were regarded as busy; of days when a perfunctory visit to the university campus made for a positively hectic schedule.

Toast and Tea

Food seems to feature heavily in the landscape of my nostalgia. My earliest fond food memory is of my maternal Grandmother’s morning tea and toast. She would creep into my room with a plate of crustless white toast triangles, smothered in butter and accompanied by sweet, milky tea. The aroma would lull me awake. It smelled of family outings, of treats and mornings with no school.

Apple Crumble

I imagine many people have food memories forged in the kitchens of their grandparents. My paternal Grandmother captured my imagination with her apple crumble; when I visualise the house where we would join her for Sunday roast dinners, I can still fleetingly recapture the smell of sweet, stewing apples and slightly scorched flour.

Creamy Cereal

Breakfast was clearly important to me as a child - I recall being determined to get to the kitchen first so I could secure the ‘top of the milk’.

In those days in the UK, glass bottles of full fat milk were delivered each morning by the milkman. If the bottles had been kept still enough, there would be a few inches of cream clearly separated from the rest of the milk at the top of the bottle. Skilfully poured, this could give you the equivalent of single cream with your cereal. Better still, if there were two or more bottles, I could risk incurring my Mother’s irritation by taking only the very creamiest bits from each.

My favourite breakfast was two Weetabix soaked in cream and covered uniformly and generously with white sugar. I associate it with sunny kitchens and the excitement of a day ahead.

Cheesy Noodles

Later, when we spent time abroad, I discovered instant noodles. I would cook them for myself as a snack. While the noodles were simmering I would grate cheese into a bowl - lots of it. I then poured the cooked noodles on top of the grated cheese and stirred. The result was precisely the kind of cheesy, salty, gooey dish I loved.

My memories of that country are of beach-combing at dawn, buffeted by warm tropical wind, of trips into the jungle to chase impossibly large butterflies and insects – and of eating noodles and cheese. The food and these experiences are somehow inextricably bound.

Heinz

Somewhere in my psyche there is a place for Heinz. There is a loose association with childhood which it’s hard to define. I can see tins with the Heinz logo sitting alluringly in cupboards. Again there is the sense of a sunny kitchen.

When gripped by a bout of food nostalgia I find myself fantasising over tomato soup with grated cheese and buttered bread; or spaghetti rings on buttered toast with grated cheese on top. Mmmmm. Clearly I have a thing about cheese.

Butterscotch Angel Delight

Perhaps the food I hanker for most is butterscotch-flavoured Angel Delight. My Mother would buy these sachets of powder as a dessert. As per the instructions she would add milk, blend, then leave and in the fridge to set. The result was a delicious, mousse-like pudding. The butterscotch flavour was divine.

At some point I decided to make milkshakes using the powder. In theory this meant using less powder than indicated by the instructions, but with each successive milkshake, the ratio of milk to powder shrank - until in reality I was creating a kind of butterscotch paste; the thicker the paste, the more exquisitely sweet the taste. Once again, my penchant for goo is evident. Of course when there was ‘top of the milk’ available, I would use that instead of milk…

Dietary Proclivities

Don’t get me wrong – neither my Mother nor Father encouraged me to eat these things. I would hate to give the impression I was some kind of neglected urchin desperately inventing his own meals in the absence of parental interest. In fact my Mother cooked splendid meals for us at the traditional times, paying due attention to the prevailing views of the time on what was healthy.

The fact is that the evolution of my dietary proclivities took place at unsupervised, between-meal snack times, often covertly. If I knew I was under observation, I would moderate. One of the reasons for placing the grated cheese under the noodles was to conceal its true extent.

Nevertheless, clearly the availability of the foods was a factor in my developing a taste for them.

Lost Innocence

Strangely enough, I have singularly failed to indulge most of these nostalgic fantasies at times when I have fallen unceremoniously from the Paleo wagon. Apple crumble is the only one I have tried – and that was because it was available by chance. It was nice – but the experience was somehow a one-dimensional sensory episode that failed to recapture the associations I have cultivated over the years.

So whilst there are associations between certain foods and happy memories, I think more broadly it’s about innocence. Not necessarily the general innocence of childhood, but specifically the innocence of consequence. Even as a McDonalds-munching student, I had not yet acquired any real sense of certain foods being bad for me; and I was in any case utterly indifferent to health threats, being still at an age where mortality was a foreign concept.

Innocence is the one ingredient that cannot be added to the experience of eating these foods now. I could surely make myself a batch of butterscotch-flavoured Angel Delight (they still sell it)… but I could not recapture the experience of eating it with total impunity and utter abandon.

Perhaps this is why I have hesitated to indulge my nostalgia fantasies even when I have allowed myself a holiday from correct eating - and perhaps why the impromptu apple crumble experience didn’t live up to expectations.

In a sense, finally ‘getting it’ around the Paleo diet is a moment when innocence is lost. I remember experiencing a certain sadness when I realised I would never go back; when I realised, for example, that I would never again eat cereal or toast in the morning. Sure, I knew I could treat myself to either one whenever I wanted, but what I could never recapture, unless someone wiped my memory, was the sense of routine around those foods – the comforting feel of a simple, pleasing habit.

Junk Food does Taste Nicer

In a crude and immediate sense, the foods from my childhood memories probably do taste nicer than healthy foods. Otherwise, why would it be such a challenge to wean ourselves off similar carb-heavy, sugar-laden, salt-encrusted offerings?

I’ll be honest and admit that for me a slice of supermarket cheesecake with its ingredients list that reads like the back of a shampoo bottle, is an experience that transcends any roasted organic chicken with butternut squash and seasonal vegetables. They are not in the same league. Food scientists, blundering morons though they might be, have at least managed to fool our taste buds to that extent.

Yet, when my palate and body have been cleansed of all such garbage (the cheesecake, I mean) and I am living on a strictly Paleo diet, I learn to take a pleasure in my food which is fundamentally and intrinsically rewarding in a way that the cheesecake and its evil associates could never be.

Memory-Driven Urges

So whilst I am not blaming our love for junk food entirely on childhood associations and experiences, I do think that to some degree it drives and shapes our urges.

I wonder how my present-day food fantasies would be different if my childhood had been populated by Paleo treats? What if my Mother had only kept the larder stocked with nuts, seeds and dried fruit? Or if my Grandmother had woken me with peppermint tea and a bowl of fresh berries, nuts and coconut cream? The irony, of course, being that such foods would have been regarded by most physicians of the time (and, dare I say it, many now) as unhealthy:

Nuts? Coconut? Good Lord Madam, what about all that fat? No, no, no – what your son needs at snack time is something low fat with roughage – have you considered spaghetti rings on wholemeal toast with margarine?

Shaping our Fantasies

When (and if) a mini-M comes on the scene, Mrs M and I will be doing some careful thinking about how to handle this. On the one hand, you cannot protect kids from junk. They have to know it exists and they have to come to terms with how to moderate its intake. After all, they will inevitably encounter it at friends’ houses and in the playground.

Yet, I don’t have any fond memories of eating food in the playground, or at friends’ houses or even of buying treats from shops when out with my friends. My nostalgia centres primarily around family experiences. Perhaps by providing our kids with positive emotional associations with healthy foods, we can contribute to shaping their urges and fantasies in later life.

Mountain Runs, Lake Swims and (Mostly) Paleo/Primal Eating

2009-09-17T07:00:00.008+01:00

This is probably the best photo I have taken of Buttermere Valley in the English Lake District. It gives you an idea of the kind of weather we enjoyed last weekend.

On Train Now Live Later I've posted a photo-story of our 4 days of hiking, mountain running, wild swimming, tree-top workouts and Paleo/Primal eating.

The 'Buttermere Duathlon' and Other Exploits

Well, in Mrs M's case I would say mostly Primal/Paleo eating, as you will see...

The Amputation Diet

2009-09-02T06:18:00.002+01:00

Guest Post by A. Hack

Cruise: no allegations

The latest diet craze sweeping through the rich and famous is being dubbed the 'Amputation Diet'.

New advances in surgical technology and cryogenics have made possible the most gruesome calorie restriction technique yet to emerge.

Dieters have one or both of their hands surgically removed and frozen cryogenically for a period of up to 6 months. Since this removes their ability to properly handle dining utensils like a knife and fork, they naturally lose weight.

"Some people are happy to just have their fork hand removed," said a surgeon who wished to remain anonymous. "The extra effort of eating with a hand they don't normally use leads to up to 33% fewer calories consumed.

Yet stars determined to lose weight as quickly as possible are having both hands removed.

"This is only really practical for movie stars and rich people," said celebrity watcher Donna Kebab. "In the same way that they can afford to disappear for 3 months after plastic surgery, they can also hide away during the months of an amputation diet."

Pitt & Thurman: disguising scars?

At the end of the agreed period, the frozen hands are defrosted in a special way to avoid tissue damage, then re-grafted onto the dieter's wrist.

"Have you ever noticed how many stars wear wrist watches?" asks gossip columnist Helena Handbasket. "Although the plastic surgeons do a great job, they can't work miracles - there is always some scarring," she added.

The amputation diet may have been around for longer than people realise: Luke Skywalker is believed to be amongst a small number of stars who gambled with their hands to achieve the perfect body in the early eighties, when the technique was in its infancy.

Unfortunately the procedure went badly wrong, and the Jedi's hand was damaged beyond repair. It is rumoured Skywalker then conspired with Star Wars director George Lucas to change the Empire Strikes Back plot, engineering a storyline to explain the missing hand.

Skywalker - procedure
went wrong

Film-goers saw the hero lose his hand in a gripping light-saber battle against arch-enemy Darth Vader. As fans will know, Skywalker then had a robotic hand fitted, which appeared to function every bit as well as the original.

Insiders say this plot twist was in fact a cruel joke dreamed up by Vader and the producer Steven Spielberg, both of whom were overweight at the time and jealous of Skywalker's improving figure.

Once he became accustomed to the robotic hand, Skywalker quickly regained the weight he had lost and more besides - while in the meantime Vader and Spielberg had lost 20lbs each through Atkins and Jazzercize.

So as celebrities queue up for the treatment, concern is being expressed from those connected with more traditional weight loss approaches.

"This is symptomatic of the quick-fix culture we find ourselves in today", commented Professor Hal Fwit of the Centre for Universal Nutrition Technicians and Scientists. "We recommend a low fat diet and a regular exercise regime for effective weight loss. This has proved 100% effective for sustained wight loss when you exclude from the data those who later put the weight back on."

Getting Started: A Brief Guide to Paleo / Primal Living

2009-08-27T06:40:00.008+01:00

What is the Paleo / Primal Lifestyle?
Eating
Exercise
Other Things
How Paleo/Primal Are You?
Further Reading/Listening/Watching
Your Resources

I thought it was about time I pulled together a single resource that could be used to guide for newcomers, a summary for the curious and a reference for the already inducted.

What is the Paleo / Primal Lifestyle?

Also known as the hunter gatherer, caveman, ancestral, evolutionary lifestyle.

In one sentence:

We have been evolving for 2,000,000 years, yet we have made profound changes to our activity patterns and the composition of our nutrition in the last 10,000 years; whilst there may have been some small genetic adaptations in that time, we are still, essentially, built to eat and behave as our earlier ancestors did.

Where’s the evidence?

Don’t take my word for it – the blogs, books, podcasts and videos listed in the Further Reading/Listening/Watching section contain a wealth of detail, including scientific references, to help you make up your mind.

I won’t pretend it’s easy - proving what’s best for the human body is one of the most complex challenges we face. No one has all the answers, but the material in that section is produced, for the most part, by fair minded and intellectually rigorous individuals with a more transparent agendas than many who influence mainstream advice.

Eating

The Paleo/Primal ‘diet' is what people tend to hear about first and is usually the first thing they try.

In a sentence:

Paleo/Primal food is so much more nutritionally dense and so much more in tune with our genes than the typical modern diet that a radical improvement in wellbeing is almost inevitable when you switch from one to the other; you will feel better, look better and minor ailments you had taken for granted will often disappear.

In a quote:

Plants (vegetables, fruits, seeds and herbs) and animals (meat, fish, fowl, and eggs) should represent the entire composition of your diet.

- Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint, 2009

In a nutshell:

Paleo in a Nutshell Part 1: Food video.

Changing what you eat to fit the Paleo/Primal model can be quite a challenge. This guest post I wrote for another blog provides some ideas on how to go about it.

If you want to see what I am eating every day, follow me on Twitter or if you just want to see the photos, they automatically appear on this page.

I sometimes post the recipes for my favourite meals, which you can see here.

Exercise

The diet and exercise aspects of the lifestyle cannot be truly embraced in isolation. Our bodies evolved to function optimally with a certain kind of nutrition, with a certain range of patterns of activity.

In a sentence:

Our ancestors had short, intense bursts of activity when hunting, fleeing or climbing, along with extended periods of low level activity when tracking animals, foraging or playing; so either getting no exercise, or doing regular, long, hard sessions is out of tune with our evolved past and affects our wellbeing adversely: fitness and health are not the same thing – otherwise Olympic athletes would not catch colds.

In a quote:

An evolutionary activity pattern is mixed and varied. It contains brief, intermittent episodes of highly intense physical action mixed with languid periods and play.

- Art Devany, Evolutionary Fitness essay, 2000

In a nutshell:

Paleo in a Nutshell Part 2: Exercise video.

For ideas, you can follow my own workout diary on Train Now Live Later.

Other Things

Diet and exercise are the big ones – but there is more. There are other things our bodies evolved to expect, but which modern life deprives them of.

Here are just a few:

Sun exposure: we got a lot more before. Many of us are vitamin D deficient as a result (read here and here for my experiences.)

Cold water exposure: we would have swum or bathed in cold water regularly. There are significant health benefits to doing so – yet we avoid it.

Sleep : we used to get more of it, get more naps, and be woken naturally. Modern sleep habits can affect our health more than we may think.

Medicine: we didn’t take any. Modern pharmaceutical drugs can save and improve lives - but many of us happily consume daily cocktails of drugs without realising how they affect our wellbeing.

How Paleo/Primal Are You?

Try this quiz to see how your current Paleo/Primal credentials stand (but don't take it too seriously!)

Your Resources

Read below in the comments for more resources. Please do add a comment of your own if you know of relevant blogs (including your own!), books, websites or any other media.

What is the Paleo / Primal Lifestyle?
Eating
Exercise
Other Things
How Paleo/Primal Are You?
Further Reading/Listening/Watching
Your Resources

Transitioning to a Paleo Diet Case Study: 3 Month Update

2009-08-18T06:48:00.004+01:00

This is a guest post by Straight to the Bar's Scott Bird - 3 Months In : Increased Mental Clarity

Having switched over to a Paleo diet just over three months ago, I've noted a gradual improvement in many areas; and in health overall. No regrets whatsoever.

One of these improvements has been a steady increase in mental clarity. This is perhaps the most difficult area to quantify (as I haven't exactly got a stockpile of 'mental history' notes); though from my point of view it's the biggest change so far.

Before I take a look at the improvement itself, I'll define what I mean by 'mental clarity'. Here are a few phrases to give you an idea of what I mean :

ability to focus on a task

reduction in the impact of distractions

detailed recall of events

extension of my peak working hours

As you can imagine, all of these are very welcome changes - and a complete surprise. To me, at least.

To see the changes themselves, lets take a brief look at each one in turn :

Ability to focus on a task

The clearest example of this occurs when I first wake up each morning.

When I first open my eyes, I'll have an idea of what I'm going to do that day. Major items - 'work on project x' or 'finish writing y'. This thought is only approximate; more the 'what' than the 'how'.

As I go through the usual morning routine (a bodyweight workout, coffee and so on), this idea solidifies. Gradually the 'how' comes into view.

By the time I'm ready to start work, both the 'what' and 'how' items are lined up and ready for action. It's a great feeling.

Reduction in the impact of distractions

In the past, I'd seek a quiet area in which to work. Whether writing, photographing a subject or solving problems; silence was always the goal.

Gradually, however, I'm finding that I can tolerate more and more ambient noise. This in turn leads to being able to work more effectively in a greater number of environments. And yes, this is a good thing.

Detailed recall of events

Although I've always been noted for observing details about a place or event (yes, I'm that person who announces that all of the bad guys are using a particular type of 'phone in your favourite show), my memory is not exactly world-class. Still, all the information's clearly in there somewhere.

Over the past few months, this has been changing. Whilst the observant part is unchanged, the recall has been steadily improving. Especially the level of detail for each event.

The exact location of a house I used to live in? Not going to happen. The license plate of a car I passed yesterday? Yep.

Extension of my peak working hours

While I still work the same number of hours each day, I've always found that I get the most done in the late morning (around 10am - midday). If I've got a major task to get done that day, I'll try to work on it during that time.

Since the switch to Paleo, I've noticed that the 10-12 has grown a bit; 9am - 12:30pm would now be more accurate. As I said, I still work the same number of hours each day as before, I just have a larger 'peak operating window'.

Final thoughts on the Increased Mental Clarity

Overall, I'm astonished by the level of improvement that a switch to the Paleo Diet has brought. Of particular note are the benefits which came as a complete surprise - and very welcome ones - such as this increase in mental clarity.

Love it.

---

Scott Bird is a writer, photographer and lover of all things strength. He can usually be found in the kitchen stuffing his face, or over at the strength-training site Straight to the Bar.

See Also:
Transitioning to a Paleo Diet - Guest Post on 'Straight to the Bar'
First 2 Weeks of Transitioning to Paleo Diet: A Case Study

The Primal Blueprint Health Challenge: My Competition Entries

2009-08-12T06:55:00.007+01:00

Mark Sisson is running a 30 days of competitions over on Mark's Daily Apple, with "Over $6,000 in Prizes". It's being billed as The Primal Blueprint Health Challenge.

I was unable to resist entering a few of them myself, and am including the video and photos I entered below.

Competitions vary from the small (send a photo of your breakfast) to the large (create your own Primal Blueprint workout video.) The prizes aren't too shabby either, with that second example promising the winning entry quite a haul.

There is a list of the competitions, many of which are still open, here. There are more being run every day. Here are my own entries so far:

Show Your Breakfast Competition.

Primal Post-Its Competition

Primal Blueprint Recipe Video Competition

Warrior Paleo Experiment & the Many Faces of Fasting

2009-08-07T09:35:00.002+01:00

Background
My Plan
Why was I doing this
What Happened (the meals)
What Happened (body composition)
The Good
The Indifferent
The Bad
Feasting or Binging?
My Verdict
Another Perspective
Other Reading and References on Intermittent Fasting

Background

In the middle of May I decided to try the Warrior style of eating - essentially, one meal per day. There had been a lot of buzz about it on Twitter and I was interested in the concept.

My normal eating pattern – and the one I have returned to since, is roughly this:

Monday	Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Tuesday	Dinner
Wednesday	Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Thursday	Lunch, Dinner
Friday	Dinner
Saturday	Lunch, Dinner
Sunday	Lunch, Dinner

The precise days vary, but this is a good representation of the average week. Another way of putting it would be:

- 2 x 24-hour fasts
- 3 x mini, 16-hour fasts
- 2 x full eating days

Intermittent Fasting

For those less familiar with intermittent fasting, the simplified premise is this: your body takes advantage of the ‘downtime’ to perform cellular repair and do other good things. This makes sense as an evolved function - our eating patterns would have been less regular when we were hunter gatherers.

Studies on animals have shown longevity to be extended by periods of reduced calorie intake – even when the net calories over a given period are the same.

The idea with intermittent fasting is that you eat the same number of calories – just in a different pattern.

If you want to read more about intermittent fasting, see the further reading section below.

One important thing to note about fasting – it’s much easier when you have been on a low carb diet (such as Paleo/Primal) for at least a few weeks. This is how long it takes your body to start remembering it does not need a constant supply of blood sugar to function well.

My Plan

My plan was to try this instead:

Monday	Dinner
Tuesday	Dinner
Wednesday	Dinner
Thursday	Dinner
Friday	Dinner
Saturday	Dinner
Sunday	Dinner

Clearly I would have to start eating bigger evening meals.

In fact, if you look at my normal eating pattern, this meant I would be eating exactly half as many meals and therefore need to be eating evening meals that were twice as big!

...although in fact my breakfasts and lunches are typically about two thirds the size of my evening meals, so it was not quite that extreme.

Why was I doing this?

Curiosity: how would this affect me physiologically? I felt like this to be a viable interpretation of ancestral living – spend the day locating and hunting food, then feast in the evening. I wanted to know how that felt.

Greed: I liked the idea of big feasts. I am a greedy eater by nature, and having an excuse to eat big meals was appealing.

Time Saving: I would not have to prepare breakfasts or lunch to take to work. Seven fewer meals to prepare meant at least an hour saved per week (yes, I can make them that quickly!) Each day I would just skip out of the door and return later to make dinner.

What Happened (the meals)

My experiment ran from May 21st to June 11th.

Here are all the meals I ate during that time, taken from my Twitter records:

Date	Breakfast		Lunch		Dinner
May 21st						trout with steamed broccoli, onion and kale.
May 22nd				got 2 hungry at lunch (not enuff trout last night) & hit the shops - chicken & nuts		Roast rabbit + veg
May 23rd						wine, mackerel kebab, wine, salmon curry, banoffee pie, whisky, biscuits, then can't remember
May 24th						huge bowl of rabbit stew + veg + nuts + chunk of creamed coconut. Forgot photo!
May 25th						crab starter, then 1/2 roast chicken & veg, parsley
May 26th						chicken soup (from last night's carcass) then seabass & veg
May 27th				chicken leg from Monday's roast + small bag of walnuts.		sea bass & tomato soup, 16oz cow's heart steak + parsley, cabbage, cauliflower, other veg
May 28th						whole roast wild duck, cauliflower, cabbage, carrot, onion, parsley, courgette
May 29th				Fasted through the morning but overtaken by hunger at lunch so resorted to supermarket		duck & cabbage soup + grilled pork rind & tomato puree then pork fried in c'nut oil + tin of salmon + avocado + veg + nut feast afterwards! full!
May 30th						salmon & trout starter then lamb & chicken platter
May 31st						curried venison liver (c'nut cream, onions, spices etc) + steamed broccoli.
June 1st						6 'special' scrambled eggs (evoo & c'nut cream mixed in) + ling + steamed veg
June 2nd						lamb mince fried w onion, pepper, tom, c'nut oil + 2 tins sardine & mixed veg
June 3rd						trout, scrambled egg mixed w c'nut cream, broccoli, peppers, beetroot leaves
June 4th						beef heart steak, tuna, wine+evoo sauce, onion, celery, beetroot, avocado, toms
June 5th						beef fried in c'nut oil, wine & toms + broccoli, avocado, beetroot, aubergine
June 6th						tandoori salmon, chicken and a bowl of mixed roasted nuts.
June 7th						Curried venison & steamed mixed veg
June 8th				Chicken breasts and walnuts. Hunger got the better of me despite big meal last night		Wild Sea Bass, scrambled eggs, carrots, cabbage, courgette, parsnip, onion, evoo, almond butter
June 9th						braised grass-fed cow's tongue chunk + steamed veg + evoo + tongue juice
June 10th		scrambled organic, kiwi, sardines.				lamb cooked in garlic, onions, mushrooms, tomato puree, olive oil & thyme + mixed veg
June 11th						Beef heart, carrots, courgette, cabbage, kale, avocado, celery drizzled in evoo

What Happened (body composition)

During that time, my weight did not significantly change, as this chart shows:

The Good

Not having to prepare food to take to work did turn out to be a liberating experience – an hour feels like a long time to someone who works a 40-hour week.

In fact it was like a second liberation, since I had already been liberated a couple of years previously from a many-meals-per-day routine when I went Paleo/Primal (that epiphany is described here.)

As an aside, this was a double whammy, liberation-wise, because at roughly the same time in May, I started experimenting with the Body by Science training method (my ongoing account of this can be seen here) – which requires theoretically only 15 minutes of working out per week.

I even noticed the reduction in rucksack weight. I am guessing it weighed between 1 and 2 kilos less on days when I would normally have carried breakfast and lunch to work, a round trip which involves up to an hour of walking.

The Indifferent

Other than the practical benefits, I don’t remember feeling a lot different. Energy levels, gym performance – these were neither better nor worse.

The Bad

When you have only one meal per day, it takes on new importance. For me this meant a few issues.

The first problem was sometimes under-eating. Being an innate glutton, I was not expecting to struggle on this front - yet there were days when found myself driven to eat during the day. As you can see from the meal records, I failed to stick to the protocol on 5 days out of the 22.

Clearly I am capable of fasting through a day until dinner, as I regularly do with my normal eating pattern - but I don’t normally fast on two consecutive days. The ravenous hunger I experienced on these 5 days must have been because I got the meal size wrong on one of both of the previous days.

No doubt this is one of the reasons why well-spaced intermittent fasting works so well – each fast is padded with days of plenty.

In a way this is a great example of the human appetite in action: in spite of my intention to follow the warrior protocol and my usually steely determination when fasting over 24 hours, my body ratcheted up my appetite to a new level when deprived of calories to a new extent.

A second issue was meal composition. I often found myself feasting on nuts after meals to a much greater degree than I would normally recommend – simply because I had not managed to create a big enough meal from meat, fish and vegetables. Too many nuts and I get uncomfortable guts.

I think to an extent I was also using the ‘I must get enough calories’ mantra as an excuse to binge on something I would normally limit myself on – so as the experiment progressed I made an effort to ensure the meal itself was bigger. I would buy bigger pieces or meat or throw in a side of sardines or scrambled eggs – this helped with the third issue...

… which was variety. I am a creature of routine – which means my breakfasts and lunches tend to be composed of similar foods. When I stopped having them, I stopped eating those foods. Eggs, fruit, tinned fish, avocado and salad were the main casualties.

I was happy to lose the fruit, which I consider a nice-to-have - but I valued the others more, both nutritionally and emotionally, so I started incorporating them into the main meals. This also helped increase the meal size. For example, look at the medley of foods I had on May 29th and June 1st.

You may have guessed the fourth issue by now: sleep. Being a 9-5 man, I had little flexibility around when this big meal took place. I could usually get it prepared and eaten before 8pm , but with a 10pm bedtime this scarcely provided enough time for me to go to bed without still feeling full.

Depending on the composition of the meal, this could mean some discomfort - especially when I was still eating too many nuts. Likewise, too much of some coconut-based products and I get bloating. This leads neatly to issue 5…

…which is, ahem, intestinal turbulence. Let’s just say that Mrs M was not always so pleased to be next to me on the sofa during this time. One of the benefits of eating a hunter gatherer diet is a lack of this turbulence. However it would seem that if you eat large enough meals then this benefit diminishes. No doubt the post-meal nut or creamed coconut binges contributed to this, so I am willing to accept that it was not the size of the meals per se that was to blame.

Feasting or Binging?

Finally, a thought about binging and fasting.

In a previous post I talked about how I had taken to repetitive fasting during some festive binges, as a way to repent/recover from large, carb-laden meals. This, I felt, was behaviour akin to eating disorder.

During this experiment I essentially did the same thing, but with real, Paleo/Primal food - and it was interesting to see the differences.

The main one was that my appetite was under control. I recall distinctly from the festive binges that my appetite was no help. I had to consciously decide whether to eat and if so why. I was forcing myself to fast, whilst simultaneously lusting after more junk, whilst simultaneously hating the idea of eating it. Then when I did finally eat, I would eat too much. Another difference is that I put on several pounds with the high-carb binges, as the chart I published soon afterwards showed.

Faithful Guide

This time, hunger was a faithful guide. I looked forward to the feasts, but they always seemed to come to a natural end. I ate a lot more than I would normally do in a sitting, but my body seemed happy. The next day, the hunger seemed to grow proportionally through the day until I was ready.

My Verdict

This is a sustainable approach in my view and great for busy people. Provided you get the meal size and composition right, it does not seem to significantly affect how you feel or perform through the day. However, it does require additional thinking, at least initially:

- how to make those evening meals fulfil the nutritional variety normally spread across lunches and breakfasts

- How to make sure the meals are big enough – buy bigger chunks of meat, for example. Get this wrong and the next day you could find yourself at the mercy of food vendors you would normally eschew...or binging on foods that should be consumed in moderation.

…and based on my previous experience, clearly this only works when the meals are Paleo/Primal – or more to the point, not high in carbohydrate.

If I do it Every Day, is it still Fasting?

It seems counterintuitive that you can fast every day. I imagine that somehow the body starts to adjust and the benefits of intermittent fasting are moderated. Aside from that, the very size of the single meal must extend the digestion period, thus reducing the fasting time. Perhaps the answer is that you are indeed fasting every day, but just not for as long.

Another Perspective… from Rusty at Fitness Black Book

By coincidence, Rusty over at Fitness Black Book posted recently about his experiences with Warrior and Eat Stop Eat, Brad Pilon's approach. As it turns out, my typical week more or less follows the Eat Stop Eat pattern, so it was fascinating (and a little spooky!) to read Rusty’s post just as I was writing mine.

We seemed to come to the same conclusion, but perhaps for partly difference reasons.

The main difference is that I am more interested in the sustainability and practicality of fasting and less in the fast loss.

I am always grateful when I do become leaner through fasting – but personally I have found that regardless of my meal pattern, the main contributor to success or failure in fat loss is whether I am willing to be a little hungrier for a little longer on a day to day basis.

Primal in the Pyranees (In a Nutshell)

2009-07-26T10:24:00.005+01:00

We started in Paris - nothing much Primal happened there - too much of this ... but we did do some walking, such as here Then to the Pyrenees, where we stayed here and were presented with local produce (well, not the bananas or melon!) - so local that the eggs were laid by her and her sisters who lived in the grounds. In the morning I sprinted here and here followed by this We hiked here where we found these wild bilberries and picked this many In the evening we ate this local food Next day, more eggs followed by a hike to here and here then a swim here (cooold!) and some sunbathing. Later this for lunch. Next morning, a dawn hike for more of these getting this haul which included wild raspberries. So we had this for breakfast, ahead of some seriously primal activity here and here and here followed by this in the evening. On our final evening, this then on the boat journey back, more sun!

UK Supermarket Redefines the Word 'Healthy'

2009-07-19T06:41:00.001+01:00

Outraged by what I found when I examined the difference between UK supermarket Somerfield's standard garlic bread and so-called 'Healthy Choice' garlic bread, I decide to initiate a new campaign:

Dear Somerfield,

Based on the differences between your standard and 'Healthy Choice' garlic bread products, I believe the premise behind your 'Healthy Choice' range is deeply flawed.

I also believe I have an excellent opportunity for you to lead the way on healthy eating.

The differences demonstrates one of two things.

Your marketing and product development departments are either…

…cynically exploiting consumer ignorance (which is despicable) or…
… themselves ignorant (which is lamentable.)

Using the phrase ‘Healthy Choice’ is flawed on a number of levels:

White bread is not a healthy choice, regardless of how you tinker with the ingredients.

Reduced fat is not healthier - the only significant difference between the macronutrient composition of your standard garlic bread and the ‘Healthy Choice’ garlic bread appears to be that the latter contains less fat. This suggests you regard fat as unhealthy. This is not necessarily true. More on fat in a moment.

Standard

Healthy Choice

Less healthy ingredients - there is only one difference between the ‘Healthy Choice’ ingredients and the standard:

Standard: Butter

Healthy Choice: Low Fat Spread [Vegetable Oils (rapeseed oil, palm oil), Emulsifiers (E471, E476), Water, Milk Proteins, Salt, Stabiliser (E401), Preservative (E202), Flavourings, Vitamin A, Vitamin D, Colour (E160a)]

Standard

Healthy Choice

Ironically, the low fat spread is less healthy. First because it contains vegetable oils (not healthy) instead of saturated fat from butter (healthy). Second because it contains 5 additional e-number additives.

On the package you say

Somerfield Healthy Choice can only aid weight loss as part of a calorie controlled diet. Healthy Choice can help maintain your health as part of a healthy lifestyle including an appropriate level of exercise.

Nothing we have seen so far suggests this would be true – please provide some evidence – how does it help?

I cannot emphasise enough what an opportunity this is for you.

All the other supermarkets remain behind the curve. They are also selling low fat alternatives under the banner of healthy eating, pumping them full of garbage ingredients to make them palatable.

I am not suggesting you make an immediate u-turn; but if you start researching this now and thinking about ways to engage the customer with the realities of healthy eating rather than pandering (wilfully or otherwise) to their misplaced perceptions, then when the mainstream finally realises what genuinely constitutes healthy eating , you will have started making the changes already.

You could be forgiven for dismissing me as a crackpot – but I assure you I am not; and nor are the highly respected doctors and researchers whose references I can provide.

I challenge you to take one small step – ask me for references. To make it easy, let’s pick one of the issues only: saturated fat. Email me and request a couple of articles or papers.

Maybe you are not the right person. Maybe you are in the PR department. In that case, I challenge you at least to pass this onto someone at Somerfield whose expertise lies in this area.

Of course this would ultimately be important to the PR department, too – after all, there is great PR to be had from being the first to get it right.

I await your response with eager anticipation.

Yours faithfully,
Methuselah

The Primal Blueprint: A Review

2009-07-12T08:45:00.004+01:00

I was nervous about reviewing Mark Sisson's The Primal Blueprint. In a blogosphere where it's customary for fellow bloggers to be complementary about one another's work, the whiff of faint praise is not hard to detect. I was worried about what I would say if it was no good.

Then, as I was reading it, for a while I worried I would struggle to find sufficient criticisms to avoid accusations of blogger backslapping. So if any of my analysis appears pedantic, you will know why.

In December I wrote a piece about some of the books in this field. Of The Primal Blueprint preview, I said:

I think The Primal Blueprint will combine the best aspects of these other works into a hunter gatherer bible the man in the street will feel comfortable reading and recommending. As a former professional athlete who has looked into the science of nutrition and exercise in great depth, Mark is likely to justify The Primal Blueprint with as much science as the layman requires without blinding him with more than he wants. His blog has a vibrant community of readers and contributors, of which I am one. So although the others do offer a holistic view, I expect The Primal Blueprint to add a real-world, man-in-the-street feel that has not yet been seen.

Once You Get it, You Get it

The Primal Blueprint brings the books I read on this subject to a modest three; but really - how widely do you need to read about this? Once you get it, you get it, as someone said to me recently.

In fact to be perfectly honest, for that reason I had originally been in two minds about whether to read the Primal Blueprint at all. We all have a finite reading time in this life, and I hate the idea of displacing some great work of fiction with a book whose only contribution is to allow me to pontificate in even greater detail to my already bored friends about the macronutrient breakdown of the ancestral diet.

Where my December analysis falls short, is that The Primal Blueprint is more than a book about how to eat or exercise according to ancestral patterns. Rather, it is a philosophy of life Mark Sisson has constructed around the framework of ancestral principles. For this reason, and because he is happy to imbue the book with his personal views, experiences and humour, it is a genuinely pleasurable read.

Minefield of Modern Life

Mark does two things very well in the book. First, in describing what a terrible mess the world and our lives are in. After the first chapter, in which he outlines the 10 Primal Blueprint laws, you are left wondering what else there can be to say – at which point he hits you with the second chapter, which could be summarised thus (my words not his):

We hurtle through life in a stressed haze, slowly destroying our bodies and minds with drugs, bad food and poisons, influenced by obsolete and baseless recommendations and trusting our health to ignorant experts. This is not how we used to live. It's killing us.

This message is delivered very effectively through two narratives, one describing a day in the life of 'Grok' and his hunter gatherer family, the other a day in the life of the Korgs, a modern American family. It's at this point you realise Mark has a lot more to offer than a list of rules. Interestingly, this is the only chapter he provides references for, signalling its importance in setting out the Primal Blueprint stall.

The second thing he does well (which is fortunate, given the first success) is provide practical advice on how to navigate the minefield of modern life to follow the Primal Blueprint laws as much as possible.

The chapters covering the laws in detail take up the bulk of the rest of the book. They offer scientific rationales, practical advice on how to succeed, a wealth of background information and detail where required, such as how to calculate appropriate heart rate zones and lists of good and bad oils. Of course the laws cover areas beyond diet and exercise, such as play and intellectual stimulation. One new area for me was footwear and the effect modern shoe-wearing habits can have. I had also never heard of epigenics.

Conventional Wisdom, the Villain

I suspect that even for seasoned Paleo types there are more than a few nuggets of new information here, as well as new or better ways of explaining things and areas not covered in other books. Most notably, he explores issues around motivation, the dangers of perfectionism and deals with accusations of elitism and the costliness of the lifestyle.

There is an edge to Mark’s writing which he employs well when debunking some of the common myths, such as those around the life-expectancy of our ancestors, the connection between cholesterol and heart disease and the fallacy of cardiovascular exercise. From the start he sets up ‘Conventional Wisdom’ as the villain of the piece and much of the background and rationale takes the form of a sustained attack on this abstract enemy. It works well, allowing him to be dogmatic without excessive finger-pointing and creating an amiable but compelling style; but he can also be sarcastic and witty:

On evolution, he says

Presumably we could wait another thousand generations to see if we fully adapt to overemphasizing sugars and grains, but I don’t wish to be sick and fat in the meanwhile.

and

Lance Armstrong has a genetically superior cardiovascular system, but he could easily have cruised through life as a candy-chomping, video-gaming fat kid and still have reproduced successfully…

I particularly like the quotes he includes at various points, my favourite being:

If we’re not supposed to eat animals, how come they’re made of meat?
Tom Snyder

Don’t get me wrong, the book is not perfect – or to be more precise, I don’t necessarily agree with everything in there.

Supplementation

I don’t agree, for example, that multi-vitamin or omega 3 supplementation is necessary. Mark is very up front in this section about his commercial interests in supplementation and just about gets away with giving his enterprise a brief plug. I am certainly not suggesting his objectivity is compromised by that. Yet the chapters on food left me convinced that if you eat grass-fed organ meat and plenty of organic, local fruit and vegetables, you should get all the vitamins and minerals you need. I understand the counterarguments about selective breeding reducing the nutrient content, but wonder whether the sheer volume of fruit and vegetables we have access to would mitigate this.

One kind of supplementation Mark does not specifically recommend, is vitamin D. It is perhaps because, like Dr Eades, Mark dwells in sunnier climes than I, that he follows the precedent set in The Protein Power Life Plan by not covering vitamin D supplementation in much detail. Like Dr Eades, he does give plenty of information on the subject, but seems not to acknowledge that for many people, getting enough sun is simply not possible. As I type, sound of relentlessly drumming rain on my roof serves to illustrate.

Dairy

Another area where the lines are blurred is dairy. Mark does cover in some depth the pros and cons of consuming its various forms, empowering the reader to make his or her own choice – indeed, I learned some useful facts; but it doesn’t seem right to include, as he does in his version of the food pyramid, the possibility of eating high fat dairy in moderation. Mark’s point is that of the bad foods, dairy is one of the least bad, so eating it in moderation can be part of a healthy life; but I think dairy’s status as ‘least bad’ should be enough to let people know. I would rather see a list of what’s strictly good and then a list of what’s not, with the ‘not good’ foods ordered by badness. When advising my training partner on what to eat, I always make a point of saying dairy is bad – but not as bad as wheat. If I said dairy’s okay now and again, he’d eat it every other day.

Compromise

I think the dairy point is a reflection of my own, no-compromise approach rather than, necessarily, something Mark should have done differently. It might not suit me, but perhaps for the majority of his readers, it’s exactly what’s needed. After all, Mark’s key message is one of compromise and pragmatism. His 80-20 rule is emblematic of this – get it right 80% of the time and you will be fine. Perhaps he recommends supplementation on the basis that it’s needed to plug the gap in nutrients left by the 20%.

One more thing: he doesn’t mention swimming in the sprint section, yet even the despicable StairMaster gets offered as an alternative to running sprints. I can’t think of anything more primal than swimming for your life across a cold river, having been discovered by a grizzly fishing for salmon in his favourite spot!

---

The Primal Blueprint is a reminder that it’s not as easy as you might think to live according to hunter-gatherer principles. We take a lot for granted about our modern lives, perhaps not realising quite how out of step they are with the kind of world our genes thrive in.

Why am I wearing a one-inch raise on my feet all day? Why am I taking a sleeping tablet that contains God-knows-what? Why am I buying food that’s been flown in from Guatemala?

I would be surprised if even the most dedicated follower of the hunter gatherer lifestyle would come away from The Primal Blueprint without a few questions of their own.

So yes, I now have yet more information with which to bore the pants off my friends - but it's interesting and genuinely useful information; and whilst I may not feel as enriched as if I'd read a Joseph Conrad novel, I am enriched nevertheless.

See Also:
The Hunter Gatherer Lifestyle: One Religion, Several Bibles

Primal/Paleo Breakfast of Champions - so Good it's like a Dessert!

2009-07-04T09:03:00.014+01:00

I have to share this recipe. I have it for breakfast or brunch. Two reasons I think its so great:

First - each ingredient is highly praised by Mark Sisson in his book, Primal Blueprint, which I am reading at the moment (full review coming soon.)

Second - it tastes like a dessert. The interaction between coconut cream, cocoa powder and fruit creates a genuinely chocolaty sensation - which when coupled with the innately dessert-like qualities of egg seems to really hit the spot.

Whilst it can be eaten hot or cold, I usually put it in the fridge overnight and eat it the next day - this is when when it acquires it's most dessert-like qualities.

Here are the ingredients (to serve one greedy person like me):

Coconut cream, 100 ml
P.B. "Coconut oil offers numerous health benefits...has been found to help normalize blood lipids and protect against damage to the liver from alcohol and other toxins, and it has anti-inflammatory and immune-supporting properties."

There is an example brand of coconut cream in the instructions. I always make sure the only ingredients are coconut and water. I think 'coconut extract' is also fine.

Unsweetened Cocoa powder
P.B. "Some studies have shown that cocoa contains considerably more flavanoids than acclaimed heavy hitters like green tea and red wine...dark chocolate is rich in antioxidants, brain-stimulating compounds...offers impressive health benefits, such as reducing the instance of blood clots, lowering blood pressure and helping prevent cancer...the ORAC values of coca powder and dark chocolate are higher than those of virtually any fruit or vegetable..."

Mark suggests ideally using organic cocoa as conventionally grown beans are exposed to pesticides.

Eggs, 8 medium organic
P.B. "Excellent source of healthy protein, fat, B complex vitamins, and folate...the yolk is one of the most nutrient-rich foods you can find-laden with omega-3s and the aforementioned nutrients."

Mark also explains in the book why the cholesterol fears around eggs are unfounded. He urges people to buy organic eggs to maximise these benefits.

Any fruit
...ideally berries like strawberries, blackberries, blueberries etc

P.B. "...most fruits offer a host of nutritional benefits..."

Mark does caution people to consider the GI value of fruits in relation to the amount of antioxidants they contain. In the case of berries this is a very favourable ratio.

Cooking Instructions

The ingredients.

This is the brand of coconut cream I use.

Put the eggs in a pan.

Beat them.

Cook whilst continually stirring until nearly cooked, but not quite.

Add the coconut cream. Be careful here - you don't want it too runny, so maybe add half of the cream and cook a little further to see whether it was enough. Then a little more, and so on. You are aiming for a moist but firm consistency.

Cook until you have a creamy scrambled egg consistency.

Prepare your fruit and place on top.

Sprinkle the cocoa powder using a sieve.

Serve and enjoy!

Here's one I made with strawberries to take to work last week. I ate it cold from the fridge.

See Also:

Recipes

Celebration Turns into 6-Day Junk Food Rampage, Part 2

2009-06-27T07:30:00.003+01:00

In part 1, I described my escalating culinary indulgences over the course of a 3-day celebration. That post ended as I apparently reached the zenith of my rampage. As Monday morning dawned, the feelings of abandon began to be replaced by thoughts of recovery.

But wait! What's that? There's still food in the kitchen? The small group of us who had remained at the venue on day 3 now had a couple of hours to vacate the place, taking with us anything not belonging to the owners. Including food and drink.

Aladdin's Cave and Cheese on Toast

Once again, we entered Aladdin's cave. Now there was a more complex set of factors influencing my food choices. I was still, technically, celebrating. We had three further days off work. Yet I was feeling the accumulated jadedness of three days of self-poisoning, and knew it had to end sometime.

So a bowl of 'specially special' fruit salad was not on cards, even though plenty of fruit salad, clotted cream and chocolate bars remained; but there was also fresh, sliced bread and a variety of cheeses. Mmmmm... grilled cheese on toast.

Dividing the Spoils

Day 4

3 slices of cheese on toast with hummus, ketchup, mayo

Ice cream snickers bar

roast chicken with parsnips and broccoli

chocolate bar
10 x chocolates
cake with cream

While others assembled and divided the remaining spoils, I made cheese on toast for Mrs M and me. My three slices were heavy on the cheese and various relishes, including the divine hummus one of the guests had made. Naturally ketchup was the predominant ingredient. By the time these were constructed, the bread was little more than a convenient platform.

We left with our boxes of food and drink, including a large chunk of the celebration cake and two snickers ice cream bars for the journey.

Once the ice cream was gone, I had a moment of reflection.

This is the End.... or Maybe Not

Okay. That was it. From now on, Paleo, Primal food. We would give the cake away. Thoughts of recovery dominated those of celebration. The time was now.

We stopped at the supermarket and bought a large organic chicken, broccoli and parsnips. Our favourite meal and the ideal gateway back to healthy eating.

Later, when we had unpacked, the chicken and parsnips went in to the oven. Since we were still on holiday, opening some wine couldn't hurt - our box of spoils included several bottles. But those chickens take a while to cook don't they? Since Mrs M and I drink white and red respectively, we each had our own bottle from which to refill each time we checked on the cooking bird.

The Wine does it Again

By the time it was ready, we were sozzled, ravenous and largely oblivious to any earlier pledges about healthy eating. My carving efforts degenerated into manual savaging - probably not the kind of dignity the chicken would have opted for.

the little fat guy with horns on our right shoulders delivered a knockout blow to the pious, slender guy on the left...

Having feasted on the chicken and its trimmings, we walked to the local shop to buy cream, then ate cake until the cream was gone and we felt vaguely nauseous. We also found some chocolates that had been hanging around the house for a few months and at them 'to get them out of the way.'

I can hear the collective slap as readers strike their forehead and cry 'well, duh!'

if you get drunk, you're probably going to eat the cake

But another way to look at it is

if you get drunk, it's probably because secretly you want to eat the cake

I am pretty sure I knew what I was doing when I opened that wine - examining one's behaviour and thinking before an after a binge can deliver a master class in rationalisation and self-trickery.

The Last Hurrah

The next morning I was hungry. Normally the sheer volume of calories from the day before would have at least propelled me to lunchtime without pangs of hunger, but by 11 I was getting the itch. Reminded me of the high carb days.

We hit the supermarket.

Breakfast: a half litre mango smoothie a bag of nuts.

Lunch not long afterwards: a large slab of salmon from the spoils box with salad and much hummus and balsamic vinegar. To finish, blueberries, kiwi and more cream.

It seemed that by drinking through our best intentions the night before, we had allowed the little fat guy with horns on our right shoulders to deliver a knockout blow to the pious, slender guy on the left.

So we decided to make this evening our final 'hurrah'. The following day was our final day off work. A last chance to recover.

Cocktails, Champagne and Seafood Banquet

Thus, at 5pm we changed and hit a local bar, where wine and cocktails delivered by the waiter were given little time to acclimatise to their new surroundings. Onward at 9 to a nearby Thai restaurant, where champagne was ordered, along with the seafood banquet.

Day 5

mango and apple smoothie
100g nuts

salmon, hummus, salad
blueberries, kiwi, cream
dried fruit + nuts

glass of white wine, two cocktails, half a bottle of champagne
seafood banquet
cheesecake & cream
Irish coffee

Where the hell do you get your money from?

...I hear you cry. Let's put it this way: many more meals like that one and we'll be eating out at the local kebab shop for the next 20 weekends.

The platter of starters was a vast spread of grilled and battered seafood. That alone would have sufficed for any reasonable person. Naturally Mrs M was saving herself for the main course, so it was up to me to ensure completion. I simply won't see food taken away by waiters.

Then, after a barely adequate pause, the three main dishes arrived, one of which was a whole sea bass. The obligatory bowl of sticky rice was brought, but remained untouched by our sides, confirming what I've always suspected: we just don't like rice.

It was perhaps the avoidance of the rice that gave us the capacity to finish all three dishes. I'd had a couple of memos from the stomach department entitled

Re: excessive food

...which I naturally ignored; those guys were always bitching - I knew there was more capacity if needed.

Cheesecake and Irish Coffee

When the dessert trolley arrived, quick decisions were made. I had been eyeing it from the beginning. Cheesecake.

"And a jug of cream," I demanded.

I always ask for a jug of cream in the UK (on the rare occasions I am eating it) because the amount they put on dessert is usually derisory. So I had to chuckle when this time they brought a jug - but containing the same paltry amount! I was going to complain, but when the first mouthful of cheesecake hit my palette there wasn't time. Despite being a pretty sizable slab, it was gone in 2 minutes.

The stomach department were calling emergency meetings and compiling strongly worded complaints, but too much booze and the knowledge that...

this was the end, no I really mean this time tomorrow it's strict Paleo, FOR DEFINITE

...meant I was determined to wring every last drop out of the evening.

"Two Irish coffees" I blurted without proper consultation with Mrs M, who shrugged. The waitress duly obliged.

When the coffees arrived, I was amused to discover each contained way more cream than the jug for dessert. Not only that, but it was thick, clotted cream. Great chunks of it floating in the coffee like ice bergs, dominating the capacious glasses.

Unholy Trinity

Suffice it to say that during the short walk home I felt unusual. The unholy trinity of alcohol, sugar and caffeine were duly slugging it out in my blood. Meanwhile the guys on my shoulders were now kicking back with a beer and watching TV together, knowing that for at least 12 hours there was nothing to argue about - it had all been done. I can imagine the conversation:

Devil, sympathetically: He's gonna feel terrible in the morning.
Angel, indignantly: I f***ing told him.

The following day I didn't feel anywhere near as terrible as I would have done if I had done the same thing in the middle of a strict Paleo run. Amazing how the body adjusts. I almost felt normal.

The Final Day

Day 6

mango smoothie
coffee with cream

salmon, smoked salmon, sour cream, hummus, salad, cheese puffs Primal/Paleo chocolates
nuts + dried fruit

Paleo/primal curry (but with real cream) & steamed veg
Primal/Paleo chocolates
real chocolates
cake x 3
bottle of red wine

I won't bore you with the details of the final day, save to say that it was a peculiar mish-mash of attempted Paleo/Primal eating (I came up with the chocolates recipe on this day) and continued indulgence. It culminated in a bottle of red wine and a determination to finish the cake, which in composition was by now toe-curlingly skewed towards icing.

The next day was work; the natural backstop of any binge. If I ever start eating badly there, I know the wheels have come off. They didn't.

Epilogue and Weigh-In

A week after being truly Paleo/Primal again, I weigh 11 stone 12. That's 7 pounds heavier than the night before the first day of the celebration. To me that means a clear 7lbs of weight gain not attributable to the factors I discuss here.

This is all junk maths, but I figure that if all that weight was fat (certainly looks like it!) then 7lbs is 3,175 grams (says Google) which (x9) is 2,8575 calories. Divide by 6 to get excess calories per day and you get about 4,700.

4,700 extra calories per day? Really? Someone please tell me my maths is wrong.

One thing I have learned from this is that momentum goes in both directions. I talked about its importance in beating a binge here. I certainly gained some momentum this time - and it was not the right kind.

You may have been wondering about Mrs M... did she gain a lot of weight too?

Some, but not as much. The thing about Mrs M is she just doesn't do volume. Although she gleefully matched me on most indulgences, she simply hasn't the stomach for gluttony. Her thing is endurance.

Whilst on Thursday I stoically battled the caffeine withdrawal headache and snootily waved my hand at the stockpile of wine in the kitchen, Mrs M was unable to resist the allure of both.

Her diet was better, but this was thanks in large part to my being in charge of the cooking. I know she was making covert trips to obtain non-Paleo/Primal food for days after the binge had officially ended.

Did she do her health more or less damage? Who knows.

---

Note: only the photo for Wednesday is of the real food.

See Also:
Celebration Turns into 6-Day Junk Food Rampage, Part 1
Articles about Fasting, Bingeing and Appetite

Celebration Turns into 6-Day Junk Food Rampage, Part 1

2009-06-20T07:54:00.025+01:00

Last Thursday I weighed 11-5. On Wednesday I came in at 12-4. This phenomenal weight accumulation was the result of an epic food and alcohol binge that spanned a full 6 days and saw me insanely rampage through the A-Z of junk food like a lunatic on a shooting spree.

Before I go into the details, let me make a few things clear:

It's not big and it's not clever. I may now appear to take pleasure in recounting the events and entertaining you (I hope) with the sheer lunacy of it - but don't let this give you the impression I am happy about it.

I am lucky, in that I have the capacity to adopt a profoundly strit Paleo/Primal lifestyle on the turn of a pin and maintain it for as long as necessary to get back to where I started. By binging like this, I abuse that good fortune and undo the good work that cannot be seen - i.e. the health of my organs.

This was a one-off event - a big, 3-day celebration I was closely involved with. I take solace from the fact that this will never be repeated, so at least one excuse to binge has been removed forever.

Friday

6 glasses champagne
10 canapes
2 coffees

Fish, meat, cheese, quiche, salad
table chocolates x 10
fruit salad and cream
chocolate cake and cream
crème brûlée x 2
large wine x 3
coffee

The Family Party - Champagne and Buffet

The event kicked off on Friday with champagne at 2pm. Until then I had fasted, anticipating the evening feast.

The thing about champagne is that it appears to keep arriving. It's the only drink I know of that finds its way into your hand by magic.

6 glasses and two hours later I was rifling through the canapés and slurring my speech. Time for some coffee. This is something I don't normally drink, but was strategically imperative (I'd decided,) given I had to remain lucid for the imminent dinner. Of course being drunk, I went for two of the strongest coffees I could find.

The buffet format was a bad start for a latent glutton like me. The caffeine propelled me around the feast-laden table, where I garnered copious amounts of meats, fish, mozzarella, quiche and soft cheese pastries. Back at the table, I nailed this lot in fairly short order, during which 3 large glasses of red wine somehow also negotiated entry to my gullet.

Enraged Sweet Tooth

I had fostered deeply unrealistic hopes that I could hold out until the following day before caving in to sugar, but by the time dessert was wheeled out I had already pillaged the table of various chocolates and mints, no doubt intended to be eaten later with the coffee.

Saturday

3 cheeseburgers & 3 lamb burgers with mayo, ketchup & cashew nut butter (80g)
various salad and cheese
2 slices of chocolate cake with clotted cream
fruit salad with clotted cream

50g hummus
a burger
2 bottles of red wine
unknown quantity of champagne

Rather like injuring a lion with a sharp stick only makes him more dangerous, my sweet tooth was now enraged. A time-lapse photograph of the dining area would have revealed a blur between my seat and the dessert area as I systematically demolished one or more bowl of each type.

Then, finally, boom: I hit my limit; and while the rest of the party danced the night away I wandered around sweating lightly and willing myself to feel better.

Burger Spectacular

Saturday, day 2 of the celebration, began with the return of the catering staff, whose job it now was to execute a lunchtime barbecue for 50 people.

While burgers, meat and seafood sizzled on grills, a spread of salads, cheeses and relishes was prepared.

I was initially pleased with my restraint. Not drinking alcohol helped maintain some semblance of control. I took the decision to allow myself dairy but avoid the bread. Thus was I able to comfortably consume 6 burgers - an unlikely feat had the buns been included.

With the burgers I had copious helpings of mayo, ketchup and cashew nut butter - the nut butter coming from a private stash of Paleo/Primal food which I had naively thought would help me avoid eating bad food.

With the sugar genie now out of the bottle from the previous night (and no doubt further kindled by the ketchup), I had little chance against the dessert. I once again launched a valiant assault on the chocolate cake and fruit salad while the caterer-in-chief nervously monitored my clotted cream consumption.

The Friends Party - another Barbecue

When the lunchtime barbecue was over, the caterers and the family guests left. Meanwhile, a new set of revellers continued to arrive, armed to the teeth with booze and food for a further 24 hours of celebration. From now on, it was DIY.

The venue had 4 large refrigerators, which were now being tested to their limits as food and drink for the evening barbecue was crammed into every shelf and drawer.

Fortunately, booze was being drunk at a sufficient rate to allow an equilibrium to prevail; and one or two guests selflessly acted as self-appointed fridge guardians, consuming as many cans as possible themselves whilst offering ever-more erratic assistance to those arriving with supplies.

Sunday

2 bowls of 'special' fruit salad

3 'chip butties' with mayo, ketchup butter and cheesechicken curry
Salmon

90g cashew nut butter
2 chocolate puddings with clotted cream
'special' fruit salad with clotted cream and chocolate bar chunks

red wine

The evening barbecue, executed with great aplomb by the guests themselves, was a superb spread - better, arguably than the first; yet I managed only a single burger with hummus, thanks to the sheer calorie count from earlier.

The alcohol toll was a different story, and may also have contributed to my eating less food. My best guess is two bottles of red and at least half of champagne. As I say, not clever.

The Hangover and Aladdin's Cave

And so to the hangover. Possibly the most powerful inducer of bad food binging. Sugar and salt balances all over the place, a weakened psychological state and the profound need for comfort of any kind. Clearly, after what I had drunk, I had one.

Also, picture, if you will, the place in which I awoke. It was like Soddom and Gommorah and Aladdin's Cave rolled into one. Work surfaces festooned with part-eaten burgers and precariously stacked bowls of congealing cream and cake. Empty food packets and part-empty food packets. Bottles of booze, glasses of booze, cans of booze. Overflowing bins and part-filled, abandoned black bin bags.

Yet amongst the devastation, a wealth of uneaten food remained. One fridge was still full to the gills with unopened containers of cream, relishes, fresh meat, fresh bread, cheeses of all kinds, strawberries, chocolates, beers, wines and desserts. Tubs of homemade hummus and potato salad had only partly been consumed.

Meanwhile, the guests were departing, seemingly oblivious to the riches they were leaving behind.

'Special' Fruit Salad

I discovered the huge tub of 'special' fruit salad one of the guests had brought. This was something I had been eyeing the day before but never got to. It was like normal fruit salad, but made with yogurt and chocolate chunks. I had a bowl. This definitely hit the spot. I had another one.

By early afternoon, most of the guests had left, leaving a small group of us who intended to stay a further night at the venue (since it was a 3-night hire.) The trusty barbecue was cleaned up and Mrs M and I stood before an open fridge, basking in the golden glow of possibilities. Emissaries were dispatched to the supermarket to acquire more coals and curry sauces.

By this point, I was well beyond any reasonable care about what or how much I was eating. This had become an exercise in covering all the bases. Satisfying every possible craving. A kind of while-I'm-at-it mentality.

Chip Butties and Absurd Relish Slathering

'Chip butties' have always been one of my weaknesses. I think this a UK term. Essentially, fries in a sandwich with butter and whatever relish you choose. In my case, mayo, ketchup and melted cheese. Can you think of anything worse? I constructed and ate three of these, each more absurdly slathered in relish than the last, and each progressively more difficult to control, as the combined volume of sauces inevitably found its way through my fingers to the plate or the ground.

Between butties I paid due homage to real food by working on the chicken curries (nice when the chicken has been barbecued, by the way) and some cooked salmon steaks. Oh, and red wine. At least a few large glasses.

Unfortunately I ate more than I should have, and the combination of hangover and the sudden rush of blood to my stomach sent me drowsily to bed, after being up for only 7 hours. I was heckled by Mrs M and our companions, and felt personally cheated that I had not had any dessert; but the call was too strong.

Some hours later I woke up. It was dark but I could hear talking. Others were still awake. Now the refrigerator was calling. There were more riches in the cave.

Heroic Intenstines

My heroic intestines had clearly been working hard as I slept, so my appetite was back. Oddly, my first instinct was to finish the jar of cashew nut butter in my room.

Then, to the kitchen, where I found evidence of recent dessert consumption. Chocolate puddings, chocolate bars, cream. In the fridge, plenty more. I assembled the first of 2 bowls of chocolate pudding and cream. Later, more 'special' fruit salad, augmented by me to be 'specially special' with clotted cream and chunks of chocolate from a chocolate bar.

Having clearly not learned the lesson of earlier, I was once again driven to bed, having managed a further hour.

This is where part 1 ends. It's making me feel faintly nauseous recounting the events, so I think I need a break before posting part 2.

Note: none of these photos are of the real food: I was far too focused on eating to take pictures.

See Also:
Celebration Turns into 6-Day Junk Food Rampage, Part 2
Articles about Fasting, Bingeing and Appetite

Paleo/Primal Chocolates - A Quick, Simple & Tasty Recipe

2009-06-17T17:43:00.007+01:00

Having just emerged from the throes of a 5-day food and alcohol binge that made Christmas look like a minor lapse, I require a few days in which to gather my thoughts and prepare a written account that does justice to the truly Herculean display of gluttony to which I must confess.

In the meantime, I feel able to share two pearls of wisdom.

1. It is possible to get sick of cashew nut butter if you eat enough. Really - it's true.
2. A recipe for Paleo/Primal chocolate that's genuinely easy and tasty.

Paleo/Primal Chocolates - The Ingredients

50g Creamed Coconut (update 18/06/09: Creamed Coconut is actually the compressed, concentrated form of coconut meat. See here and here.)
50g Coconut Oil
50g Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
Small chunks of dried or fresh fruit

Paleo/Primal Chocolates - The Equipment

A pan
A cooker
A spoon
A flexible ice cube tray

Paleo/Primal Chocolates - The Steps

Put the creamed coconut and oil into the pan and heat gently until it's a liquid
Add the cocoa powder and stir until it's fully blended
Allow it to cool until it's a little less runny - this will make adding the fruit easier
Pour into the ice cube tray - remember to leave some room for adding the fruit
Add a piece of fruit into each - it should slowly sink out of view
Place in the refrigerator - or the freezer for faster readiness

After 30 - 60 minutes, pop out the chocolates...

Paleo/Primal Chocolates - Final Thoughts

Okay, so this is not exactly strictly Paleo/Primal. I am guessing dried fruit, cocoa powder and creamed coconut are not things cavemen kept in stone jars at the back of the cave. However, I think most of us are pragmatists and look for recipes like this as a way to avoid straying into the realms of processed garbage - and I do believe these will do that job just fine.

Also - thanks to Twitterers treelizard, Threnos, Paleo_princess and comaboy for their advice on this a couple of weeks ago.

Other Recipes:
My Mum's and my apple crumble
Our Paleo/Primal Curry - More of a Guide Than a Recipe

See What the Rest of the Paleo/Primal Community is Eating!

2009-06-11T20:31:00.007+01:00

In April Mark Sisson encouraged all the Primal/Paleo people on Twitter to start tagging their Tweets with the #primal tag - see this post.

Since then plenty of us have been doing just that....but we have also been using TwitPic to post photos of our meals.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, we now have a page on this blog where you can see all the latest photos of meals posted to Twitter by the Primal/Paleo community. You can get to the page by clicking the 'What YOU are Tw-Eating' button in the sidebar, or by clicking here.

How Paleo/Primal are You? Answer these 8 Questions to Find Out...

2009-06-06T15:41:00.012+01:00

Eat the fries, order a side of garlic bread, then chow down on a slab of cheesecake to follow. Ask the waiter to substitute extra vegetables or salad for the fries. You are not at the restaurant. Cavemen did not have them so you would never eat in one. Besides, your loin cloth does not meet their dress code.

Buy a bag of potato chips and a chocolate bar at the nearest shop. See whether the shop has something Paleo, like unsalted nuts - otherwise wait until lunch. Lure the neighbour’s cat with the promise of affection, kill it with your bare hands, then use your pocket knife to skin and eat it.

Agree without question. Thank him/her for the advice, but instead go on a broadly Paleo/Primal diet, based on what you’ve read about cholesterol and the best diet for a healthy heart. Bludgeon him to death with his rolodex and scrawl the words ‘bad medicine’ in blood on his office wall.

Buy the cheapest chicken you can find. Look for an organic, free-range bird, but if you can’t find one, decide to shop elsewhere. You are not in the supermarket. You are chasing birds in the park while worried parents gather their children.

Devour every available morsel, leaving your plate cleaner than it started. Do your best not to hurt his/her feelings, but try not to eat too much - perhaps say you ate a lot earlier because you didn’t expect the surprise. Overturn the dinner table in righteous anger, deliver a 15-minute tirade accusing him/her of attempted poisoning, then leave, never to return.

Tell them you wish you could be vegan, but you enjoy junk food too much. Explain the philosophy behind Paleo/Primal, but also say you appreciate their moral courage. You don’t have any vegan friends. Last time you met vegans you harangued them until they cried and left a kilo of giblets on their windscreen in the morning.

Take along a bottle of Baileys and a cheesecake like a Humvee’s wheel to guarantee a gargantuan sugar binge. Politely warn them about your preferences ahead of the meal so they can cook you extra meat and vegetables and perhaps make a fruit salad. You were not invited in the first place. All your friends got sick of your interminable rants about modern food and stopped asking you round.