eating

May, me eat meat.

Leave a comment

Urgh. Gruff. What is this M&M’s of which you speak?


Remember the bit in Pulp Fiction where Marcellus Wallace promised to get medieval on someone’s ass? Always sounded like a good threat to me. (I imagine it would involve building cathedrals and trading in relics…) 

However, the whole world seems to be hellbent on going much further back in time, with Trump wanting to bomb everyone into primordial soup (presumably to level with his intellectual discours). So in keeping with that spirit, I figured the month of May might be a good time to challenge myself in a new way: by getting Stone Age on my own ass. 

It’s not as mad as it seems. I’m not proposing to go live naked in a cave and hunt mastodons for breakfast (although that would be fun, too), no, what I will do is go on a Paleo diet for a month, to see what happens. Paleo is essentially about eating the way our earliest ancestors did, in an attempt to get away from starch, sugar and carbs – something which those early hunter-gatherers didn’t find much of on their menu.*

It will require quite the change to my eating habits: no more oatmeal and milk for breakfast, no pasta, beer or pizza post long runs, no sushi on Fridays, and certainly no sneaky Haegen-Daaz ice cream orgies late at night. 

I’m getting hungry just writing about these guilty pleasures, and chances are you are, too, which is due to the fact that our bodies are hard-wired to like this kind of food. The problem is it used to be a very rare treat back in the palaeolithic, whereas now there’s sugar everywhere, and our bodies cannot deal with such quantities of the stuff – hence diabetes, obesity, cardio-vascular diseases; the list goes on and on.

The physical effects of switching to paleo are interesting for another reason too, because after a while – anything from a few days to a few weeks – the body goes into a state where it stops craving carbs and starts using fat as its  prime source of fuel. This will supposedly make you much more efficient in long distance races, as the body’s supply of fat is vastly bigger than its stores of sugar (the difference between your muffin top and the muffin you just ate, if you will). 

Now, I experimented with this prior to running Ultravasan, but chickened out during the race. But my triathlon is coming up, and if I can do that without craving sugar then this diet must be the real McCoy. 

As always, there will be an update afterwards to account for how I did during the challenge – the practical aspects of it as well as any changes to my physique/performance. Now, what’s the best way to cook mastodon for breakfast?
————-

*This sounds like an excellent idea to me, particularly since some studies show dementia to be caused by an accumulated inability to break down sugar, similar to diabetes, and I really don’t want to go down that path. 

Eating order

It’s December already. Who’d have thought way back in January? I’m still working on my to do list, though, which I guess is a result in itself.

I did say I would try something new and challenge myself every month, and since I cannot go travelling (no more holidays, plus December is a busy month as it is), I have decided to challenge myself at home: I will try to improve my eating habits. 


Now, I already eat fairly ok. No eating disorders or anything like that, but altogether too many carbs, too much sugar – and the holiday season hasn’t even begun yet. So… I have begun writing down every last thing that I eat and drink. Nothing fancy, just a list that I keep in my phone. 

To my delight I find that the act of writing it down is in itself really useful, because I can no longer hide from myself what I’m eating. It’s culinary mindfulness, if you will. Knowing I will have to write down whatever I eat, I hesitate to allow myself treats that I would normally turn a blind eye to, or justify as “deserved”.

That last statement is particularly absurd, if you think about it. You don’t “deserve” something unhealthy for having done good. First of all, you’re not a dog, you shouldn’t reward yourself with treats, and secondly, surely a good deed should be rewarded with something good, not something you know is bad for you?

This one simple act has other knock-on effects as well. Suddenly I’m more keen on vegetables and clean protein (vegan ultra runner Scott Jurek’s book Eat and Run helped with the former, if not the latter!) and preparing meals in large batches makes more sense, since having ready-made food at hand reduces the likelihood of my straying from the path, be it at home or at work. 

So Sunday saw me making oven-roasted sweet potatoes and other veggies and frying up lots of lean chicken, and yesterday I made a double batch of lasagna (admittedly a carb fest, but working out hard you need some carbs, too), and I’m looking forward to trying other stuff as well.


I figure the worst is yet to come – Christmas and new year’s aren’t exactly known for being bastions of healthiness, after all – but I reckon this way I will at least think twice before going Cookie Monster on any of the upcoming feasts.

I’m not going to publish the list itself, but I will let you know if it has any effect. I started this month of traditional gluttony at 83,6kg, which is well above what I feel comfortable with. Changing nothing else in terms of training, it will be interesting to see if this one act of documenting my food intake will have any discernible effect on the scales. Can I get down to my match weight of 80kg whilst eating well and orderly? Well, we’ll see. 

One Challenge without fries, coming up!