Tag Archives: Food

Paleo Progress report – Day 14!

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So as of tonight I am two full weeks into my strict paleo diet. So far so good on both how I’m feeling, and some other things too. First I’ll get to the results of the scale. I’ve been weighing myself daily for a few months now, long before I started the paleo diet, and long before I started exercising regularly again.

Paleo 14 day progress by weight

My daily weight and 7 day moving average

In the graph above, the blue wavy line is my daily weight. I weigh myself every single morning as soon as I roll out of bed. The scale is right next to the toilet, so after I empty my bladder, I step on the scale. Even with this consistent method of measuring, you can see that my weight fluctuates greatly. To help reduce the variability of the daily weight, I have added my 7 day average weight, which smooths things out a bit, but you can see that there are fluctuations as much as 7 pounds up and down within 2 days of each other.

The half green background that starts in July is when I started Crossfit. When I first began, I was going twice a week and trying to figure out how to balance Crossfit, work and grad school. Over time I started regularly making 3-4 times a week, and now I go between 4 and 6 times per week. The full green background is when I started Paleo 14 days ago. As you can see, the results so far have been great. I’ve lost about 10-11 pounds so far.

Now, if I had started it on a low point, instead of a high point, maybe I would have been down 4-5 pounds. We’ll never know, because I didn’t think about it, I just went for it. Along with the weight, I’ve also lost 3/4″ in my waist.

Next up I want to cover the challenges, cheats and mistakes I have made so far. I’ve only made one mistake really that I should have caught. One Monday night I had class after work, but I thought it would be a short one, and planned on eating dinner after it. When the class ran until 8 p.m. and the professor wasn’t done, I went to the vending machine on our break. Obviously vending machines aren’t a bastion of paleo food, but they did have beef jerky. I figured that would be my best bet to hold me over until dinner. After eating half of the bag(it was pretty small bag) I realized that the beef jerky had high fructose corn syrup. BUMMER.

dr. pepper and almond milk in the fridge

This soda has been in the fridge since before I started paleo.

As for cheats, the only thing I have cheated on is my sneaking protein powders post-workout. I ordered a new mix from true protein just before starting this(I modeled it after the Progenex formula), and a few times I have snuck a little powder in when I get home if I think it’s going to be a while until I can make breakfast or dinner is ready. For context, I have probably done this 2 or 3 times over the past 2 weeks. In general, I am letting go from my “addiction” to post-workout shakes, and trusting in the paleo meals for my protein. As you can see in the photo above, I’ve had a soda sitting in the fridge for the entire two weeks so there is plenty of opportunity to give in and cheat, but I am holding strong.

Speaking of supplements, I have really reduced what I had been taking. I rarely take my multivitamin anymore, I definitely never take pre-workout white flood anymore, and I stopped taking the creatine supplement I had because it has maltodextrin in it. I ordered some cheap creatine monohydrate to take in it’s place, but it hasn’t arrived yet. I’ve thought about resuming my casein powder shakes before bed, but so far I haven’t. I’ll probably wait until the 30 days is over so I can evaluate that independently, before deciding if I want to mix that into the program or not.

Then there are the challenges. Before I started paleo I knew the importance of a good breakfast. Even still, one of the hardest things for me was to figure out when to eat it, and what to eat, given that I worked out at 7 a.m., and still needed to get ready for work afterwards. On many days I just didn’t eat breakfast, instead having the post-workout shake, and holding off until lunch. I came to the realization that, barring an important meeting, I can always take a little extra time in the morning to make and eat breakfast, and get to work at a reasonable time. It might be 15 minutes later than before, but I can make up for that 15 minutes, where as I couldn’t make up for the missed meal.

The next challenge is lunch options. I am starting to run thin. My first week I hit the Whole Foods buffet almost every day. The next week I hit Chipotle for a steak bowl with guacamole, but no rice or beans. Luckily Apple has a great cafeteria with tons of options that I can make some great paleo meals out of. But I feel like I have reached the limit on choices, and I think thats due to a lack of creativity on my end. I know there have to be more options out there for paleo lunches.

Now for the things I think I am doing right. Documentation! I am taking a photo of every meal. If you don’t believe me look at my Tumblr. I usually post every meal there with some commentary on the ingredients and other nonsense. Another thing that has helped is finding recipes ahead of time. Since Stacy is home most days, she can prepare everything for dinner with the needed ingredients from the recipes we find online. Speaking of Stacy, that is another big help. When your spouse is also eating paleo, it makes things a lot easier around the house.

I think the last thing to cover is how I feel. Overall I feel really, REALLY good. One of the first things I noticed was I wasn’t waking up with sore knees. Before I would notice my soreness as soon as I walked down the stairs in the morning. That feeling is very much reduced since starting paleo. I guess you can call me a believer on the anti-inflammatory benefits of the diet. Secondly, and this took me a while to realize, was the amount of time I spent hungry was much less. Over the past few years I have been the epitome of the guy who is ready to eat lunch at 11:30 a.m. every day. Starting the day with a solid breakfast, really does keep me full until lunch time, which gives me the flexibility to eat it whenever I want to. The same goes for the afternoons. I’m no longer dying of hunger around 4 p.m. and thinking only about dinner. It’s amazing how much removing sugars from your diet, and replacing them with slower digesting foods can improve your hunger situation.

So I think that’s it. Full speed ahead. Any questions? Let me know in the comments.

New Tim Ferriss book – The Four Hour Body

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Tim Ferris has just announced the details of his new book on his blog. For those not familiar with Tim, he wrote The Four Hour Workweek, a guide for taking your full-time job, convincing your employer to let you work part, and using that time to travel, see the world, and create a business with auto-generating revenue that will allow you to quit your original job all together, all while continuing to travel.

Sound to good to be true? I don’t blame you, but the plays are straight from Tim’s experience. The newest version is expanded with more examples of people doing just what Tim says.

Here is the back cover description of the book. I’ve already pre-ordered it.

THINNER, BIGGER, FASTER, STRONGER… which 150 pages will you read?

Is it possible to:
Reach your genetic potential in 6 months?
Sleep 2 hours per day and perform better than on 8 hours?
Lose more fat than a marathoner by bingeing?

Indeed, and much more. This is not just another diet and fitness book.

The 4-Hour Body is the result of an obsessive quest, spanning more than a decade, to hack the human body. It contains the collective wisdom of hundreds of elite athletes, dozens of MDs, and thousands of hours of jaw-dropping personal experimentation. From Olympic training centers to black-market laboratories, from Silicon Valley to South Africa, Tim Ferriss, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, fixated on one life-changing question:

For all things physical, what are the tiniest changes that produce the biggest results?

Thousands of tests later, this book contains the answers for both men and women.

From the gym to the bedroom, it’s all here, and it all works.

YOU WILL LEARN (in less than 30 minutes each):

- How to lose those last 5-10 pounds (or 100+ pounds) with odd combinations of food and safe chemical cocktails.
- How to prevent fat gain while bingeing (X-mas, holidays, weekends)
- How to increase fat-loss 300% using temperature manipulation
- How Tim gained 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time
- How to sleep 2 hours per day and feel fully rested
- How to produce 15-minute female orgasms
- How to triple testosterone, double sperm count, and (literally) have sex like a porn star
- How to go from running 5 kilometers to 50 kilometers in 12 weeks
- How to reverse permanent injuries
- How to add 150+ pounds to your lifts in 6 months
- How to pay for a beach vacation with one hospital visit

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are more than 50 topics covered, all with real-world experiments, many including more than 200 test subjects.

You don’t need better genetics or more discipline. You need immediate results that compel you to continue.

That’s exactly what The 4-Hour Body delivers.

As the soreness fades, the strength returns

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I’ve done a horrible thing to myself. Last year I wrote bunches of posts about how I was exercising, eating right, and losing weight. In about 3 months I lost about 20-25 pounds. People were coming up and telling me that I looked great, looked like I lost weight. My motivation was my upcoming wedding and not wanting to look like a fat slob in my wedding pictures that I would look at the rest of my life.

I achieved that goal and I am happy with the way I looked in my pictures. And then I went on the honeymoon, and then I started grad school, and then my back pains started happening, and one excuse after another caused me to stop exercising.

Fast forward about 9 months, and after just celebrating my one year wedding anniversary, I have put back on all of the weight that I had originally lost. What I worked so hard for in 2-3 months, was lost in 9. I can not contribute everything to not exercising, because my eating habits went down the toilet too. I started drinking the occasional energy drink and soda. Fast food started creeping into the weekend meals. Overall is was everything I wanted to stop doing, and I started right up again.

So here I trying to get back into shape again, and this time come up with a better maintenance plan. The good news is that Stacy is working out with me. We just started this past Sunday, and have been very sore the past few days, but just as of this morning, the soreness has started to fade, and I am hoping that muscle memory kicks in and I will be able to resume what I used to lift in my work outs in a shorter amount of time.

Fast food: It’s a scone off!

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So every year at about this time eating establishments begin to roll out there autumnal offerings.  To most people, this means pumpkin flavored foods.  In my casual consumption of such things, I noticed some variety, or distinction between products that even shared the same time: pumpkin scone.  Surely a pumpkin scone is the same wherever you order one.  Not so!  To which I present to you, the pumpkin scone off!  Starbucks vs. Peet’s.  (Apologies to people that prefer mom and pop coffee houses, I do too, but haven’t found any good ones since I moved out here.) Continue reading →