Eating Modern Foods with an Ancestral View

Monthly Update: March

2012-03-01T11:40:00.001-08:00

The March mug shot appears at the right of the strip and my waist was a little less than an inch down from last month. One difference I've noted is that I lost relatively more fat from my limbs this past month. I don't know if that would've happened anyhow or whether fasting somehow caused that but it's very nice because I happen to be someone who carries more fat on my arms and legs than many women in proportion to my torso/butt fat. I don't think my new mug shot looks much different than the last 2, but in real life my cheek pads and throat do look a little leaner to me. Also, as mentioned before, my clothes are noticeably looser lately in the arms and legs.

When I first read about ADF (alternate day fasting) they said most people wind up eating about 120% of their normal 1-day intake prior to ADF on their feed days--and 20-25% on their fast days--and they lose weight. I quickly found I eat 100% of my pre-ADF intake on my feed days and, of course, 0% on my fast days. The latter is because I've always hated "diet" meals and if I ate a meal of 300-500 calories on a fast day that would actually be harder for me than not eating at all. As it is, about once an hour on a fast day I get an instant impulse to eat and I give the impulse a condescending mental smile and it goes away. My particular body is REALLY good at fasting and I feel as good as I can imagine feeling.

Until yesterday, I fasted when scheduled and ate sensibly (translation: whole foods) when scheduled. Yesterday I wound up eating in the evening so I will have only 2 fast days on record this week. I'm mulling whether to go for 2 or 3 fasting days next week; yesterday it started to feel like there was too much deprivation too fast and I may just shift to 2 days based on how I feel. Or, I may fast 3 times but try the 300-calorie meal recommended in the write-ups for fast days. Or, a 3rd option, I may do 3 zero-calorie days one week and then eat for a week straight. You see what I'm doing here? I'm reserving the right to experiment and find what suits me best before settling into anything long term.

I've now had 2 ADF weekends. On the first, I fasted on Saturday and ate on Sunday because I started ADF on a Thursday. During that weekend, through routine reading I discovered many people fast 3 days per week and I immediately realized I'd like that better than having my fast days vary every week. I could just hear myself asking, "Was yesterday a fast day or a feed day?" When I used to take medicine for GERD, I had to buy one of those day-of-week dispensers because I was never sure if I'd taken it that morning or not.

I designated my fast days as Monday, Wednesday and Friday so this past weekend I ate both days. Going into the second weekend, I wondered how I would react to eating both days. Would I be hungrier and eat more the second day? Would it be harder to resume fasting on Monday? Would I lose the deep feeling of physical calm that appeared during the first week of 2-day cycles?

No, no and no. I enjoyed being able to eat again and that was it. All day Sunday I was aware of Monday as an upcoming fast day but there was no urge to binge in preparation and when Monday came it was just another fast day meaning black coffee still doesn't do it for me but it's not quite as bad as it was the first time.

The really interesting measurements will be next month--will I continue to lose fat at the current rate or will adaptive responses cause weight loss to slow/stop? What will my blood glucose/pressure do as I continue ADF?

There are no negatives here, only the thrill of self-discovery (and the joy of more time to read/knit/walk.)

The Tastes of ADF

2012-02-25T19:40:00.000-08:00

"Fasting is the single greatest natural healing therapy. It is nature's ancient, universal 'remedy' for many problems. Animals instictively fast when ill." Elson Haas, M.D. in Staying Healthy with Nutrition

Today happens to be my 10th day of ADF (alternate day fasting.) If you haven't read my last 2 posts, I'll explain quickly that I limit my intake to water and black coffee on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On the other 4 days I can eat as desired but I am trying to lose weight as well as optimize my blood glucose/pressure so my "feed" days so far have included only whole real foods.

On my fast day yesterday I was high energy so I did many chores and errands. At one point I went to Safeway with my son and grandson and I'm happy to report being surrounded by food didn't stress me at all because I knew I could eat until happily full today. Tomorrow is Sunday and it will be the first time I have eaten 2 days in a row since I started ADF because at first I followed a true 2-day cycle pattern. After the first weekend I decided it would be simpler and easier to follow ADF if my fasting days were always the same days each week.

Yogurt and Fruit (archive photo)

So, this was my 5th "feed" day and I ate 2 meals. Actually, I ate exactly the same meals/amounts as when I ate daily. I broke my fast by sipping 2 mugs of coffee with heavy cream and honey. My breakfast at about 9 am was a banana, a handful of berries, some cinnamon and about 1/2 cup of home-made Bulgarian yogurt. Now, you may think you've had some great meals but let me just say when you haven't eaten in about 42 hours yogurt and fruit taste GREAT.

I was not feeling urgent hunger so I spent the day visiting with my son and then my friends and I didn't have my main meal until about 6 pm. I forgot to eat a grapefruit, my usual appetizer, but since I had fruit this morning no biggie. I started my meal with a 4-5 cup leafy salad; the only dense ingredient was a few stuffed olives. I usually find when I finish a salad that there is some liquid--oil, vinegar and water--left in the dish. Usually I just pour that liquid down the drain but today it became the "magic ingredient" for my main dish (pictured below.)

I slow-fried (setting 4 out of 10 on my induction cooktop) a pound of grassfed ground beef. I removed the cooked beef from the skillet and melted a chunk of Kerrygold butter--between 1 and 2 tbsp. I had rough-chopped about 1/3 of a fresh fennel bulb and had cut a bunch of asparagus into 1-inch pieces; I added those to the skillet and slow-fried them in the melted butter.

Ground beef, asparagus and fennel

To finish my main dish I mixed the vegetables into the crumbled beef AND poured my leftover salad liquid into the dish. I put half of it into the fridge for tomorrow or Tuesday and ate the other half. WOW! The mixture of flavors really worked. In some bites the dominant flavor was fennel and in others there was a hint of the salad liquid. Still others were pure beef or asparagus. I'm glad I have half of this dish left over and I will definitely use my salad liquids in my main dishes on a regular basis.

On the health front, which is why I decided to practice ADF for a couple months in the first place, I am truly amazed at the difference the first 10 days have made. Until the recent family-related stresses affected my blood glucose/pressure I had considered my overall health much improved after 9 months of quality nutrition, but honestly I have never felt THIS good in my life. Not as a child or teen or young adult or middle-ager. This morning I "sensed" every part of my body and could not identify one single complaint. If I had to decide right now I would definitely choose to stay on ADF permanently, although I still intend to shift to 2 fasting days per week in April.

UPDATE: For day 2 of my eating weekend, I sauteed some cauliflower in butter then poured the leftover dish from yesterday on top and covered the pan to re-heat the leftovers. I barely managed to take the photos below before attacking the food:

Today's Leafy Salad

Beef, asparagus and fennel with cauliflower added

Note: With the addition of cauliflower this was again a large batch of food so I ate half and refrigerated the other half for my grandson tonight or my meal on Tuesday. Since I was eating less meat (divided again) I also ate a can of sardines, which went very well with the other flavors.

A Gift of Time

2012-02-23T17:25:00.004-08:00

"A good meal ought to begin with hunger." French proverb

Did you ever wish you had 2 hours more per day to do what needed doing or what you wanted to do?

Well, on ADF (alternate day fasting) I'm finding I have that time and it's really fun deciding how to best take advantage of it. Think of it--on a typical day of eating, I dish out yogurt and add fruit and maybe a couple of eggs. For my main meal, I peel a grapefruit and chop/slice a large leafy salad, cook (usually fresh) vegetables and cook or re-heat a little meat. I then eat my meal and have to wash the dishes and pans. I'd estimate I spend at least an hour, and usually closer to 2, on meal-related activities.

Now contrast that to my fasting days--I spend 5 minutes re-loading the coffeemaker for the next day. Period. Oh, I pour a few glasses of water from a pitcher in the fridge but I do the same on eating days too so that one's a wash, as is the 10-minute daily water kefir routine (on fasting days, I don't drink water kefir. I bottle it so on eating days I have a little fresh and a bottle of carbonated. And my home-made yogurt lasts twice as long so the time spent on that is also cut in half.

I won't lie--on my fasting days, there are times when I get sudden, wistful thoughts of eating but I divert my thoughts to what I'll eat the next day. I'm not distressed or low-energy. I do feel happy anticipation about what I'll fix and eat tomorrow.

On my feeding days, I obviously enjoy the meal-related activities a great deal--not to mention the meal--but I also find myself thinking about how I'll use my gift of time on the fasting day. Another round of happy anticipation. I find it's easier to remember to chew thoroughly and eat mindfully since I know the food is all I'll have for a long time.

I assume this eating pattern is not for everyone as many people would hate having to go completely without calories 3 days per week but right now it suits me perfectly. My gut is happy, happy. It might be less happy if I were hitting junk food on feeding days but since I'm eating healthy meals of whole foods my body relishes them. The last 2 mornings, my waking blood glucose has been 93 and 76 which is a great improvement.

Warning: I'm about to describe bathroom matters. Perhaps because I eat a lot of watery fruits and vegetables, I've never been a very thirsty person. If I drink, I pee and it seems liquids go straight through me. Even if we include the time I was pregnant, I don't think I've had puffy ankles in my life. So it's something of a relief that even though I make an effort to drink water (and morning black coffee) on fasting days I don't seem to have to pee quite so often as before. It's as if my body is seizing the liquid and making use of it so I don't need to pee so much. To give my stomach a break on fasting days, I dilute my black coffee to about half-strength since it won't be followed by food.

Another area that might concern other people considering ADF is bowel movements. I've always gone too often in my opinion--1 to 3 times per day. Very healthy consistency but too frequent for convenience. I eat 2 pieces of fruit per feeding day plus a large serving of cooked veggies and a large bowl of leafy, crunchy salad. Happily, I'm only going once per day now and I actually skipped one day. I can see where that might scare you if you only go every 2 to 3 days when you're eating every day.

So, did you ever wish you had 2 hours more per day to do what needed doing or whatever you wanted to do?

Making Lemonade ...

2012-02-19T10:08:00.000-08:00

"If life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Dale Carnegie

Everything was going so great. I was sailing along, enjoying ancestral eating and looking forward to my physical since I've lost weight. Yes, there'd been moderate to high family-related stress for months involving my son and grandson but I handled it well--or so I thought. Well, okay, I'd noticed gradual increases in my blood glucose and blood pressure readings but they were still in the normal ranges, just creeping toward the upper regions of normal. I'd given some thought to how I might adjust my routines to encourage those readings to return to their previous levels. For the record, until last week at least half of my ongoing stress came from life/health issues my son was experiencing.

Then, as I was pulling into my doctor's parking lot for my physical, I got a call from the grand-kid's high school--he was being suspended for 3 days. It wasn't really a great surprise that I walked into the doctor's office and had the highest blood pressure I've ever had. It took almost 4 hours for my blood pressure to return to anything like my normal levels and my blood glucose readings were also unusually high that day and the next morning. I haven't had the follow-up tests yet but as far as I know I am in good overall health. Just very, very stressed. To be clear on the events, I was called to the school one day to take the boy home and had to return the next day for a disciplinary conference.

SO--I decided it was time to give top priority to me and to nurture me. I actively avoided anything likely to increase my stress levels (other than the afore-mentioned grandson and son) so I didn't read my usual list of web sites or join conversations on Paleohacks. I also decided not to do any blogging here until I "felt like it." Let's just call it what it was--I POUTED. But you know, I happen to think pouting can be a healthy reaction to excessive stress. And my pout only lasted about 24 hours anyhow.

Despite being very upset and physically out of whack, I didn't suffer a migraine attack and the only specific symptom of the incident was that I needed extra sleep after returning home from the conference. I rarely nap but I took a very long one and still slept all night.

To complete the background info before addressing the ancestral eating topic of this post, I have mentioned before that I have done a lot of intermittent fasting (IF.) My practice for months was to eat one large meal per day so that I was well nourished but my GI tract had periods of rest. I find IF calming and it served me well in the early months of this stressful period. There were some days where I casually skipped my meal altogether because I was busy. I had recently started eating yogurt and fruit as a small second meal, which I enjoyed but which gave my system less resting time. Because of mounting stress, 2 weeks ago I had discontinued the second meal.

Anyhow, to the business of "making lemonade." The day after the conference I sat down at my PC and started reading about non-prescription strategies people use to deal with blood pressure/glucose issues. It is important to me to avoid the need for prescribed medications as long as I possibly can. As I did searches and read both blog posts and research abstracts, one subject kept coming up over and over--fasting. While a somewhat scary concept for many Americans, fasting is actually a natural remedy that's been used all over the world throughout history. And while it's not a cure for the common cold--that's a joke, okay?--there are studies that have confirmed that fasting can in fact have a positive impact on both blood pressure and glucose levels. It's also supposed to allow significant healing and repair of the GI tract and joints which are also issues for me.

Without boring you with too many details, I'll just say that 2 types of fasting were explained. One was long-term fasting, 5, 10, 21 or even 40 days of water-only or juice-only. I was quite intrigued but that didn't sound like something I wanted to try on my own. I watched some YouTube videos by professionals and individuals and if I were going to try a long water fast I'd want to check myself into a clinic where I could be monitored. Since I can't afford that I decided against a long water fast. AND I couldn't imagine leaving the kid and the pets for 3 weeks.

However, another type of fasting also is backed by research and is safe to try at home: alternate-day fasting (ADF.) Several variations of ADF are explained and recommended by various studies and sites. The gentlest version involves eating at least one meal per day and skipping 2 meals every other day. Another version rules out full-sized meals on the "fast" day but allows one small meal of 20-25% of your usual food intake. The classic version requires a no-calorie approach every other day with a "whatever you want" allowance on the feeding day.

People who've been eating the usual American diet find ADF a radical change. They tend to go with the 25% fasting days and their first 2 weeks of feeding days are pretty much junk food binges. Those who adapt well start eating more sensibly but many stick with the 25% fasting days or the "have dinner every day" approach. Many people reported successfully following ADF for months or years.

In my case, after 9 months of ancestral eating and intermittent fasting I am already well adapted to skipping meals. I decided to try ADF for 8 weeks and to go with no-calorie fasting days; I start the fasting day with black coffee and drink water as desired. On my feeding days, I just eat my usual ancestral foods. So far, I haven't needed extra-large portions or extra meals. If I've had a problem, it's that I'm not particularly hungry for food on my feeding days but I assume that will change as I continue to eat only every other day. I've made sure I eat a large fruit-salad-meat-veggies meal on each of my feeding days and I also put cream and honey into my coffee on those days.

And here we are. The important news--the lemonade if you will--is that I've had amazing results so far. Day 1 of ADF, my first fasting day, was the day I was still stressed and pouting while searching for options via PC. On my first feeding day I felt better and my blood pressure and glucose were better but not ideal. On day 3, my second fasting day, I felt FABULOUS--my mood was great and I was high-energy all day. Nearly all my blood pressure/glucose measurements were down to my lifelong norms and I felt the last of my stress leaching out as my body and GI tract rested from dealing with food. This morning, my 2nd feed day, my waking blood glucose was 70--yes, 70! And I had bp to match. I also noticed that my gums look MUCH happier.

I've now completed two 2-day cycles of fasting/feeding. Frankly, I wish I'd tried this a couple months ago. I spend my fasting days happily using my extra time (not taken up by meal prep and cleanup) to do errands, chores and craft projects. My fasting days are also my exercise days since I've eaten the day before--although I've already learned this may not be important. I've always performed well fasted and I've found I don't have any low energy days on ADF. I just have more time on fasting days.

Right now, my plan is to continue with 7 more weeks of ADF. In mid-April, I will either continue ADF for a longer period or switch to a long-term pattern of 2 fast days per week. I haven't yet mentioned weight loss, have I? Losing weight is not my primary goal but I'm happy to report I'm noticeably losing fat on ADF.

The research studies reported that overweight/obese subjects had a start-up loss and then a slower continued loss throughout the study period. People of normal weight stabilized quickly and ate enough on their feeding days to maintain their weights--also, the normal-weight subjects were only on ADF for a short period.

Here's a link to a timely article on the subject of ADF.

Unlike Friday, I had a robust appetite today. I ate blueberries, grapefruit, banana, a leafy salad, beets and roast Cornish game hen. Yum! I was happily stuffed, but only for about 30 minutes and then I noticed a rapid clearing of my stomach. My 2-hour blood glucose was 112.

If you've tried or stayed on ADF, I'd love to hear from you.

Coming Back Soon ...

2012-02-15T12:13:00.000-08:00

Update 2/18/12: Things are leveling out for me. That could change at any moment but as things stand now I'll be back to business as usual within a week.
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One Form of Stress Relief

Due to some things not related to ancestral eating I am not blogging right now. My son and grandson are having separate-but-related issues at the moment and it's enough external stress that I need to focus on my health and well-being for a while rather than reading forums (other people's stressors) and blogging.

FYI, one thing I'm trying at the moment to help manage my own stress is alternate-day fasting (ADF.) So far, it's working beautifully to keep me aware of my own needs and health rather than sinking into my loved ones' stress. Unlike some who try ADF I am just eating my usual ancestral foods on my feeding days rather than "anything I want." Since I've practiced intermittent fasting for months, this is just a slight extension but the calming effect of IF does seem somewhat amplified for me so far.

Feel free to browse through my past comments by clicking on labeled topics at the right.

It's Great to be 65!

2012-02-13T14:34:00.000-08:00

Family stresses are still there and ongoing. Enough said. No sign of migraine, which is an amazing first, but my brain is just too healthy now to bother with drama I guess.

Well, here I am at 65. It's funny, really, how your perspective changes over the years. In my 30s, I hobbled around like an old person and here I am, an OLD person, and I walk like someone in her 30s. If you've followed my story at all you know the difference is wheat.

I picked up new information last week on the wheat issue. In the last year or two before I started ancestral eating I had noticed slight losses of balance and "clumsiness" as things I was holding dropped out of my hand after a minute or so. I didn't connect that particular problem to wheat even when I realized many other chronic symptoms had disappeared--I had labeled that problem as "aging" and hadn't given it any more thought UNTIL last week, when I was reading about gluten sensitivity and read that "ataxia" can be one of the symptoms. Ataxia is when your brain is affected by gluten and you suffer balance and coordination issues. Hmm.

I then thought hard about my own balance/coordination issues and realized I didn't have any and hadn't had any since about the time I changed my eating patterns. I did have a nasty fall last summer but it started when a stepping stone slid from under my foot, my ankle rolled, and my lower leg bone slammed down on an adjacent stepping stone. Totally wrecked my ankle and bruised (or worse) the leg bone.

Anyhow, the long list of symptoms caused by wheat now includes brain interference that thankfully seems to have healed.

I made the mistake of letting my friends know the date of my birth. If I had a time machine that would be one of my first adjustments. Just kidding, actually, I had a wonderful morning laughing at the cards they gave me and gabbing for a couple hours in our breezy but temperate morning. I wore my favorite tee, "So far, this is the oldest I've ever been."

Food-wise, I'm ignoring the birthday thing. I'm having a physical in 2 days so it wouldn't make sense to eat insane food--and I don't really want any anyhow. The afore-mentioned friends were telling me it's time to eat bran muffins vs. cake anyhow, and I of course reminded them I'm off wheat. So they said rice bran would work. :-))

It's a weird birthday because I feel so good and my mood is ebullient, yet I have loved ones in deep stress. I'm reacting differently than in the past. Before, it seemed I joined them within the stressed zone--hence the follow-up migraines--but now I offer support and comfort and laughter from outside the stressed zone. I think that may make me more valuable to them but we're all feeling a difference.

I'll close by saying I'm feeling really good about my health and weight improvements and it would be very cool if I could finish the weight-loss phase and just enjoy maintenance ancestral-style next year. If that happens, I might even make some kind of paleo dessert.

Hope You Had a Great Week!

2012-02-10T08:53:00.000-08:00

Before you ask, yes I did have a great week. I ate carefully, started my days with breakfasts of fat/protein, and I feel fabulous.

Here in the extreme southern tip of Nevada, we've had a balmy week so I was walking around at mid-day in knee-length pants. Pants, I might add, that were too tight to wear this time last year, wearable but needed to be worn for a while before going outside last summer, nicely snug out of the dryer last fall and are NOW beautifully loose.

Once again, after using recent cold weather as an excuse not to, I've started to do some walking. And, as I'd advise you to do, I started sensibly by walking briskly for only 20 minutes. At the end of my walk I felt no fatigue or soreness but when I got out of a chair a few hours later there were mild twinges--and muscle tone--that told me the walking did good things. Next week I'll look at going farther.

I've had upsetting things going on within my family this week and while I wouldn't have asked for such a test I'm truly pleased with my physical response. All my life I was "the rock" during a crisis but once things settled down I would collapse with anxiety, depression and migraine. During those past crises, I wouldn't be able to sleep or eat normally due to adrenaline surges although my conscious mind was strong and available to support others.

This time, I'm actually feeling the stress at a more conscious level although my interaction with my family is pretty "rock-ish." The good thing is that my robust appetite and great night's sleep last night appear to indicate I'm processing this stressful interval in a much more healthy way. I'll be able to report next week on whether or not a follow-up migraine attack occurred. So far, though, this week seems to confirm that the repair of my digestion and metabolism has also repaired some of my neurological processes.

How Do You Measure Success?

2012-02-05T21:21:00.000-08:00

No, seriously, how do you measure success? I think each of us knows success when we feel it. Sometimes we plan for it and other times we stumble into it. And I'm sure we have areas of overlap but we probably each have our own personal definitions of success.

For me, there are 3 key areas of my life in which I will judge outcomes with labels such as success or failure: family/friends, health and weight.

Family/friends hasn't always been an easy one for me. I grew up in poverty and we moved around a lot (think gypsy mode) so I didn't have a chance to practice friendship skills. Family relationships were very dysfunctional so it was more a matter of knowing what I didn't want than anything else. And it didn't help that I was a bashful, withdrawn child who grew up to be an introverted-but-assertive woman. However, I look at my son (nearly 40) and grandson (nearly 18) and feel successful to the extent that I've always done the best I could and have extremely close relationships with both. And I'm blessed with great friends, both human and companion animals, to help celebrate the good times and survive the bad ones.

On the health front, that's been an up-and-down story. I've always been a basically healthy woman with a lot of chronic complaints, many of which involved considerable pain. After 9 months of ancestral eating, I can't remember the last time I felt true pain and that's almost spooky. My upcoming physical in 2 weeks will flesh out the story but as far as I know I'm unusually healthy for someone about to turn 65. I feel more like 40-ish.

Then there's weight, which has 2 success/fail elements: appetite control and level of body fat.

Given my 50-year history of binge eating, I have to say it's very weird that in the past 4 months I seem to have lost the ability to binge. Forget desire--I never had that, and who does? If you are able to control what you do/don't eat you may be many things but you're not a binge eater. No, I mean no matter what I do now a binge doesn't happen. Get upset? Nope. Eat sugary holiday treats? Nope. Have cupboards full of highly-processed treats the grandkid bought? Nope.

That doesn't mean I can't get a little off track. Eating a ton of fruit earlier this week made my blood sugar a little unstable and took the shine off my energy and sense of well-being, but there was never any time that I felt a true binge coming on. My body (personally, I think it was my gut flora) told me to knock it off and I did, and after several days of a better-balanced ancestral routine I'm feeling great again.

On the body fat question, I've thoroughly learned in my life that fast-off means faster-back-on. I do my best to eat at equilibrium or only a slight deficit so that any fat loss is very gradual and hardly noticed. And yet, since the first week in September my waist is down at least 5 inches. This morning I pulled out a pair of khaki cut-offs. This particular pair of pants was so much too small this time last year that I couldn't even pull them above my knees. I said MY KNEES. This morning I pulled them up and was able to zip and button them--what do you think of that? Okay, don't get too excited, I'm an old lady and the pants are still too snug for me to wear them in public but in a month or 3 I'm going to be walking around outside in those pants.

That's SUCCESS, baby!

How Do You Know You're Eating the Right Mix/Proportions of Ancestral Foods?

2012-02-01T10:31:00.000-08:00

I'm looking for a particular answer here but I won't spell it out quite yet because I want you to form your own response. Hint: It isn't the answer you'll ponder and develop, but the instantaneous one that probably popped into your head when you first saw the title. Did you "hear" one?

I put a lot of thought into what I have eaten/will eat. Hopefully not TOO much, so much that you'd consider me obsessed, but enough that I can say I eat mindfully most of the time. That said, I think the answer to how you know if you are/aren't eating the right mix/proportion of foods is your gut will tell you. Now, you might not put it that way--you might say by instinct, or some other phrase, but what I'm talking about is a clear, not-verbal so let's say visceral--message.

Speaking for myself, even when things are going great I sometimes wonder if I could do even better or perhaps get away with more. Is there a different ratio of ancestral foods that would speed weight loss, or cause me to feel even better? Can I have more of my very favorites rather than a some-of-all approach? Etc., etc. That feeling may come after reading blogs with firm opinions that high-fruit is very healthy or very-low-carb is absolutely the best.

Well, that's been the story of my life for the past 2 weeks. I varied the proportions of fruit, vegetables and meat and I tried alternating days of high-meat and high-fruit/veg. And yesterday I got that clear, visceral message that I was off track rather than better and I needed to revert to the routine I'd previously followed. Imagine my gut flora rapping on the door to my conscious mind, "Hello! Hello! Is anybody there?"

I believe the experimentation came from my mind (let's say the impulsive side as "rational" probably doesn't apply) and the answer came from my gut flora. So here I am today, back exactly where I started. My overall eating pattern is based on fatty meat, supplemented by vegetables both cooked and raw, and my appetizers are fruit in moderate quantities.

I don't want you to think I became truly ill or had cramps or other signs of severe GI/mental distress. It was more that I stopped feeling on top of the world--a noticeable shift in my overall well-being--and there was a clear non-verbal sense that I was an idiot. It's possible that if I continued the higher volumes of fruit and greens that I might have acclimated, but when I saw blood glucose readings above 140 after fruit-only meals I decided not to wait.

So here's the main point of this post--I think we should assume our guts have always sent such non-verbal messages and clues but we either hadn't learned to listen or we mis-interpreted them. In my case, I'm pretty sure I used to interpret such messages as "hungry for more junk."

For ancestral eating to provide the most profound and sustained benefits, it's important to "listen" for gut messages and take them seriously. I believe it's worth the trouble--no, I KNOW it is.

Monthly Review: January 2012

2012-01-29T12:15:00.000-08:00

I know, I know, it's not quite February yet but it's my blog. :-))

I feel like starting the next month right now so that's what I'm doing. The bad news is that my weight is about the same as a month ago. The GOOD news is that my weight is about the same as a month ago. :-))

I hadn't thought about it much, but I've now kept at least 30 pounds of my weight loss off for 6 months and that's better than I historically did. The fact that I've managed to lose about another 10 and I'm not currently gaining is, in fact, good news for me.

My waist measurement is about the same as last month, although I do have a sense that I may have lost a small amount of body fat overall. My new mug shot is also about the same although I think the shape of my neck has definitely changed in the last 60 days.

There was one cheat this month, hard-shelled tacos and tiny portions of rice and beans. And in the past week, I've hit fruit and salad hard while de-emphasizing meat slightly. I'll probably reverse that in the next week or two because I don't seem to be as high-energy on a high-carb diet.

The other marker to record for January is that I was less active than desired. I just don't like short days and cool weather! I won't have that excuse this month, because the days are noticeably longer now and the mornings are somewhat warmer. I really need to get walking again.

I'm a February child, so there will be an "anything but wheat" day in the coming month but it's still reasonable to expect a modest weight loss if I eat wisely (always a major IF, of course.)

Does "No Symptoms" Mean No Problems?

2012-01-26T13:23:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about my health lately, I guess because I've been feeling so great. I've wondered to what extent my metabolism has actually healed and to what extent my ancestral eating is masking symptoms I might otherwise be having.

And that's where my question to you comes from--are you assuming that no symptoms means no problems? If you're making annual trips to a doctor for a thorough check-up I'd support you in saying that's enough and I'd also support you in taking your own measurements every few months just because you're interested. But my question remains.

I'm usually careful to eat fruit in modest amounts and eat other foods either immediately afterward or with the fruit. I've wondered, though, how my blood pressure and glucose would respond if I splurged by eating a lot of fruit by itself. I've also wondered how I'm handling the yogurt I've started eating most mornings.

If you aren't having check-ups with a physician, which I suspect is more common these days because of financial pressures and high medical/insurance costs, are you taking your own blood pressure and glucose measurements? Or, are you assuming that no symptoms means no problems?

The good news for you is that I'm not going to bore you with a blow-by-blow description of the lengthy experiment I ran this week testing my blood pressure and glucose. I will share a few observations though.

My typical morning coffee--2 mugs over 2 hours with heavy cream and honey--barely registers on the blood glucose meter. I've read that some people have high insulin responses to dairy, but clearly I don't. Also, the home-made yogurt I frequently have for breakfast plus the quantity of fruit I typically add causes only a moderate blood glucose reaction well within the normal range.

During my experiment, I ate fruit as stand-alone meals three times, 2 large meals and one smaller meal of the exact types/quantities of fruit I had added to my yogurt the morning before.

My fasting blood pressure and glucose rates are both very normal on the typical ancestral meals I've been eating. After the large fruit-only meals, my blood glucose had returned to about the fasting rate 2 hours later BUT the readings spiked pretty high at the 30-90 minute marks. The smaller meal of fruit stayed within the normal range throughout but my blood glucose went higher than when I ate the same amount of fruit with yogurt or any of my typical fruit-salad-meat meals.

The bottom line for me is that I was paying very close attention so I noticed some very slight symptoms after eating the large meals of fruit, including minor mood alteration (less calm). If I hadn't been paying attention I don't think I would've noticed anything although I would've been less serene than usual for a few days. I've been known to eat stand-alone meals of sweet fruit from time to time but I probably won't do that any more.

What about you? Are you relying on "no symptoms" or do you know how your meals affect you? Do you eat enough fruit or sweeteners that it matters?

Chain Saw Stew

2012-01-22T14:26:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the title, but my kitchen currently looks like the scene of a chain-saw murder.

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been hungry for more fruit and vegetables lately and still enjoying but much less hungry for meat. And, as you may already know, I always have a bone broth stew on hand with less meat nowadays than in the past but still very rich with meat juices and marrow, etc.

So my menu today reflects my current interests. I started with my usual coffee--flavored with heavy cream and local honey.

The first course of my breakfast was a whole grapefruit, 2 tangelos and a ripe banana. Before eating those, though, I started the main course. I had my stew in the slow-cooker to re-heat it for adding fresh vegetables later today so I started by dipping out about a cup of fatty meat broth. I put that on my induction cook-top and sliced/peeled 3 nice fresh beets. Once I had the beets cooking away in the broth, I dug out the remaining cooked rutabaga, cabbage, fennel, celery and carrots from the stew to clear the way for the next set of vegetables (celery, carrots, cabbage and rutabaga.)

I left the dished-out warm vegetables, with bits of meat and fat, in the dish while the beets cooked and I ate the fruit. I then added some pats of butter to the top of the stewed vegetables before dumping the cooked beets and broth over the top of the other vegetables.

Chain Saw Stew

Heaven! I definitely inhaled the beets. Sorry, I ate about 2/3 of the beets before remembering I really should take a pic but I figured late was better than never. My review of this ad-lib recipe is that the beets were very sweet and while the visual is a little vivid--definitely blood red broth--the flavors meshed wonderfully. This was a GREAT meal!

Okay, the final step is to clean up the "gore" from my pans, bowl and counter. I will make this recipe again soon.

P.S. I called my meal "breakfast" because it's my first meal of the day. I may or may not eat again, though. If I do eat later, it will be a meat-based meal since I've already had a lot of vegetables and fruit.

Do You Vary Your Eating Routine?

2012-01-22T10:31:00.000-08:00

Yep, that's the question for today--how often do you change up what you're eating?

In your "bad old days" that meant switching from burgers to fried chicken, right? I mean, even on the artificially-taste-enhanced SHAD (supposedly healthy American diet) you didn't always eat the same thing every day.

Now that you're buying and fixing/eating real whole foods, variety is even more important for several reasons:

boredom is a great way to get tired of eating this way in the fastest possible time
good nutrition is achieved by eating lots of different whole foods, each of which contains a different mix of things your body needs
your hunger is both stimulated and satisfied by a mix of different foods

Does that mean you have to eat different things at every meal, or every day? Of course not! If you imagine yourself back on the ancestral plain a successful hunt for meat would be cause for celebration and an initial feast of the choicest bits followed by carefully and thoroughly eating every last scrap of the critter. I assume as you got to the less-favored bits you threw in more and more plant-based tubers, leaves, etc. And if you were out of meat then the gathering of vegetables and fruits was pursued even more vigorously. In that natural environment, you ate a bunch of the particular greens, vegetables and fruits that happened to be tastiest at the time so your menu varied widely on a weekly or monthly basis.

We're not trying to eat exactly as we really did back in those days--for one thing, I'd be the old granny everyone waved a sad goodbye to when the group had to move out to find food and left me behind because I couldn't keep up. :-))

But we can keep our "natural" way in mind and feel free to eat our fill of what sounds/looks good this week knowing that next week we may select a quite different mix. In my case, I find I have times when I eat a LOT of meat and fat but I also have times when I'm really, really hungry for vegetables and fruit and a modest serving of meat--or no meat at all--is fine. If we assume that you've been eating ancestral foods for at least 3 weeks now, your body should be giving you signals now about what is needed and I strongly recommend you follow them.

If you wake up some morning and want a huge meal of fruit and nothing else, go for it unless there's a medical reason not to such as blood sugar response; even if you have to be careful about fruit, just mix it with low-response foods or watch your portion sizes--have what you're hungry for. If you wake up hungry for bacon and eggs--or a slow-fried steak--enjoy and you probably won't want much if any food for the rest of the day. Or maybe you will be hungry, but for other things and that's great too. A lot of raw stuff for a few days followed by a few days of cooked-foods-only is just fine.

I've definitely noticed that my tastes change from week to week and if I allow myself a range of healthy menus I tend to lose weight a little faster even if it seems like I'm eating more. And the good response to variety includes SHAD meals occasionally as long as they don't include wheat. The best "weight loss formula" for me is that there is no set mix of foods to eat--if I always eat the same things I get bored and I stop losing weight.

Yesterday I ate 3 hard-shelled tacos with a few forkfuls each of rice and beans at a nearby cafe. When I got back home I added a few pieces of fruit and a chunk of fried pork rind (I buy large pieces rather than machine-cut products) to complete my daily menu because I was still hungry for those things. This morning, I woke up feeling very hungry and high-energy and that's my typical reaction as long as my splurge doesn't include wheat or manufactured food-like products. I've found the active appetite means my metabolism was stimulated by the food change. I can choose to eat more than usual, with probably no weight change, or I can eat wisely and lose a little more weight than usual this week.

You don't have to eat boring meals with no variety over time to be healthy or lose weight! Be creative, have fun and listen to what you're hungry for even if it doesn't fit a uniform "routine."

How are you doing/feeling?

2012-01-19T10:01:00.000-08:00

The first half of January has been pretty uneventful for me. I haven't been tempted to eat any non-healthy foods and I've been feeling great. Of course, I didn't cut back on my yogurt and coffee as I thought I might either. If I go by the signals my body is giving, I've lost a little weight anyhow so I haven't felt the need to be overly-restrictive.

But that's enough about me, how are you doing? Have you been trying to change what or how much you eat? Has that caused any problems for you and, if so, what have you tried so far to get around it?

I can tell you this--health goals rarely if ever unfold in a straight line. A binge eater, for example, almost always has one or more crisis points and may binge a few times while trying to break the pattern. It's not about whether you struggle. It's about whether you get back up when you fall.

Many people who try to leave grains and refined "neolithic" foods behind them suffer withdrawal. Has that happened to you? The lucky folks just look back fondly at their old foods while others are shocked by how strong their cravings are. They have to become obsessed with their goals for a while in order to see past how much they want wheat or other addictive foods. If/when they succeed in breaking the pattern the obsession can be managed and then broken by learning new tricks such as intermittent fasting but that can be a tough period.

Other withdrawal symptoms include feeling what is referred to as the "low-carb flu." If you ate grains and heavily sweetened neolithic foods for many years you have gut flora that include the "bad boys" and they are the source of feeling both cravings and sickness. Cravings mean they're demanding to be fed junk food and sickness means they're actually dying because healthy food encourages the "good guys" who crowd out the bad ones. So being sick for a while can mean you're getting healthier!

If you changed your eating pattern at New Year's and stuck with it, you may be feeling fabulous about now--how cool is that? If you're like me, you hadn't noticed that you hadn't felt GOOD in a long time so you're feeling too good to be legal.

If you tried but couldn't stick with healthy eating, why not give yourself permission to try again? Instead of beating up on yourself, how about being your own best champion and rooting for yourself to feel really, really good after you get through the tough part?

Well, it's a beautiful day here in southern Nevada and I'm going outside to play with my 3 toy dogs and visit with my neighbors. You should do something that gets you outdoors, particularly if the sun is shining--sunshine is very healthy.

Just remember--you own your body and you own your life, so live toward having the one you wish to have.

When Life Happens ...

2012-01-15T18:25:00.000-08:00

I've been waiting for something to happen that triggered strong emotions.

It wouldn't have mattered whether the emotions were happy, sad, fearful or what--strong emotions can cause a desire to eat, particularly in binge eaters. In my case, the urge to eat was always for the junk foods I was usually trying to avoid.

And here I am tonight, pouting because the Green Bay Packers lost. Pouting angrily. I lived in Wisconsin for about 40 years so I'm deeply fond of the Wisconsin Badgers and the Pack.

I've been waiting for something emotional to happen to see how I would react now that I seem to be an ex-binger. And yep, it's pretty different. I had my usual morning of coffee with cream and a little sugar (out of honey--bleh even turbanado tastes awful to me now.) I also had my usual dish of home-made yogurt. Wow, the yogurt was fabulous! It's taken a while, but I've grown to love the taste of the yogurt by itself rather than needing to have fruit as the dominant flavor. I still add fruit--today it was an organic banana and a ripe persimmon--but I like a little pure yogurt with each bite of fruit.

Anyhow, I digress. My morning and mid-day were normal. I didn't eat before the Packer game because I was too nervous. I drank a pineapple water kefir and that was it. Now that the game's been over for a while and I'm calming down, I find I have no appetite at all. Unless something changes in the next hour or so it looks like I'll wait until tomorrow to eat.

No urge to binge at all. When eating loses it's importance as a stress management tool there's just no impulse to binge. Since I'm enjoying my whole foods so much, that's pretty weird really.

The next time you get emotional, find your "comfort" in something other than food--put eating in its proper place.

Update 1/16/12: As I suspected, I never became hungry last night and I'm no more hungry than usual this morning. I really believe the "weak from not eating" is either a mental belief creating reality or a symptom of inability to burn stored fat.

I do plan to eat a complete and healthy menu today but no extra portions.

Are You Pessimistic About Weight Loss?

2012-01-14T16:19:00.000-08:00

No, seriously. If you want to lose weight, are you afraid you won't or you'll gain it back?

I guess I should be. It seems like every blog, web site and magazine I've seen in the last week or so has quoted grim percentages regarding the difficulty of achieving/sustaining weight loss or they had ongoing conversations about all the people who've lost and then re-gained body fat. On my favorite forum, Paleo Hacks, people who've been trying ancestral eating for a week or a month sometimes complain they aren't losing weight and are frequently told "this is not a weight loss plan."

Unless you're selling a book. The only place I've seen unbounded optimism about weight loss, in fact, is on the covers of all the newly released books about eating--ancestral or otherwise.

But I'm confident anyhow. I've lost significant body fat so far and I hope to lose a lot more. I believe my ancestral eating regimen is working and my body is going to continue its release of excess fat. I also believe that if I continue as I am I'm not going to put any weight back on. I admit it could turn out differently. After all, I lost and "found" the same 50 pounds four times before finding ancestral eating last April. I could find myself getting hungrier and gaining weight back or my weight could stop going down.

So why aren't I worried? For one thing, I'm not "on a diet." I'm following a lifestyle that includes real, whole foods rather than manufactured food-like products. I like what I'm eating; everything tastes wonderful and leaves me with a feeling of contentment. I feel great from the moment I wake each morning until I go to sleep at night. I feel calm and content rather than anxious and guilty. I doubt many people who are "dieting" can say the same.

I've had a lot of ah-ha moments lately. One occurred yesterday morning when I was typing a comment and off-handedly mentioned I was feeling a little hungry but not going to do anything about it. Hell-o? Former binge eater here. Any twinge in the GI tract was enough to send me scurrying to the kitchen--and also enough to make me worry I was about to binge. Nowadays, though, the feeling of physical hunger is just another normal sensation--it has no more meaning than the first hint that I'm getting a little tired. I can choose to respond but I can also choose to ignore. Nothing bad is going to happen.

This morning was another ah-ha. I woke up and was considering the drastic action of leaving my warm, comfy bed for the very cool air of my bedroom. Thinking, not moving, you understand. As I lay there, I realized I felt very lean and perhaps lighter. I moved my hand to touch my side but before I got there I "hit" the layer of fat that still surrounds "me." That was the first moment that I noticed I no longer include my body fat in my identification of "me." It's just a covering like a heavy winter coat and the only connection to my lean body is that it slows me down when I move--but a lot less than it used to.

Unlike a calorie-restricted diet, my choice of real foods is causing me to slowly assume my natural shape and resume my natural level of activity without feeling deprived or anxious. There is no famine response from my body because I'm well nourished. At some point, I will stop losing weight and I don't plan to worry about that. I may be close to my desired weight or I may be quite a bit heavier. Either way, as long as I feel this good I will probably just keep going as I am and see what happens.

As I read all the depressing articles and optimistic book titles I plan to walk the middle path and just do what feels right. I'm not worried and I'm not afraid.

If you aren't already doing so, I hope you'll try eating some real, whole foods and see what happens. What have you got to lose?

The End of Binge Eating as I Knew It

2012-01-11T16:00:00.000-08:00

Previously titled "Binge Eating is SOOO Neolithic." In the Paleo/Ancestral community, "neolithic" refers to highly processed/refined/manufactured products.

This post is not for everyone. If you aren't a binge eater, you may think you understand but you don't because most binge eating occurs in private--out of guilt and shame. And since all binge eaters KNOW others don't understand I'm going to bare my soul in this post even though it makes me a little uncomfortable. We're not talking about having 2 helpings of dessert here.

Non-bingers are welcome to read the remainder of the essay but you still won't get it any more than you can really understand other problems you've never had--smoking, anorexia, migraine, alcoholism, etc. You just have to be there.

My Credentials

I still remember roaming the halls of my mother's apartment and feeling totally alone. She was working to support us so she was either gone or asleep. My father and brother were 1000 miles away and I missed them desperately. I was in a low place. I enjoyed school but I was a "brain" and had few friends since everyone knows brains are "weird."

There was nothing else to do, really, a 15-year-old girl can't go walking around in the night so I started eating for comfort. What, you ask, was the magic food that plunged me into 50-odd years of binge eating? LIMA BEANS. Yes, because that's what was in the kitchen and not much else. Having a major binge on processed junk came much later as money became available and I could buy the stuff for myself. One element of emotional binge eating is that it's not about the food--if available, you'll go for junk but you'll binge one way or another.

At 17, out on my own and staying in a motel for a temporary job, I was so consumed with guilt after an evening binge that I threw the remaining food away some distance from the motel. But the next day I bought another supply so I tried to purge--I couldn't do that, and I'm sure my teeth and throat are grateful to this day. I had to trek back into the night again to throw away the remains of THAT binge. If you are a binge eater this is may be sounding somewhat familiar.

During my 21-year marriage I did most of my binge eating when I was home alone or the only one awake. It wasn't really a secret, of course, since junk disappeared from cupboards and my weight was out there for the world to see. I had enough shame that I started stopping on the way home from work to buy food to binge on before my family came home and I made sure to hide the bags and boxes. It was also during my marriage that I became a yo-yo dieter, losing and re-gaining the same 50-60 pounds four times.

After an involuntary divorce I achieved a truly lean and fit physique through heavy cardio--and stress of course--and maintained it for a few years which was really great. I was still having 1-3 binge days per week but I managed to burn it all off. Until I crashed because I have loose joints and had to stop all exercise and endure a cervical fusion plus shoulder surgery. I'd been doing so much that I pretty well destroyed all my joints. I rapidly found myself at a new peak weight and remained solidly in binge mode until April 2011 when I gathered my courage and decided to try ancestral eating.

A New Way of Eating

I had been Google-ing healthy eating because I was desperate to do something to feel better but also determined never again to try an extreme diet after 4 failures. Somehow I stumbled across Mark Sisson's book The Primal Blueprint and, gradually over the course of about 3 weeks, a number of books and web sites. Although I eventually purchased The Primal Blueprint and several other books, it was following conversations on a question-and-answer site called PaleoHacks that finally pushed me into giving ancestral eating a try.

The first week was tough but I was a pro at "first weeks." Between 2 and 3 weeks in, I noticed that I didn't need GERD medicine any more. My life-long stuffy nose (I was the classic runny-nosed kid) dried up. My bloated, sore gut started to feel better. And, magically, all the stinging and tingling in my joints and limbs disappeared.

Something else happened too. The ancestral foods I was eating started to taste GOOD. I mean, biting into a plum was orgasmic. Meat and grapefruit started to taste SWEET. It was truly amazing. A life-changing success story, right?

Um ... no. I was still a binge eater. At about 3 months in, I started occasional binges on fruit. After all, that was better than chips and cookies, right? Then, 4 months in, I had the bright idea that every weekend I could have one, just one, soft-serve cone as a treat. Within 2 weeks, of course, I lost it and went out to buy all my binge favorites. Yes, I had a mental list and I got them all. It took me about 4 days to work through all the foods. For the first time in my life, though, the binge didn't follow the script.

All of those life-long favorites tasted BLEH. To be fair, they tasted exactly like what they are--manufactured food-like products. But my tastebuds and gut were now acclimated to real, whole food and they sent me very clear signals. In other words, rather than just being uncomfortably full as expected, I got sick as a dog. Down and out. I felt too bad to even be too guilty about the binge; I was too busy feeling sorry for myself.

So, I went back to ancestral foods and within a week I felt better. Once I was feeling better I did a really brilliant thing and convinced myself the first reaction was just because I wasn't used to those foods any more but I'd be okay now, right? So, out I went to buy them all again. On the second binge the foods tasted even worse and I got much sicker much faster so I stopped eating the junk halfway through the pile. I didn't realize it at the time, but that was the end of my career as a binge eater. So far. I have no crystal ball.

The second binge occurred in late August. Since that time, when I look at neolithic (manufactured food-like) products they register in my brain at the same level as plaster figurines. That makes sense as the nutritional equivalents probably aren't all that different. :-))

The result, or perhaps the final step, of my recovery was intermittent fasting also known as IF. There are many discussions about IF on PaleoHacks and a web site called leangains.com is considered the home of IF but I'll just provide a simple definition here: you eat a large, nutrient-dense meal and you don't eat again until you are physically hungry. In the beginning this could be only a few hours but over time the interval frequently becomes longer as your lean mass reaches good overall nourishment. If you find yourself indifferent about eating and deciding to skip a meal you just started IF and that's how it happened for me. I went from 3 meals to 2 and then from 2 to one. Recently, I added a small breakfast and still have my main meal in mid-afternoon. On a given day, if I feel no interest in food I don't eat even if it means I don't eat that day--that's happened a few times but I never plan/schedule it and it's a non-event on the same level that being unusually hungry and having an extra meal is. Most veteran IF-ers find they have a preferred "eating window" of 4-8 hours during which they usually eat their daily food but it's not a hard-and-fast rule.

The End of Binge Eating

The final chapter of my story is the holidays just past. In mid-November, my waist measurement was down 5" from early September and I was happily perking along with IF. I became slightly apprehensive, though, because the holidays were traditionally the time that I fell off the diet wagon and began the bitter climb back to my peak weight. After much thought, I decided to face the issue head-on. If I was going to fail in the long run there was really no point in trying to be perfect during the holidays.

I declared "open eating season" and planned for the season to be from mid-November to either early January or after my birthday in mid-February. On Thanksgiving I attended a neighborhood bring-a-dish feast and I chose to take a mixed fruit salad with no additives except cinnamon. To my surprise, I looked at the "plaster figurines" and just didn't want any of them so I grabbed some raw veggies, some of my fruit salad and a nice pile of turkey meat. The only person comfortable with that was me, so I left a little early. It's strange, isn't it, that all my friends exclaimed with delight over my improved figure but were unhappy with my food choices . . .

Since this was an as-desired open season, it turned out that I didn't eat any neolithic choices at all until mid-December. At that point, I bought some shortbread. That didn't turn out well as this post explains. But for the remainder of the holidays I enjoyed some ice cream, corn chips and other non-wheat treats without any problems. If I'm honest, I had a few momentary impulses to binge but my brain (I think it was the one in my gut) rejected the notion instantly. As there wasn't a single day on which the neolithic treat tasted as good as the ancestral foods/treats I wound up closing open season early and resuming my normal routine with a deep sense of relief. Assuming my waist would be the same or an inch or so larger, I took a measurement on the 3rd or 4th day after closing the holiday season and found it was an inch smaller.

If you are a binge eater, here are my closing thoughts:

It's not hopeless! It's hard as hell and you have to be stubborn and really want it.
Learn the difference between physical hunger and emotional cravings. This post may help.
You may not be able to stop binge eating until you truly prefer real foods to manufactured food-like products. Work on that. Find out which meats/vegetables/fruits delight your senses.
Binge eating is over when you see neolithic food-like products and they register in your brain as "not food." That has to follow step 2 though.

I hope this is the beginning of the end for binge eating in your life. Remember--neither fun nor comfort are spelled FOOD.

P.S. If you are a binge eater, you really need to get over your guilt and shame and translate them to living your way to a better life. An interesting post by Paul Jaminet this week hypothesized that food cravings are really your lean mass screaming for nourishment but we don't realize that so we eat more and more non-nutritious food instead. So give your gut what it wants--start eating real whole foods!

Enjoying 2012 so far?

2012-01-09T12:51:00.000-08:00

How's the new year treating you? Are you happy with yourself or displeased with what you have/haven't done so far? If you're down on yourself, just STOP IT and think about tomorrow as New Year's day. Do with that new start as you will, or not, but don't waste time worrying about the past week or so.

I had a great walk this morning. The last one was less fun because it was mostly in "sugar sand" and felt like I was walking along a beach. Very tiring!

I had residual fatigue after that and even after 2 days off I noticed a little tightness when I started off this morning. The 2 off days were because of family activities but I wasn't eager to walk yesterday anyhow.

So this morning I walked for an hour on much better footing and enjoyed the scenery and the activity much more. At one point in my walk I went past the edge of the golf course I live next to and I was delighted to see a white heron.

I was in a "working" state for most of the walk, feeling warm with increased but not labored breathing and for the final 20 minutes my body was ready to stop at any time but I wasn't in sharp distress. Needless to say, my breakfast of yogurt and fruit about 3 hours later tasted GOOD!

The delay between finishing my walk and eating breakfast was because I am one of the many for whom exercise means little or no appetite. I think it's because I perform very well in a fasted state--my bodily easily releases and burns stored fat so I don't need food for energy--and my mildly aerobic walks don't burn fuel fast enough to exhaust the stored fuel in my muscles and/or the replacement of those stores from the burning of released fat. And stoking up my metabolism with brisk walking floods my system with endorphin and fuel so I don't feel a need to eat for quite a while afterward. So there's no need to eat before, during or after the walk but that would probably not be true for highly intense activity.

I'm also happy with my eating in the past week. On most days I had a green salad with my main meal but a couple times I skipped the salad. On a few days I ate cuts of whole meat and on others I ate bone broth stew with chunks of several types of meat and cooked vegetables. Yesterday I was unusually hungry so I ate a little more than other days.

Yesterday after my usual breakfast of full-fat fruit with yogurt I had a nice large piece of browned ham steak at mid-day and in late afternoon I ate some crispy/baked chicken wings. So it was a low carb day although it wasn't VERY low. In case you're wondering, I was very high energy for my walk today and at the end of the hour I wasn't lagging or starving so obviously I did just fine on what I ate the day or two before.

And that's what it's all about--I am skeptical of people who say I HAVE to go very low carb or very high carb, or very low meat or very high meat. I think I should eat what I'm hungry for from my supply of whole meats and foods and let nature take its course. Since I notice some variety in what I'm hungry for from one day to the next I'm unconvinced of there being one "right" way.

Well, if you followed my weight-loss series please don't be a stranger. Leave me a comment and tell me what I got wrong and what you're learning from your own reactions and experiences after any eating/activity changes you've made.

My next post will be about binge eating. That may take me a day or a week but it will be posted fairly soon.

Weight Loss Tactics for 2012 - Part 5

2012-01-07T09:08:00.000-08:00

Review:

In Part 3, we talked about supporting your health and energy by moving around a lot and incorporating walking or other exercise.

In Part 4, we talked about different eating patterns and why I settled on a moderate pattern of eating whole foods and home-made probiotic foods.

Okay, now we get back to the hard part--eating healthier and/or losing weight in the real world, which includes events and circumstances that trigger emotional responses.

Let's imagine you're walking on a sidewalk. Except, the strap/lace/heel of your left shoe just broke and the shoe wants to fall off. You'd do something about that except, your arms are full of packages. They aren't terribly heavy, but they're all shapes and sizes and make an unwieldy burden. You'd put down the packages and deal with the shoe except, this is a very busy sidewalk and there's a crowd of other people moving briskly past you in all directions. In fact, you're at an intersection so the people are jammed up waiting for the light to turn green. If you step off the curb, your shoe will fall off. If you just stand there, the guy at your right elbow will jostle you and the packages will go flying. What will you do, WHAT WILL YOU DO?

So what, you ask, does the above goofy scenario have to do with your desire to get healthier and/or lose weight? Well, life is a messy business. It was messy before you decided to change how you eat and life isn't going to change just so you can follow your perfect plan for ancestral eating. S*%# happens!

But you're human. You get a promotion, or hit a nice pot at the casino, and you want to celebrate. You get laid off, your son/daughter/grandchild seriously messes up or suffers a tragedy, and you need comfort. You find out your credit card has been hacked and you're furious. Or, maybe nothing has happened for days and you're bored out of your skull. That's a pretty good list of reasons to slide on your eating plan, isn't it? Isn't it?

Or maybe it's not that dramatic. It's just that you go to the buffet and, yes, there are plenty of healthy options but your eyes go straight to all those tempting (think unhealthy, fattening) foods. Decision point: what do you REALLY want? Because if you want to eat for better health and vitality with gradual loss of any excess fat, you will look at the junk foods as if they are plaster figurines and you will walk past them to the real food. You will feel free to fill your plate several times with salad (oil and vinegar please, not dressing) and whole fruit and cooked vegetables and 3-5 kinds of meat. You will walk out of that buffet with your head held high and triumph in your eyes. Or ...

Yes, it's about you. You will be tired, you will be busy, you will suffer emotional highs and lows and you will be tempted. But you won't notice those things so much if you are obsessed with the life you want to have next month and next year.

What will you do? WHAT WILL YOU DO?

I hope you enjoyed this little series focused around the decision to eat for improved health. Possible topics of discussion are endless and I'll be as surprised as you when I select the next one. :-))

'Til then, think of ancestral eating as your new hobby and have fun learning about it and practicing how to make it work for you.

Special note to binge eaters: I didn't talk about us in this post because I've decided to write a self-standing one on the subject. I'm not sure when yet.

Weight Loss Tactics for 2012 - Part 4

2012-01-06T09:40:00.000-08:00

Review:

In Part 3, we talked about supporting your health and energy by moving around a lot and incorporating walking or other exercise.

Today, the subject is one people love to argue about: which type of eating pattern is best for your health and well-being in the long run. Please note that I very carefully did not use the word "diet." Any time I do use that word it will refer to "how you eat" versus "reducing calories." Let me be blunt: reduced-calorie diets don't work. You either don't lose weight or you make things worse and a year later you're heavier than you started. The goal is to find a mix and volume of foods that naturally moves you toward--and keeps you at--a leaner and more energetic (healthier) state.

You'll find people who swear by eating only plant-based foods. Some of them claim it's more humane or sustainable in addition to being healthy. They don't seem to notice how agri-business is raping the planet and wiping out wildlife while meat-producing land normally includes a bounty of wild animals and plants. Hmm. Also, plant eaters are a significant percentage of patients that medical professionals see.

You'll find people who swear by eating only meat/fat. They claim it's what we were meant to eat. They don't seem to notice that the only paleolithic people known to eat mostly meat were in harsh conditions where plant-based foods weren't much of an option. And over time a significant number of them seem to suffer metabolic/hormonal imbalances which they try to treat with supplements--think manufactured, highly processed supplements. Hmm. And while low-to-moderate carb intake seems to work for many, zero-carb makes me shudder with thoughts of rampant constipation. That might just be me.

I want it all, so I eat whole meats/eggs, vegetables and fruits with an occasional handful of nuts plus a little cream, butter and yogurt and my favorite probiotic food--water kefir. I will admit that if I could only afford to eat one type of food I'd go for meat for the protein/fat since, in a pinch, we can make whatever we need from them in an emergency.

When I say whole meat I mean the entire bird or a cut of meat from the animal. I love a rare treat of summer sausage, ham or even a hot dog but it must be said that they are processed and full of additives--the very things that give me fits. So, they make great treats but I don't consider them whole food.

I eat whole eggs rather than just yolks or whites--you know when ancient people stole from nests they didn't throw half of each egg away! And I make yogurt at home so it's full-fat and has no additives other than my yummy fruit and cinnamon. If I had a local source of raw whole milk I might make my own butter and use the buttermilk for yogurt but since I don't eat butter often I feel comfortable going full-fat with the yogurt.

Okay, so why am I recommending the above approach? Well, for starters I tried just about all of the others with horrible results. I adore fruit but it takes less than 2 days of just fruit for me to start climbing the wall with cravings. The same is true of just-meat or just-plants. For me to be content and high energy I need a little of each AND I need to stay away from refined grains, oils, and sugars. Yes, I put a tsp of honey in a mug of coffee and I use fruit to sweeten my yogurt but that's it. Other than my morning coffee, any coffee/tea/chocolate I have is totally unsweetened.

And there's a funny thing; when you're eating refined sugar every day eating unsweetened chocolate is unthinkable and for me coffee/tea were the same. After a month or two of no sugar, a grapefruit is sweet and unsweetened coffee/tea/chocolate may not taste like treats but they no longer seem inedible.

So, let me repeat that the goal is to find a mix and volume of foods that naturally moves you toward--and keeps you at--a leaner and more energetic (healthier) state. We don't want to be hungry/tired/sick all the time. You may need to experiment to find the best overall mix--you may do better with just a little meat and lots of starch or vice versa.

Have fun figuring out what's best for you!

In the final post of this series, we'll talk about the reality and importance of dealing with your emotions while trying to lose weight.

Weight Loss Tactics for 2012 - Part 3

2012-01-04T10:42:00.000-08:00

In Part 1, we talked about distinguishing between physical and emotional hunger because for weight loss we want to feed one while distracting the other.

In Part 2, we talked about losing weight slowly and steadily rather than trying drastic measures that can back-fire.

In this post, we'll talk about the relationship between health and moving around. Since every person reading this post will have a different level of daily activity and a unique level of possible fitness, I'll quote Arthur Ashe, "To achieve greatness, start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can." And that's exactly the attitude you should have about being as active you you can. And I'd add, "Use it or lose it." The more muscle tone you can comfortably build, the better your other physical systems will perform.

I probably fall somewhere in the middle. Last spring, I was walking vigorously for 3-4 miles every other day and doing a number of manual activities so I had good overall muscle tone for a gray-haired lady. Then, I fell one day in a fluky accident (a stepping stone shifted under me) and I seriously wrecked my ankle. I was not able to do much for weeks. Then it was hot, then it was cold--you see where this is going. I've done some light walking, but I haven't done serious walking for exercise since. So yesterday morning I headed out and put in about 1.5 miles. I'm resting today but I could have walked again which tells me I did the first walk just right.

I don't think it does more mature folks any good to work so hard you hurt all over the next day. It's better to under-do a little, particularly in the early days, than to over-do. Even though I call this a "rest" day, I will behave as if I am a fidgety, restless person--that does burn a little energy and gives your muscles something to do. It's as simple as getting up every 15 minutes and moving around your space or your yard or your neighborhood/building. If things go well, you'll gradually find you have more energy and are stronger; over time you can gradually ask more of your body but remember to stay within the range of what's reasonable for your level of fitness.

I do my chores one at a time with a sit-down in between.The sit-down and get-up count as squats but the rule is you can't use your arms--sitting and getting up, plus stairs, should be done with legs only because that's much better for your back. Now, if you have any balance concerns just let your hand hover over the rail or support. I have a bad back, mostly from issues I was born with, and I learned in my 20s that I should push my way up stairs with my legs rather than unconsciously pulling myself up with my arms. It feels better and keeps your back and legs strong.

Moving Helps You Sleep

So, be calm and serene and enjoy your day but remember to pretend you are fidgety and move around a lot. What you can do today will help you do more next week!

In part 4, I'll talk about why I choose to eat whole foods and follow what is called ancestral eating.

Weight Loss Tactics for 2012 - Part 2

2012-01-03T11:19:00.000-08:00

In Part 1, we talked about distinguishing between physical and emotional hunger because for weight loss we want to feed one while distracting the other.

In this post, we'll talk about losing weight sensibly--interpret that as slowly and steadily--rather than trying to lose it too fast--going into crisis mode and doing things that will risk your health and/or cause you to lose control and actually gain weight.

Whether you suffered from binge eating as I did or just gained some extra body fat over time, I'll bet you didn't get to where you are now in a week or two. It takes time to gain AND it takes time to effectively lose excess body fat.

I don't recommend using a scale because your poundage will change erratically based on retaining/releasing water, gaining/losing muscle tone, eating more/less food volume and having/not having bowel movements. We're not really interested in most of those, although improved muscle tone should indicate improved general health.

If we think of our body as a living machine, we realize that the body already knows how to "run" but we, as the driver, have control of the steering wheel, accelerator and brake. Think about that--what's going to happen to your car if you put in the wrong kind of fuel? Or put the accelerator to the floor? Or slam on the brakes? How are those actions likely to work out?

Well, the body's not that different. We can start by using the right fuel--whole meat, vegetables and fruits. In this case, by "whole" I mean in the natural state as opposed to processed meats like hot dogs and whole vegetables/fruits instead of juice or vegetable/fruit products with sweeteners and/or additives.

So how do you lose sensibly? The good news is that if you are eating "plain" whole foods most people don't tend to over-eat the way we do when eating manufactured food-like products. You shouldn't need to use a scale or count calories, at least at first. If you start your day/meal with a nice portion of fatty meat that's one way to knock your appetite down to size. If you tend to over-eat the meat--only in terms of weight loss--then start with a nice leafy salad or other raw vegetables to gain a feeling of comfortable fullness before starting to eat the meat. Whether you use a little raw fruit as an appetizer or dessert doesn't matter. If you start with fruit, though, use your logical side to decide the right amount and then move on to the salad or meat.

If you eat in that way for a month, you are likely to find you feel and look better and your waist and hip measurements may be smaller. If not, don't panic! Your body may have needed a month to adjust to this different way of eating. You may need to eat/drink some probiotic foods/beverages to improve your ability to digest foods. Or, you may need to make SLIGHT adjustments to what you're eating and drinking. For me, that would mean looking at how much cream/honey I'm using in my coffee each morning, how much yogurt I'm eating per day and how many cups of fruit I'm eating. Frankly, I seem to lose weight no matter how much meat/fat/vegetables I eat although if you like starchy vegetables like white/sweet potatoes you may keep an eye on portion size there. The goal is to make sure the portion sizes aren't too generous rather than to eliminate any of the foods you're eating.

So, if the first month of ancestral eating causes you to drop some body fat that's terrific but it's not the end of the world if you don't. This is a slow, steady process and to reach the destination we'll make gentle use of the gas/steering. In the second half of the month, and in the months to come, we can talk about other strategies such as how many meals are eaten per day, the importance of bone broths and organ meats, etc. For now, let's just keep it simple!

In Part 3, we'll talk about the relationship between your health and moving around a lot.

Happy New Year! Go Badgers (Wisconsin)

2012-01-02T17:30:00.000-08:00

Hope you're having/had a great holiday! I'm still working on my next post, but here are a few holiday pics:

Breakfast

Bailey

Pippen

Taco

Not Watching the Game

Weight Loss Tactics for 2012 - Part I

2012-01-01T20:33:00.000-08:00

If you have a goal to lose weight this year, there are a few things you'll want to consider. The points I've listed below will be a series of posts over the next week or so:

Your chances for success will be improved if you eat in a way that minimizes physical hunger while helping you to recognize and manage emotional hunger.
It's better to let weight loss occur slowly and comfortably rather than punishing yourself with harsh restrictions that may cause you to give up and even gain more weight than you started with.
Light activity such as walking and doing household chores are helpful for both health and weight loss. Again, you don't have to punish yourself but the more you can move around the better.
It's possible to lose weight on many different diets but you'll enjoy the best health results if you eat healthy whole foods while you're losing and doing so will make it easier for you to keep the weight off.
Emotional highs/lows must be carefully managed to stay on course with weight loss, particularly if you are a binge eater.

Avoiding/Managing Hunger. Since you want to lose weight and we're coming off the holidays, I'm going to assume you've been eating at least some highly sweetened foods such as baked goods. If you now change to eating healthy whole foods (meat, vegetables, fruits) you are probably going to experience emotional hunger.

What is the difference between physical and emotional hunger? Physical hunger occurs when you have absorbed and used the nutrients from the last food you ate. Now, if you're like me you're carrying around excess body fat, and you're not in any danger of starving, but your body would much rather work on new food than go to the trouble of releasing stored fat. Physical hunger is fine and it's not going to spoil your weight loss effort. You can and do ignore physical hunger until it's convenient to eat.

Emotional hunger is a different story. Have you ever gone into the kitchen and opened the fridge or cupboard and thought, "There's nothing in here to eat?" That's emotional hunger, because you're looking at a lot of food and if it was physical hunger everything would look GOOD. Emotional hunger is a craving for a specific food or type of food and nothing else will do. It is almost always something that's not healthy or nutritious--think chips or ice cream or cookies. The irony of emotional hunger is that you don't really need the food you're craving but the urge is much more powerful and upsetting than true hunger. You "need" the food and it can become the most important thing in your world at that moment.

So, if your attempt to lose weight is going to succeed it's important to avoid physical hunger by eating the right things. And avoiding physical hunger will also be an important piece in your efforts to manage emotional cravings. How you do that will probably change over time, but for now just remember that you FEED physical hunger and DISTRACT emotional hunger.

Feed your physical hunger. What are your favorite meats, vegetables and fruits? Fill your fridge, freezer and cupboards with them. Read this post about what an ancestral eating shopping list looks like.

One of the best things you can do is get out the slow-cooker and make a nice home-made stew. Buy some meat that includes bones, or separate packages of bones and meat, and cook them in the slow-cooker for a few hours. When the meat/bones are simmering nicely add whatever vegetables you wish (remember that corn, barley, rice and noodles are NOT vegetables.) Cook the stew until all the bones are clean and fish them out. Then refrigerate the stew and re-heat a bowl whenever you're hungry. If you're "hungry" but don't want the stew, guess what? That's emotional hunger and we'll address that in a minute. I recommend a thorough re-heating of the stew every 4 days or so if it's not all eaten yet.

Eat your first meal of the day as early or late as you like but here's the rule: the first meal has to be mostly meat and/or eggs. The goal is to eat a filling meal that will take your body a while to digest. Why? If you eat enough meat/eggs to fill you up, you won't be physically hungry for hours. You could eat your slow-cooked stew, but make sure you eat lots of meat. For the first meal, I'd think of something like chuck steak and eggs and use the stew for later meals. You can have a salad with oil and vinegar any time you like and you can have 1 or 2 cups of fruit per day.

If you are going to work, you'll want to take food with you. A portable salad or cut-up vegetables, a piece of fruit, a can of tuna (in olive oil) or salmon, leftover meat or boiled eggs, etc. Take plenty because you don't want to be at the mercy of vending machines, cafeteria or restaurant.

Distract your emotional hunger. Okay, back to the cupboard "with nothing in it." Make sure that's true--before you begin trying to lose weight, get rid of all the foods you don't want to eat. If you're going to try ancestral eating, that means giving away or discarding foods that include grains or sugar or soy or processed seed oils. Pretty much everything in a bag or a box with a list of ingredients is probably not a good match for ancestral eating. Let's just say, if cravings strike you don't want a cupboard full of chips and cookies!

Since you're not physically hungry, real food won't be appealing and that's your signal that you are suffering from emotional hunger. You don't want to feed that, you want to distract it.

If weather permits, this is a great time to go for a walk or a drive because movement is good for you and it may temporarily kill cravings. Take a shower or clean out a storage closet. If you have a pet, groom it or play with it. Do a Google search on "ancestral eating" or "paleo diet." If you have a yard, do something outside.

Update 1/15/12: Check out this link on the subject of distracting emotional hunger from Health on TODAY.

If you are at work, catch up on phone calls or change what you're working on (if you can) so you have to concentrate. At lunch time or after work you can get up and do the walk or drive.

Good options are to go to big-box stores or large businesses that don't offer food such as clothing, hardware or garden centers. Walk around, read labels, etc.

Social contact may be great or risky--being around people can be a great distraction but it needs to be situations or people that won't tempt you with the foods you're trying to avoid.

You will do whatever is most important to you. If losing weight and enjoying better health are what you truly want, your physical and emotional hunger can't stop you and neither can other people. You may need to learn new habits and you may need to fight against old habits and attitudes.

It's about you. You'll only struggle if you aren't sure what you want OR if you believe that you don't have control. Well, you do have control of what you eat and, to a great extent, how you feel. You can make it happen and you aren't alone. There are web sites, books and forums available to provide information and reinforce your new reality.

To go directly to Part 2, click here.

It's Time, and I'm Ready! Part #3

2011-12-30T09:14:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! I'm posting this on New Year's Eve so here's hoping you've had a great holiday season and you're excited about what you can do to make your life rich and enjoyable in 2012.

This will be the final update to this post because the "transition" back to ancestral eating turned out to be a ho-hum event with no difficulties whatsoever. Wednesday morning I will measure my waist and hips, begin my 2012 walking program and take my picture for use in a month or so to evaluate my progress.

I lived in Wisconsin for many years and on Tuesday the Badgers are in the Rose Bowl. My menu will be ancestral but I plan to park myself in my recliner, celebrate, and watch lots of football. Food-wise, no major adjustments will be needed for weight loss but I do plan to moderate some of my daily portions starting Wednesday:

Full-fat yogurt will drop from 2/3 cup to 1/2 c daily
Total fruit will be reduced from 2-3 cups daily to 1 c or less
Coffee will be reduced from 2 mugs to 1 (only because I'm not willing to reduce the cream/honey I add per mug. I'd rather have 1 yummy mug than 2 yucky ones)

All together, the changes should make the difference between maintenance and slow-but-steady weight loss. Portions of meat and vegetables will stay the same (basically, as much as I want) but that will be subject to change if I don't lose weight in January.

If you have established a goal to lose weight after the holidays I strongly encourage you to measure your waist and your hips and make sure you can find the note in a month. You could measure other places, of course, but if your waist and/or hips are losing inches you can bet the rest of you is doing the same. Also, you can calculate your waist-to-hips-ratio.

Plan to re-measure about once per month. If you do it more often than monthly, you have an anxiety issue so just chill. :-)) Okay, okay, if you HAVE to you can measure more often but don't expect dramatic changes every week. It's also a good idea to take your picture so you can compare monthly photos and monitor your progress. If you find yourself struggling to get your weight loss started, check back here. I plan to offer a few suggestions in my next post.

In my case, I admit I expected the end of holiday splurging to be a much different experience, based on my history of binge eating and sugar addiction, but I suffered no cravings for sugar and I'm happy as a clam to be back eating grain-free, sugar-free, additive-free whole foods. During the holiday season I have been very lazy so an important goal for me will be walking every other day until I can go at least 2 miles. When I can do that, I'll start using 3-day cycles in which I walk twice and rest once.

Today was very spur-of-the-moment and totally off plan. Oops! The shrimp are still in the freezer and will probably be my New Year's Day meal. I had my usual coffee and yogurt/fruit in the morning but I was on the go after mid-day and wound up grabbing things like a chunk of fried pork rind (2" by 5-6") a grapefruit, a 7.5 oz can of wild salmon which I ate as is--just stirred the juice back into the meat and sprinkled on a little salt, and my usual bottle of water kefir.

New Year's Eve Dinner :-))

It was early evening by the time I sat down and enjoyed a leafy salad, and by then I didn't feel like eating anything else. It was fun to just do what felt right. Overall, what I ate was probably better suited to my state of mind that if I had forced myself to fix a fancy dinner.

Part II - late on 12/30/11

Happy New Year's Eve! (posted late on the 30th) My first day went well! For breakfast, I chopped a fermented fig and a ripe persimmon and mixed them in 1/2 c full-fat yogurt.

I fixed my salad at about 1 pm and sat in my recliner munching slowly in the way I used to enjoy a bag of chips. I ate my beef stew at about 2 pm; since it was a same-day stew the bones weren't quite completely clean so I dished some bones into the bowl and had a great time gnawing off the last of the cartilage and sucking out the last clinging bits of marrow. I also went back for seconds, so the bones in the second photo represent both helpings. On slow-cooked stews that have cooked longer, been chilled and then re-heated, the bones are clean and I just toss them.

Bone Broth Stew

Nothing Left But Bones

I don't know whether to be happy or disappointed, but I had no cravings today. I mean, where's the heroic sacrifice? I had a plan ready and my willpower was poised to execute but nothing happened. It was anti-climactic, really. Okay, I'm kidding. It was a relief to have this first day go so well and it gives me confidence going into tomorrow.

I expect stronger cravings on New Years Eve. At the very least I want to be mentally prepared in case they strike hard. I'm going to do some laundry at mid-day to keep me away from the fridge for a while and then I'll eat my main meal later in the day so there's less time to think about food afterward.

My planned menu is suitably festive: fried pork rind (I buy a brand that comes in large chunks rather than machine-cut pieces,) salad, shrimp and eggs sauteed in butter and--wait for it--broccoli cooked in bone broth. In honor of the holiday, I'll finish with one square of 90% chocolate. You may not have noticed, but you can now buy chocolate bars at your regular supermarket that are nearly pure chocolate. I find that greater than 90% doesn't taste good enough to be a treat but 90% or even 85% tastes great without causing binge cravings.

My New Year's Eve will be quiet. The grandkid is spending the night at a friend's place and I will watch the Eastern time zone's celebration with a fizzy water kefir.

Part 1: Originally posted on the morning of 12/30/2011

I'm calling an early end to my holiday "open eating" season. The plan was to stop splurging on Jan 3rd, but for a number of reasons today is the day. Don't worry, I will have home-made eggnog and other ancestral goodies this weekend but I won't eat any more processed/commercial treats.

One reason for the accelerated schedule is that it isn't fun any more. I mean, in the past few days I'd look back at what I ate each day and the food that tasted the best was never one of the splurges--it was the yogurt and fruit, or the brussels sprouts cooked in bone broth, or the bacon bites. So why bother?

Two other reasons for stopping are more ominous: It was becoming important to have a neolithic treat every day AND I was starting to feel physical signs of an unhappy GI tract--tingling down my arms, uneasy stomach and bloated gut. It really makes you wonder why I would start to feel strong urges to eat more of food that didn't even agree with me, doesn't it?

So, if you're also trying to shift what you eat--a little or a lot--I invite you to join me as I head back to the health and well-being of ancestral eating. If you just want to keep me company as I jot down my results for the next few days that would be great too. I will post daily updates at the top of this post for the next week or so until I feel confident I am safely through New Years weekend and back onto my ancestral routine.

This morning is easy--two mugs of coffee. I always put a little heavy cream and a tsp of honey in mine and I happen to think it eases any urge to eat first thing. Others drink it black. You do what you want, but I do best with a light "breakfast" at mid-day and my main meal in the afternoon.

My breakfast will be about half a cup of home-made yogurt with a fermented fig (from my water kefir brew) and a banana. Doesn't sound like a diet, does it? It isn't; it's a lifestyle and you don't punish yourself, you just ease your way to better shape. Some in the ancestral community avoid dairy but I do use cream, butter and yogurt although in moderate amounts.

I don't plan to eat a snack today but if I feel I need one I'll eat a can of sardines. With or without the sardines I will drink a bottle or two of home-made water kefir.

My main meal will be a salad and a large bowl of bone broth stew. I started the stew this morning but first let's talk about the salad. I like rich-colored leaf lettuce. It tastes good and has lots of volume to make me feel like I've eaten a lot of food. I add a green onion and some celery (think crunch) and some cucumber. Oil and vinegar with a little salt and pepper and it's great to sit and crunch the salad. I sit in my recliner and I take my time to slowly munch my way through the bowl. It should be a relaxing interval rather than an intense workout for the jaw.

Okay, about the stew. At a local market, I found 2 small packages of inexpensive meat/bones--a hunk of marrow bone sliced into several thin slices and a cross-cut piece of shank. I also found a small package of 3 cross-sections of beef tail. All together, the meat/bone items cost about $7 and the meat/broth will be good for at least 3 meals. Since I always have bone broth on hand, I didn't put water on the meat after I seared it in fat from the previous stew--I added rich broth and vegetables from the previous batch. I brought it all to a boil and it will simmer gently all day until I'm ready to eat it.

Bone Broth Stew

Note: I added a lot of broth to the bowl after taking the photo; I just wanted the solids to show up well. I won't add vegetables today as there are brussels sprouts and carrots I added a day or two ago, but whenever the stew runs out of meat or vegetables I just add what I want. I frequently add a dose of cod liver oil to the broth just before eating (not into the main stew.) I will eat as much as I want, there's no need to walk away hungry. The salad will take care of portion control anyhow.

If you're not comfortable without breakfast, have the meat of your choice plus eggs. If you want a meal in the evening, have the meat of your choice and 1 or 2 vegetables. Something like asparagus and maybe 1/3 of a sweet potato or half of a white one with butter.

Talk to you tomorrow!

On the Edge of the Precipice

2011-12-28T08:43:00.000-08:00

A little dramatic with the title, don't you think? After all, I am a pudgy grandma and not the type you'd imagine standing on the edge of a precipice.

And yet I am. After a life of binge eating and yo-yo dieting, it appears I've finally found the solution in ancestral eating. It took months, but I can now "hear" the signals my body gives when I eat good/bad things.

I've done so well in 2011 that I deliberately chose to splurge for the holidays. In the past, I had to be perfect on any diet because the first time I "fell off the wagon" it was the beginning of a binge that lasted until I regained all my weight back and then continued on to an even higher weight. I need to know if that has really changed. So, on November 15th I officially declared an "open eating" season.

So far, so good, but I'd be lying if I pretended not to be nervous about the upcoming end of open season on January 3rd.

On the good side, I have had a specific treat or two on a given day rather than anything close to a binge and I have comfortably had no treats at all on many days. I made a bad choice when I tested my wheat tolerance with shortbread, but home-made eggnog and 85% chocolate were fine. I even ate ice cream once and nothing terrible happened. Extra fruit on my yogurt has just been extra fruit. On the bad side, though, I have been thinking about food more and have noticed that I'm feeling cravings late in the day sometimes although I easily ignore them.

So here I stand, knowing I can either turn and walk away toward the healthy ancestral eating that resulted in the loss of half my excess body fat OR I can throw myself off the cliff and dive into bags and boxes of processed foods. Obviously, my rational side fully intends to turn and walk away but that other, compulsive and self-destructive side is hovering near the edge.

Why did I put myself at risk? Well, I want it all. I want to have an occasional treat and still reach and maintain a normal weight. I want to know that my inner shadows are under control. I want to be able to relax and celebrate major holidays confident in the knowledge that I can and will return to sensible eating.

January 3rd is coming. We'll see what happens then.

Speaking of Eggnog ...

2011-12-26T09:48:00.000-08:00

I grew up on home-made eggnog. We made it one serving at a time whenever we wanted some. The store-bought nog available today just isn't acceptable to my taste buds so I decided to make my own. The goal of my recipe is to have eggnog as thick as store-bought without all the additives.

In today's environment I don't feel safe with raw eggs so my recipe requires heating a milk/egg base. You absolutely need a good thermometer you can clip to the side of the pan so all you have to do is stir and watch the temp.

I also strongly recommend using 2 pans: a larger one that holds boiling water and a smaller one that can be added without boiling water splattering into it. Before turning on the heat, test the water level in the larger pot with the smaller one pressed to the bottom of the larger one. Make sure there's plenty of room for the water to boil without spilling into your eggnog base. The taller the smaller pot is the better, as long as you can stir.

Okay, to make 5+ cups of eggnog I used the following:

3 cups of whole milk (I use organic)
1 c heavy cream (organic)
3 eggs
2 tsp-1tbsp of vanilla as preferred
1 tbsp of sugar or honey (optional)

Put your larger pan with pre-measured water on the heat and bring to a boil. Don't forget to also pour our cold water into another larger pan to use when cooling the base later; check to make sure you can add the smaller pan in, pushed to the bottom, without spilling any water into your eggnog base.

To create and cook the base, put about half the milk/cream into a blender, add the 3 eggs and whip until very well mixed. Make sure you clean your blender after you put the cold mix into the smaller pan for heating, because you'll be whipping the cooked eggnog base in it later and you don't want to add any germs back in.

Pour the eggnog base into the smaller pan and add to the pot of boiling water. Let it heat for a minute or two, stirring constantly, and lower the heat under the larger pan when it comes back to a boil--you really only need an active simmer to heat your eggnog base.

When the base reaches 160F, it will suddenly begin to thicken. Place the hot pan into the cold water bath and keep stirring--you don't want scrambled eggs! After a couple minutes it will be starting to cool and you can pour the hot base into your (cleaned) blender. Whip it and it should have the texture of a very thick milkshake.

Pour the still-warm base into a large bowl or pitcher; you'll need to spoon the last of the base out of the blender as it's so thick. Add the vanilla and the rest of the milk/cream plus the sugar/honey if desired.

The eggnog should still be pretty thick after you add the milk/cream. Put it into the fridge until nice and cold--you'll never want store-bought again! I sprinkle nutmeg on mine; I'm a non-drinker but with or without the nutmeg you may also want to add a tiny bit of rum.

Fun Is Not Spelled "Food"

2011-12-25T09:28:00.000-08:00

Ah, the joy of a holiday morning.

I can catch him--he did!

I surprised my grandson with a stocking of goodies, trinkets and a gaming chat-set although I think I got a better happy reaction from him with the home-made eggnog. He's hooked for life!

I shared the eggnog with some friends yesterday and I'm lucky to be friends with such enjoyable and wonderful people.

Puff of Smoke

Buzz Lightyear

Each of my 2 kitties got a catnip toy and some catnip to roll in, so we're currently having a wild kitty rodeo. They are ROWDY!

Taco (head dog)

Pippen

The 3 toy dogs each got a squeak toy with 2 slices of dog jerky. They campaigned for 3, but then they gave up and played with their toys.

Bailey the Beserker

I'm sipping on eggog myself and I've resolved to never buy another container of store-bought because it just doesn't compare to organic milk/cream, organic eggs and real vanilla (plus a little sugar, of course--it is a holiday after all.)

Life is good when you're eating in a way that makes you feel good and you can share good energies with others.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

2011-12-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

Like many others, I'll be seeing some family members at Christmas and missing others. I derived some comfort from sending gift cards to those far away and I derived additional comfort and some laughs from visiting with friends. And I'm very lucky to have my grandson living with me; when he's not making me feel really old, he makes me feel younger.

I'll be traveling today and eating at a buffet in Vegas. That should be interesting; I'm hoping to find enough "ancestral" foods that I don't have to risk more digestive upset OR feel deprived. Yes, I'm a little wary due to the shortbread I convinced myself would be okay earlier this week. You can read yesterday's post if you want to know more about that sorry episode.

Update: I was very pleased with the foods offered at the buffet at The Fiesta in Henderson, NV. There was good news on 2 counts: the foods I was able to find and how immune I was to the foods that would've been tempting a year ago. On the latter, when I looked at them it was as if they were plaster figurines; I had no interest in eating them. My selections: an orange, a leafy salad with good color, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, a tsp of black-eyed peas and another of chickpeas, pulled pork, beef brisket, crayfish. For dessert I nabbed a small-scoop coconut sweet that had a hint of lemon flavor.

Now the preparations are as done as they're going to be and I plan to eat "bacon bites", some sauteed duck and home-made eggnog.

Have a great holiday!

Why Did I Do That?

2011-12-22T12:00:00.000-08:00

“It’s theholidays—why can’t I have a piece of shortbread?” That’s how it started. Yousee, this year I discovered after a month or 2 of ancestral eating that I havetrouble with wheat. Long-standing health complaints disappeared and I feltbetter than I could ever remember.

So, walkingaround a store last week I saw Walker’s shortbread and thought, “Maybe if Ijust eat one cookie per day it’ll be fine.”

Day 1 – I ateone cookie and felt fine afterward. Maybe this’ll work! Yay!

Day 2 – Wokeup with a stuffy nose. That’s not so bad—I’ll take that if it means I can havea cookie every day. At bedtime, I noticed a little itchiness when I changedclothes for bed. Also a light hacking cough.

Day 3 – Nosea little stuffier. Went for Mexican food and had 2 tacos—the shells were crispso I assume they were corn. (2 hours later) Itchy! I want to scratch myself bloody!(5 hours later) Woke up in the middle of the night and my hip was killing me.Also noticed a little heartburn.

Day 4 – Noseat the level of a mild cold. Still feel some general itching on my skin. I’mthinking those taco shells were at least partially wheat. My brain is foggy and I'm not thinking very quickly. My thumb is swollenand stiff, so either I hurt it somehow or the hip and thumb reacted to thegrain. I now think it’s not a “GI intolerance”for wheat but an allergic reaction.

So, insteadof thinking “one cookie per day will be fine” I’m now thinking, “Why did I dothat?”

Thoughts About Home-Made Yogurt

2011-12-20T16:11:00.000-08:00

Forgive me if I gush about my new hobby, but you know how it is. The new toy gets all the praise.

It's less than 3 weeks since I began making my own yogurt, but by itself that should tell you there isn't a long learning curve. I've been asking myself why I waited so long to start making it, but the answer is that I could never tolerate it before. Since I started drinking water kefir, though, good things have happened and I now handle a dish of yogurt just fine every morning.

Let's Eat!

Because ancestral eating means eating whole foods without fear of animal fats including dairy, I don't make reduced-fat yogurt. In fact, I enhance my whole milk with heavy cream. Fats have been wrongly accused of causing heart disease when research now shows the opposite--low fat diets increase your chance of suffering heart disease. If you want to read more about that, here's a link to a relevant article. However, if you want to make reduced-fat yogurt then just buy reduced-fat milk.

Here are my first reactions to making yogurt:

I can't believe how easy it is!
I love having control of how much/little fat is in the yogurt
I love having control of how much I make each time rather than having to buy containers that are too large/small
I love the flavor--the plain yogurt isn't sweet but it definitely tastes like a dairy product unlike the commercial ones that taste like sweeteners, thickeners and stabilizers
I love the texture. I'm already successfully producing a nice thick yogurt that mixes easily with fruit and is smooth on the tongue either plain or mixed
I like the fact that my home-made has a full complement of live, active cultures and has no appreciable shelf life as I make it every 3 days

And that's just the beginning. In case you're curious, I'll detail a few facts:

I bought a yogurt maker. Living in a 5th wheel RV, temperatures are comfortable but quite variable. In winter, it gets cool overnight and in summer it's quite warm despite 2 air conditioners and a ceiling fan. I bought one that allows me to use my own container of preferred size. Many people are able to make yogurt without a yogurt maker, though, and advice is easy to fine online.
I buy organic whole milk and heavy cream (the cream also goes in my coffee.) I purposely tried mixtures of different strengths--milk plus a little cream, half/half and mostly cream. My strong favorite is 1.5 cups of whole milk and 1/2 cup of cream. It sets up beautifully but still has a milky taste.
Few supplies are needed other than the yogurt maker. I use a stainless steel bowl for heating the milk/cream, a silicone spatula to stir, my full-purpose glass measuring cup, an instant-read thermometer and 2 2-cup ceramic mugs-with-handles that are nice for handling the warm liquid and yogurt. The only things I purchased for the yogurt project were the 2 2-cup mugs and a package of culture starter.
To make the yogurt, you heat the milk/cream to 185 degrees, then cool to 110. You then add the starter culture (I used the one I bought for the first batch only) or 1 tbsp live-culture yogurt per cup of liquid. I reserve 2 tbsp of yogurt from each batch to start the next.
My yogurt is ready in about 5 hours; I cool it briefly then cover and put it in the fridge. Right now I'm using about 2/3 cup per day.

New Batch

Sample for Next Batch

Instead of staring in bewilderment at the supermarket's yogurt display, looking in vain for full-fat yogurt without additives, I now open the fridge and take out my creamy fresh yogurt and all I have to do is decide which fruit sounds good today.

Resources: The most complete information I've found about making yogurt at home is at makeyourownyogurt and I recommend you check it out.

Holiday Splurge: Yogurt as a Between Meal Dessert

2011-12-17T11:04:00.000-08:00

The best things about my recipe are that I'm using home-made, full-fat yogurt and there are no sweeteners used.

If you aren't making yogurt, then look for plain unsweetened yogurt with no- or few additives as they basically make yogurt taste like something else. My favorite part of my home-made is that it still tastes like a dairy product. I can and will eat it plain, but only to keep losing weight. Once I reach my desired weight I plan to eat it this way every day.

I start with a ripe banana. Mash half of it coarsely with a fork and sprinkle with cinnamon. Add your yogurt. I use about 2/3 cup of yogurt; you should start with your preferred portion and, if it's much more or less than 2/3 cup you may want to adjust the fruit quantities from what I describe.

Once the mashed banana and cinnamon are stirred into the yogurt, slice the other half of the banana and add a handful of either sliced or whole grapes in your desired quantity. Gently mix with your spoon and EAT! The mashed banana sweetens the yogurt but not so much that the other fruit tastes sour.

To enhance the flavors, I add a few raw pecan or walnut halves for contrast.

Variations can include replacing the grapes with any of these: kiwi, sweet apple, pineapple (preferably fresh), berries.

Brewing Water Kefir, part 2

2011-12-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

If you aren’tfamiliar with the basic process of making water kefir I strongly recommendreading part 1 of this recipe—or basic recipes on other sites—before readingthis article.

Sometime inthe past day or two you started a new batch of water kefir and now we’re goingto discuss ways of flavoring it and/or creating home-made sodas.

First,though, let’s review the overall daily routine: you need to feed your kefirgrains by starting a new batch and you need to do something with the waterkefir that is now fully brewed.

Feeding the Kefir Grains. This involves preparing a new sugarwater solution in one of your glass mixing bowls (steps 1-5 in part 1 of thisrecipe), straining the finished water kefir into the other mixing bowl andrinsing your pitcher. Then rinse the kefir grains by running clear un-chlorinatedwater through the strainer. If they have multiplied, just put the amount ofgrains you need—usually a cup or so—back into the pitcher.

Fermented Fruit--Sweet not Sour!

If the fruitin the cheesecloth was new yesterday, you can just rinse it and put it back inthe pitcher. I always take out the now plump-and-juicy fig because I eat it onmy yogurt, so I have to put in a new one. If the fruit has been used more thantwice you should eat or discard it and rinse the cheesecloth, then make up anotherset of fruit (step 8 in part 1) and put the sack into the pitcher with thekefir grains.

Finally,pour the new sugar solution into the pitcher and stir so the grains get a niceflow of liquid. The actual amount of new sugar solution should be based on thenumber of people for whom you’re making it. Also, if you mix fruit juice with your waterkefir for a second fermentation, you’ll need less basic water kefir per day; ifyou don’t, you’ll need more. Just remember, it’s 1 tbsp of sugar for each cupof water. Cover the pitcher again and place it into a shady corner or cupboard.

Too many water kefir grains? If your water kefir grains are healthy andhappy, they are likely to multiply—mine frequently double in volume in a day ofbrewing. If you don’t have anyone who wants some and you don’t need them all,just measure a nice amount of rinsed grains into your pitcher for the nextbatch and throw the rest away. You can also eat them, they taste very sweet andnice and have a tapioca-like texture, or give them away or put some around yourplants.

Too much water kefir? Since you need to keep enough microbes—I’dsay at least a cup—to ensure a healthy community of them, and you need to feedthem every day with new sugar water, the truth is you may wind up with more water kefir than youwish to drink. At the end of the recipe I’ll mention resting the grains, butthat’s a vacation or emergency thing rather than a casual practice so you needto give yourself permission to give away excess water kefir, feed it to yourplants occasionally, or (gasp!) throw some away.

Using the water kefir as is. You don’t HAVE toflavor or bottle your basic water kefir. You can just put it into a regularpitcher/container and refrigerate it—I also like a room-temperature cup of the freshkefir I just took out of the pitcher. The kefir is teeming with those probioticmicrobes that are so good for you so unflavored, the water kefir will continueto get more and more sour and at some point you’ll probably find it undrinkablealthough it might make a fun substitute for vinegar.

If you sealit in an airtight bottle (I use the old-fashioned kind with long necks andrubber stoppers on wire brackets) it will still get more and more sour but itwill also get fizzy. For good carbonation, leave it at room temperature foranother day and “burp” the bottle to ease pressure before you chill it.

Pineapple Water Kefir

Flavoring the water kefir. If you browse the internet you’llfind many recipes for flavoring your water kefir. Two simple ones are addingvanilla extract or some grated fresh ginger (or ginger extract.) There are alsoextracts for other flavors such as root beer. If you don’t want to add otherflavors but you need it to be sweeter you can just add your favorite sweetenerbut in that case I’d do it as you serve it rather than before chilling.

My preferredmethod for flavoring my water kefir is to add fruit or fruit juice. If you usefresh fruit, you’ll want to mash or puree it so the microbes have lots of surface area to work on,and you’ll want to strain out the juice with cheesecloth or a fine strainer. Soready-made juice is more convenient.

Organic Grape Kefir

You’ll needto experiment to find the mixtures and flavors you like best. I normally mix50% juice and 50% water kefir. It’s going to ferment again, remember, so themicrobes will eat most of this sugar too. I’ve tried many flavors and mycurrent favorite is blueberry. WARNING: I bought organic cranberry juice but it killed the probiotic bugs and didn't carbonate. I don't know if it's a lack of sugar or too much acid but I don't use cranberry juice anymore. I've had great results with pomegranate juice but I usually mix it with another juice so the total mix is only 20-25% pomegranate.

Now, whenyou buy 100% juice blueberry (and don’t buy juice with additives—just mixturesof juice) there will be other juices shown such as apple and that’s fine. Whenyou first mix it, you may not taste much blueberry but after the secondfermentation and chilling the blueberry flavor really pops out and, with thecarbonation, it’s delightful. To make the pineapple water kefir pictured above, I pureed a fresh pineapple and strained the juice through cheesecloth. It turned out excellent, like fresh pineapple juice with a zing and fizzy bubbles.

Start withyour favorite juices and see which ones are the best match for the kefir.

The second fermentation. All this means is that you give your liquid more time at roomtemperature for the microbes in the water kefir to eat the sugar out of the fruitjuice; if you don’t want carbonation just put it in a pitcher or container witha loose lid.

If you dowant bubbles, use your funnel and pour the juice/kefir mix into bottles andleave a lot of space at the top.

Ready for another day on the counter!

For instance, I use the long-necked bottlesand I fill only to the top of the wide body of the bottle. If you fill thebottle too full and make it airtight there’s a risk the pressure of carbonationcould blow the top right off the bottle. Leave the bottles at room temperaturefor 12-24 hours. The actual time will depend on how sweet your like yourhome-made sodas. Since the fermentation will continue for a while after thebottles go into the fridge, I put mybottles into the fridge when the soda is still lightly sweet. “Burp” thebottles by carefully opening the tops and re-sealing them, and place them inthe fridge.

And that’sit, except every day you get to drink either fresh or carbonated water kefir orboth! With different flavors, it should never get boring. To get the maximumbenefit from the probiotic microbes in your water kefir, drink it between mealsso your stomach is empty and the probiotic bacteria can sail right through your (hostile) stomach and intoyour (friendly) gut.

Resting your water kefir grains. It’s risky to stop the daily routineas the grains may deteriorate or die. If you’ve given grains to friends andfamily, you have a back-up and you can just toss them if you wish. Otherwise,the easiest way to stop your daily routine for a vacation or other situation isto put some grains in a 2-cup jar, pour in new sugar water solution and coverthe jar with a coffee filter. Put the jar in the fridge and the microbes willslow way down and not starve in a reasonable time of a week or two.

When youwant to use them again, expect them to take a few days to get back into fullaction but make sure you give them new sugar solution every day.

I’ve alsoread that you can freeze them but I haven’t tried that. And, of course, you canbuy a new starter set of grains.

An Excess of Holiday Ham?

2011-12-16T07:31:00.000-08:00

Yesterday my day started as usual, with 2 mugs of coffee, each with a little heavy cream and about 1tsp of honey. At mid-day, I had my usual dish of 2/3 c. home-made yogurt with a banana and a fermented fig (more on the fig later.)

So, in late afternoon, I decided to have some ham. This is not a strict "ancestral" ham because it's not from a pastured hog and I'm sure it was sugar cured. You know the type I mean, a ready-to-eat shoulder with the bone still in. I have plans for that bone, but for now I'm just going to freeze it.

Now about my meal--normally, I make a leafy green salad that marinates for a bit in vinegar and olive oil. And I usually have raw and/or cooked vegetables, and maybe a piece of whole fruit for dessert.

But not yesterday. No, I carved myself a huge slice of ham from around that bone, browned the slice of ham in a skillet and made a feast of it. It was about the regular thickness for a ham steak, but I would normally eat about half of a round with the salad and veggies.

That slice filled my dinner plate! And nothing ever tasted better. Ham has never been my favorite meat, so I only have it once or twice per year, but I am a woman who hasn't had refined sugar in 8 months (well, except for that binge in August) and my taste buds actually work now. The sweet, delicate flavor of the ham inspired me to eat that whole slice with gusto.

How, you ask, was I punished for eating a large meal of nothing but ham?

Umm . . . well . . . I WASN'T! When I woke up this morning, alert and well-rested, I had that tell-tale feeling when you know you've lost a little fat overnight. When I walked my dogs I was light on my feet and I had tons of energy; my waist was the same size as it was on Nov. 15th when I went on my holiday rules.

So, the moral of the story is that if you really feel like a big meal go for nothing but meat. It's not the ham that'll make you fat, it's the bread and mashed potatoes and pie. There's no such thing as an excess of holiday ham!

P.S. The fig I mentioned above is a dehydrated (unsweetened, unsulphured) fig I put in the pitcher when I brewed the previous day's water kefir. It soaks up the brew and becomes the juiciest, most delicious fig you ever had. I change out the other fruit every second or third day, but I have to put in a new fig every day because I just can't resist them.

Brewing Water Kefir, part 1

2011-12-15T08:41:00.000-08:00

This recipeis divided into 2 parts because I normally brew my water kefir twice. In thispart, I will talk about what water kefir is, how to get started and how to brewa batch of “fresh or raw” water kefir. The second part will talk about recipesfor mixing and bottling water kefir to create home-made fruit sodas.

What is water kefir? If you do an Internet search for“water kefir” many detailed articles will come up so I will keep it simple:water kefir is a probiotic drink (think good microbes for your gut) that isfermented in a pitcher or jar on your counter or in a cupboard. There are 2 types of kefir,actually: dairy kefir and water kefir. I will talk only about water kefir.

Do I really want to make water kefir?

You shouldask yourself this question before spending any money even though water kefir isreally cheap to make. I thoroughly enjoy the daily routine of bottling waterkefir and starting another batch, but it’s a commitment. You know, when you geta puppy you have to walk it e v e r y da y. Well, with water kefir you need to do the daily routine of feeding thekefir grains. Once every great while you can rest the grains in the fridge, but95% of the time you need to rinse and feed them.

How can I get started brewing waterkefir? If you don’tknow anyone who makes water kefir (they’ll frequently have spare microbes theycan share) you can purchase some of the microbes (commonly called water kefir“grains”) online. You’ll need to assemble some ingredients and supplies, manyof which you already have, including some sugar—I use organic unrefined whole cane sugar from Rapunzel. The sugar is for the microbes, not you!

Ingredients:

Sugar(different people use different types but I stick with the least processed,most complete type called rapadura
Water kefirgrains
Baking soda
Bone meal oregg shell (cleaned)
Salt
Fresh lemon
Organicunsulphured/unsweetened raisins
Unsulphured/unsweetenedfresh or dehydrated figs
Non-chlorinatedwater with normal minerals (don’t use city water or distilled; use well water,spring water, etc.)

Supplies:

a glass 2-qtpitcher, fairly wide-mouthed
2 mixingbowls
Cheesecloth,a piece large enough to make a 2-layer piece about a foot long
A largestrainer, either plastic or stainless steel
2 glass2-cup measuring cups
1 tbsp plastic or stainless steel measuring spoon
Wooden spoon
Coffeefilter, rubber band

Note: The items that I said “2 of” are forconvenience and you could get by with only one.

How do I start drinking water kefir?

The recipe belowwill make 4 cups of water kefir, which is as much as a typical starter set ofwater kefir grains (several tbsp) can produce. Be prepared for the first fewbatches to be weak or sour as your kefir grains adjust to your home's water and temperature.

You cantaste the water kefir at all steps at any time during fermentation; it will besweet at first, because it’s just sugar water, then it will become less andless sweet as the microbes eat the sugar. At first just taste a tablespoon or so once or twice per day. Let your GI tract get usedto the good microbes you are introducing. When the kefir is done (not too sweet, not too sour) you should plan to toss the first batch or two—NOT thekefir grains, just the strained liquid--after drinking your small amount.

By the thirdbatch, you should notice that it’s tasting better. That will be because yourkefir grains are settling in and you are getting used to the taste. Graduallyincrease how much you drink every day. With luck, your kefir grains are nowmultiplying and you can increase to 6 cups of sugar solution if desired. Justremember, 1 tbsp of sugar for each cup of water.

I drink 2-5cups of water kefir every day, but I took 2 weeks or so to build up to thatamount and you may need more or less time to become fullyaccustomed to this new beverage.

How do I make a batch of water kefir?Okay, let’s go!

Kefir Grains

Fruit for Fermentation

Measure outone cup of water. Again, this should NOT be chlorinated or distilled; you needwell or spring water.
Add onetablespoon of the Rapunzel sugar for EACH cup of water you will have in thepitcher; for the first batch, start with 4 tbsp (you can use any type of sugar,but if you use refined sugar you need toadd some blackstrap molasses—check online for recipes using other sugars.)
Heat the cupof water and sugar just hot enough to dissolve the sugar. While it’s heating,measure 3 cups of cool water into a mixing bowl.
Stir theheated water and sugar until the sugar is fully dissolved. Pour it into the 3cups of cool water. If you put your hand on the outside of the mixing bowl, itshould barely feel warm or room temperature.
Add tinypinches of the salt, baking soda and bone-meal/egg-shell into the sugar waterthat’s still in the mixing bowl.
Remove yourkefir grains from the container or storage liquid and rinse them with cool cleanwater (not part of your brewing liquid, and again it can’t be chlorinated.) Putthem into the glass pitcher you’ll use to brew the water kefir.
Pour thepleasantly cool sugar water into the pitcher.
The fig, ¼fresh lemon (well scrubbed on the outside) and 6-8 golden raisins should betied up in the cheesecloth. You don’t have to use the cheesecloth but it makesit much easier to discard the used fruit later; without it, you’ll be pickingthe raisins out of the kefir grains. The lemon is important because it addsacid to the brewing solution.
Drop thecheesecloth sack into the pitcher.
Put a coffeefilter or two over the mouth of the pitcher and hold in place with a rubberband. Put the pitcher on the counter where it won’t get direct sun or in acupboard.

Brand New Brew Solution

That’s it!If you’re around, stir it occasionally with the wooden spoon. Check the brewafter about 24 hours. If it no longer tastes sugary sweet and the color of the liquidis much lighter (with my whole sugar, it goes from dark brown to honey color) thebatch is done. The longer you let it brew the more sour it will get. If it’s not done, you can let it brew up to 48 hours but with the first batch or two plan to prepare new sugar water (steps 1-5 above) after 24 hours because you are trying to encourage the grains to grow.

Strain the water kefir you're going to drink or store into a cup or container. Any liquid you're not going to keep can be strained into the sink. Rinse yourkefir grains--now in the strainer--in cool, clean non-chlorinated water and put them in the newliquid and also rinse your pitcher out.

Ready to Strain and Drink/Flavor

Freshly Strained Water Kefir--Good!

If your grains multiply, you will reach a point where you need to make more water kefir at a time OR you will need to throw some of the grains away--or give them to friends and family. It's good if they grow as it means they're happy and probably making terrific water kefir!

Please note that water kefir grains can starve if left too long afterall the sugar is gone from the brewing water. My water kefir has always beenready after 24 hours. Don't put too many grains in the sugar water or they'll run out of food and could starve.

If you wantto bottle the water kefir you can, but I recommend you just sample and toss thefirst two batches because you’re only drinking small quantities per day anyway.I normally use the bag of fruit at least twice before discarding it, rinsingthe cheesecloth in non-chlorinated water and putting new fruit in it.

Fresh water kefir from the first brew (not yet flavored or carbonated) is not particularly sweet or fruity, although I enjoy about 1/2 cup of it in the morning. It is somewhat like apple cider if you're off sugar, more like vinegar if you have a high-sugar diet. It is, of course, teeming with the good bugs for your gut.

In part 2,we’ll add flavor and seal the water kefir in an airtight bottle or container soit becomes carbonated. If you don't want to add anything for flavor, just seal it loosely if you don't want bubbles and tightly if you do.

Important: If you put water kefir into an airtight bottle or jar, it should be "burped" once or twice a day to release carbon dioxide. After a day or so, put it in the fridge for a day or two and the fermentation will slow down so you can stop worrying about pressure but always open water kefir slowly and move the top carefully in case it's very fizzy.

Resources: I recommend you check out Basic Water Kefir Instructions and this YouTube video

My Holiday Rules

2011-12-14T16:36:00.000-08:00

Since April2011, I have lost nearly 40 pounds. Since September, when I first measured it, Ihave lost 4 inches from my waist. Since I improved how I feel and my energy level at the same time, I feel good about the way I approached eating in 2011.

My holidayrules make sense to me, but they may offend ancestral eating purists. First, I definedthe “holiday season” as beginning November 15th and ending February 13, 2012which is my birthday. The general rule for the season is that I will tryto maintain my reduced weight. My intent is to have this time as anannual rest period when I can relax somewhat about nutrition and my weightwhile maintaining an awareness of my health and reactions to food.

As of today,December 13^th, I have maintained the same weight or perhaps lost apound or so since mid-November. It will only get harder in December, of course.For one thing, I spurned all conventional dishes at Thanksgiving and just hitthe ancestral meats, vegetables and fruits hard. Secondly, on a day-to-daybasis the only change I’ve made is eating full-fat yogurt every day. As mentionedpreviously, I make the yogurt at home so I can spike the fat content and avoidadditives.

As we getcloser to Christmas I’m sure I will partake of some conventional treats. I’lljust keep my portions small and keep an eye on my waistline. After New Year’sI expect to go back to typical ancestral eating, and will be in weight lossmode if I did gain at Christmas, but for the Super Bowl and my birthday Iexpect to be naughty again. I will then focus on nutrition and exercise as Idid last year—2012 should be the year I achieve normal weight!

What Does Exercise Look Like for an Older Woman?

2011-12-14T09:10:00.001-08:00

It’s prettysimple!

Start where you are. You may be bed- or chair-bound or youmay be extremely active and always in motion. Those who are already extremelyactive can stop reading now, unless you have a friend you want to encourage, but the rest of us need to talk.

Health isn’tjust a matter of what you eat—it’s also a matter of what you do. Simple thingslike sitting in the sun or wandering around a store can make good contributionsto overall health and well-being.

What we callhealth is really the strength of our bodily processes including movement,digestion and thinking. So regardless of how much you are/aren’t doing now, youcan start where you are and simply decide to make an effort to get a little stronger.

Do what you can plus just a littlemore. If you’ve beenin bed for a while, you aren't going to march out and take a 3-mile walk.Walking to the bathroom may be your goal today. Or even just lifting your armsonce in a while and wiggling your feet. Whatever you can comfortably do, justdo a little more—kind of like holding your breath. You don’t try to suffocate,you just extend the time a little bit. So whatever you’re able to do, do it tothe edge of your comfort level and try to do it just a little bit more.

If you’retired the next day, take a recovery day. With age, we recover more slowly andyou may only want to work on your strength every other day. Or, you may dosomething every day but try to challenge different body parts (walk one day, dolaundry the next.)

If you canwalk around the block, walk a bit past before turning back. If you can walkinto a store and back out, park farther away than usual. If you can walk ½ amile, try to go a few minutes more before turning back.

It’s notjust about your legs either. If you have a dishwasher, wash the dishes by hand.Use a manual can opener instead of an electric one. Push your own groceries and lift the bags one at a time. Clean out your closet. Find things to get up and do!

Every day,without making it painful or too hard, do more little things that work yourbody and activate muscle tone. Yourappetite and your energy may improve, and pretty soon we’ll be talking aboutyou grabbing 2 cans of green beans, or 2 mixing bowls, and doing a few bicepcurls!

Just thinkabout giving up many of your modern conveniences and take the time to do thingsin a more basic and physical way.

Depending on your overall strength, how much you can do may have limits but you may also be surprised to find you can do much more than you thought. Just don't stop stretching what you try to do!

What Does a Typical Menu of Ancestral Eating Look Like?

2011-12-13T12:21:00.000-08:00

One practicein the ancestral eating community that’s been very helpful to me isintermittent fasting aka IF. I have a history of binge eating and I have foundthat eating only 1 or 2 meals per day quiets my urge to binge. So, the firstthing I can tell you about my daily menu is that it currently involves a smallmid-day lunch and a main meal in the afternoon.

I don’texperience sharp hunger or lack of energy. In fact, since I don’t normally eatin the morning I never even think of food and I have plenty of energy even ifmy schedule causes me to miss one or both meals.

Meal #1:This is normally home-made yogurt. I buy organic whole milk and cream; I use ½ c.cream and 1 ½ c whole milk to make 2 cups of yogurt. I also eat fruit with thismeal—one day it may be a whole grapefruit and the next a small salad of a fig,a date and a banana (sliced and mashed into the yogurt.) Per day, I’m eatingbetween a half and a whole cup of yogurt.

Meal #2:This is my main meal. I like to be full when I finish. I start with a leafysalad, usually rich-colored leaf lettuce, chunks of fresh celery includingleaves and slices of English cucumber (all my favorites, you can choose yourown.) I use vinegar and olive oil on the salad and I like to let it marinate abit while I cook the other foods.

I makeslow-cooked stews with strong bone broths at the base. However, most of myactual meals are skillet meals.

Here’s atypical recipe:

Fry 1 or 2 pieces of uncured bacon. The crisp bacon comesout and is usually munched as an appetizer; the bacon fat stays in the skillet.If I don’t use bacon, I will either cut visible fat/skin off my meat/poultry toprovide a little liquid fat or I will skim hardened fat off the top of my currentslow-cooked stew. Another option is a spoon of coconut oil or beef tallow.
Okay, we now have a seasoned skillet with at least a littleliquid fat. I now add any fresh/frozen vegetables that will be part of thefinished meal. They are removed once cooked and fat is added to the pan ifneeded.
The next step is the main piece of meat—could be beef, lamb,poultry, fish, etc.—and cook it until what we’d call medium-rare. Now we startadding things to the skillet, leaving the main meat in it.
Once the meat is nearly cooked, I dump in 1-2 cups ofslow-cooked stew. Ideally, the meat in the stew will be a different kind thanwhat I’ve cooked. The broth in the stew should have a firm gelatin texturecoming out of the fridge; I bring it to an active simmer and let it cook down abit to more of a sauce.
While the broth is simmering in the skillet I’ll add anyfresh/frozen/canned vegetables.

The finalstep is to sit down, munch the salad and enjoy every spoonful/bite of theskillet meal.

Note: My dayof ancestral drinking includes at least one bottle of water kefir; more on thatin another post. I usually drink the water kefir before or well after a mealbecause it is a strong probiotic drink and I want it to sail through my stomachwhen it’s empty.

What Does an Ancestral Shopping List Look Like?

2011-12-13T11:30:00.000-08:00

Sorry if you’redisappointed, but I don’t go out and hunt/gather my food. I go to Safeway. I’vealso ordered some grassfed meat from US Wellness but frankly, I’m on SocialSecurity and I can’t afford to buy grassfed meat exclusively so I also buy alot of chuck on sale.

So, theshopping part of ancestral eating is the easy part. You walk around the outsideof the store and you buy produce, meat and dairy. More on dairy in a minute. You duck quickly into the aisles for a fewthings and you’re done.

In theproduce section, the best choice is organic to the extent your store has it andyour budget can handle it. If you have to compromise, there are lists availableonline of which organic foods are most important. I buy salad greens with richcolor, fresh celery and cucumber. I also rotate a variety of fresh vegetablesand fruits. With the exception of corn, there isn’t much in the produce sectionthat will get you in trouble. It’s okay to grab a bag of nuts as long as theyare unsweetened. Raw nuts are best if available.

Moving on tothe meat section, your first thought should be marrow bones, roasts with bonesin, soup bones, etc. Making bone broth will keep your bones as joints as happyas they can possibly be. You should have bone broth in the form of broth, sauceor stew liquid every single day.

For musclemeat, beef is my staple. I supplement with seafood, either fresh, frozen orcanned and I occasionally eat poultry. Poultry is not preferred choice becausethe type of fat in poultry isn’t as desirable as beef or seafood. When I do buypoultry, I buy Cornish Game Hens, duck or turkey because I like the flavor betterof both the meat and fat. I buy bacon, normally uncured, but I avoid hot dogsand sausages unless they say “no hormones, etc.” In general, buy what YOU likeand just remember to avoid meat choices that lack a normal level of fat(skinless, boneless) or are highly processed. Try to rotate in some organ meatsuch as liver or heart or kidneys.

Okay, now wereach the dairy section. Most people in the ancestral lifestyle eat at leastsome eggs and many eat butter. Some add heavy cream. Beyond that, many avoiddairy. In my case, I am lactose intolerant but I do fine with heavy cream,butter and home-made, full-fat yogurt. I’m more interested in healthy nutritionthan exactly what people ate 10,000 years ago and I find home-made yogurt (without all the commercial additives) is arich, wholesome food. The main problem with milk and other dairy products isthat they have lists of ingredients that are sweeteners, stabilizers and/orpreservatives. They’re not ancestral unless you can find real, whole productsand preferably organic. Even organic products may have additives so be careful.For butter, look for Kerrygold or any brand of butter made using milk frompastured cows.

Okay, nowcomes the scary part—going into the aisles that hold all the tempting andforbidden “Neolithic” foods. I buy coffee, honey, vinegar and olive/coconutoil. End of food list. In my case, I don’t buy any cleaning or hygiene productseither (don’t panic, I use soap nuts and vinegar which can be the basis of afuture post.) If I weren’t already getting my water from a well, I’d also buyspring water for the minerals.

I shouldmention here that I visit health food stores for a few things: I buyunprocessed salt, kelp powder (for the iodine) and cod liver oil. I’ve boughtsome other things but those are the 3 I actually use frequently.

What Does “Ancestral Eating” Mean?

2011-12-13T11:26:00.000-08:00

You may alsohear terms such as paleo, primal, stone age or cave man. They all mean roughlythe same thing—we should eat the foods that best nourish our bodies and containas few additives and contaminants as possible. We should avoid foods andfood-like products that interfere with health.

Throughouthuman history, regardless of location, people ate whole foods they prepared infairly simple ways. They used fermentation and dehydration but they didn’t havetoday’s manufacturing processes. They ate many vegetables and fruits and theyalso ate a variety of meats—pretty much the whole animal.

Until about10,000 years ago people ate little or no grains. As agriculture developed andpopulations grew, people learned to use fermentation and careful preparation tomake grains more digestible. For many people, particularly older ones, grainscause or aggravate autoimmune and digestive problems. Unfortunately, mostmodern grain products focus on rapid production and profitable sale rather thandigestibility.

Dr Kurt Harris did a wonderful job of describing ancestral eating in one page he calls the Archevore Diet . J Stanton at Gnolls.org has another terrific explanation. I also like the "5 basics" described by Paleoista.

Frankly, I think many people waste a lot of time trying to find the "perfect" ancestral-type diet. We don't all thrive on the same mix of foods--I happen to have ancestors who were all far-northern and I don't thrive on tropical foods. What's wrong with that? Should I expect folks with tropical ancestors to thrive on the same foods I do? In general, the farther north your "clan" was from the fewer tropical foods you may find delicious and vice versa.

You don’t really have to go back much farther than 50 years to think about healthier eating.If you are over 60, odds are if you think back to your childhood most adults were slender compared to today.Those who were overweight were said to eat too many sweets—NOT too much fat.People happily buttered their vegetables and ate the fat ontheir meat.

After themeal, they might have home-made cookies or cake or pie. They didn’t drink aliter-plus of soda every day and they didn’t munch constantly on chips or crackers. Eating mass quantities of snacks/desserts was reserved for special occasions.

Ancestraleating is easy:

1. Eat real, whole foods, notmanufactured food-like products

2. Eat a variety of meats including bonebroth and organ meats

3. Eat a variety of vegetables and wholefruits

4. If you can/wish, eat dairy that isorganic and free of additives

5. A few nuts or a little honey are okay but avoid excess

6. Avoid highly processed foods; this includes grains, legumes and sweeteners. No lists of ingredients unless they are real foods!

7. Avoid all oils except olive and coconut; cook with animal fats such as lard, tallow or butter

First Post - Scary!

2011-12-13T09:31:00.000-08:00

First, let me say that I HATE my picture! I've included a small "mug shot" in my profile only because we'll be able to track my continued progress in the coming months. Also, I hope you can see that in addition to being an ancient crone with extremely light skin I am also in pretty good health and said skin is very bright. Trust me, that was not the case last April.

The only photos I have from when I started ancestral eating in April are in paper form, taken over my objections by a close friend. Just imagine 40 more pounds on my 5'4" frame and no more needs to be said. Except that my skin had an unhealthy sallow tone and there was a reddish flush on my cheeks that spoke of inflammation.

I am now 8 months into an ancestral eating lifestyle. The month of August shouldn't really count since I went on 2 neolithic binges, but actually it was my breakthrough month. I haven't been seriously tempted to eat junk since.

Over the next month or so, I will post some foundation information regarding what I eat, my activity level and how I have incorporated probiotic foods into my new lifestyle. Once that is in place, I will post opinions, lessons learned and successes/failures that occur along the way.