Thoughts About Ancestral Eating

Note: I read and enjoy every single comment. At the moment, though, the darn blog isn't letting me reply. My comments disappear into thin air--maybe the universe is trying to tell me something?

I've been somewhat philosophical this weekend, pondering what I/we mean when we say we practice ancestral eating. There are many iterations out there, after all.

I was reading a great blog post over at Paleo for Women and her comments were centered around the recent paleo conference, paleo fx.

Two of her comments caught my eye: eating lots of fruit, and being ashamed of it, and "I suspect the paleo diet’s infatuation with fat with some day be debunked." She wasn't saying fat was bad, by the way, but questioning the assumption that it's somehow holy and the only good body fuel.

Anyhow, I had to laugh when she said she "came out" about loving fruit but still shaded her confessed intake downward--I did that just yesterday! When I wrote my Saturday Brunch post I described my fruit dish as "banana and a mineola orange" rather than "2 bananas and a mineola orange." I definitely eat more fruit than many paleos if their online comments are accurate.

Her other comment, about paleo infatuation with fat, also struck a chord because I'm convinced it's healthy, for me at least, to avoid meals that consist only of high-fat/starch foods. My gut, brain and muscles all perform much better after meals if I eat a combination of food types and densities. On a daily basis, that means my main dish may be meat and/or tubers but the total meal includes greens, low-starch vegetables and/or fruit. If I eat just the meat/tubers my brain and gut just aren't satisfied enough to leave me alone until the next day. I love fatty meat, but it's a bit much without the salad. I enjoy tubers, but I enjoy them more paired with colorful low-starch veggies.

This morning I was not in a mood to cook; I spent my time outside enjoying our beautiful cool Nevada morning. So, I popped 2 nice potatoes into my toaster oven, one sweet and one white, and went back outside.

Since I wanted to go low-prep, I completed my meal plan with banana (just 1 this time) and an orange. When I dished out the sweet potato, which was ready before the white one, I rinsed and added canned green beans. The beans have a pleasant flavor with the yam and make a decent substitute for greens when I'm too lazy busy to make a salad. I might have added broccoli, asparagus or something else low starch instead. Low-starch plants add a nice amount of food volume while diluting the intensity of the tubers/meat. I didn't bother heating the beans; I just put a little butter on the yam, waited for it to melt, then dumped on the beans. I flipped them over after a minute or so and they were nicely warm when I ate them.

When I finished my potatoes--the white one was simply buttered with salt and pepper--I had the banana/orange dish as my dessert.

What works for you? Do you also eat meals of mixed food densities, or do you strongly favor density vs. volume?

Fall is a Great Time to Examine the Menu

Autumn comes very late in southern Nevada. I'll define autumn as morning lows under 80F, since we've been above that since early May. When I lived in Wisconsin it was more like late August or early September when the nights and mornings became pleasantly cool, but Nevada doesn't really have what northers would call true autumn weather until December. Wherever I am, autumn seems to be a good time to think about my eating patterns because I seem naturally programmed for changes as my body reacts to the end of summer heat.

I find myself with more energy and, I'm happy to say, declining appetite. I don't think I've lost any weight but I have been able to get myself on a 1-meal-per-day schedule and that meal is built around whole foods although it usually ends with a processed treat. I haven't yet achieved a true hunger/satiation cycle but I feel I've made progress.

This morning I was definitely high energy and that's usually a signal that I've switched to fat-burning and my body is "ready for the hunt." Limiting myself to one meal per day seems to be an essential trigger in order to experience normal hunger/satiation and any semblance of weight control is impossible without that cycle.

I'm still using liquid CoffeeMate but I've gone from 3 mugs of coffee to 2. I'm down to 25% soda to 75% ice/water in each tall mug, with only ice water overnight, and I think I'll be back off soda within a few weeks. I'll then drink carbonated water with a wedge of lime.

If you're wondering why I haven't just made a clean break to whole foods only, it's very simple--I tried that twice and it triggered binge eating. I have to approach my eating regimen as a sidewalk rather than a line, because the line seems to function as a cliff with a strong wind trying to push me over the edge.

With the sidewalk approach, binge eating is outside one border and "pure paleo" is outside the other. Between those boundaries, I find the best balance I can manage. I don't have my house full of processed treats, and I shop only once per week (as early morning as possible to manage temptation.) I buy ONE treat (along with the CoffeeMate and soda.) So far, I've been able to VERY gradually reducce the portion sizes and frequencies of treats.  Eating a healthy meal has improved my appetite for real food without sending me into another binge. There is still a point 1-3 hours after the meal when I have a strong urge for something junky but I'm happy to report that a reasonable portion size is working right now--by reasonable, I mean a cup or 2 of ice cream rather than a quart, or 2 snack-sized bars of candy rather than 10.

Edit: On good days, when the meal is a great match to my emotional/physical needs, I don't need the SAD treat at all. Since I eat the fruit and salad/veggies first, the meat serves as the treat. On other days, I do seem to need a treat and the question becomes "How little is enough?" 

Can I do better? That'd be nice, but frankly I'd rather continue some width of sidewalk approach than set myself up for another miserable, lengthy binge like the one I endured this past summer.

Wish me luck!

How Do You Measure Success?

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!