Time to Clean it Up

We were in St. Louis for a month (returned late last night), and during that time, I gained some weight. I did work out quite a lot, so I’m sure it wasn’t all fat, some of it undoubtedly was. I have a lot of signs of inflammation, my digestion is messed up, and I’m just not feeling tip-top.

The problem is that these trips tend to involve a lot of drinking, social activity and a lot of eating out. This means my self-control goes out the window, and I wind up eating things I shouldn’t. Having gluten intolerance cuts way down on an entire class of low-quality neolithic foods, but my diet was still pretty lousy. I also had gluten-free pizza twice (I made it myself), and I used up a loaf of gluten-free bread in the month I was there. It’s the best gluten-free bread I’ve ever bought in a store (Glutino), but it’s still not so awesome that I can’t avoid it in the future.

In short: I’ve been eating crappy food, drinking too much booze, and I have not been sleeping enough. The sleep is easier to fix, and that should take about a week. The drinking is easy to fix because I can just stop drinking. Pulling certain foods back out of my diet…that’s always a bit harder. Basically, I’m leaning a lot more paleo/primal than I have been for the last month.

Here’s the list that needs to get the axe:

• Corn – This eliminates virtually every commercial gluten-free cracker and bread. Disallowing the oil means that I probably can’t eat anything deep-fried outside the house since corn oil is in almost every single fryer on earth. This makes it really easy to eliminate the next thing.
• White Potatoes – I’m not sure they actually are a problem in and of themselves, I know that I can’t seem to draw the line and just eat a little bit of french fries. The fries are, of course, all fried in mostly lousy fats, and many contain trans-fats, so it’s best to just not eat them.
• Legumes – Needless to say, this one is very hard to avoid in the wild because there’s soy in seemingly everything. I don’t eat a lot of it, but I have some tofu shirataki noodles to use up first, then I’ll cut it. I’ve only been eating soy sauce for a couple of months after not eating it for a very long time, so that won’t be too hard to drop. Virtually all soy sauce that I encounter in restaurants contains wheat, so it was only something I ate at home anyway.
• Dairy of certain types – UHT Pasteurized, anything with vegetable gums or preservatives, cheese or dairy that I know or suspect is not 100% real (think American cheese, for instance). If it could have junk in it, I shouldn’t eat it. I plan to stick mostly to my raw milk share, and I’ll eat some of that as yogurt. I’m sure I’ll eat cheese at home.
• Nuts and seeds that are high in polyunsaturated fats (and their oils) – This one is controversial with a lot of people because, well, a lot of literature says that these oils are very healthy. I’m sticking to macadamias and cashews anyway. Yes, I know that some paleo types think we shouldn’t eat cashews, but they are mostly monounsaturated fats, and I don’t agree with the reasoning anyway. Cutting nuts out of my diet is hard for me, and my goal really is to cut the polyunsaturated fat content in my diet rather than to stick to someone else’s rules. Avocados and olives are fruit, so they and their oils can stay (and are mostly monounsaturated), though I don’t really eat avocado oil. Peanuts are a legume, and are possibly the worst offender when it comes to overloading oneself with Omega-6.
• The rest of the grains (rice, millet, etc) and pseudo grains (like quinoa and buckwheat) – I don’t seem to have problems with them, however, so I’m not in a big hurry there. I don’t eat that much of these anyway.

Already axed are gluten-y grains – Wheat, Rye, Barley, Spelt, Triticale. Can’t digest them, don’t eat them anyway. As I look over this list, the bad stuff I’ve been eating is all fried potatoes. Not entirely, but mostly.

Tomorrow, I will have to do some shopping. I was able to produce lunch and dinner out of what I had on hand, and I can definitely make breakfast tomorrow…but then things start to get a bit more grim. On the bright side, the fridge was so empty that I could see how badly the glass shelves and the produce drawer needed cleaned, so now that’s done.