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Primal Play

Nicole — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 17:38:56 +0000

After spending the afternoon at the St. Louis City Museum, I’m starting to think fun exercise is something I need fit in every week.

The grind that occurs at the gym is a big reason why I don’t go to one.

I don’t really do any exercise I don’t enjoy. If I don’t like it, I find some other way to work that part of my body, but I haven’t really had so much fun being active for a long time, with the exception of some days backpacking. A lot of backpacking is about immersion in nature and meeting constant challenges, but sometimes, it really just is a long slog up a viewless mountain in 85′ heat. Other times, it’s physically fun, climbing over weird terrain along the side of a cliff or scaling a pile of boulders. I used to actually dread that kind of thing, but the last four bits of complex rock terrain I’ve done[1], I actually recall quite fondly! Anything on the A.T. with a bad weather trail is generally awesome.

The only kind of gym I’d actually consider would be CrossFit, and I’m not doing that because it just means I will spend waaaay too much time commuting to a freakin’ gym. It’s certainly a different kind of workout experience, but it’s still mostly about meeting challenges. CrossFit supports a number of sport activities, but most people don’t seem to make time for those, and instead spend their time at the box. I know people get a big sense of accomplishment, but I also note that CrossFit and the Paleo world generally contain a lot of forceful, Type A personalities who are also free-thinkers or libertarians. CF is kind of an anti-gym already, but I sure haven’t seen anything about it that looks painful.

I’m thinking more along the lines of climbing more trees, and when I get back to Virginia, I’m going to hike a section of the Massanutten Trail that’s a knife-edge for a long way. The map is labeled “experienced hikers only”. I’ve done it before, so I do know what’s there.

[1] Off the top of my head: Blackstack Cliffs, Laurel Canyon, a big pile of boulders near the Vermont line (with it’s own blue blaze for bad weather) and Albert Mountain.

Woman’s World Paleo Diet Piece

Nicole — Tue, 04 May 2010 11:30:28 +0000

Well, I didn’t get my actual menu items up, and it’s not going to happen before I go hiking. Work has been taking up my time that I would normally use for blogging. We all have to work some time!

Anyway, I’m not sure what the legality of this is, honestly, but this magazine is off the news stands, their website has absolutely no content from the magazine, and this is not the kind of thing you find on microfiche at the library!

The small images link to large ones.

Intermittent Fasting

Nicole — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:56:54 +0000

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Intermittent Fasting. I certainly see how it fits into the whole idea of eating as we evolved to eat, and that probably isn’t five (or six, in some cases) meals a day. Skipping meals seems to work for people when it comes to a leaning out stage where, say, a man is looking to go from 15% body fat to below 10%. Based on what I’ve seen by hanging around in the on-line nutrition and diet communities for the last few years, I’d say that IF is a useful tool in the final stage of becoming a real evolutionary bad ass. As far as using it as part of a weight loss program where you still need to lose 10% or more of your body fat? I’m not so sure about that.

Obviously, I’m not a biochemist, but let’s look at the evolutionary logic here. It’s a great strategy for us, as an animal in a state of nature, to be able to hunt hungry without hypoglycemia making us dumb and shaky and to be able to live on meat and a little bit of green forage nearly forever. At some point, however, the game is up, and the interaction of your genes and your hormones will decide that you’ve now optimized for your particular situation. For a lot of people, this means that they are still carrying around some fat they would rather not be.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people who are very successful on low-carb and paleo diets seem to get to a point where they can’t lose any more fat. Many of these people have lost quite a lot of weight, but they cannot get the last bit off. If they’ve lost 80-100 pounds, it’s the last 25. If they’ve lost 30-50 lbs, it’s the last 10-15. Some percentage of their excess weight just does not want to come off, even though their diets have worked a treat up to that point. The advice I generally see is to go lower in carbs and “add some intermittent fasting.” In low-carb circles (where they are not into skipping meals), people are generally told to go lower in carbs and control calories. Both of these things seem to be exactly the wrong advice, based on our evolutionary adaptations.

To be honest, I *hate* IF. I know people report feeling good while fasting, but I am just not one of those people. I can actually work out fasted without a blood sugar crash. I start at a blood glucose reading of 85 and after exercising, I’m closer to 105 through the magic of gluconeogenesis. This is what people who *like* intermittent fasting report, so I do not claim that I’m special or that I’m an exception to some biochemical rule.

To be perfectly clear: I’m defining a fast as no calories consumed. I don’t mean a juice fast or an egg fast, I mean no food, liquid or solid. Black coffee and tea have a few calories, but they count as non-caloric beverages for the sake of a fast.

Ultimately, what I am saying is that I sincerely doubt skipping three meals in row on a regular basis is an effective strategy to get off a weight loss plateau. If you’re already very close to your goal of being an Art DeVany type bad-ass? Then absolutely, yes.

Here’s what I see on comment boards fairly often:

Someone has been eating a low-carb Paleolithic or Primal-style diet, and has lost a bunch of excess fat and has become keto-adapted. Most people feel quite good in this state, and don’t experience any excess hunger. This is certainly a win-win for the dieter.

Women of child-bearing age may get to this state even earlier than men as their hormones are still thinking about the idea that they might get pregnant. They are eating what they think is good food, and certainly vegetables and high-quality meats can fuel you indefinitely, but it’s not a state that is conducive to weight loss. For some, it can apparently set the stage for infertility. If you read this epic comment thread on Free The Animal, you’ll find a lot of women wind that their cycles get wonky way before they look too skinny.

If you’ve got nothing available but meat and maybe some greens, your best bet for survival is to make glucose out of protein, and that’s what you’re doing. Your hormones have decided that there’s no fruit or tubers in their immediate future, so the best strategy is to hang on to that bit of fat just in case things get worse. Any fat-loss diet is about convincing your body to burn fat. In order to get it to do that, it has to be creatively starved.

And here’s something I’ve never really seen considered: what about all the foods that you’re putting off limits that you can see and smell? Might the psychology of denial have something to do with your body being unwilling to continue shedding fat? Grok wouldn’t be hunting hungry if he had food readily available, now would he?

Let’s say that our mythical person then stumbles on to a Paleo advice board and gets advice to try IF and to cut carbs lower. If it does work, then YIPPEE! you’re now adapted to eating even less. When you try to normalize your diet to that of a healthy eater that’s not consciously dieting, you have a higher chance of gaining back weight. If it doesn’t work, you’ve just put your body under more stress, possibly provoking problems with cortisol or your thyroid, and you are now worse off. None of this causes a problem for Grok, but you want to look good in a bikini, so it’s a problem for you.

I like meat and salads – really I do, but I’m not interested in living on that and nothing else. I do see a lot of hard-ass for the sake of hard-ass in Paleo/Primal circles. Intermittent Fasting and very low or zero carb diets are often the form that takes. Just because you can do that and feel good doing it does not mean that you will shed fat that way. Think about the signals you are sending your body. Do you want to work on being evolutionarily, optimally fit, or would you rather lose more fat first?

Consider just picking one of those if you’ve hit a plateau. A lot of folks seem unable to do both at the same time.

Two Tidbits

Nicole — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:24:59 +0000

There’s a great Primal Checklist here.

This coconut milk is the best adapted for use in coffee that I’ve yet encountered. It’s thick and creamy enough, but not oily or clumpy in the least. Best of all, it’s *nothing* but coconut milk. In case the link breaks, it’s Aroy-D 100% Coconut Milk in an 8.5 ounce aseptic box. I paid the same price on the web page (89 cents), but bought them in person at Global Foods in Kirkwood, MO. I bought four, then went back and bought eight more, and if I’d known they were *this* good, I would have bought a case.

I’ve been seeing this market from I-66 near Manassas: Juliana’s Sari Sari Store. Apparently, a Sari Sari Store is a Filipino convenience store, so I will try there next time I’m in the area. I will also try the general Asian goods store in Manassas since there’s apparently some people from the Philippines in Manassas.

Have I talked about this before?

Nicole — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:45:24 +0000

Paleolithic-style diets have gotten a lot of press of late. The articles mostly take this form:

1) Hipster discusses their caveman diet and explains that all their problems with digestion, allergies, obesity, blood sugar, athletic performance or what-have-you are gone.

2) Reporter says “isn’t that nice” and proceeds to quote sources of conventional wisdom saying that somehow, a diet based on whole, natural foods is actually unhealthy, mostly because it’s lacking in whole grains. There’s also the same spew about how paleolithic people’s lives were “nasty, brutish and short”, so why would anyone want to emulate *that*?

There were two main tomes on this diet: Dr. Loren Cordain’s The Paleo Diet (2002) and Ray Audette’s Neanderthin (2000) and, more recently, there’s Mark Sisson’s The Primal Blueprint (2009). Good luck finding a reasonably priced copy of Audette’s book – they seem to be going for $70 used. I found one for $13 and snapped it up.

The gist of the diet is this: Eat only meat, poultry, eggs, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. Don’t eat grains, legumes, dairy, potatoes or sugar or anything that’s not on the first list. Honey and maple syrup, though they are “sugar” are technically OK since they can be acquired without technology, but they should be rare in the diet as they would be in nature. Potatoes does not mean yams – sweet potatoes or yams are allowed. Peanuts are a legume, in case you didn’t know, and are thus forbidden. Everything else is pretty obvious. Any modern non-foods (like artificial sweeteners) are not allowed. Salt is strongly discouraged, though other spices are welcomed.

Within the world of paleo eaters (and I really need to come up with a set of links at some point), there are differences. Sisson is OK with a little dairy and with an 80/20 approach in general. Cordain allows something called “cheat meals” that you hear discussed often on Robb Wolf’s podcasts (which are quite interesting, at least to me). Ray Audette’s book comes off as more absolutist. Actual practice encompasses all of these camps.

There are some oddities within the books. Some people don’t eat cashew nuts as Audette claims their poisonous shell would have kept cavemen out. I recently found out that people who work in cashew shelling factories actually become immune to urushiol coating on the shells. We’ve all eaten cashews – they are delicious, and I’m think that our ancestors were maybe a bit more clever than Audette thinks. In any case, I’m not going to worry about that too much.

Certainly, there are a lot of valid arguments against consuming another animal’s milk, but I’ve been a big milk consumer my whole life, and except for when I was still eating gluten, I’ve never had problems consuming dairy. I tolerate it well, so I’m not interested in cutting it out.

At the moment, it seems like most of the Paleo types I read stick to very low carb diets. I’ve found that this actually causes more fluctuation in my blood sugar than if I eat fruit. I have *better* post-prandial numbers if I finish my meal with fruit than if I don’t. I have more stable numbers throughout the day this way as well, and with the amount of fruit I eat, it’s not that much sugar anyway.

The studies I’ve seen based on Cordain’s book include fruit and daily honey, and they still produced weight loss and improvements in fasting glucose and blood lipids. I could go on more about this, but Dr. Stephan Guyenet has done this exhaustively, and if you want the science, read his posts on paleolithic diets.

The only thing I ate from my banned list yesterday was tofu shirataki noodles. It’s not much soy, but since that might be like saying it’s only a little poison, I won’t be doing that again as I’ve used them all up.

Oh, and here’s a statement summing up the argument against the “nasty, brutish and short” meme.

Can’t believe I forgot this

Nicole — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:36:15 +0000

There is an aerobic exercise that I really like: rhythm boxing. It’s a little hard to figure out what they want me to do, especially in the advanced mode, but it does actually retreat to something simpler when I totally screw up the complex thing. If only the balance games would do that, the bubble in particular.

About

Nicole — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:22:46 +0000

My flickr feed is here.

Start following me on Twitter!

Ack! Flip Flops

Nicole — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 02:14:21 +0000

I realize that since I do wear sandals, and Birks at that, I probably have no right to complain about flip flops, but here I am doing it.

This is from the NYTimes style section that they do on Wednesdays. If you open the picture in a separate window or tab, you’ll get a full size version.

This is the text that’s too tiny to read above:
This summer, prep school style is seducing fashion followers of all ages in the traditional form of Bermuda shorts and polo shirts. But the most sought-after accessories of the season are ribbon flip-flops, rubber thongs with grosgrain ribbon straps in stripes and patterns. At A. Tierney, multistripe ribbon in sorbet shades is attached to bright blue, pink and lavender soles ($28 at www.atierney.com). Mella’s Preppy Trim collection uses wide ribbons festooned with icons of the country club life: little lobsters, crossed tennis rackets, pineapples ($38 at www.mellausa.com. And J. Crew’s entry puts grosgrain straps in stripes and critter patterns on black platforms or flat soles with leather fastenings ($19.50 to $22.50 at www.jcrew.com), all in eye-popping shades to bring out the color in even the palest personalities.

I’m tired of flip flops on people EVERYWHERE. Flip flops are for the beach. They are not appropriate for wearing in the office. I recall a friend of ours telling me that all his office mates wore them and he’s seen them trip on them because, of course, they stick to the carpet and then roll up. Amazingly, they don’t do this ON THE BEACH or at the poolside, where they belong.

I am also tired of shower sandals. Believe it or not, you still see those out here in the sticks.

Someday soon, I’ll complain about flares. I am SO sick of flares.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Nicole — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 18:56:37 +0000

Hint: There’s more than one thing wrong.

A Few Common Errors

Nicole — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 21:00:24 +0000

I use Limewire on occasion, mostly to download things I’m nominally interested in buying or to obtain something that would be on a greatest hits of the [insert decade here] compilation. A few common errors have appeared.

The song “The Boys Are Back in Town” is not a Bad Company song. It is a Thin Lizzy song.

“A Girl Like You” has never been recorded by Iggy Pop, although I admit it would be a great one for him to cover. It is a song by a Scottish songsmith named Edwyn Collins. It’s usually found under the title “Never Met a Girl Like You Before.” This is not the proper title either.

“Feel Like Makin’ Love” is not a Foghat song, it’s a Bad Company song. Many people have performed this, but it was written by Paul Rodgers and Mick Ralphs and the original is from 1975 and almost certainly the one you seek.

“Smokin’ In the Boy’s Room” is not a Bad Company song, it’s by a band called Brownsville Station. Lots of people have performed it, yes, but the Ur version on all the greatest hits compilations is theirs.

Whoever you think the performer is on the common version of “Free Ride”, if you’re not thinking Edgar Winter, you’re wrong. Again, this is frequently attributed to Foghat.

So, what the hell song *did* Foghat do? “Slow Ride” is probably the best known. Most people alive in the 70’s have heard “I Just Want To Make Love To You” and “Fool for the City.”

That is all. Have a nice day.