I cannot believe I’m about to link to the Huffington Post, but this article really gets to the meat of the so-called obesity epidemic.
In 1977 America changed its health advice. In a nutshell (or, more likely, an ADA approved Mars bar): Eat more starchy foods, eat more carbohydrates, saturated fats are bad. If that sounds like pretty good advice to you, then you don’t know enough about what you are putting into your mouth.
Your grandparents were raised in a generation aware that God’s supermarket was better than man’s. Saturated fat was a vital part of their diet. For them, obesity was not a common health problem. They were not suffering malnutrition in the fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K). Remarkably, you, dear Western reader, probably are.
The 2010 Dietary recommendations are very much simply “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” It is total insanity.
I think the biggest danger out there is the foods with a health halo – too many people, even supposedly smart Whole Foods shoppers – fall for the idea that processed foods, if it fits their particular orthorexia, are healthy. Evaporated cane juice and agave nectar are *still* sugar. You might as well feed your kids HFCS for all the difference it makes. Most fat-reduced dairy products are full of additives that, let’s face it, you don’t even KNOW WHAT THEY ARE! But if Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods is selling it, you trust them that is must be OK.
Don’t even get me started on the gluten-free junk food revolution. It’s going to be the next giant money maker for the processed food industry.
I think I need one of those “bang head here” signs on the wall today.
I belong to a meat CSA that provides 5 lbs. of pastured pork and one pastured chicken per month. Last week, we had our “Indian Summer” here in the Shenandoah Mountains, and my farmer lost a lot of his broilers from heat stress. He’s pretty new to the farming game and even has a full-time job, so he’s still learning, but basically, he did not realize that it would hit 100′ at his farm last Thursday and did not provide enough shade. During the summer, he had shade cloth over the fenced chicken pasture, but I guess he’d moved the chickens (you have to rotate them around) and thought the hot weather was over.
Anyway, as a result, he did not have broilers for the monthly delivery on Saturday. I was given the option of taking a stewing hen or waiting a week for a different batch of broilers to be finished putting on weight. I decided on the stewing hen as I haven’t really found the broilers to be compelling anyway. I’m not sure if it’s my preparation or what, but I just haven’t been eating much chicken as I’m a little bored with it.
His email said “there’s a lot of flavor in a stewing hen.” What there is for sure is one hell of a lot of fat. This is not a bad thing, but I have never handled a chicken like this in my life.
I got up Sunday morning planning to pop it in the crock pot with BBQ sauce ingredients. Unfortunately, when I pulled out the crockpot, it was obvious that it would not fit in there whole. This meant dismembering a chicken at 6:30am before I’d had my coffee. OK, fine.
I got out my poultry shears and started on removing the spine. First note: the cavity was full of globs of dark yellow fat, and all the meat was obviously much darker than on a broiler. I continued cutting and found dark yellow fat everywhere, seemingly at random. This is all good, but like I said, usually chickens have a lighter yellow fat that’s in very expected places.
I put it in with the BBQ sauce stuff and cooked it for about eight hours, flipping the pieces top-to-bottom one time. I turned off the crockpot in preparation for deboning and skinning (the skin is NOT appetizing when you cook chicken low and slow – at least not to me). I came back an noticed that there was a heck of a lot of fat floating on top. I skimmed it off, and it turned out to be nearly TWENTY OUNCES worth. I set it aside since I needed to see how fatty the remaining sauce and pieces were before possibly putting some back.
The bones came out very easily, as they always do, but the weird thing is that all the long bones looked transparent. I removed the skin, but there was very very little to be found – it’s almost like it all melted. I wound up with about 1.5 quarts of meat and sauce plus the 20 oz. of liquid fat. I have no actual use for that fat, but the resulting pile of pulled BBQ chicken was fantastic. The texture of the chicken was tougher, and the meat was much stronger, but since I’m a dark meat person, this was a good thing. Overall, it was a lot more like pulled pork than chicken.
I would absolutely do this again. For what it’s worth, this farmer produces really great eggs. The layers and the rooster just wander around and eat bugs all day and then come in the hen house at night and presumably get a grain supplement. I’m pretty sure this hen was a layer. I don’t think you can actually buy stewing hens in grocery stores any more. Since we’re getting into chicken soup season, you might want to ask egg sellers at your local farmer’s market what they do with their old layers. Most people do want broiler/fryers, so they might be a pretty good deal, and if the eggs are good, you know the chickens are treated and fed well.
I entered the suggested “safety and comfort” reducing diet for my ideal weight into Fitday.
It’s a little short on potassium and calcium, but those could be brought up with the “clear broth” suggested if it were made with bones. Potassium can be supplemented with NoSalt.
Here’s the food list. Pretty standard diet material.
I’d lose weight on this, I’m sure, but note that this diet is chock full of protein and would likely be pretty satisfying. It’s moderate carb and low-ish fat.
On our last trip to St. Louis, I did a bit of tidying on our enclosed back porch. I had set this cookbook aside for the future because I figured it would be interesting. This cookbook has at the beginning a plan for a reducing diet. The whole beginning of the cookbook is presumably included in *all* of these church/jr. league/community cookbooks. It’s standard boilerplate stuff, and at the time, it was well understood what constituted a reducing diet.
What I find most entertaining is that this is basically a Zone type moderate-carb, high-ish protein diet. It includes bread, but very little. Most modern bread weighs 1 oz. per slice, so I have to imagine this was a thinly sliced diet bread. I’m thinking of the type that Pepperidge Farm produces now – it’s about 40 calories a slice. Other than that, there’s nothing special about it.
The whole thing is a LOT less complex, but it’s what we used to call a “balanced” meal when I was a kid. At some point (in the 80s, I’m pretty sure), protein got kicked to the curb in favor of more grain products. This was all, somehow, in the name of reducing fat, but this diet is not at all high in fat.
For more about that, see Gary Taubes “Good Calories Bad Calories” and it’s chapter called “The Disappearance of the Fattening Carbohydrate.”
(Click on the pictures to get the full-size version.)
  
And here are the sample menus:
As for the Zone diet, I’m still following it, but I’m beyond the weighing and measuring stage. It’s at least 100% easier. I still don’t eat five times a day as I think that’s completely ludicrous. While I was out backpacking I ate four times a day (that’s just how I felt best), but at home, I eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with breakfast being at least 12 hours after I finish eating dinner. I know when I do IF on purpose, I freakin’ hate it, but it’s easy enough to eat dinner kind of early and not snack.
I’ve been out playing in the woods for the last week or so. What’s more “primal play” than this? I did a lot more rock climbing than usual, and I enjoyed every minute of that.
Instead of going to Vermont and doing new mileage up there, I decided to clean up some (comparatively) little gaps in my Appalachian Trail mileage in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. I actually had intended to complete New York as well, but I miscalculated a section in Pennsylvania, so I had to spend an extra day there. I’ve now hiked the southern 1,500 miles of the AT, except the 35 in NY I just mentioned. This means i need to hike from Danby, VT to Mt. Katahdin in Maine.
At no point on this trip did I get water anywhere but a spigot, so I was carrying at least one liter more than I usually carry (usually 2l, carried at least 3l this time).
All told, it was 84.6 miles, but the daily amounts were all over the place.
(NOBO is Northbound, SOBO is Southbound)
September 15 (NOBO) – PA 443, Green Point, PA -> Wm. Penn (8.7)
September 16 (NOBO) – Wm. Penn -> Eagle’s Nest (19.6)
September 17 (NOBO) – Eagle’s Nest -> Port Clinton, PA (7)
(drive north)
September 18 (NOBO) – Lehigh Gap, PA -> Wind Gap, PA (20.7)
(drive north)
September 19 (NOBO) – NJ 23 -> NJ 284 (near Unionville, NY) (9.8)
September 20 (SOBO) – Bellvale, NY at 17A -> Waywayanda Shelter (10)
September 21 (SOBO) – Waywayanda Shelter -> County 565 (Glenwood, NJ) (8.8)
Last Wednesday (15th), I started at 3:30 and finished at 6:15. I was expecting there would actually be water at the shelter. Unfortunately, it was totally dry. Shortly after that, while figuring out how far I had to make it the next day, I discovered that it was actually 27 miles to Port Clinton, PA not 17, as I was expecting. It’s a good thing that I had enough food – I had really only been expecting an overnight. After that, I carried a lot more water!
Over all, it was an excellent trip. I got rained on all day on the 16th, but the weather the other days was spectacularly nice.
This is a bit of the view UP the climb out of Lehigh Gap, PA. This particular mountain is a Superfund Site damaged by zinc smelting fallout. The rock climb is about 1000′ of elevation, and then there’s some negotiation of a flatter version of the same kind of thing. I’d heard a lot about how rough it was, but I had a blast climbing it. This whole day, all 20.7 miles of it, was totally awesome. The climb would have been pretty terrifying if it had been wet, however.
This kind of scenery is all over the place on the AT in New Jersey. This farm is sort of near Vernon, NJ. Shortly before I took this photo, there was a herd of cows on the trail that I more or less chased off. They really had no where to go but down the trail, so I felt like a backpacking cowboy or something.
This was in the shelter register at Waywayanda Shelter in NJ.
Bellvale Mountain (the border of NY and NJ is on this stretch of trail) is about four miles of walking on these big humped boulders. The views of Greenwood Lake were fantastic, and since the weather was dry and cool again, it was tons of fun, at least for me. There was even a ladder at one point because you had to drop down six feet, and nobody wants to jump that with a backpack.
I took this towards the end of my hike. This boardwalk continues for at least a mile through Pochuck Marsh. It’s a really amazing piece of trail engineering. The Appalachian Trail is maintained by volunteers. Imagine building this thing for more than a mile through a swamp!
I’ve been doing CrossFit for a while now. In fact, I completed a Level 1 Certification Seminar this weekend. The only reason I don’t know if I passed the exam is because they had a large (and frankly inexcusable) IT failure, and we have to wait for our results from HQ. Yes, I hope to train others in the future, but I need to feel a little more advanced first.
I do have a serious case of ass envy after this weekend. My god, the female CrossFit Certification staff have such great asses. That’s not a very specific goal, however, so I don’t think that one can be on the list. “Get a Better Ass”….too general. 
Anyway, part of the reason I haven’t said anything about it is because CrossFit’s appeal is a bit hard to explain. Doing kettlebell swings and medicine ball runs in the blazing hot sun for 10 minutes with five pushups done on hot asphalt every 60 seconds does NOT sound like fun to most people. It sounded pretty awful to me before I did it. But afterwards, I felt pretty good that my partner in that madness (KBS and runs alternated, everyone drops what they are doing for the pushups) and I did 178 KBS in the 10 minutes we had for the drill.
When people go in for CF, they tend to go in for it in a Big Way, and I’m no exception there. As a system for achieving over all physical fitness, it’s amazing, but CrossFitters tend to evangelize, and that put me off for a while. In addition to that, I don’t live near a CF box – minimum 45 minutes each way – and it’s a lot to take on doing at home. I did my foundations/elements while I was in St. Louis early this summer and staying near several CrossFit boxes. I did some WODs there, then started up at home.
If you’ve never heard of CrossFit, the gist of it is this: Constantly varied functional movements executed at high-intensity. There’s ample info out there on the web, so I don’t feel like I need to talk about it here. I will be posting my WODs over at BrandX in the daily scaled WOD thread. I’m not going to do that here because I’ve seen that quickly overtake all other material on a blog, and I just don’t want to go there. I might put my WOD in a sidebar here, I haven’t decided, but it will not be part of the posts.
Moving on…
I think systems work best when you work them, so going whole hog into CrossFit means using a 3-day on 1-day off workout schedule. This seemed completely brutal to me before, but after this weekend I now understand programming and scaling for specific goals, and I do understand the “why” of that schedule now. The other thing I wasn’t doing is, drumroll please, The Zone Diet.
It’s hard to believe I’ve never tried it, but frankly, I was put off by the book and the crass commercial products that accompanied it. In particular, Zone bars are junk food and hideous hack. The book pushes hard on cutting fat and there’s even a Soy Zone book, for gosh sakes, and I’m sure it’s pretty obvious why I don’t accept either of those ideas.
The way it’s presented to new, aspiring CF trainers is a bit different and considerably simpler. After people achieve their weight goals, they start upping fat. Most of the extremely-low-body-fat types eat upwards of 4X fat blocks. CrossFit emphasizes that no foods are forbidden, but that quality really matters, and you should only venture into the center aisles at the grocery store for nuts, seeds and olive oil, and then get the hell out. They push working the perimeter, just like Primal, Paleo and any whole foods diet does. You can do the Zone Paleo if you like. Oh, and the CrossFit Zone chart doesn’t push all lean meats, skim milk and low-fat cheese: it’s just “cheese” or “ground beef” or “milk”.
I am loosening up my diet a bit. My prohibited foods list is down to: gluten, legumes, vegetable oils, and refined sugar. I might try a 1/4 cup of pinto beans or a little tempeh at some point, but legumes have failed me in the past, so I might not.
I’m not really trying to lose weight (who wouldn’t like to lose *a few* pounds?), but I’m not into elite levels of body fat either. Still, I think their blocks-per-day recommendations are too low for me. I’ll be fine-tuning that depending on how I feel, but I’m going to be having more blocks instead of 2X fats, at least for now. We’ll see what happens. I am weighing and measuring because the carbs and fats (protein is weighed out) are all in cups and tablespoons, and I used to weigh those. I feel that for me, it’s important to stay the hell off of fitday, and just go by my body fat scale and how I feel. If I need to change it, I’ll drop two blocks and double the fat. I have to say that I’m skeptical about that working for me, however. OH, and five meals a day? Are you kidding? I will not be doing that!
So yeah, The Zone Diet. Who saw that one coming? I sure didn’t!
I’m pretty big on diet shake-ups: if what you’re doing is not working for you then change it. Doing the same thing (or more of it) and expecting better results is just *nuts*, if you think about it.
Just in the last few months I have finally wrapped my brain around the idea that insulin is not the only hormone. I’ve recently gone back and read the actual food suggestions in Neanderthin and The Paleo Diet and found that those diets have 25-35% of calories (maybe 150g in a 2,000 calorie diet) from carbohydrates. For The Primal Blueprint, that’s near the top of the curve, but it’s definitely still on the curve. Certainly, from the point of view of the USDA Dietary Guidelines, that is a low-carb diet, but for people that come from a world of GCBC and Atkins…from the way they react to the idea of eating a banana, you’d think it was SAD-levels of carbohydrate.
I found myself saying on a forum “but I eat a lot more fruit than is currently fashionable in Paleo circles”, and I realized that it is probably more than just fashionable — it’s more like a dogma. In particular, there seems to be a terror of fructose, but the accepted leading authority, Robert Lustig, has no problems with fruit. He thinks fruit juices are a really bad idea, but not whole fruit because it comes with fiber. I’ve seen others (and I’m not sure who, unfortunately) say that juice is OK if it’s fresh squeezed in your own kitchen (something Ray Audette has on his Neanderthin meal plans, BTW) – that what makes fruit bad is *cooking* it. Since virtually all bottled juice is pasteurized, that would eliminate all but that you’ve squeezed yourself. That whole end of the discussion seems to provoke incredulity in people like Jimmy Moore who think all sugar is bad and that’s that. I believed for a long time that any kind of sugar would make me gain weight, but it just doesn’t.
A trip around paleohacks.com will show that there are more than a handful of folks that have stalled out with muscle gains and/or weight loss while eating 50g or less of carbohydrate a day. I see people on the low-carb boards and forums decide that they are eating too many calories, so they take carbs lower or go ZC because more protein and/or more fatty meat allows them to eat fewer calories. They either can’t stick to it or it still doesn’t work, and they just come on and off the threads alternately sounding discouraged or confused. It gets a little sad to read because it gets to the point where, though they diet is failing them ultimately, they think *they* are a failure for not sticking to it properly. If you can’t stick to it, that’s a failure of the diet too. TRY SOMETHING ELSE. Many of these folks have lost a lot of weight already, and they have demonstrated they have will power…but suddenly it’s not working, so it must be their fault!
Here’s how it seems to me:
- If you have an insulin resistance problem, low-carb will work well for you and you probably don’t need to deliberately reduce calories. You may or may not be eating less, but reducing the glucose load on your already burdened liver and pancreas is so helpful that you lose weight no matter what.
- If you don’t have an insulin resistance problem, low-carb will work well for you if it causes a decent-sized spontaneous reduction in calories.
The insulin resistant folks seem to stop losing weight when they have solved their sugar problem. This is often way before they’d *like* to stop losing weight. Eventually, kind friends and internet acquaintances start talking about how health is more important than appearance. Goodness knows, I think that a long-term low-carb diet is quite healthy for people. All their biomarkers are excellent, but if they want to be thin, they need to take a chance on something else!
I’ve made this marinade twice now, and both times it was excellent, but I think I got better results today.
1/4 cup fresh squeeze lime juice
1/4 cup pineapple juice
1/4 cup diced onion
1 t. sea salt
4 garlic cloves
Rooster sauce to taste (I used a goodly squirt)
The lime and pineapple work really well together. I used boneless skinless breasts and thighs, and marinated at least four hours. I chopped and skewered the meat, and grilled over charcoal fairly slowly, dumping on additional marinade and rotating the skewers.
Chicken is not my favorite meat, but these were darn good.
I had these with traditional BBQ fare on the 4th and today I just had slaw and mango. The mango worked really well with this.
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.
I don’t really have issues with using salt. When I make all my own food, I generally eat 1,500-2,000 mg per day, which isn’t a lot…but I don’t care. Which is why I’ve always ignored sodium-free salt.
What I do sometimes care about, however, is the fact that my diet is always well under the FDA recommendation for potassium. I eat a lot of vegetables and some fruit, and I almost never hit it. I’m not sure what they are expecting you to eat, exactly, but apparently, not what I’m eating.
Also, when one is losing a lot of water from dieting, heat or exertion, it’s easy to not feel your best from electrolyte issues. Gatorade is either loaded with sugar or contains fake sweeteners, and is generally a pretty jive plastic food anyway.
Magnesium and calcium are easy to supplement, but potassium only comes in 99mg pills. The RDA is around 4.7g, so that’s a lot of pills – generally the whole bottle! Also, when I’ve taken potassium on an empty stomach, I’ve gotten a horrible stomach ache, so I will never do that again.
So, an old answer is to swap out some of your sea salt for salt substitute.
 
With 610mg of potassium per 1/4 teaspoon, it’s the best option in potassium supplementation.
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