Thoughts after day one of paleo eating
Oct. 13th, 2010 09:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
muck_a_luckDay One went very well. I started with the zinfandel of beef that I made this weekend specifically for the purpose of having a paleo breakfast easily available, and it actually turned out to be even better for that purpose than I thought. The onions and the sauce make the stew somewhat sweet and it really hits the spot in the morning. I like it better for breakfast than I liked it when I initially had it for dinner.
For lunch I took a salad with a mix of flax seed oil and bottled "ceasar" salad dressing. The dressing was probably way too salty, since I read about the whole salt/potassium thing last night, and plus it was probably bad for the acid/base thing, but eh, 80/20? After my salad, I had a banana and some almonds. Later in teh afternoon, because I was still feeling hungry, I had half a can of tuna with some "lite" mayo. Which was TOTALLY not worth whatever caloric savings it had. I'll be going back to the real thing.
I should also mention that by bring iced herbal tea, I probably cut my diet soda consumption in half yesterday. Not sure, though, how the herbal tea will fare. Probably I should just try to be sure that for every cup of soda I drink, I drink a cup of water, and leave it at that.
As I was driving home, I realized I had not planned for dinner. However, as it turned out, Husband wanted burgers on the grill. As we use 93% lean ground beef, that wasn't too bad, but I wasn't in the mood for a grilled burger with no cheese. I would have just put barbeque sauce on it, but I figured for my first day of paleo eating, I'd avoid the sugary sauces, though in the long run I will probably use them if I feel like it. Instead, I cooked the meat up with a little olive oil, onions and garlic, dumped tomato sauce on top, peppered the heck out of it and had what I decided to think of as beef soup. It wasn't quite spaghetti sauce without the pasta, because the seasonings were wrong, nor Picadillo without the rice and chips, because there was no cumin. But it hit the spot. I finished up with thawed frozen strawberries mixed with canned (in juice) crushed pineapple.
My two observations yesterday. 1) At no time in the day was I horribly hungry. 2) At no time in the day did I really crave anything.
Also, after my meals I was very full and satisfied feeling.
Considering I had three servings of friut, three servings of veggies, and no cookie attacks, it was a fantastic day for me nutrition-wise, though at the very end, when I had decided to put a little Hershey's syrup into my 24 ounces of skim milk as my "dessert" for the day, Husband decided he needed help to eat the last brownie. But even that was sugar in moderation, which I rarely manage.
In all, I was extremely pleased with how I felt and how it went.
I was also thinking about the thing of calling it paleo eating or primal eating or whatever. Yes, it does strike me as going a little far - it has the sound of an evolutionary argument, or an historical one. It has the feel of an almost moral statement about the form of eating. This is the way you were "designed" to eat. And in fact, I certainly believe the guy who wrote the book I took out of the library in fact is making that argument. I'm not as comfortable with that, though. I like his premise and how he came to it, but I also know that human civilization is based on agriculture, and there are all sorts of ways to consume grains and dairy and legumes that are extrememly beneficial and in fact entire healty cultures are based on those food groups. Just because Americans eat like poorly disciplined children doesn't mean that these food groups should be rejected.
Still. It's a lot more fun and more interesting and simpler to think, "I'm a natural hunter-gatherer! I'm eating like (an uber-sucessful) one!" It's uncomplicated and affirmative. I like it. It also hit me with the same force aslucky_sometime's casual comment about power yoga six and a half or seven years ago.
I have been laughing at myself recently. I used to think I was trend proof. These days I think I just hadn't met any trends I really liked.
For lunch I took a salad with a mix of flax seed oil and bottled "ceasar" salad dressing. The dressing was probably way too salty, since I read about the whole salt/potassium thing last night, and plus it was probably bad for the acid/base thing, but eh, 80/20? After my salad, I had a banana and some almonds. Later in teh afternoon, because I was still feeling hungry, I had half a can of tuna with some "lite" mayo. Which was TOTALLY not worth whatever caloric savings it had. I'll be going back to the real thing.
I should also mention that by bring iced herbal tea, I probably cut my diet soda consumption in half yesterday. Not sure, though, how the herbal tea will fare. Probably I should just try to be sure that for every cup of soda I drink, I drink a cup of water, and leave it at that.
As I was driving home, I realized I had not planned for dinner. However, as it turned out, Husband wanted burgers on the grill. As we use 93% lean ground beef, that wasn't too bad, but I wasn't in the mood for a grilled burger with no cheese. I would have just put barbeque sauce on it, but I figured for my first day of paleo eating, I'd avoid the sugary sauces, though in the long run I will probably use them if I feel like it. Instead, I cooked the meat up with a little olive oil, onions and garlic, dumped tomato sauce on top, peppered the heck out of it and had what I decided to think of as beef soup. It wasn't quite spaghetti sauce without the pasta, because the seasonings were wrong, nor Picadillo without the rice and chips, because there was no cumin. But it hit the spot. I finished up with thawed frozen strawberries mixed with canned (in juice) crushed pineapple.
My two observations yesterday. 1) At no time in the day was I horribly hungry. 2) At no time in the day did I really crave anything.
Also, after my meals I was very full and satisfied feeling.
Considering I had three servings of friut, three servings of veggies, and no cookie attacks, it was a fantastic day for me nutrition-wise, though at the very end, when I had decided to put a little Hershey's syrup into my 24 ounces of skim milk as my "dessert" for the day, Husband decided he needed help to eat the last brownie. But even that was sugar in moderation, which I rarely manage.
In all, I was extremely pleased with how I felt and how it went.
I was also thinking about the thing of calling it paleo eating or primal eating or whatever. Yes, it does strike me as going a little far - it has the sound of an evolutionary argument, or an historical one. It has the feel of an almost moral statement about the form of eating. This is the way you were "designed" to eat. And in fact, I certainly believe the guy who wrote the book I took out of the library in fact is making that argument. I'm not as comfortable with that, though. I like his premise and how he came to it, but I also know that human civilization is based on agriculture, and there are all sorts of ways to consume grains and dairy and legumes that are extrememly beneficial and in fact entire healty cultures are based on those food groups. Just because Americans eat like poorly disciplined children doesn't mean that these food groups should be rejected.
Still. It's a lot more fun and more interesting and simpler to think, "I'm a natural hunter-gatherer! I'm eating like (an uber-sucessful) one!" It's uncomplicated and affirmative. I like it. It also hit me with the same force as
lucky_sometime's casual comment about power yoga six and a half or seven years ago.I have been laughing at myself recently. I used to think I was trend proof. These days I think I just hadn't met any trends I really liked.
*wanders by again*
Date: 2010-10-15 08:40 pm (UTC)And the paleolithic period continued for millions of years, whereas agriculture's been going on for a mere 12,000 or so, and we haven't had time to do a lot of evolving in that period.
(As a name, though, I can never take "primal" seriously: it's so PRIMAL CAVEMAN MANLINESS GRAAARGH. *g*)
As you'll probably have noticed, I am not into rigid dietary rules and regimens. But, IMHO, it makes a lot of sense to say:
"Hey, the standard Western diet includes huge amounts of refined, high-glycemic-load carbohydrates, mostly from grains and sugars. This is not what humans have been eating for most of human history, and there is decent evidence to suggest that our systems don't cope with this very well. Therefore, it might be a good idea to experiment with various ways of taking your diet back in the opposite direction and seeing how that works for you."
My two observations yesterday. 1) At no time in the day was I horribly hungry. 2) At no time in the day did I really crave anything.
*nods a lot* I believe that may be a blood sugar thing -- basically, stuff with a high glycemic load tends to make your blood stuff spike then crash, and when it crashes, your system starts sending you the HELP HELP MAYDAY NEED SUGAR NOW messages.
And paleo eating tends to be low-GL almost by default (unless you do something wacky like eating a large bowl of dates, which I don't recommend).