No pretending to like tofu any more!: Eric's primal transformation page 4

[en2ec]

Hi Eric,
Just popped in to say I love the title of your journal. My sentiments exactly. I can't believe how much soy I used to eat thinking it was the healthy thing to do.

About the IFing. That's so cool when you reach that freedom from the "I must have a snack or i am going to faint now" syndrome. This is a YMMV but I have found that skipping lunch works better for me than skipping breakfast. I know all the IF sites are all about powering through breakfast time on high octane coffee but I find that that just sets me up for overeating later. If I get a solid protein heavy breakfast in me, I am good to go until dinner. Of course a lot of this depends on your schedule of when you and your wife can/want to eat. I don't know how we all got so used to the idea of three meals a day. I seem to feel more satisfied with two substantial meals than with three smaller ones.

Best wishes to you. Sounds like you are headed the right direction.

Thanks! And thanks for the tip about skipping lunch instead of breakfast. For now, skipping breakfast seems to work for me, so I'll stick with it, but if it gets to be a problem, I'll try skipping lunch instead. I definitely eat more for dinner when I IF, but the extra is still less than what I'd eat for breakfast. Lunch is the same whether I IF or not. I always eat lunch right after I work out, and for some reason I'm not all that hungry then.

I have to confess that "No more pretending to like tofu any more" is only partially true. One of my favorite all-time dishes is an authentic mapo dofu. I'd guess there are only a handful of szechuan restaurants in the US that can make it right. Joe's Noodle House in Rockville, MD is one. It is mostly tofu, but it also has ground pork. The combination of silky tofu texture and crunchy-chewy ground pork bits in a wonderfully complex, spicy, tingly (from the szechuan peppers), pungent sauce is almost sensory overload, but in a good way. Other than mapo dofu, I don't miss tofu one bit. My god, I've eaten so many morningstar burgers and "soysage" patties over the years thinking that I was eating healthy. Oh well. I'm on track now.

[en2ec]

I haven't written much lately because the last two posts I made suffered technical glitches and were lost.

I'll summarize.

Exercise: I lifted Monday and Wednesday, increasing weight on schedule. All the lifts feel like I can go a lot further before I plateau except for bench press. I swam Tuesday and will today too. I was well off my time Tuesday and struggled from lap 13 through lap 30, but felt really good after that and ended up swimming 46 rather than my normal 40. I had the energy to keep going, but I was starting to feel a little strain in my shoulder and decided to stop.

I'v been IFing every day this week. All good. The more I do it, the easier it becomes. At most, I feel a little hungry around 9 am, but then it passes, and I'm neither hungry nor lacking energy.

Food: Still very much on track. All week for lunch, I've been eating the chili I made with either a big salad or a big serving of of leftover greens.

Lunch_2012-06-11.jpg

Dinner Monday night was a repeat of the shrimp tom yum soup. I had everything I needed to make it, and it was yummy, so why not? Tuesday night was a chicken breast, 3 eggs, and some greens. Wednesday night was the same. The photo doesn't show the chicken. By the way, I've only started eating eggs over easy recently, and I still don't have the hang of cooking them, so they are a bit mangled.

Dinner_2012-06-12.jpg

I've been eating primal for 20 days now, and I feel great. I have so much more energy, and it is much more constant. I've lost 7 pounds just since starting primal! That's 26 pounds overall. I've also gained strength, endurance, and I've improved my conditioning. This morning I ran to catch the train, and I caught it no problem and wasn't remotely out of breath. I breathed heavier while I ran, but immediately went back to normal as soon as I stopped. Before I began my body transformation, I would have been sucking wind for a couple of minutes afterwards, feeling like I might pass out.

As an added bonus, last Friday, a guy who works on my floor (we are in different departments and don't work together but will chat at the elevator, etc.) commented on my weight loss!

[en2ec]

I haven't written much lately because the last two posts I made suffered technical glitches and were lost.

I'll summarize.

Exercise: I lifted Monday and Wednesday, increasing weight on schedule. All the lifts feel like I can go a lot further before I plateau except for bench press. I swam Tuesday and will today too. I was well off my time Tuesday and struggled from lap 13 through lap 30, but felt really good after that and ended up swimming 46 rather than my normal 40. I had the energy to keep going, but I was starting to feel a little strain in my shoulder and decided to stop.

I'v been IFing every day this week. All good. The more I do it, the easier it becomes. At most, I feel a little hungry around 9 am, but then it passes, and I'm neither hungry nor lacking energy.

Food: Still very much on track. All week for lunch, I've been eating the chili I made with either a big salad or a big serving of of leftover greens.

Lunch_2012-06-11.jpg

Dinner Monday night was a repeat of the shrimp tom yum soup. I had everything I needed to make it, and it was yummy, so why not? Tuesday night was a chicken breast, 3 eggs, and some greens. Wednesday night was the same. The photo doesn't show the chicken. By the way, I've only started eating eggs over easy recently, and I still don't have the hang of cooking them, so they are a bit mangled.

Dinner_2012-06-12.jpg

I've been eating primal for 20 days now, and I feel great. I have so much more energy, and it is much more constant. I've lost 7 pounds just since starting primal! That's 26 pounds overall. I've also gained strength, endurance, and I've improved my conditioning. This morning I ran to catch the train, and I caught it no problem and wasn't remotely out of breath. I breathed heavier while I ran, but immediately went back to normal as soon as I stopped. Before I began my body transformation, I would have been sucking wind for a couple of minutes afterwards, feeling like I might pass out.

As an added bonus, last Friday, a guy who works on my floor (we are in different departments and don't work together but will chat at the elevator, etc.) commented on my weight loss!

[en2ec]

Sorry about the double post. I'm having some weird glitches. Lost posts. Double posts. I even deleted the second one, but it is still there.

[primally_yours]

I've been eating primal for 20 days now, and I feel great. I have so much more energy, and it is much more constant. I've lost 7 pounds just since starting primal! That's 26 pounds overall. I've also gained strength, endurance, and I've improved my conditioning. This morning I ran to catch the train, and I caught it no problem and wasn't remotely out of breath. I breathed heavier while I ran, but immediately went back to normal as soon as I stopped. Before I began my body transformation, I would have been sucking wind for a couple of minutes afterwards, feeling like I might pass out.

Yay, that's great!!

Your meals look yummy. Eggs over greens is one of my staples too.

[en2ec]

Wow! I am so excited. I swam today while also IFing, and I had the best swim ever. I think maybe the best swim of my life. I started doing laps when I joined the gym on March 28. I did 12 the first time, and it was a struggle. I worked my way up to 30 laps by May 3. That's when I got a nifty little lap counter that fits on my finger like a tiny digital watch. It also tracks lap times, and on May 3 I started to log them. I don't log them every time I swim. I do it every few weeks, so it isn't a full record of my swims by any means, but I typically do it on days that I felt like I had a good swim. It is biased in that respect. But that's fine. I see it as a snapshot of my progress points along the way. Here's the graph. Note that today's swim is highlighted.

swimgraph.jpg

There are several things that jump out to me when I look at this. First, my earlier swims in early May were characterized by one lap (not especially fast) followed by a long rest and then another lap and then another long rest. By May 22, I had reduced my resting times, but they are still obvious. I also swam more than 30 laps then. By June 1, I had significantly reduced my resting time and had extended my laps to 40. But today, I reduced my rest times even more. Plus, I swam faster in the actual laps, and I swam 50 laps. As you can see from the table below, I've steadily improved my average lap time from 45.36 seconds to 37.4 seconds while going from 30 to 50 laps. I've also reduced my slowest lap, which captures my rest time, from 58.84 seconds to 40.49 seconds.

swim table.jpg

By the way, I could have kept swimming today, but I needed to get back to work. I attribute my recent improvements to four things. 1) I started doing my katas with much higher intensity, treating them like sprints. By the time I finish, I'm bent over and gasping for air -- I think this is the big one that is helping me swim without any significant break between laps. 2) The last couple of days, I've been able to get my son back to sleep in the morning and so have slept longer. 3) I do think I'm slowly improving my technique in the pool to be more efficient. 4) My primal diet is giving me the constant energy I need to swim at a higher intensity.

[Paleobird]

Thanks! And thanks for the tip about skipping lunch instead of breakfast. For now, skipping breakfast seems to work for me, so I'll stick with it, but if it gets to be a problem, I'll try skipping lunch instead. I definitely eat more for dinner when I IF, but the extra is still less than what I'd eat for breakfast. Lunch is the same whether I IF or not. I always eat lunch right after I work out, and for some reason I'm not all that hungry then.

I have to confess that "No more pretending to like tofu any more" is only partially true. One of my favorite all-time dishes is an authentic mapo dofu. I'd guess there are only a handful of szechuan restaurants in the US that can make it right. Joe's Noodle House in Rockville, MD is one. It is mostly tofu, but it also has ground pork. The combination of silky tofu texture and crunchy-chewy ground pork bits in a wonderfully complex, spicy, tingly (from the szechuan peppers), pungent sauce is almost sensory overload, but in a good way. Other than mapo dofu, I don't miss tofu one bit. My god, I've eaten so many morningstar burgers and "soysage" patties over the years thinking that I was eating healthy. Oh well. I'm on track now.

Just about anything with enough szechuan seasoning on it would taste good to me.

Your food is looking awesome and you are making some great progress on the swimming as well. Keep up the good work.

[en2ec]

For dinner last night, I had shrimp and bacon with cajun seasonings (kind of a shrimp and grits without the grits), two fried eggs, and a small portion of roasted sweet potatoes. I know. No veggies. We ran out, and thanks to the fact that grocery stores close at 7 pm here, I was out of luck. Sorry, no photo this time.

I'll finish off the last of the chili for lunch today, along with a salad from the salad bar. I have some Brazilian strip loin that I'll cut into steaks and a nice bottle of rioja waiting for me for dinner tonight. Well, not the whole bottle. A glass or two.

I'm looking forward to lifting today.

[en2ec]

I had a great weekend. My wife made some spicy ground chicken lettuce wraps for dinner on Friday, which were really good. I had bacon and eggs for breakfast on Saturday -- I don't IF on the weekend. We were out shopping and ended up going to a Turkish restaurant for lunch. I had a lamb and beef donner kebab plate (like a gyro) without rice but with extra salad. For dinner, I had a nice grilled grass-fed steak, some wild asparagus (I'd never heard of it before, but they were fantastic), some kimchi (because I love it), and a big salad.

Dinner 2012-06-16.jpg

I discovered something this weekend. I like sardines. I had never tried them before. Maybe it was the name. Maybe it was some vague negative association I made as a kid. I don't know. But I thought I didn't like them. Turns out, they taste a heck of a lot like tuna. I've been taking fish oil capsules -- 5 horse pills -- for 1.8 g of Omega 3 a day. One little tin of sardines provides 2 g of Omega 3 plus 23 g of protein and 12 g total fat with no carbs. And they're cheap.

On sunday, my wife made bacon and eggs and a grilled tomato for me for breakfast since it was fathers day. We went out for lunch, and I had some spareribs, a salad, and some cabbage with bacon. For dinner Sunday I had a steak and salad.

Today for lunch, I brought some leftover steak, which I'll be having this week for lunch. And I also had a can of sardines on top of my big salad bar salad. It was a very satisfying meal to break my fast after a great workout.

I lifted today and moved up on weight with squats as usual. I had to improvise on the OHP and rows because the olympic bars were taken when I needed them, and I didn't go up on weight this time because I had to use small fixed barbells.

I have been using the gravitron to slowly improve my pullups and dips. Hopefully, by the time that I lose the fat I want, I'll be strong enough to do unassisted pullups and dips.

I weighed myself at the gym before and after the workout just out of curiousity. I lost 0.7 kg or about 1.5 pounds of water. I sweat a little when I lift, but I sweat buckets when I do my katas, which take only about 10 minutes. So almost all of that was lost in 10 minutes doing katas. There was a saying in my dojo that if there wasn't a puddle of sweat on the floor from doing sanchin kata, you weren't really doing sanchin kata.

[Metric]

Mmm. Wild asparagus is super delish! I'm not sure if you have access to garlic scapes. I tried them for the first time last year. SO GOOD!