Primal Blueprint Journal DCarr10760 (David) page

[DCarr10760]

So, like I said in the New Member's Forum, I am a 51 year old man who has been fat essentially all of my adult life. I have been on nearly all of the trendy diets at one time or another and managed to lose weight on all of them, but since I never really changed my basic eating patterns I would drift back to the patterns and the weight would return.

I made various changes over time, eliminating soda, junk food and empty calories completely so my weight never went out of control entirely, but I've never been at a healthy weight either.

So in doing a great deal of reading I came across books like the Paleo Diet, Why we get fat and finally The Primal Blueprint. It made sense to me and I've been eating clean for several weeks now. I joined the Forum just yesterday and have been reading through the posts.

I decided to start a journal right away and this is it. I've tried journaling just on my own and at Fitday, but I really think I would like the interaction.

I know the intention is to state publicly that one intends to live according to the PB principles for 30 days, but I am thinking more in terms of a lifelong commitment. I've been on enough short term diets and when they are through I seem to ease back into old patterns of eating and lethargy. So I need to start with permanent changes.

I'll keep you all posted!

DC

[DCarr10760]

So Sundays are a challenge for me diet-wise, our family visits my SO's parents, both in their 80s. But they are pretty active and enjoy nice meals. I often help with the cooking. Usually we have snacks (chips and dip) in the late afternoon and a big meal at dinner, with cocktails and dessert. On diets that allowed scheduleded cheat days or "re-feeds" this was always one.

Today I brought over some of the grass fed pork chops I got, they made a big pasta salad and a garden salad and we had some sautéed zucchini, the first from their garden. So they poured me a cocktail, and I sipped at it until a sufficient time passed and then poured it down the sink and replaced it with ice water with lime. I managed to avoid all the chips and crackers.

Dinner was easy enough, I took the tiniest spoonful of pasta salad and lots of the veggies and a big pork chop, which I cooked on the grill like a steak, it was perfect (if I do say so myself). I kinda pushed around the pasta salad as I ate everything else and then finally made a big show of complimenting my Mother-out-law on how good the pasta salad was (it was), while putting down my fork in a way that showed my meal had ended.

Dessert was a small piece of watermelon and we were done. I am pretty happy that the meal was within guidelines mostly and I really enjoyed everything. Now the next challenge is several business lunches and dinners that I'll need to navigate through. But so far I've done pretty well.

I managed to take a 4-mile walk today as well, and later had a nice swim.

[DCarr10760]

So today I had no breakfast, I wasn't really hungry, at least not enough to prepare and make an omelet. So I decided to skip it.

Last year I did quite well on a diet called The Warrior"s Diet, which is similar in a few respects to PB, but still allows some grain based carbs, the major thing being that you dont eat anything during the day except small amounts of lean protein- but only after working out. All of your eating relegated to one big meal after 6:00 PM. But during that big meal there were essentially no restrictions. I actually did very well with it, except that in my business there are a lot of lunch meetings and that really didnt fit. But like with most every diet I went on I lost 50 lbs... then put most of it back after I stopped.

The takeaway for me on that one was that it is okay to feel hungry periodically. Prior to that I never really stopped eating long enough to know what it feels like. I actually like feeling lean and a bit hungry during the day. Like I do today. :-)

Of course I know when my next meal will be. Leftover pork chops from dinner last night and a half an avocado :-)

I might take a walk during my lunch hour, because I didn't this morning.

[Mshathvri]

Hi! I'm liking your journal a lot. And now I want half of an avocado. Om nom nom.

[DCarr10760]

Today was pretty good food wise, like I said above I skipped breakfast and while I was not ravenous by lunchtime, at least not homicidally so, I was certainly happy when lunchtime came around. I ate my huge pork chop and my avocado half and was fine until about 4:00. When I got home I saw that I received the 3 pounds of macadamia nuts (organic, raw) I ordered and had an ounce of those mmmmmm!

Dinner was grilled chicken, grilled yellow and green squash and a huge garden salad. Dessert was a smallish bowl of mixed fruit with a dollop of Fages total yogurt. It was delicious.

I'm done eating for the day. I did manage a walk on my lunch hour, I rarely do it over the summer when it's hot and humid out or I will be sweaty and smelly all afternoon :-(. But today was nice out. It's a 2.5 mile loop I do that takes me down by the beach. A perfect break from a hectic day. I didn't get too sweaty and my deodorant didn't fail or my coworkers were uncharacteristically polite (I can never be sure).

So all in all, a good day!

[DCarr10760]

Good morning! I woke up at 5:00 (pretty usual for me) and got out the door for a walk. The weather here in Connecticut has been beautiful, warm and dry since Sunday and it was nice watching the sun come up over the river near my house. I have several walks that I do, a half-hour walk, an hour long walk and the one I did today takes an hour and a half, just over four miles. I read in the Sunday links post by Mark about how 8- second long sprints repeated over a twenty minute span increased fat burning according to a recent study, so periodically I'd sprint for 8-10 seconds.

These left me pleasantly breathless and sweaty, but conscious of being overweight and not in good physical condition I gave myself plenty of recovery time (I counted 125 steps between sprints). I stopped at 8 sprints. I'll do it again in a week or so.

One of my motivational images is running fast. I remember as a kid effortlessly running full tilt, it felt like flying! My 7- year old son loves running too. I got fat at his age and stopped. But the image has stayed in my mind. I want to get to the point where I can sprint like that again. Each sprint this morning allowed me a moment of exhilaration before gravity intervened. It will get better as I get lighter and stronger. I do need to be careful, pulling a muscle would set me back.

Food will be easy today, lunch is leftover dinner food :-), Breakfast is an omelet with salsa and avocado. Dinner will be something. We have a lot of vegetables in the house, SWMBO and I joined the local farm's CSA and we have produce from them, plus lettuce from the garden. I do all of the cooking, SWMBO Does. Not. Cook. I ordered a mixed quarter of pasture fed beef, it's way less expensive if you by a quarter or a half and can store (freeze) it. It is shipping this week sometime. Maybe it will surprise me and get here today. Steak....

I'm sort of doing the locavore thing, this particular ranch (where I buy meat) is in Upstate New York so is not strictly local, but it is a small family business and they care about what they're doing and I am happy to buy from them. Their pricing is also reasonable in quantity. The producers in Connecticut seem to grow for the restaurant business and for wealthy folks in the west of the state (essentially a suburb of NYC).

So I'm rambling, time to wake the troops and move forward!

[DCarr10760]

So yesterday's food was not bad despite going off plan. Breakfast was my yummy 3-egg omelet with fresh salsa topped with more salsa and a dollop of Fages total yogurt. Lunch was to have been leftover dinner from the night before, but the owner of our company (it's a family business, I'm cousins with the owners) wanted to go to this nice restaurant on the shoreline for lobsters. So several of us went. I passed on the bread and the potatoes but gobbled up a half dozen clams on the half shell and a 1-1/2lb bug, indulging in the drawn butter without guilt. Green beans as a side dish. I usually drink several beers on an excursion like this but had a glass of red wine and nursed it throughout the meal.

It was such a beautiful day that after work two of my cousins talked me into going to the beach and I went. I stayed until sunset and had several more glasses of red wine but didn't eat any of the grainy snack poison that they brought.

I did a lot of swimming and it was a lot of fun. I grew up at the beach with these cousins, so we are really comfortable around each other. It was a nice day. I managed to wolf down my dinner (the lunch I had intended to eat before) on the ride home.

I weighed myself this AM to see what this debauchery cost me in terms of weight gain, but to my surprise I was 258.6 DOWN from 261.2 Yesterday! Okay, likely it has to with dehydration caused by the wine, but it was nevertheless a nice surprise.

What this debauchery did cause me is a little hangover... I don't typically get hangovers with beer, but with wine I do. It's not terrible but I'm not real active this am.

I am pleasantly stiff from yesterday's sprinting.

[DCarr10760]

Hmmm. Based on yesterdays success, I might need to make red wine a regular addition! I could go for a glass right now!

[DCarr10760]

Yesterday was a good day eating wise, I ran the numbers (Fitday) and I consumed right around 75 grams of carbohydrate. I've been trying to keep it between 50 and 100. It would have been lower except that I was blindsided by a honeydew melon, while hungover and dehydrated and well...Omnomnom! But the rest of the day was under greater control.

SWMBO brought the boy and we went for a swim at the beach after work, it was a lot of fun, not so much as exercise, though I did do a lot of actual swimming, but just hanging out with the family. My son is 7 almost and has learned to swim and it is so much fun to see him filled with joy splashing around.

Much of the reason I want to lose this weight and get in better shape is so that I can be a bigger (more active) part of his life.

[DCarr10760]

Today in our CSA box we got Bok Choy I really like it, I did up a stir fry with beef and onions and the BC with coconut oil and soy sauce. I steamed the stems a bit then stir-fried everything else. Yumm.

It was a good day eating wise, I did stop at the beach again on my way home and had a glass of red wine...

:-)