I'm on the Blood Donation Boat

First off, my weigh-in today was 214 pounds.  Back to a total 55 pound weight loss.

I'm terribly sorry I don't have the link, but a while ago I recall reading an article about the Paleo movement in which somebody maintained we should all give blood because early man would have been regularly using it.

This has always seemed a silly hunter-warrior fantasy to me, the idea that men were constantly spraying blood everywhere and lived to tell the tale.  I don't know.  Never really bought it.

On the other hand, blood donation is a good thing to do both for your community and for your health.  Especially when you're like me and your body makes too much blood.  Which I found out a couple months ago when my routine hormone-related bloodwork came back and I was told I had secondary polycythemia.  This is the opposite of anemia... rather than having too few red blood cells, I have too many, which can eventually lead to a stroke or heart attack.

The treatment is frequent blood donations to lower the blood count, which I've been doing. 

So I guess I'm on that wagon after all.

Paleo Mayo and On Honey

Updates:  First off, I forgot this blog still existed.  But it does, so here I am.

Diet-related, I am giving up most dairy, at least for a while, to try it out.  My main exception is ghee, although I am a bit lax when it comes to butter.  I'm going to see how it makes me feel, since I stalled a bit weight-loss-wise.

I stopped tracking my food intake because it wasn't helping me.

I don't care very much about carb intake anymore, although I eat less fruit and more vegetables.

I weigh roughly 216 pounds now.  Which is good as I slipped up between now and the last post and gained some weight.  I'm fine now, though.

Next, the mayo.  And the honey.  I eat honey.  I don't eat like, buckets of it, but I eat it.  A lot of us do.  And the first response I got from posting this recipe was somebody telling me to omit the honey.

Uhhh, no.  You are not Paleo Czar and I will eat what I want.  Honey is a food that's found in the wild, has been eaten by humans for a long time, and gathering it is portrayed in cave paintings.  You can omit whatever you damned well please, but I like my mayo the way it is.

But yes, you can omit the honey, that's fine.

Paleo Mayo

First I should mention why I made this today.  At r/Paleo somebody posted a recipe with mayonnaise in it, and since most people associate mayonnaise with that soybean-oil-laden rancid crap in the supermarket, there were people questioning its involvement.

Maybe it was that supermarket crap.  OK, let's be honest, although it's not ideal, supermarket mayo is not the worst thing you can eat.  But if you have the time and elbow grease, a way better option is to make it on your own, switching the bad ingredients with good ones.  Because at its base, mayonnaise is literally nothing but egg and oil.

I used a recipe for this.  Kind of.  It's one by Alton Brown from the Food Network.  His recipe, of course, contains two problems:  Sugar and bad oils.  So if you follow this recipe exactly, switching out the oil for avocado or light olive oil and the sugar for honey--or omitting it entirely--you will have an ideal mayo.  If you are going to be eating it right away, you can even use hardening oils like coconut or bacon grease.

I made an additional substitution.  Since I had no dry mustard, I used some whole corn wet mustard--deliciousness in a jar--instead.  The result is s hown in the pictures, here:  A gorgeous-colored accompaniment to a naked BLT or an addition to some deviled eggs.