Giving up soda step-by-step.

Bottled poison.

I'm a recovering soda addict.  That sounds a little tongue-in-cheek, but it was ridiculously bad.  And it's still ridiculously bad.  I haven't drank soda since the beginning of January, but when I walk past it in a store or when I am asked to buy it for someone else my hands shake.

If you're where I was, I'm afraid to say it'll probably never entirely go away... but that doesn't mean that you can't give up soda.  Although they may seem obvious, these are the steps that I took--and in many ways continue to take--to slay the sugary beast.

1. Start by raising the amount of calcium you eat.I actually supplement calcium specifically for this reason.  Paleo options for this include eating whole sardines and other small fish that still have bones as well as green leafy vegetables, those primal among us might choose dairy instead.  The reason for this is that addiction to carbonation may be a sign of a calcium deficiency.  It won't work for everyone, but it's worth a shot, right?
   
2.  Reduce sugar soda as much as you can.
   If you're like I was and you literally drink it every hour of your waking day, make a conscious effort to drink less of it.  For example, at my peak I'd drink roughly a can of soda an hour for twelve hours most days.  That's 1,800 calories and over 500 grams of carbohydrate.  Think about the impact one would make by cutting that in half; starting by drinking a can every two hours instead of one, then every three hours.
   You can also replace it with other drinks, but be warned...People have it in their heads that certain things are "good replacements," when they really aren't that great.  Iced tea might have less sugar, for example, but not always.  I have a resident who is trying to lose weight who overdrinks sports drinks like Gatorade and Powerade thinking it will help him.  These won't harm you if you are extremely active and athletic, but if you're not they are no better for you than a soda with some salt added to it.  Fruit juice, as well, may seem like a good choice... but wouldn't it be better to just eat the fruit?  In the long run, the only really good substitute is water.
3. Once you've reduced, switch to diet soda.
   This one is actually the most difficult for quite a few people to hear, especially if you're coming from a natural foods (or so-called-natural-foods) movement.  I tried this when I was still a vegan only to have a bunch of friends tell me how evil aspartame was.  And, well, it is, but I assure you it's way better for you than sugar soda.  Consider that a 20 ounce Mountain Dew has around 290 calories (enough for a whole fricking meal) and 77 grams of sugar (more than enough or a whole fricking day), getting rid of that is making an impact.  The caveat here is to make sure you either improve or don't change your other lifestyle habits; diet soda can encourage people to eat more because they think they've made up for it.
   Be warned, "real sugar" is not "diet."I remember one day my father--a diabetic--came home with a twelve pack of Sierra Mist Natural because they market it kind of shadily.  Sugar, in the long run, is still sugar.  And the same, unfortunately, goes for those natural sodas brewed with honey or maple syrup.  Still sugar.
4. Start going days without soda altogether.This is an optional step.  Personally, after a year of diet soda, I gave up soda cold turkey.  This step is if you can't do that.  Just start going days without soda.  If you're addicted, you'll shake.  Drink water.  Eat some fruit if you need to.  Know that the shaking is not because you need it; just as carb addicts may think they are going into sugar shock when they reduce their carb intake because their body reacts, your body might react to the lack of soda.  But make a conscious effort to cut it down.
5.  Give it up... for good.Don't fall into the trap of thinking you can drink it once in a while and be OK.  It took me ten years to give up soda because every time I'd give it up, it would be a half-assed "moderation" way of going about it.  I'd drink a soda--just this once--and it would spiral into four, five, six, or more and I'd be right back where I started.

PaleoTrack Analysis for May 29th

Alright, time for yesterday's PaleoTrack Analysis:

What I Ate And Why

I worked today, and miraculously it didn't harm my food intake that much:

 The list isn't all that accurate, but I'm going to assume it's accurate enough to not throw me off entirely.

For breakfast I had two rashers of bacon and two eggs fried in a little of the leftover grease, which is normal for me.  For lunch I had haddock cooked in coconut oil.  For dinner, which I ate at work, I had two chicken thighs with the skin.

For a throughout-the-day snack I made a trail mix with jerky (made from a grass-fed strip steak, this is where the "maybe not so accurate" thing comes up), home-dried bananas (another one) and a quarter cup of pecans.

There was no strange reason for eating any of this today.  I ate when I got hungry.  That part is a success for me.

The Pie Chart

Pie chart today is pretty damned good:

I didn't eat as many calories as I wanted, but it's not a huge deficiency and I'm not hungry.  My carbs are in a good spot at 31g.

The Labels

Hey, I gained one!

 No dairy today.  It's still ragging at me because of my omega-6 fatty acids, but I figured out they're high because of all the chicken I've been eating.  The skin has lots of omega-6s.  The pecans didn't help, but I wouldn't have gone over had it not been for the chicken.  And let's be honest, I'm not going to fret over chicken skin.

I went shopping today and brought back pork, lamb, eggs, and avocados.  So perhaps I will moderate the chicken better and I'll eventually get a magic "Strict Paleo" gold star there.  Not today, I'm afraid.

A PaleoTrack Warning

I love PaleoTrack.  It's great for when you're sick of SparkPeople or FitDay whining that you're eating too much fat and not enough carbs, and it'll even remind you of whether you are grain free, dairy free, and so on.

There are a couple of things that can be confusing, though, and I thought I'd draw your attention to them because I've seen multiple people  have these problems without really seeing what was going on.

The first and simplest is to make sure you have your time zone correct.  Foods I was adding were magically disappearing on me, and it turned out that my "today" was the program's "tomorrow" based on my time zone settings.

But that's not a big deal.  This next one, though, is.  A couple days ago I ate ten ounces of pork.  When it gave me the amounts, it didn't give an option for ounces, only chunks of three ounces.  So I put the number as 3.33 as a quick estimate and clicked "Add to journal."

It converted the amount to 9.99 ounces, which was sufficiently close, and so I didn't think anything further of it.

I added the rest of my food for the day and then found I had added the wrong number of beets to the wrong day (based on the problem above).  So I clicked the "Edit" button to change the beets.  When I clicked "Save," it said I had gotten over 3500 calories.  Which confused me because I had reduced the number of beets I'd eaten, and beets aren't that caloric anyway.

I actually wound up doing this multiple times, and the calorie count ballooned to around 23,000.  Finally I looked at the amounts to find that it thought I'd eaten almost 270 ounces of pork, 27 times what I actually did.

What happened?  Well, whenever you click "Edit," it reverts back to chunks of three ounces instead of the ounces it converts itself to.  What it doesn't do is recalculate the number.  So whenever you click "Edit," and don't bother making sure all of them are accurate, it'll multiply the number it calculated from your original entry by three ounces.

So if you start by adding 3.33 to signify around ten ounces, it'll multiply that to about 9.99.  Next time you edit you wind up with a little under thirty.  And so on.

Maybe this'll be fixed in the future, maybe it won't.  PaleoTrack is a great program, but you need to be careful with it.

Oil Pulling, Oil Swallowing.

Coconuts.

I started an oil pulling regimen.  Kind of.  Oil pulling is an Indian technique in which somebody takes a mouthful of oil, sesame oil being traditional, and swishes it around their mouth, trying to squish it between teeth and the like, for about twenty minutes before spitting it out.  This is meant to "pull" toxins out of the bloodstream through the mouth, particularly bacteria and parasites.  This is purported to "cure" all manner of ailments, such as allergies, diabetes, skin problems, etc.

I'm going to say this for the first time on this blog, although I've said it plenty of times before:  Alternative medicine is puffed-up and often useless.  When it is useful, it usually isn't for the ways its proponents say it is.  Going on an Ayurvedic diet, for example, will not give you any extraordinary benefits, but it does encourage dietary mindfulness, so plenty of people will do better on it than they would if they continued to eat, say, a SAD diet.  Drinking coconut water can reduce your blood pressure, but not because your body is "too hot" and coconut water is "cooling."

Oil pulling falls into this category.  I decided to try this, using coconut oil, because it's likely good for your oral health, and because my teeth are suffering from a triple-attack (years on the SAD, years of veganism and vegetarianism, years of soda addiction), this is something really important to me.  There is a big difference between the way I do it and the way others do it, though, and that's that I swallow the oil.

"What?  Blasphemy!"  OK, hear me out.  I'm not saying that you need to swallow oil after you pull it.  And if you believe the trotted out reason why it supposedly works, I don't blame you for being horrified.  I already explained it above... people seem to believe that swishing oil in their mouths is yanking parasites and bacteria from their bloodstream and that by swallowing it afterwords you're just letting all of those parasites and bacteria fester in your stomach.

Here's the thing:  Our bodies are intelligently designed.  That doesn't mean by a higher power (although I support that), but that we--like all organisms--are carved by millions of years of evolution.  Think about what happens when you're sick.  You might sneeze or snort stuff out of your nose, but you aren't carrying around a spittoon to ensure you never swallow it for fear you will be sick forever.  Your stomach is full of acid, which in addition to digesting food is there to keep this stuff from entering your body.

Does it always kill parasites and bacteria?  No.  But we need to remember something else here:  The oil isn't pulling parasites and bacteria out of your bloodstream to begin with.  It's reducing the number of bacteria that destroy your teeth, providing a temporary film on your teeth and gums, and some say introducing the oil sublingually... but it ain't pulling stuff out of your bloodstream.  It's limited to your mouth, and I assure you any bacteria and parasites that reside in your mouth are probably already draining into your stomach anyway.

Finally, the idea that you are swishing a tablespoon of now-incredibly-toxic-sludge in your mouth after twenty minutes of swishing is based on the assumption that you are incredibly toxic to begin with.  And you know what?  You're not.  Not in that way, anyway.  The average human being may be lethargic, overweight, and sick from diet and lifestyle conditions, but if you change your lifestyle habits your body will--barring certain afflictions--do just fine in getting rid of that stuff on its own.

That means that detox procedures in general may make somebody who otherwise eats like crap feel temporarily better, but eating right to begin with removes that need to detox altogether.  Your liver, kidneys, and other organs will do that job way better than juice, swallowing gauze, or colonic irrigation ever will.

Besides, coconut oil is better for you inside your body than spat out.

PaleoTrack Analysis for May 28

The Foods I Ate And Why I Ate Them

Yesterday I was at home all day, which means I was less hungry in general due to less boredom.

I had eggs and bacon for breakfast before doing a coconut oil "pull and swallow" (Oil pulling, except I swallow the oil.  I know, I know, the oil pulling shills hate me now.).  I had a pair of chicken thighs each for lunch and a late dinner.  I also had a 6 oz. haddock fillet and a pound of broccoli with butter.

Later as the day was winding down I noticed my bananas were going bad.  I put some in the dehydrator and made the remaining two into a banana pudding, hence the bananas, coconut water, and cocoa.  This radically changed the way the day was going, but not so much that it ruined the day.

Plus, I didn't eat anything that I didn't process myself, and since I was at home and not work it meant I wasn't distracted by other people eating or boredom.

The Pie Chart

Yesterday's pie chart wasn't terrible:

I didn't get under the 70 grams of carbs I intended because bananas are sugary, but I'm still in the 50-100 carb sweet spot popularized by Mark Sisson so I am satisfied.  I also kicked myself out of ketosis, but my body drifts in and out very easily so I'll probably be back into it by morning.

Half of my calories are from fat, which is acceptable, and I ate pretty much the same amount of protein as the day before.

The Labels

There is no difference here from my last entry:

Too many omega-6s, loss of the "dairy free" label due to butter (but only butter).  Not bad.  Still room for improvement.

Exercise for the Day

Today's activities included playing fetch with the dog, foraging for asparagus (without actually finding any), and a fifteen minute Men's Health body weight workout video that gets me really sweating. 

I overcarbed today, here's the recipe.

The actual dietary run-down comes tomorrow, and I'm still not doing terrible, but I did something I try to avoid usually, which is make a paleo version of a non paleo food.  Actually, since I did that today, I think after this I'll write why you should avoid that.

Banana Chocolate Pudding

•  2 bananas
• 1/2 cup liquid (I used coconut water, you can use milk, almond milk, water, whatever)
• 1 tablespoon powdered baking chocolate

It's really easy.  Just blend it all together until it's smooth.  Chill it.  It might be runny and it's definitely a dark chocolate taste.  You can also freeze the mix and blend it to make an ice-cream like treat.

It'll look something like this:

Which is, by the way, an actual picture of it that I just took.  Don't you hate it when people come up with recipes and then, instead of showing the actual results, they just Google a picture of something similar and pretend that's what it'll look like?  Ugh.  I'd rather not have a picture and leave you guessing than pull that.

The Road So Far

This is a bit of an introduction to my health and dietary life because, well, that's what this blog is about anyway.

I'm a 27-year-old, 230-pound transsexual food addict.  There are several foods that will make me an insatiable, hungry beast when I eat them--sugar and flour, mostly.  At my peak I could down a twelve-pack of soda a day.  In fact, for many years I drank soda every hour of my waking existence.

Did you know you can gain weight pretty easily on a vegan diet?  I do.  That's because when I went vegan in 2004 I didn't know yet that most of the foods that make me a ravenous beast are vegan.  I spent a big chunk of my life devouring vegan bagels and fake meats before realizing I had ballooned to a morbidly-obese 269 pounds.  I tried repeatedly to give up the things that I expected were doing this.  I switched to whole grains and diet soda, went long periods without soda before caving and drinking it, avoided meat substitutes, with no improvement.  I went ovo-lacto vegetarian four years later after repeatedly going to bed with excruciating hunger pains from trying to lose the weight I had gained.  It took away the hunger, but not the weight, although it stabilized around that time.

I went to a new doctor for my yearly check-up, like many people feeling embarrassed by the scale.  I said that I was more worried about diabetes and high blood pressure than my weight, but that I understood my obesity wasn't helping.  My doctor brushed off the number, saying that if I ate fewer carbs it would help reduce that risk.

I had a friend who had gone paleo and wouldn't shut up about it (I'm not knocking her, it's not like I shut up about being a vegetarian).  Due to my familiarity with her and holes being poked in my animal rights philosophy from all directions, I decided it was time to give up vegetarianism.

That summer I went mostly-primal.  I was working at a summer camp and had to deal with the food they gave me, so to ensure I wouldn't get total crap I was lenient.  I lost fifty pounds that summer and

Social graces got to me and after the millionth time my dad tried giving me fried chicken I gave in.  Bam, weight gain; not as much as when I was a vegan, but ten pounds isn't a small thing when you still weigh fifty pounds more than you should.  To make matters worse, I had just started testosterone therapy to transition from female-to-male, which ramped up my appetite as well as my blood pressure.

As I write this I've been on testosterone for five months.  I have a blood-work appointment in roughly one month, during which time I hope to have my blood pressure at a level that will not prompt my doctor to prescribe me medication.  My target weight right now is 180 pounds, which is roughly fifty pounds lighter than my current weight.  The last time I checked my blood pressure it was 138/89, which is lower than it was, but I'd like to control it further.

This is the initial purpose for this blog, but I do intend for this to be an overall lifestyle change and not just a thirty-day shindig.

PaleoTrack Analysis of the Day

Or rather, yesterday.  I am going to log everything I eat until at least my next bloodwork appointment.  I am using PaleoTrack to analyze each day of food, and I'll reflect on why I eat the way I do when I do screw up, goals for the future, etcetera.

The Foods and Why I Ate Them

Yesterday I actually packed out all my food, or what was supposed to be all my food.  This is due to the fact that every once in a while I'll pick up a twelve to fifteen hour shift at the group home I work at, and although I am allowed to eat the food I cook for my residents, it is very non-primal.

The star here was ten ounces of pork steak cooked in lard.  I also ate two eggs and a piece of bacon before I left, hoping to stave off the fake hunger pangs (those "I think I'm hungry" feelings that aren't actually hunger, but drug side-effects and boredom).  I brought along two pieces of bacon, three boiled eggs (they're labeled as "poached" here because I couldn't find "boiled" at the time), a bag of frozen broccoli, butter for the broccoli, an apple, an ounce of cheese.

I forgot to put on the list that I had a cup of French onion soup while I was there, but that had no carbs and only 20 calories so I'm not worried, although I'm annoyed that I ate something out of a box.  The soup was pure boredom eating.  The rest of my food was more than enough for the day, but I ate it early despite telling myself I shouldn't, finishing it all at around 3:30p.  Since my shift ended at 10p, it was rather annoying, but again, I survived, so no big deal.

The chicken was a last-minute addition.  I'd planned not to eat anything when I got home at 10:30, but I was legitimately hungry, so it's cool.

The Pie Chart

The pie chart on PaleoTrack gives a run-down of where my calories come from:

And I did eat more calories than I wish I did, but I did manage a reasonable level of carbohydrate (I'm aiming for under 70 grams) and the percentage of fat and protein is also pretty good.  Overall this was a success.

The Labels

PaleoTrack tells you, based on what labels are on the food you entered (contains dairy, contains grain, etc.) just how paleo your day was.  I'm not strict paleo anyway, so it's not a huge concern to me, but it is a good motivator.

Sugar-free, legume-free, and grain-free.  I did eat dairy today, so that's not on there.  I honestly don't know how to eat to get rid of the omega-6 label without cutting the fat off my meat (which I'm not going to do).  My Omega-6 ratio is around 7:1, which is a huge improvement compared to most Americans.  It's not a major concern to me although I will continue to try improving it further.