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.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Thursday, September 27, 2012
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.
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
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.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
On the Vegetarian Mental Disorders Study
So on r/Paleo somebody posted a study showing that vegetarians have a higher incidence of mental disorders. The gist of it is that they direct-matched data from vegetarians with non-vegetarians and predominantly-vegetarian-eaters and found that depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, and somatoform disorders are more common in vegetarians. More interestingly, the onset of these disorders tends to happen after people go vegetarian.
Do we really know why? No. There are undoubtedly paleo and primal eaters out there who believe it is a nutritional thing... I don't. As an ex-vegan, I have my own way of looking at this, by which I mean this finding is not shocking when you consider what disorders we're talking about. And while vegetarianism is not an inherently healthy lifestyle, I don't think it's due to the common nutritional errors in thinking vegetarians tend to make. I think it has to do with the kind of mental environment they are in.
Depression and anxiety are both chemical and social disorders. What I mean by that is that there are plenty of people who get depression and anxiety for what feels like absolutely no reason... there are plenty of others, though, that get depression and anxiety due to outside pressures. In 2006 I was working on a political campaign for several months that led to harassment and property damage. Even worse, we lost. It got to the point where several of us needed psychiatrists because we were suffering from anxiety and depression. I would have panic attacks over the phone to my parents. And actually, during Wisconsin's recall election the same thing happened for the same reason.
Now think about the social environment of the vegetarian, especially the vegan. Vegans are in the position where they believe 99% of the people they care for, that they associate with, that they are surrounded by every day are supporting cruel and murderous practices. They are aware that animals are being killed by humans by the thousands in their own backyards and that there is very little they can actually do about that. And while this comparison is inaccurate and rightfully seen as absolutely insensitive to most non-vegetarians, vegans easily view this as an animal holocaust that everybody seems to support except them.
Pile in the fact that people often outright refuse to accommodate their eating choices and make them the constant butt of jokes. They're guilted by relatives for not eating the turkey, they constantly have to ask for modifications when they go out to eat at a restaurant, and they have to deal with a lot of insensitivity from other people.
This is enough to make anybody extremely anxious and depressed. So that doesn't surprise me.
Then you have somatoform disorders. These are maladies for which there is no apparent medical cause... hypochondria, for instance. And every restrictive diet makes it easy to have somatoform conditions. Have you ever witnessed a long-term vegetarian accidentally eat something with meat in it? Some of them are chill about it, if annoyed, but there are a lot of them who will dramatically freak out over it, thinking they're really ill. When I was at summer camp somebody put pepperoni in the spaghetti, which one of the vegetarians ate. She bawled for hours. People were reassuring her on ethical grounds without realizing that it wasn't because she had killed an animal, it was because she hadn't eaten meat since she was three years old and vegetarian culture--and her parents--had told her time and time again that she could no longer handle meat. My vegetarian friends seriously do feel that this is going to make them violently ill. One of my Facebook friends recently wrote a rant about how using the same knife to cut meat and then cut vegetables could cause a vegetarian to become sick because she "can't handle it anymore."
Alright, let's be really fucking blunt here: Vegetarians are not going to get sick if they eat meat unless they have a legitimate (and rare) intolerance to it. But they aren't just being dramatic, either. When I was a vegetarian I decided I would try freeganism and bit into quesadilla made with ingredients I had rescued from being thrown down the garbage disposal. Because I still had that vegetarian mindset, though, I wound up vomiting and getting a stomachache. When I flat out gave up vegetarianism in favor of paleo, the first thing I ate was a steak. I hadn't eaten meat in six years at that point (the quesadilla incident having been far gone) and suffered no ill effects.
The problem with using this to damn vegetarianism is that it's common among all restrictive diets, like I said before. Personally? I feel really ill when I eat grain, especially whole wheat. Even when I decided paleo wasn't necessary, whole wheat gave me a stomachache the entire time. But I can't entirely rule out the possibility that it is entirely somatic, because other paleo and primal eaters constantly talk about how much sugar and grain make them feel sick. I have no doubt it does, and it's a perfectly good reason not to eat it... but without actual tests, we just don't know. Just using testimonials we'd have to assume that everything anybody ever omits on a restrictive diet makes people ill. Meat, grain, fruit, dairy, cooked food, raw food, Jesus, we can't eat anything without becoming violently ill!
The point here is, of course, that studies like this don't actually damn vegetarianism... all they really do for me is confirm what I already know about it, which is that culturally vegetarianism is great at churning out certain mental disorders.
On the other hand, though, not many environments aren't.
Do we really know why? No. There are undoubtedly paleo and primal eaters out there who believe it is a nutritional thing... I don't. As an ex-vegan, I have my own way of looking at this, by which I mean this finding is not shocking when you consider what disorders we're talking about. And while vegetarianism is not an inherently healthy lifestyle, I don't think it's due to the common nutritional errors in thinking vegetarians tend to make. I think it has to do with the kind of mental environment they are in.
Depression and anxiety are both chemical and social disorders. What I mean by that is that there are plenty of people who get depression and anxiety for what feels like absolutely no reason... there are plenty of others, though, that get depression and anxiety due to outside pressures. In 2006 I was working on a political campaign for several months that led to harassment and property damage. Even worse, we lost. It got to the point where several of us needed psychiatrists because we were suffering from anxiety and depression. I would have panic attacks over the phone to my parents. And actually, during Wisconsin's recall election the same thing happened for the same reason.
Now think about the social environment of the vegetarian, especially the vegan. Vegans are in the position where they believe 99% of the people they care for, that they associate with, that they are surrounded by every day are supporting cruel and murderous practices. They are aware that animals are being killed by humans by the thousands in their own backyards and that there is very little they can actually do about that. And while this comparison is inaccurate and rightfully seen as absolutely insensitive to most non-vegetarians, vegans easily view this as an animal holocaust that everybody seems to support except them.
Pile in the fact that people often outright refuse to accommodate their eating choices and make them the constant butt of jokes. They're guilted by relatives for not eating the turkey, they constantly have to ask for modifications when they go out to eat at a restaurant, and they have to deal with a lot of insensitivity from other people.
This is enough to make anybody extremely anxious and depressed. So that doesn't surprise me.
Then you have somatoform disorders. These are maladies for which there is no apparent medical cause... hypochondria, for instance. And every restrictive diet makes it easy to have somatoform conditions. Have you ever witnessed a long-term vegetarian accidentally eat something with meat in it? Some of them are chill about it, if annoyed, but there are a lot of them who will dramatically freak out over it, thinking they're really ill. When I was at summer camp somebody put pepperoni in the spaghetti, which one of the vegetarians ate. She bawled for hours. People were reassuring her on ethical grounds without realizing that it wasn't because she had killed an animal, it was because she hadn't eaten meat since she was three years old and vegetarian culture--and her parents--had told her time and time again that she could no longer handle meat. My vegetarian friends seriously do feel that this is going to make them violently ill. One of my Facebook friends recently wrote a rant about how using the same knife to cut meat and then cut vegetables could cause a vegetarian to become sick because she "can't handle it anymore."
Alright, let's be really fucking blunt here: Vegetarians are not going to get sick if they eat meat unless they have a legitimate (and rare) intolerance to it. But they aren't just being dramatic, either. When I was a vegetarian I decided I would try freeganism and bit into quesadilla made with ingredients I had rescued from being thrown down the garbage disposal. Because I still had that vegetarian mindset, though, I wound up vomiting and getting a stomachache. When I flat out gave up vegetarianism in favor of paleo, the first thing I ate was a steak. I hadn't eaten meat in six years at that point (the quesadilla incident having been far gone) and suffered no ill effects.
The problem with using this to damn vegetarianism is that it's common among all restrictive diets, like I said before. Personally? I feel really ill when I eat grain, especially whole wheat. Even when I decided paleo wasn't necessary, whole wheat gave me a stomachache the entire time. But I can't entirely rule out the possibility that it is entirely somatic, because other paleo and primal eaters constantly talk about how much sugar and grain make them feel sick. I have no doubt it does, and it's a perfectly good reason not to eat it... but without actual tests, we just don't know. Just using testimonials we'd have to assume that everything anybody ever omits on a restrictive diet makes people ill. Meat, grain, fruit, dairy, cooked food, raw food, Jesus, we can't eat anything without becoming violently ill!
The point here is, of course, that studies like this don't actually damn vegetarianism... all they really do for me is confirm what I already know about it, which is that culturally vegetarianism is great at churning out certain mental disorders.
On the other hand, though, not many environments aren't.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
New Scale, and a Microwave Brownie Cake
A weight update and a recipe? Madness!
I bought a new scale today. It's a digital scale that also gives body fat percentage and a few other numbers, and is more accurate than my other scale, which could vary five pounds in a matter of seconds.
So my weight right now is around 220 rather than 218 like my other scale said... but that's not a big deal; just a two pound difference, and my weight varies more than that anyway. My body fat percentage is roughly 40% which, despite being abysmal, is lower than I would have expected.
I've been having sweets attacks like mad, and because of this today I made a microwave brownie. I forgot where I got the recipe I modified this from...I'll keep looking, but I can't seem to find it. Whatever.
Microwave Brownies with Pecans
To make this, you need:
Put in the microwave and cook on high for 1-4 minutes. If you have a microwave that burns stuff really fast like the powerhouse we use at work, tend toward one minute. My microwave gets it in about three minutes.
If you want to avoid the baking powder, I hear from some folks that you can just whip the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold everything else into it. I'll have to try that before I actually endorse it, though.
I bought a new scale today. It's a digital scale that also gives body fat percentage and a few other numbers, and is more accurate than my other scale, which could vary five pounds in a matter of seconds.
So my weight right now is around 220 rather than 218 like my other scale said... but that's not a big deal; just a two pound difference, and my weight varies more than that anyway. My body fat percentage is roughly 40% which, despite being abysmal, is lower than I would have expected.
I've been having sweets attacks like mad, and because of this today I made a microwave brownie. I forgot where I got the recipe I modified this from...I'll keep looking, but I can't seem to find it. Whatever.
Microwave Brownies with Pecans
- 1/4 cup canned pumpkin or squash.
- 2 tablespoons cocoa powder.
- 2 tablespoons whey powder or coconut flour (I've tried both, I prefer the whey but they're both good).
- 1/4 cup chopped pecans.
- 2 egg whites.
- 1 tablespoon maple syrup or honey (or another sweetener if you want, or omit).
- a few pinches baking powder (makes it fluffy... you can omit if you want to avoid the corn or sodium).
- A microwave-safe soup bowl.
- Some oil.
Put in the microwave and cook on high for 1-4 minutes. If you have a microwave that burns stuff really fast like the powerhouse we use at work, tend toward one minute. My microwave gets it in about three minutes.
If you want to avoid the baking powder, I hear from some folks that you can just whip the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold everything else into it. I'll have to try that before I actually endorse it, though.
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