Paleo Day Nine: ABORT!

Ancient Egyptian Farmer, Circa 7000 BCE






I'm ending the paleo experiment early for the following reasons:

• After nine days on the diet I am slightly fatter
• After nine days on the diet I am slightly weaker
• After nine days on the diet my general sense of well-being is lessened
• I don't like the food selections
• My compliance is only fair, possibly leading to the negative results.
  
• Eating such huge meals is not comfortable
  
• I am certain I can come up with a diet that is better for me personally
• I cannot eat enough protein
  
• I cannot eat enough carbohydrate
• I have absolutely eaten too much fat

I am going to finish out this week, back in the zone, 17 blocks +.5x fat, which I think should be my maintenance level at my present level of activity. Then I am going to go back to what I have found to work to try and get this last stubborn 10 lbs of bodyfat off and build some muscle:

Four weeks at 15 blocks, with added cardio
Four weeks at 18 blocks with added 5x5s

I was inspired to do a little poking around the internet by another CF/Zone blog, which gave a glowing, and, in my well-informed opinion, misguided, plug to "Raw Foodism".

Medical vegetarianism and Raw Foodism

Vegetarianism is sometimes engaged in for medical reasons, especially in situations where meat is not well-tolerated by the patient or where the patient's cholesterol levels might be particularly high.

However, medical vegetarianism is far more often the province of quacks; many alternative medicine practitioners have recommended vegetarian diets for many of their patients (Martin Gardner discussed the matter at some length in chapter 18 of his seminal Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science). A great deal of propaganda goes along with altie vegetarianism; Gardner wrote of some vegetarian activists of the 1950s talking about the phantom threat of "necrones" (a never-defined alleged property of meat), while others have selectively interpreted features of the omnivorously-adapted human digestive system to support the idea that humans are really meant to be plant-eaters.

A subset of medical vegetarianism is raw foodism, the idea that raw foods are healthier for the human body due to the presence of more active enzymes. In practice, these enzymes, having evolved to work in a plant environment, do little or nothing in the human body, and are also destroyed in the digestion process. In addition, raw foodism tends to be ignorant of the fact that cooking and other forms of processing actually destroys significant amounts of toxins (real toxins, not the imaginary ones invented by alties) such as cyanogens in manioc, as well as protease inhibitors and lectins in legumes, along with reducing some complex proteins and polysaccharides to more digestible forms. A sizable number of raw foodists are also "juicers", consumers of large quantities of fresh vegetable juice (a major guru in this area is Jay Kordich, aka "Jay the Juiceman").

6AM 1 cup milk = 1 block

8AM Breakfast Sandwich (2 turkey sausages, 1 egg, 1.5 oz cheese, 2 slices diabetic lifestyles bread, 1/2 tomato, slices onion, 1 apple, teaspoon oil, tablespoon lite mayo = 4.5 blocks + 1x fat

Note: I felt MUCH better after eating this!

Noon 6 oz lean ground beef, 3/8 cup steel cut oats, 1 apple, 12 raw almonds = 4 blocks + 1x fat

5PM 1 slice diabetic lifestyles bread, 2 oz roast beef, lite mayo = 2 blocks

7PM 1/2 hot dog, 1/2 child popcorn = 2 blocks + extra carb

9PM 6 oz ground beef, 1/2 oz cheese, 2 slices diabetic lifestyles bread, 1 apple, lite mayo = 4.5 blocks + 1x fat

Block Target = 17 +.5x fat

Block Total = 18 blocks +.5x fat, little extra carb

Workout: None (rest day)