People have some very weird ideas about fat. They think that low-fat foods are good for dieting. They have this unconscious image of the tiny particles of fat being discretely removed from their food by some mysterious process and being redeposited at various locations on their body. Don't want to be fat? Don't eat fat. It's sort of intuitive. It's also more or less completely wrong.
Here is the grossly over-simplified version in layman's terms- our body turns food into fat. First it turns everything into calories (energy.) It turns surplus calories into fat. With me so far? It turns some things into calories faster than other things. It turns fat into calories faster than lean meat. It turns some kinds of fat into calories faster than others. It turns carbohydrates into calories faster than it does fat. It turns sugar into calories faster than it does other carbohydrates. It turns processed sugars into calories so fast you might as well mainline the stuff. This is OK. We need calories to function. they are the gas that runs our engines and makes us go.
This brings us to starch. Your body turns starch into sugar. Thus the connection between starch and fat is that next to sugar starch is the first thing that translates into fat. But all sugars are not created equal. Nor are all starches or fats. Some are more bio-accessible (easier to turn into calories) than others. Processed sugars are the worst- and the more processed it is the worse it is for you. Some hold that High-Fructose Corn Syrup is the worst of all. Since it's use exploded in the 1980s America has gotten fat. There may be a connection.
The problem with this of course is that processed sugars get converted to calories far faster than you can use them- at least faster than you can use them unless you are running a Marathon. So it turns the surplus calories into fat to save up for later. But then we eat more sugar before that fat gets used up. Or starch, which is quickly turned into sugar. The result is that we get fat.
This all gets horribly complicated and involved and the science of various aspects of it are still being debated. Unfortunately I am a simple guy. I need simple rules, preferably that I can count on one or at most two handfuls of fingers. Here are the rules that we are following so far:
*NO processed sugars. High Fructose Corn syrup is a HELL NO. Do we do this perfectly? Of course not. We have our planned slips- we get to split a 20oz. cola a week. That's not going to kill us. And of course on our monthly Go-To-Hell Diet Day we can have whatever we want. Weirdly I'm starting to suspect that we'll want less bad stuff then you might expect on those days. Pizza and pasta are real contenders for GTHD days... but we'll see.
*NO 'white starches.' These are things like potatoes, white rice, wheat flour and most grains period. No bread products, no pasta. These are too easily converted to sugar and have some other problems that we'll get into another time. Wild rice is apparently OK but see the next rule. The other exception to this is likely to be late-summer and fall where certain grains will be on the list in moderation. I expected to crave these things because I love bread and pasta but it's not happening. Interesting.
*Processed= Bad. While meat is on the menu processed lunch meats, hot dogs (even kosher ones) and sausages are not. Damn. I love me some sausages. From here out though if I want them I'm going to have to learn to make them... a tragedy of limited scope given how much I love to cook! Basically if it comes in a box it's probably out. If it's packaged in a factory it's probably not good. Most canned goods will be out too. Anything that contains something that is not recognizably food is a no-no. Of course reason and cost enter into this. 'Natural' foods are often very expensive and we don't have a ton of money. We have to make some compromises but we are buying 'natural' and 'organic' products when possible.
*Olive Oil, Butter and home-rendered Lard for cooking. I'm relying on other primal dieters information on this one but it makes sense. These are the least processed fats used for cooking. I think it's safe to say that humans have been eating olives and squeezing them for oil as long as there have been people with access to them. Which is a very bloody long time. This does not mean that fat has become a new food group. I would imagine that things like gout and congestive heart failure are still things to be concerned about. But your body is designed to consume a certain amount of fat and as long as you stick to the simplest fats and exercise some moderation you'll probably be better off than eating modern hyper-processed 'healthy' fats. Which last time I checked had turned out to be some of the worst possible stuff for you. The theory is that if your body isn't dealing with all the 'bad stuff' from processed foods it's more than capable of dealing with moderate amounts of the fats we are using. A couple months in we'll be having medical tests to see what effects it's having on us.
So, with those rules in mind let's talk about what we have been eating. We're finding that eating 'seasonally' is more of a goal than a reality at this point but we're working on it.
Breakfast: Breakfast usually features a protein, either eggs or meat and an 8oz. glass of goat's milk and a cup of coffeee or two.
I have become fond of what I call 'Nomlets' (nom nom!) for a quick and easy breakfast. We have a pan that is just the right size to make a nice disk out of two eggs. A little olive oil and medium heat for the pan, two eggs (yolks broken) and fry the eggs. After flipping them add a slice of goat cheese and some tomatoes or a tablespoon of salsa and fold the egg over like an omelet. Served with sea-salt, some fruit.
Another favored breakfast was sliced fried pork belly (from naturally raised Berkshire pigs.) This is basically bacon that has not been cured and you cook it like bacon. After cooking you can strain the fat to use for cooking in the future. We ate this with grapes, sliced apples and some goat cheese.
'The Pig Guy' gave us a present last time we picked up our pork from him- he called it a 'Korean Yam.' A couple of days later I sliced it up and fried it in lard from the pork belly. After the yam slices were starting to get crispy I removed them from the pan and quickly sauteed some baby spinach to serve with the yams. Served with a little sea salt, some cheese and fruit.
Scrambles are also good. 2 eggs per person well scrambled. add some goat cheese, cubed tomato, green onion. After it's pretty well done toss in some baby spinach or other greens and cook until they begin to 'wilt.' Serve with fruit.
Lunch: On the rare occasions that I have had lunch it's usually been some fruit, baby carrots and some cheese. Maybe some leftover meat if there is any from the night before but there usually isn't. More often we are just not hungry and 'lunch' becomes a handful of baby carrots or a small bowl of home-made cole-slaw between 3-4pm. Maybe a slice of cheese if dinner will be late.
Dinner: Meat, a green vegetable, a salad or coleslaw and some fruit and maybe some cheese. More often than not we have water or seltzer with dinner rather than goat's milk but this is not a hard and fast rule. Once at least we have had fried yams with sweet onions with dinner and a couple of times sauteed Baby Bok Choy cabbage with garlic and a bit of soy sauce.
The most common fruits we are eating currently are apples, grapes and tomatoes. Not really seasonal but relatively cheap and easily had. We'll be researching seasonal substitutes but at our latitude there just isn't much this early in the year.
Even though we're only a week into the diet we have noticed some interesting things. The things that we have fried in lard don't taste greasy to us, even when we can see a slight sheen of grease on the food. We are finding that we don't get hungry as much; as I already said we usually don't feel a lunch is needed. We also don't get bitchy or head-achey when we don't eat like we used to. No sugar drops either. We also have more energy and are not getting upset stomachs regularly like we used to. Overall we are feeling... healthy. We're not used to that...
We have noticed that we are eating perhaps too much fried food and want more green vegetables. We are also aware that fruit is quite sugary and don't want to eat too much until our activity levels go up as summer comes on. We need to exercise moderation with nuts; they aren't in season yet and are quite fattening. We have just read on Mark's Daily Apple (a leading paleo-diet blog at Marksdailyapple.com) that Sweet Potatoes and Yams are really carb-rich and should be eaten in moderation or as a post-work-out food. This being the case we'll eat them less often and restrict them to breakfast when we have a day of work ahead of us to use up all those carbs. I am also going to be doing more research into Neolithic feeder crops and grain harvesting by paleolithic hunter-gatherers; I may have to rethink the 'seasonal grains' theory.
The biggest thing that we have noted with surprise are the lack of cravings. We are not craving breads, pasta, sugar or sodas. We are finding the meals very satisfying and really feel good physically. We've had no 'carb flu' or carb crash because of course we are still eating natural carbs. So far so good.
Next time we'll talk about rendering your own lard and maybe even some recipes.
This all gets horribly complicated and involved and the science of various aspects of it are still being debated. Unfortunately I am a simple guy. I need simple rules, preferably that I can count on one or at most two handfuls of fingers. Here are the rules that we are following so far:
*NO processed sugars. High Fructose Corn syrup is a HELL NO. Do we do this perfectly? Of course not. We have our planned slips- we get to split a 20oz. cola a week. That's not going to kill us. And of course on our monthly Go-To-Hell Diet Day we can have whatever we want. Weirdly I'm starting to suspect that we'll want less bad stuff then you might expect on those days. Pizza and pasta are real contenders for GTHD days... but we'll see.
*NO 'white starches.' These are things like potatoes, white rice, wheat flour and most grains period. No bread products, no pasta. These are too easily converted to sugar and have some other problems that we'll get into another time. Wild rice is apparently OK but see the next rule. The other exception to this is likely to be late-summer and fall where certain grains will be on the list in moderation. I expected to crave these things because I love bread and pasta but it's not happening. Interesting.
*Processed= Bad. While meat is on the menu processed lunch meats, hot dogs (even kosher ones) and sausages are not. Damn. I love me some sausages. From here out though if I want them I'm going to have to learn to make them... a tragedy of limited scope given how much I love to cook! Basically if it comes in a box it's probably out. If it's packaged in a factory it's probably not good. Most canned goods will be out too. Anything that contains something that is not recognizably food is a no-no. Of course reason and cost enter into this. 'Natural' foods are often very expensive and we don't have a ton of money. We have to make some compromises but we are buying 'natural' and 'organic' products when possible.
*Olive Oil, Butter and home-rendered Lard for cooking. I'm relying on other primal dieters information on this one but it makes sense. These are the least processed fats used for cooking. I think it's safe to say that humans have been eating olives and squeezing them for oil as long as there have been people with access to them. Which is a very bloody long time. This does not mean that fat has become a new food group. I would imagine that things like gout and congestive heart failure are still things to be concerned about. But your body is designed to consume a certain amount of fat and as long as you stick to the simplest fats and exercise some moderation you'll probably be better off than eating modern hyper-processed 'healthy' fats. Which last time I checked had turned out to be some of the worst possible stuff for you. The theory is that if your body isn't dealing with all the 'bad stuff' from processed foods it's more than capable of dealing with moderate amounts of the fats we are using. A couple months in we'll be having medical tests to see what effects it's having on us.
So, with those rules in mind let's talk about what we have been eating. We're finding that eating 'seasonally' is more of a goal than a reality at this point but we're working on it.
Breakfast: Breakfast usually features a protein, either eggs or meat and an 8oz. glass of goat's milk and a cup of coffeee or two.
I have become fond of what I call 'Nomlets' (nom nom!) for a quick and easy breakfast. We have a pan that is just the right size to make a nice disk out of two eggs. A little olive oil and medium heat for the pan, two eggs (yolks broken) and fry the eggs. After flipping them add a slice of goat cheese and some tomatoes or a tablespoon of salsa and fold the egg over like an omelet. Served with sea-salt, some fruit.
Another favored breakfast was sliced fried pork belly (from naturally raised Berkshire pigs.) This is basically bacon that has not been cured and you cook it like bacon. After cooking you can strain the fat to use for cooking in the future. We ate this with grapes, sliced apples and some goat cheese.
'The Pig Guy' gave us a present last time we picked up our pork from him- he called it a 'Korean Yam.' A couple of days later I sliced it up and fried it in lard from the pork belly. After the yam slices were starting to get crispy I removed them from the pan and quickly sauteed some baby spinach to serve with the yams. Served with a little sea salt, some cheese and fruit.
Scrambles are also good. 2 eggs per person well scrambled. add some goat cheese, cubed tomato, green onion. After it's pretty well done toss in some baby spinach or other greens and cook until they begin to 'wilt.' Serve with fruit.
Lunch: On the rare occasions that I have had lunch it's usually been some fruit, baby carrots and some cheese. Maybe some leftover meat if there is any from the night before but there usually isn't. More often we are just not hungry and 'lunch' becomes a handful of baby carrots or a small bowl of home-made cole-slaw between 3-4pm. Maybe a slice of cheese if dinner will be late.
Dinner: Meat, a green vegetable, a salad or coleslaw and some fruit and maybe some cheese. More often than not we have water or seltzer with dinner rather than goat's milk but this is not a hard and fast rule. Once at least we have had fried yams with sweet onions with dinner and a couple of times sauteed Baby Bok Choy cabbage with garlic and a bit of soy sauce.
The most common fruits we are eating currently are apples, grapes and tomatoes. Not really seasonal but relatively cheap and easily had. We'll be researching seasonal substitutes but at our latitude there just isn't much this early in the year.
Even though we're only a week into the diet we have noticed some interesting things. The things that we have fried in lard don't taste greasy to us, even when we can see a slight sheen of grease on the food. We are finding that we don't get hungry as much; as I already said we usually don't feel a lunch is needed. We also don't get bitchy or head-achey when we don't eat like we used to. No sugar drops either. We also have more energy and are not getting upset stomachs regularly like we used to. Overall we are feeling... healthy. We're not used to that...
We have noticed that we are eating perhaps too much fried food and want more green vegetables. We are also aware that fruit is quite sugary and don't want to eat too much until our activity levels go up as summer comes on. We need to exercise moderation with nuts; they aren't in season yet and are quite fattening. We have just read on Mark's Daily Apple (a leading paleo-diet blog at Marksdailyapple.com) that Sweet Potatoes and Yams are really carb-rich and should be eaten in moderation or as a post-work-out food. This being the case we'll eat them less often and restrict them to breakfast when we have a day of work ahead of us to use up all those carbs. I am also going to be doing more research into Neolithic feeder crops and grain harvesting by paleolithic hunter-gatherers; I may have to rethink the 'seasonal grains' theory.
The biggest thing that we have noted with surprise are the lack of cravings. We are not craving breads, pasta, sugar or sodas. We are finding the meals very satisfying and really feel good physically. We've had no 'carb flu' or carb crash because of course we are still eating natural carbs. So far so good.
Next time we'll talk about rendering your own lard and maybe even some recipes.
