Sunday, February 21, 2010

Trying To Find Equilibrium...

Without going on and on about the whole drug-induced hyperphagia bizzo, I'm still experiencing surprising bouts of deranged eating frenzies, as well as mood swings. However, my weight is holding steady, either because the six-week cure is doing its thing, or because the weight is mainly water-retention and my cells are full. My average food intake over the week is still much higher than I would like it, but I'm feeling a bit slimmer and have been receiving some leptin signals after particularly large meals (i.e. a protein shake with extra cream and water). The message might not last long, but it's an improvement. So that's the good news, but the bad news is that I'm still being taken over by the feed-demon every few days, and the best I can do is remove myself from all access to food. Last night I actually left the house at 10pm and went walking in my Vibrams, but ended up with such bad stomach pain that I had to call the beau to come rescue me after just an hour. Also, it seems like everyone but me has knowledge regarding the link between anti-depressants and weight gain. No wonder my doctor was always very keen to know whether I was having any 'reaction' to the drugs we were trying. I always thought he just meant fatigue...

Anyway, even if I've been eating what I'd class as too-much food some days, it's always been good food!

Thursday

Protein shakes for breakfast, recess & lunch:


Dinner - entree: salmon sashimi with a dollop of my Lemon & Macadamia Mayo


Dinner - main: kangaroo steak fillet, cheesy scrambled eggs, and chipollatas from Jonathan's, served with a bit of butter


Friday

Protein shakes for breakfast, recess & lunch.

Dinner: White Fish Fingers, bacon, sautéed red cabbage, and an avocado! I've been scared of avocados since a nasty sushi incident in 2004, but after watching this avocado slowly ripen in my fridge after being purchased for my Dips Recipes experiment, I decided to give it a go... Yum! If it weren't for all the fibre, I'd seriously consider putting avocados on regular rotation...


Saturday

Breakfast: Tasty beef snags from Jonathan's


Lunch: snacked on brie cheese, blueberries, strawberries and a nuts & seeds mix at a friend's place. The beginning of a very bad appetite domination - makes me wonder about the role of carbs in this reaction...

But amidst the inhalation of Nola, lots of double cream, saganaki, and macadamia nuts, I managed to whip up another Oopsie Pizza for the beau and I. The eggs were freshly bought and therefore were at room temperature, resulting in a VERY fluffy crust. Yum!




Sunday

Like a good little catch-up faster, I ignored food for a solid 24 hours after breaking away from the pantry on Saturday night (and putting a couple of kilometres in between myself and the fridge), eventually breaking the fast with some leftovers from the lunch I made for the beau - a succulent preparation of roast chicken thighs using a lot of coconut oil and lots of chopped basil, plus other herbs & spices...

Before cooking:


After cooking (with a sprinkling of almond flour added mid-cooking):


I served the beau's share on top of sautéed red caabage and red capsicum, which itself was on top of romaine lettuce leaves.


I served my post-pushup dinner 'plain', although the flavour was anything but!


Yes, I said post-pushup. Why? Because, to help keep my beau to his plan, I have joined him in the Hundred Push-up Programme, which states that you can improve you push-up ability through adherence to their six-week programme. I finished Day Two today, managing to eek out 12 push-ups in the fifth set. I'm going to be sore tomorrow...

Due to today being a push-up day, I decided to wash dinner down with a protein shake, trying the Macha Green Tea flavour of Natural Factors' Whey Factors powder range. Interesting taste, and noticeably lacking in sweetness - a good thing in case a sweeter shake would have sent me running for the kitchen! So despite my fasting, I've met my protein intake minimum - no lean mass loss for me, I hope!

Back to work tomorrow, with shakes in tow, and a tasty meal already planned for tomorrow's dinner...

Until next time, I wanted to share with you a recent post of Melissa's Hunt.Gather.Love, where she presents a fantastic starting-point for discussions with non-paleo eaters, focusing primarily on health (right where the focus should be!). Her Human Health Quadrants diagram is a little hard to make sense of at first, but is an interesting way of looking at how particular lifestyles link to nutrition and environmental hazards. A very neat way to shut down the usual 'paleolithic people only lived til 30' bollocks, and a pithy picture to point out the realities of today's choices. I love it when the primal/paleo community works to make the info we amass more accessible to the average SAD-eater; a dynamic grass-roots movement is the best way to propel health understanding forward. Keep it up, team!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was going to tweet this at you but twitter fails at supporting OpenID logins...Nutiva coconut oil is AWESOME straight off the spoon!

GiGi said...

Where do you get your salmon sashimi?!

Jezwyn said...

I make it!!

Chad said...

GGP,
I don't know if you've read his book or seen the material about depression and exercise, but "Spark" by Dr. John Ratey is very good. Not saying that you can go medication-less, but just a thought. And I apologize if you've blogged about this before, as I am a newcomer to your blog.

Nice posts thus far that I've read!! Keep it up!

Jezwyn said...

Um, hi Chad - I don't have depression. I'm taking an anti-depressant which treats a damaged nerve cluster, a physiological issue. The anti-depressant serves to gradually diminish the sensitivity of the nerve endings that have been damaged. The dose I am taking is not enough to cause neural effects (except for my side-effects, which are physiological).

Thanks.

Anonymous said...

I love your posts...keep 'em coming! What is the six-week cure you so frequently mantion? Also, can you describe the leptin response you refer to? What type of protein do you use in your shakes? Darc

Jezwyn said...

Hey Darc, thanks for the praise! :D

The Six-Week Cure is a fat-loss program created by the Drs. Eades that I experimented with since it's designed for the 'middle aged middle' and my Mum was looking to lose weight before my cousin's wedding in January. It worked for me, so I recommended it to her, and she shed the tiny gut she was hanging on to! She currently weights the same as she did in high school - not bad for a 58 year old! If you look in my tags list, you can click the six week cure link and look through all the relevant posts - look to the oldest for more details about the program.

The pain-muting drug I was taking blocked leptin, the hormone that controls satiety amongst other things. This meant that I was always feeling hungry, and no matter how much I ate, I never felt any fuller - even when my stomach was aching from being over-filled! Madness! I relish every moment of satiety I experience now, although my hormones aren't completely back in order.

I use Natural Factors Whey Factors protein powder - it has minimal additives; just stevia as sweetener and then a bit of 'natural' flavouring, whatever that means... ;) Lesser of many evils! But I don't like using it, so I'm happy to be moving into meat-only as of tomorrow! Mmmmm, sausages, pork roasts... yum!

I love your posts...keep 'em coming! What is the six-week cure you so frequently mantion? Also, can you describe the leptin response you refer to? What type of protein do you use in your shakes? Darc

Anonymous said...

Jezwyn,
Thanks for your prompt reply and info. I will review the six-week cure posts as you suggested.

I wanted to let you know that, after reading your posts for some time and doing my own research, I decided to try the all meat diet. I wanted to find out if it would help me lose the stubborn fat on my upper thighs, hips and belly (that is, lose it faster) and if the diet could sustain my workout efforts (Crossfit). Long story short, it was not for me.

After only 7 days I was as weak as a kitten and having heart palpitations (I kept envisioning my heart trying to pump my saturated fat laden, super thick blood all around my body...ugh). To say nothing of the constipation (!).

Anyway, I'm back to my strict Paleo diet which works great for me as I abound with energy on it. I will just have to be patient and wait for the adipose tissue to melt off slowly, as it's been doing the last 5-6 months.

Keep posting, I love to read about your efforts and your recipes are very creative.
Darc

Jezwyn said...

Thank you for your reply, Darc! All-meat might not be for everyone, although those who struggle tend not to be consuming enough fat. 65% of calories is an appropriate amount - did you track yours? If you were constipated, that's probably your answer - not enough fat. The body can take a few days to adjust, since the intestines heal and you need to mentally adjust to not going as often (because there's not as much junk passing through your system).


Feeling weak is also a sign of not consuming enough fat. Your colourful imagination is still entrenched in flawed science - saturated fat does not "clog" your arteries. The food that causes blood triglycerides to raise most significantly is sugar!

But Paleo is fantastic, of course! If fat is steadily being burned, then there's no problem. Your body will burn it at its own speed, so there's no reason to force the issue. If you're stalled, make sure you're not under-eating or over-training.