Thankfully, today was a public holiday. I am thankful for the opportunity to sleep-in, although I woke up awfully groggy and remained that way all day. Hot weather always wipes me out; it takes a while to perfect that delicate balance of being cool enough at night to fall asleep, yet warm & covered enough that extremities don't freeze and drop off. I'm thankful that I was at home when my body started showing signs of dehydration, despite drinking copious amounts of liquids in the past few days. Finally, I'm thankful that after crashing into a coma at 5pm and waking at 6 o'clock, I did eventually realise that it was still evening and not early morning so it was not in fact necessary for me to start organising to go to work. It only took me 15 minutes to put two and two together (why is it so dim outside? why didn't my alarm go off? why aren't I hungry?). Amen.
Food-wise, the day started well, with a late breakfast of lamb chops out in the sunshine.
Then, after a shopping trip to the local mall that took longer than expected, the beau and I drowned our 'hungry grumps' in a rotisserie chicken.
His plate:
My plate:
Sadly, I could only manage to eat one wing and a lot of skin before hitting satiety, so the rest of this plateful was popped into the fridge for dinner. However, shortly thereafter my all-day bleurghiness started to peak, so I began imbibing liquids while stretched out in bed. I managed to remain conscious just long enough to see the boy off to his latest geek conference, and then I was outta there!
It's dinnertime now but I have zero inclination to eat anything, and since it's getting late I will have to wait until tomorrow to try my first ever pot of Yerba Maté, freshly shipped in from iHerb.com along with my egg protein powder and Mum's Whey Factors powder. Yerba Maté contains quite a bit of caffeine, and although I have never noticed the stimulating effects of caffeine in other beverages before, I don't want to exacerbate my dehydration, if that is indeed what's going on here...
So since lunch was eaten at around 2pm, thus begins an intermittent fast!
Carnivore Cost Calculation:
Breakfast - $5.50 Lunch - $1 (whole chicken = $6)
Total for the day: $6.50
To end on a positive note, I lost more weight overnight, dropping below 77kg, with further noticeable reduction in my muffin top. Today's caloric intake is awfully low, but given my inactivity today, hopefully boosting the calories tomorrow will allow me to get away with a low day without any lean mass waste. Let's drink to progress!
Ahhh, food! From the minute my delicious breakfast passed my lips, I instantly felt healthy, lithe and balanced.
I'm starting my meat weeks - Weeks 3 & 4 of The Six-Week Cure - at a mere 77.2kg, the lightest I have been since high school! My adjusted goal is now 70kg, but that may be a little low, so as always I'm going by the way I look more than what I weigh.
Today's line-up felt very filling - after so many shakes, to eat three square meals suddenly felt like a lot of food! And yet, when tallied in Spark, I was still right of caloric-deficit target - win!
Breakfast: an organic lamb forequarter chop, and an egg fried in coconut oil
Lunch: two lamb forequarter chops
Dinner: I whipped up some burgers out of organic ground beef and egg, then seasoned with parsley, thyme and garlic granules. The beau took his with leftover green salad and low-carb tomato sauce...
... while I enjoyed mine naked! Delicious!
I've been having hot flushes since lunch, but I can't tell if that's just my metabolism being stoked once more, or this suffocating weather! Summer has come early, with today hitting at least 30 degrees Celsius, and here's me without any nice Summer clothes! The beau is heading interstate for another geek conference, so maybe I'll take myself to the local shopping centre and organise a whole new wardrobe, even though I'd ideally like to wait until I'm at my final weight... But life has made other plans - I already had to wear a semi-transparent shirt to work today, so I think my grace period is officially over!
Carnivore Cost Calculation:
Breakfast - Lamb ($2.50) and egg ($0.50) = $3 Lunch - Lamb = $5 Dinner - Beef ($2.80) and egg ($0.50) plus herbs = $3.50
Total for the day = $11.50
Organic, grass-fed meats, three times a day, for less than what most people pay for a cafe lunch. Stop whinging about factory farming and how expensive organic food is, and go talk to farmers - save the world and your wallet!
Another lazy morning of sleeping in, followed by a day of lying in the sun and mucking around on the computer. Plus, our monthly delivery of meat from Organic Direct arrived! So we're all set for the meat weeks of The Six Week Cure. For those of you interested in the Carnivore Cost Calculation series, here's what AU$370 got us:
The big freezer section of our new fridge (bought for the extra freezer space) is chock-full of meaty goodness! The haul is well over 60 servings of meat, so should last the month out even if I eat meat twice a day during the meat weeks. We've also plenty of whole chickens, drumsticks and breast portions left over from a couple of months ago - we've both gone off chicken a bit. It doesn't satisfy me much and the beau isn't a fan of plain chicken. But now that the weather is warming up, I'll be grateful for leftover chicken that I can whip into an egg scramble, or pack up for work, or even eat out on the veranda as the sun sets...
Today started with a late breakfast shake - my system does NOT enjoy such a large, cold beverage in the brisk morning air! But I imagine it will be nice to have a shake on hand further down the track on hot summer mornings where cooking is simply not an option... A few hours later I took another shake for lunch, after lounging in the sun to top up my vitamin D levels.
Organic Direct knocked on the door at around 3:30pm, and I grabbed out the rolled beef roast and popped it into the oven (after searing the edges on the stove). By 5:30pm, it was tender, juicy, and perfectly cooked:
Now, does that really look like 1000kcal of meat? I don't know whether to trust NutritionData.com or not on this one... Fingers crossed I don't end up ravenously hungry at bed time, even though my data tells me I've covered my needs for the day... I cooked up an omelette as a side, since I finally found a wheel of True Organic brie, but it's not nice alone! Melted, however, it is delicious! So I ate an Eades-approved amount, especially since I cut my cream-in-shake amount by half today, and only made time for two shakes (I really wasn't hungry when I had to force the second one down, and didn't feel like stuffing myself with a third). I've hit the bottom of my original whey protein canister now, so tomorrow I'll be cutting into my half-tonne of Professional Whey protein and experimenting with ground vanilla and stevia... Wish me luck!
Out of sheer fear of hunger with nothing but protein shakes to keep me going, I loaded up on protein and fat this morning - scotch fillet steak, bacon, and fried eggs, topped with melted butter (used to cook the eggs):
A Carnivore Cost Calculation note - I was going to stop monitoring my meat costs for this fortnight, but if every meal is going to be like this morning's, it'll be pretty balanced in terms of representing my normal 'big' meat meal, if not a little bigger! I need to do a summary post of my spending thus far, and then this fortnight's meats can have their own summary post and side-note in the on-going record. Organic Direct delivers this weekend as well, and their prices are more representative of my usual expenses - the local butcher is quite a bit pricier so the tallies thus far are probably above-average. We'll see...
I packaged up two bottles of protein shake (one serving of shake each) to serve me for lunch and a snack to keep me going through my late afternoon Monash tutorial. And it worked! Admittedly, I wasn't really a fan of that much extra liquid interrupting my day (and I don't just mean stopping to drink), but hopefully various organs will learn to accommodate that change.
I wasn't able to snap a shot of the shakes, but I can promise you that they looked nothing like these:
My day ended with another shake for dinner, made with a full litre of water to replace my usual tea consumption. The Drs. Eades say that white tea is low enough in caffeine to remain in the program, but I'm still cutting back to give my liver the best chance, should it have any stored fat...
So that's Day 1 under my belt, exactly where I hope to find less of me by the end of this programme! Tomorrow will be the reverse of today - tomorrow night is the Year 12 Valedictory Dinner, so I'm going to plan to enjoy some of what is served there, if the meat isn't smothered in sauce. I'll drink my shakes for breakfast, lunch, and late afternoon, and will see how I go with dinner! If there's nothing appropriate and I'm feeling fine, I might fast through dinner in anticipation of a nice big breakfast the next day! The one downer of this fortnight is the lack of food - the novelty of drinking something that comes closer to milk or ice cream than I have tasted in ten months is still not enough to off-set the pleasure I get from a nice thick lamb chop, so I'm hanging out for my daily meal! I'm already thawing a pork roast in anticipation for my next dinner day - but I'm so busy this week, it may not happen until Friday! Is it wrong to cook up an entire 400g pork roast for breakfast?
Decided to fast through breakfast and lunch so that I could enjoy a generous serving of dinner - corned beef silverside, served with fried eggs and butter!
The beef turned out tender, moist, and flavoursome! My technique is awfully simple - place meat, 1/2 cup of apple cider vinegar, 1T cloves, 1T black peppercorn, and two bay leaves in a deep saucepan, and add water under meat is covered. Bring to the boil, then reduce heat and allow to simmer for 90 minutes. Allow to rest briefly out of the water before carving. I used to serve it with gravy, and I thought about trying to make my first Hollandaise sauce, but decided to go with runny egg yolk and the butter I fried them in. Delicious!
Carnivore Cost Calculation:
Organic beef silverside - $17/kg, so my serving cost about $10 (300g cooked). Eggs - $2
Total - $12
Well, this would have been a terribly brief entry, except that I have some more links to share with you...
First up, I recently watched a video recording of a lecture given by Dr. Chris Gardner, a director of Nutrition Studies and an associate professor of medicine at Stanford. He studied four popular diets, determining that (relatively) low-carb diets showed the greatest improvement in all bio-markers. Dr. Eades and Tom Naughton have both published write-ups about the studies, so they make great complementary reads, or will give you a good summary of the lecture if you don't have access to the video below:
To help explain why wearing Vibram Fivefingers is so good for us, I found this intelligent blog post by Anthony Johnson a terribly long time ago, back before my Vibram enthusiasm hadn't been tainted by damaged Sprints. To catch my non-Twitter followers up to speed, I had to engage in an epic struggle in order for the original retailer to respond to my messages of complaint, who then forwarded me to the US supplier, who then sent me back to NY Kayak, who then... And so on until I changed the tone of my emails from polite to, well, you know... Only then did the US supplier pull his finger out and get in touch with a 'local' store in Sydney, who would swap my faulty Sprints for a new pair. This took at least a month. I quickly sent off my shoes (another postage charge on top of the original International shipping of AU$45), and then headed to Thailand. Upon my return, I emailed the Sydney stockist to ask why the shoes hadn't been returned. Well, it turns out that the US guy never bothered to tell Sydney that my Sprints were fuschia, a colour not currently sold in Australia (hence why I imported them), and they had been trying to ring me while I was overseas to ask what colour I would like instead! I promptly sent an angry email to the US supplier, demanding a pair of fuschia Sprints or my money back. The US guy then told NY Kayak to refund my money. So they did - the cost of the shoes, and FIVE dollars shipping! Never mind that I paid FORTY-FIVE bucks and had been screwed around for two months! Sheesh... However, Sydney then contacted me to ask whether I would like them to repair my shoes since they couldn't get their hands on a new pair of fuschia Sprints... I was a little confused, since I thought the shoes would then be sent back to the manufacturer since I had been refunded, but apparently not! So I said yes! They have been fixed today, and Sydney has popped them in the mail - I should have them in my hot little hands early next week! Woohoo! It's been a painful struggle, but in the end I will have what are essentially free, slightly damaged but repaired fuschia Sprints to show off all summer!
I recently discovered Sheryl Canter's Normal Eating Blog, a lovely resource of articles detailing health and nutrition written in highly accessible language. I am planning to spread her post entitled Good Nutrition: Myths & Facts around my work and personal networks since it's such a straight-forward primer to the healthy eating habits I have discovered as well as an explanation of why we should only eat foods that supported us throughout the majority of our evolution. Another great article is her summary of Good Calories, Bad Calories. Sheryl's candour and non-threatening tone makes her writing quite soothing to read - perhaps an appropriate style through which to ease loved ones into deeper thinking and life-altering realisations when it comes to health and well-being.
Here's one for teachers and parents to think about - with all the information out there, what's most crucial and relevant to teach our kids so that they can make healthy choices? Every Kitchen Table has come up with their 10 Things We Should Teach Every Kid about Food. I'm certainly working it into the English curriculum, and am very proud that my Mum has a kitchen garden at her school and that the information I am passing to her about nutrition may be feeding to her tiny 6 & 7 year old students through that program.
Meanwhile, I hung out with a few staff members after school (they drank their booze and ate their chips, I supped on green tea, and no one made fun of me at all), and - like all conversations with me these days - we ended up talking nutrition, sustainability, and health. Apart from encouraging everyone to eat more roo meat (and already a few of the gathering of 15 do, so huzzah), we discussed why it's misguided for the daughter of one teacher to be pursuing the vegetarian lifestyle for ethical reasons. I only commented once that the soy faux-meat products that the daughter has been introducing into her family's dining routines are terribly unhealthy, before focussing the discussion on why it's incorrect to assume vegetarianism is better for the environment. I would love for each and every staff member to be given a copy of The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith (or at least give me one to share around - it's so pricey over here!), but in the meantime I was essentially espousing information like that of Lierre's quote below:
"The environmental movement has taken up the plant-based diet as the way to save the planet and they’re wrong; they are not wrong in their basic values; to repeat justice, compassion, sustainability are the only values that are going to get us towards the world that we need. But a plant-based diet is not the way to do that and that’s because agriculture is an inherently destructive process. It is in fact the most destructive activity that people have done to the planet. Agriculture is carnivorous and what it eats is entire ecosystems; the only hope we have to save this planet is to restore the perennial polycultures, so [the native] grasses, the forests, the wetlands: it has to be restored and we humans have to learn to take our nourishment from inside those living communities instead of imposing our food across them. When we do that imposition, we destroy and what we leave behind us, is Desert. We’ve Got to Stop! The hopeful moment here is that if we took all the agricultural land essentially east of the Mississippi, and we turned it back into grassland, to the perennial polyculture that it desperately wants to be, the US would immediately become a net-carbon sink. That’s how much carbon would be sequestered … and that’s with everyone still driving their SUV’s around all the way to hell! If everyone on the planet did it, if we took all the agricultural land in the world, and we let it return to whatever it used to be (grassland, forest, wetland)? … It would take 9 to 10 years… to sequester ALL of the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the Industrial Age.”
One of the other topics that arose during the afternoon was whether or not science should be involved in treating infertility, etc... I made the point that a lot of perceived infertility today is linked to diet and yet doctors aren't making those connections - they want to treat the symptoms with drugs and invasive procedures rather than pick up on the lifestyle problems. I was shouted down by one of the science teachers who asserted that infertility is normal and that there are many natural genetic mutations etc that cause infertility. So it was nice to come home to a new post on The Nourished Kitchen that supported my point completely: How the foods you eat are keeping you from getting pregnant. That's not to say that the science teacher was wrong, it's just that I think it's more of an issue that a significant 'symptom' such as infertility is just one in a growing list of 'ailments' that are treated these days, rather than prevented where possible. I felt like pointing out to this teacher, who is also the mother of the vegetarian I mentioned earlier, that soy is a big player in the growing infertility rates, so maybe she shouldn't be feeding it to her three kids if she didn't know whether tofu was fermented or not... But I chose to play nice. :) For now...
Breakfast: Beef mince and bacon, fried in a little butter (I'm all out of home-rendered lard!)
After work, I was whisked off to Crown Casino by the beau for a classic date - dinner and a movie! First up was Fame at Village Gold Class, where we took in a late lunch of wagyu beef burger (no lettuce, relish, or bun!), and a cheese platter of cheddar and double brie.
Then it was off to Rockpool Bar & Grill for a scrumptious steak - a Cape Grim dry-aged grass-fed rib-eye on the bone!
Aw yeah... Best date ever!
Carnivore Cost Calculation:
Beef & bacon - $4. Cinema food and dinner were courtesy of the beau, so I don't want to know how much that cost! :)
I concede, sometimes alliteration is achingly arduous... And a bit of a stretch. IT may also impinge on my coolness factor. A little.
Breakfast: Let's start with the lamb (and a little bacon, mostly for colour)
Late Lunch: a lovely plateful of buttery squid - is there anything finer or simpler to whip up upon arriving home of an afternoon?
Dinner: The other creature from the deep - a luxurious wild Atlantic salmon fillet, with a few anchovies, and a dollop of butter to help balance the protein-heavy nature of today's eats
Meanwhile, I figure it's about time that I share some more research into the carnivore lifestyle, to continue to demonstrate the variety of folks eating all-meat or some variation of Zero Carb as well as the ways in which scientific research continues to prove that our ancestors did happen to know what they were doing.
I'll start with one of the big guns - Dr. Michael R. Eades, whose newest book, The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle has the primal Twitter community (not all of whom are middle-aged) gulping whey protein shakes in the desperate hope of shedding an inch or so from their waists. Hm. While they enjoy their quick-fix (and I do hope it works, for the sake of waistlines and bio-markers everywhere), I'm more interested in what Dr. Eades presents about our pre-shake evolution:
Are We Meat Eaters or Vegetarians: Part I & Part II.
Dr. Eades is also quite active as a micro-blogger through Twitter, sharing cutting-edge research and articles that strike his fancy - not surprisingly, most are studies showing how beneficial low-carb diets are for preventing/curing this or that health issue.
Then there's Dr. Dan whose blog is At Darwin's Table, one of the first blogs I found when I started my process of self-education. He too has done a Meat Eaters vs Vegetarians series, with a Part I and a Part II, and it is the latter that I find particularly interesting. While Dr. Dan doesn't go into sources - presumably in order to keep his posts concise and accessible? - I find his conclusions regarding the necessity for fish oil in the human diet very interesting. I have been taking fish oil every day for a long time now, so I'm glad there's historical precedence supporting that my actions are the right way to go. I also eat salmon regularly, but whenever I tell myself that I should have salmon for dinner, my whole body starts screaming for red meat! Gotta go with those instincts...
Some other blogs that have been inspiring and challenging my knowledge of late (with a recent relevant post to get you started if the blog is new to you):
And as always, check out my Girl Gone Readin' list for some of the most interesting and active health and nutrition blogs if you love keeping up with the science and anecdotal evidence of like-minded individuals as much as I do!
Since Spring has finally sprung, I have a query for any carnivorous readers who have been doing this for longer than I have - whilst I fully intend to live on barbequed meats for the majority of summer (in Australia, we're all carnivores in summer!), do you have any other meal recommendations? I'm thinking cold roast chicken, tuna, crayfish... Any favourites?
One of the most memorable dishes I tried while in Thailand was a watery stew labeled 'Tyrolienne Beef'. Internet resources disagree as to what 'Tyrolienne' actually is, so I went with my sense memory...
Ingredients:
800g diced beef 1 ox kidney 4 chopped tomatoes 1 diced onion 1T black peppercorns 2 garlic cloves 1T chopped basil 3 bay leaves 3 cups water
Method:
Slice or dice kidneys into the same thickness as beef.
Place all ingredients in a saucepan, and heat on stovetop until water begins to boil.
Once stew is boiling, reduce heat and simmer for an hour with the lid off. Enjoy the delicious odours that will permeate your kitchen and home!
After an hour, bring stew back to the boil until liquid is at desired thickness.
Served topped with some fresh basil (I didn't have any more).
Today's eats:
Breakfast: fasted. Amazing that I wasn't tempted to snack on nuts while I made the beau a new batch of grain-free granola - just almonds, walnuts, coconut, sweetener (slowly weaning him off it though...), and egg whites.
Lunch: Tyrolienne Beef & Kidney stew! My first try of kidney... Definitely an acquired taste/texture, but one I'd like to cultivate for the nutritional value of organ meats.
Dinner: Egg yolks from making granola in the morning, scrambled in a little butter.
Ahhh, sunny Saturdays. Nothing to do but cook and buy fresh, organic meat. A perfect way to mark the real beginning of my Carnivore Cost Calculations - how much does it cost (in Aussie dollars) per day to live on a diet of organic (where possible) meat?
Breakfast: Two lamb forequarter chops - $4.
Then it was off to the shops in my KSOs, to Belmore Meats. It's still another two weeks before my freezer is restocked by Organic Direct, and we were down to diced beef, and a whole lotta chicken. So I took the opportunity to stock up on the items that are sold at a good price from the organic butcher (whose prices are fixed - no 'specials' here, sadly) - the steaks and such are best left for the monthly shipment.
The haul:
1.35kg leg of lamb @ $16/kg 1.7kg (10) lamb forequarter chops @ $16/kg 1kg corned beef silverside @ $17/kg 400g ox kidney @ $10/kg (can't wait to cook with kidney for the first time!) 1.1kg (10) pure beef sausages @ $18/kg
Total expenditure: $92.50
Meals: 15 or more breakfasts, and 3 dinners for two people with leftovers.
Lunch:Crab cakes, my newest experiment, and an absolute winner! Crab costs about $8-$10 per container, depending on the kind of meat, and two organic eggs run to the order of $1.50 or so, so this meal isn't cheap. Perfect as an appetiser at a luxurious dinner party though.
Dinner: Leg of lamb ($21), rubbed in lard and sprinkled with thyme, rosemary and garlic...
Then popped in the crock pot and cooked in a moderately hot oven for four hours...
The result is tender, perfect meat sitting in its own incredibly delicious gravy! Who needs Gravox when you have this?!
Carnivore Cost Calculation: $4 + $12 + $11 (half the roast, no leftovers this time) = $27. Given that I wasn't actually hungry for lunch and just felt like testing a recipe idea, I only really needed $15 worth of food today. So for those of you who want to watch the purse strings, that's 700g of organic lamb for $15. Nice. Conventional meat would probably be even cheaper, of course. Grok on!
I cut out grains, sugar and starches at the beginning of 2009. I have been keeping a journal as I have progressively shed my bulges and my processed foods. I am aiming to live a clean, primal lifestyle, and I wish to share my eating habits with those who wish to clean up their lifestyle and live happily and healthfully. As the cliche states - if I can do it, so can everybody else.
I cut out grains, sugar and starches at the beginning of 2009. I have been keeping a journal as I have progressively shed my bulges and my processed foods. I am aiming to live a clean, primal lifestyle, and I wish to share my eating habits with those who wish to clean up their lifestyle and live happily and healthfully. As the cliche states - if I can do it, so can everybody else.