Week 9 was pretty good. I ate well, I hit the gym 4 times and I was feeling good. Saturday night we had a night out in Brighton but I was well prepared – I had done a gym session in the morning and we had a very nice meal out in the evening but mine was actually pretty healthy. My starter was a salad and I don’t usually do salad! It wasn’t to be healthy – I actually just love that salad.

Anyway all was fine until that evening… and then it snowed!

Hibernation Time!

Us Brits are famous for being useless in the snow – a couple of inches and all hell breaks loose. Well this was 6 inches and we had to drive home 150 miles in it. We made it but only just! However, the next morning I was already in hibernation mode and I did not leave the house in my car for an entire week. No gym, no shopping, just me, my pyjamas and my desk!

I love to be at home on my computer, mostly in my pyjamas. Working at home for a living really suits me. It’s my true nature to just hibernate indoors and I have to fight against it to actually be active. This week has started much the same but it rained last night and melted all the snow away so I have no excuse. Well actually I do, it’s Valentine’s day so today is about preparing for that and for me that means food! I imagine I’ll get some exercise but it probably won’t be at the gym ;-)

I really don’t know if I managed to consume 7,000 more calories than I needed in just one weekend (I doubt it) or if my metabolism was low from Atkins and has not caught up yet or whatever, but regardless, all that matters now is moving forward from where I am. As I said in my last post, my goals have not changed.

Eating Whole Foods

Other than the weekend indulges my gut instinct tells me that I am eating well now. Whole grains, ample protein, fat (yes fat!), lots of veg and some fruit, real home cooked food are the staples of my diet. I’m not eating white carbs, processed crap or sugar. Since stopping Atkins / Paleo I have brought back bread, pasta & rice and found no ill effects. However one thing that has affected me badly is sugar – it really makes my heart race which is incredibly uncomfortable. Enough to actually make me not want the sugar. Well that’s something!

So I’m carrying on with this. This week I have one meal out on Saturday and other than that I’m cooking all my own food so my diet should be good.

Loving the Gym!

I joined the gym last week, went three times and this week I went last night. Every session I am working out well – I’m coming out red in the face and sweating (yuk!) so I know I’m really working and it feels good! This week I’m aiming for 3 sessions again and I will actually end up with 4 as on Saturday morning I have a half hour personal training session. I’d like to work up to going 4 or 5 times a week but right now I’m being consistent and that is the most important thing.

I have always been slow to lose weight, and that may well be just the way it has to be for me. When I saw how much weight my neice lost in her recent transformation I wanted the same thing. What if I could get rid of this extra 30lbs I’ve had hanging around for over a decade and just get rid of it in a few months? Shortcut mentality – I should have known it was doomed to failure. The last time I was truly successful, I lost 30lbs but it took 18 months. I also massively increased my fitness in that time.

I’d like the same results but I really hope it doesn’t take that long. But I am now clear about what I am willing to do and not do. I’m willing to increase my exercise and work harder in the gym as my fitness increases. I’m willing to put the time and effort in to prepare and cook healthy meals and avoid the processed convenience food. I am not willing to go hungry, to feel deprived or to avoid social occasions and meals out. I accept the fact that if I do these things I will most probably impede my progress and possibly have set backs. So be it.

This week will be a test (this whole thing is a test!). I’m going to eat as much as I want to feel full and satisfied and I’m going to enjoy my meal out on Saturday to the fullest. I’m also going to work hard in the gym for those 4 sessions. Will this be enough to shift some flab? I’ll find out next week and if it isn’t then I’ll worry about it then!

What brought on the change of heart?

Breakfasts have been fine, lunches mostly ok but I have still struggled with evening meals because I don’t like many of the traditional vegetables. Therefore most evenings I’ve been hungry some hours after dinner and the only snacks I can eat are meat, cheese & eggs and that just feels wrong! It just doesn’t feel healthy to have a high calorie, high fat snack when I could have some fruit, or better yet not be hungry after dinner in the first place. Okay I could have the fruit on Paleo but I still can’t eat any of my staples.

Last night I cooked my partner a pork dish with special fried rice made with whole grain rice and packed with lots of veggies. I was looking at that and looking at my own meal which was a beef stew and honestly the rice dish seemed healthier. Later in the evening I snacked on some pork scrathings which did not feel healthy at all. I think that’s when I made the decision to stop but I was planning to slowly ease myself back in but I guess willpower got the better of me and I added some of that wholegrain rice to my lunch today so it ends now!

I’m going to consider the last 7 weeks an interesting experiment, take what I have learned and move forward from here. My goals have not changed but my methods certainly will do.

Results recap so far

My first week of Paleo I dropped almost 4 lbs then it stalled. I had Christmas & New Year to deal with so I’m actually pretty pleased I at least stayed the same. When I started Atkins last week I dropped just over 3 lbs in that first week but this week the scale has barely moved. I have weighed myself daily since starting and I know you’re not supposed to do that but by this time last week I was already 2lbs down and this week its about half a pound so it’s clearly not working. The book suggested that weight lost in the first few days would be water weight and then as the body adapts to burning fat that will be dropped next. It would appear to still be working, but slowly. It simply is not worth the effort and restriction. I actually had to cook separate meals for my partner and also eat separately from friends last weekend which did NOT feel good. I refuse to live this way.

What has changed for the better

These last few feeks have not been a waste though. I’ve dropped half a stone over a period of the year when I would usually put on as much. I have increased my vegetable intake hugely and introduced new veggies into my diet. That feels good, that is staying! I have dropped virtually all sugar and I have truly felt the benefits – no cravings, no nagging feeling of constant hunger (only genuine hunger in the evenings), heightened taste buds. When I had some cheesecake at a restaurant the other week just before starting Atkins my heart was racing for hours. I used to get this all the time and I hate it so the sugar is staying dumped! I’m not saying I’ll never eat sugar again but it will be a very rare thing on a special occasion only.

I have proved to myself that I can be strong (to an extent). Today is the first time I have eaten rice in 7 weeks. The same goes for bread & pasta with the exception of New Years Eve when I literally had no choice – it was starve and offend friends or eat it. I have proved to myself that I don’t need to snack all day long, and that I don’t need caffeine (I gave that up too), or sugar, or processed crappy junk food. One benefit of being a bit of a foodie is that I love real food – I enjoy cooking and so I never ate much processed stuff anyway.

So what now?

I’m fed up of following diets. There is so much conflicting advice. From now on I’m going to be on the ‘Caroline’ diet – I am throwing all rules out of the window and simply eating what feels good and right at the time! I will continue to track everything in detail as I have been. Incidentally, my calories on Atkins have been higher that before and as calories do matter this is probably why it has not been effective for me this week. Every week I’ll continue to monitor what I eat, how I feel, what my results are and I’ll just carry on or change things accordingly. I’m going to consider it an evolvement.

Some ideas I definitely want to take forward with me now are having lots more veg and a little fruit every day, cutting out the sugar and white flour products and still keeping carbs relatively low. But I will eat rice, pasta, some bread products as I did before. I am not afraid of fat but I don’t want to eat it in the quanties that I was on Atkins. I’d rather get a good dose of everything in each meal. One thing I really can’t be doing with is meal timing – only having carbs after a workout or before a certain time of day etc. I’m just going to eat what I want, when I want as long as it feels good. I’ll keep my fridge stocked up with lots of fresh veg so I can always make a salad, some soup etc so I have healthy food to have if I do need to snack.

I will NOT be restocking my cupboard with crisps, biscuits, pot noodles, chocolate chip brioche rolls (I used to have one of those every morning as a ‘pre-breakfast snack’!) or any of that rubbish.

Oh yes, I joined the gym!

On monday I joined a local gym and have used it twice so far and used it properly – yesterday I was in there for an hour and a half! I did about 30 mins of cardio followed by quite a bit of weight training. Another reason why I decided to stop Atkins in particular – the exercise should have boosted weight loss, it may have been non existent if I hadn’t started down the gym this week. I plan to go again Friday this week.

So, excersie and real food are the plan then. If my weight loss slows to a crawl as a result, so be it, at least I’ll be well fed!

So, it’s not just calories in v calories out

I read in my Paleo book a couple of weeks ago that calories do matter and I was hugely disappointed. I was under the impression that as long as I kept my carbs low, I could eat what I wanted and not worry about calories. It turns out that is true, but my carbs were not low enough. This week my calories have been at maintenance level – I’ve had more than I was on my Paleo days but the carbs have obviously been MUCH lower.

Mark Sisson recommends 50-100g carbs a day for steady weight loss, or less than 50 for short periods to boost weight loss. Atkins starts you off at 20g a day and then after the 2 week induction has you increase daily intake by 5g per week until you find a point where you’re still losing at an acceptable level and eating an increased amount and wider variety of carbs. I like the Atkins approach because it lets you experiment for yourself and see exactly how the carbs affect you on an individual level. Everybody is different.

There is one part of Atkins I have not complied with this week – exercise again. I am still struggling with it. I keep coming up with ideas to try and make it interesting so I’ll exercise at home but it’s not taking hold. The recommendations in the Atkins book are a little flakey – in one section he says you must exercise every day and in another section he outlines 3 different workout plans, none of which are more than 4 days per week. Honestly, it looks like it was put in the book as an afterthought. However Mark and other Paleo guys recommend a LOT more exercise and this is most likely taken into account in the carb level recommendations. The Atkins book suggests that someone exercising vigorously for 45 mins for 6 days a week would be able to eat up to 90g carbs a day and still lose weight.

I’m not entirely sure how exercise factors in when carbs are low. I know that in terms of calories burned, people often underestimate just what they are burning – it’s not hundreds of calories an hour for most activities. But there’s also the effect on metabolism and in the case of low carb, I’m guessing that exercising would quickly deplete what little levels of glycogen there are in the blood stream thus forcing your body to burn fat if it wasn’t already. This coming week I will make a more concerted effort to exercise.

How I felt through the week

This diet is difficult for me. My biggest challenge is that I just don’t like all that many vegetables and so for an evening meal, I would usually have meat & carbs – spaghetti bolognaise for instance. I had the same difficulty when first making the transition to Paleo but this is even more restrictive – no fruit, no nuts, no starchy vegetables. However, if it continues to work as intended then it will gradually get easier as I go on as I will be re-introducing more foods back in gradually as each week passes.

The breakfasts have by far been the easiest – eggs fill me up. By lunchtime on Monday though I was hungry and lunch was not that satisfying. By the evening I just couldn’t seem to curb the hunger and I was craving sweet things as well. Thankfully this was better on Tuesday but over the next couple of days I experienced bouts of tiredness – particularly around lunchtime and in the afternoons. This passed by the end of the week but the evening snack attack has still been there most evenings as I have sometimes struggled to come up with a decent meal for dinner. It would be so much easier if I liked more vegetables!

Last night I allowed myself to get really hungry before dinner and I was suddenly hit with really strong cravings – I wanted takeaway – Indian, Chinese, Pizza, and sweet stuff too! I felt really miserable for a while but then I reluctantly ate dinner, the hunger subsided and the cravings went with it too. Turns out that hunger brings back all my cravings so lesson learned there – don’t let myself get overly hungry!

Plans for this coming week

After Thursdays realisation that I was mis-calculating the carbs, I am now properly on 20g a day and not 26! So officially I am on day 4 today and not day 8. However, I think I will decide whether or not to do those extra few days of induction based on this week’s results. The Atkins book has a table of average weight loss in the 2 week induction period for men & women based on metabolic resistance. A woman with average metabolic resistance should lose around 6lbs. Depending on how much of this week’s loss is water weight, I could be on track to hit that so if I do, I see no reason to continue the induction for additional days.

Even though I like seeing big numbers, I am worried that I will eventually rebel against this level of restriction, have a blow out an undo all this work. I’d rather move onto the next stage, start upping the carbs, re-introcuding fruits, nuts etc to get back to a more Paleo diet and be on something I can more easily stick to over the longer term.

In the US, food labels list total carbohydrate and they also list fiber but the total carb count also includes the fiber. Fiber is indigestible so it passes through the body without affecting blood sugar levels and thus we don’t need to count it. In the US you need to calculate ‘net carbs’ by subtracting the fiber amount from the total carb count but UK food labels list them separately and the carb count already has the fiber subtracted.

I realised the mistake when looking at a recipe and the carbs minus the fiber gave me a negative value. Huh? I googled around and found the answer pretty quickly. So all week I had been subtracting the fiber and I shouldn’t have.

Okay so how much of a disaster is it? Well it depends on the way you look at it – considering before this week I was eating around 80g carbs a day and before Paleo I was probably around 200g, a mere 6g does not seem like much. But the problem is that I am doing this as a personal experiment and I can only truly know the results if I follow the diet to the letter. Plus, for me personally I am really bad at following anything – I always cheat so it’s important for me psychologically to really do this right. So I’m starting over today.

Today should be day 5 but instead, I’m now counting it as the new day 1. There is an advantage of doing this actully – the Atkins diet does not allow Caffeine and I am a regular coffee drinker. Not wanting to suffer withdrawls, I decided to wean myself off the caffeine gradually but I’m nearly there now so I reckon I can just cut it out completely from today so then I will well and truly be doing it 100% correctly.

It’s irritating starting on a Friday but no big deal really. Better than having a 4 day cheat.

Before paleo I nearly always had at least 3 components – some kind of carbs such as rice, pasta, potatoes etc, the protein – meat, fish etc, and in most cases some kind of vegetables though sometimes the veggies were missing :/

Because I don’t like all that many vegetables I have never really been a fan of the traditional British ‘meat & 2 veg’ which is a shame because that would be an ideal paleo meal!

As I spent more time on Paleo I found that I was still having something on my plate that acted like a carb in my old meals. For example, sometimes it would be carbs – some kind of potato! Another example is a paleo version of a tortilla I made with coconut flour. I also tried to do a paleo pizza base once but that was pretty nasty!

But in the last couple of days I have been on the induction phase of Atkins on which I can only eat from a very small selection of foods. No potatoes, no starchy carbs, no nuts – thus no coconut flour, no fruit etc. Yesterday I really stuggled with dinner. I had planned a steak with some sugar snap peas but this was just not enough and not satisfying at all.

It wasn’t just the volume of food – it needed variety. Tonight I had 4 different things on my plate – steak and the sugar snap peas as before, but I added a portion of sauteed cabbage & bacon and a baby avocado. This gave me a full plate with a wide variety of colours and textures and it worked – I felt full and satisfied afterwards and I didn’t miss the carbs.

I see a lot of Paleo recipes which are just for the meat portion of the meal but I never know what to put with it because I don’t like many popular vegetables such as brocolli, cauliflower, asparagus, parsnips, carrots and so on. I’ve now managed to hobble together a few recipes for veggie side dishes and so I am now trying to make sure that for each meal I have at least 3 different items of my plate – all with different colours.

Also yesterday I was eating up stuff in the house that are not permitted on Induction of Atkins so the last couple of days have undone the beginning of the week. I’m obviously quite sensitive to splurges – one or two meals can set me back a whole week and so I can easily go weeks without any change despite sticking to a diet ‘most of the time’. Obviously, most of the time is not good enough for me – I must be strict!

Primal Atkins Begins Today

I’m calling it ‘Primal Atkins’ because I’ll be following the Atkins plan but the foods I happen to eat will also make the diet Primal. The reason I say Primal and not Paleo is due to the inclusion of cheese. As far as I am aware I don’t have any kind of intolerance to cheese but we’ll see! The purpose of trying Atkins is to experiment. Obviously I am not somebody who loses weight easily but I want to know why. Is it simply that I am metabolically resistant? Or am I just sensitive to carbs or do I have some food intolerance that sabotages my progress without me knowing about it?

Atkins works in phases and after the induction phase which is the most strict, additional carbs and food groups are added back in very slowly just one at a time which will make it easy to pinpoint when problems occur. If I lose well in the induction phase then at least I know I am not intolerant to cheese!

Caffeine

One of the rules of Induction that worries me is to avoid caffeine. It can cause low blood sugar which can lead to sugar cravings (though I haven’t had any in weeks other than when I have eaten excess carbs!) and can increase insulin which of course will slow down weight loss. If I still drink caffeine I may not see the maximum potential results. I’ve had coffee every day of my life for as long as I can remember so I’m fairly sure I am dependent on it but to what degree I am not sure.

What I don’t want to do is go cold turkey and then experience all the withdrawl symptoms – headaches, fatigue, lack of concentration etc. I have some important work to do this week and I can’t afford to have these symptoms! So I’ll wean myself down like I have done with sugar (I gave up sugar in coffee when I was 13 simply by gradually reducing the dose). I have some decaff coffee so I will make my coffee with part caffeinated and part decaff. Hopefully I will not notice the difference and then I can gradually alter the ratios to favor the decaff.

Setting Myself Up to Win

Yesterday my partner had a long day at work and was not able to have any kind of break for lunch. Towards the end of the day she was obviously getting very hungry and with no food available she ordered a pizza which she later felt very guilty about eating. Trying to wing-it when it comes to food puts you up against hunger and cravings and these are two demons that I certainly cannot resist. I find that in order to have any chance of sticking to a diet such as this I have to set myself up to win.

I have meticulously planned my meals for the first 3 days and I have chosen some of my favourites. This is not the time to start experimenting with new vegetables! I’m having a cheese & ham scramble with fresh tomatoes for breakfast, a meatza with a large salad for lunch (I made this last night) and dinner is my all time favourite – steak, plus some sugar snap peas and an olive & avocado salad to start. I have a friend coming to dinner Friday so I have simply asked my partner to cook that night for herself and our guest and I can just stick to my thing. Usually I would also cater for guests of course but this week I simply don’t know how this diet is going to make me feel and I don’t want any additional food related stresses getting in the way!

It is possible that I am insilun resistant. I may also have unlucky genetics and not have a very good metabolism. I feel as though I want to find out for sure by lowering carbs to a low enough point to force my body into burning fat and seeing if the fat loss improves further. It should do but I have never managed to get the carbs low enough to try it properly.

Enter Atkins…

One of the podcasts I listen to is by Jimmy Moore who lost over 180lbs on the Atkins diet. His podcast is recommended by many Paleo people which is how I found it. Listening to his podcast over the last few weeks has made me interested in giving the Atkins diet (which would still be Paleo in the initial phases) a try. This is tough for me to think about as I have always held an extremely negative view of atkins, thinking of it as a harmful short-term crash diet. However, rather than just pass judgement on something that I know absolutely nothing about, I decided to actually read the book – so I did!

I can see where my skepticism and misinformation came from. I have heard horror stories of people who feel awful, have headaches, no energy, bad breath and basically feel so terrible that they cannot stick to it more than a few days. I also was under the impression that the carbs were so low that you could not possibly get enough nutrients from your food. Now that I have read the book, I can see where these ideas come from and I also feel a lot better about trying it.

The 4 Phases of Atkins

One thing I never realised is that Atkins is a diet which is separated into phases. The most restrictive one is the first phase, known as induction. For most people this is only for 2 weeks and the idea is to force your body into switching its primary fuel source from glucose to fat. It is in this phase that most people have difficulty but this 2 week induction is just that – an induction and it is not the whole diet. Also, I don’t actually think I’d experience many of the symptoms.

The worst symptoms that I hear about are those people having energy crashes and headaches. This comes not from the lack of carbs as such, but from withdrawl symptoms from the sugar. Most people have radically high levels of sugar in their diets and are addicted to it and cutting it out completeltey in all forms (this diet is super-duper strict; absolutely no sugar of any kind allowed) will trigger withdrawls. I’ve already done that – even before I started on Paleo per-se, I started to drop my sugar and I had a headache for 3 days. That was over a month ago and now I very rarely eat sugar of any kind so I don’t see this being a problem for me.

Secondly, some people experience tiredness and lethargy but this is often attributed to a lack of nutrients in the diet. Atkins expresses the importance of getting the carbs from vegetables. (No fruit in the induction phase). I have already done a food plan for the first few days to see just what I’d be able to eat for 20g carbs and I was surprised to find that I struggled to use up all 20g! All the time I have been on Paleo I have been averaging around 70-80g a day but they have come from not just vegetables but also fruits & starches such as potatoes. With those removed completely, my first few days on Atkins will increase my vegetable intake evn higher than it has been so far! This seems like a good thing to me! I’ll supplement with a multi-vitamin to be sure.

The other phases increase the carb count slowly, introduce additional food groups one by one such as starchy vegetables such as carrots, parsnips etc, berries, nuts & seeds, legumes and finally grains. I would most likely not opt for grains as of course they are not Paleo.

Will This Be Easy?

Because I have been doing Paleo for almost 6 weeks now, I have a bunch of recipes that already fit Atkins, I have ditched most of the crap from my kitchen and restocked it with lots of healthy foods. I already keep fresh salads, vegetables, eggs and meat hanging around for snacks if I need them. I have already lowered my carb intake and ditched the sugar. This is only a relatively minor change from what I am already doing.

The most difficult aspect that I can foresee would be eating around other people. When I am home alone and doing my own thing I am 100% in control of my food and I don’t have to defend or justify my food choices to anybody else. Sometimes I cook for my partner but she wants to lose weight also so she may eat what I prepare or she can just fend for herself heh! If the induction phase lasts just two weeks I will be unsociable for two weeks and not go out for meals. I don’t want to add any additional difficulty to the most restrictive phase.

Currently if I eat out or go to somebody else’s house, I eat potato which allows for a fairly ‘normal’ looking meal and it would not be obvious that I was eating radically differently to most people. This is not going to be an option on Atkins. Potatoes are absolutely not allowed in the induction phase and in later phases they can only be introduced much later down the line after other food groups such as nuts & berries.

After that, I am not sure what I will do if I am going round a friends house for dinner for example. The biggest problem that I can see with this diet from other people’s viewpoint is that carbs make a very cheap filler for expensive meat. I can’t go to a friend and demand to eat steak & fresh salad when a pasta bake or risotto is much cheaper. Unfortunately one single meal that is high in carbs can set back the process by upto a week. I will have to take each day as it comes and just see what happens. But first, I need to get through induction!

I’ll be doing my 6th weekly weigh in on Monday and I will also re-do all measurements at this time and some additional ones such as thigh as well. The Atkins-Paleo experiment starts Monday.

How to estimate calorie expenditure

In the past I have always been a calorie counter. I have calculated how many calories I need based on a common formula and then calculated how much of a calorie deficit I would need to lose the target amount of fat. The theory goes that 1 pound of fat contains 3,500 calories which means to lose that fat from your body you need to work up a calorie deficit of 3,500 calories. The numbers work quite well if you work on a weekly basis. 1lb fat loss per week should require a nice round 500 calorie deficit per day.

We start with a calculation which tells us our Basal Metabolic Rate. The metabolic rate is the rate at which the body burns calories. We can use the Harris-Benedict formula to estimate our BMR (do not confuse with the utterly pointless BMI!) based on height, weight and age using this handy online calculator. Note straight away that this does not take body fat percentage into account. This is why I am using it actually, because I am not convinced that I am calculating my body fat accurately. But what this means is that the BMR for a 200 pound athlete will be the same as a 200 pound obese person of the same height and age. Okay so we know this is just an average, let’s move on. Mine comes out at 1,466.

The BMR is how many calories our body needs at complete rest. If you do anything other than lie perfectly still 24/7 you will need to factor in an activity level. Harris-Benedict then give you a chart of various levels of activity and a corresponding multiplier. These are below:

• Sedentary (little or no exercise) : BMR x 1.2
• Lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week) : BMR x 1.375
• Moderatetely active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week) : BMR x 1.55
• Very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week) : BMR x 1.725

I’ll talk about activity in another post but right now I’d put myself as ‘Lightly active’ giving me a multiplier of 1.375 which now gives me a total estimated calorie expenditure of 2,015.

So you calculate how many calories your body burns per day, then decide how much fat you want to lose, and work out how much deficit you need. Most people want fast fat loss and even 2lbs a week is too slow for many people but let’s look at that for the moment. The average woman requires around 2000-2500 calories a day. I would say that the average overweight inactive woman requires closer to 2000 than 2500 and this is certainly true for me. If she wanted to lose 2lbs per week, she would need a deficit of 1000 calories day bringing her daily allowance to just 1000. This is too low for several reasons.

The Importance of Metabolism

First of all, all we can really do is estimate our calorie needs. We can never calculate it accurately. We just estimated our basal metabolic rate but this varies from person to person. The metabolic rate is the rate at which the body burns calories. People with fast metabolisms (we hate them right?) burn calories very quickly and are generally lean all the time. People with slow metabolisms burn calories more slowly and generally hold on to fat and find it more difficult to shift it.

Unfortunately the calculation used above to estimate it is a one-size-fits-all formula that has no way of accounting for your genetics. Also, recall in the last post that I discussed insulin resistance – someone who is insulin resistant will not process carbs well and will store them as fat. So the BMR is really just a ballpark. Using only the standard calorie formula and ignoring the carbohydrate content of the meals even if our overweight woman managed to stick to 1000 calories, if they come mainly from carbs she’ll be battling hunger and cravings all day long and that simply cannot last.

Our metabolisms are quite clever but they can work against us when we want to lose fat. We are designed for survival and up until fairly recently in evolutionary terms, a big threat to our survival was hunger. Our bodies are designed to conserve energy in times of food scarcity and it does this by slowing down the metabolism so that we don’t need as many calories to live on. This is how people stuck out in remote areas can survive for weeks on very little food – the body will know that it is starving and slow down the metabolism accordingly so that it can function on far fewer calories.

The problem with traditional calorie reduction is that if you take your calories too low you will also trigger the starvation response. Your metabolism will slow down so you don’t need as many calories. Your deficit is not big enough so you stop losing weight. You cut calories some more and this goes on and on but it has it’s limits. Eventually you cannot continue starving yourself and you abandon the diet. But here’s the kicker – the body does not know that this was intentional and it keeps the metabolism low for a while longer after the food returns to normal. You’re now gorging on anything in sight as you’re so fed up of being hungry all the time but your body is still in starvation mode with metabolism at rock bottom so you gain even more weight. 3 months later you go on another diet to lose the weight regained. Classic yo-yo dieting!

Keeping your carbs low and eating enough to get a healthy amount of protein (covered in the next section) & fat and enough overal food in general will allow you to lose fat without hunger pangs or cravings. If you’re hungry you’re either eating too many carbs, not having enough protein or fat or just not eating enough food overall. Many women in particular starve themselves and do not eat enough – their metabolisms are very low and their bodies do not get anywhere near the nutrients they need.

Muscle, Metabolism & Protein

Why is it that a 200lbs athlete needs more calories than a 200lb obese person? Because muscle requires lots of calories to sustain it. If I recall it is something like 50 calories a day per 1lb of muscle. Thus if you were to increase your lean muscle mass by 5lbs, you’d burn around 250 calories a day more without changing your activity level. Of course, you’d need to do some exercise to build the muscle in the first place but you can see why building or at least preserving the muscle you have is so damn important.

Something to add to the starvation response – when your body needs energy quickly it cannot metabolize your stored body fat fast enough so it burns glucose. Once the glucose in your bloodstream has been depleted it will eat into your lean muscle tissue – ouch! Following a severe calories restriction then not only brings your metabolism down but it also lowers your muscle so even when you go back to eating ‘normally’, your body no longer needs as many calories as before to sustain it and thus if you eat the same as you did before, you’ll now put on even more weight! Nasty stuff.

To build muscle generally requires a calorie surpluss alongside a healthy dose of strength training so it does not usually go hand in hand with fat loss that requires a calorie deficit. However you can at least preserve the muscle you do have. Firstly, do not starve yourself. Eat well, do not go hungry and ensure you have adequate protein. Mark Sisson recommends 0.7 – 1g protein per day per pound of lean body mass. If you don’t know your lean body mass use 0.5-0.7lb of body weight. So I weigh currently 166 lbs, I would want between 83 and 116g protein a day. I get that so that’s all good.

Secondly, do strength training – this triggers the muscle fibres and even if there is not enough nutrients to build much more muscle because you’re in a calorie deficit it sends the signals to the body that this muscle is required and it is less likely to be burned. If you are keeping your carbs low then you shouldn’t burn lean muscle anyway but if you do your strength training as well you should most certainly be able to hang on to what you have and maybe build a little as well.

 Remember, this is an estimate

I have not yet talked about activity – I’ll cover that in another post but there are also others factors that determine calorie expentidure. I already talked about differences in genetics, the effect of muscle of calorie consumption but there are other factors such as the thermic value of food, exercise afterburn, effects of sleep and stress etc. I won’t bother discussing these as they are all very well documented in books such as the Primal Blueprint. The point is that these online calculators give you an estimate to start from but at the end of the day it is your results that matter.

You can use a clalculator to estimate your calorie expenditure and then use calculators to estimate your consumption and hopefully you’ll do it right and burn fat at an acceptable level but if it’s not working then you must change something. Your genetics may suck – if you come from a family of overweight people then they probably do but that does not make the calculators wrong! It just means you need to put in a bit more effort than the lucky ones! Remember do NOT starve yourself! Whatever your genetics, eat enough to satisfy all hunger and cravings and then you’ll need to factor in some exercise which I’ll discuss in another post.

I believe that if we eat well and do at least a moderate amount of exercise, everybody should be able to lose fat but the one variable will be the rate at which it comes off. If you don’t have much time for exercise and you have unluckily genetics then you may struggle to lose even 1lb a week where somebody else is dropping 2 or 3 lbs a week. This is life, suck it up and carry on! This is exactly the situation I find myself in right now so I know I need to make changes to see the results that I want.

I have to admit, when I started this Paleo thing I did so based on the success my neice had because she lost so much so quickly. I figured that maybe there was something going on in the science of the Paleo way of eating that made the fat come off much faster than normal so that the usual calorie counting rules did not apply. But as I blogged about yesterday this is not the case and calories do still count. Also, I must not forget that my neice did an incredible amount of exercise – twice a day most days. If she burned an average of 400 calories in each session and did 10 a week that’s 4000 calories which is more than 1lb of fat and on top of that the exercise would have given her an afterburn effect which would have gone on to burn more calories for several hours after her workouts.

I need to exercise more

I need to take my own advice and suck it up! I have looked back over the last week and I simply ate too many calories for my activity level. I can pinpoint several issues – firstly there was New Year which was fairly disastrous carb-wise but I don’t think I had enough calories to have a lasting effect on the week so I can’t blame that. Then there was the meal out Tuesday night – I can only guess the calorie & carb content of the meal and although I tried to refrain I don’t think I did a great job. But this week I’ve been having evening snack-attacks and many of these snacks have gone un-recorded. Eaten late at night I’ve not counted them but I know they’re there!

I can’t cut calories more – this will put me back into the old days of being hungry all the time. I have a big appetite. I don’t want to cut carbs more as I am already finding it difficult to keep coming up with food ideas – I’m struggling this week. I’m bored of a lot of what I have been having and need to start mixing things up. Also, if I cut calories too low I risk going into starvation mode which is a Very Bad Thing.

The absolute best thing I can do is to exercise more, there are so many benefits:

• The additional activity will give me the higher calorie allowance I am after
• Strength training in particular will give me an afterburn effect increasing calories burned
• Any exercise increases metabolism which has an overall calorie-burning effect
• I’ll get fitter for my snowboarding trip
• I’ll keep what muscle I have and may even gain a little

I’ve been putting it off. I thought I could ease myself in with the 7 small workouts and then the daily Kettlebell swings but it’s not worked out that way. The kettlebell sessions are short but tough. Once I have done some exercise for the day I find it very difficult to do more later on – I want it done and out the way so even though I have done them every day I’ve only done 2 of my other workouts and these were pretty short. It’s simply not enough.

I’m fat & lazy! There, I said it!

I’m being lazy and I know it. I don’t even have to drive to a gym as I have the facilities to workout at home. I have a good enough weights set to keep me going to many years, I have several kettlebells which can do cardio or strength depending on how I use them and I also have a massive room in which I can practice karate. I haven’t got round to that yet either. If I am completely honest with myself it is fear that is stopping me. I quit karate just over a year ago at Christmas the previous year. I had recently graded to brown belt but since hitting that grade I struggled. Everything was much faster and I couldn’t keep up – I actually felt like my skill was getting worse and not better. I stopped enjoying it.

I didn’t actually mean to quit. I was not happy with my club – nobody ever failed a grading and the last straw was when I watched a black belt grading where only 1 person failed when the standard was pretty appauling. I didn’t think I should have passed my brown belt grading and I knew that if I stayed with that club I would pass every grading including black even though I was feeling shit about my ability. I want to earn it, not just be given it because I turned up to class. So I found a new club, did a couple of trial classes then I had a stupid fall in class – tripped over a mat but I really hurt my toe! Sounds ridiculous but it was hurting for about 10 months and I never went back.

So now, I am rusty, unfit, inflexible, fat and quite frankly, terrified at just how bad I’ll be when I take it up again. However, I can be shit all by myself, nobody has to see me. I can train at my own pace in the privacy of my front room. I know I need to do it, I just need to face my fear and start.

Calories Matter… Sometimes

You’ve heard the saying, “calories in vs calories out”. The theory goes that you calculate how many calories your body needs, then make sure you eat less than that amount to burn off fat stores. That’s the very simplistic version but it says nothing of insulin…

Carbs, Glucose, Insulin & Body Fat

I’m not a scientist and my recollection of what I have been reading may be a litte fuzzy but here’s the gist – when you eat carbs those carbs are converted into glucose and our blood glucose level rises. Glucose is needed by all the cells in the body but we can easily ingest too many carbs and now we have too much glucose (a form of sugar) in our bloodstream. When it is too high the body triggers an insulin response – insulin is excreted into the bloodstream which removes the glucose from the bloodstream and converts it into fat.

When we eat too many carbs this causes a couple of problems. First of all a massive amount of insulin is released to try and get the glucose levels down quickly – this in turn brings the glucose down very quickly causing what’s known as the ‘carb crash’. You’ll now feel lethargic, hungry and craving more carbs. Secondly, the purpose of insulin is to take that glucose and store it as fat – it’s taking the carbs you just ate and storing it as body fat and this is why carbs make you fat!

But it doesn’t stop there… many years or decades of consistent high carb eating can cause the body to become insulin resistant which means that more and more insulin is required to keep the blood glucose level regulated. Recall that the purpose of insulin is to store fat – the more insulin resistant you are the more your body will produce and the more fat you will store. All that excess insulin is also making you hungry and crave more carbs so the vicious circle continues.

People trying to lose fat eating a low fat and high carb diet are going to struggle immensely because they will be battling with constant hunger and cravings.

Lean people have an easier time of it

The good news is that this insulin resistance can be reversed by dropping the carbs and a Paleo lifestyle can encourage a low carb diet as many traditional diets are high in bread, pasta, rice etc and if you take those out you’ll naturally eat less carbs. Of course it’s still easy to overeat the carbs if you gorge on carb rich fruit, sweet potatoes etc. Mark Sisson recommends 50-100g carbs a day for ‘effortless weight loss’, and 100-150g a day for maintenance.

For people who are already lean and have normal insulin sensitivity, the body can correctly regulate its blood glucose levels and calories do not matter too much. Carbs still matter because it is the carbs that cause insulin resistance / sensitivity but for someone who is already lean and functioning well, the occasional splurge is not going to affect them.

People who need to lose excess fat are almost always insulin resistant to some degree and so the carbs and the calories matter because the body is not functioning efficiently enough to process any excess. One thing I am unclear on is exactly how long it takes to become insulin sensitive if you are already insulin resistant. I’m going to assume that it takes several weeks or months and as long as I have excess fat to lose, I’ll assume that calories do matter. Damn!

In the next post I’ll discuss how to calculate calorie requirements to determine exactly what I need to be eating each day to effectively burn fat.

Tomorrow night I have the first social event of the year – a meal out with friends. I simply can’t bring myself to go off-diet this soon into the New Year and so even though I said I’d always cheat if I was going to eat out, this time I have given my partner strict instructions to choose a restaurant at which I can eat Steak & Salad! I’ll let you know how that goes!

Carbs & Sugar Really DO Cause Cravings!

One thing I noticed over the New Year celebrations in particular is the effect of carbs / sugar on cravings and ‘willpower’. I’ve been saying for weeks how I was finding the transition to Paleo pretty easy because I am not craving non-paleo foods such as bread, pasta, sugary stuff etc and now I know that this lack of cravings is not psychological. We stayed with friends on New Years Eve and most of the following day. These friends are unaware that I have changed my diet and so served up exactly the kinds of foods I would have always gleefully indulged in. Dinner was pasta with some bread on the side – I skipped the bread but that turned out to be short lived.

I found that rumbling hunger and carb cravings quickly rushing back. What used to be normality for me now felt really noticeable and pretty uncomfortable. I found myself gorging on peanuts just to stave away the hunger and that only worked for a little while. Before the evening was out I’d eaten a load of chocolate and bread. I had a mild stomach ache most of the evening and I was also incredibly tired and had a headache which was not alleviated with pain pills. I realy struggled to stay awake until the Midnight count down! The next morning I woke up very hungry, shaky and with the headache still there. Luckily I had brought with me some fresh cherries and a small bag of seeds and nuts. This kept me going for the 3 hours or so until a high carb breakfast of pancakes served with lemon & sugar!

This did not fill me up but I turned down the offer of toast after breakfast and decided to wait until lunch which I knew was a Turkey dinner. Even though dinner had a lot of non-paleo stuff, the large portion of turkey was most welcome and I felt immediately better and finally shifted the headache that had been plaguing me since the previous evening. In the evening I came home and found a left-over beef dinner in the freezer and ate that followed by some fruit & cheese.

I started today with my pure paleo breakfast – a non-dairy smoothie followed a couple of hours later by devilled eggs & bacon. I feel good today – no headache, no tiredness, no cravings! Ahhh, I cannot emphasise enough how much better I feel eating this way!

Kettlebell Swings Done and Then Some!

Today is the first day of my January challenge I set myself. I vowed to do 50 swings a day for 30 consecutive days to total 1500 in the month of January. As I neared my 50 for today I realised it would only be a very slight challenge and as I am only on day 1 and expect to get fitter and stronger over the next 50 days I’ve decided to go for 2000 instead. So I performed 67 swings and shall do the same for all other days! I think I will also need to buy the next weight kettlebell pretty soon! :-)

I wish everyone reading this a happy & healthy 2012!

Note that as well as the Christmas indulgences I also went out for a meal at a Thai restaurant the other night. The starter was loaded with sugar and possibly soy sauce. The main cause was Chicken Satay with Rice Noodles so the satay was all peanuts (and possibly more sugar?), the noodles are noodles and all of that cooked in who-knows-what oil. I actually had a mild stomach ache for about 3 hours afterwards but I’m not sure if that was real or just kinda in my head.

My measurements have not really changed either so I’m definitely not seeing any discernable results on the outside yet with the exception of week 1 where I dropped 4lbs. This is really disappointing but I’m not deterred for two big reasons: firstly, I am eating more fresh vegetables than ever before and I have ditched all sugar, white carbs (all grains in fact), and all processed crap out of my diet completely and this just feels right. Secondly, I may not be seeing a difference on the outside but I am feeling a big difference on the inside – quite a few in fact.

No Cravings, No Headaches?

My favourite change so far is the total lack of cravings. I saw a friend post on Facebook today how she was trying to eat less and felt grumpy and I can totally relate to that! That’s how I felt on Weight Watchers and just about any other diet – always having to resist temptation all the time. That has simply gone. Now, I can look at something and think “hmm that looks appetizing” but not feel any actual urge to eat it. It’s a really odd feeling! I have actually been craving vegetables and specifically (and this is sooooo weird for me!) anything green is looking particularly appealing! I’m having big salads of spinach, watercress & rocket, fresh herbs in my omelette, green vegetables like mangetout, runner beans with my evening meals. This may not mean much to folk who eat veggies on a regular basis but previously I was somebody who could go several days without a single vegetable in sight, particularly anything green!

Along similar lines I am finding that my meals (particularly breakfast) keeps me full for longer – well until lunch. This has never happened before. I used to have a ‘pre-breakfast-snack’ an hour or two before the real breakfast just so I could make it until lunch time. I also used to panic about being hungry because it nearly always came with a headache. Now, the only hunger I am experiencing is at the right time – before I eat my next meal and it’s normal hunger – just a rumbling in my tummy and not that awful kind of hunger where you feel ravenous in a deprived kind of way as well as feeling shaky, lethargic and headachey. That appears to have gone.

Actually writing that has just made me realise something – I have not had a headache since those few days at the beginning when I was just starting to convert to Paleo. Headache’s have always been something I have suffered with on a regular basis – several times a week. I go as far as to take headache tablets with me anytime I am leaving the house for any significant length of time. I’m pretty sure this is not normal! If this diet has got rid of my headaches then I don’t think I’ll ever want to eat bread again!

New Year This Weekend

So today I am off to stay with friends to see in the New Year. I have no idea what is on the menu for this evening and we’re also staying for dinner tomorrow so for about a 24 hour period my food is not under my control at all. I’m not going to worry about it as it’s New Year (once a year and all that!) I have already planned all my meals for next week and my Tesco shopping order is coming the day after we get back from my friends so I am all set to get straight back into Paleo.

I have made one change for this week coming – I am reducing my carbs fairly significantly. For the days I knew my carbs this week (Christmas and meal out day excluded) I averaged 70g carbs a day and most of that came from a small serving of potato in the evening meal. Now 70g is fairly low – Mark Sisson suggests 50-100g a day for effortless weight loss. However there are a few factors to consider – I only did that consistently for 3 days. I had a lot of other days where I had more carbs. I ate dairy and I still don’t know if that is an irritant for me. I’m a fairly small female and this suggestion is a generalisation for everyone including a 6ft male so maybe I need to be on the lower end. Lastly, a significant portion of those carbs came from starchy tubers (potatoes) rather than complex carbs from vegetables. Lots of room for improvement I think.

My Plans for Next Week

Next week for the meals I have planned my carbs will average 40g per day. Too low? Well we’ll see… There’s no potatoes next week either and I’m boosting the veggies / salad even more. It will be interesting to see how I do on that – if any cravings return, if I’m hungry or low on energy etc.

Just in case anyone is interested in exactly what I am eating my plans for next week are:

Breakfast – a small protein smoothie along with devilled eggs & bacon. I miss my smoothies and I am bored of omelette’s and Frittata’s but I don’t want only liquid food so I am only having that with something solid as well.

Lunch – Salad Nicoise for a couple of days, and a Pork Fajita thing done in an egg omelette rather than tortilla for a couple. If I am still hungry after that (I always find lunch the odd one where I’m not sure how much to eat) I made some crackers from ground almonds and seeds and will have a few of those with some pate along with some crunchy veggies.

Dinner – Chilli served using romaine lettuce leaves as a taco and with guacamole and a cucumber & tomato salsa with it. I have never eaten chilli like this before – it’s always been over a large serving of rice or pasta. Oh also, I found a source of grass fed beef right on my doorstep – literally 3 doors down from me! Gotta love living in the country! The meat there is on par with and in some cases cheaper than the supermarket! I can’t wait to see what it tastes like!

Also for next week from Tuesday onwards I am starting my January Kettlebell Swing Challenge so at least I will be doing some exercise daily. Now if I don’t drop some body fat next week I really will be disappointed!

I’ve seen lots of these challenges around the Internet – the largest I saw was 10,000 swings in one month but thats over 330 a day without any missed days so that’s a bit tough for someone just starting out. I’m going to set my sights much lower and aim for 1500. However, what I really want to emphasise is the act of doing this every single day. There are 31 days in January and I’m staying with friends at New Year so I shall start on January 2nd so I can ensure I’m at home and set myself the simple goal of doing 50 swings every single day for the remaining month of January reaching the target of 1500 on the 31st. If I get on well with it the aim would be to continue doing challenges increasing the total reps each time. Maybe I’ll do a 10k month at some point in 2012!

This will be on top of any other exercise I’m currently doing which is another reason why I’m starting low. I’m going to drop the Kettlebell day from my 7 workouts routine as that would just be a bit confusing.

The main meal itself was not too damaging though its difficult to tell really. I don’t know how the stuffing and gravy were made for instance. The most obvious indulgence was the cranberry sauce which had sugar as its highest ingredient. However I filled myself up on the main meal and did not have any dessert either day. Alcohol wise I had one glass of wine with dinner on Christmas day, a couple of glasses of Baileys and that was it – no alcohol on Boxing day.

Sweets wise, I did make those chocolate nutty balls and had a few of those when everyone else was eating chocolate. The only chocolate I ate was a little of a present on Boxing day and it was so rich that I really struggled to eat it and could not eat much. My desire for chocolate has completely dropped off and that is something that I would always crave on any other diet.

The only other non paleo item I can think of was a sauage roll and I think I only had 1 each day. So, all in all quite a few bots here and there but no where near what I would usually eat & drink at this time! Weigh day this week will be Saturday so I shall see then what the damage really was!

Food wise I have eaten about 95% paleo this week and started tracking my carbs & protein as mentioned in a recent post. This week coming obviously is going to be different as I have two days at my partners house which I am simply going to consider as cheat days and not worry too much. For the rest of the week I’m sticking to foods I really enjoy to make it easier to transition back onto the diet. It would be great if I could actually lose weight in the Christmas week but I wont be too upset if I don’t.

I’ve done a little exercise – two of the workouts that I talked about in my 7 workouts post. I hope to do another 2 or three in the coming week between Christmas and New Year. All I’m trying to do at the moment is make exercise a habit and get my body used to moving on a regular basis! I’m not too fussed about duration or intensity yet.

My hunger, cravings and taste buds are definately changing. I used to eat at all sorts of weird times and always had to snack between meals but now I just seem to be eating regularly 3 times a day without needing to snack for the vast majority of the time. The only time I was hungry (other than right before a meal) was when I didn’t fancy my dinner one night and left half of it. I was really hungry that night and ended up having to eat something at 4am!

I’ve still not had any cravings for sugary stuff or any of my pre-paleo meals and I’m still finding this strange! This morning I was craving fresh veggies of all things! My gut instinct is that this kind of approach is good for me and to keep at it! I hope that I will not indulge too much over the next few days! Happy Christmas everyone :-)

Anyway, this blog follows what he calls Paleo+ which adds in dairy and some ‘safe’ starches. I didn’t take much notice of this until I came across a recipe that called for rice! In the post he referred to something called the Perfect Health Diet which is similar to Paleo but much less restrictive and allows for certain starches deemed safe including white potatoes & rice. Very interesting. I wanted to find some more information on this diet and I couldn’t find much but I did come across an interesting post by Chris Kresser that discusses these variations and suggests thinking of Paleo as a template allowing for individual variation. This makes good sense to me.

The inclusion of rice would massively open up the food possibilities as if you read further down the page in the link above you’ll see that it includes not only rice itself but products made with rice such as rice noodles, crackers etc. I’ve seen use rice flour used in pastas and bread recipes so that would really open up the spectrum.

However this is not something I would want to try now. Right now I have a lot of fat to lose and I want to concentrate on keeping my carbs low to facilitate that fat loss. Adding extra starch will only make it more difficult to do. Also, by not having pasta, rice, bread etc it forces me to get creative with vegetables and this has been a goal for years – I’d really love to actually enjoy all vegetables. It would make cooking so much easier! I see so many recipes that look delicious but I know I just dont like half the veggies in them which I find really limiting.

However, if I get to a point where I have dropped most of my fat and I’m eating more vegetables then it would be interesting to experiment with bringing some of these additional foods in and see how I fare on them.

Alas I still need to ditch the dried peas but it is another vegetable (legume, whatever!) to my limited arsenal! And hey, they’re green!

• Grains – avoiding completely. All bread, pasta, rice, noodles, anything made with flours from these grains. Corn unfortunately falls into the grain category
• Legumes – avoiding completely. This includes peas and peanuts both of which are legumes. This makes me sad – I always thought of beans as being the healthy alternative to ‘bad’ foods like bread
• Sugar – I’m completely avoiding refined sugars but occasionally having small amount of manuka active honey or agave syrup in certain recipes
• Dairy – Avoiding in general with the exception of organic butter. I will however occasionally have some as a treat on some recipes
• Artificial Sweetners – avoiding completely. No diet coke, no squash (still weaning myself off this), no sweetners in tea etc
• Alcohol – avoiding completely
• Fruit – limiting to 1-2 portions a day for the most part due to the high fructose / carb content

Further Clarification on Dairy

Dairy is a neolithic food. It was not available to humans until the advent of agriculture. However the paleo community is quite split in regard to dairy. One camp will avoid it completely and others enjoy it in abundance. Dairy is high in protein in fat and is generally extremely low in carbs. Milk has some carbs but I don’t drink milk anyway so not an issue for me.

The reason for the split appears to be a couple of factors. Firstly there is great variation on the tolerance level to dairy in individuals. It is suggested that as many of 80% of the population is at least somewhat intolerant to dairy (and that does not necessarily mean lactose intolerant). The only way to know for sure is to completely eliminate it for a full 30 days and then to re-introduce it and test the results. I may try this experiment at some point in the future but right now I am still working towards doing everything else and dairy doesn’t seem to have any obvious effect on me.

The second factor is that for those people looking to build muscle, many have found that adding dairy in with other sources of protein & fat alongside heavy lifting produces better results than just meat / fish / eggs alone.

Carb Levels

A pure Paleo diet does not restrict carbohydrates. I could eat a massive bowl of mashed potato followed by 3 bananas and that’s ‘paleo’ but it is not going to help me with my secondary goal of losing body fat. It’s suggested that the leaner and more sensitive you are to insulin, the more carbohydrates you can get away with but if you are overweight (particularly more than 30lbs – I’m just about right on the line there) then you are most likely insulin resistant and a lower carbohydrate diet will be recommended to dump the extra fat.

I found a really cool article on Mark’s Daily Apple that explained just how many carbs should be eaten depending on your body type and your goals. 50-100 grams a day is recommended for effortless weight loss. Note that calories is not mentioned here. Mark recommends simply eating when you are hungry and eating until you are full and focusing on the quality of what you eat rather than the calories. Last week I mentioned that I was going to track the carbs and protein content of what I was eating and I could clearly see just how quickly carbs in potatoes & fruit can add up. This week I have naturally cut back (without feeling deprived) and most days I seem to be sitting it around 80g of carbs which is where I want to be. I’ll check the results on my weigh in and possibly tweak from there.

Protein

I actually only added the protein tracking today with the exception of breakfast. Many people have a protein deficient breakfast of toast, cereal, oatmeal, pancakes etc and these style of breakfast often have no protein at all. Over the last few days I have been experimenting with having a high protein breakfast – over 40g in that one meal. An example is 2 sausages, 2 rashers of bacon, 2 eggs and a few tomatoes – that works out at a whopping 47g of protein and only 5g carbs. This keeps me full for at least 4 hours and I just don’t need to snack all day.

One thing worth mentioning is Whey Protein. Whey is dairy so it’s not Paleo but it’s so widely used in the body building community that I started to use it fairly consistently in a morning smoothie. But this was not working too well. I was often hungry within a couple of hours and then snacking throughout the day. Why? I was getting almost 30g of protein in a single smoothie so why was it not working? Two reasons as I have now discovered – firstly any liquid food is problematic in two ways. The more processed a food is (liquid being the ultimate in processing) the more of an insulin load that it has so liquid food will spike insulin. Secondly, when you chew your food it sends messages to the brain that you are eating so you naturally begin to feel full. Drinking does not have this effect so liquid foods don’t fill you up as much as solid whole food. But to add to that problem, apparently whey protein in general also causes an insulin spike. So, I have nixed the smoothies!

The recommended intake of protein is roughly 1g of protein per day per 1lb of lean body mass. Many people do not know their actual body mass so people often just state to use lbs of body weight. However I do know mine and it’s just under 100. I went back over the last few days food log and tracked what I had eaten and strangely enough it has come out at almost exactly 100g of protein a day so it seems like I’m on track there.

Paleo Foods To Consume in Moderation

Nuts and fruit are both Paleo and many people get a reasonable amount of their dietary fat from nuts but this can easily go a little too far. For example I have now found a ton of rather good looking recipes for cookies, cakes and all sorts of desserts! These are mainly made with nut flours (such as coconut flour), nut butters, dried fruits, cocoa powder etc. Whilst all of these ingredients are Paleo, when smooshed together and made into these kinds of foods it packs an absolute ton of calories into a small amount of food. Not only that but fruit has a high level of fructose (which raises insulin) and excess nuts can cause gut irritation in some people.

So, should these foods be eaten? The conclusion I have come to on this is that for someone who needs to lose fat then these foods should be avoided. Once the fat is gone they could be enjoyed in moderation as a treat. I don’t consider them a cheat because they are paleo. Saying that, I intend to make some sickly sweet cocoa-nut balls in a couple of days time! Why? Because it’s Christmas and if I have to choose between Fererro Rocher (laden with refined sugar and wheat flour) or these high calorie but paleo treats, I’m going to take the Paleo option! I figure it’s the lesser of two evils! If I had willpower of iron (mine if more like cotton wool), I’d just resist entirely. Maybe next year!

So that’s a treat, what about a cheat? There are times, mainly social occasions, where I am going to have to choose between my diet and my friends and family. I could not imagine going to a restaurant and paying good money for just a bit of steak & salad that I could easily eat at home. On these occasions I will blatantly cheat and simply eat what I want and then I’m done. In general I would rather cheat when eating out so that once the meal is done there is no further temptation though if I was to really feel the need to cheat then I might cook something at home. So far though, in around 3 weeks I’ve not had any cravings and have not felt the need to cheat so that’s all good!

So What AM I Eating?

Meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, a little fruit mainly. One of my issues with a restrictive diet like this is that I get bored easily and enjoy variety. Not everybody is like me and men especially can often eat the same thing day in, day out and be quite happy. That would drive me insane! So at the moment I am spending lots of time (too much probably) reading blogs and recipe books trying to come up with more and more varieties of meals to eat.

Ebooks

• A Paleo Diet for the 21st Century: by Douglas Robb
• Everyday Paleo: by Sarah Frogosso
• MDA Reader Created Cookbooks: recipes submitted to Mark’s Daily Apple and made into ebooks
• Paleo Food Cookbook: this is an online recipe book rather than a download
• Paleo Made Simple: by Gerilyn Burnett
• Primal Blueprint Fitness: by Mark Sisson, author of The Primal Bleprint which I highly recommend

Paleo Food Porn

• Chow Stalker: takes the best Paleo recipes from around the ‘net, presents them with gorgeous pictures, great stuff!
• Dessert Stalker: sister site for the above site but just for desserts!

‘Big’ Blogs

• Mark’s Daily Apple: by Mark Sisson, author of The Primal Blueprint. Years of fabulous posts plus an extremely active forum
• The Paleo Solution: by Robb Wolf, author of The Paleo Solution. Lots of very scientific info and has a forum also

Other Blogs

• Civilized Caveman Cooking Creations
• Everyday Paleo
• Fast Paleo
• Living in the Ice Age
• Living Paleo
• Paleo Plan
• The Primal Palate

Podcasts

• The Paleo Solution: by Robb Wolf
• Latest in Paleo: by Angelo Copolla
• Everyday Paleo: by Sarah Frogosso

Armed with this lot, you should have all your Paleo questions answered and never be short of a recipe! If you know of a good resource that you’d like added please list it in the comments and I’ll keep this post updated.

To summarise the Paleo-style exercise guidelines as briefly as possible, it advocates being active in general, doing a wide variety of activities including lifting heavy things and doing the occasional all-out ‘sprints’. I’m not a fan of running so I was pleased to read that sprints doesn’t have to mean actual sprinting – it can be any activity that significantly increases the heart rate for a brief period of time. What is NOT recommended is traditional steady-state cardio – spending an hour on a cross trainer at the same pace for example.

Now I am really terrible at sticking to things and if something is too regimented I give up really easily. I also get bored very easily so I have decided to do something completely different to anything I have tried before – 7 really different workouts of different types, intensities and lengths! Note, just because their happens to be 7 doesn’t mean I intend on doing them every day. If I work up to that great but to begin with I’ll just pick one and go with it. The next time I feel like doing one I’ll grab the next one and so on.

Workout 1: Pushups

Pushups are a great exercise for the upper body and this is an area in which women in particular seem to lack. Just for fun, I found a cool website that lays out a 6-week training plan that is designed to get you to a point where you can do 100 consecutive pushups. That sounds like an awesome goal so I’m going to follow it. For this workout this is all I will do so it will be a nice, simple, short workout to get me started.

Workout 2: Walking

I’d like to actually move and walking is a great place to start. Now that I have a house right in the country I have a nice long lane right outside my door that I can walk up and down without fear of many onlookers other than the odd tractor driver and pheasant! All I’m going to do here is a kind of interval walking as suggested by Robb Wolf in the Paleo Solution. Walk slowly at first to warm up then alternate a slow pace and fast pace for around a minute each. I can vary the intervals, the pace, the overall duration to make progress and mix things up a bit. This is one I could start real easy and work up to being a longer duration workout. Maybe one day I might even jog a bit but for now, just walking.

Workout 3: Standard Weight Training

I’ve been a fan of weight training since my early teens. At home I have a mini gym with a bench, long bar, dumbbells and several weight discs. I can easily get a full body strength training workout from my equipment. The two workouts I have done thus far have comprised 3 large areas – legs, chest and back and for those I’ve done Kettlebell Swings, Bench Presses and Bent Over Barbell Rows. I’m going to move the swings to it’s own workout and swap it for a Sumo Deadlift. I may add in other exercises later if I feel like it.

I do 3 sets of 12 reps at the moment and once I have done a few weeks I’ll try upping the weight some more and lowering the reps. This workout tends to take me about 20-30 minutes depending on how much rest I have between sets and I find it extremely intense as I do push myself quite hard.

Workout 4:  Core Training

After weight training I’ll certainly want to give my main muscle groups a good rest so this is a good time to do some core training. I’ve always had a weak lower back so I think this would be great for my overall health. Plus, you really need a strong core for snowboarding as you’re using so many stabiliser muscles. I’ll begin with a beginner core workout and go from there. I also have a stability ball that I can use for lots of core work. Endless options here.

Workout 5: Kettlebell Swings

The kettlebell swing is just bloody marvellous! It works out the entire body and it gets your heart pumping so it improves cardiovascular fitness as well. Honestly, google it! When I did these a couple of weeks ago I was horrified at how unfit I was! I have only very light kettlebells (2, 3 & 4kg lol!) and ideally they shold be done using MUCH heavier weights but hey, I could only do something like 20-40 reps of each so I still have a long way to go.

I’ll take the lightest weight, do as many reps as I can, rest then pick the next highest and go again. I’m going to purchase a new kettlebell each week or two as I feel I’m progressing to get heavier and heavier. This workout is short but intense but as I add more bells the workout could get longer but if it starts to get too long I’ll just knock off some of the lighter ones from the start of the workout. This is a great workout for really measuring your progress. I’d love to work up to doing 100+ reps of a decent weight.

Workout 6: Bodyweight Interval Training

For this workout I’ll pick a handful of exercises I can do with just bodyweight such as squats, pushups, lunges, stepups, plank and do each one for a set amount of time, rest and then move to the next for one circuit. Initially I’ll probably start with just 1 or 2 circuits and then I can increase the exercise time, lower the rest time or increase the number of circuits much like the walking workout. If these eventually get too easy I can add weights easily enough.

Workout 7: Karate Practice

For this workout I’m just going to do any kind of karate practice that I feel like doing. Karate is extremely varied and I can really tailor this to how I feel and how much energy I have. This workout will also just get me back into the swing of thigs with karate and my aim here is to re-learn the stuff I have forgotten, and get myself back to the level where I feel I should be at for my grade (brown belt) and then I can join a club again without feeling like an idiot.

Too Ambitious?

That may seem like a lot but it really isn’t – it’s just varied. The pushups and kettlebell workouts will probably only take about 10 minutes, the weight training I am already used to, the walking and interval training can be done for as little or as long as I have the energy for and the karate can also be done on an ‘easy’ setting if I need to. The real purpose here is to make exercise a habit and to make it fun. Doing all these different things feels a lot more fun to me than just doing boring cardio (at a gym that I don’t have time for) every day. And I can do all of this at home which gives me a much better chance of actually sticking to it! I’ll keep you posted on my progress :-)

Day 1 Starts Today

Well it’s easy to write a post about what I intend to do but I thought it best to actually take some action and do day 1 so today I started with the 100 pushups challenge. I did the initial test yesterday and I managed a pitiful 7! I used to be able to do almost 20 hrmph! Well that’s why I’m doing the challenge! This puts me in column B for the weekly plans. Today I completed the week 1, day 1 workout.

Note that the plan is 3 workouts a week and as I’m doing all this other stuff I wont be doing that many so I’ll just keep track of what week / day I’m on and pick it up from there each time. I may do the extra one here and there on days where I’m not working out my upper body such as on walking or core training days if I feel particularly up to it.

The only sugar I have had in the last two weeks has been the odd small amount in something I am using up such as ketchup. I have had some natural sugar in the form of agave syrup or honey but only in tiny amounts. The day before yesterday I made a smoothie for breakfast – Banana Choc Chip. The chocolate is raw chocolate which is chocolate in it’s purest form without any processing or anything added – it is incredibly bitter and very different to the kind of sugary chocolate we’re used to. I put a pinch of those in with a banana in my smoothie and figured it would need some sweetening so added a small squirt of syrup. When I tasted it I was shocked at how sweet it tasted. I had the same thing yesterday morning minus the sweetner and it tasted so much better!

I am also cutting out artificial sweetners. Some of them (such as aspartame) have been linked with cancer and many other nasty things. I’ve known this for years but I’ve also had a pretty severe diet coke habit for several years. I typically go through 4-6 litres a week. I’ve not had a sip of diet coke for over two weeks. I have also cut right down on squash with the aim of removing it completely and replacing with pure fruit concentrate as flavouring. I have cut back so far that when Celia made me a drink of squash a couple of days ago, again, it was way too sweet for me.

Similarly last night I ate some melon and again it taked like never before – so sweet! This morning I decided to ditch the smoothie and opt for a cooked breakfast with the aim of getting in more protein. I had sausage & bacon and the tastes were quite extreme. The bacon tasted incredibly salty and the sausages tasted pretty horrible! Again I’m using up stocks and these are the Tesco’s Light Choices I always used to eat. Low calorie, filled with tons of crap like rusk. Now I eat some 97% meat sausages but found in this pack in the freezer and thought I’d finish them.

My conclusion to all this is that even though I didn’t eat a huge amount of sugar and sweet stuff compared to some people, I still ate a lot and I was addicted to it. I would always get sweet cravings in the afternoons and evenings in particular and foods that were naturally sweet such as fruit simply did not taste sweet to me. Now it’s as though I had some kind of filter on my taste buds which has now been lifted and I can actually taste what food really tastes like! Quite a novel feeling!

I remember setting myself a goal to beat my sugar addiction a few years ago. I think I just achieved it!

Conflicting Advice

I’m still reading through various bits of information and getting conflicting information. Here’s an example: Source #1 states that we must get a good dose of protein every 3-4 hours or our bodies will begin to break down muscle tissue. Source #2 states that if we eat sufficient protein at breastfast (50g+) that we need not each much at all for the rest of the day and can easily go many hours without any good and should not have any snacks between meals.

Now one thing I have figured is that you can hunt around online and find an opinion for absolutely everything. Any theory you could possibly want will be backed up somewhere. Just about anything can work for one person and not for another. So I have now decided that when reading anything, to read into results simply as what occurred with that person, and not to assume that I shall replicate the results.

I will conduct my own experiments and see what results I get – I will see what works for me and what doesn’t.

What’s Right For Me?

Going back to the weight gain, I’m not quite panicking as one thing I do think is a possibility is that there could be stuff going on inside my body that I cannot see on the outside that may or may not manifest itself on the scale for some time. I feel very bloated this morning and I often do but I know that is not a natural state of affairs. That suggests something is not right with my gut. So what next?

My gut feeling tells me that this Paleo thing is the way to go for me. Filling up on starchy carbs usually feels a bit wrong and I can’t escape the fact that I am usually hungry all the time. I have not been hungry between meals (unless I had something that was just too small) since this switch to Paleo and I still have not had any cravings. Celia was again muching on chocolate in front of me yesterday and I was not tempted. We went shopping and the shops were so full of sugar-laden carb crap and all I could see on the shelves was carb-sugar, carb-sugar, carb-sugar! I’m actually dreading Christmas somewhat because I know I will be ‘expected’ to eat chocolate, drink Baileys (which I usually love but right now all I can think of is how much sugar is in it) and generally gorge on crap. And a week later it will be the same at New Year.

Better Tracking

I think I may be eating too much in general, well too many calories at least and possibly still eating too many carbs. Even though Paleo cuts out all those starchy carbs such as bread, pasta, rice etc which are usual staples it doesn’t mean that it’s natually low carb. You can still get a lot of carbs from fruit, sweetners like honey and from starchy vegetables such as sweet potato. Before I really try to change anything I think I need to have a clearer baseline of where I am now. Next week, not only am I going to keep track of what I eat but I’m going to track the calories and macronutrient content (carbs, fat & protein) of each meal so I can determine exactly what I’m eating.

On the subject of calories, why is it that some people can eat seemingly anything and never put on weight and others really have to watch the calories? Metabolic rate is one reason – if you have a sluggish metabolism then you’ll burn less calories and mine probably is very sluggish as most of my waking life is spent on my ass in front of a computer. I’m starting to do a little exercise now but not nearly enough. The goal would be daily exercise. I’d like to start karate again and get to a point where I’m doing karate 2-3 times a week and weight training 2-3 times a week and some core work and maybe even some yoga now and then just to keep everything working functionally.

Curbing Hunger

But I’m not there yet so right now I have to work with what I have and that is food. There is one small change I’m going to make next week – make my hunger dictate my food. I’ll make breakfast as soon as I get up and then I will eat lunch when I am genuinely hungry. Before, if I got hungry early then I’d feel it wasn’t time for breakfast so I would snack to try and keep myself going longer. Instead, I’ll just eat when I’m hungry and if I am hungry too early (within 4 hours for instance) then I will adjust my meals so that they contain more protein.

Recall I said one of the sources of advice was to eat a big breakfast with a lot of protein. The reason for this is that protein (and fat) keep you feeling full and for a long time after the meal. Carbs on the other hand do not – a meal thats high in carbs will cause a spike in insulin which then causes a subsequent ‘carb crash’ which leaves you with hunger and cravings for more carbs. Try this – one morning have a breakfast of almost all carbs such as toast, cereal etc and another morning have a breakfast of almost all protein & fat such as eggs. sausage & bacon. Make them about the same in calories and see how long these meals keep you going.

I figure if I can get adequate protein in each meal to curb hunger then I will eat just my 3 meals a day without snacks in between which should hopefully be less calories overall (though I also think I need to cut carbs more but thats for another week). As I suspect my metabolism is probably low I think that calories matter for me. In a few months if I’m exercising almost daily and eating better then my metabolism might be performing better and calories may not matter so much – just a theory.

Conclusion

So, 6 days of clean eating left until Christmas. I aim to eat more protein, snack less and track all my calories and stats properly.

Paleo Origins

There seems to be quite a lot of debate over what is Paleo and what isn’t. Some people seem rather obsessed with the origins of Paleo which is the concept of what foods were available to Paleolithic man. The original concept of the Paleo diet is that as a species our bodies have not yet evolved to be able to properly digest the foods that agriculture has brought in the last 10,000 years. This may seem like a long time but in evolutionary terms it is a mere speck of time.

Before the agricultural revolution people ate what they could find – animals, eggs, vegetables, nuts, berries and it remained this way for millions of years and so the theory goes that our bodies are efficient at processing these kinds of foods. Agriculture and farming brought us grains and dairy and we’ve not yet fully evolved to eating these. The grains have lots of nasty effects on our bodies (the science is far too confusing for me to understand but I got the general gist of grains = bad!) and most people are at least somewhat lactose intolerant which is where the dairy problems arise.

But some people get caught up in what was available to the average Joe Caveman and forget about the nutritional properties of the food and the effect it has on the body. I don’t really care what some Caveman ate two million years ago, I care about what I eat right now and what effect it has on my body in my own life.

Individuality

But what I am seeing is a lot of variation. Some people don’t have any dairy, some only have raw dairy from sources of unpasterized milk, others have dairy in abundance. Then there’s legumes… these are not grains but apparently they have similar properties and can have similar ill effects on the body but other sources state that adequate soaking and cooking can eradicate these harmful effects so which is it? The debates continue with nuts, fruits, natural sweetners like honey.

Fruits have obviously been around forever and are a natural food so they are certainly ‘Paleo’, but some people still limit them as they are high in fructose which if eaten in excess can cause insulin levels to rise which is what causes the body to store fat. Nuts are another Paleo food and I’ve found some interesting uses for them – people are making forms of flour from nuts to use in baking. Some people say this has helped them adopt the Paleo way of eating as a way of life and others stay away from such foods saying that Paleolithic man would not have ground up almonds into cupcakes and pizza bases! Yet others say they get awful gut aches if they eat too many nuts.

The list goes on… Phew! One thing that IS clear from all this is that everyone is different. Some people obviously get on better with some foods than others. If I was to avoid everything that caused anybody a problem I think I would be eating nothing but meat, fish, eggs, veggies and limited fruit. To be honest that is probably the ‘pure’ Paleo way!

80/20 ? Staying the Course?

From what I understand, eating in a Paleo way has health benefits for our whole lives – it can reduce the risk (or even reverse in some cases I have read about) of diabetes, celiac disease, auto-immunity, cancer, osteoperosis and many other ailments. It can also lead to fat loss but it is not designed as a short term fat loss plan to then be abandoned after some goal weight has been achieved. I am learning a little about the root cause of obesity and it would seem that over time, years of high carb diets can actually cause our hormones to get out of whack and this messes up the signals that the brain receives from food. The brain cannot correctly figure out that it has ample fat reserves to use as fuel and continues to burn sugar; the brain doesn’t know when we are full and this leads to constant feelings of hunger, cravings and the desire for snacks.

For someone like me who has eaten in this high carb way for literally 40 years, from what I understand, my homones in my body could be so out of balance that it could take considerable time to get them back into balance and functioning again. So, if I am understanding all this stuff correctly, I may need to be eating this way for several weeks or even months before noticing any real difference and of course if I were to lose the weight I wanted and then go back to my previous high carb diet, those problems would return.

So this needs to be a lifestyle change and I have to admit that is scary! So far, oddly, I’ve not had any cravings or missed any particular foods. I do get the desire to snack in the evenings in particular but I’m not yet craving those big pasta dishes, lemon risotto, and all the other high carb stuff I used to eat but I’m waiting for it! One thing I am struggling with is variety – I like to have a lot of variety in my foods. I don’t like having the same thing almost every day. I’m spending lots of time pouring over recipe books to find new ideas but not liking too many vegetables makes that tricky and I am wondering how I am going to stay the course. Am I going to get bored silly and just want my old food purely for variety? Can I really make this a way of life?

Only time will tell. Christmas is looming too and from my past experience something of this kind has knocked me off the wagon. I indulge for a day or two as a treat and then struggle to get back into the proper habits and within a few more days the entire diet is down the drain. I really don’t want that to happen this time as I have invested time and money (in weird foods like coconut oil!) in this thing!

My gut feeling is that in order to do this long term there has to be some respite in tough times. Mark from the Primal Blueprint states right at the beginning of the book that in this modern day and lifestyle, achieving 100% compliance is almost impossible if you want to socialise with other humans! He advises to aim for 100%, and probably hit about 80% and be happy with that. Many people seem to have one or two ‘cheat’ meals a week. I haven’t planned any specific cheat meals as such yet but I know I am still not following the diet wholly yet. I hate to throw food out (especially if it’s nice food!) so I am using stuff up – like those wasabi peas and nuts that I think I mentioned in a previous post.

My hope is that I can adopt this way of eating as the ‘norm’ when I’m at home, on my own and in control of my food and that I can relax a little if eating with other people whilst still gaining the benefits of following it for the vast majority of my eating. We shall see!

Wednesday I ate a fish pie that I’d cooked some time before and put in the freezer. This had white potato, milk, and some pretty awful white sauce granules so I’d definitely call that one a cheat meal! Though following on from what I was saying in my last post – that’s not a favourite meal of mine so I would not want to compromise my health or fat loss for it so that is one that I would convert to Paleo.

Towards the weekend I got much better and I think Sunday was my first pure paleo day in terms of the protein & carbs but I did have a little cheese!

Results!

I’m going to jump straight to the results before the other stuff. It’s Monday morning today so six days after attempting the switch, and I’ve just done weights and measurements and I must say, I’m pretty astounded:

Weight: -3.8lbs
Waist: -1.5 inches
Hips: -0.75 inches

Now I must add that I have NEVER had these kinds of results before! I have lost significant amounts of weight (around 2 stones) on two separate occasions in my past – once with Slimming World and the second time doing ordinary Calorie counting with a lot of exercise. Both times I lost on average less than 1lb per week and tended to fluctuate a lot.

Now a few things could cause this sudden loss. It could be water weight though that’s kind of unlikely because before switching to Paleo I had been doing Weight Watchers for about 6 weeks so I was already dieting. However last week was also ‘time of the month’ and that can do all sorts of funky things with water retention and bloating!

Still, it’s still put a massive smile on my face and spurred me on!

Tiredness & Headaches

Wednesday, & Thursday I was massively tired and had a bad headache most of the time. However the cause of this could be several things. I had decided to use an alarm to get up earlier from Tuesday onwards and I never usually use one and it was also that time of the month! If you make a sudden switch from a high carb diet to something much lower in carbs and all those artificial toxins then your body can go through a detox which can cause side effects such as tiredness, headaches, flu-like symptoms etc but I honestly doubt that was the case with me because I have still had some carbs every day. Honestly I don’t know whether my diet has changed enough in just those few days to cause that – I suspect I was just tired because I wasn’t sleeping to well and I often get a headache when I’m tired because I spend hours on a computer every day. By the weekend however, that was all gone.

Cravings

None. Seriously! Very odd for me! Usually the moment I do anything funky with my diet I immediately crave chocolate even though I rarely eat it normally. On Monday I was having a bit of an emotional meltdown and I had some chocolate then and left it on my desk. It was that day that I decided to do this diet properly and started Tuesday but I left the chocolate there. I looked at it a few times over the next few days and felt nothing lol! I put it back in the cupboard yesterday. The only reason I didn’t throw it out is beause it was a present from Celia – she’d brought it back from New York for me :-)

I’ve honestly not had any cravings for anything which is truly odd. Not chocolate, not pasta, not sweeties, nothing. I’ve just eaten my food, liked it and that was that! I have been a little hungry and then I have snacked on some stuff I had prepared – some boiled eggs, some nuts (and naughty wasabi peas!) and I also bought some of those Nakd bars which are pure raw fruit & nuts – purely Paleo and also allowed in moderation on Craigs diet. I’ve not written everything down but I am pretty sure that is all I have snacked on so this is looking good so far!

At the weekend Celia was at mine for quite a lot of it and she was eating biscuits (yummy ones) and chocolate orange and I didn’t even twinge. I had decided to have a cheat meal on the Sunday night of burgers with a bread bun because I hadn’t managed to find a substantial enough looking side to go with it instead of the bun. However, it got to Sunday night, I’d had only veg carbs all day and I was feeling good and I just didn’t want that bun. So I ditched it and had the burgers on the lettuce leaves and a side of coleslaw. People who know me and know how I eat will be wondering who I am and what I did with Caroline!

Sleep

I have been sleeping really badly all week – taking a long time to get to sleep and waking up a lot. Now the getting to sleep has been because my brain would not stop. Once I made the decision to do this I made an all out effort to find everything I could on the subject. I am now armed with several ebooks including some great recipe books and a ton of blogs (I’ll put links in a later post) and I have been reading them and investigating recipes every evening all week so I really have this stuff on the brain. This means that I have been going to bed thinking of food and that has kept me awake.

However, I have also been waking up a lot and I’m not sure what the cause of that is. To be fair I am usually a pretty bad sleeper anyway – I am a very light sleeper and I sleep best on my own in complete darkness and complete silence. These conditions are almost impossible to create however so I don’t sleep well most of the time. But saying that I had actually been sleeping better over the last couple of weeks until I started this diet. A couple of days during the week it’s taken me around an hour to get to sleep and I’ve been sleeping in excess of 8 (broken) hours but I’m going to bed early to give myself that sleep because I think I need it. The last couple of nights have been better and Celia has been here and I always sleep worse when she’s here (cos she elbows me in the head when she’s asleep and wakes me up!)

Overall

I have felt as if I have gone through some kind of detox which seems bizarre to me as I am still not following it 100%. With the results I have got from the first week and from talking some more to my neice (who came 3rd out of 120 people in her body transformation contest!) I have decided to go as close to pure paleo as possible and ditch the starchy carbs. So I won’t be including oats, brown rice, legumes etc. At this stage I’m still going to include some dairy – I don’t eat much anyway and I haven’t read up on why that’s supposedly bad plus good quality dairy can be a source of extra protein so that’s staying for now.

My biggest challenge right now is figuring out what on earth to eat alongside the main protein part of each meal. Meat & what? Obviously the answer is vegetables but I only like a select few veggies and so the common broccolli and carrots side does not work for me! I am spending a lot of time pouring through recipe books trying to come up with ideas!

Exercise wise, I never did that workout on Saturday so in the end I did one single workout, and took a very short walk and that’s it. This week, I’ll do more strength training  aiming for two sessions and I’m still not sure on the cardio. I’d rather just stay at home so I’m a bit limited on my options.

Having now read a little more about the Paleo diet (I still have a lot to read so I’m no expert yet) it appears very strict – no grains (even whole grains, brown rice, pure oats), no legumes of any kind including peas, and no dairy of any kind. The programme my neice followed, by a guy called Craig Maddocks allows for some of those starchy carbs such as brown rice, gluten free oats and legumes to be eaten at breakfast or after a workout. He also allows for some select dairy if its organic.

At the moment I am undecided about those foods. I am certainly cutting out the obviously crap food – sugar, anything made with sugar, white bread, pasta and so on. But I have been eating some brown rice and oats and I’ve had a little dairy. However one thing to note is that Craig’s nutrition plan is based on a total body transformation plan that includes a lot of intense exercise -both strength training and cardio and with that much exercise it makes sense to eat more carbs to re-fuel.

But I’m not there yet with the exercise. I did do my first strength training session on Tuesday and OMG did I feel it over the next few days! I’ll be doing another one today I hope but I am not doing any cardio yet so I’m really not doing very much exercise at all.

What’s My Goal?

Craig’s plan that my neice followed is designed for optimum fat loss and muscle growth. I do indeed want to lose quite a lot of fat (a little over 30 lbs) but really, my main reason for embarking on this diet (and I say diet in the sense of a style of eating as opposed to a short term calorie restriction) is for long term health. I hit 40 a few weeks ago and now more than ever I want to ensure that I stay healthy for the rest of my life. I like sports like Karate and Snowboarding but I’ve had a year off karate and I have only been Snowboarding once at an indoor centre since my 3 day trip to Scotland in March. I want to take up karate again and do another Snowboarding holiday but I know I am not physically fit enough for either right now.

Plus, I’m thinking longer term. My mother has arthritis, athsma, emphysema, a hiatus herna, she’s had a heart attack a few years ago and these days she can barely walk more than a few yards. Granted she’s 82 but that does not have to be the norm. People are designed to be strong and healthy until they die – breaking down and suffering in pain for the later years may be the common thing but it is not normal and it is not how we were designed. I’m not going to let that happen to me.

So far I have been lucky. I have got through 40 years reasonably healthily unlike several other people I know around my age or younger who have all sorts of health problems. So I feel very grateful for the health I have but I want to hang onto that, get a lot fitter and ensure I continue that way for the rest of it!

Health v Fat Loss

So I know what my goal is – my primary concern is overall health and my secondary concern is fat loss. So this brings up some interesting dilemmas. Take the concept of cheat meals for instance. If you are someome who has Celiac disease and that is your reason for going Paleo then any cheating puts your health in severe jeopardy. If you are doing it purely for fat loss then cheat meals will only affect the rate at which you lose fat and if you are willing to accept a slower pace then you may incorporate more cheat meals freely without concern.

But I am neither of those, I am somewhere in the middle. At first, before I starting reading about the long term detrimental effects of all these grains (especially in a highly processed form with lots of extra artificial rubbish thrown in) I was immediately concerned about the yummy stuff I was leaving behind – Nachos, Lasagna, New York Cheesecake, Wagamas Ginger Chicken Udon, all you can eat buffets at my favourite Chinese! I could go on… I cannot imagine life without those foods being in it. Plus, I have always loved food and I even collect Cookbooks and I love going through them and trying Nigella or Jamie’s latest recipe. I don’t want to give that up!

So I need to find some kind of compromise that fits in with both my health and fat loss goals. For example, I was thinking about Nachos the other day. The meat, salsa and guacamole are all Paleo. It’s only the actual chips and the dairy that are not. I’m not too concerned about dairy as if it’s good quality organic then I’m ok with it – i’s a good source of protein. The main issue is the tortilla chips. These days I use Doritos which I’m sure are evil! I actually found a couple of recipes online for a Paleo version of these using either almond or flaxseeds as an alternative to the cornflour that they’d usually be made from.

Now it would be interested to check the calories in both versions and I have a suspicion that the Paleo version could actually be higher than the Doritos! But I havest measured it yet so that’s just a guess. But assume I’m right – what do I do? I see three choices – 1) Stay true to both of my goals and abstain completely, 2) Compromise on the health goal and just have the Doritos, 3) Compromise on the fat loss goal and go with the Paleo version and bear in mind this version may taste like crap!

Option 1 is not an option for me right now. If I think I can never again have the foods that I love then I know I will not stick to this long term. It’s possible that could change in the future if I really enjoy this way of eating but I certainly won’t count on that. My track record with this sort of thing has been extremely poor! I usually last less than a month. For nachos I think I’d go with the last option and try the Paleo alternative. If they taste good then I can enjoy one of my favourite meals without cheating whilst losing fat a little slower which is ok.

But what about the things that cannot be substituted such as my favourite meals at certain restaurants? Those will have to remain a special treat but then they are anyway. I’ve been craving that Ginger Chicken Udon for months now and I need it in my life shortly! But one of the books I read talked about the 80/20 rule and if I am eating Paleo 80% of the time then my health is going to be a whole lot better.

In the next post I’ll talk about how I have felt on the first few days of trying to convert to Paleo.

The last few posts on this blog were from a very short lived diet – Slow Carb, made popular by Tim Ferris. I did not get on with the diet at all and quickly stopped doing it. My weight has been creeping up and so once again action is needed!

My Neice’s Amazing Transformation

My neice has recently completed a 12-week body transformation programme which was run by the owner of her local gym and her results have been amazing! She’s dropped several clothes sizes and lost in weight more than the whole weight of her 5 year old son! Quite incredible in just 12 weeks!

I’m really impressed by this, not just because of the level of her success but because it’s so real. It’s easy to find all sorts of amazing transformations on the internet but I can’t help but think “well that my work for that guy but he probably has a lot more willpower / ability / time / genetics / <other random excuse> than me”. This is different because it’s my own family and I know my neice has struggled with her weight for many years and has tried various fad diets in the past with only short-lived success but this programme seemed like a very healthy approach to both food & exercise so I’m convinced!

The Paleo Diet

I first asked my neice about this programme she was following quite a few weeks ago. When she told me about the things she was not eating, I immediately dismissed it as being far too strict for me to follow – no white carbs so no bread, pasta, potatoes etc as well as a ton of exercise – she was doing 6am workouts! However the results could not be ignored, she was really looking amazing after just a matter of weeks so I decided to do a little digging.

The guy who runs the programme only appears to do so out of his actual gym which is too far from me to use; he doesn’t appear to do any kind of online version of it. However, from reading through his blog posts and watching some YouTube videos of his transformation programmes I have managed to glean quite a lot of information and especially the fact that the nutrition aspect is based on the Paleo Diet.

The version that my neice is doing looks a little different. She emailed me over the food lists she was working from and it actually looks a little more relaxed that pure Paleo – her diet actually allowed for some starchy carbs such as brown rice, gluten free oats, sweet potatoes, legumes etc if eaten around workout times so it began to look doable. Plus, for me, the fact that I knew it was based on Paleo was the turning point as I’d already heard about Paleo and knew there was a ton on information online.

Within a couple of hours I’d found a bunch of blogs (two extremely popular ones that also had reader forums) and several downloadable ebooks containing hundreds of recipes.

Easing Myself Into the Diet

Once my neice had emailed me the food lists I started to follow the diet a little bit – just the odd meal here and there but it was tricky coming up ideas for what to eat. I love my food and for me, eating has to be pleasurable. Many people who are strict with their diets, men in particular, have a different attitude to food where they see it purely as fuel, and not something to be enjoyed. Many of these people eat basically the same thing every single day. This absolutely would not work for me! If a diet is going to work for me, I’m going to have to find a way to make it yummy!

Thankfully now armed with all these blogs and ebooks I am convinced that I can do that but there are still some issues that come to mind:

• It’s basically meat & veg, both of which are expensive!
• I don’t like many vegetables so I’m going to have to get creative to get enough veg in the diet
• Do I eat out on Paleo or cheat?
• What do I do if invited round others for dinner?
• What about Christmas which is around the corner

I’ll be talking more about how I deal with these issues in upcoming blos posts and of course I’ll post more about the diet & exercise program as I learn more about it myself.

I may post more stuff, or I may not post anything for another 6 months!

This of course is not unlike real life where we are often thrust into the real world at adulthood with no experience, no money and if you’re lucky, a beat-up old car! The aim in the game is always to advance in some way – to gain more experience so that you can reap the benefits of the increased strength and skills which in turn allows you to go out a conquer even greater challenges which of course result in increased rewards. So again, the life analogy is very similar. Most young people can’t gain many rewards in life (minimum wage) unless they start to gain some skills but to do that they need to gain experience (work).

All of this stuff is obvious, but I noticed another analogy today as I struggled with my seemingly never ending workload. I have a pretty standard routine when I start work in the morning – I’ll start by checking my email. There’ll be a bunch of admin stuff about my server as well as a handful of customer enquiries. Then I have a bunch of checks to make from the day before – checking log files, server status, submission status and so on. Finally when I’ve got all that crap out of the way I can get some real work done. But a lot of the time it feels like I’m spending more time dealing with crap than actually getting stuff done.

There’s a similar thing that happens in these computer games. The idea of gaining experience points to level up is at the corner stone and as such it is also usually used as a penalty when things don’t go to plan. If you die in the game you suffer ‘experience debt’. This means that as you go out and achieve things in the world you have to first pay off your debt before you can actually move forward and gain some new experience and this reminded me of my work today.

Checking emails and log files does not move me forward in my business. Doing new development, bringing in new websites, creating training materials, doing marketing and so on – this is the stuff that moves me forward. But each day it seems that a certain amount of this ‘debt’ is built up and I have to clear the debt first before I can actually move forward.

If I diligently work each and every day then it is not a problem because I can usually clear than debt in an hour or so depending on what has happened during the business day but I don’t work every day. I have a life, I have friends, loved ones, food to cook, shopping to do and telly to watch. As such, I work intermittently and some times I will have a few days break. If I don’t do any work at all during these breaks then what happens is that the debt builds up – more emails to respond to, more problems mounting up that need solving etc and so when I return to work I end up spending most of the day just dealing with this debt and not actually doing any activities that move me forward.

Is there a point to all this? Well unfortunately not because those emails and problems are still going to mount up each day regardless of whether or not I am on top of them but one thing I do know is that it is hugely unsatisfying to get to the end of a full day’s work and feel like I have achieved nothing. I used to wonder sometimes what on earth I had been doing all day to spend so long working without having anything to do show for it and least now I know the answer to that riddle – it’s all the debt building up.

If I figure out how to stop it building up in the first place then I may actually have a useful post to write but until then I guess I’ll at least make more of an effort to check my emails etc even on my days off. The joys of self employment :/

I weighed myself this morning just out of curiosity and I appear to have lost 2lbs already since Sunday! This is unheard of for me! Even when successfully dieting before (I have previously lost 2 stones in two different periods of my life), I have only lost an average of about 0.5lbs a week! Usually the pattern is I lose 1 here and there, put one back on here and there and overall it crawls along at about 2-3lbs a month. Of course it could just be water weight but I don’t tend to drop dramatically when starting diet’s like some people do so I doubt it! We’ll see as the week goes on…

One thing to note is that I am following the diet only, and not any of the exercise stuff from the 4 Hour Body book. I know I would be healthier and probably lose more if I did more exercise but I really want to test this diet and see if it works for me so I don’t want to introduce any other variables. It takes a lot of planning and I’ve spent quite a bit of time planning, shopping and cooking so far so I’m only going to do this if it works! I usually do karate a couple of times a week but this weekend (on my first cheat day!) I just happen to be on a karate course which will involve 8 hours training over the weekend so that is another reason I wanted to weigh myself during the week as that is a very high level of activity for me and could influence results.

The Slow-Carb Diet

Also since then, Tim Ferris launched his 4 Hour Body book which I have been looking forward to for some time. The fat loss method he recommends is ‘slow-carb’. He already talked about it at some length in a blog post from 2007 where he describes how he lost 20lbs of fat in 30 days on the slow carb diet. It’s quite similar to the popular low carb diets in that you remove sugar and ‘white’ products such as all bread, pasta, rice, grains, and potatoes from your diet but one major difference is the inclusion of all kinds of legumes (pulses) such as beans, chickpeas and lentils. Low carb dieters often suffer from low-energy, bad breath and other side effects but by including these legumes you avoid all of those as the carbs are still there – but they’re good carbs that don’t cause insulin spikes in the way that white carbs do.

Also, another feature of the diet, and the only reason I am even considering trying it is a cheat day once per week. Not one measly cheat meal – but an entire day to eat whatever I like. I’ve always found in the past that the minute I tell myself I can’t have something, I start to crave it so when dieting, I tend to crave chocolate, sweets, savoury snacks and all the things that I try to cut down on. However, with this diet it’s just postponed, and I can live with that! Well I hope so… today is the morning of day 1 so I have only just started!

I first decided to try the diet about 18 months ago after reading Tim’s post but I didn’t get any further than the planning stage. One of the reasons for that is that Tim mentions a handful of meals and then says to eat the same things every day. That just doesn’t work for me. I need variety. I don’t need it daily – I can eat the same meal every day for a few days, maybe a week, but I’d then need something different the following week and so on. I googled ‘slow carb’ and came up with nothing other than Tim’s post so I was really stuck on what to eat. However since the book has been released, a whole bunch of people are trying it and blogs and sites are starting to pop up over the Internet and people are posting their experiences and their recipes so now is a great time to try it.

Having a Pre-Breakfast Snack

I start my morning quite slowly. For years now I have been in the habit of making myself a cup of coffee and then reading a book for a while in bed before I get up properly. I’m a bit peckish when I wake up but I can’t face proper cooked food for a few hours so my habit over recent years has been to have a small ‘pre-breakfast snack’ as I call it while I’m reading my book in bed, and then have my proper breakfast much later in the morning – around 11-12, when some people would be having their lunch.

My usual snack was often a brioche roll with chocolate chips or a home made muffin of some kind. These are both out on the slow carb diet. I really don’t want to get up and cook at 8am or whatever so I had to find an alternative. Tim suggested a hard boiled egg. The thought of eating an egg first thing made my stomach churn at first… until I tried it. To make it more palatable I slice it up, season with a little salt, red pepper and asafoetida powder and this morning I also include a slice of salami for extra flavour. I put it in a little bowl and just nibble slowly over time whilst reading my book. What surprised me was how tasty it was with the seasoning and also how full it kept me. When I would have a bread-based snack which was around 95% of the time, I would be feeling ravenous within an hour or two but since swapping to the egg (I started trying this about a week or so ago in preparation for the real diet start today), I haven’t felt hungry for hours!

I can see myself getting bored of that though so I’m also going to try making myself some little bean fritters which I could cook up in a batch and keep in the fridge or freeze.

My Menu For Week 1

Breakfast – Cajun Chicken Frittata

A frittata is an egg-based dish that is basically a quiche without a crust. You cook it in a frying pan as you would an omelette but the main difference is that you fill your pan with the ingredients and add only enough egg to bind together, as opposed to adding a few sparse ingredients to eggs. Frittata’s are great because they are quick to cook and then once cool you can cut them into pieces and eat either hot or cold. They will keep for several days in the fridge and can also be frozen so its so easy to make one large one to last for several portions.

I can see the frittata being a breakfast staple but I don’t want to get bored so I came up with several recipes that varied the meat, beans, veg and seasoning in each so they were all suitably different so as not to taste the same. This week’s Cajun chicken was pre-cooked chicken (I get these from the supermarket – saves time and mess!) with lots of cajun seasoning, onion (onion goes into just about everything I cook), canned corn, and it was supposed to be black beans. I actually forgot to prepare the beans (oops) so instead decided to use canned and even managed to forget to put them in the frittata so in the end I just fried some up in a pan with a little of the cajun seasoning and had those along side the beanless-frittata! Canned and frozen beans are another thing that make life so much easier!

Lunch – Chicken & Avocado Salad

I’m so glad that avocado is allowed on this diet as I absolutely LOVE them! Tim says to go easy though so I’ve just bought some baby ones and will have just one with my salad. I’m using the same pre-cooked chicken as I had for the frittata, with a small avocado, a bunch of spinach leaves and green pesto. Note that I had to search around to find a supermarket pesto that did not have sugar in it! Supermarket sauces can be a nightmare – sugar seems to creep into everything! It’s easy to make your own pesto as it is just basil, pine nuts, parmesan and olive oil but it’s hassle and I only want a tiny amount. Note also that dairy is not allowed but I am including a small amount for flavour in some dishes.

Lunch – Spicy Lentil & Tomato Soup

I’m a fan of making my own soup – as long as I do it in a big enough batch. It doesn’t take too long and it’s a great way of getting extra veggies. I don’t like most vegetables and so I really struggle with a diet like this. I don’t want to be eating a ton of meat & eggs as I don’t think that would be wonderfully healthly. But if I blend vegetables into a soup I can get away with it so I’ve decided that I’m going to make one soup a week and have that with my lunch or dinner depending on which is lighter. This week, the lunch is light as there are no pulses so I’ll need to get those from the soup.

I have literally hundreds of soup recipes and there is so much variety that I think I could have a different soup every week for a year and never have the same one twice! This week I’ve started with a nice simple soup that I have cooked before – I just fry onions, carrots (one of the veggies I won’t eat unless blended into oblivion!) and garlic until softened, add a couple of cans of tinned tomatoes, top up with water and then add dried red lentils. The red ones don’t need pre-soaking and can just go in dry. I also like my food spicy so I added some chilli for extra kick. I made a bigger batch than I am used to and I didn’t modify the ingredients properly and the soup has turned out a little thinner than I would have liked. Next time I will increase the lentils to about 250g dry to make 6 large portions.

Dinner – Beef & Bean Stew

This is a recipe that I used to cook before but served with roast potatoes. I cooked this last week and froze it in batches but I wasn’t well prepared and made a few mistakes. I wanted to put some carrots in as I could mash those so I don’t taste them and I also wanted to put in some baby onions but I actually forgot to buy both of those! I also didn’t use enough beans. I put in two cans for 4 portions and that was with 1kg of beef but when I served it up the portion looked small. However, I’ve not eaten it yet so it might be perfectly adequate. Next time though, I will definitely try and pad out with more veggies.

Emergency Food & Snacks

If there is one thing almost guaranteed to make me fail on any kind of diet it’s hunger. When I lost 2 stones before, I did so by eating 4 proper meals every day. I am not someone who can survive on an apple and a milkshake all day and I don’t think that’s healthy anyway. I have my meals planned out but until I actually try them out, I won’t know if they will keep me full. I am most worried about dinner – is that stew going to satisfy me or am I going to be craving potatoes? I’ll find out tonight.

I figured that to reduce my chances of failure I should have emergency food and snacks available if I get hungry. First of all, I want storecupboard food – this is stuff I can just have in a cupboard for months until I need it, without going bad. Having veggies, meat sticks and hard boiled eggs in the fridge is fine but what when I don’t have those things in, or I am not at home? I’ve stocked up on some mini cans of tuna, packs of jerky, protein bars (these are technically not allowed so are for a real emergency!), and I’ve also found various snacks of dried beans and nuts. I often get the urge to snack in the evening if I am watching telly so I can still do so within the bounds of the diet but I am also aware that these could be ‘trigger’ foods and make me binge a bit so I’ll see how I go with those!

I’m planning to post on the progress of this diet fairly regularly. I’m really hoping that I can stick to it and it’ll work. Tim warned that for some women the results don’t show up for a few weeks so I’ll try and persist for at least a month even if it doesn’t look like it’s working at first. I took all my weights and measurements yesterday and entered them into the Bodyspace website which is free and creates nice pretty graphs for you. I’ve never lost more than 1lb a week on any diet and it’s usually been slower than that so I’m really hoping that this one will not only work but work faster than others have!

Simplify Your Life

I think I first heard this expression from the Zen Habits blog (a great read) but it has never really sunk in. One of my persistent bad habits has been to over-complicate and over-analyze everything to the point where I never get anything done. I first started to be able to break free of this bad habit with software development. I used to spend so much time researching, analyzing, designing and documenting that I never really got any development done! But then I discovered ‘agile’ development.

Basically the idea is to build the simplest thing that will work – and only ever build what you need right now. If I hadn’t adopted this philosophy over the last few years I could not possibly have got my IMAutomator web software out the door. I may have adopted the agile approach with my work but I am still guilty of over-analyzing when it comes to just about every other area of my life. As I approach 2011 and start to think about what I want to achieve I know damn well that if I don’t simplify my approach I’m simply not going to get anything done.

One Goal Or Many?

If you have one single goal and go after it with the whole of your being to the exclusion of everything else then you’ll undoubtedly reach it. However, that’s not usually ideal as human beings generally need a balance. We all know the stories of people who focus too much on one goal (be it financial, a sporting achievement, political position or whatever) at the expense of all else and they find their relationships or health failing and so on. I know I need a balance in my life but I can never seem to find the time to fit it all in because I’m trying to focus on so many things at once. So how to choose just the goals that really matter? Well first, you can simplify matters by working out what doesn’t even need to be a goal at all.

Find Your Baseline

There are 168 hours in a week but we don’t have that much time available to work on our goals because there are always some things that are part of our baseline and cannot be moved. These things include sleeping, eating, socializing with friends & family, exercising, television etc. Did you look at that list and say, “hang on <activity> is not essential!”? We all have a different baseline. For me for example, television is not included – I generally only watch a few select drama series – everything else bores the crap out of me and feels like utterly wasted time. Socialising on the other hand is essential – there are people in my life that are more important than anything else and spending time with them is a priority. I fit in work around those people and not the other way around.

I used to set goals around people – but now I don’t need to because I know that is an area that is so important that I’ll never neglect it so I can simply ignore that area when setting goals. It doesn’t mean that people aren’t important; on the contrary, they are so important that no goal will get in the way of people so I simply don’t need goals in that area. You only need to set goals in those areas where you need to push yourself to achieve them. I need to do this with exercise for example but I know people who could not imagine not exercising on a daily basis – but perhaps they need to remind themselves not to neglect their friends.

Selecting Only Essential Goals

My baseline includes people, fun & adventure. Over the last few years I have come to a couple of very important conclusions:

1. Life is short. Don’t waste it. Seriously!
2. People > everything else

I had great fun in 2010 – holidays, gigs, festivals, sports, and lots of social goodness. This is set to continue in 2011. I already have 3 holidays in the works and my calendar is starting to fill with lots of fun events. The goals I want to set are the things that I want to achieve around that stuff and there are two areas that crop up again and again – work and my physical health.

I want to get more IMAutomator releases done in 2011 and there are lots of physical goals I want to achieve – I want to drop body fat (and clothing sizes), get fitter, and improve my ability in sports such as karate and snowboarding. The problem is, if I think about what I really want in those areas, I don’t think I’d have time to achieve it all in a single year when I know I have to fit it in around my baseline. So I have to think about what is really essential.

I have to make progress in both areas. I want to get IMAutomator to Release 4 but I am still on Release 1 and have been for over 6 months so I know that 3 further releases in a year would only be possible if that was all I was focused on. But my health has been sliding over the last year. I have put on a lot of weight and neglected exercise to the point where my fitness is really suffering – I even feel like I am worse at karate than a year ago! So I know I need at least two goals, but how do I pick them?

Well I need to simplify. If I think back to software, the question to ask is “what is the simplest thing possible that would work?” I can ask a similar question when it comes to goals – “what are the simplest goals for 2011 that would make me happy?” Launching Release 4 of IMAutomator would be great, and so would achieving 20% bodyfat, and getting my karate black belt (actually I DON’T want that one – but that’s another post), but I know that I am unlikely to be able to find enough time to reach all of those goals.

The work goal is easy to simplify. Release 2 should be done within a matter of weeks so I should easily be able to reach Release 3. Sorted. My With my health based goals it’s easy to have lots of very specific goals related to weight, bodyfat percentage, fitness level, karate ability and so on but all of that is far too complicated. What is one goal that could contain all the others within it? Weight – it’s simple. I’d like to lose about 35lbs (not sure on the specifics as I’ve avoided the scales for a while!). If I focus heavily on exercise as a way to lose the weight then my level of fitness would automatically improve and if I use karate as my main cardio exercise then my karate ability will also have to improve. Multiple objectives reached with a single goal – exactly what I want!

So after all that waffle I have two simple goals for 2011:

1. Launch IMAutomator Release 3
2. Lose 35lbs of fat

Simplify The Achievement Of The Goals

Setting the goals is just the first step. My over-analytical tendencies also crop up during the execution. With my work, I’m okay as I’ve been doing the agile thing for a while now and that’s working but I need to apply that approach to fat loss. This is one of the worst possible subjects for information-overload syndrome. There is SO much information out there – a squillion diet plans, exercise routines, supplements and other tricks to choose from that its hugely overwhelming. In the past I have spent countless hours reading all this stuff, coming up with elaborate exercise plans and let’s not even start on food – I don’t even want to know how much time I have spent working on planning menus & recipes!

I must break free of all this if I actually want to achieve the goal. So what’s the simplest possible thing that would work? Be in a calorie deficit. That’s all there is to it. I know this and I also know how to do it as I’ve done it before. In 2006 I was heavily overweight and finally reached a tipping point. I changed my life and lost around 30 lbs though it took me about 18 months to do it. Still, it worked. I may be able to lose fat faster if I tried a low carb diet, or doing cardio in a fasted state, or if I took various supplements blah blah but all of that is time-consuming waffle. If I exercise daily and eat around around 1500 calories a day, I will almost certainly lose about 1lb a week which over a year would be 50lbs so I should easily be able to reach my 35lb goal.

So how do I stick to 1500 calories without spending hours planning every detail of my food? Easy – I go with what I know and go with what works for me:

• I can’t cook early, I like to grab a quick snack when I wake up and have breakfast later.
• I like a big dinner late in the evening, and I don’t care about late night carbs.
• I don’t want to cook every day – I like to cook one big batch and have that for a few days.
• I want convenience – I’d rather spend as little time in the kitchen as possible
• I also want satiation – snacks don’t work for me, I need real food and lots of it
• If I’m going to cook, I’ll use pre-prepared veggies etc for speed

So one immediate idea that popped in my head was ready meals. Yes, yes I know they can be awful – full of salt, ingredients that aren’t fresh, you don’t know the welfare level of the meat in them etc but they tick so many boxes. They don’t require time in the kitchen, they provide hot food so make me feel full, and I can check the nutritional labels so know exactly what I’m eating. They’re also cheaper than cooking from scratch. So I’m going to use these for lunches. I find breakfast and dinner quite easy, it’s usually lunches that are the problem.

Exercise is also simple – I’ll exercise most days (I won’t say every day as I know it won’t happen) and I’ll alternate between weight training and karate. I don’t need to worry about the details – I’ll use a weight training program I’ve used in the past and just do it. Actually doing it is far more important than the details. I can always tweak later.

What about the times when I can’t stick to this? All those holidays and social events usually revolve around food and make it hard to exercise. The simple solution is obvious – don’t worry about it! I used to try and come up with contingency plans – how I could eat healthily at a restaurant or take my own food if I was going somewhere and so on but all that was so much effort! If I lose 1lb a week and then put back on 0.5lb in a week due to the exceptions then I’m still moving in the right direction and that’s all that really matters. Again, I can tweak later… maybe!

Conclusion

It’s taken me a couple of hours to write this post and the irony is that the actual writing of it constitutes the very over-analyzing that I am criticising within the post! However, doing so has allowed me to come up with simple solutions to achieving my goals in 2011 so a couple of hours spent now should save me a huge number of hours over the coming year!

What is the Present Moment, Exactly?

The idea of the present moment is a very easy one to conceptualize intellectually but as Tolle explains in the book, having a mental concept of something is nothing more than a thought, and does not infer true understanding. That’s a really tricky one to gasp! How do we know when we understand something when in thinking that we understand it, we’re probably just thinking a mental construct?!

You’ve probably heard this saying before, or something along these lines anyway: “the past and future do not exist, there is only now”. It’s so easy to roll that one off the tongue and nod in agreement – it sounds like an obvious statement but what does it really mean?

Let’s look at the past first – what is it? A collection of memories? What about somebody who has impaired memory for some reason such as amnesia – do they still have a past? Does that last phrase ‘have a past’ even make any sense? Tolle explains that our ego is a false sense of self which is developed through identification with all kinds of forms and constructs. One of those is the idea of ‘me and my story’. Saying that we ‘have a past’, suggests that it is something that we own but upon examination, that makes so sense at all. Events cannot possibly belong to a person; you cannot own your past. The idea of your past is the idea in your mind of how various events in the past somehow happened to you and thus became part of your story.

When we think of past events in terms of how they affected us, we personalise them and that usually involves judgement – this was a good event, that person did something bad to me and so on. Now Tolle explains that nothing is good or bad, everything simply is and as humans we tend to label these things as good or bad when we apply them to our own personal story. Being able to let go of judement and simply see things neutrally would allow us to be free from a huge amount of suffering – imagine if you could instantly get rid of any negative feelings towards any of the events in your past.

However, most people (myself included) have difficulty with that but let’s set that aside for the moment. If the past has already happened and doesn’t really exist, then how can it possibly cause us any suffering anyway? Because when we think of the past we are doing so in the present moment. We are allowing the emotions triggered by thoughts of the past to become our current reality right now. If we focus purely on the ‘good’ parts of our past then this could actually be a positive thing – reminiscing about past enjoyable experiences can bring that joy back into the now. Of course it could also backfire and cause you to feel sadness because that moment is now ‘in the past’. Do you see how ridiculous this all sounds?

Events in the past are gone, and what remains is only our thoughts about them. But we are only ever able to experience those thoughts in the present moment. And of course exactly the same goes for the future but the difference with the future is that it is unknown so we could choose an infinite possibly of thoughts about that! Human nature for many people includes a large dose of worry – and worry can only be based on the future – something that might happen or not happen in the future, or how a current situation will affect the future in some way.

But once again, the future is nothing more than a thought and we can only ever experience that thought right now, in the present moment. The chances are that most of us spend around 90% of our present moments wrapped up in thoughts about the past or the future. If these thoughts are happy and joyful then that’s all good but if they are worrisome and negative then probably not so good.

Change your thoughts or drop them entirely

Changing how you feel about an event is known as ‘reframing’ and is a popular method of feeling better about seemingly negative situations or events but many people have a huge amount of difficulty with that – especially when that situation is seen as overwhelmingly negative. Something such as a loss of a job can sometimes be reframed as an opportunity to explore forgotten career aspirations for example but it might be more difficult to reframe something such as the loss of a relative.

So what do we do then? Drop the thought entirely – don’t think about it. Isn’t that just denial? Well no, not when you think of it in terms of the present moment. If you can ask yourself what you are doing at any particular moment, the chances are that for a large portion of the time you’re engaged in an activity that has no relevance to the situation which is causing you pain. You may be getting dressed, driving your car, cooking some food, reading a book, and so on. As human beings we have developed the remarkable ability to be able to engage in activity whilst our mind is elsewhere – often stuck on the negative topics.

What Tolle is suggesting (if my interpretation is correct), is that to be fully Present, allow yourself to do whatever you are doing with your whole being. If you’re making a cup of coffee, being present in that moment means to fully experience the making of the coffee – the look of the steam rising from the liquid, the aroma of the coffee, the sound of the spoon jangling against the cup. Use your senses to fully experience the moment and allow your mind and all its chatter, to rest. This may seem like a stupid example but if in those few moments you can fully concentrate on the making of that cup of coffee, and nothing else, you are present which also means you’re not wallowing in the past and you’re not worring about the future – you’re simply making coffee.

One Moment, Every Moment

Tolle says that being Present gives rise to a sense of peace, of freedom from emotional suffering that often comes about from constant thoughts of past and future. All we ever have is now – if we can understand that life is lived only in the present moment and can develop the ability to be fully present in that moment, then we should be able to live our lives in peace.

Often however, we think in terms of time. When we think of big goals they have a time scale but still, no matter how large the timescale, it is still only ever lived in the present moment. Whether you’re making a cup of coffee, or developing a complex piece of software (that’s me!), or studying for a degree that will occupy several years, or attempting to achieve a 5th Dan black belt in martial arts (something that would take a very minimum of 15 years), all of that is only ever experienced one moment at a time – the present moment.

Have you ever noticed a situation where you or somebody else somehow managed to find themselves facing the very thing they feared most? This is not a coincidence. Over the last few years I have read and studied a lot of material that points to the idea that the world doesn’t just happen to us and that what we think in our minds and feel in our hearts actually have a powerful effect on the reality that we experience. It could be just self-fulfilling prophecy, it could be that what we believe in skews our perception of our experiences or maybe our own minds really are powerful forces that work with the Universe itself. This in itself could be the subject of many blog posts but for the sake of this post I just want to concentrate on the idea that our fears have the ability to manifest in our lives.

What are you afraid of?

When I look at my own fears, there are some which are quite potent and if realised, have the ability to cause me severe suffering. My fears really come down to two things – getting old, and death. Though not my own death – but the death of those close to me. These two fears are actually just one thing – expressions of the fact that all sentient beings will eventually grow old and die. I am not being morbid – this is just a fact of life! The fear of growing old has become particularly relevant to me recently as I approach the big Four Oh next year.

For a while I struggled against this fear and started reading books from people such as Deepak Chopra about ageing and how we can reverse it. However last week I saw a video of Deepak and saw that he looked like an old man! The one man who seemed to provide evidence against the inevitability of growing old, was growing old! So there I was back to the fear of growing old again! But even if I could somehow stave that one off, what about other people? My mother is now in her 80′s and she’s most certainly not going to be around forever so her dying is something that I will have to face – unless I die young of course! And that becomes another fear – not that I might die young but that somebody close to me, like my partner could!

But then this morning, I had a strange realisation that in actual fact I wasn’t afraid of growing old at all, or of death, but in fact I was afraid of something entirely different…

It’s not the ‘thing’, it’s how the thing will make you feel!

I’m not afraid of growing old at all – what I’m afraid of is how it will make me feel! If I look at it closely, there are two effects of growing old that I fear – one is a decline in physical appearance, and the other is a decline in physical ability. I’ve already found a ton of evidence of people in their 70′s, 80′s and 90′s doing amazing things physically so the latter one is not so much of a concern now but I don’t see any evidence of 80 year olds who still look 20! However, do I even care what I look like? If I really think about it, all I care about is that I like the way I look and that other people like the way I look (ego I know!! – another post!)

The profile picture I have used for this blog was taken last year, aged 38. I like it a lot – I like it a LOT better than photos taken of me in my 30′s and 20′s. Sure I look older now but that doesn’t actually matter because I like the way I look in that picture. I have this fear that as I get older I’ll start to hate my appearance but it hasn’t happened yet so why should it later on? Sure when I put too much weight on I dislike my appearance but that is not an age thing.

What this line of reasoning made me realise was that instead of trying to battle an impossible fear – of something that was totally inevitable, could I instead reframe it as a fear of something that I can change. I don’t fear looking older, I fear not liking the way I look as I grow older and that is something that I can definitely work on!

This brings me round to my second fear of losing people close to me. What I fear is not the loss itself, but how that loss will make me feel – lonely, devastated, empty, depressed and so on. Yet there are many people who have experienced loss of loved ones and then find their peace with that and go on to live happy lives.

All we really want is to be happy!

As I started to break this down into the simplest terms I realised that the only thing I was really afraid of – was not being happy! I was worried that growing old would make me unhappy or that losing loved ones would make me unhappy. But what if they don’t? I’m not sure I could lose a loved one and not feel sadness but what really scares me is that this sadness would be extremely deep and last a very long time. What if I find peace within the sadness and can continue to function perfectly well and find happiness again relatively quickly?

Facing the fear of old age or death is a losing battle but the fear of unhappiness is a much easier one – something that I am much less afraid of. And if what all the books I have been reading recently are true then if I can conquer the fear of unhappiness then it won’t manifest in my life!

So I encourage you to look at the things you fear and try and see if you can find something else that the fear is hiding – are you really truly afraid of the thing, or is it how you think the thing will make you feel that you are really afraid of? Does it have to be that way? Can you reframe the fear in a way that makes the fear less scary?

Initially I had wanted the blog to be a kind of online journal where I could share my experiences in this new journey of making a living online. My background had always been in software development and it was a job as a Software Engineer that I had quit in 2007 so I knew I wanted to continue development, but I wanted to branch into a new area that I hadn’t been before – web development. However I had no skills in this area and no idea for a software project and as I had just quit my job, I figured I needed to earn some money in the meantime before I came up with this great project that would make me rich! ;-)

Shortly before quitting the day job, I’d stumbled into the world of Internet Marketing. I’d actually been there before in the years around 2000 – 2003, but back then the IM world was very different – no social media for example. So my interest was sparked and in my naivety, I figured I could do a bit of Internet Marketing to earn a bit of ‘quick’ cash before my millionaire idea descended upon me. Oh dear, it makes me laugh when I look back on it now!

What *actually* happened is that I somehow completely forgot that I was a software developer and somehow morphed into a ‘blogger’. Worse still, I started making money with this blog, which was never the intention and so I became known as one of these ‘make money online’ bloggers! Eventually after a couple of wake-up calls in my personal life and some deep soul searching, one summer day in July 2008 (the 22nd to be precise), I got my software idea and everything changed…

I got an idea for a website that I could develop that could actually earn me money but all my time was occupied with a ton of meaningless Internet Marketing activities which I had to somehow stop without offending my growing readership. Now it sounds like I’m really resentful of that time spent on IM and that’s not actually true because the idea for the software project was born out of what I had learned in that time. If I hadn’t spent that year or so working on this stuff I could never have got my idea so I guess all things really do happen for a reason!

Over the next year or so I gradually wound down the old projects, and I started blogging about this new website I was developing but I could start to feel a growing unease within me. You see, one thing which I had done consistently with my blog every month was write a stats post showing my progress in my quest to make a living. I’d show how much money I’d earned, where it came from and so on. These were some of the post popular posts that I had. But as time went on I began to feel very uncomfortable about the idea of posting financial stats. I knew that if the software headed in the direction that I wanted it to go (I’m still in the early stages as I write this in December 2010), then it could potentially earn me a monthly sum that was considerably above average. Somehow when I wasn’t earning very much it resonated with people; they told me how ‘real’ it sounded but I didn’t want to tell people my earnings if it grew because then it would feel like bragging. Not only that, but to be quite honest I don’t want personal friends & family knowing how much I actually earn or they’ll all be wanting better Christmas presents! ;-) B

Also, as I got deeper and deeper into the development of my new website I just ran out of stuff to blog about. My core audience had become a group of Internet marketers and Bloggers and yet I was spending my days knee-deep in PHP code, Zend Frameworks and a million little technical issues that were worlds apart from the audience that I had built up in my blog.

Fate intervened in the form of several hacking attacks on my blog. This started to become the bane of my life, it took my attention away from my software project and in the end, I just deleted the whole damn thing and bloody hell, what a relief that was! Suddenly I was FREE – no more wading through hundreds of emails every day, no more worrying about what I should post, and at last I could really concentrate on my software.

So that was about six months ago I think but recently I have missed certain aspects of blogging. Mainly, I like to write – it helps me to get my thoughts out in pixellated form, and secondly, I miss the interaction with readers. So I’ve decided to start blogging again but it will be very different this time!

The blog remains at the same domain because it’s appropriate – this will now be a personal blog in the traditional sense. I’ll be blogging on all sorts of topics. Previously it had become an Internet Marketing blog almost my accident and I don’t want that to happen. Sometimes I needed to write about other topics but they just didn’t fit in. I even started other blogs to help with this but ultimately I’d just like to have a single place to write and not worry about the topic. To make things easier for the readers I’ll be carefully categorising the topics of the posts so you can read only what interests you.

Secondly, I’m writing because I want to – when I want to. I know from personal experience that I most like to write when I’m happy but when I’m unhappy I withdraw from the world and the last thing I want to do is blog about the stuff thats making me unhappy. So I’m not going to have a blogging ‘schedule’ – I might write every day for a while, or I might not write a damn thing for 6 months; I really don’t know. Along the same lines, my only motive is to write. I don’t care how many readers there are, I’m not trying to make money with this blog so you will NOT be seeing annoying banner ads! I’ll probably promote my own stuff somewhere but that’s not the purpose of the blog – it is simply an outlet for my thoughts.

It’s nice to be back :-)