Month: January 2018

I added the ability for people to support this site through Patreon. This can be done via one-time donation, or a subscription.

I have no plans for any private or subscriber content, and I never will. I hate paywalls, and nothing turns me off from a site faster than having to pay for an article. Therefore, this site, and all its content, will remain free of cost for everyone.

What I am doing, however, is asking that if you find value in what I’m writing, if I inspire you, or if I help motivate you, consider supporting the site. I do this for free, but it does cost money to keep up. From the custom domain to the web hosting, it all adds up. If I can get enough supporters, I’d love to be able to do contests and giveaways. My ultimate dream would be to be able to do this full-time and write more than one or two articles a day. Perhaps produce better videos, talk to others who have used Whole30 and Paleo to get healthy and lose weight, and to offer more information.

In the end, it’s up to you. I will not be offended if you don’t support the site financially. Just leave a comment every now and then to let me know if what I’m doing here is helping you. In the end, that’s what I’m really after: getting the word out about healthy lifestyle through diet.

How long do you actually enjoy eating a meal or dish? Really think about this for a moment. How long can you savor a dish? For me, it’s probably 10-15 minutes, tops. And that’s if I’m eating very slowly.

Now, you typically eat three meals a day. That’s 45 minutes of gratification and savoring.

Forty-five minutes.

The rest of your day is spent doing other things. Walking, sitting, working, reading, cooking, etc. The rest of the day, you aren’t eating. You are doing the stuff in-between meals that we call, “Life.” I had to make a conscious decision in September 2015 that I valued that time in-between the meals more than I valued the meals themselves. It’s not that I wanted to eat bland food; I didn’t. But I didn’t want to sacrifice my in-between meals time for very short-term and short-lived gratification. Said another way, it seemed ridiculous to me that I would feel tired and be so overweight and unfit all the time just so I can enjoy eating pizza, bread, or pasta for very small parts of my day.

As good as those foods are, they aren’t worth the bad I felt the rest of the time.

And therein lies the crux of the matter for me. Such a little bit of pleasure isn’t worth the huge amount of pain, no matter how good the food is.

Think about what is more important to you: what you eat, or how you feel the entire rest of your day.

So, this one starts off different, because Day 27 of this Whole30 started with me being sick. It looks like I’ve got the flu. Sore throat, headache, achy muscles, low energy, and sleeping 18 hours.

This made my diet very strange today.

Breakfast: Two eggs sunny-side up and three slices of sugar/salt-free bacon. So far, so good, right? Now it gets weird.

Comfort Food: Cantaloupe. For some reason, eating cantaloupe makes me feel better when I’m sick, whether it’s a cold, a flu, or a stomach flu. Today was no different, and I ate an entire medium cantaloupe. I figured I could use the fiber, anyway.

Lunch: Slow cooker chicken with mushrooms and broccoli. This is one of the meals Sherry made for us last week that we had in the refrigerator. It was tasty!

Snack: For some reason, I feel hungry a lot. I think it’s because my body is fighting this flu, and it’s using up a lot more energy. Oh, and I have a fever, too. So I had two hand fulls of cashews.

Dinner: Sherry made us a slow-cooker pork with Whole30 barbecue sauce, onions, and apples that she served with some baked sweet potato cubes. It was really good. I ended up eating the leftover apple and onions.

Sometimes, we slip. We fall. We get behind.

Sometimes, we need help. We need someone to pick us up. We need someone to bring us back to the fold.

Sometimes, we need to be motivated. We need to be reminded of what’s important. We need to be told we’re doing a good job and someone is there to support us.

We are all, afterall, human.

I get my motivation from a few different sources at different times. Sometimes, that strength comes from within, from that burning desire inside of me that refuses to fail and wants to succeed. I have to admit that part of that motivation comes from having failed before and never wanting to fail at weight loss again. I never wanted to have to say that I tried and couldn’t do it. Other times, my motivation comes from my wife who supports me in every way, loves me, and sacrifices for me. When I told her I needed her help to do this, she accepted. Sometimes, I’m motivated by the people who read my blog and comment or email me. I feel like I can’t let them down, either. Ultimately, I am motivated by my love of my family. I don’t want them to have to deal with burying me early due to a weight-related ailment. I want to give myself the best chance of sticking around as long as possible for them.

Look to people you love, people you trust; friends and family. Look to your spiritual advisor, minister, priest, rabbi, or shaman. Look to people you admire, or to people who have walked the path you are on before. Look to them for motivation, for inspiration, and for some words of strength to get you back to where you need to be.

Once you realize that your new, healthy lifestyle is 90% mental and 10% actual eating, it gets easier to tackle. Food doesn’t materialize in your mouth; you have to put it there. It takes discipline to ignore cravings, but with strength and motivation, you can get past cravings and live a life that consists of normal meals without the hunger in between. Without that overwhelming desire to eat and eat and eat.

I got a decent amount of sleep but that meant I woke up a little later than usual. For this reason, while I had the same breakfast, it was reduced in portion. I didn’t realize that this would be a mistake.

Breakfast: Pork, apple, and egg casserole, but a little smaller than usual. The thinking was that we’d be eating lunch at normal time, so I could get back “On schedule” with Sherry.

Lunch: Lunch happened about three hours later than planned which meant I was very hungry. I split a Larabar with Sherry at around noon, and we ate our late lunch at around 3 pm. I started with a side salad with oil and vinegar and then I ate a filet of Red Snapper with lump crab on top which was served with asparagus. It was delicious, but not very filling. I don’t know if it was because I had waited so long to eat, but I was still hungry. After lunch, we went and had some coffee at which time Sherry and I both split another Larabar.

Dinner: This is where I gets really weird. We decided not to eat a regular dinner since our lunch was so late in the day, so Sherry and I had some cashews. I had about 6 oz of lightly salted cashews that I ate while drinking some coffee. It filled me up and allowed me to go the rest of the day without eating or without being hungry.

This was a very weird day of eating, and this is not recommended as it is not Whole30. It was a weird day that, while I ate all Whole30 compliant meals, it wasn’t standard by any stretch of the imagination. I will be back on a normal meal schedule tomorrow, I hope!

According to articles released in the past few weeks, Whole30 ranked as one of the worst or most difficult diets to undertake. This came as a surprise to me because it has changed the way I eat and improved my health. The articles said that they ranked Whole30 lowest for a few reasons

• Difficulty to maintain.
• Expensive
• No real evidence (yet) that it is effective (aside from what is called anecdotal).
• Restrictive.
• “Any diet that says bacon is good for you has to be suspect.”

I have thought about it long and hard because the reasons they stated for ranking it so low all made it successful for me.

Difficulty to maintain

Whole30 didn’t seem difficult for me to maintain. My wife and I did the necessary pre-work to get ready for our Whole30. We did (and still do) food prep on Sundays. It wasn’t easy in the beginning, but it taught us about how important it is to make our food from whole, natural ingredients. It taught us that feeding ourselves is hard work, and that the shortcuts that go into making our food fast and easy are bad for us and our bodies.

Expensive

This has been debunked before, but shopping for whole, natural foods is no more expensive than buying pre-processed foods. Almost dollar for dollar, you can spend the same on good foods as you can on the processed foods for the same number of people and the same number of meals. Eating grain-fed, free-roam, and organic can cost more, but if you stick with meat, vegetables, and fruit in their natural form, you can find deals on meats and vegetables and fruits on sale almost all the time. We find that our dollars spent on natural ingredients goes farther.

No real evidence that it works

Evidence is based on scientific studies, and these take years or decades to conclude. Anecdotal evidence, in the scientific community, refers to experiences people have and report on. It doesn’t take into account all the factors to isolate the diet as the cause for the improvement in health and loss of weight. Fair enough. But nearly everyone I know who has done a Whole30 or has gone Paleo has gotten healthier and lost weight. This is well-known now in the medical community. The studies are being done; it will take time.

Restrictive

This one made me laugh out loud. For real. If you are going from an, “I eat everything and anything” diet to Whole30, then yes, it’s very restrictive. Our diets NEED to be restricted. Our obesity epidemic is due to the lack of restraint and the horrible information we’ve been fed by nutritionists, doctors, and the government regarding “Balanced diets” and the over-use of sugar and grains in our diet coupled with the vilifying of fats. I learned to restrict my diet to only meat, fruit, and vegetables. This is a good thing, not something that should be considered bad.

“Any diet that says bacon is good for you has to be suspect.”

This one also made me laugh. It told me everything I needed to know about the person(s) writing the article(s). They didn’t understand that fat is not bad, and that the myth of a balanced diet was just that: a myth concocted by pseudo-scientists passing off their ideas of nutrition as fact based on nothing more than a theory from a doctor in the 50’s. The idea that fat in our bodies comes from fat we eat is laughable and ignores the complexity within our bodies to create usable energy and how our bodies store that excess energy.

The irony is that everything the article listed as being shortcomings were all what got through to me and helped me succeed in getting healthy, losing weight, and maintaining my health and weight loss. Nearly two and a half years later, I’m still at my lowest weight, and maintaining it easily.

Not enough sleep again last night due to friends coming over, but after a slow start to the day, I feel great again. Weight is up a bit due to the lack of sleep, but I’ll fix that Saturday morning. I plan on sleeping in on Saturday to catch up a bit on the sleep I’ve been missing out on this past few days.

Breakfast: The pork, apple, and egg casserole I’ve been enjoying all week. I really do love this stuff! It starts my day off a bit dandy.

Lunch: Being Friday, it’s our “Go Out to Eat” day. We typically eat lunch, but today, I took Steve to a new place: Sammy’s Wild Grill. I had the mixed grill which consisted of an emu steak, kangaroo on a skewer with onions and green pepper, and a sausage made of elk. It was served with sweet potato fries. Now, the only item that was suspect was the sweet potato fries, but I asked, and they said they cooked them in coconut oil, so I’m somewhat okay. The lunch was delicious and filling, but I forgot to get a photo of it.

Dinner: Friday nights is when we have dinner with friends, and they prepared for us a lovely Instant Pot cooked Mojo Pork with Tostones and Spicy Slaw. The pork was very tender and delicious and the Tostones are plantains that are cooked in coconut oil and squashed to be sort of a plantain cake. This was an amazing dinner, and super-delicious!

It’s tough to do, but after two years of showing the way, being successful at losing weight, and trying to live the example, I’ve had to give up on some people. These folks have ignored everything I’ve said, shown them, or explained. They ignore the evidence that is as clear as the nose on their faces: that eating a low-carb/high-fat diet works in making you healthy and helping you lose weight.

I just watched someone else I know posting on Facebook all the work they’re going through to try to lose some weight. Their method: eat lots of fruit, eat all day long, and portion control. The number of people who are successful on this type of diet is very small, so it’s akin to watching someone douse themselves with fire and then start playing with a Zippo with one hand.

If I could accomplish just one great thing in this life, it would be my hope and desire that people would learn about LC/HF diets and their benefits. Along with that, it would be to dispel all the horrible, bad, and harmful information we’ve been taught for the past 40 years that low-fat is good for you, that grains are beneficial, and that sugar is harmless.

I am not giving up on you, dear reader. I am here for you, and I will carry on and continue blogging. Maybe those friends will change their minds and catch on that maybe I’m not just making this all up, and that there is some veracity to my claims. Until then, I will continue on here, as I have, as the PaleoMarine.