The Wonders of Body Image -- or, Is it Possible to Change it at this Late Stage in the Game?

As a child, I recall that the fat on the steak was my very favorite part. Somewhere around the age of 8 or 9, though, I began to learn that I shouldn’t eat the fat. That it would make me fat. That I was fat. At first these admonitions were said gently, and with wisdom. But later, they felt like digs into the very core of my being. I remember, once, helping myself to a second helping of tuna salad, and I heard my Mother say, “Do you just want to be fat your whole life?” The level of disgust in her voice frightened me, and the humiliation felt like ice in my stomach. I had only wanted a little more tuna.  It had tasted so delicious.

Little did she or I know that it wasn’t the fat, tuna, or the mayonnaise that was the problem, it was the bread, and the sugar in the mayonnaise and the relish. But that memory has stood the test of time.  I sometimes hear the shriekish way it was said to me when I see my own daughters fixing food.  I worry that I’ve projected my own body image issues onto my oldest daughter, who has already heard criticism from her peers. Sure, she has a little tummy, but she is growing, and will likely grow nearly 12 inches in the next several years. She devours vegetables, and chile, and all sorts of amazing foods that most kids would turn their nose up to.  Chicken tenders were never her thing.  Hot salsa, stir fry, and green chile stew, those were the things she ate as a toddler. She will start bleeding and will learn to live with her blood moon. She is strong, graceful, lovely. Her legs are to die for.

I am thankful that she is not in school so that the critics are far and few between. I am thankful that she is enamored with dance and soccer and swimming and running, and that we can provide her with opportunities that I did not have; that my own parents refused to give to me.

I have struggled with my own body image for as long as I can remember.  Growing up with mostly Hispanic and Indian girls, I was immediately and obviously different. More pudgy, more blond, more blue-eyed than most everyone else.  My hispanic friends were ridiculously skinny and much more leggy than I could ever dream of.  I wished for dark brown or black hair, and would look at my wet hair after a bath and wish it would stay darker and not dry into the wheat-blond locks I was, actually, blessed with.

In the fourth grade, one particularly ruthless boy named Ruben started calling me Chubby Checker.  I didn’t know who Chubby Checker was, other than some old guy that the characters on Happy Days mentioned from time to time.  In fifth grade, the boy both my best friend and I both had a crush on, Bryan, said he liked me because I had a “chunky pussy.”  Yes, really. As much as I did not feel like that was a compliment, I was happy he liked me. By sixth grade, when I was 11, it was clear that me and my gringa friends were developing at a different rate than our Hispanic sisters.  We had more boobs and were much taller, me being much wider, while they all still had legs the circumference of the fourth graders, just taller.

By middle school, everyone seemed to catch up. I wasn’t fat or skinny, just average.  But by high school, my weight again became a prominent factor in my own life.  I wanted desperately to do sports like swimming or diving and track, but my parents told me I could only do band, which was “enough” of an obligation for me. When my weight began to climb at age 14, my mother brought a nutritionist in to meet with me.  She concurred that I was too heavy for my age and height.  She proceeded to instruct me on measuring out my morning cereal, one-half cup of raisin bran, and one cup of skim milk.  Ick.  By 10:00 am, I distinctly remember feeling brain-fogged and starving, thinking that lunch time was an eternity away.  I lost about 10 pounds and the nutritionist fell by the wayside. 

A meager allowance meant that my friends and I could cross the street to the little market and buy Oreos and smoked almonds for lunch every day.  Some days I existed on diet coke and peanut butter chocolate wafers, with a serving of peanut M&Ms during French.

When I was 14 I had strep several times. I had the chicken pox. I had regular common colds multiple times. I would get bloody noses every single day. Sometimes it took an hour to make them stop bleeding.  As a result of the multiple colds I had, I bought nasal spray to unblock my congested sinuses, which surely only helped to erode the tender mucosa that lined the inside of my nose. My hormones were running rampant and I was cursed to fall in love with guys over and over. Somehow I managed to maintain my aura of normalcy, but I remember feeling anything but, deep down inside.

My Mother’s overwhelming domineering control and her unspoken fear that I would end up pregnant and destitute at age 14, became all-encompassing. She went through my stuff, she read my journal, she grounded me for 6 months. All just for being a normal 14-year old. As the year wore on, and my diet became worse and worse, it is remarkable that I was able to survive the endless stream of diet cokes, peanut butter bars, M&Ms, and Oreos.  Surely it was my Mom’s insistence on the home-cooked meat or fish-based dinners that salvaged my poor brain.

At 16, I discovered that my tall, blond, gorgeous friend, Wendy, was a foodie.  She would insist on bringing me to her house for lunch where she would fix me leftover cheese ravioli with pesto, or leftover chicken parmesan from the night before.  She told me she enjoyed cooking because it was her job to do so, to take care of her sisters because her Mother didn’t do so, since she was a doctor.  I envied her skill at whipping us up a lunch from the remains of the fridge.

By 17, I would eat my lunch with my boyfriend every day, so I pre-made my lunch the night before, eating mostly sandwiches and fruit, but sometimes leftover hamburgers or my Dad’s famous beef teriyaki.  When I first started dating my future hubby, I was a large 160 pounds.  I remember thinking that my ass was one of the widest in school.  Another dear friend, with a matter-of-fact way of being told me, “Who cares? Why do you care?”  And I couldn’t come up with an immediate answer. Why did I care if my ass was wider than everyone else’s?  Well, obviously I cared because I wanted to be skinny, and pretty, and desired.  That’s why I cared.

When I started dating Scott, he tortured me.  It became clear that to be his girlfriend I would have to be active, which was enjoyable as a child, but I had clearly had fallen into ill-repair as noted on the first bike ride we did together. I felt like I was going to die.  My legs could not even push the bicycle up Urban, or back to his parent’s house on Arizona. The first several hikes we took made my lungs feel like they would implode, and I would beg to stop and rest constantly. He must have really liked me.  He was patient and gentle and never criticized, ever.

I joined Tae Kwon Do, I started running regularly. I bought a mountain bike.

My life had just begun.

At age 19, I visited my first alternative practitioner, Jeff Santay. He diagnosed me as being sensitive to wheat and dairy. I attempted to learn how to eat without eating crackers and bread and tortillas and milk, and it was incredibly difficult as a poor college student living in the city. I bought rice-bread and natural hot dogs and ate a lot of carne adovada.

Eventually my desire to maintain the food elimination became too difficult because I was young, in college, and didn’t have much money or motivation. We ended back up in Washington, this time in our own house near the water. Our year in Albuquerque had introduced us to stir fries and the organic food co-op.  Back in Olympia we discovered we could eat on $30 a week by shopping at the co-op.  Fresh vegetables, salmon, and fruit were purchased there, and we’d buy our cheese, canned goods, and beer at the super-store, Top Foods, where fresh Halibut was sometimes on sale for pennies. We lived next to an organic bakery, and could buy day-old bread for next-to-nothing.

Bicycle commuting, running, Tae Kwon Do, swimming, Aikido, and dance meant that I was burning plenty of calories, despite our regular consumption of beer and fresh-baked bread.  I was the lightest I had ever been as an adult those last two years at Evergreen, weighing between 125 and 130 pounds. 

And I still thought I was fat.

I look at pictures now and think, what the heck was I thinking?  I was beautiful!

And as I’ve aged, I’ve watched my weight slowly and surely continue to climb and climb up through the numbers.  Despite maintaining a heavy exercise load, my hormones could not keep up with the carbohydrate-heavy days I funneled into my body. Four to six beers a day, quesadillas, pasta salads, cheese and crackers, home made pizza—all these things overloaded my insulin receptors and sent my brain on a desperate search for hormonal communication between my receptors and my cells.

Despite my home-cooked soups and stews, sautéed greens, casseroles, stir-fried meals, consciousness towards fresh, organic, whole foods, I was still just getting fatter and fatter. Year after year.  If my hours of exercise dropped, my weight would climb faster. If I increased my biking or running loads, I would only stabilize, not lose. Despite being an herbal practitioner who helped others to regain health and well-being, I felt like I could not grasp hold of my own well-being when it came to my weight.  And as much as I knew I was fat and getting fatter, felt my own embarrassment in the fact that my clothes were getting tighter and tighter, and that I did not look like the athlete I think myself to be, I didn’t know what to do other than what I was already doing.

Trying to eat well, and exercise a lot. I was, in fact, resigning myself to the idea that I was just one of those people who is big.  That I was big-boned, stocky, Scandinavian. I am strong, I told myself, when it comes to kicking someone’s ass in a self-defense situation, I want the weight behind my kick. I can go longer and farther than most people, I would tell myself. There is a lot of muscle under that upholstery.

But I was still selling myself short. I was not looking myself in the eye. I was not being honest.

I knew that the primary problem was beer, and my over-consumption of it.  Thousands of calories a month. Thousands of grams of carbohydrates.

But the more that I’ve learned that calories in/calories out is not accurate, I’ve come to see that it was my constant glycemic loading--the continuous pumping in of carbohydrates that my body could only deal with by storing them as fat. And that the more carbs I pumped in, whether from beer or grains or beans, the more metabolic disruptions I continued to cause. Slowly and surely, I was headed down the pathway of metabolic disorder, and eventual type II diabetes. As much as I proclaimed to know about health and well-being, I was headed down my own personal road to disaster.

Many pathways led me to this moment.  I am thankful for each one. I now know that I do not have to be resigned to being fat. After more than a decade of not being able to lose 5 pounds to save my life (minus and plus the 17 pounds I lost with soup and hours of spinning, cycling, and running—over the course of 9 months, and then regained in a matter of weeks), I have lost over 34 pounds in 4 months. The effort did not come from exercise and a calorie deficit, rather from a mindful and diligent choice to eliminate all grains and legumes from my diet.  As a result of that elimination, low-carb living has also manifested as part of my life. 

All the years of confusion about ketosis, dietary fat, hormonal and metabolic processes, and food choice came rushing in like a tidal wave. Interestingly, my own understanding about these issues seems to be shadowed by an increase in media and scientific research as well, as though the information needs to be spread far and wide and many different disciplines are working in concert to get it there.

Life is a mysterious and wondrous thing.

Why I started Meditating Again

The Japanese call an awakening Satori, which seems fitting to what happened to me on April 22, 2012. Ironically, this moment of Satori coincided with my return to meditation.

My introduction to meditation began when I was 21.  I was a 4th year student at Evergreen, and I'd been studying with an amazing professor, Paul Przybylowicz, since the start of the year.  Evergreen operates on a quarter system, and I'd been Paul's student since the Fall Quarter, when I took Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest, a thoroughly remarkable course that had only been offered by Evergreen one previous time, in the '70s, when Paul Stamets of Fungi Perfecti fame took the class.

After relishing in the delight of the mushroom class, and then enduring Paul's Biogeochemistry class, (the highlight of which was my dear friend, Josie's presentation on Astrophysics), Paul told me that he was going to be leading a lichen biology class for the Spring Quarter. He said that he planned to incorporate lichen biology, rock climbing, and meditation into a class that would be open only to upper level students at Evergreen.   

When Scott heard that I'd be traveling to Onalaska for a meditation retreat, and that I'd be learning how to rock climb, he asked if there was any possibility he could be involved.  He didn't realize that I'd said Onalaska, and not Alaska, but he was interested in the climbing nonetheless. I told Paul that I knew a really good photographer, if he was interested in documenting the course. Right before spring break, Paul released the questionnaire for those interested in taking the course, which would be limited to 20 or so students. Scott and I filled out the appropriate paperwork and then attended the mandatory informational session.  That night I had the only migraine I've ever had in my life, which was weird, but I was psyched on the class.  I was highly surprised by the number of students who attended the info session, there had to have been several hundred people there.  A short time later, Paul released the accepted students list, and Scott and I were both on it.  Immediately after that, we left for spring break.

During spring break, Josie, Scott, and myself drove the 24-hours to New Mexico via rental car, and spent  our time enjoying some of the best late-season snow Los Alamos has ever seen with our dear NM friends. I distinctly remember the extreme run-off flows in Pagosa as we made our way to Los Alamos.  Something I've not seen since. The piles of snow in our families' yards was insane!  Despite the early-April time-frame, there were piles about 6-ft tall on the north-sides of the houses.

At the end of the trip, Scott and I drove back to Olympia; Josie had gone on to her family in Austin, and flew home from there. Both of us had made the cut, and were registered as students in the very hot Ecology, Awareness, and Exposure.  If my house hadn't burned down in the Cerro Grande Fire, I would have scanned my class synopsis to share.

We arrived back at Evergreen and went to the first lecture regarding our new course.  Paul told us that he would require that every student participating sign a vow to refrain from alcohol, drugs, and caffeine.  I wasn't so worried about the alcohol and drugs as I was the caffeine.  Mochas and Lattes were pretty much my raison d'etre during the rainy Olympia days.  Beer would be hard too.  But we both signed our signatures and then prepared for what was to come.

Paul explained that we would be doing a meditation retreat.  It would be a Vipassana-based meditation retreat, and we would all be required to be silent for 10 days. At the time, I was so gung-ho on learning to rock climb and learn about lichen biology, that I really didn't give much thought to what a silent 10 days might mean for me, individually.

We made sure our dog had a caretaker, (thanks, Josie!) and off we went. (Chillum thanks you, too.)

When we arrived at the meditation center, we were told that the men and the women would be segregated.  That seemed reasonable, but since there was no curtain in place during meditation, it did seem surprising that a curtain was placed between the sexes in the dining hall.

Meditation began at 4 am.  A bell-ringer went around the outside of the building, waking everyone before the 4am start time.  I woke up every day about 1 minute before the bell rang.  A clue to me that I have an innate, internal alarm clock. I watched the bell ringer every morning, who just happened to be Paul.  I'm sure he felt some sort of responsibility to wake all his creeds for this adventure he signed us up for.

We would pile into the meditation hall to sit from 4 to 6 am.  And two other time slots during the day. (My memory is failing me on the exact times...) I never knew how uncomfortable sitting could be until I sat in one place from 4 to 6 am.  I then realized I had to do that again and again each day.  Sitting is hard work.

I was not a very good meditation student.  I thought I was being brain-washed for the first several days, and then, when I finally started grasping the meditation part of the retreat, I started yearning to write, which was supposedly forbidden.  As was exercise.  I solved these two dilemmas by doing push-ups by the dozen as much as I possibly could, and by digging out some large paper grocery sacks and a half-used pen I found in the utility closet.  I wrote and wrote and wrote, when I had the opportunity, and then hid my writing from my classmates, lest they feel compelled to write as well, and I be the source of their forbidden inspiration. In the end, I made a conscious choice to return my writ-upon bags to the utility closet in case someone else might be so in need, and perhaps my writing might be a source of solace for them.  (I do wish I had that writing now, as I lost so much of my past writing in the afore-mentioned fire.)

But as the retreat went on, I discovered several things.  My dreams became more vivid than any I've ever had in my entire life.  Being a dreamer, that says A LOT.  I have movie-epic dreams that are worthy of any Spielberg screen.  I remember those meditation retreat dreams to this moment.  Graphic, vivid, gory, scary beyond belief...they seemed to convey the state of the world at that time. I was so removed from the rawness of war and brutality, yet my dreams ensured I was still an actor in the drama.

Secondly, I discovered that men and women are very different.  And in ways that seemed surprising.  We were segregated by sight for eating, but during the breaks, only a low wire fence separated the men's area from the women's.

I noticed upon arrival that the women's area had a well marked square-box trail with an "X" of a trail crossing the middle.  The yard was just that, a yard.  A fenced-in area marking the property.  On the very first day, at the first break, I discovered that women walk.  We don't just walk, we WALK.  With gusto, vigor, purpose, intention.  We walk in one direction, and then we walk in the other.  We will criss-cross the field after we've completed both directions.  This way, that way, and then this way and that way.  Our walking would have been running had running been condoned.  For nearly the entire break you could see the women walking.  It was rare to see them sitting for any period of time.

The men, on the other hand, strolled.  They didn't just stroll, it was more like lolly-gagging around.  Looking at this, looking at that, stopping here, stopping there, just meandering.  It was remarkable the difference between the sexes! Men, who have always been purported to be these action-driven creatures were actually not action-oriented at all. Mostly, they just wandered about aimlessly and stared at things.I didn't get a chance to see their trail structure, but I imagine it to be very random and all over the place.

One day, late into the retreat, I decided to sit down and just observe my surroundings.  I'd already walked the women's course a number of times.  Scott and I had concocted our own little way of communicating, which involved clearing our throats. We did a little of that, which no one observed other than us, and then I proceeded to just sit. Instantly I noticed that a bee was making its way around the grounds and I latched on to observing the bee.  It went up and down, around, all over.  I watched it fly upwards and downwards to the flowers and other plants. It meandered this way and that. I surmised it must be a male.

As I observed the bee I noticed the sound of trickling water.  As I paid more attention to the sound, it became louder and more concentrated.  I paid closer attention to try to find the source.  It was Washington, and thus, wet.  In fact, the weather during this particular retreat had been clearly awful.  It would deluge for hours, which was great for meditation, but horrible for walking the women's course.  We women would be battened down in our Gore-Tex jackets, hoods drawn tight, rain pelting over our bodies, the mist of the clouds hovering close to the ground. Sometimes the rain stopped for a a few minutes, the sun would push through, and I would feel hopeful that the sun might stick around for a while.  Quickly the clouds would blanket back up, and the rain would deluge again.

During the moment I heard the water trickling, it was sunny.  The clouds were light and fluffy, and did not hold the deep, menacing gray of the past week. I listened as tightly as I could, practically willing my ears to tune in as if to a line on the radio.  And then I had a moment of surprise.  An awakening of sorts!  This sound didn't have a source, really, it was the actual sound of water percolating through the soil, and I could hear it so clearly, distinctly!  When I looked at the ground, I saw only the grass blades and the dirt beneath.  But as I looked with keen ear, I noticed that the earth had pores, and that the blades of grass were nothing but conduits deeper into the earth.  The sound became almost overwhelming.  It flooded my ears and I was fascinated by the lack of visual effects.

Within a while, we all returned back to the meditation hall and I realized that my meditation skills were indeed becoming more refined, despite my complete ignorance of the art when the whole retreat had begun.  The bee and the water had cemented my realization.

When we returned back to school, life, home, I think we all required a bit of transition.  Within a matter of days, I was back to my dilemma of deciding whether or not to buy a mocha on campus, or whether it would be okay if we had just one beer in the evening.  We learned the basics of climbing safety, and ended up at world class climbing areas to put our skills to the test. We were, in fact, with world class people.

Years have passed since I was a student in Ecology, Awareness, and Exposure. Nineteen years, in fact. Prior to this year, I've probably put my meditation skills to use only a handful of times.  Martial arts were my focus, and mountain biking, or snowboarding.  To a lesser degree, rock climbing, and some ice. Later, trail running and road cycling became my moving meditations.

But on that day, this past April, I realized that I needed to begin meditating again. 

Not being one for convention, I chose my place on the edge of a cliff. I sat down, settled in, and breathed.  I breathed in.  I breathed out. I breathed in. I breathed out. A thought interrupted me. The wind blew over my face. A bird warbled nearby. The heat wafted over my skin. A fly landed on my hand. My foot hurt from the rock beneath me. I shifted. I told myself, "breathe."  So I counted. Breathe in, one. Breathe out, two. Breathe in, one, Breathe out, two.

It was a start.  I began meditating again.

I've been doing it now for several months.  For short periods.  On the edge of cliffs.  I'm constantly interrupted by nature and by my thoughts.  But I keep trying.  And magical things have begun to happen.

The hummingbird that sat next me and took a break.  The deer that was bedded down just feet away, yet neither one of us noticed each other until I got up to walk back to my office.  She did not spook when I did so.  The rock I found, abandoned most likely, from when Pueblo was a school and not an office space, sitting on another rock I had passed multiple times. Yet the day I noticed it, I discovered it was a special piece, full of a variety of different crystals and geologic importance.

Every time I've sat down to meditate, I've also written in my journal.  And every time that I've sat on the edge of the cliff and written in my journal, I've cried.  Sometimes for no reason at all, at least that I can discern.  But I attribute it to the world. To life in this day and age. To my own awareness to this change that I'm experiencing. To being.

It is a heavy time to be alive. 

What in the Heck is a Fat-Adapted Athlete?

My carbohydrate intake has been low, on average, for the past 13 weeks.  I've had occasions where my carb intake has been greater than 100 grams, but I can count them on two hands.  In general, I've been eating about 60 grams of carbs or less per day.   This site is an awesome resource for the nutritional information of foods, in this case sweet potatoes.

When I first started this journey, I didn't really do anything to change my intake of fats, I simply began working on no longer being afraid of them. That is a paradigm shift that I still find I'm working on.  I found that I my desire for cheese and yogurt nearly disappeared, with the exception of parmesan cheese, which I tend to crave.  It's possible that for the first several weeks, my fat intake decreased.  I have experimented with coconut oil a bit, mostly adding it to some baked goods, and using it to cook certain vegetables, like roasted broccoli and asparagus.  The kids are not too fond of the flavor, so I'm having to be creative in using it in a manner that is not overwhelming.

But the information on coconut oil and other medium-chain fatty acids (MCFA) show that MCFAs assist the body in burning excess calories, promote fat oxidation and apoptosis, induce ketogenesis, and assist in protein metabolism.  Pretty awesome, right?  Kinda makes you wonder why the food industry recommended that saturated fat products like palm oil and coconut oil be removed from foods during the mid to late 1980s. Of course the combination with grains was not a match made in heaven. But I sure do remember one particularly tasty cereal Kellogs made in the '80s that was comprised of a significant amount of coconut and palm oil.  I used to love that stuff!

Physicians and nutritionists familiar with the fat-burning benefits of coconut oil, often prescribe tablespoon doses of coconut oil per day for obese people.  It is recommended to be stirred into their coffee in the morning, added to salads in the afternoon and evening, or just eaten by the spoonful.  I've tried it a few times, and it's remarkably delicious.  The flavor is mild and slightly coconutty, but the oil is soothing and cooling on the tongue.  Coconut butter is another delicious option.

As I research more information regarding grain-free cooking and lifestyle, I've realized that I need to up my own intake of quality fats, as well as seafood.  Seafood will be the topic of another post, but for some brain-bending information on how seafood affects the brain, you can read what Dr. Jack Kruse is writing about on his blog. (Note:  he is a neurosurgeon and writes from that medical perspective.  The typos can sometimes drive me bananas, but I realized that as a busy medical practitioner, I can't expect his typing to be perfect.  I know mine isn't!)

While doing some research on athletic performance while on ketogenic diets, I discovered this whole new topic of being a fat-adapted athlete.  Mark Sisson has this great post on the topic, but I think this is the gist of it, at least for me:

"A fat-burning beast can rely more on fat for energy during exercise, sparing glycogen for when he or she really needs it. As I’ve discussed before, being able to mobilize and oxidize stored fat during exercise can reduce an athlete’s reliance on glycogen. This is the classic “train low, race high” phenomenon, and it can improve performance, save the glycogen for the truly intense segments of a session, and burn more body fat. If you can handle exercising without having to carb-load, you’re probably fat-adapted. If you can workout effectively in a fasted state, you’re definitely fat-adapted."

 He even answers the question I had burning in the back of my mind the entire time I read his post, can one be both a fat-adapted athlete and a keto-adapted athlete?  Is one preferable over the other?  It sounds like fat-adapted is the way to go:

"A quick note about ketosis:
Fat-adaption does not necessarily mean ketosis. Ketosis is ketosis. Fat-adaption describes the ability to burn both fat directly via beta-oxidation and glucose via glycolysis, while ketosis describes the use of fat-derived ketone bodies by tissues (like parts of the brain) that normally use glucose. A ketogenic diet “tells” your body that no or very little glucose is available in the environment. The result? “Impaired” glucose tolerance and “physiological” insulin resistance, which sound like negatives but are actually necessary to spare what little glucose exists for use in the brain. On the other hand, a well-constructed, lower-carb (but not full-blown ketogenic) Primal way of eating that leads to weight loss generally improves insulin sensitivity."

So, with that, I'm going to go eat my breakfast of fresh green beans with pastured butter, scallops, shrimp, calamari, and garlic.  Yum!




A couple more links in case you were interested: 

A short-term, high-fat diet up-regulates lipid metabolism and gene expression in human skeletal muscle

Fasting for 72 h increases intramyocellular lipid content in nondiabetic, physically fit men.

A Metabolic Paradigm Shift, or Why Fat is the Preferred Fuel for Human Metabolism

Really, NO grains?

I've had this question a lot the past several weeks.  I've begun sharing, very casually and in a very non-pushy manner, that I've eliminated grains from my diet.  I usually stop there, because on the couple of occasions I've mentioned that I no longer eat legumes, potatoes, or processed sugars, the looks of complete shock I've received have been mind numbing.  And hey, I'm not a dogma junkie.  I've had some beers on occasion (grains), and I did finish my daughter's ice cream from Haagen Daaz, too.  I'm not gonna let good money go to waste!  I'm very conscientious about not pushing the paleo idea onto others.  I know how I came to my decision, and it required some pretty serious soul-searching.  Ultimately, it is a choice I made out of both a need to turn my life in the opposite direction, as well as considering it an experiment to see what happens.

But considering the reactions I've received, the questions I've been asked, and some downright crazy things smart people have said, I decided I needed to explore this a bit further.  I mean seriously, a very super-smart person I work with told me that I was at risk of losing all my hair, because grains contain an amino acid not found anywhere else, and I was likely going to shrivel up, go bald, and start losing my teeth.  I think she had paleo confused with fruitarian vegan...but that's another story.

I've done my research enough to know that eliminating grains from my diet is a good thing.  But it's harder to explain why it's a good thing.  The first response is usually, "but what about rice?"  Because, everyone knows that Asians have been subsisting on rice for thousands of years, and they don't seem too worse for the wear.  And that is true.

But back to regular grains, for the time being.  Things like wheat, and barley, and rye...you know all the makings of a good beer!  First of all, all grains contain lectin, and lectins can damage the gut lining, increasing inflammation in the intestines and colon; and they are now known to contribute to autoimmune (AI) diseases like MS and lupus. Lectins are also thought to be a significant factor in insulin resistance and liver pathology. Dr. William Davis gives a nice little summary of lectins on his Wheat Belly Blog.

Additionally, grains contain immunoreactive proteins.  Gluten, one of these beastly proteins, is becoming a pretty well-known factor in celiac disease, irritable bowel syndrome, and other AI diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and eczema.  All grains contain similar proteins.  Oats have avenin, Corn has zein, and rice has orzenin. All these proteins have a high content of the amino acid proline. Proline makes these proteins difficult to break down via normal digestion.

Robb Wolf's book, the Paleo Diet Solution, goes into deeper nitty gritty about grains, their lectins and their proteins, but I found this little sidebar note to hit below the belt (courtesy of Tim Ferriss's site):

Sidebar: Oats, Quinoa, and False Friends
Hey Robb, I appreciate your concern, but my dietician told me Oats are gluten-free, so no need to worry about my morning bowl of oatmeal? Yep, I love oatmeal too, but it contains similar proteins to gluten. Cereal grains tend to have proteins that are high in the amino acid proline. These prolamines (proline rich proteins) are tough to digest, and thus remain intact despite the best efforts of the digestive process to break them down. The result is gut irritation, increased systemic inflammation, and the potential for autoimmune disease.

Corn has a similar prolamine called zein. Now you can heed or disregard this information as you please, but grains are a significant problem for most people. Upon removal of these grains, you will notice that you feel better. With reintroduction of grains…well, you feel worse. Keep in mind this inflammation is also a factor in losing weight and looking good, so don’t dismiss this if your primary goal is a tight tush. What I’m asking you to do is take 30 days and eat more fruits and veggies instead of the grains. See how you do. Not so hard, right? And just to head you off at the pass, let’s tackle two other grain related topics: “Whole grains” and Quinoa.
When we factor in their anti-nutrient properties, and potential to wreck havoc on our GI tract, grains are not a sound decision for health or longevity. For the purposes of our discussion, consider dairy and legumes in the same category.

Quinoa pops up frequently and the refrain goes like this, “Robb! Have you tried this stuff Quinoa (the pronunciation varies depending on how big a hippy you are). It’s NOT a grain! It’s fine, right?”

Well, you’ve likely heard the expression, “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…” Quinoa is botanically not a grain, but because it has evolved in a similar biological niche, Quinoa has similar properties to grains, including chemical defense systems that irritate the gut. In the case of Quinoa, it contains soap-like molecules called saponins. Unlike gluten, which attaches to a carrier molecule in the intestines, saponins simply punch holes in the membranes of the microvilli cells. Yes, that’s bad. Saponins are so irritating to the immune system that they are used in vaccine research to help the body mount a powerful immune response. The bottom line is if you think grains or grain-like items like Quinoa are healthy or benign, you are not considering the full picture.

 Finally, grains contain phytates.  Phytates are amino acids that essentially make minerals biologically unavailable to our bodies.  They are in a class of substances called antinutrients.  According to Amy Berger, "Phytic acid binds to minerals and makes them unavailable to the body. Specifically, it binds to things like calcium, magnesium, zinc, and iron. There are ways to neutralize some of the phytic acid in foods, like soaking, sprouting, or fermenting (hence the “sprouted grain” breads or natural sourdoughs you see in artisan bakeries), but it should be no surprise that the vast majority of commercially available grains do not undergo this kind of meticulous preparation."  So, your sprouted bread may contain less phytates, but still contains lectins, and immunoreactive proteins. 

Finally, there is the whole issue of microRNA.  Nature just published this interesting article:
http://www.nature.com/news/phylogeny-rewriting-evolution-1.10885

These microRNAs are present in all foods.  But the ones in grains have a particular ability to turn on and turn off different functioning aspects of our own RNA.  I'll save that for another post.

When I was about 19 or 20, I was diagnosed as being "allergic" to wheat.  I tried being wheat free for a few months, but it sucked.  In the interim, I moved back to WA where we started eating a lot of local vegetables, salmon, coffee, and beer.  Because we lived right down the road from the best organic bakery that side of the Mississippi, I began eating wheat again, and didn't seem to be suffering any problems.  I continued to eat wheat without "problems" until April of this year.  However, one of the most profoundly noticeable things that has occurred to me has been that the severely increasing allergic reactions I had been having right up until April have disappeared.  Last summer, eating raw vegetables became a nightmare.  It started years ago with Avocados, Kiwi, and Cantaloupe.  But over the years I started having rapid, immediate, and very uncomfortable reactions to radishes, turnips, tomatoes, carrots, jicama, cucumbers, and pretty much anything other than greens and onions.

Robb Wolf's book discusses food allergies, and how inflammation in the stomach, intestines, and colon (aka leaky gut syndrome) causes food allergies.  He also describes that on a paleo diet these allergic reactions might disappear.  Well, they have definitely disappeared for me.  With the exception of avocados, which still cause me to feel like I have a hangover within 12 hours of eating them.  I'm hoping that allergy will disappear too, but that may take some more effort.

To sum up, I'm learning so much about the brain, hormones, metabolic reactions, circadian rhythms, and blood work.  I can't possibly sum it all up in this one post.  I will try to continue with a better regularity, but I'm going camping, so it's going to have to wait!

Cheers!!

ps.  leave a comment if you like what I'm writing here, I'd like to hear what you have to say!
 

Grounding, Reconnecting, and Transitions

 "Both the Hopis and Mayans recognize that we are approaching the end of a World Age... In both cases, however, the Hopi and Mayan elders do not prophesy that everything will come to an end. Rather, this is a time of transition from one World Age into another. The message they give concerns our making a choice of how we enter the future ahead. Our moving through with either resistance or acceptance will determine whether the transition will happen with cataclysmic changes or gradual peace and tranquility. "
— Joseph Robert Jochmans


I am no believer in doomsday myths or non-native sensationalism surrounding the purported end of the world in 2012.  However, in my own life, I've noticed a huge shift taking place within my mind, my body, and my essence of what I would call spirit.  As a good Greener, as those of us who attended The Evergreen State College are called, I experienced a college life that blended my scientific observations with a creative flow that felt compelled by the stirrings of my soul.  When studying plants, fungi, and lichen, I did more than jot down a few observations to satisfy the scientific requirements at hand.  I immersed myself into the subject at hand, observing far more than physical details such as size, growing media, and color.  I sat in the environment and listened.  I felt the rain misting over my being and heard the droplets percolate deep within the ground as simultaneous ones fell from the massive trees above me.  I observed the many varieties of plants growing within the area, and looked for signs of animals that might have passed by.  I inhaled the smell of the damp and the moss and all the life and death that a damp Northwest climate brings.


I felt in tune with my surroundings in the Northwest.  I tried to experience my time there in three-dimensional quality:  sight, smell, taste, touch, and intuition.


During the end of my teens and my early 20s, my life was more moved by my depth of feeling of what was right and what was wrong for me.  For us.  We made decisions not by practicality, but by how things felt.  Intuition and an inner knowledge is as close as I can get to describing the process. As my Grandmother suggested to me, I walked within beauty.  I let beauty be my guide.


When we knew the time was right to move back to New Mexico, we drifted in on the ease of good timing.  We believed everything would work out, and so it did.  


As time went on, a career was rooted and I began to feel the first pangs of dissatisfaction. The job wasn't what I wanted, but how do I turn back and start over?  Maybe I should wait another year. Maybe two.  Maybe I should pay off my car.  Maybe we should see if I can get another job.  It's too expensive to go to school. It's too expensive to add an addition.  Maybe we should see if I get a raise.  Maybe we should find a new house.  


The fire settled that.  We got a new house. We had some funds.  But as quickly as they came into our life, they were gone.  A new home.  A baby.  Then another.  Back to my job to earn more money.  More time passes.  I struggle to remember my connection to the Earth, to the inner stirrings of my own soul.  I grew tired, foggy, clouded with habit and the exhaustion of being a hardworking Mama.


Until April of 2012.  


Suddenly, I woke up.


My habits needed to be dropped.  Change had to occur.  I no longer felt powerful, intuitive, sexy.  I felt worn down, run out, and gross.  I felt fat.  I still had plenty of physical energy, but it was my mind and my soul that was left without ignition.  My creative interests had all but fallen by the wayside.  My athletic interests were falling prey to excuse after excuse, and I no longer recognized myself in the mirror.


But I woke up on April 22, 2012.


I decided at that moment to adopt a Paleo diet template, to completely eliminate all grains and legumes from my diet, and to banish beer from my glass.  Within a week, I'd lost 7 pounds.  By 3 weeks I'd lost 12.  I suddenly had a desire to sit on the edge of the canyon outside my door at work.  I would slip down and just observe.  The ants crawling along the rocks, the lichen, the swaying of the trees, the ravens circling overhead, and the nuthatches crawling up the few remaining Ponderosas.


I began to feel the spark of intuition and power creeping back into my day.  A walk out to a favorite old Indian cave place reminded me of my regular cave walks that grounded me to my place, my Los Alamos.  


As I walked amongst the caves and the cliffs jutting red and skyward above me, I wondered what it must have been like to live there, and then, I realized.  I did.  I do.  I live here. 

What the Heck is a Keto-Adapted Athlete?

I just listened to a podcast interview of Mark Sisson, the author of The Primal Blueprint, and the host of Mark's Daily Apple. The interview was fascinating for me, because as I commit more and more to trying to become as close to ketogenic as I can, while still allowing myself the choice to have a beer on a special occasion, I have been constantly wondering how I will learn and adapt to ketosis and training for events at the same time.  So far, because I'm still in the very early stages of transition, and I've had a couple "cheat" days, where I've consumed more carbohydrates at a time than I allow otherwise, I do not think that I've been truly "ketogenic" for periods longer than 5 days in the past 7 weeks that I've been on a paleo diet template.

That said, I've noticed that I feel lighter and faster while running, and even on a day when I did a 5.5 mile trail run, I never felt like I was running on carb-empty.  I felt fine, great, actually.  But as I go through this process, and actually get back on my bike for more than 8 miles, I am sure that I will start to experience the various ups and downs of low-carb eating and how that may impact what I'm used to with regards to cycling, running, and swimming.  Swimming, so far, seems only improved.  I can sprint in the pool and feel relaxed, fueled, and fast (relatively, some people's warm-up speeds are my fast).  Running, well, I just don't run long enough right now to feel anything but good.  Although, I have noticed a difference in the way my muscles react during and after running, and it seems to be changing, and it's difficult to describe.

But cycling...that is a whole different ball game. Cycling leads to bonking.  I've bonked hard before, and it isn't pretty.  There is nothing worse than being 25 miles from home during a mountain bike and feeling like only an act of god will bring you home. So, I need to go bike. Long.  Without a pocket full of gels, but with something.  What?  That is my question.  Apples?  Dates?  Nuts?  A hard-boiled egg?  Nothing?

This is one aspect of the paleo-sphere that I'm super interested in -- fueling for the endurance athlete.  There is very little written on the subject that I've been able to find that answers the questions I have.  But I'm sure there is information tucked in places I haven't found yet.  Information like the following excerpt from the interview I linked to above:

Mark Sisson: It’s entirely possible to be a keto-adapted endurance athlete. I touched upon this briefly in my Paleo FX talk. One of the things about being keto-adapted is that it’s really a commitment. And once you’re keto-adapted and once you’ve made the necessary dietary changes, and some of the training changes to increase mitochondrial biogenesis and increase what we call the metabolic machinery that’s involved in using ketones and ramping up fat metabolism, you can go long periods of time at a very high output and not have to depend on glycogen stores or an exogenous feeding of glucose. It takes a little bit longer to do this, it takes months of training. But there are a number of athletes that are doing this now, including two of the guys who basically wrote the book on ketosis: that’s Stephen Phinney and Jeff Volek.  Both of them are athletes in their own rights. One is an Olympic lifter and the other one cycles, century rides. And they do this completely ketogenic. The problem comes when you think you’re going to be a ketogenic athlete and then you start to slide into, “Well, maybe I’ll have 100 grams of carbs, maybe 120 grams of carbs. Because what that does is… the cutoff is about 60 to 70 grams of carbs a day for an athlete. And once you get past that, then you shut off the ketosis. And the danger zone is when you’ve turned off ketosis but you haven’t supplied enough glucose to take over that new fuel partitioning. So the idea is that you’re either going to be a sugar-burning athlete taking in 300 to 400 grams of carbs a day  and training for the Spartan races, or you’re going to be 100% keto and keep the carbs at less than 70 a day. And in that middle ground lies epic failure for a lot of people. For most people, I would say. So you kind of have to pick and choose where you want to be. And if you’re willing to be on the side of that keto-adapted athlete, there is the possibility that you could drop the weight and the possibility that you’ll probably perform even better than if you were just depending on carbohydrate and glucose.

Abel James: So how much time would he have to give himself before a race to get adapted?

Mark: I mean, I think it’s a three to four month adaptation period. And during that time you have to ramp up your long-slow distance and if you’re doing trail running if you’re doing a little metabolic conditioning stuff you have to be very careful about how you do it and not go into the anaerobic zone too much. Now you can go anaerobic once in a while and come back down. I’m pretty much a keto-adapted athlete and I’ll play two hours of ultimate Frisbee on the weekend, and I’ll do a lot of sprints, but because I have a lot of time to rest in-between, the way you do in soccer, I don’t feel like I’m depleting glycogen I just feel like I’m burning fat and I’m able to completely do anaerobic, ATP-type sprints and recover very, very quickly and easily. I’m usually the kind of guy that, at the end of a two–hour game, I’m out –performing everybody because, you know, they’re all toasted. They’re all out of juice.

Abel: Now, what about carb cycling? That’s something that you used to do a lot of, I imagine, but you probably don’t anymore?

Mark: Well, I don’t do any carb cycling at all. I used to be…I didn’t even call it carb cycling, I was just at I carb a loaded every day of my life. I had 1,000 grams of carbs just about every day of my life for 15 or 20 years. And that’s because I was training as hard as I was. In my running days, that meant 100 to 110 miles a week, in my Triathlon days it was 50 miles of running and 250 miles of cycling and 25,000 meters of swimming. Plus anything else you had to do in the weight room and other things, too.

So, in those days, I just slammed down the carbs willy-nilly, a-la-Michael Phelps at 12,000 calories a day (which I think is a bit of an over-estimate). In terms of carb-cycling now, if you were a sugar-burning athlete, and I don’t mean to use the term disparagingly, but if you’re an athlete who has chosen to continue to rely on glycogen stores, then it seems that the best way to manage weight an fuel-partitioning is to do an appropriate amount of carbs, not an excessive amount of carbs. So if you’re a guy who’s doing one hard work-out a day, it’s probably appropriate that you take in 250 to 350, maybe 400 grams, but not much more than 400 grams of carbs per day. NOT 700 or 1,000 or 1,200. And in that regard, you can maintain that appropriate amount of carbohydrate intake and continue to train the way you do and, hopefully, in the process, ramp up your fat-burning machinery a little bit. You won’t be doing much with ketones, but you’ll be ramping up your fat-burning ability.

Then there’s another group of athletes who are trying to do what we call ‘train low, race high’. So they train on low glycogen stores, and they try to ramp up their fat metabolism. Again, they’re still not really taking full advantage of their keto-adaptation. But they’re training at low glycogen, and then, days before either a really hard work-out—maybe one that’s going to have massive amounts of intervals in it—or the day of a race, they’ll carb-up. They’ll fill their glycogen stores up. And, again, these are all choices, and I don’t purport to have the answer. Because if I did, I’d be coaching a world-class team of athletes. These are choices, and we’re still trying to work out the variables that give you the best possible outcome for that choice.

_____________________________________
Another good source of information about metabolism and ketosis is found here on Dr. Michael Eade's site, and which I found truly informative.

I'm new to all this, but I'm eager to learn as much as I possibly can.  The researcher in me is hungry for information, and I plan to sift through as much as I can.

 

Living A Cliff-Side Life

Paleo Diet, Primal Diet, the Caveman Diet, all these are synonymous with a growing trend in health through diet. Most healing modalities stress diet as the primary source of health and healing, but in this day and age of the "Standard American Diet" or SAD, healthful living seems to move further and further away from many peoples' grasp. Why is there such a disconnect between modern medicine and the health of Americans and other Westerners? How have we made such profound advances in technology and medicine, only to be failing at a fundamental level?  Diabetes and autoimmune disorders seem to be rampant and increasing. The interconnection between a failure to help people to recover from diabetes and other autoimmune dysfunctions leads to the ever-skyrocketing costs of insurance and medical care.

How did we end up at this point?

What if simple dietary changes and other simple, inexpensive therapies could reverse these conditions and lead people back to a life of health and abundance?

These are the kinds of things I intend to explore with this blog.

I'm learning about and implementing paleo diet principals into my own life and seeing profound change. If such change can happen so quickly, how might it help people who are really ill?

My curiosity is also piqued by wondering how paleo principals and cooking might affect overall health when living and training at altitude.

Join me in exploring this lifestyle and diet approach, and how it can be used to improve health and performance.  This is a new road for me, and I'm very curious about the sorts of challenges and intriguing things I will discover.

Welcome!

Going Paleo and Cold Thermogenesis

On April 22, 2012, I woke up and made a decision to change my lifestyle entirely.  I made a choice to stop drinking micro-brewed beer every day.  Additionally, I've been browsing through Jack Kruse's website, which I found by happen-chance through the American Herbalist Guild's yahoo list.  Through Dr. Jack's info, I was introduced to Robb Wolff's Paleo Diet Solution.  I think that somewhere along the line I had heard of the Paleo Diet.  But for whatever reason, I had never investigated what it was, or why it might be beneficial to me or others.  On that April day that I decided to make drastic changes to my own life, I decided that I could probably initiate some of the changes Dr. Jack prescribes on his website.  Remarkable, really, because a few weeks before, when I'd first read about the Leptin Reset Prescription I figured it would never work for me because there was no way I would give up drinking beer for 6 to 8 weeks to incorporate the protocol into my life.

Well, ha!

I'm still taking baby steps, but I feel my motivation for these changes growing day by day.

I basically went into grain-free, legume-free mode, and I'm incorporating a modified version of Paleo into my lifestyle.  I say modified because I'm still drinking cream in my espresso and having small amounts of cheese.  Dr. Jack doesn't dispute dairy entirely and recommends it for some people, but true Paleo does not include cheese. 

My body feels different.  I'm sure that I'm experiencing a state of ketosis, and I can feel the changes my body is making in relearning (maybe learning entirely) how to burn fuel differently.  Swimming feels different, strength workouts feel different.  I feel different. It's only been 3 weeks, so I'm extremely curious to know how this is going to evolve.

The other aspect Dr. Jack writes about is Cold Thermogenesis (CT) therapy.  This concept really tangled up my brain.  When I first read that people are voluntarily placing themselves in ice baths, even going so far as to wear ice vests during the day, I thought, "What?? Does losing weight need to be so contrived?" And I thought it was totally over-the-top crazy.  But, the tangled-up brain kept going back and reading about it some more.  And thinking, and reading, and remembering my own experience with cold, and how it makes me feel.  And the more I remembered things like skinny dipping in the Skokomish River at Staircase National Park in Washington State.  Skinny dipping in the Pacific on the coast of Oregon.  Skinny dipping in Puget Sound.  All these dips were done in the winter when it was cold and rainy, but when I would emerge from the water, I felt warm and toasty once back in my clothes. Northwest natives often bathed or swam in the abundant cold waters of their region and said that it boosted their immunity. Scandinavians are known for their cold water plunges, and part of me has always felt that cold water runs through my own veins.

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made, especially when reading about recent articles on brown fat, and knowing that cold water swimmers tend to have more of it than most people.  So, I've begun easing into CT and I'm beginning to think I need to up the ante starting this weekend.  I began with cold showers after swimming at the pool, and I find them not the least bit uncomfortable.  Last Friday I sat in the Jemez River for about 20 minutes, and found that to be quite enjoyable.  I wish the river was closer, or that the reservoir wasn't closed and empty.  It would be so much easier to do CT in local water than to buy ice and do it in my bathtub.  But I'm going to start that this weekend.

Already, I've lost 12 pounds.  If I wasn't actively involved in this process, I wouldn't believe that it could happen.  But 12 pounds in 3 weeks seems like an astonishing number. It leaves me fired up for more.  I also plan to get my bloodwork done, as apparently Paleo eating will result in drastically different bloodwork numbers when followed over a period of time.

All this has me pretty dang excited!

An Awakening of Sorts

Two weeks ago I saw two friends, on two different days, that I had not seen in over 20 years.  One, a dear, sweet friend I met the summer of my 14th birthday, while we were both at Hummingbird Music Camp. She was 12 and tiny.  It turned out she lived a few houses down from a close friend of my Mom's. And so I was able to see her more than I might have otherwise.  Over time our friendship grew, and we managed to remain good friends during high school, despite the distance factor. I lost  track of her while in my twenties.  I knew she had had a baby, and had been married, but nothing more.  Until Facebook came along.  Delighted to know she was well and still within a 2-state radius, I knew we'd connect in the future.  And finally, we did.  Over breakfast at Tia's, off the Plaza in Santa Fe.  A fitting place for a reunion.

The second friend I had met while living in Albuquerque between 1990 and 1991.  She was 25 and seemed worldly compared to my 19 innocence. She worked as a topless dancer in a bar off San Mateo.  She had the most adorable baby I'd ever seen and a rock and roll guitar player boyfriend.  I was at her apartment every day as Scott's band rehearsed there after 8pm, when the taco place downstairs closed. She often didn't go to work until 9 or 10 pm, so we'd hang out for a couple hours while our boyfriends played music.  Playing with the baby, talking about life.  It was easy for us to get along.  She often teased me about my bicycle riding, and more mountain-leaning lifestyle.  I was definitely not a comfortable city girl. After I went back to college in Washington State, I lost track of her as well.  Although I'd heard rumors of times not so good, after Facebook, again, I knew that she was well, happy, and safe. At an Eric McFadden show that Scott played drums for we reunited again, another perfectly fitting place to see each other after 21 years.

I rode a sort of old-friend high for the next week.  Scott left for Denver to play another gig, feeling very much like the rock star life was finally taking hold.  I tried to keep my daughters entertained, and conflict free, as it seemed like my youngest has been having a hard time being the youngest lately, and it's been sorta rough keeping them both happy.  Scott came back home on Saturday night, after experiencing some truck trouble, and cutting the weekend short by a day.  We drank good beer to celebrate a safe arrival without the need for tow trucks and added expenses.  And I drank way too much, after having spent the day in the sun all day, enjoying the PEEC Earthday Festival, and an earlier soccer game.  I hadn't eaten much Saturday, and thus woke up Sunday feeling awful.  I felt bad.  Not so much physically as mentally.  Mentally and emotionally hungover.

I couldn't quite put a finger on what was going on within me.  A stirring.  A wide awakening.  A change.

It felt strong, deep, powerful. I knew that if I didn't do something right away, that I was going to tumble into some sort of abyss that I would be unable to pull myself out of.  This wasn't the dark pit of alcoholism, depression, or self-induced angst.  This was different.  It was my life.  My habits, my choices, my perception of all that I am and all that I want to be.

I knew that if I didn't somehow make drastic changes to my life, I was going to continue down the road of being that person I do not want to be.  A fat, bitchy, heavy drinking slug.

I do not consider myself an alcoholic.  I have never had a bender, and I don't particularly like hard alcohol, with the exception of high quality tequila in a margarita, every now and then. I rarely drink wine, and usually wish I hadn't, as I seem to get a headache nearly instantly every time I do.  I drink quality micro-brewed beer.  I am particularly fond of craft lagers. I've been thinking for years that I should write a letter to New Belgian Brewery to thank them profusely for their production of Blue Paddle, the ultimate beer love for me.

Unfortunately, my taste for craft beers run deep and long.  .

As my metabolism has changed, first starting at age 38, when my pants began getting tighter and tighter despite the fact that I was exercising nearly 6 days a week, I realized that I needed to do something, if I were to continue to enjoy quality beer and still fit into my clothes.  So I began eating soup for breakfast or lunch everyday, and cut out bread from my diet.  I quickly dropped 17 pounds and my pants were looser and looser.

But, this past winter, I've put those 17 pounds back on and a whopping 20 more!!  Holy batshit, batman, this was not what I signed up for when I turned 40!  I was suddenly in a whole other pants size, and began feeling very self conscious when around my athlete friends, of which nearly all my friends are.

The real whammy for me, however, came about a week ago while trying on yet another pair of pants to wear to work, as I had none, and I saw my ass in the 3-fold mirror.  It looked like the ass of one of those fat people they show on the news while discussing obesity.  I felt like throwing up.

The following week, while doing my weekly strength class at the local YMCA, I was up front, where I don't usually mind being, but I saw myself differently, possibly more clearly in the mirrors.  I saw a roll of fat between my lower abdomen and the top of my thighs.  I saw what I was becoming, and it was not becoming.

So that Sunday morning, last week, I woke up with the mental and emotional hangover and I was suddenly flooded with the reality that if I don't do something NOW.  And I mean RIGHT-THE-FUCK-NOW, I would seriously be unable to reclaim myself.  I literally felt the breeze from the abyss wafting over my feet.

I kissed my daughter's hand, and I apologized to her. I promised her right then and there, that I was going to change my ways. 

I bought Stevia-sweetened soda and sparkling water, and decided to put my habit to the test.  And after a couple days, I realized that my craving in the evening for that frosty, ever-wonderful beer, was easily replaced with a cold, glass of sparkling beverage.  Calorie-free is a bonus.  And I realized that if I can substitute my favorite beverage with something comparable, at least in temperature and sparkleyness, I can change my eating habits as well.  So for the past week, I've been low-carb, and learning all there is to know about the paleo-diet, and some even more radical concepts such as cold thermogenesis and leptin resets.

I have been absolutely floored with motivation to change, this past week.  I am determined to continue forward on this pathway of what I would consider radical change.  As an herbalist, athlete, and conscientious foodie, I owe it to myself, my family, and possibly the earth to change in a manner that is befitting to who I think I am.

By not consuming the added 5000 or more calories last week, I lost 7 pounds.  That included 2 days of swimming, 1 day of strength, 1 day of running, 1 day of hiking, 7 days without beer, 7 days of eating low carb.  I rewarded myself with a beer last night.  It is my choice to become one of those people who enjoys beer, and not one who inhales beer.  Nearly all my friends enjoy a cocktail or a beer on occasion, but none of them consume it daily.  And certainly not in the quantities that I have.  So, for now, I'm done.  I'm done with the person that I was, and I'm moving forward into a more radical, more healthy, one.