Blah

2010-05-15T21:56:00.000-07:00

I'm now like 156 lbs. Some of that is muscle, most is fat. Shows what binging does to you. Gotta cut the cals.

Holy crap!

2010-01-27T17:37:00.001-08:00

I'm now frickin 146 lbs (just under 5'10). Last year I was 176. That's 30 pounds. I was 165 all through high school when I was super active. Now I'm nearly completely sedentary! Insane.

The Quest for the Perfect Burger

2010-01-07T21:58:00.000-08:00

The cheeseburger has always been my favorite food. It is a testimony to the awesomeness of paleo that not only do I get to still eat cheeseburgers, I'm encouraged to (w/o the bun of course).

I had all the ingredients, so I set out to achieve cheeseburger perfection.

Here's what I had to work with:

1. Grass-fed beef patty
2. All-natural bacon, no nitrates, from Creston Valley Meats
3. Grass-fed, organic, sage cheddar from Jersey cows
4. Organic jalapenos, pasillas, lettuce, onions, and avocado

The process:

The result:

I slapped some avocado on top, squished it between two large lettuce leaves, then gorged.

It was good.

I love paleo

2009-12-26T08:24:00.000-08:00

My breakfast today: decaf coffee with a crapload of cream, then three pieces of bacon and two eggs sauteed in butter, topped off with a few walnuts.

The Two Meals a Day Paradigm

2009-12-16T02:19:00.000-08:00

I had troubles overeating awhile back -- I couldn't resist snacking, and found it hard to get a good fast going. Then I stumpled upon an interaction between KGH of Pa Nu and a commenter who had the same problem as I (she was consuming 500 calories more than him a day). He recommended disciplining her metabolism. First, work on skipping breakfast, then try to eat only lunch and dinner, and stop snacking.

So I tried it out. I found eating two meals a day a bit difficult at first, but once I started adding more fat to my meals, easily adjusted. Fat, I've found is the key to satiation. Avocado has become a staple. Also, with the no snacking policy enforced, I didn't have to constantly worry about eating, enabling me to concentrate on other things.

After a week or so, I begun experimenting with 1 meal a day, which, as long as I waited a good 4-6 hours after waking and had a hardy fatty meal, came quite naturally as well. By the time the next meal roles around, I have a solid 22 hour fast going, with few hunger pangs during the whole thing.

I feel like I've made a sort of evolutionary leap as a paleo dieter. Two / one fatty meals sauteed meals a day with little fruit, make for a healthy, tasty, time-efficient, EM2 (evolutionary metabolic milieu -- from Pa Nu of course) compatible food routine. I'll probably tweak things here and there, but the basic framework I think is here to stay. It's essentially Pa Nu, but it took lots of experimenting and reading to get here.

The Hadza Diet

2009-12-04T13:08:00.000-08:00

Just read this National Graphic article on the Hadza -- the last hunter gatherers in Africa. They live in one of the most inhospitable regions of Tanzania, so they've remained fairly untouched by civilization (though they do trade honey for tobacco and weed).

Very insightful look into the hunter gatherer lifestyle and diet. The most interesting part, for me, was the baboon feast. They ate everything, savoring the fatty parts the most (they especially liked the paws) -- of course, the real delicacy, which went the the tribe elder, was the head. Their dessert? Brains.

This confirms my suspicion that fat, especially saturated fat, was central to the primal diet.

Tubers and wild fruit, which was gathered by the women, seem to have composed the bulk of their diet, especially during the wet season. However, the dry season enabled them to eat a lot more meat, and the author noted that the quantity of meat intake varied between tribes.

Their diet is essentially: tubers, fruit, and game.

I'll excerpt what I found to be the most interesting parts. Scroll down toward the end for the baboon feast.

Onwas is an old man, perhaps over 60—years are not a unit of time he uses—but thin and fit in the Hadza way. He's maybe five feet tall. Across his arms and chest are the hieroglyphs of a lifetime in the bush: scars from hunts, scars from snakebites, scars from arrows and knives and scorpions and thorns. Scars from falling out of a baobab tree. Scars from a leopard attack. Half his teeth remain. He is wearing tire-tread sandals and tattered brown shorts. A hunting knife is strapped to his hip, in a sheath made of dik-dik hide. He's removed his shirt, as have most of the other men, because he wants to blend into the night.

[...]

Onwas was interested in a picture of my cat. "How does it taste?" he asked.

[...]

For Onwas such navigation is no problem. He has lived all his life in the bush. He can start a fire, twirling a stick between his palms, in less than 30 seconds. He can converse with a honeyguide bird, whistling back and forth, and be led directly to a teeming beehive.

[...]

The Hadza do not engage in warfare. They've never lived densely enough to be seriously threatened by an infectious outbreak. They have no known history of famine; rather, there is evidence of people from a farming group coming to live with them during a time of crop failure. The Hadza diet remains even today more stable and varied than that of most of the world's citizens. They enjoy an extraordinary amount of leisure time. Anthropologists have estimated that they "work"—actively pursue food—four to six hours a day. And over all these thousands of years, they've left hardly more than a footprint on the land.

[...]

Traditional Hadza, like Onwas and his camp mates, live almost entirely free of possessions. The things they own—a cooking pot, a water container, an ax—can be wrapped in a blanket and carried over a shoulder. Hadza women gather berries and baobab fruit and dig edible tubers. Men collect honey and hunt. Nighttime baboon stalking is a group affair, conducted only a handful of times each year; typically, hunting is a solo pursuit. They will eat almost anything they can kill, from birds to wildebeest to zebras to buffalo. They dine on warthog and bush pig and hyrax. They love baboon; Onwas joked to me that a Hadza man cannot marry until he has killed five baboons. The chief exception is snakes. The Hadza hate snakes.

The poison the men smear on their arrowheads, made of the boiled sap of the desert rose, is powerful enough to bring down a giraffe. But it cannot kill a full-grown elephant. If hunters come across a recently dead elephant, they will crawl inside and cut out meat and organs and fat and cook them over a fire. Sometimes, rather than drag a large animal back to camp, the entire camp will move to the carcass.

Hadza camps are loose affiliations of relatives and in-laws and friends. Each camp has a few core members—Onwas's two sons, Giga and Ngaola, are often with him—but most others come and go as they please. The Hadza recognize no official leaders. Camps are traditionally named after a senior male (hence, Onwas's camp), but this honor does not confer any particular power. Individual autonomy is the hallmark of the Hadza. No Hadza adult has authority over any other. None has more wealth; or, rather, they all have no wealth. There are few social obligations—no birthdays, no religious holidays, no anniversaries.

People sleep whenever they want. Some stay up much of the night and doze during the heat of the day. Dawn and dusk are the prime hunting times; otherwise, the men often hang out in camp, straightening arrow shafts, whittling bows, making bowstrings out of the ligaments of giraffes or impalas, hammering nails into arrowheads. They trade honey for the nails and for colorful plastic and glass beads that the women fashion into necklaces. If a man receives one as a gift, it's a good sign he has a female admirer.

There are no wedding ceremonies. A couple that sleeps at the same fire for a while may eventually refer to themselves as married. Most of the Hadza I met, men and women alike, were serial monogamists, changing spouses every few years. Onwas is an exception; he and his wife, Mille, have been with each other all their adult lives, and they have seven living children and several grandchildren. There was a bevy of children in the camp, with the resident grandmother, a tiny, cheerful lady named Nsalu, running a sort of day care while the adults were in the bush. Except for breast-feeding infants, it was hard to determine which kids belonged to which parents.

[...]

If a hunter brings home a kill, it is shared by everyone in his camp. This is why the camp size is usually no more than 30 people—that's the largest number who can share a good-size game animal or two and feel decently sated.

I was there during the six-month dry season, May through October, when the Hadza sleep in the open, wrapped in a thin blanket beside a campfire—two to six people at each hearth, eight or nine fires spread in a wide semicircle fronting a brush-swept common area. The sleep groupings were various: families, single men, young women (with an older woman as minder), couples. During the rainy season, they construct little domed shelters made of interwoven twigs and long grasses: basically, upside-down bird's nests. To build one takes no more than an hour. They move camp roughly once a month, when the berries run low or the hunting becomes tough or there's a severe sickness or death.

No one sleeps alone in Onwas's camp. He assigned his son Ngaola, the one who had waited a few days by the tree, to stay with me, and Ngaola recruited his friend Maduru to join us. The three of us slept in a triangle, head to toe to head around our fire, though when the mosquitoes were fierce, I slept in my tent.

[...]

Why grow food or rear animals when it's being done for you, naturally, in the bush? When they want berries, they walk to a berry shrub. When they desire baobab fruit, they visit a baobab tree. Honey waits for them in wild hives. And they keep their meat in the biggest storehouse in the world—their land. All that's required is a bit of stalking and a well-shot arrow.

[...]

Onwas's wife, Mille, is the first to wake. She's wearing her only set of clothes, a sleeveless T-shirt and a flower-patterned cloth wrapped about her like a toga. She sees the baboon, and with the merest sign of pleasure, a brief nod of her chin, she stokes the fire. It's time to cook. The rest of camp is soon awake—everyone is hungry—and Ngaola skins the baboon and stakes out the pelt with sharpened twigs. The skin will be dry in a few days and will make a fine sleeping mat. A couple of men butcher the animal, and cuts of meat are distributed. Onwas, as camp elder, is handed the greatest delicacy: the head.

The Hadza cooking style is simple—the meat is placed directly on the fire. No grill, no pan. Hadza mealtime is not an occasion for politeness. Personal space is generally not recognized; no matter how packed it is around a fire, there's always room for one more, even if you end up on someone's lap. Once a cut of meat has finished cooking, anyone can grab a bite.

And I mean grab. When the meat is ready, knives are unsheathed and the frenzy begins. There is grasping and slicing and chewing and pulling. The idea is to tug at a hunk of meat with your teeth, then use your knife to slice away your share. Elbowing and shoving is standard behavior. Bones are smashed with rocks and the marrow sucked out. Grease is rubbed on the skin as a sort of moisturizer. No one speaks a word, but the smacking of lips and gnashing of teeth is almost comically loud.

I'm ravenous, so I dive into the scrum and snatch up some meat. Baboon steak, I have to say, isn't terrible—a touch gamy, but it's been a few days since I've eaten protein, and I can feel my body perking up with every bite. Pure fat, rather than meat, is what the Hadza crave, though most coveted are the baboon's paw pads. I snag a bit of one and pop it in my mouth, but it's like trying to swallow a pencil eraser. When I spit the gob of paw pad out, a young boy instantly picks it up and swallows it.

Onwas, with the baboon's head, is comfortably above the fray. He sits cross-legged at his fire and eats the cheeks, the eyeballs, the neck meat, and the forehead skin, using the soles of his sandals as a cutting board. He gnaws the skull clean to the bone, then plunges it into the fire and calls me and the hunters over for a smoke.

Onwas then reaches into the fire and pulls out the skull. He hacks it open, like a coconut, exposing the brains, which have been boiling for a good hour inside the skull. They look like ramen noodles, yellowish white, lightly steaming. He holds the skull out, and the men, including myself, surge forward and stick our fingers inside the skull and scoop up a handful of brains and slurp them down. With this, the night, at last, comes to an end.

[...]

I am also invited to bathe with the men. We walk to a shallow, muddy hole—more of a large puddle, with lumps of cow manure bobbing about—and remove our clothes. Handfuls of mud are rubbed against the skin as an exfoliant, and we splash ourselves clean. While Hadza have a word for body odor, the men tell me that they prefer their women not to bathe—the longer they go between baths, they say, the more attractive they are. Nduku, my Hadza language teacher, said she sometimes waits months between baths, though she can't understand why her husband wants her that way. I also discover, by listening to Mille and Onwas, that bickering with one's spouse is probably a universal human trait. "Isn't it your turn to fetch water?" "Why are you napping instead of hunting?" "Can you explain why the last animal brought to camp was skinned so poorly?" It occurs to me that these same arguments, in this same valley, have been taking place for thousands of years.

[...]

There was little reaction. The Hadza are not sentimental like that. They don't do extended goodbyes. Even when one of their own dies, there is not a lot of fuss. They dig a hole and place the body inside. A generation ago, they didn't even do that—they simply left a body out on the ground to be eaten by hyenas. There is still no Hadza grave marker. There is no funeral. There's no service at all, of any sort. This could be a person they had lived with their entire life. Yet they just toss a few dry twigs on top of the grave. And they walk away.

Bison Patties Are Amazing

2009-12-04T12:57:00.000-08:00

Just had a bison patty from Grass Land Beef -- holy shit they were good. Much more flavorful than beef.

Paleo Blog

Blah

Holy crap!

The Quest for the Perfect Burger

I love paleo

The Two Meals a Day Paradigm

The Hadza Diet

Bison Patties Are Amazing