I’m happy that I’m walking more, I’m happy that I’m feeling better I’m also friggin ecstatic that I weighed in at an unbelievable 175.4 this am. Blew my mind. I’ve lost 4 pounds this week.

I have mentioned PhysicsDiet a few times now and haven’t had a chance to elaborate much. I’m such much of the web community I hang with are savvy about most online trackers etc. and so many will be familiar but I’m really liking using PhysicsDiet to track my weight so I thought I would say a little something about it and explain what these crazy pink graphs are that you will likely be seeing more of on here.

In a nutshell, data is collected when you weigh in daily or almost daily (the software can extrapolate missing data points). I’ve been getting up and hopping on the scale pretty much first thing in the morning. I do it without even thinking now and before I’m truly even awake in the morning. The data gets entered into your fitness log in your PhysicsDiet profile (you can enter weight or fat percentage or both if you like) and the software (membership is free) does the rest.

Your “current weight” is a reflection of the moving average of your daily weights with an emphasis on more recent data points. In the graph below you can see what my average weight was at any given time by viewing the blue line. The black line is simply a trend fitted for ALL the points available and is a bit less informative but shows clearly in my graph that I’ve been gaining just a wee little bit in general over the last month. Times when I was “in the green”, my daily weight was lower than the current moving average and when I was “in the red” I was headed above the current average. Clearly I’ve spent too much time in the red and not enough in the green lately.

That’s okay though. What I love about this is that it is helping me take the daily fluctuations in stride. I really don’t fret weighing in anymore and I don’t get all nervous about how I live the day before “scale day”. I like that because there is nothing sustainable about eating all funny on Fridays just because I am planning to collect some data about myself the next day and then if the moon is wrong I end up defeated anyway and I retaliate by eating chocolate or something else to say “screw you scale”! convinced that trying to impress the scale with my deprivation was pointless (and it IS!!). This just didn’t work for me and at times I had given up on the scale altogether and banned it from my home. That didn’t work either because I do need to lose some weight and the data helps guide behaviour. What PhysicsDiet helps me appreciate is that the only thing that is important is the trend. Not the individual points and that appeals to my wee little scientifically inclined mind.

Overall, what I see on the graph below makes a lot of sense in terms of what I’ve been doing with my food. Times when I was paying more attention to eating well, I lost. No rocket science there, just common sense but for the first time in a long time I’m not stressing about the numbers.

Carbs a bit more on target today. Hit 98 grams mostly from veggies like carrots and cauliflower and swiss chard but also a bit from avocado and some apple I cooked with cinnamon and topped with a bit of whipped cream for a treat… man is it good. Total Calories came in at 1694 according to fitday and lots of fat, 61% to be exact! eek Oh well it was all good natural stuff like coconut milk and oil, olive oil and from the avocado and bit of whipped cream of course. Certainly, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking that all this fat has got to be bad for me but I feel better! And of course the whole idea of dietary fat heading straight for your vascular system is not representative of anything that really occurs and fats, after all are an important component of cells. It is just growing up in the 70s and 80s and continuous low fat brain washing but where has that gotten us? LOL I’m sure I’ll have a lot of days lower than 61%.

I don’t plan to post details on every day of living primal, just updates now and then and I’m keen to monitor my progress and keep track of how I’m feeling. Today I felt great. A bit low on energy mid afternoon but I was tackling something particularly hard at work so maybe it was just related to that. I might have waiting a bit long before eating lunch as well. I’m generally feeling well. Not really craving sugar much and my appetite isn’t off the charts like it has been.

Exercise today was 7 kilometers of walking including a 20 minute + slog up a big hill.

I got enough sleep last night… good restful sleep. That and the lower carbs yesterday seems to be a good recipe for feeling good. This morning I’m feeling fresh and happy and more confident/less paranoid than I have in a while. Carbs were very low yesterday. Fitday tells me around 55 grams. I’m aiming for around 100 grams for now. There will be more veggies today and I’m planning to run and packed an apple to snack on after the run along with some almonds.

Wasn’t too hungry this morning but I made a great discovery. My vanilla protein powder mixed with cocoa and hot water makes the best creamy hot chocolate you could hope for and with 4 grams of carbs and 18 grams of protein I’m happy with that. It isn’t very sweet but I don’t like hot chocolate too sweet anyway. I got up late again this morning (oh but the sleep felt good) but I can see a lot more  cooked breakfasts in my future. I’ve never been one to care about breakfast food at breakfast and will eat just about anything so it might be interesting to see what I come up with.

My weight was down 0.6 of a pound from yesterday this morning. I don’t pay much attention to the daily fluctuations now that I’m using Physics diet and weighing daily but I do hope this is a sign of things to come.

I’m still wondering what to do about my running. I’m thinking of turning my two shorter weekly runs into 30 minute interval sessions with sprinting and walking and then doing the longer weekend run as an easy run with walk breaks a la Galloway in order to keep it really easy and with a lower heart rate. I’m thinking that a decent cardiovascular fitness base should still develop given that type of structure to my weekly running especially if I up my walking mileage. I’m sure that many endurance runners will tell me that I’m cruising for an injury that way but I can always try it and see what works. I know my body pretty well and my good pains from my bad pains so we’ll see.

Anyone else out there going primal? Drop me a note and let me know how it’s going.

I did pretty well today. Feeling good. It was supposed to be a rest day so I didn’t exercise - need my rest.

I also got a late and crazy start to the day and so my first food was lunch which was bacon and eggs. I love omletes with tonnes of veggies stir fried up in and middle. I’ll be doing this one again tomorrow.

Supper was curried veggies - cauliflower, silverbeet and celery in a sauce made from onions and tomatoes and lots of spices with coconut milk and just now I had some home made applesauce (no sugar added just a LOT of cinnamon) with some whipped cream on top. I would have liked to get even more veggies in but it wasn’t in the cards today.

Oh and for afternoon tea I had a gluten free cookie. LOL I know that isn’t primal but you know what. That is okay. I did it because a very sweet colleague of mine brought me a gluten free cookie that she had baked with her gf friends in mind. You just don’t turn that one down folks! Some times you just eat the cookie and enjoy the love. It was really good too and not too sweet so probably okay anyway.

I’m still feeling a bit of a sugar hangover from the weekend. Weighed in at 179.6 today so holding steady still. We’ll see what this week of less carbs has to say about that.

Time for bed now. Still no kettlebell swinging in the near future since my cheese grater mangled knuckle is still unbendable. I had a doc look at it today and was told to just make sure to keep the dressing dry and not bend the finger… yeah that is fun when your two choices for work are type or pipette. I will walk and run tomorrow hopefully the drizzle will cooperate and give me a some walking to and from work windows.

So I’m working out some menu planning and thinking about my sugar addiction and what has worked best in the past to fix it and I keep coming back to this and the ideal of the Primal Blueprint that is much talked about over at Mark’s Daily Apple (maybe it should be Mark’s Daily Steak but I digress) and I think I’m gonna give it a try. I’m a bit late to the challenge and I’m not sure that I’m ready to change my exercise too radically right away* but from a food perspective and aspects of the exercise approach I will to give it a go.

*Running is one of the only things that is really working for me right now and I can’t justify ditching that until I have something else reliable to replace it with.

I won’t get into too much detail on the idea of the Primal Blueprint I’ll just encourage you to pop over to MDA and give some of his well written articles a read. What I will comment on it what it is going to mean for me. What changes will I be making? When I am on track, I eat a lot of veggies and lean protein anyway and I already avoid gluten containing grains. I also eat a lot of fruit and lots of dairy products which is a relatively recent thing for me. I will basically be cutting back on the dairy, keeping an eye on my fruit intake and cutting out almost all sugar and processed food. On the exercise front I’ll be trying to walk a lot more and get more weight training and high intensity sessions in. I’m not ditching the running even though it isn’t really recommended. I don’t run high mileage anyway and sprinting is really hard on me at my weight so I’ll tweak that a little as I go and keep running for now as a medium intensity activity and if I need to cut it back I might turn some of the runs into run walk combos to decrease the likelihood of injury. In about 10 weeks I’ll be on my feet all day every day so the more running/walking I can build up to the better.

Why primal? Well it might not be the answer that many are looking for but I like some structure and guidelines and when it is a plan that others are succeeding with I find it easier to give it an honest try without tweaking it out of existence before it’s had a fair go. Also the plan fits well with the sort of things my body seems to appreciate (not as sure of this on the exercise front but in terms of food for sure). Higher fat helps me with my cravings, grains tend to give me heartburn and send me looking for a candy store and I’ve been wondering if the high levels of dairy I’ve been eating are right for me for some time now.

Do I buy the “primitive” man thing? I have to admit that I don’t but that’s alright. If the logic behind it works for you, go for it. I don’t think it is essential to the rationale behind the blueprint anyway. Many of the lifestyle suggestion do have scientifically viable support in terms of physiology so I doubt it really matters why they arose. When it is all said done I’m sure we are more adapted to an apple than a drink full of HFCS but “Primal” and “natural” as a surrogate for optimal just make less sense to me given my tendency to see things through the eyes of an evolutionary biologist. I won’t get into it too much since I would probably put people to sleep but animals, humans included, under “wild” conditions (whatever that means nowadays LOL) rarely get near anything you could describe as optimal from a physiological point of view. Stabilizing in terms of demographics, sure, but optimal, I doubt it. Besides that, if I were “primal” I’d be set to wrap up the extreme end of my lifespan right about now and in my teens and twenties I honestly didn’t feel too bad on a diet of white bread, pb&j, chocolate bars and beer - it definitely wouldn’t have impeded my ability to mate and reproduce if I’d been inclined ;).

I’m worried about living longer and better during the years of my life that were generally less relevant to my “primal ancestors” so looking to them for guidance on how to accomplish this doesn’t make much sense to me. That’s okay because eschewing processed food, additives, refined sugar and myriad ways modern life pours destruction on so-called “food” DOES make a lot of sense and the end result would be the same regardless of why you think it works.

You can read more about the Primal Challenge here and here

I was just subjected to the music video for “I swear” by All for One. It made me tear up a little thinking about my hubby (in a good way). If you knew me and understood my hate for that song and songs like it you would know that this means I am truly round the twist.

Today has been mostly a write off. Amazing that a little cheesegrater incident could have such an effect but I can’t bend my finger at all without the giant hole popping back open again and blood starting to ooze out so I’m lying low and feeling under motivated.

Potluck last night was a pretty good time and I didn’t over eat at all. I did have some sugar and wine and not a lot of either but I’m paying for it today. The effect is really strange and I’ve been suspecting sugar to be the culprit for a long time on this one but now, watching it’s onset and coupling it with what I’ve been eating, I’m convinced. It is all mood. I feel paranoid and panicky at the same time and also strangely like the world is out to get me. A weird combo of uber victim combined with anger and some sort of sense that I ought to be doing something urgently that feels like a low grade panic, not an attack, just in the back of my mind. Like all particularly frustrating onsets of panic it is of course directed at nothing at all and so just what I should be doing has not been revealed. At the same time I’m feeling this way, I’m also feeling totally under motivated when it comes to the idea of doing anything that doesn’t involve eating more sugar. I’m not giving in to that but the craving is there and it is strong. Shitty eh! LOL

One interesting aspect of this is the realization that as far as I can recall, I used to feel this way all the time. It only seems out of the ordinary now because I don’t usually feel this way when I avoid sugar and get lots of exercise. It is as extreme as if I had taken some kind of mood “de-hancing” drug. I’m calling the place I go after sugar “La La Land” because where ever I am right now lacks reason and coherent thought. I’m pretty sure that all of my acquaintances and colleagues don’t hate me (can’t even bring myself to say friend right now because right now I’m feeling like I don’t have any). I know this is irrational but it doesn’t make it all feel any less real. I’m shocked and saddened at the idea that this would have ever felt normal. It isn’t normal or healthy. I’m making this observation and taking the time to write about it because I need to work on cementing this association between eating sugar and these bad feelings. My brain doesn’t remember these things when I’m tired, poorly planned and faced with a mid afternoon vending machine raid. I want to learn to remember. I did this with cigarettes and finally successfully quit after umpteen tried. I did this with wheat and gluten and finally learned that gluten = sick for me. I can do this with sugar but I have a feeling this one might be a little harder.

Lack of sleep is the enemy. Lack of planning is the enemy. How can I be proactive here. I can plan. I’m working on a menu right now and although it will probably take me ages with this messed up finger, I’m going to slowly work on preparing some food that will help me with my week (none of this prep involves cheese grating thankfully). I can’t swing a kettlebell because I can’t grip anything with my right hand. I might be able to do some push ups though. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll be able to manage yoga.  But even if I can’t do these thing, I can walk and I can run and I plan to do lots of both this week by maintaining the running and getting back on the walk to work band wagon.

This week’s menu is going to be high in protein and relatively high in fat but low in carbs. Not crazy crazy low but low enough that I will be able to survive the call of sugar. I’m hoping the menu planning will keep me on track and that weight loss will finally start again. When I look back honestly at my past few months I can see that the only time I was really planning my food well was at the beginning of June and I also started losing at that time. I eventually cut the Calories too low and that set me up to fall apart so I need to recreate that level of planning and but add Calories so that I don’t crash. I’ve had enough drama and enough whinging I need to just HTFU and get this done. I know what to do I know I will feel better and I know that seeing that scale start to move down is going to feel awesome.

Okay warning… tale of minor yet gross personal maiming below… don’t read if you are squeamish.
Oh a bonus points for anyone old enough to know what the title of this post is a nod to.

I was making a rushed lunch right now. Getting ready to head out the door for a Saturday afternoon in the lab. I made some veggie and meat chili and I was grating some cheese for the top when my hand slipped off and I grated the knuckle off my index finger of my right hand!!! Just the flesh but still!!!! OUCH fuck Ouch. It is bleeding a lot and the meat over my knuckle is now shaped like  shredded cheese. Fun. Way deeper a wound than I was aware a cheesegrater was capable of. Oh well… no pipetting for me this afternoon.

Slept a little later today. Still feeling exhausted though, in a sort of way that makes it hard to think clearly about how to approach all the stuff I need to get done. Especially when I think of it all at once. I need to learn not to do that. I turned to chocolate tonight for a boost and I know that if I’d have been better rested I wouldn’t have reached that way.

I’m not going to judge myself. I’m trying to learn instead of condemn. Food is food. It is a nutrition and can act like a drug. We all need it but there are things we eat that we definitely don’t NEED. Humans are also hard wired to associate good feelings with things like carbs and fat. I’m not being BAD when I turn to chocolate to boost me up. I’m doing what I’m conditioned to do. More and more I’m coming to understand that I need to stop judging myself so harshly for this and realize that the behaviour I most need to correct is the chain of events that lead up to putting that chocolate in my mouth, even when I consciously know that I’d rather not eat it. I punish myself and beat myself up about chocolate when I really should be setting myself up to sleep more and plan better and fill the void with other nice things. I still haven’t picked my decadence for this week but I haven’t forgotten about it.

The next month or so is going to be filled with working 7 days a week, many many hours a day and I cannot live with letting my fitness slip. I didn’t work out yesterday and only went for a walk today and it feels nasty. Don’t want to do that again, need more exercise. I’m craving it now more than chocolate. So I’ll be working a lot and exercising whenever I can. I’ll need some good planning to deal with this and I’ll need to deal with this sleep issue of mine.