Primal eating challenge, day 23

Lemme guess.... Your Monday began with some vague griping about the day of the week, work, the weather, the boss. Mine began with checking the website and finding out we were deadlifting today. More reasons why CrossFit makes you happy. There is no lift so joyful as the brutal simplicity of the deadlift.

We did a weird rep pattern, though: 8,6,4,2. I got 315 pounds for four reps, but failed at 365 for two. I shouldn't be too bummed out about that. 365 is my current one-rep max. Frankly, with the end of a cold still bugging me and slightly less than perfect sleep last night, I shouldn't have been so bold.

Live and learn.

Woke up to the smell of a four-pound lamb roast in the crockpot in coconut curry milk.

Pre-workout: blueberries and almond butter. Black coffee.

Immediate post-workout: coconut water, a little sweet potatoes and apples. Sadly, it's the end of that combo until I make more.

Breakfast: the last two nights' dinner over eggs, plus bacon.

Lunch: The crockpot lamb, over greens, with sauerkraut. There was nothing short of amazing about this.

One pecan Larabar. Some almonds. A little grassfed cheese.

Dinner (pictured below): crockpot lamb, asparagus, butternut squash, acorn squash. Both squashes are flavored with cinnamon, grassfed butter, nutmeg and cloves. Jamie made this. Jamie rules.







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A quick thought about "paleo making you more sensitive to gluten."

I have occasionally heard a complaint that eating primal/paleo seems to make a person *more* sensitive to gluten. You know....you stay away from it long enough that a blast of gluten hits you harder than it ever did back in the fat/flabby/insulin-resistant/pre-paleo days. And, for some reason, this concerns some of us?

Try this on for size: a pack-a-day smoker lives it up one day and smokes two packs. He doesn't really feel much different. On the other hand, a non-smoker (or, if you like, a long-ago former smoker) smokes a single cigarette and feels like fermented ass. Would this lead you, the non-smoker, to the conclusion that maybe you should smoke more often?

See, I knew you'd get it.

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Or the sunnier version....

“We are born and we die.
No one cares, no one remembers, and it doesn’t matter.
This is why we laugh.”
--J. Stanton

Yeah, I like this one much better. It ends with laughter.
Heh.

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Yup

In 100 years, barring something extraordinary, no one will know anything about you or care that you ever lived. Impermanence: It's permanent.






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Primal eating challenge, day 22

It seems that roadblocks were thrown in my way at every turn today: strange traffic doings, thanks to yesterday's strange weather doings (snow in October? Really?); simple conversations bogged down by weirdness; even the puppy is bizarre, barking at some phantom menace in the yard.

So we turn to the food for some sense of normalcy....

Breakfast: wild salmon, eggs and green peppers, plus black coffee

A lemon Larabar.

Lunch (on the road): Chipotle salad with carnitas, lettuce, salsa, guacamole, peppers and onions.

Some frozen peaches heated up with almond butter.

Dinner: steaks and asparagus on the grill. More sauerkraut too.




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Oof....

Are you kidding me? We *just* got back from Berlin a few weeks ago, and now I learn that there is a paleo-only restaurant there called Sauvage!?!? More reasons to go back.


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Halloween workout and the primal eating challenge, day 21

Today was our annual Halloween workout at CrossFit Aspire. The one day a year they tell you to dress like an idiot. I complied, quite willingly. It was easy: dreadlock wig/cap and a Bad Brains t-shirt. Ridiculous, but I loved it.











As for the workout, it was a blast:

Weighted Pullups in sets of 5 were the strength component (I got sets of five with 47 pounds in a weight vest that I was wearing, but when I went for 57 pounds, I only got a set of three...next time) followed by a partner WOD! I love team WODs. And somehow, they let Jamie and me be a team. What we lack in strength in our 49-year-old bods, we make up for with ace planning. This was the workout:

10 Rounds – no setting the KB down
10 KB Swings
10 Goblet Squats
10 Burpees
10 Jumping Lunges

Your partner had to hold the kettlebell while you did the burpees and lunges (or vice versa). We just each took a round and alternated. Boom. It was fun, and more tiring than it may look.

Oh, and we all looked awesome.







This all prompted a lot of eating today.

Pre-workout: black coffee and a bowl of sweet potatoes and apples.

Post workout immediately: 16 ounces of Vita Coco coconut water. Nice.

Breakfast: More black coffee and then eggs, last night's lamb/veggies and bacon.

Snack while watching Nebraska take Michigan State to the woodshed in college football: almonds and a little grassfed cheese (my first dairy in days...feeling a lot better).

Lunch: more of last night's lamb/veggies, over greens with guacamole.

Some Morning Thunder tea, then some herbal tea while cooking. Missing a good Saturday night while-cooking drink, I am.

Dinner: Whole Foods chorizo with green peppers and spinach. And sauerkraut. I love sauerkraut, and it is so good for your digestion. This was the super clean stuff from Whole Foods. Some frozen blueberries too, heated up in microwave.

Three weeks down.

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Primal eating challenge, day 20

Breakfast: blueberries with almond butter, then eggs, spinach, paleo meatloaf and bacon. Coffee. Black.

Lunch: wild-caught salmon and guacamole over greens. Sweet potatoes and apples.

Best just-got-home-from-work snack ever: bacon and eggs dumped on sweet potatoes and apples. Oh my god....

More coffee. Black.

Dinner: grassfed ground lamb with curry powder and turmeric plus broccoli and asparagus. Oh, one Whole Foods fresh turkey sausage with sundried tomato, garlic and basil.








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The power of bacon

Interesting and nutritious breakfast (eggs, meat, spinach):





Becomes interesting, nutritious, sexy and awesome (the aforementioned plus bacon):




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Q: Will CrossFit help me beat this cold? A: I wish.

I hope I have made it clear that I love CrossFit. It has been (and continues to be) very very good to me. Along with dialing in sleep and diet, my focus on CrossFit as my principal fitness regimen over the last 18 months has done a hell of a lot for my body composition and overall fitness.

But CrossFit is intense and demanding. All the reasons it kicks my ass and whips me into shape are all the reasons why I am not at the gym this morning.

Why? Because of this damn cold I am fighting off.

My experience with exercise and a cold back in the pre-CrossFit days was pretty simple: if the congestion was "above the neck," I would exercise; if it was in my chest, I would back off and rest. But I have not found that to be a successful strategy with CrossFit.

It all gets back to "intense and demanding." When I am beaten down, particularly when I am on a sleep deficit from waking up coughing ten or so times overnight, going into the gym and doing, say, "Fran" or "Helen" even at my 49-year-old's pace, is not terribly advisable. (And no one loves Helen like I normally do). Even worse is cranking out something monstrous that takes 20 to 30 minutes to complete. The long workouts tax the immune system -- and when the immune system is down and out already, it's a recipe for staying sick even longer.

So here I am, sitting in the kitchen, cup of coffee (black, no heavy cream while I am sick) next to me, as I type away while my gym is blasting out a workout. I am going to take more Mucinex, eat well (day 20 of a 30-day challenge) and try and get a truckload of sleep tonight.

I hate skipping a workout that I otherwise intended to do, but it's a smart move. And it increases the chances that I will be there tomorrow morning, clad in a ridiculous "costume" (of sorts), ready for the Halloween WOD. Well, hell yeah.

Man, I hate having to be an adult....

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