Primal eating challenge, day 4

5:30 a.m., pre-workout: almond butter and blueberries, microwaved. Coffee with heavy cream.

8 a.m. Post workout immediate-stuff-into-my-mouth nomnomnom: pile of those sweet potatoes and apples from the other night.

Breakfast, half an hour later (hint: breakfast usually equals leftover dinner plus eggs): leftover andouille sausage plus three eggs and spinach. Oh yeah....and guacamole (there's a surprise). More coffee with heavy cream.

Lunch: salad containing mixed greens, one can of salmon (ingredients: wild Alaskan salmon and salt...that's it), coconut/curry sweet potatoes and guacamole.

Snack: Larabar (coconut cream...awesome).
Snack: sweet potato/apples. Yes, again. Oh, and some almonds, and a bit of Dubliner cheese. Yeah, we deadlifted today at CrossFit. I am effing hungry.

I may have to found "Guacamole and Sweet Potatoes Anonymous" soon. (Me: "Hi, I'm Steve." Group: "HI, STEVE!!!" Me: "It's hard to admit you have a guacamole problem, but I found myself speedballing guac and sweet potatoes yesterday in an alley behind Wegmans, and, well, here I am...." Group: "IT'S OK, STEVE!!!!" ....etc.)

Dinner: grassfed ground beef stir-fried with onions, peppers, garlic, asparagus and spices. Made it with four pounds of beef, so, even with the teenage son here for dinner, we will have leftovers.


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Primal eating challenge, day 3

We'll call today's theme: "sweet potatoes."

Woke up and ate some sweet potatoes that were cooked overnight in the crockpot in the coconut milk/curry that was left over from cooking the Thai beef yesterday, plus some of the sweet potato/apple combo that I cooked yesterday.

Took a two-mile walk with Jamie and the dogs (no CrossFit today),
then had a breakfast of: a few more hunks of sweet potato/apples and then three-egg omelet with spinach, bacon, and grassfed Dubliner cheese. Also had two cups of coffee before work, both with heavy cream. Wheeeee...I love caffeine.

Lunch: Thai coconut/curry beef, greens, guacamole, sweet potato. Yes, I put guacamole on Thai food. Sue me.

Snack: more sweet potatoes/apples.

Another snack: some grassfed cheese and some roasted almonds.

Dinner: greens sautéed in grassfed butter and spices plus andouille sausage on the grill.

I'll add onto this if I eat more, but, damn, that was a lot of food today... a lot of really great food.



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Primal eating challenge, day 2

5:30 a.m., pre-workout: frozen cherries and almond butter, heated up in microwave.

Breakfast: three eggs, leftover sausage, broccoli, guacamole.

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

1 cherry Larabar.

Dinner: Thai coconut-milk/curry beef and spinach. (Beef cooked for 12 hours in crock pot with 1 can coconut milk and 1 small jar of red curry paste).

Beverages over the course of day: coffee (both black and with heavy cream), water, seltzer.

Currently in crock pot overnight: sweet potatoes, peeled and sliced, in the leftover beefy coconut milk/curry sauce.

Just cooked in the oven: sweet potatoes and apples. Note to self: use cooking apples next time. These ones kind of melted. Whatever.

Postscript: I couldn't resist....20 minutes after getting those sweet potatoes and apples out of the oven, I dove in and had a few. Not the best eating plan to jam in carbs just before bed like that. The score: deliciousness (but still within the parameters of the challenge) 1 - good sense 0.

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Protein shakes aren't primal/paleo

I woke up this morning and was about to engage in the usual pre-workout routine when I thought, "Riiiiiight. Protein powder isn't primal." Every day that I head to the gym, I drink a protein shake that consists of three shots of espresso, some heavy cream, protein powder and water. I see better results at the gym since I started doing that. All those things are just fine during a primal challenge, except the protein powder.

Read the label. There's a lot of stuff in there that you can't find in nature. There is nothing "clean" about protein powder.

So what's a not-so-young crossfitter to do? The protein powder is out the window during this challenge. What's the substitute?

Enter my son Kevin the trainer, who suggests the following: put a bunch of frozen fruit (no added sugar, no ingredients on the label except "fruit") in the microwave for one minute. Add some almond butter and microwave for another minute. Bask in the deliciousness.

It tastes incredible. But is it nutritionally sound as a clean substitute for protein-powder in a pre-workout setting?

I think it is.

When I look for nutritional information, particularly in an exercise context, the first guy I turn to is Robb Wolf. He has a website and a podcast that I am addicted to. One of the things I have learned from him and Dr. Kurt Harris is that excessive fructose consumption is bad, but that if consumed in the pre-workout window, particularly if the workout is something glycolytically demanding like CrossFit, fruit (hint: contains fructose) can be a great source of energy. If you hit your system with good clean fructose from fruit (note: that's "good clean fructose" ... put down the can of Coke and step back slowly) and then workout soon thereafter, your liver treats the fructose more efficiently/differently than usual, and converts it into glucose --  an energy source. This is especially effective if you workout in the morning because the glycogen stores in your liver are low after a night's sleep. More on all that here.

Additionally, the almond butter is a good source of fat and (some) protein, and, oh yeah, I am still drinking coffee with heavy cream along with this delicious almond-butter/fruit concoction. I love the bump that caffeine gives me in the gym, and heavy cream only accelerates that bump.

So, I think, thanks to Kevin that I just cleared another hurdle in this particular challenge. I may miss the protein powder enough that I eventually go back to it after the challenge is done, but I have a good substitute to get me through the 30 days.

Postscript: I really sucked today in the gym, but I *think* that has little to do with subbing out the protein powder and more to do with crappy sleep last night. Continuing note to self: sleep is king. CrossFit hits the wall at 100 mph without proper sleep. You can't "nutrition" or "exercise" your way out of a bad night's sleep.



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Primal eating challenge, day 1.

Breakfast: three eggs, broccoli, Dubliner cheese, bacon, in a giant, beautiful skillet-y slurry.

Lunch: greens and spinach with guacamole and wild-caught salmon.

After playing some volleyball: a bigass salad from Chipotle containing white rice, shredded beef, salsa, guacamole, onions, peppers and lettuce. (You might sense a guacamole theme here).

Dinner: pork/garlic/herb sausage and asparagus on the grill plus some crazy great organic sauerkraut from Whole Foods.

Didn't have any "snacks" today, but with four fairly colossal meals there wasn't much need for that sort of thing. Eat like a predator, not a prey.

Beverages, over the day: coffee (with heavy cream), water, seltzer.

This blogging thing is, pretty clearly, gonna get dull really fast. Guacamole is, kind of obviously, my condiment of choice. Breakfast, you will soon see, is usually meat, veggies and eggs with either grassfed cheese or guac. Lunch is usually a salad with meat and guac. Dinner is meat and veggies, and yeah, sometimes guac too.

This really isn't rocket science. About the only thing I'm really going to miss for this month is the whisky and/or wine. I bought two bottles of single-malt whisky (Highland Park and Laphroaig, if you care) at the duty-free store at the Munich airport on Friday. As soon as I got home, I hid them in a closet so I don't have to look at them for the next month.

The 30-day Primal Eating Challenge

I've told you before about the way I eat: meat, veggies, fruit, good fats. Other than a little bit of white rice here and there, I don't eat any grains. It's usually called something like "paleo," and, when modified (as I do) to include some full-fat dairy, the going terminology seems to be "primal."

But you know how it is....a lot of us try to eat well, but sometimes we stray a bit. And then sometimes we do things like go on really cool vacations, and there's a little more alcohol in our lives than usual, and well....let's just say that my gym's decision to encourage all its members to do a 30-day clean-eating challenge is well-timed. Of late, particularly on a recent two-week jaunt to Germany (during Oktoberfest fercryinoutloud) I ate a bunch of things I usually don't -- bready things, beery things, more beery things, more bready things. We just got back from Germany two days ago and I am still a little sluggish to say the least.

So anyway, the gym version of the challenge starts next Saturday, but I decided to accelerate the schedule and start my 30 days right now.

Today.

So here are the rules: no grains, no legumes, no dairy, no alcohol. Eat meat, fish, eggs, veggies, fruit and good fat (almonds, avocado, etc.) Eat real food. No sugar. No processed crap. Those are the "paleo" rules. But here's the catch: if I follow those rules exactly as written, I will lose weight. I don't need to lose weight. I just want to clean up the minor mess from the minor dietary detours that I have taken in the last month or so. Really....I don't want to lose more weight. I have done that already. So here are my modifications, which morph this into a "primal" challenge,instead of a paleo one. All the above rules apply, except:
1. White rice is okay in small doses. It's just pure starch, and doesn't have the inflammatory properties of other grains (including brown rice). Simply put, for someone not trying to lose weight, a little white rice is harmless. And, like sweet potatoes (and white potatoes too, for that matter), white rice is a good source of clean post-workout, non-gluten-containing carbs.
2. Heavy cream, full-fat cheese and butter are okay as long as they are from grassfed sources. If they come from grassfed cows, those items contain wonderful omega-3 fats. You know...just like salmon. Again, this rule applies only if you are not trying to lose weight. And have I made it clear that I do not want to lose any more weight?

Honestly, this is not going to be tough. OK, I'll miss alcohol, but, otherwise, I already eat this way *almost* all the time. But the gastronomic detours of vacation have left me craving a cleaner diet. So, as I said, the gym challenge is well-timed and, to keep myself fully on the straight and narrow (and maybe offer a little encouragement to others who are doing the same challenge) I am going to blog the whole damn thing here. My plan is that if it goes down my pie hole in the next 30 days, you're going to read about it here.

So let's go.







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I just got on Twitter, and I am not sure what it all means

@stevethrash62


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"Enjoy yourself; it's later than you think" (thereby avoiding the REO Speedwagon reference that everyone else is using)

We don't get a lot of hurricanes around the Philly area. Every now and then one comes by in the slightly used-up form of a tropical storm. There is a bunch of wind and rain, and we go about our business.

Irene seems a little different. First of all, it's hitting the NJ coast at still-hurricane force. Plus, we've had a metric ass-ton of rain in the last few weeks. The ground is saturated even before we get the extra foot of rain that is predicted. So I am a little concerned.

From a purely selfish perspective, I am principally concerned about two things: losing power (we have a well, so no power means no water) and getting water in the basement. Either or (shudder) both would be a monumental pain in the ass.

But you know what? It's a tired old cliche, but there is absolutely nothing we can do about either of those calamities.

And I guess that is the meager point of this meager post.

These storms reduce things to the basics. You can't go anywhere, so get to know your spouse again, or a little better. Have a drink. Hell, have a lot of drinks, just not so many that you can't leap into action if you need to get stuff done in the hurricane department. Eat stuff you wouldn't normally. My food obsession of the day is Ben and Jerry's Bonnaroo Buzz, which, somehow, the supermarket still had in stock just two hours ago when I decided I couldn't live without it, and my drink of choice at the moment is a ten-year-old Ardbeg that is a damn work of art.

This is kind of cool.

And, yeah, I am well aware that it is likely to turn a whole lot less than cool very soon.

A wise man once said, "Buy the ticket; take the ride." I didn't order this particular ticket, and the ride is coming whether I want it or not. Might as well try to enjoy it.




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Rick Perry? Really?

Back in November, I offered the opinion that while a number of the GOP presidential candidates -- or what were then the *potential* GOP field -- were worthy of your scorn, one in particular deserved your outright fear and condemnation: Rick Santorum.

Well, that race has taken some interesting twists that I didn't foresee back then. Mitch Daniels never jumped in. Jon Huntsman became the (unlikely-to-be-nominated) adult in the race -- imagine... a GOP presidential candidate who boldly accepts evolution *and* climate change as fact. And the Rick Santorum moralizer wing of the race had to make space for both Michele Bachmann (and her husband) "praying away the gay" and Rick Perry running a campaign, so far, that is long on bluster, prayer rallies and generalities and really short on specifics.

Bachmann and Santorum are two peas in a pod -- religiously-fueled zealots so far on the fringes of the mainstream that I like to think, based on their performances so far, that they couldn't possibly win a general election.

But I am a little worried about Rick Perry. 

And then I began to think about *why* I am a little worried about Rick Perry.

It's because social conservatives freak me out, and science-ignorant social conservatives really freak me out.

I've never done The Big Politics Post that I've contemplated a number of times, but let's just say that my instincts run generally toward the libertarian without lapsing into either a man-crush on Hayek (although Salma's just peachy with me) or silly taxation-is-theft sloganeering. I dig my freedom in many forms and resist assaults on it from the right *and* the left -- and so it repels me when liberals want to control the content of the airwaves in the name of some sort of government-sanctioned "fairness" (look here if you want to see me raise a middle finger to Jay Rockefeller regarding that sort of thing) *and* when social conservatives want to tell us what adults we can marry. But lately, there seems to be a particular resurgence of the social-conservative moralizer as GOP presidential candidate, and when that gets paired with a science-ignorant stance that dismisses evolution as a "theory," it's downright frightening. The Rick Perrys of the world want to tell me what to do in my personal life *and* keep our kids in the dark about scientific fact by distracting them with non-science talk of "intelligent design" in a science classroom.

And don't think I'm not aware that the left often wants to tell me what to do too. It's why, while I am a registered Democrat, I am always willing to consider voting for any smart, reasonable person regardless of party. If Jon Huntsman were the GOP nominee, I'd have some thinking to do as the November 2012 election came closer. But I don't think Huntsman is going to get that nod. Instead, it is looking more and more like it'll go to Perry, one of a number of GOP presidential candidates who want to moralize at me from a social-conservative stance while laughing in the face of established science.

So it's looking more and more like the president is going to be my candidate for 2012. It'll be a vote cast more from the standpoint of repelling the dumb and preserving gridlock (rather than heading down a right-wing road) than it will be some sort of "I love Obama" statement. But if Rick Perry is the GOP nominee, I may not have much choice. Pun intended.

Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light

So, you may recall that a relatively short time ago, I said something about letting my then-kinda-crazy 85-year-old dad make his own choices in life, like to live alone even under circumstances that would constitute elder abuse if they were imposed upon him by others. I swore I wouldn't override his will even if he was acting against his best interest. I also used a qualifier that amounted to something like: "as long as he is competent to make that call."

How quickly things can change.

I was away two weekends ago on a king-hell fantastic hiking weekend with one of my sons in New Hampshire. I even blogged about it here. I also gave my dad a call just to check in on him, and things weren't right. I mean they *really* weren't right.

He was telling stories about having fallen (not terribly novel for him) but the explanation was different than the usual routine of just having misstepped. Instead, a phantom "he," later identified as his handyman, Rich, had boobytrapped the house and even stood over my dad laughing as he struggled to get off the floor. The same "he" was a frequent visitor. "You hear him in the early morning hours. Tap tap tap on the walls. Trying to drive me crazy." Oh boy. Then he said Rich had stolen his shoes, his keys, a pair of sneakers and his wallet. I had a feeling I might find them pretty easily.

So when I got back to the Philly area, I took a day off from work and headed over there to see just how far gone he was. I don't think was quite prepared for what I found. First, when I walked in, he said, "Rich, is that you?" When I told him Rich had quit days earlier (true story), he said, "Oh, he will be back. He always comes back at night." And then I started surveying the place. Furniture overturned in the living room. A broken fluorescent bulb in another room on the floor. Then, I started looking for a few of the missing items. Within minutes, I found them all. (OK, in the interest of accuracy, I should admit that there's still one shoe strangely unaccounted-for). So I said, "Hey, dad, you feel like there's anything wrong?" and his answer made me jump -- a wild, crazy cackling laugh followed by a denial that anything was amiss. My father doesn't cackle. Jesus.

And then I went into the kitchen. A wash of heat hit me from the stove. It was like a textbook on dementia come to life. There was a kettle, empty of water, blackened on the bottom, resting atop a red-hot burner on the (thankfully) electric stovetop. Double Jesus.

From that moment on, I went into what a friend calls "TCB" mode. Taking care of business. It was the melting kettle that did it, for sure. I went upstairs and called 911, and I was initially a hair apologetic: "Um, I am calling with what I *think* constitutes an emergency, but you tell me...." I told the operator what I had found, and she said, "Oh sir, I am calling you an ambulance."

I met the cops and EMTs outside and we put together a story to tell my dad, about how they were under orders to take him into hospital for an evaluation, etc. He balked, but ultimately gave in.

He isn't ever going to go home.

The battery of tests showed a prior stroke that we knew about, in theory, but, apparently, its effects may be spreading. Plus, they suspect another more recent one that couldn't be confirmed because he moved during the MRI.

The old guy fought *everything* in the hospital. He didn't eat for the first day or more. Despite the fact that he couldn't stand up, even with his walker, he physically attacked staff both of the first two nights and they started him on anti-psychotic meds to control his behavior. Later they added anti-dementia meds to the stew, after a diagnosis of "progressive dementia." He tried to lie his way out the door multiple times. But his ability to deceive others effectively had passed him by. My favorite attempted piece of misinformation involved a claim that "Dr. Doolittle" had authorized his discharge and could we please get going? How the nurse didn't laugh, I have no idea. Instead, she just calmly said, "Oh, you know, there really isn't a Doolittle on our staff of doctors. I know them all and none of them is named Doolittle." Katie, you are Nurse of the Year, if not the whole damn decade.

Ultimately, after a few days, a zillion tests, multiple meetings between me and various docs, nurses and social workers -- all of whom were several degrees greater than merely awesome -- my father was moved, against his will under a power of attorney that has me in control of his affairs, to a local nursing home in a locked dementia unit.

And, somewhat amazingly, when I visited him yesterday -- my first time seeing him at this place -- he was calmly sitting in a room full of similarly situated patients, enjoying a sandwich and watching the Phillies game with great interest. Mind you, when he gave me an update on the game, he had every single detail wrong, except for the inning, but trust me....reality isn't what we are looking for here. Safety and contentedness are all we can hope for and he seemed to be almost basking in both. Yeah, he still thinks he is going home. He even dictated a grocery-shopping list to me to fill in anticipation of his return home. But, again, I am not interested in attempting to correct him into understanding his plight at this point. I pretended to make the shopping list, and he seemed satisfied. I am also not stupid enough to think that every visit will go so smoothly. It's a work in progress, but at least now the artist's canvas sits in a safe place instead of dangling off a cliff as the work goes on.

So what can you learn from all this? Hell, in general, I don't know. I guess mostly hope your parents aren't as stubborn as my dad. But there are a few things that made this easier than it might have been. First of all, have a plan. Don't go into this stuff like a deer in the headlights or an ostrich hiding in the sand. When I first got to the hospital this time, I knew he was not going home again and I made sure docs, nurses and social workers were all on board for that approach. It required acting massively Type A and taking the bull by the horns and all that, but it paid off in spades. In fact, that was a multi-day project, but it was worth every second of effort. Secondly, have a power of attorney ready to go. If you have elderly parents and they haven't signed a document to give you control of their affairs if they falter mentally, you need to get that shit done. Now. Better yet, when you get the thing, read it and make sure it is detailed and gives you power over everything if necessary. The less you have to go into court (hope that isn't at all), the easier/smoother things will be. Finally, think about long-term-care insurance. My dad has it and it means that he will have fewer financial issues over this nursing home.

I was driving home from work today, and I *know* I was driving fast, and I *know* it was a sunny day, and I *know* the first Squirrel Bait album was soothing my cerebral cortex like only its Huskers/Mats hybrid roar can do, but there was something else along for the ride today that made me feel just a little better than all that wind and sun and beautiful volume could on their own -- the realization that maybe, just maybe, a very stressful chapter of my life was coming to a less-stressful close.

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