A Day in the Life of… warts and all. I’ll go into meticulous detail assuming you have the same knowledge of food and cooking as I did 2-20 years ago.

Here are:

Part I (breakfast),

Part II (lunch),

Part III (dinner),

Part IV (the witching hour).

I wrote this series to show you that as Uncle Lew often says, we all have feet of clay. I have my paleo heroes out there. But they aint perfect. And certainly neither am I. The pursuit of perfection has made me quite miserable in my life, including my pursuit of paleo perfection.  I’m much happier taking a different tack.

Fasting once every 3 days, working out and doing a sprint session once or more every week, not eating anything Neolithic, embracing grassfed meat and wild caught seafood at all times…  all of that sounds well and good, it doesn’t always work out like that.

I’m not perfect, and neither should I want to be. I work out once every 7-21 days. Sometimes it’s 2-3 times a week. I don’t like going into workouts exhausted from work. I sprint once every 7-21 days. I buy meat at the grocery chain store from time to time, usually organic, but when the beef is labeled vegetarian cornfed… yeah, I know the deal. When I have time (and money) to buy the grassfed and wild caught, I do. When I don’t, I don’t.  I’m progressively getting better.  I do an 18 hour fast from 3pm on Friday to 9am on Saturday once a moon, sometimes more often though, maybe once every 7-14 days randomly skipping a meal, usually breakfast.

These are the things that cause me to go off the rails:

-Dairy. Usually cheese and cream up regulate my desire to have some corn chips.

-Mexican food. It’s impossible to have Mexican without the rice, corn chips, and tortillas. Try you will, not succeed you will. In the 4-5 times I’ve eaten Mexican, I was successful in avoiding all of that 50% of the time, the other 50% of the time it led me to continue with other stuff, usually stuff involving a lot chips with salsa and drinks with salt on the rim.

-Cheese cake. Cheese cake leads to donuts and other kinds of cake.

-French fries.  When I have potatoes, any kind of potatoes, it leads to French Fries cooked in PUFA’s.  If I have a potato I know I’m one step away from justifying a big sack of fries at a fast food place.

If there’s cheese in the house, a pound of it will be eaten after 8pm if the Witching Hour strikes me. That’s where I depart company with lacto-paleos. Great quantities of cheese makes my intestines a bit sore the next day, mucus in my throat and nose, and given that cheese will spike my insulin levels, I’m probably not improving my insulin sensitivity that much.

Cheese and potatoes, again may work for some in moderation. I don’t know how to do moderation with cheese and potatoes, because unlike meat, seafood and vegetables, I can keep eating both of these items until my belly extends like a dumb horse that eats the overturned barrel of oats until he nearly dies. I’m a HUGE fan of Robb Wolf, bordering on Kathy Bates. His recommendations for eating yams I can deal with. If I only buy 1-2 yams a week at the grocery store, and thus there are only 2 yams in the house, I will stop at 2 yams. If there are 5 yams in the house and the Witching Hour strikes… I’m eating 5 yams.

I have a system that I do the shopping on Saturday or Sunday. I freeze large portions in small freezer bags (e.g., 3 thighs, 5 burgers, 1 steak, 2 pork loins). All in all, I’ll make about 14-21 bags of these various kinds of meat on a Saturday after shopping for the upcoming week’s consumption. Each evening throughout the week I’ll rotate 1-2 of these frozen bags from the freezer to the fridge so that by the next evening or the evening after next it’s thawed out. I always have 1-2 packets of bacon ready to go in the fridge.  I cook (usually grill meat) in the evenings for what I’m having that evening for dinner, and what I’m having for lunch the next day.  I chop my salads for that evening’s dinner and the  next day’s lunch while listening to Jimmy Moore, Robb Wolf or whatever music may strike me.

If you look at the foods I listed for breakfast, lunch and dinner it’s easy to imagine my grocery list. It’s really simple and doesn’t really change that much from week to week. I usually over buy eggs, bacon and all the other kinds of meat. I try to only eat food from these items that I bought myself at the store. And sticking to just these items from my grocery list is really simple most of the time.

After all, it’s a lot of nutritious food, good variety, and though it may be bland for some people at first compared to their preferred sprayed on cheese puff flavorings, over time my taste buds have thrived on this diet. I try once every couple of weeks or so some of the awesome recipes on Girl Gone Primal or the countless other sites out there. Son of Grok is always a good place to search, too.  Marc’s Feel Good Eating is another great one.  Being a paleo foodie is cool, and when opportunity meets desire, eat like a paleo gourmet.  But just eating good real food isn’t a consolation prize, it’s not falling short.  I don’t find eating my way boring at all, though some have told me they couldn’t get by on it.  I’m fancy in the kitchen about once a week if I’m doing the cooking.

These unnecessary feelings of falling short of paleo perfection lead to running off the rails in a big time manner. Because if you fail, you might as fail big time, right?

This is how I’ve increased my lean muscle mass and sustained and maintained a weight loss of 65 pounds for the last 21 months from my high back in the spring of 2008. It’s not a lot of work. I work out and sprint as often as I can, without stressing if it doesn’t happen. I’m working on doing an intermittent fast more often, but not beating myself up. When I can go to bed without resorting to 8pm bacon or chocolate, it indeed is a much more pleasant sleep and a more energetic next morning. I’m learning to deal with the Witching Hour, and if combating it with bacon, or another burger, or 90% Lindt chocolate keeps me from paleo sainthood, that’s OK.

I could be stronger, leaner, faster, and even more metabolically fit.  But right here and right now, it’s a trade off to playing, spending time with family and for now working some long hours.  What I have noticed is that every week despite my leanings that I could have done more, that I could have done better… my body composition and mental acuity improves progressively.  There’s no rush.

I have experimented and played with the typical day in the life of meals that I have written about here.  I’m not afraid or opposed to try something new, or sticking to what I know shaking my fist that I’m right… this simply has worked for me.  Milk and potatoes for me are gateway drugs to ice cream with cookie dough and fried meats with flour based gravy.  I cook with butter, and lots of it, and that’s where my dairy line is drawn.  I don’t need raw milk for growth like I don’t need creatine.  But, that’s just me.

If following some of these “A Day in the Life Of… protocols” work for you, that’s great, because it’s rather easy.  It’s 100% effective!  I’m telling this diet is fool proof, it’s the best the world has ever seen!  In the history of mankind nothing like this has ever come along!

But that really just means, it works for me.  It works for me, for now.  It may change.

It took me awhile to develop a flexible diet/lifestyle that worked for me.  You can use this as a starting block, or just a template.  If something already works for you, then do what you’re doing and be happy.  But don’t be afraid to vary it up, especially if life asks you to deviate from your routine.  Find what works for you, be more creative than I am, or be less. In the end, I don’t know how to give you directions to the freeway, all I can tell you is how I get there.

There is no one way.  There is no perfection, only disappointments in your perfect little plan which tried to predict the future but yet didn’t adhere to the outcomes from the probabilities that you had all worked out.   All of us have Feet of Clay, even folks who wear Vibram’s.  

My next series will be on my strength training, which will mainly be a recount of my top influences. Not sure when it will drop, but it will come.

A Day in the Life of… warts and all. I’ll go into meticulous detail assuming you have the same knowledge of food and cooking as I did 2-20 years ago. Here are Part I (breakfast), Part II (lunch), and Part III (dinner) of A Day in the Life of…

The Witching Hour

I don’t have any alcohol Sunday through Thursday evenings. I don’t drink beer anymore at home. On the rare once-every-6-months that I do drink a beer, it will be at a restaurant or someone’s house if wine is not available.

WINE

I’ll have 2-4 glasses of wine on Friday and Saturday nights. On Sunday through Thursday nights, I’ll stick with my water. The only three liquids that I drink are water, coffee (between 7am-2pm nearly daily), and wine (Friday-Saturday).

I try (and the key word is try) to have a 12 hour gap between my last bit of food in the evening until I eat breakfast the next day. This 12 hour gaps is achieved probably 3-4 times a week. For those other 3-4 times a week I succumb to the Witching Hour, and this is what happens…

CHOCOLATE

I tend to have 90% Lindt chocolate about 3 times a week. Friday and Saturday nights either it’s a bar stretched over 2 nights, or a bar each Friday and Saturday evening. These weekend chocolates are purchased when I buy the wine. Probably about one night a week, somehow I end up stopping by the store to get the chocolate. Usually, it’s when I have a couple of more hours to do of work at home, and I’ll have some chocolate with my another ill-advised cup of coffee.

BACON

About two times a week on a work night around 8pm-9pm I eat bacon. Anywhere from 5-10 strips of it.

Yup. I do.

What I really want is some chocolate, or some wine or some Reese’s peanut butter cups.

The chocolate aint a bad choice at all but I try to save that just for Fridays and Saturdays. The wine is simply not an option on a worknight with a 5am wake-up. Maybe for some people it’s not a big deal to have one glass a night, I just can’t handle it every night. I start feeling too wino-ish, I don’t like for wine to be a crutch for stress relief. I like my wine to complement a good meal with a good atmosphere.

And the Reese’s, I gave up eating peanuts completely and only eat nuts of any kind very rarely. The only chocolate I eat is if it has 70% and above cocoa content.

I have acquired an aversion to eating fruit right before bed, and rarely have it for dinner. I make it a point especially in the evening not to eat anything that spikes my blood sugar and insulin levels… Well other than the wine on the weekends, and the high quality chocolate, which has a sugar content 6.5 times less than a standard American chocolate bar. So, that leaves bacon.

And if bacon isn’t available, I’ll eat part of the meat that I cooked for my next day’s lunch. Or, I’ll grill or fry up a hamburger.

And that’s my strategy for dealing with the Witching Hour. For anyone in my modest readership dealing with compulsive eating issues, overeating, anxious eating, etc., especially in the evening, this is how I do it. It may work for you, it may not.

Any fruit that I may have in the course of the day I try to have it just for breakfast and lunch. The exception is a sprinkle of raisins in my evening salad (if I have one). Bacon or another helping of meat or fish, it beats mainlining sugar. That simple.

A Day in the Life of… warts and all. I’ll go into meticulous detail assuming you have the same knowledge of food and cooking as I did 2-20 years ago. Here are Part I (breakfast) and Part II (lunch) of A Day in the Life of…

Dinner

See Lunch. I try to sit down for dinner no later than 7pm. I usually eat dinner between 530pm-6pm when I’m going to work early and may return home early. On Saturdays and Sundays I prefer to have dinner around 5pm.

MEAT

Seriously, I grill up either chicken, pork, hamburgers or steak. I may grill up some sausage from time to time. The one thing that’s different is that I’ll eat seafood. I either broil or grill salmon, or fry up some scallops. Usually when I cook seafood, I’ll cook enough to eat for the next evening, as well. I don’t like eating seafood at lunch, it stinks up the plastic bowls. I eat seafood about 2 times a week for dinner. I have the goal to making that 3-4 times.

On occasion, I’ll marinate my meat with a BBQ sauce and maybe have some sauce on the side, too. At the grocery chain store I buy the bulk of my food there are literally dozens of BBQ sauces. There is only one brand that has sugar instead of High Fructose Corn Syrup. Same thing with ketcup. Many different kinds of ketchup, only a couple of brands with sugar instead of HFCS. These 2 items, BBQ sauce and ketchup, are practically the only remaining packaged/processed foods that remain on my menu.

I know full well that they have sugar, and that to excess they’ll spike my blood sugar and insulin. Since I usually only have BBQ sauce and ketchup in the evening, and in particular it’s the evening when I want to avoid spiking blood sugar and insulin, I try to have just no more than a squirt or two.

I want to go into starting my slumber with a full belly of nutritious food so that during the 12 hours between eating:

-I don’t have elevated levels of blood sugar and insulin

-I burn as much fat as possible

-Autophagy occurs

I’ll stop there and encourage you to note as always that these concepts are from the Prof’s work. If I have a workout the next morning, I want to hit it right. Excessive eating from the previous evening won’t put me in the state I want to be in for that morning’s workout. I want to heighten my insulin sensitivity after draining my glycogen stores after a good weight workout. There’s a lot of other positive adaptations, but I’ll post on that another time, or refer you to where you may piece together the diet and its relation to working out.

SALAD

See Lunch.

If I didn’t have a salad at lunch, I’ll nearly always have it for dinner. If I had a salad at lunch, I probably only have it 50% of the time at dinner, and will then usually eat a lot more meat.

While I’m preparing dinner, I prepare what I’m going to bring for lunch the next day, e.g., meat and salad. This is key. I’m tired from work and want to just focus on the here and now regarding dinner. It’s a struggle to make that extra effort to cook for the next day’s lunch. However, when go to bed in the evening, and lunch is already ready and waiting for me in the fridge for when I wake up the next morning, I go to bed with much less stress. Yeah, what an exciting life! But it’s the little things like this that keep me on track.  

A Day in the Life of… warts and all. I’ll go into meticulous detail assuming you have the same knowledge of food and cooking as I did 2-20 years ago. Here is Part I of A Day in the Life of…

Lunch

I don’t carry a lunch pail or fancy velcro lunch sack. I either lose them at work or they live in my car. I usually carry my lunch in a plastic grocery bag.

MEAT

The night before I cook on the grill one of the following options and this is what I take to work in a plastic container:

-2 chicken thighs

-2 pork loins or some other cut

-3 hamburgers (no cheese, no bun)

-Steak

I put this meat into a plastic bowl with a lid. The key here is to cook what you’re going to take for lunch the previous evening. If I don’t do that, I usually buy my lunch, which costs 3 to 4 times more to get the exact same thing I could have cooked at home.

SALAD

On average, 3 out of 5 work days, the previous evening, I’ll chop up a salad and place it in the refrigerator. All or some of this is what I put in my circular bowl with the blue lid:

-Mixed greens

Either the Natural Select brand in a plastic box, or I buy some good lettuce and peel off some as I go along in the week. I almost always go with this.

-Spinach (usually in the Natural Select plastic box)

1 out of 5 salads I’ll use Spinach.

-Red or Green Pepper

I cut half of a pepper and put the other half in a sandwich bag for the next day. I almost always go with this.

-Broccoli

I buy a big head of broccoli and tear off 2-3 pieces, chop of a bit of the stalk, and then chop up the broccoli for the salad. I almost always go with this.

-Cucumber

I usually cut off about ¼ to 1/3 of the cucumber, cut them in thin circles, and then cut them into 1/8ths that resemble little triangles, or Spanish gold coin bits for the Austrians amongst my modest readership. I almost always go with this.

-Celery

In every salad bowl I prepare for lunch, I’ll tear off 2 big pieces of celery. I chop off the ends just a bit, I don’t like how the whiter part tastes at the bottom of the celery. Then I’ll tear these 2 piece in half and put them into the salad bowl. I usually eat them at the end of the salad.

-Bacon

I hardly ever eat bacon in my salad for lunch, but maybe 2 out of 5 times for dinner I’ll cook up about 4-5 strips of bacon to crumble in my salad.

-Raisins

A sprinkle a handful of raisins into my salad more often than not.

-Carrots

I put about 4-5 unchopped baby carrots in my salad about 1 out of 5 times.

Strawberries

I cut up about 2-3 strawberries in my salad about 1 out of every 10 times.

-Onions

Probably 1 out of 10 salads I’ll chop up about 1/3 of a raw onion to put into the salad. Most of the time I fry up onion in butter to serve on top of whatever meat I’m eating.

-Avocado

Probably about 1 out 10 of my salads I’ll put avocado. You have to wait until it’s brown/black and a bit squishy. I usually cut in 1/4ths, scoop out the green meat out of the skin with a spoon, and then cut those pieces into chunks.

-Tomatoes

I usually don’t buy tomatoes. If they’re on my salad at a restaurant, I’ll eat them. I don’t dislike them, but in my readings of nightshades, I somehow just grew accustomed to not purchasing them.

-Cheese

I don’t ever put cheese on my salad anymore at home. Only at restaurants when it comes with the salad will I have cheese.

-Salad dressing

Vinaigrette, that’s all I ever put on my salad.  But probably only do so one every 5 times. I don’t buy any store bought salad dressings anymore. They have too many PUFAs, especially soy. There are two things I go way out of my way to avoid. High Fructose Corn Syrup and anything with Soy. It’s usually pretty easy when you avoid all packaged foods.

The key here is to prepare the salad the night before. If I don’t do that, I usually am only carrying a slab of meat of some sort and a piece of fruit for lunch.

FRUIT

Along with a portion of meat, I’ll pack into my plastic sack on most days an apple or an orange. I usually eat that around 2pm or so.

All in all a rather bland lunch I know, but it gets me through the day along with another cup of coffee and a few glasses of water. I feel light with an “agile fullness”, and am hungry by dinner time without feeling groggy like I used to before paleo.

Next “A Day in the Life of…” post will be about dinner.  

A Day in the Life of… warts and all. I’ll go into meticulous detail assuming you have the same knowledge of food and cooking as I did 2-20 years ago.

Wake Up

I’ll wake up at ~515am. If I’m lucky I’ll have had the foresight to iron my shirt the night before, or maybe a few of them on a Sunday night. If not, I’m ironing for about 15 minutes.

Shower.

Breakfast

While multi-tasking getting the house up and people in order, I start cooking. I’ll just go over my meal. I cook 4 scrambled eggs. I nearly have this every morning. And two sausage paddies. I eat these before heading out the door. For the drive to work, I have travel mug of black coffee filled to the top and a sandwich bag about half way filled with about 1/3 being blueberries, 2/3 raisins. This is what I have to eat as I listen to the radio on the drive.

On weekends for breakfast, I will have scrambled eggs and probably about 5-8 strips of bacon. I eat about 2 dozen eggs a week. On the rare mornings I don’t eat scrambled eggs, I’ll eat something that I prepared the previous evening that was intended to be for lunch, but I woke up late and instead ate it for breakfast. On weekend mornings I’ll have some melon, as well.

It’s that simple.  Scrambling 4 eggs and having some sausage takes about 10 minutes.  I won’t go into detail about supplements in this post, but some fish oil and vitamin D and a cup of coffee and you’re on your way to a great day.