Paleo Day 31: Month 1 Finished, Month 2 Starting

With one month of Paleo behind me, I look forward to continuing the success that I have had so far as well as to hopefully get a little more cooking experimentation in.  With some holidays and vacations mixed in that won’t necessarily be easy, but we’ll find out how that goes soon enough.  As it was, today was a relatively ordinary day with some good eating and finally a roll on the exercise front.

Breakfast for now has to be eggs and bacon or something along those lines since I’m out of protein powder for the time being.  It’s easy enough to sautee some greens and crack two scrambled eggs into it.  However the bacon takes a little time to get ahead of.  With 20-25 minutes of lead time you can get the bacon done, but I think more mornings than not that’s going to be skipped and replaced with something else.  Also, I forgot to order the pastured pork bacon from the farm, so I’m stuck with regular supermarket bacon.  I won’t pretend that it tastes bad, it is quite delicious actually.  It’s also half the price, but I know that the animals went through a life of hell for cheaper bacon so I can’t bring myself to make that a regular purchase option when I know I can afford and acquire easily the humanely, sustainably and responsibly raised stuff.  That’s not even getting into the health benefits of the pastured pork over the regular stuff.

I actually skipped lunch but did have a light mid-day snack of pumpkin seeds and a banana.  I was on the road and was feeling like I should have something in my system before doing my run tonight.  I stopped at a gas station hoping they would have some mineral water (which they did) and something to snack on.  I did find a banana easily but I was craving something like nuts or seeds.  Most of the nut packages had peanuts in them.  I did find some that didn’t but they were roasted in peanut oil.  I gave up on that and then went to the beef jerky, which to a product had soy and wheat products in them.  Finally I saw another nut display at the front of the store and lo and behold there was a bag of pumpkin seeds.  I used that to round out my afternoon snack and headed home to get my run started.

I really wanted to run outside but it was still in the mid-90s around 6 pm when I planned on starting my run.  I therefore did it in the gym on the treadmill instead.  It was originally supposed to be four miles, but due to some procrastination on my part I didn’t get to the gym early enough for that.  I rationalized that I needed to cut the mileage ramp up back a little from the plan anyway, so I went with “just” three miles.  I tried to do it in the Zone 1/2 like I was supposed to but it slowly crept up into Zone 3 by the end of the run.  I still had a decent pace compared to what I had been, especially considering that I am just now getting back to it.  Just like the progress on weight training I’m chalking up my diet to some of the improvements.

My post run dinner was a giant salad of kale, dandelion, jicama, carrots and avocado with a whole can of wild sardines packed in water.  Before I ate these things I almost gagged at the thought of eating these things regularly.  When I first bought them I choked them down, at least the traditional oil packed ones.  These wild water packed ones however don’t taste any fishier than canned tuna, which is admittedly a bit fishy, but they are packed with a lot more nutrients than canned tuna.  Along with more nutrients it has a better omega-3/6 fat profile, contains tons more Calcium and because it is much closer to the bottom of the food chain will also have lower levels of toxins.  I could eat these regularly.

After soaking in the hot tub, getting some work done and then getting my writing done I’m finishing up with a bunch of watermelon and some almond butter.  I just need to get some calories into me since skipping lunch left me in a quite a bit of deficit.