I remember when O’Douls beer was introduced.  I wasn’t old enough to drink yet but I thought the idea was really cool.  It’s not that I never had a sip of beer as a kid, but the idea of being able to drink a full beer and legally sounded great.  I didn’t actually try one for real until I was an adult however.  I had been drinking for a few years and saw it on the menu at a restaurant, so I figured I would give it a go.  I can’t say I was disappointed because I had low expectations.  The problem is that it didn’t even live up to that.  It was therefore a mix of enthusiasm and excitement when I ran across a champagne at my local grocery story (in my state they can’t sell alcohol) called Fre.  Again going in with low expectations I decided to give it a try.  The results were surprisingly good.

After spending the rest of the week away from home I was finally able to have a day at home.  The day after “fast food and eating out” Paleo I’m now back to the making things at home and doing a real Paleo eating plan.  On top of that I got to experiment with a new champagne and a new style of cooking potatoes.

Have you seen this picture before?

You can find recipes all over, and the premise is quite simple.  One that will be universally available is from this link on Pinterest.  After seeing this several times I decided to try it myself tonight, but with a twist.  I tried both a regular and sweet potato version.

After a night of restless sleeping, and only a few hours at that, most of the day was spent traveling.  A couple of days of good manual labor and little sleep combined to make me feel like I was dragging ass all day, to say nothing for the stresses of the day itself.  When on the road diets that don’t substantially mirror the standard American diet can be hard to accommodate.  Today was no different, but it wasn’t totally impossible either.

In the process of reading lots of books and reading articles on nutrition I keep running across the meme that what is ailing our society is the proposed “low fat” diets from the 1950s.  Back then research said, and depending on whom you listen to it still does, that the secret to battling heart disease is to switch to a low-fat diet and to reduce meat consumption.  As the meme goes, we as a society did all that and all that happened was we got fatter and didn’t make a dent in heart disease.  If that’s truly the case, then that’s a travesty.  The question is, is that what happened at all?

With a second day of having to do work away from home I just settled into the same routine I had yesterday, for the most part.  I had most of what I needed so it was easy enough to just rinse and repeat.

There is nothing like a day full of activity to get the appetite up.  I knew from the start of the day that I needed to think ahead for the food choices I’d be faced.  Usually when I’m in this sort of work mode I reach for the easy foods that most people would.  A sandwich for lunch is always a good option.  Certainly one would snack on chips or pretzels or both.  I had none of these options, so making sure I didn’t set myself up for failure was important.

After my first day being the overwhelming majority of my time on the road, the second day was mostly me working from and around home.  I was therefore able to much more easily cruise through getting everything I needed without scrounging around for scraps of barely acceptable food products to eat.  The caffeine withdraw however is increasingly getting worse.

I originally wasn’t expecting to be driving on the road for my first Paleo day. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be also finishing up digesting a very heavy and luxurious dinner meal from the night before while doing that either.  That, however, was my first world problems tribulation of the day.

I have now official started the Paleo phase of my diet experiment.  Earlier in the year I spent several posts reviewing the paleo dos and don’ts.  Rather than trying to comb through all of that, I figured I’d summarize it in one convenient place.