Paleo Week Test Day 2 2013-07-29

Waking up with a hangover (even though I didn’t have a drop of alcohol the previous day), not packing enough snacks and having a tasty but not filling lunch made the second Paleo day drag on, but it ended with bacon wrapped chicken and sweet potato pancakes so all ended well.

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Paleo Week Test Day 1 2013-07-28

Ah, the first day of Paleo!  The beginning of my one week Paleo expedition began somewhat auspiciously after an afternoon and night of feasting.  The trials of breaking my daily routines, attempting to avoid Coke Zero, and to eat a pure Paleo way on a day when I woke up especially irritable to begin with, certainly posed some challenges.  However by the end of the day the challenge of the diet wasn’t about what I wasn’t eating but what I still had left to eat.

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Let Paleo Week Commence! 2013-07-28

After a fun afternoon and evening with friends at a pool party, which was decidedly not Paleo but very delicious, I get to start my first day of Paleo with a bit of a food hangover.  I’m sure having 5 beers over 8 hours may be contributing a little bit too it, but that’s hardly the stuff of hangovers over embarrassing internet photos.  The food on the other hand, especially with the dessert selections that I made sure to try one of each of, definitely put things into high gear.  Try this, I ate over 3300 calories over the course of the party and that wasn’t with a bunch of grazing or drinking high calorie cocktails.  Ouch!  But today is the beginning of one of the “clean” diet phases so I can pretend to be detoxing or what not.  So what are the steps for getting this week kicked off?

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Ikaria: The land of a real Mediterranean Diet 2013-07-26

The diet that I thought would be the easiest to square away has turned out to be the hardest: the Mediterranean Diet.  As I have highlighted previously it’s mostly about trying to dress up a Standard American Diet into something that sounds healthy so that people can feel good about trying to eat healthy.  If it wasn’t just lipstick on a pig I wouldn’t find the concept so offensive.  I still wouldn’t bother eating it for 3 months just to pretend to be picking up a new eating style, but at least there could be a claim of some health benefit.  That still leaves me to try to figure out what I’m going to do for an actual Mediterranean diet.  As I worked through my backlog of podcasts this week I think I found some hints to what I’m looking at in the form of the diets of the Sardinians and Ikarians.

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T-2 Days to Paleo Week 2013-07-26 It’s two days until I start my one week of Paleo Diet. Yes, between vegan and Paleo I decided to try the latter. I’d like to be able to include my partner in it somewhat, and there is absolutely no way I’d be able to get him to try more than a bite or two of any vegan food at all. (More ...)
Which diet should I use for one week trial? 2013-07-24 I’m really itching to give a much longer duration experiment, including weekend nights, in as soon as possible. I’d like the experiment to be with one of the extreme, for lack of a better word, diets that I’ll be cycling through. (More ...)
Elaboration is apparently very important 2013-07-23 I was quickly chatting with some friends over dinner tonight and the topic of my blog came up. These are some pretty smart guys but their overall comment on my monthly summary was, “I have no idea what the hell you were talking about. (More ...)
Doubling down on muscle stiffness theory... 2013-07-22 I’m doubling down on my theory about what is causing my leg stiffness. Today I was stuck in the car for multiple hours, when I wasn’t stuck in a chair somewhere for multiple hours. (More ...)
Leg tightness is from lifestyle, just not the way I thought (I think) 2013-07-21

When this lifelong non-athlete got too winded from walking up the stairs a few years ago, he decided to start doing something about it.  Exercising just for the hell of it, or for some long term health benefits didn’t seem to be motivating enough.  I instead directed that towards the one thing that I thought may work, attempting to run a 10K.  I thought a short term but doable goal would motivate me better than anything, and I was right.  But a 10K soon became a half, and now I’m on may way to starting to run my first full marathon.  While that has been good, one thing that has been concerning me is my perpetual muscle tightness.  I’ve talked it over with my PT several times and had some late night sessions with Doctor Google trying to figure it out, but it has been persistent.  I had hoped it was a lifestyle thing, and after the last week I think I’ve figured out that indeed it is, but not what I was originally expecting.

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Snapshots in Life Can Show How We Change 2013-07-19

Tom Hussey is a photographer whose work has started popping up in viral Facebook and Twitter messages. Particularly his “Reflections” series is quite riveting. What would a photograph look like if you had the present-day elderly and the lost to time young adult version of the same person? You can get a glimpse of it at FStoppers.com.  Imagine yourself looking forward in time into the elderly you, or looking back into the younger you from a few decades ago.  Projecting yourself into the images leaves you with a most surreal emotional impression.  For the biohacker in me, it also got me reconsidering yet one additional technique I used to engage in but no longer do.

reflections

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