MTheads

LCHF Diet Extraordinaire Update

I'm still eating LCHF and eating any kind of diet with a catchy name means I have to write excruciatingly detailed and personal posts about my "journey" and personal transformation following this new doctrine, I mean, diet.  Luckily for you, I'll be skipping the bathroom details.  Let's just say all is A-OK and on the boring side. 

From reading other people's blogs and books and testimonials though, I have to ask, "Why am I so untroubled in the bathroom department??"  It's like a rite or something on any new diet to finally be regular, stop being regular, stop everything, never have a minute's peace, wonder what the hell that is, ask strangers on the internet if they've ever seen anything like what I've described, and maybe even take pics of it to bring to the doctors.  Instead, I'm just sailing through life without purpose.

So nothing tantalizing on that front.  What is different for me on this new way of eating?  Actually, not much.  I think I eat less because the fat fills me up.  I seem to be more likely to skip meals, but then, I did before.  I do notice less energy after hard weight workouts, but I'm also still making progress and getting stronger.  I'm thirsty more often, but that's probably the kidneys groaning under all the red meat I'm eating.  Suck it up, waste strainers!  We all have our little challenges.

I have not gained any weight.  I sleep the same.  I look the same.  I spend five times as much on food.  But, who knows, I have no proof that this diet has not made me resistant to all illnesses, and perhaps immortal.  That's something.  More updates later.  If you're lucky, I'll post pictures of my fat drenched meals. Instead, I'm posting this:

Low Carb High Fat tips I've learned from the internet

LCHF tip #1: If it's a floaty, you're eating fat mostly.

(sorry...)

Wlog

Unfortunately, no new PRs in the bench press.  I'm doing mostly dumbbell bench presses right now.  I did add in military presses.  Dang, those are hard!  I'm up to 65lbs max rep on those. Pull-ups are great.  I want to start doing dips. 

At least I'm deadlifting and squatting heavier.  I'm up to 155lb max reps on both.  And I'm doing straight legged dl for the hams.  Keeps me off the streets.

Low carb fad diet is still good.  I eat a lot of steak.  The real challenge is feeding six people this way.  One, I have to go shopping almost everyday for fresh food.  I'm aware I could do freezed meat, but our freezer is tiny.  I'm lucky I can squeeze in some frozen veggies.  This refrigerator came with the town home and was meant for someone single with cat who puts a premium on various ice types and filtered water.  We want to buy another freezer sometime in the future.  

Two, what I like to eat is expensive.  I'm buying the highest quality food we can afford on any given day.  Right now I have a 15 dollar chicken, admittedly large, sitting in the fridge for tonight. 

Luckily, I love to walk, cook and buy expensive food.  So, I'm not complaining.  But I am having to relearn how to feed all of us.  Instead of getting recipes from low carb or paleo cookbooks, I'm turning to older cookbooks for recipes.  For example, Julia Child and Elizabeth David aren't overly concerned with fat content. 

Roast beef, stroganoff, goulash, pot roasts, stews, pates, liver, coq au vin (a personal favorite), and lamb tips are all recipes I've tried recently, some more successful than others.  I haven't been able to make a beef stew I love yet. 

Cat included for scale. 



Tax on Fat was Going to be Just the Beginning...

In case someone out there isn't a fanatical data collector on the low carb diet and hasn't kept up with the case of Denmark's government taxing "unhealthy" foods, here's an article in The Economist on it: A Fat Chance.

Let's just say it didn't work out.  In the comments, some people surmised that the Danish government is always looking for things to tax and it just categorized fat as a health risk in order to extract more kroners.  Or they really really cared.  This time the populace fought back. 

Fast Facts on Denmark

1) I got married in Denmark.  So, I'm quite the authority.

2) Denmark is surrounded by LCHF countries.  Around 25% of Swedes eat low carb.

3) Everyone speaks English better than most native speakers of English.

4) If you get married there on one of their wedding packages, you will be asked at least five times if you have ever had relations with a family member.  Relations means sex.  Not sure if this is how they see the rest of us, or if they themselves have a problem with it.

5) They will spike your complimentary bottle of champagne with sleeping drugs so you'll miss your dinner reservation and be forced to eat at a Chinese takeout on your wedding night.

6) They are all good looking.  What have they done with all the unattractive people?  (Read Uglies by Scott Westerfeld....)

Is it about Health, or Class?

One of the arguments made by Bloomberg's benign fascist army is that we've already bowed our heads in submission to all kinds of safety ordinances, laws, and regulations.   For example, regulations covering seat belts, child seats, motorcycle helmets, texting while driving, smoking, guns, etc.  So what's the problem with limiting soda portions?  Such a small thing...

As an argument, this argument is flawed (tut quo toe, or something like that).  As a persuasive appeal to our logic in a risk averse, complex regulatory environment, it's pretty good.  We can all find regulations and laws we agree with.  Some regulations, like child car seats, would be difficult to make a case against without sounding heartless -- yes, but it's my child's risk to take.  Helmets save lives, those who text while driving are idiots, bazookas in town homes are risky, etc. Most of us accept these limitations to our choices.

So should we accept any regulation or law our State deems for our own good because most of us buckle up?  Of course not. Each proffered regulatory limitation needs to be judged on its own particular merits.  We need to balance individual and public safety with the ideals of personal responsibility and individual freedom.  We all know this.  Which is why those who've decided they need to rescue us have to ratchet up their warnings: 

“Obesity is one of America’s most deadly problems, and sugary beverages are a leading cause of it,” Bloomberg said Sept. 4 in Queens,

“To not act would be criminal,” said board member Susan Klitzman, a professor and director of the Urban Public Health Program at Hunter College in Manhattan.

One could argue that after tobacco, sodas might just be the biggest killers via preventable disease in the country. Yet just as 32 ounces seems to be the new normal, so does death by preventable disease. - Mark Bittman

Again, I chose random, cherry-picked quotes, sort of like the way our self-selected superiors choose the health threat of the moment.  Why soda and not snack foods?  Why soda and not alcohol? Why soda?? Maybe because it's the kind of people who like to drink huge sodas.  Maybe because our leaders are actually convinced that our greatest national threat are sugary soft drinks.

 What if sugar is really responsible for so many of our current health problems?  Would I be for limitations then?  Probably, if I thought it could actually be enforced.  But I'd have to be pretty convinced that sugar was a health hazard all on its own and that its restriction outweighed our right to choose to consume it -- like crack.  And all sugary products would have to be included.

 What a nightmare trying to enforce a sugar ban!  We could go after the producers straight off, demonize and tax them.  And then we'd have to regulate or ban or tax cocoa, sweet chocolate, cakes, ice creams, cereals, sweetened teas and coffees, cocktails, and other sweetened products.  Or we could just stick with sodas - simple, obvious, and self satisfying in a since you can't control your behaviour I'm going to do it for you kind of way.

The Hungry Beast Within...

I've tricked, er...encouraged my husband into eating low carb with me.  Considering I do all of the cooking, that wasn't hard.  And he doesn't even realize it yet.  No, he suspects. 

His problem with the diet so far is the inconvenience of making quick meals low in carbs.  When you're running out the door, it's much easier to eat a quick bowl of cereal or grab a sandwich.  Now, he throws some pre-cooked sausages into the microwave.  But that'll get old eventually.  I'm good with cheese cubes, liverwurst, and coffee, but he wants something more...traditional.  Pussy.

But the biggest change in the townhouse has been our daughter's change from strict vegetarian to meat eater.  Now, she was a vegetarian in name only because she really didn't eat any vegetables.  Cerealtarian or carbotarian or crappofoodoterian would have been more accurate. 

When she started waking up with black circles under her eyes, I was done with her diet.  I bought her a double quarter pounder and barely got my fingers out of the way in time.  So now I work very hard to make sure she is eating high quality meat almost everyday.

Unfortunately for my family when I think I'm right about something, I go on an unceasing propaganda campaign that can only end when they have all converted to my way of thinking, or I've been done in Murder on the Orient Express style.  But I never sleep.  I just keep sweeping the world like the eye of Sauron looking for ever more obscure documentaries, books, and blogs to make them watch and read.  Oh, they will turn, they will turn.  Or they can make their own damn dinner.

Part I Where LFHC Goes Head to Head with LCHF

Just for fun, I've been reading up the LFHC diet, the one completely opposite from my LCHF diet.  LFHC is promoted by Ornish, Mcdougall, Esselstyns, etc.  This is the kind of diet Bill Clinton is on now.  Hey, guess what!  These low fat high carb guys also claim their diets will cure you of death and unattractiveness!  And just to prove it, they too have millions of personal testimonies on their sites from formerly diabetic fat people with rashes who are now thin, healthy, and rash free.  Just like on LCHF sites. 

How can this be?  One diet advocates fat as 75% of your diet and no carbs, the other no fat and mostly carb.  Yet both claim to be the perfect diet for humans!   Ahhhhh!  Let's look very shallowly into some of their claims and see where they differ.

1)  Both claim science is unequivocally on their side. 

LCHF: Man descended from the trees carrying tongs and hickory wood chips, ready to grill. 

Agriculture wasn't a thing until 10,000 years ago, when man was snookered into high interest mortgages, attending early morning religious functions on his one day off, and monogamy. 

Obviously, we were better off as hunter gatherers.

LFHC: Ha! Man shares 99% of his DNA with apes, and apes love whole grain pasta with butternut squash.  What, you think you're betta than an ape?  Get outta here.

Man lived nasty, brutal millennia eating grubs, bark, and grass seeds while hiding in caves from predators until someone finally figured out walls and industrial farming. 

Thank God.  Now man could stop skulking around in fear of being eaten and instead learn to fear other men.

 

Pre agriculture LCHF man

 

Pre agriculture LFHC man

Doctrine Creep

If a diet can be compared to a political ideology, the LCHF diet would be near the libertarian end of the spectrum with veganism and raw foodism planted firmly on the fascist end, really firmly.  The whole low carb movement reminds me of the homeschooling movement -- same kind of non-conformist slightly geeky people, same disregard for cultural norms, and the same self confidence that the individual is more than capable of steering their own lives.  (This is where anti-Homeschoolers will sarcastically ask if we think we can DIY our own brain surgeries, too, implying that teaching children is as difficult as surgery, brain surgery, and that only teachers should be allowed to operate on children.)

I love information, but I hate dogma.  As soon as I read anything anywhere in whatever area I'm interested in, and I come across preachy instructions on how to apply their general POV to every aspect of my life, I get highly skeptical and irritated.  A completely lame example:  In a macrobiotic diet book by Michio Kushi, which I read maybe 25 years ago, there were detailed instructions on how to  take a proper shower.  Scrubbing that caucasian off was the basic idea.  You just want some dietary advice and guidelines and you end up in a Japanese cult. 

While exploring my new perfect forever diet, I'm also learning a lot about the Paleo movement.  There are similarities btwn the two diets, and their followers even take cruises together.  But whereas the LCHF diet is about following science blindly to whatever absurd method of eating is shown to be the most efficacious, the Paleo movement encompasses your entire life.  Food has to be pure.  Eating has to be clean.  Sleep has to be 7.5 hours in duration in a cool and lightless room.  Shoes are buffers btwn you and life.  And one should leap and frisk along wave swept shores like heathen cannibal island children.  Admittedly, primal eaters do seem a happy group, always smiling and baring their perfectly toned bodies in a bonhomie kind of way.  I think it's the excess of omega-3s in their diet.

He Maketh Me to Lie Down in Green Pastures...Scratch That, Meaty Pastures.

From the enchanted bower of pure rainbow vegetables glistening with organic goodness to the grassy plains of tawny prey oozing omega 3's, I've travelled from end to end of the utopian diet world.  Both of these worlds guarantee the true believer immortality if they but have the strength to fulfil every stricture which has been carefully copied down straight from the lips of angels -- diet books.

I have to admit, for young me the appeal of vegetarianism was in its promise of health and vitality.  For God's sake, just look at vegetables and fruit:  They're so bright!  So colorful!  Personified good health!  Then look at meat:  Gray, lumpy, dead.  Might as well eat a plate full of cancer.  Yes, with the science part of vegetarianism pretty much summed up thus, I felt I was eating the best possible of all diets, like the one in the Garden of Eden.

But vegetarianism hasn't quite lived up to its promises.  First, I kept coming across results of studies involving millions of nurses and mormons and Ivy League alumni which did not show any benefit to eating vegetarian or of even eating low fat and healthy.  The participants still managed to die like everyone else in about the same time.  And carrying a few extra pounds.  WTH??  Not even thinner??  So, what is the point of rinsing and straining quinoa for 45 minutes if it is not going to transform my cells from within into beautiful butterflies?

And vegetarians as a whole are a humorless group.  Even as vegetarians, my husband and I made fun of them -- dogma and purity of motives, comrade.  Vegetarians often do well while young, but a transformation occurs after one turns 35 years old or so.  Then we start to look a bit strained and lined and frazzled.  You know I'm right.

Now, twenty years later, I've come across a different set of facts that proclaim eating only fat and protein is the secret to immortality.  I'd like some of that, or at least a fighting chance to avoid or mitigate all the degenerating and debilitating illnesses which start to haunt us in our forties.  This is the low carb/high fat diet which is diametrically the opposite of my earlier diet.  But what I like about this "new" diet is the science.  It's less emotional.  Food is good or bad for you based on chemical reactions and body response, not on an item's touted purity or goodness or ability to heal global warming.

Over the last several years I have cut down on carbs.  Last month I went really low carb.  It's been four interesting weeks eating only eggs, steaks, sausage, butter, cheese, cream, pork, lamb, liver, and greens for every meal.  So far, so good.  No evidence I'm not immortal, yet. 

Someone approves of my diet change! 

 

Workout Log Star Date, Um, 18 and Whatever 014

Sq: 125lb, but a bunch of reps

Walking Lunges: 35lb dumbbells

Leg Press: 350lb

Leg Curls: 95lb

Straight Leg Deadlifts: Just the bar

25 pull ups in total

I am sooo sore today.  I pushed extra hard and now I walk like someone without knees. The way my record keeping works, I like to keep track of my maximums since I generally prefer to work down until I feel "done".

Still on the LCHF diet.  What a fun diet and what interesting followers!  Did you know Sweden is completely overrun with people drinking butter coffee?  And eating rolled up cheese and meat filled with butter?  LCHF World is the exact opposite of Vegetarian World.  I like it here. 

Lake Baikal Adventure

I ran a half marathon in Siberia this past weekend.  A friend happened to mention she was running in the Lake Baikal Marathon/Half, and was I interested in it also?  Ahhhh, yes.  Who wouldn't be? This gave me a solid three weeks to prepare for the half marathon after a two and a half year break from running.  Luckily, I had a crack theory on how to train for long distance races.

A friend of mine (who also took part) theorizes that the best running program is one where you avoid injuries from over-training.  So, the more you run, the greater your chances of injury.  The less you run, the less chance of injury.  Taking this theory to its logical conclusion, he avoided any risk of injury by doing no training.   I took a less radical approach and did a little bit of training.  I managed to run a total of four times before the big day.  Though I do follow his theory of no training in just about every other endurance sport.

The Lake Baikal Marathon/Half Run was some of the most fun I've ever had.  It takes place in the small village of Listyanka outside Irkutsk.  Listyanka is a lovely Siberian village with charming homes and incredible views of the lake and surrounding mountains.  The air is squeaky clean, the sky a palette of blues from light to dark, and the snow brilliant white.  The biggest danger for a runner is actually snow blindness, then killer Nerpa seals.

There are lots of activities in the area -- dog sledding, snow mobiling, skiing, hiking, touring other villages around the lake.  Everywhere I went the food was excellent.  The cuisine is Russian with Siberian influence.  Most of the meals in local restaurants include the fish from Lake Baikal called omul.  These guys are related to trout and quite delicious.  

Everything I ate was good, except for one meal -- the pre-race spaghetti dinner.  Yes, we had spaghetti noodles, but the sauces were very odd and salty.  It's like the chef based recipes on images of spaghetti sauce without a list of ingredients.  Better we had had a pre-race pelmeni dinner.

Now for the race:  Imagine running in 7 degrees fahrenheit ( - 236 degrees celsius for our international readers), on the world's deepest lake, on ice, across snowdrifts, leaping over chasms of roiling lake water, dodging hovercrafts filled with crazy picture snapping relatives, rabid seals, and the strangest sensation of frost bite and heat exhaustion at the same time. 

And no toilets on the course!  It's a lonely yet very public thing to take a potty break on frozen flat tundra with nothing to hide behind except the curvature of the earth.  Only people in Florida didn't have a view to the show. I did feel much better afterwards, though - and shame, yes, but I think I made the right choice.

The race itself was very well organized.  The people running the show were personable and competent.  The runners were a hardy, insane breed from all over.  We had groups from China, Japan, Germany, and Australia.  A couple of guys from Spain.  A sprinkling of Anglo-American types, an Austrian, someone from South Africa, some other places, and plenty of locals, who swept the medals for the men's full marathon.

Starting line.  It's hard to tell whether it's a run or a scuba event.

"Please, please, no running to the left of the red flags. You may be disqualified. No questions."   The pre-race information meeting was dominated by warnings to not run to the left of the red flags. Killer seals?  Anti-Putin protests?  Mystery...

 
  Nerpa dog

 
  Nerpa cat

Actual baby killer Nerpa seal.  Luckily I got my shoe back.