Paddle trips with FishKiller always, at some point, devolve into the “diet wars.” Not the vegan/vegetarian diet wars, but the SAD (standard Australian diet) versus meat and vegetables diet wars. I have been on plenty of trips with vegetarians/vegans who, almost universally, wrinkle up their noses and give you those perjorative looks – half the population excels at these, you guess which half - when I cook bacon in the morning. I always wonder, as do all bacon eaters among us, if the nose wrinklers are secretly wishing they were eating bacon and eggs for breakfast. We’ll never know.
FishKiller, for some reason known only to himself, takes a large tub, we are talking three kilograms in size, of ground up Weetabixmixed with protein powder on kayak trips. He eats this for breakfast. I have no first hand knowledge of this, but the resultant mixture looks like it would come out in a similar consistency to that in which it goes in. I’m not sure, given Weetabix turns to some kind of runny slop when you add any liquid, why it needs to be ground up, but I think it is a space issue.
On our recent Capricornia trip, I said something along the lines of “people would be healthy if they just ate meat, eggs and vegetables.” This is, of course, with some minor variations (the addition of fermented foods) along the lines of the Western A Price nutrition guidelines, and, realistically, close to the modern equivalent of our evolutionary diet. Today, evolutionary biologists endorse the theory that humans got big brains from eating meat. I could use this as a reason to keep eating meat, but the truth is more complicated: I like meat, I am 60 years old and need a lot of protein to overcome anabolic resistance, the only alternative calorie source realistically are carbohydrates and older people tend towards insulin resistance/carbohydrate intolerance. On a more basic level, moderate to high carbohydrate diets make me feel like crap and interfere with my recovery, so I eat meat.
On the first of September, a few days after we got home from our Capricornia paddle trip, I decided I would eat a version of the carnivore diet for all of September. The carnivore diet is what it sounds like: lots of meat. However, as with any human endeavour, there are many variations. I chose my own variation which was all kinds of animal flesh, eggs, one serving of high protein low fat Greek yoghurt once a day, with vegetables only eaten with dinner, and dinner almost universally included potatoes. Here’s my reasoning: I’ve been really low carbohydrate before (under 20 grams a day) and I felt a bit floppy on that level of carbohydrate. I’m pretty active so one serving of potatoes a day is a pretty modest amount of carbohydrate.
Well, it worked so well that I’m pretty much following the same plan into October. I lost 4 kilograms but no muscle, my waist and hips shrunk so that I can now fit into trousers that I wore in my late 20’s. Literally, the exact trousers – a pair of climbing pants that just never wear out! My blood pressure dropped about 20 points, and I saved a heap of time cooking because all I have to do is make sure I have some left over animal protein from dinner and the next days cooking chores are done until that evenings dinner preparation. My energy is good: I ran 20 kilometres on Monday without any nutrition except my morning coffee (non-negotiable) and I seem to be recovering well from a heavy training load.
No comments:
Post a Comment