Okay. So I'm done explaining how frustrating it is not being able to eat all the foods you used to love. If somebody is going to tell me you get over it - I don't believe it.
The second worst part of this diet is that I'm *always* hungry. I'm pretty much snacking on fruit and nuts all day. With vegetables, protein, and fat for the meals. I'm probably doing this all wrong, but I am constantly starving.
Oh, and so far, no discernible health benefits...
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Evening: Starving as usual. Dinner was a noodleless lasagna - bless my wife's heart. I'm not eating grains, which is the goal; but I'm not sure what the double doses of meat and fat are going to do. I suspect the dietary priests are going to say I'm screwing it up, but the point of the diet was to find out if grains are harmful. Meat, fat, and sugar are a different matter.
What Is This?
If you're reading this, you may have read Tim Ferriss's lifestyle post about completely cutting grains from your diet. I did. I found it on Hacker News, and I thought it sounded interesting.
I was intrigued about the diet, for no other reason than that it satisfies my "what would monkeys do" rule of thumb. That is, the lifestyle choices that were available to our primate ancestors are, by way of evolution, quite often the circumstances we're best evolved for.
The simple truth is that grains are probably not a food that you'd find paleolithic man eating. The advent of agriculture was actually quite recent on an evolutionary time scale. Before that, we were mostly toiling away in the wild eating whatever sustenance we could get our hands on - fruits, nuts, vegetables, leafs, bugs, tubers, meat, etc. That 6 billion of us have transitioned to a diet of mostly grains in a few thousand years is not only amazing, it seems to me there's a reasonable chance that it's less than ideal.
Anyway, enough background. I found this on Hacker News and, at heart, I am a hacker (as in one that tinkers and experiments). To that end, I am going to take Tim Ferriss's challenge.
For 30 days, I will completely remove all grains from my diet. No foods containing wheat, corn, oats, barley, etc.
Now the dietary elitists among you will probably exude various protestations: "no alcohol - that irritates your stomach lining" or "no dairy - that rankles your colon" or "no simple sugars - that messes with your blood sugar". Forget that noise, I'm not a monk. This is a test of one variable alone - what happens when you *completely* remove grains from your diet. We can do dairy or cheese or meat some other time...
I suppose a litlle detail about where I'm starting from is probably in order. I am a 33 year old male. I am 5'11" and weight 171 pounds. I exercise regularly, though not particularly intensely. I'm mostly in pretty good health, though I do get the occasional stomach ache, back pain, and am bothered by a bit of chronic environmental allergies. But nothing particularly serious.
Okay, enough talk. Let's see how this thing shakes out.
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To help with hunger pangs, you could try drinking more water with lemon in it.
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