Posted a link to Hacker News today and deluged with fantastic advice. Thanks to all the commenters.
My takeaway is that I'm doing a number of things wrong. My biggest mistake is that I'm still hitting the simple sugars (soda, smoothies, ice cream, etc.) So I'm still getting insulin spikes and this is hurting my body's ability to come to grips with the fact that the grains aren't coming. Hence the constant hunger.
Also, I need to up my consumption of fats. Nuts and eggs are easy sources.
There are other changes I need to make, but those are probably the biggest.
Oh, and tonight's dinner: Baked chicken and a ton of broccoli and cauliflower.
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.
Friday, September 24, 2010
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Just a little food for thought: I recently took a course on wild edible plants. One of the staples was grass seed. You can just strip seeds off a crabgrass stalk and pop them in your mouth, or pound them into flour.
ReplyDeleteGrains are just domesticated grasses. Of course in the wild the seed's not available year-round.
Dairy, though...I'm trying to picture a primitive hunter-gatherer sneaking up to a wild lactating bison for a little teat squeeze...
I've been following a similar diet for the past 3 years and made the same mistake you did at first... not enough fat, too much carbs. And I understand what you mean by starving all the time! One of the hardest things to do is figure out what to eat so here's a suggestion for you. Try a cobb salad: chicken, bacon, eggs, avocados that's plenty of protein and fat that will chase away the hunger.
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