Ugh. I am ready for this to be over. Gym weight yesterday was 169. That's not remarkable in any way, I just forgot to report it. I'm actually surprised it's not lower, because I feel like I'm missing calories. Not by any particularly virtuous act, but simply because it's so damn inconvenient to not be able to snack on grains.
Every time I'm cruising through the kitchen looking for a snack, I see 15 grain based items I can't eat and I'm left standing in the middle of the room morosely palming a grapefruit and a jar of peanut butter trying to convince myself that it's a worthwhile snack.
Breakfast: An apple
Lunch: Grilled chicken and potatoes
Dinner: Fruit and nut salad and a bowl of chili from Wendy's. Actually pretty good.
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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
so u r not feeling any better on this diet? whats the point of trying it then if u are sure that u are going to reintroduce grains?
ReplyDeleteThe point is that it's a personal experiment. If I reintroduce grains and it causes problems then it's pretty clear that grains are harmful on some level.
ReplyDelete