Red Meat Will Kill Me?

The interwebz has been bouncing around different headlines covering that ridiculous viral article that was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine - you know the one, where they tell you that red meat consumption causes death and disease? Right.

If you MUST read it, go here. But come right back, ok? I'll wait, and then tell you why that "study" is a complete piece of bullshit, in words even a simpleton could understand.

WHY THE STUDY IS WRONG:
1) It's based not on a double-blind, controlled trial, but on SURVEYS. From people, who are notorious at lying when it comes to food intake, especially when they're people in the health profession who (supposedly) know what foods are healthy and which ones are not. These surveys also rely on people's memories to be accurate. My husband can't even remember what he ate for lunch two days ago. 'Nuff said, right?

2) They lump hamburgers (as in, fast-food hamburgers) in with unprocessed meat. Yeah, right. Have you ever looked at the ingredients list of a frozen hamburger? Soy, MSG, salt, more MSG, filler, dubious source of beef, and likely more salt. Yeah. Unprocessed. So how can they compare apples to oranges here and say that unprocessed meat is unhealthy, if they're including processed meat in with the unprocessed meat? They can't.

3) They don't look at healthy sources of meat. Like pastured, grass-fed cows, pastured chickens, nitrate-free bacon, etc. They don't consider that most meat consumed is full of antibiotics, steroids, and comes from sick, unhappy animals who never see the sun, let alone eat species-appropriate diets. Of course that shit causes disease! I'm not arguing that. But how do we know that the meat the participants ate was what caused disease, when they're also eating fast food, enormous quantities of grains (as suggested by the FDA, of course), etc? We can't.

There are many more points I could lay out here as to why this "study" is garbage. But I think you get the point, right? If you'd like to read a more in-depth analysis of why it sucks, Mark's Daily Apple has a good one.

I'll just keep eating my grass-fed, pastured beef, m'kay?

Speaking of, this is what I had for dinner:

Salisbury Steak, beets with pastured butter, and cauliflower whipped with more butter. MMMM.

One week on Low-Carb Paleo AND Salisbury Steak Recipe

I'm now on day 9 of low-carb paleo....except I can't count last night. I had a friend over and we made a bunch of tequila-and-club-soda-with-lime drinks. They were meant to be margaritas but I totally forgot. Anyway. As usual with alcohol consumption, I kind of strayed from the whole "eat in moderation" rule and ate about 3/4 of a batch of almond crackers with asiago and artichoke dip. Oh well.

For dinner I tried out a new Salisbury Steak recipe. The site is not a Paleo one, but the recipe is low-carb, gluten-free, and Paleo friendly. It does contain dairy, but you could use coconut milk instead of cream in the gravy.

Please excuse the picture, we ate our dinner before I thought to take photos. This is a pic of the leftovers.

It's a fantastic recipe but I did change it a bit. I've found I don't need egg in my ground beef to hold together patties, so I omitted the eggs from the original recipe, and cut the almond flour into 1/4 cup. Here's my altered recipe:

Patties:
1 lb pastured ground beef
1/4 cup ground almonds (almond flour)
1/2 tsp each: black pepper, onion powder, sea salt, prepared yellow mustard (use ground mustard if you have it)

Gravy:
2 cups beef stock
5-7 mushrooms, sliced
1/2 tsp black pepper
dash of salt (depends on if your beef stock has salt in it to start - mine doesn't)
dash of celery salt
2 dashes of wheat-free soy sauce (Bragg's makes some)
1 tbsp cream
1-2 tsp arrowroot flour (used as a thickener instead of flour or cornstarch)
2-3 tablespoons water (to mix with the arrowroot flour)


Directions:
Start the gravy: place the mushrooms, beef stock, and seasonings into a small saucepan and bring to a boil over med-high heat. Reduce to simmer for about 20 minutes. Taste and see if it needs more salt or pepper. Turn off the heat a few minutes before you want to thicken it. Stir in the cream. Just before serving your meal, mix the arrowroot flour into a small bowl or cup with a couple tablespoons of water and blend with a fork. Pour that into your beef stock/mushroom mixture and mix with fork. If it's not quite thick enough, repeat the process with 1/2 to 1 teaspoon or so of arrowroot flour. (Waiting to allow the gravy to cool a bit will help guarantee your arrowroot starch doesn't break down in heat and fail to set.)

Mix the meat ingredients together and form into 3 or 4 patties. Cook on a baking sheet or baking dish for 25 minutes at 350F. Broil for 2 minutes at the end. Remove to plates and ladle gravy on top.

Serve with a side of mashed/whipped cauliflower and a nice veg - I used sauteed asparagus. MMMM.

No Wonder North Americans Are Fat.

Here's a quote that literally jumped off the page at me while I was reading the Wikipedia article on the Paleo diet:

More than 70% of the total daily energy consumed by all people in the United States comes from foods such as dairy products, cereals, refined sugars, refined vegetable oils and alcohol...

WHAT!?!?

Does that seem anything less than totally ridiculous to anyone other than me? I mean...ok. When I was eating crap, I ate a lot of crap. But never that much. 70 percent??? And when you figure that probably everyone who eats this way is ALSO eating far, far, far too many calories to start with, that's an enormous amount of  crap. That stuff isn't even food. This type of diet translates into obesity, heart disease, infertility, PCOS, stroke, diabetes, and cancers, and probably many other health problems. Those are just the obvious ones.

These days, I'm eating ZERO cereals, refined sugars, refined vegetable oils, and alcohol. I eat cheese (raw swiss) once in a while, and I'm not adverse to having a glass of raw milk or putting a bit of cream in my coffee. But that's really practically nothing. Not even one percent of my diet. Not even 0.10 percent!

The only sugar I'm eating now (which is extremely rare, in any case) is honey and maple syrup. And guess what? I'm not really craving it. I'm eating so low carb at the moment that I'm in ketosis as I write this. Go ahead, look it up if you want (click on the word "ketosis," I made it a hyperlink for you).

That's the point. Our bodies were MEANT to be fat burners, not sugar burners. And that's what mine is doing. It's burning the fat right off of my ass. And that's the way I like it.

Source: Wikipedia

Staying on Track

I will be the first to admit that changing your lifestyle - when you've got deeply ingrained bad habits and preferences - is difficult. Expect to have setbacks. Figure out what works best for you; some people do really well on a 80/20 primal or pale/treat or cheat foods. Some have to do 100% primal or paleo, and some fall somewhere in between.

I've tried to have cheat/treat days or even just treat meals. It doesn't work very well for me. I have found that it opens up a can of horrible cravings and failed willpower, which cycles down into eating garbage every day until I have to start all over. I've just recently experienced this. Today is my second day on track after about two weeks off the wagon. In that two weeks, I ate inordinate amounts of pizza, some ice cream, and drank beer and vodka. Although that doesn't seem like a lot compared to most people's Standard American Diet, it's not really conducive to the lifestyle I want to explore - AND it stopped my weight loss process. I actually gained a couple of pounds back from water retention (caused by grains/excess carb consumption).

So, I'm back on track. I'm seriously going to work on staying under 50g carbs on rest days and under 100g on training days. It's actually what Gemma (personal trainer) recommended, but I wasn't really being serious about it. Now I'm going to buckle down and JUST DO IT. Once I'm at my goal weight (in about 20 pounds or so), I'll obviously consider adjusting my intake and ratios, but for now, ketogenic is what's going to get me there.

Pancake Tuesday!

Just because I eat paleo/primal doesn't mean I can't have pancakes! Today is Shrove Tuesday/Pancake Tuesday and so I made a special PWO-meal. I made two versions of pancakes, one for me and my daughter, and one for my husband (who doesn't like my version). My version is made from almond butter, eggs, yogurt, vanilla, and cinnamon. I used maple syrup on top, so I didn't include the honey from the recipe. I made a half batch, which resulted in 10 2-inch pancakes.

I also enjoyed some breakfast sausages (wheat, nitrate, and sugar-free) and some frozen raspberries...and some maple syrup, as I said. Delicious! Here's a pic of what's left of my lunch (forgot about taking a pic until halfway through)...

This is a fairly high-cal meal due to the fatty sausages and the almond butter, but that's ok. It's a workout day! I'll have to make sure I get lots of protein later, since this meal was kind of low. Macros: 1090 cals, 71g fat, 70g carbs, 46g protein.

For my husband's pancakes, I used 1/4 cup almond flour, 1 tbsp coconut flour, an egg, 1 tsp vanilla, and some cinnamon. They were much more like regular pancakes. The almond butter ones are not.

Week 2 Day 5 of BBB

It's late Friday evening, closing in on the end of the second week of Brutal Beauty Bootcamp. I'm pretty pleased with how things are going, notwithstanding that stupid piece of junk in my bathroom that calls itself a scale. Grr!

Ok, ok. I understand that it's a bad thing (supposedly) to weigh yourself every day. I understand that sometimes you can see the scale not move (or even go up!) yet still lose inches. I get it. I really do. But. I weigh myself every day. It's just a thing I do. And it's not because I want to punish myself about what I ate yesterday, or didn't eat...it's because, well...I kind of look at this like an experiment.

For example: I've noticed a trend over the last two weeks. The day after a training day, my weight is always up. It seems that the more carbs I eat, the more my weight goes up. It's a positive correlation. My calories are on-target, my protein is nice and high, I'm eating REALLY CLEAN...there's no other reason why I could be gaining weight. So, it must be water.

Last week, when I first noticed it, that weight (plus some) disappeared by the morning of the next training day. Today, I was up a pound from three days ago (the morning of my first workout day this week, the furthest I can get from a carb re-feed).

Last night, I got curious. I can't really tell much by my waistband if I'm losing any fat from the belly. I see some change in my face and neck, but I haven't measured my neck (hmm should do that, now that I think of it). So I measured myself. I was pleasantly surprised. In total, since I last measured myself at the end of December, I've lost an inch off my waist, an inch off my thigh, 3/4 of an inch off my upper arm, and an inch off my bust measurement. Wow. Not bad for - essentially - two weeks of serious bootcamp and one week of half-assed somewhat Paleo eating and a couple workouts!

I'm pretty pleased. I think I'll keep this up!