Just Because You Shop at Whole Foods…
Last week at Whole Foods an unhealthily small woman in workout clothes heaved her basket onto the conveyor belt. Glancing inside it, I surveyed her food:
2 bottles of Mix1
3 bananas
4 yogurts, fruit flavored, fat free
grapes
3 bars
bread
potato chips
a boxed slice of Whole Foods pizza
If I had to choose one word to summarize her purchases it would be “diabetes,” but I suppose a more accurate representation would be “carbohydrates.” Everything in her basket was carbs.
Mix1 is crap, the third ingredient is sugar! What’s more is that it costs $2-something a bottle and all of Boulder runs around drinking it thinking that because the company sponsors a cycling team it must be a healthy drink. Wrong. The fat free yogurt is practially diabetes in a small plastic container and the bars are fortified with so many vitamins and minerals that I refuse to classify them as food.
I could go on but my points are three:
1. Just because you shop at Whole Foods doesn’t mean you are healthy OR eating well. It doesn’t grant you free reign to eat anything in the store. You still have to select healthy, nutritious, performance-enhancing, healthy food.
2. There is a TON of junk food at Whole Foods. Unfortunately, junk food made with organic ingredients does not make it healthy.
3. If you don’t want diabetes or a host of other diseases later in life, stick to the CrossFit dietary prescription: eat garden vegetables, especially greens, lean meats, nuts and seeds, little starch, and no sugar.
As Emily would say, “Do it.”
Read MoreA picture is worth a thousand words.
Here is the link to the website This is Why You’re Fat. Contrary to popular belief, you can’t eat the foods pictured on this site (not even in moderation) and be healthy. Not ever. Just like in The Sandlot, you must remove them from your diet “FOR-EV-ER.”
Paleo Rocks.
Peanut butter glazed donut topped with bacon and bananas.
Transportable Fat
It has come to my attention that many in the CrossFit/Zone/Paleo community may have not yet discovered the delicious, transportable goodness of Justin’s Nut Butter.
Justin’s Nut Butter makes individual squeeze packs of pure, natural, paleo-friendly, almond butter goodness. Think GUs but with almond butter inside. Amazing!
The company was also more than generous and donated multiple cases of almond butter packs to me to send to my brother and his Marines during two deployments. Thanks guys!
Chow Time
As promised, here is a video of chow time.
When we started the dogs out on raw food we weened them from kibble and introduced, over a one week period, raw meat. In the beginning, we cooked bone-in chicken pieces half way through and then stripped the meat from the bones. We did this initially because dogs shouldn’t eat cooked chicken bones. Now that we feed them raw meat, we leave the meat on the bone.
If you decide to start your dog on a raw food diet and your dog is a food hound, I recommend feeding them by hand for the first few times they get a raw bone. Do this to teach the dog to bite into a chew the bone. One of our dogs tried to swallow the bone whole the first time she got a chicken leg. She is not very intelligent.
Read MoreHunger Graph
As mentioned in an earlier post, I started the Paleo Challenge last week and kept a log on paper. I posted some of my first week’s log entries to this blog.
It’s now been 11 days since I started the Paleo Challenge. The first few days were difficult. The cravings were not horrendous but my body felt lethargic despite the fact that I was eating almond butter in large quantities from the jar with a spoon. As a side note, growing up, my mother used to send my brother and I out the door to school with peanut butter on a spoon. No, it wasn’t Paleo, but she had is right knowing her kids needed fat rather than Pop Tarts for a good day at school!
When I did the Zone, despite my consistent adherence to my block prescription and increasingly multiplied fat blocks, I continued to be hungry all the time, or om, obsessed with food. This did not change much with what I ate or what I was doing in the hours between meals. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a big fan of the Zone and think my eventual end point will be a Paleo/Zone eating style, but for now, I’m focusing on Paleo only.
As part of my log I kept track of the number of hours until I experienced hunger. I know, I know – there is little scientific basis for this graph. You’re thinking, “Come on Nicole, there are a TON of factors that you have not accounted for in this graph.” Fine, I will agree with that. But it’s still interesting to look at! Check out the increase in hours until hungry beginning at Day 5! I’m going to create another graph for the last week of my Paleo month and compare.
