befabdaily

I have experienced that bread, and it will literally suck the moisture out of your esophagus and get stuck going down (way more than just stale bread would -- seriously do not try to eat it without a big glass of water close at hand). So I say, don't waste the $7/loaf even when you're back off Whole30.

Doctors still mostly don't tell patients to change their diets in a way that's sustainable and will lead to weight loss -- they just tell us "eat less move more", and they tell us to cut fat way down and get most of our calories from grain, which is not exactly helpful. It's not that patients don't LISTEN. Of course people would rather not be fat. It's that doctors are giving advice that is the opposite of what will work. And then patients get called "noncompliant" and treated with contempt by the doctor, because the standard-issue dieting advice is just wrong.

I made a liver thing the other night that turned out great. Sauteed asparagus, capers, green olives, and roasted tomatoes, with very thin strips of calf liver (strips about the size of a small asparagus stem) tossed into the stir fry at the last minute. I'd call it "liver puttanesca".

Yeah, if you put your heart into it, Zumba is NOT FOR PANSIES. If I'm going more than 2-3 times a week, I have to remind myself to dial it back or I get that super-stressed overexercised feeling. I do Zumba, small sessions of Convict Conditioning and medium-weight dumbbell exercises, T-Tapp (although I have laid off this for a month or so, just got bored with it) and walking.

Tom is my twin separated at birth, sleep-wise. I have been struggling with this the last month because I am organizing a conference that takes place in 3 days. It does help, if I wake up at 3, to drink another dose of Natural Calm. So I have been doing that.

Things to eat out of hand while working: MEATBALLS. I am a freakin' meatball addict these days. They are so easy. I'm spending a fair amount of time dreaming up new meatball recipes, trying to get some savory flavors in there so they don't need a sauce. The mushroom meatball recipe that I posted in the recipes forum is my first big success.

Well, I hope this does not come across as bootstraps but: don't make things so hard for yourself. You don't have to do elaborate planning or get lost in a very large range of options. Identify a small collection of meals you like and build off of them. Part of modern western culture is this idea that we need an infinite range of options and that every meal should be different and awesome, and that everything needs to be The Best Ever. It does not. It just has to work. Set everything up as much as possible to make things easy. I made things easy by -- cleaning stuff I no longer eat out of my kitchen, and rearranging my kitchen so that I see the paleo foods I want to eat front and center. I don't meal plan -- I meal template, and I cook. Every Sunday I go out and shop for my basics, and then I come home and cook two or three meat dishes and roast a batch of sweet potatoes. This Sunday I made Rogan Josh (out of Melissa Joulwan's book). It takes about 20 minutes to prep and 2 hours to simmer down. I roasted a chicken following the Mimi's Sticky Chicken recipe (long roast but mostly untended). I made a batch of spicy pork and beef meatballs (less than half an hour). I have a ton of food, more than enough to eat all week, and now the only choice I have to make is which container to pack my lunch out of in the morning. Every day for breakfast I eat something similar. 3 eggs, a pile of sauteed greens or asparagus, and maybe an avocado if I've worked out especially hard the previous day. It takes about 15 minutes to prepare and eat. Every day for lunch I eat something similar: a sweet potato, and a serving of one of the delicious meaty things I cooked up on Sunday. Paleo meatballs or roasted pork or rogan josh or whatever. Sometimes I'll take a little side dish of sauerkraut, or a piece of fruit. It takes 5 minutes to pack this up to go. Every day for dinner I eat something similar: a big mixed salad or some roasted vegetables, and a quick-cooked piece of fish or chicken or liver. One of the biggest illusions I've been able to let go over the last year is that there are two options -- eat prepared crap, or make something fancy and restaurant-caliber in my home kitchen. The illusion that I can do the latter had caused me to pack my kitchen full of rarely-used ingredient clutter. Now I shoot for a happy medium. Nourishing meal that tastes pretty good -- all killer, no filler.

It takes a while to settle into paleo. I track my budget on mint.com, and before I started paleo I would always go over my set food budget (which includes restaurants and such). And then when I first did the Whole30, I went WAY over. And then over the course of the last 12 months, while I've been pretty much eating paleo at home and not eating out as much, it's gradually come down to where I'm staying in budget, and I'm going to challenge myself to see if I can get even a little more frugal. I seem to just need to eat less, which helps. I've gotten more and more conscious of food waste (I am embarrassed to think about how much food I'd throw out before -- especially veggies because I'd buy them with good intentions and then not eat them, now I power through tons of them every week) and also more and more conscious of how much food I actually need to have around, so I don't overbuy as much. I am less concerned with having a wide range of choices available in my house at all times -- I used to buy like five kinds of cheese and then it would get moldy because it turns out I like the idea of cheese but I don't actually eat that much of it. I've stopped building Great Depression style stockpiles of stuff I maybe might need. I don't have to stock the accoutrements of baking under the illusion that I'm a person who bakes when really I only did so a couple of times a year. I also buy less wine, which adds up. Keep an eye on some of these issues -- your relationship with food isn't only how much and what you eat, but how much you buy and why. That may also begin to change.

Food that's broken down into juice will digest and transit your system differently. I suspect that if you were really doing all-veg, non-sweet smoothies, it probably wouldn't be actively harmful to drink them...but that's not the program. The size and timing of meals (the meal template) is actually a significant component of the plan because it can impact your hormonal regulation. So, if you want to do the Whole30 and see the impact it has on you, really do the Whole30. It's only 30 days. We can give up anything we're attached to for 30 days. Even kale juice.

A lot of these diets/ways of eating that people are having success with have some common elements. It really doesn't matter if other people fully understand what you're doing, unless they've asked for instructions so they can do it themselves, or unless they're preparing your food.

I feel ya. Prosecco is my beverage of choice. I almost don't really miss anything else (well occasionally rice, or cheese) but damn, nothing is quite as tasty as a glass of chilly Prosecco after a long day at work. I have been substituting a glass of bubbly water with frozen raspberries as "ice cubes", muddled a little to release their flavor. It hits the spot in a lot of my wine-wanting situations. But I won't lie, I like my drinkies. I'm not a heavy drinker, but my one glass of wine at an occasion is pretty sacred. Probably the thing most likely to keep me from being all Whole30, all the time. Edited to add: some studies would suggest that a little bit of alcohol (basically, that first drink) is not all that bad for you and might even be good in some ways. It's the second-Nth drinks at an occasion that are really not so great. So use your Whole30 to see if you can adapt to spending occasions without it, and become more comfortable without alcohol, and then when you do go back to it, you can be happy with less.

If you like coconut milk drink some when you feel like this. Like, a lot. On my first Whole30, I kept an open can around and just drank some if I got into a cravey spot, or had a glass of tea with a heavy dose of coconut milk added. It didn't form a permanent habit and it soothed that weird detoxing craving still-hungry feeling.

True, although if you go with that one then you have to hide that you're eating at all, which might be inconvenient!

"I'm really sorry, my doctor put me on this 30 day food elimination program and I have to follow it or I'll have to start all over -- and if I told you about it, you'd KNOW why I don't want to start over". White lies: your friend.

There's all sorts of crap in there. Get some shrimp or something. Depending on the desired texture and flavor of the surimi product, the gelatinous paste is mixed with differing proportions ofadditives such as starch, egg white, salt, vegetable oil, humectants, sorbitol, sugar, soy protein, seasonings, and enhancers such as transglutaminases and monosodium glutamate (MSG).