adabeie

I appreciate all the replies. I have reincorporated certain grains to what is so far an overall good effect; eg, breakfast is a bowl of oats with at least a portion of coconut milk and with some spices and such it provides reliable fuel for 5-6 hours (meaning I don't feel hunger until that 6th hour, and when it comes it's a stomach feeling rather than a mood swing), which is about how long I need it to until my work schedule permits a meal break. I've been doing two daily meals for so long that trying three a day was a pattern I simply couldn't establish in the end, that was actually the hardest part of the W30 for me. There are definitely more animal proteins and vegetables in my current diet than pre-W30, and less dairy. Certain things my body missed, like milk kefir. My digestion was actually quite good pre-W30 and during, it was all over the place despite following all the proper guidelines. Go figure. The stabilized blood sugar has remained, which was my chief concern, and my energy levels are rising again, allowing me to get back to the workout routines I had had pre-W30 (that fell apart for a lot of personal reasons I won't get into here). More meat in my diet is probably one of the biggest effects of doing the W30, ironically - most of my home cooked meals previously were ovo/lacto-vegetarian, though not intentionally, my wife just hates handling meat and our schedules were so up and down we'd end up buying a steak or chicken and forget about it until the day after it expired. (We both cooked, we just would handle different meals, and dinners were her passion when she had sufficient time, which hasn't been in a long while.) Anyway I'm taking the reincorporation bit by bit and paying a lot more attention to how my body reacts to certain foods, and staying away from things that act like crack. The sugar dragon is a funny thing that the whole 'wait 5 minutes, if you still want it., it's not a craving' notion has been good for, and frankly sweets.. kinda gross me out. I'd rather have a straight espresso. Thanks for the replies and input. I'll definitely be following up on any further replies.

So basically, if your body doesn't respond badly to one egg, then 4 or 5 isn't going to do it any more harm than one would.

Thanks for the advice. I'll check it out, but if white rice is the preferred form, I'd just skip it altogether: even a little white rice turns me into a total zombie, like bad food coma, pretty much immediately, and lasting for between 45 minutes to well over an hour. It's bad. (Especially for all those years I ate the school lunches, which pretty much are built around rice given that this is Korea.)

I'm just unsure of how I will be able to judge the loss of fat adaptedness except for noticing decreased satiety between meals, or a reduced 'slow burn' of feeling nutrified for hours. Today worked out okay, though - I had a grain based breakfast, sadly, and that held me for about 3 hours though I felt pretty good afterwards. My W30 lunch was far better and kept me going until the end of my shift 6 hours after I ate it. More regular meal spacing isn't really an option for me, so I really need to preserve that fat adaptation. Like I said, it's been the single-best thing to come out of the W30 for me. Thanks for the article; I'm getting a friend's copies of the books later this week, hopefully.

Just trying to figure this one out (I know it's probably in the book, and a friend has promised to lend me her copy next week) - Will grains wreck the body's habit of using fat for energy? Eg, if carbs are available, whether complex grain based (still no refined flours, as much as I can avoid), or from fruit (which I do enjoy in moderation as part of probably 2/3s of my meals, ie, two meals daily include some whole fruit), will the body forget about using consumed fat for energy? I ask because My main sources of starch have basically been sweet potatoes, and the general W30 layout got rid of my hypoglycemia, basically. I can go like 5,6 hours, sometimes more (I try not to but my schedule is, well, rather unforgiving) between meals now without any sort of crash. I really try to supplement but avoid snacking, so think of it as two main meals and a minimeal at work. I never could have done this pre-W30, and that's really the one thing i don't ant to lose. It has affect my emotional stability, a whole cascade of things. yeah, my skin's better, sure, but I'm not on these valley-peak lurches in terms of blood sugar any more. So, will having, say, brown rice screw up what the W30 has taught my body in terms of preferring fats?

Glad I found this.. during a visit back home my mother expressed some serious concern about my cholesterol intake when I told her about doing the W30.. and even though I'm eating lots of veggies, both fresh and stir fried cruciferous, and even though I'm eating more fish, both occasional apex eg salmon and more sustainable stocks like anchovies, when I told her I was eating something like 5 eggs a day.. Well, she worried. I'm still trying to figure this one out, but they're affordable, my body loves them(I feel great with eggs, usually 2-3 with breakfast, and 2-3 for lunch, and an animal protein of another sort for dinner), they're quick to cook.. I'm trying to assuage her anxiety. Not really sure how, on the cholesterol topic. But food in doesn't equal food out, eg, fat eaten doesn't just glob up and remain un-transformed. Trying to find sensible and somewhat mainstream-ish sources for her. (Ie more ideological pages like Mark's Daily Apple aren't going to help my case with her.)

I was really hoping W30 would make the author's list, since it's been in the news a bit more lately and, to my mind, seems more stably established than some of the other diets (again, it's a bit weird to call it a diet except in the sense of 'diet' meaning 'what you consume' rather than 'temporary fix to a long term problem').. I think the one thing that stuck out in my mind was a) a firm inclusion of grain based carbs for the author, and a wariness of some of the fats and protein sources that I've used in the W30, ie eggs, that I do wonder about being linked to elevated cholesterol. But I'd need routine bloodwork about that, and frankly, I feel great on the W30, and going off of it during this vacation has emphasized that more. (I did take a stand and am including far more vegetables in every meal.. I'd apparently completely misjudged the health of my family's eating habits, which I had recalled being far more wholesome than they are in practice).. But indeed - I feel like a "W30 for athletes" would have likely annihilated any of the author's concerns.. I wonder if there's a dietary shootout to be organized here. Wouldn't that be interesting? And yes, the friend who turned me on to the W30 is lending me her copies, both, of It Starts With Food and the other one.. I'd love to buy my own, and actually.. being temporarily in the US might be a good chance to do that and avoid the 200% premium Korean bookstores stack onto imported books, especially best sellers.. Thank you for your input. At least I don't feel paralyzed by the plethora of information out there.

I was wondering if anyone had read this recent article on Outside. Not all of it surprises me, except for the Okinawan diet making his cholesterol go 'through the roof' and talking about Paleo as though it was interchangeable with macrobiotic. There's not a big emphasis (or any at all, that i recall) on raw vegetables in the W30 plans.. I guess (since I can't afford to ask a nutritionist to work me over and analyze my DNA) certain reintroductions for me have had reasonable success where others' effects were more pronounced: more mucous and phlegm when using dairy (I think it's coconut milk in coffee for here on out for me), and more noticeable spikes and troughs in mood and energy levels when eating more grains, even if I'm doing my best to make sure they're whole grains.. My family has expressed concern about the number of eggs I go through, though I do balance them against other protein sources when possible, and for the first time in my life I'm eating the "right" amount of fish, and it tends to be wild caught, generally not-overfished stocks. But then, I haven't had blood work done in a while and I wonder if following the amount of 'good fats' and higher cholesterol foods like eggs (I might be mixing things up here, even though I've been doing this for - only - two months, and this vacation is my first break from the W30 regimen after the selective reintroduction period, I'm learning more with every meal).. I'm probably worrying about nothing. But I did think the article was very interesting, not that one person's experience is a full data set, though the author and I happen to share ancestry.

So I stepped on the scale a few days ago, day 34 or something, it was (I finished around this time last week!) and everyone was right: I'd held steady from that time. And my energy levels built slowly. And instead of a 'tiger blood' period, I just felt.. more stable. So I started running again, and biking a bit more, and doing a kickboxing maintenance routine I have written down somewhere from my old coach. It's hard to know how to take the expectation of feeling "great", since what I feel is more of what I'd less emphatically call, "good". I guess you could liken it to feverish passionate love for someone vs calm, comfortable, emotionally stable love. If I had to put my body state in that kind of comparison, it's more of the latter. I don't feel like I'm bursting with energy, but I can say to myself, let's go do 10k. And I run it, and I feel solid, steady while doing it, and last week I even PR'd at a sub 50 minute 10k, which is a first for me, and frankly I haven't been much of a runner lately. And so far the re-additions are holding steady: occasional soy, a much smaller amount of dairy, and while I haven't gone into wheat yet, steelcut oats and granola have come back nicely with the milk kefir I fermented and stored before I started this whole thing. (I'll probably have to get a new culture, I doubt it survived my first attempt and cold storing kefir grains for which you need powered milk.) But just checking back in with this. I feel lighter on my feet, I feel much more stable. The absence of hypoglycemia has made a huge difference in my emotional ups and downs, and probably my perceived energy levels as well. My skin seems clearer, and overall I'm eating more veggies, more fish, and cooking everything at home, which is more cost effective and I feel good about it. So, good work, W30, good work, me, and good work, all of you out there trying it for the first time, or keeping with it for months or years.

Successfully got the calorie counts off the reported data so the app cycles through avg. pace, current pace, duration, and overall distance. The only metrics I really care about. That plus elevation tracking below the figures paints a pretty full picture for me. It's taken me this long to sort out the different between hunger and cravings. I never really differentiated before, or rather, they seemed so alike and I didn't pay the difference any mind before the W30. I'm on day 29! So stoked! And I'm looking forward to the soy reintroduction since a friend from Japan is into fermentation of all sorts and she passed me a jar of two year aged miso paste that she's been selling at local farmer's markets. Can't wait to try it.

I'm poking through the settings now to see if I can disable certain metrics.. I'd just rather not know.

Quick two-part question related to exercise around life during the W30: I went through an initial enthusiasm with tracking apps like Strava and whatnot, I used to track all my runs, all my rides, etc. And at some point I got disenchanted with the notion of a quantified life and got rid of all my apps, didn't track anything, and it was really nice. A friend challenged me on Map My Fitness the other day so I thought, what the heck, I'll get the app just for this since competition plays zero factor in why I like riding, running, etc. You seem like you can't get away from calorie counts on these apps, which to me seems to veer really close, in principle, to getting on the scale. I get that many people on the W30 are probably a lot more scientific about it than I am, but I like the 'ballparking' principles of the meal plans and proportions, and if I learn what satiates me then I really, really don't care about calories in/out. (Especially since, as many of the mods have pointed out, health and exercise has a lot more to do with finer details rather than total calories.) And while I say I don't really pay attention, sometimes the counts on the apps mystify me: this morning I rode 44km in around 2 hours, with about 20km being a very nice, easy going recovery pace ride which was with a friend, and the 10km to and from the meetup point about twice the pace, not breathless but perspiring and working at, maybe 80% of what I think my capacity probably is. This app thinks I burned over 1,000 calories in that time. No way, right? I ask the more experienced athletes out there if, in your experience, this aspect of tracking apps is even marginally correct, and, do you consider calorie tracking to be of the same sort of practice that weighing oneself is?

Try as I might, I couldn't find a 'favorite blog' roundup for cooking sites. There was a favorite recipes thread, so I thought I'd put this up. Besides some of the regulars (Well Fed, Clothes Make the Girl, Om Nom Paleo), one I heard about from a friend is called Turmeric and Twine (http://www.turmericandtwine.com), from which I've so far used two slow cooker recipes: one for tomato sauce (omitting non compliant ingredients like sugar proved to be no problem in terms of a delicious result), and one for winter squash with cacao and chili, which I'm currently eating even though it's summer. With the slow burn of the chili, it works nicely as a break from gazpacho and is excellent on summer days if you're of the 'fight fire with fire' mentality that many dishes are in terms of summer eating here in Korea. Anyway, I hadn't seen it on any blog rolls, and so far I'm loving it. (Let Mickey D's sue me for appropriating that slogan.) Bonus points for an emphasis on the slow cooker, since there are never enough hours in the day.. Also, pro tip for the squash recipe: I made a simple beef bone broth last week and used a cup of that instead of water along with the coconut milk, and, well, it's a winner.. (the bone broth has also made it into my gazpacho, so it won't last long at this rate..)

For me, coming off a largely grain inclusive diet, including more sweet potatoes has been a godsend. Especially what are called 'Japanese sweet potatoes' in the west (in Korea, most squashes are called 'hobak' so it can be tough to differentiate, and sweet potatoes are collectively known as 'hobak goguma', or basically 'pumpkin sweet potato' because of their sweetness or color although there are at least 4 kinds people eat regularly that don't resemble one another in the least), which I've taken to roasting in olive oil and spices and just eating whole, provided they've been thoroughly washed. (Conventional produce in korea is reputed to use 15% more pesticides than in the US, which is a pretty staggering comparison, and recent bribery cases related to organic labeling have made me question a few of the better known national organic certifications, alas.. :-/ ....) The starches are super important, in my still very neophyte experience, particularly as relates to long-term exertion. They keep me going and prevent me from feeling hungry, and offer a great culinary foundation for more interesting meals as well.

I appreciate this thread and the W30 compliant whole-food options for randonneuring. Previously it had included things like bean burritos, so that whole notion is out. Seems I'll be making my own larabars in the future..