Let's Be Honest

I was poking through Diet Doctor's New page this morning (which is an RSS feed of lots of low carb and paleo blogs), and happened to see an interesting looking post by Dr. Adam Nally titled Much Ado About Ketosis.  The post was a pretty good one; it wasn't exactly enlightening to me since I've already read just about everything that has to do with ketosis, insulin, low carb, paleo, and food in general over the last three years, but it was good nonetheless and I'm sure it will help educate plenty of people about this subject, and that's really important in our society of sheep blindly following the conventional food gurus. 

However, there was something he said that kind of touched a nerve.  It's clear to me that he didn't intentionally try to trick people with what he said, unlike many a government food committee, but the point he was making is important to the conversation about low carb and paleo eating.  I don't want to seem like I'm attacking Dr. Nally, because I'm really not.  I think his writing is good and that he's doing a good thing by educating people.  It's just that what he said follows a pattern I've seen in the low carb and paleo scene, and I think we need to point this out and get really honest with ourselves.

So what the heck and I even talking about?  Well, here's the comment Dr. Nally made that bothered me:

Our bodies recognize the seasons we are in based upon inherent hormone release.  The key hormone is insulin.  Insulin is the seasonal indicator to our bodies.  Insulin tells our bodies when it is a “time of plenty” and when it was a “time of famine.”  Why?  You ask.  We didn’t have refrigerators 100 years ago and you were lucky if you had a root cellar.  The body needs to know when to store for the famine (the winter) that was around the corner. Insulin is that signal.
During the summer, potatoes, carrots, corn and other fruits are readily available.  These are all starchy carbohydrates and they all require the body to stimulate an insulin response so that they can be absorbed.  Insulin stimulates fat storage.  Just like bears, our bodies were designed to store for the winter.

During the winter, when carbohydrates are less prevalent, insulin production decreases to baseline levels.  If you think back in history, your grandparents probably used stored meats & cheeses that could be salted or smoked for preserving during this time of year.  Those crossing the plains were commonly found with pemmican, a concentration of fat and protein used as a portable nutrition source in the absence of other food.  Think about conversations you may have had with your grandmother when she told you that for Christmas, she received an orange.  A single orange for a gift?! Many of my patients drink 12-15 of them in a glass every morning.  The winter diets of our grandparents were very low in starches and carbohydrates.  When carbohydrate intake is low, little insulin is produced.

And here is the comment I made to his post:

I appreciate your post and the good data found within it, but I have to argue one important point you made. As a gardener and wanna-be homesteader, I know for a fact that there were plenty of carbs available to most folks before refrigeration, and yes, even in much older times. You mention that carrots, potatoes and corn are plentiful in summer but not in winter. It’s funny you mention those foods, because they are amongst the longer storing crops. And actually, potatoes have to last all winter long because you start next year’s crop by planting last year’s tubers. Fruit is easily dried by cutting it up and placing it in the sun. Many native Americans did this with wild native fruits. They even made fruit leathers. And while we’re on native plants, the native Americans also grew native winter squashes, which last anywhere from a few months to literally two years. And let’s not forget acorns, which are super plentiful, easy to store, and nearly 100% carbs.

As for grandma getting one orange for Christmas, that was because shipping fruit was nearly impossible before our modern highway system. However, that doesn’t mean grandma didn’t have fruit in the winter, though admittedly she didn’t eat as much as we do today, and mostly what she ate was preserved in a heavy sugar syrup.

I’m not trying to be a troll. I think your message is a good one, but we need to be honest when we talk about low carb and paleo. Otherwise, we’re just as bad as the health officials and scientists that spout bad dietary advice.

Yes, it's pretty easy to store carbs for the winter, and it seems paleolithic people did indeed do this whenever possible.  Tom Naughton, the guy who introduced me to low carb in the first place, and a blogger I can trust to always be honest and upfront, mentioned this last fall in a post titled My Previous View of the Paleo Diet Got Squashed. 

Again, I'm not trying to bash Dr. Nally.  What I really wanted to get across with this post is that we need to be really open and honest when we talk about food in this low carb/paleo community.  The conventional wisdom about food, with it's grain-based pyramid and low fat hysteria, is based on lies and untruths, bad science and money-making agendas.  Those of us who are fortunate enough to have found out about these lies early in the game, and who are trying to spread that information to the rest of the world, have a responsibility to not only be truthful but also well educated.  It's easy to say that past people didn't have carbs in the winter and therefore neither should we, but that's simplistic thinking.  Maybe it's true for some populations, but it's clearly not true for the human species as a whole.  That kind of logic is akin to the idea that fat causes you to become fat; it makes sense at first because it's such a simple idea, but it's clearly not right. 

Don't get me wrong; this isn't just about Dr. Nally's post, either.  I've seen this a lot over the years reading blogs and articles.  When you're trying to make a point that you believe in, it's easy to simplify data or ignore conflicting information.  It's not something we do because we're evil; I've been known to do it myself, and I'm pretty sure I'm not a bad person.  We do it because we truly believe in what we're saying, and we want to help people.  I totally get that.  But it's not the way we should be acting.  If we're dishonest or not totally upfront with people, they may listen to us at first, but then after a while it will breed mistrust and contempt, and may end up turning them away from this way of eating all together.  They may even end up feeling the same way about low carb/paleo as they do about the standard American diet; like they can't trust us, and don't know what to believe.  Which would be a shame, because this is clearly a very healthy diet.

So here's my call to every low carb/paleo/WAPF/whole foods blogger out there; be totally honest when you blog.  If you're trying to educate people, make sure to do your own research and not just depend on another's opinions.  If something seems overly complicated, don't assume telling the whole truth will confuse people.  If you don't understand all of the information yourself, be honest and tell people that and give them links so that maybe they can read it and make their own conclusions.  We don't have to be perfect; as a society, we're still trying to figure out what's best for our bodies and our health.  But we should at least be honest.

Real Life

I haven't really had much desire to update this blog lately.  There's a lot of Real Life going on around here; prepping this year's garden for planting, taking care of my own house plus my mom's house, all my crafty artistic pursuits, and as a special bonus, fertility testing.  My interest in the low carb/paleo community has waned a bunch, but that doesn't mean we're eating a SAD diet again.  We're just not super focused on all the latest diet news.  I do kind of miss blogging though.  It was always a fun pastime.

So let's get on with some updates, eh?  I'm sure the one thing most people want to know is how my weight and my diet are.  Well, to be blunt, they've been going badly.  I am eating well still; we're eating WAPF style with a low carb/paleo bent.  We incorporate resistant starches into our diet regularly, eat only organic foods whenever we can, we're still eating local organic grass fed beef and local raw milk, and eat mostly meat, dairy, veggies and some fruit.  I make a loaf of traditionally soured spelt bread once a week, although Chad eats most of it as sandwiches in his lunch.  In general, I don't count carbs or calories or anything; I just try to eat well.  However, my weight has been going up.  By January 2014 (while low carb/paleo, before we switched to WAPF), I had gained 10 pounds and was up to 195 or so.  By January 2015, I had gained another 5 pounds and I've been hovering between 197 and 200 since then.

No matter what I try, I can't lose the weight.  I've tried cutting out most carbs.  I've tried cutting portions.  I've tried a short stint of counting calories.  I've been exercising regularly.  I even tried increasing the amount I eat.  I've tried lots of things, given myself lots of crazy rules to follow and rewards and punishments.  However, nothing is working for me.  For the last year, I've been driving myself crazy with this weight and the fear that I'm going to keep ballooning up to the weight I started at before losing 30 pounds on a low calorie diet 5 years ago.  I'm close.  Just 15 more pounds.

And before anyone tells me what I'm doing wrong, or gives me advice about what I should try next to lose the pounds, I need to say that my main goal right now is to be at peace with my body.  For the last two weeks, my goal has simply been to eat when I'm hungry and stop when I'm full, and try to do most of my eating at meal times.  This may sound silly and perhaps a little elementary, but the truth is that I've never really eaten this way before in my life naturally.

I've been reading an interesting book the last few days; it's called Women Afraid to Eat.  It's an older book, written in the late 90s and published in 2000, so some of the ideas in it are dated (how long has it been since someone has used the term Syndrome X?), plus it's more SAD promoting than I really would like.  However, the point the book is trying to make is that our society, with its perverse obsession with thin women, is making a lot of otherwise healthy women sick.  It talks about how many women today don't know what it's like to eat normally, to eat when hungry and stop when full, to listen to her own body.  And it describes how dieting, even for a short while, makes it hard for people to return to any kind of normal eating.

I've known for a while that my relationship with food is far from healthy.  I can't remember a time in my life that I've eaten normally.  I was a fat child who ate when bored, lonely, or sad.  I became a vegetarian at age 14, and my emotional eating only got worse.  In my mid 20s I went on a pretty long low calorie diet that helped me lose 30 pounds, but it also made me afraid of food, and I developed a nasty binge eating habit.  Even after I started eating meat and become low carb and then paleo, my emotional and binge eating never stopped.

I think the low carb and paleo communities are doing a disservice to people by not talking about this problem more.  When I was heavy into the movement, I'd read many times that eating low carb/paleo would stop people from over eating because it's so satisfying.  And this is probably true for someone who has normal eating habits to begin with, but for someone who has dysfunctional eating, it's more than just how full your belly feels.  You don't stop when you're full; you keep eating until you're in pain.  Some people eat until they throw up.  Even the low carb foods, the butter and meat and cheese, wouldn't stop me from binge eating.

I hate to say all of this because I used to agree wholeheartedly with the message the low carb/paleo folks were saying.  And I still believe that eating a natural, low carb, paleo diet is a wonderful idea and it certainly has helped me in many ways.  But now that it's been three years, and the honeymoon stage is over, I see that it's not a perfect diet.  There's no such thing as a perfect diet, one special way of eating that cures all your ailments and makes you live forever.  We're all individuals, we all have our own special strengths and weaknesses, histories and DNA, and there are many reasons why a certain way of eating might not work for everyone. 

A big part of the reason I've been shifting away from the community in general is because sometimes it feels like people are exclusively focused on weight.  Everyone's doing it to get skinny and toned, even though they say they're doing it to be healthy.  You hardly hear stories about people who go on paleo and get really healthy but remain fat.  The celebrated story was always about a very obese person who started on the diet, easily lost 250 pounds, and is now a super athlete with a well toned body and has no problem staying on the diet ever.

I never lost much weight on low carb/paleo, even when I was very strict about it.  It helped me to lose 10 pounds I'd put on during a non-low carb trip, but that's it, really.  So here I was, 185 pounds and a BMI of 29 or 30, still what most people would call fat, and not losing any weight.  I felt like a failure.  Don't get me wrong; I was feeling great and my health was definitely improving, but I was still squishy.  It was hard to let myself even blog about low carb/paleo, because I kept thinking that someone was going to expose me as a fraud.  The whole community seemed, from my eyes, weight focused; whenever one of the leaders gained weight, they were ridiculed and said to not be following their own advice.  Remember how people treated Jimmy Moore when he gained back a lot of his weight?  Or remember the comments some would make about Laura Dolson?  For that matter, remember how everyone wanted to see a picture of Carb-Sane so they could make fun of how fat she obviously was?

Tom Naughton, bless his heart, would regularly say in his blog and in the comments section, that weight is less important that health, and that's really what you should be striving for.  And of course that was a message bloggers would occasionally try to remind their readers.  But the underlying message was always that if you were fat on a low carb/paleo diet, you weren't doing it right.  I don't think everyone thought this way, but as a whole, it was very hard to escape.  It just got very tiring after a while.

So my goal now, as I said before, is to focus on being at peace with my body.  I'm eating well; veggies, eggs, meat, good fats, fruit, resistant starches, organic and free range whenever possible.  I'm trying to teach myself what it feels like to be hungry, and to listen to and respect my body when I'm full.  I'm trying to love my body the way it is right now, squishy and lumpy and flabby.  I'm also trying to stop negative speak in my head about both my own body and the bodies of other people.  I can't expect to love myself if I go around judging other people, even if it is just a knee jerk reaction learned from society's love of thin.  And I'm also trying to not get obsessed about food, weight, dieting, or eating perfectly.  The last thing I need is to feel like I somehow don't measure up, or to beat myself up if I don't eat perfectly.

That was quite the rant, wasn't it?  I didn't even get to my garden or our fertility testing.  I guess I'll have to come back and write some more later.  Let's see if I actually remember to.

Woo!!

OMG you guys, check this out.  The Diet Doctor posted today on his blog that "paleo" is trending higher than "cupcake".




To be fair, if you compare "paleo" to "cupcakes", with an "s" at the end, then paleo is behind. But only by a little!



It's certainly a sign that things are moving in the right direction. Oh, here's another one (this is too fun). Low carb diet vs. low fat diet.



Woohoo! That's AWESOME! Low carb is nowhere near the levels it was at in 2004-2005, but it's still making steady progress, which is very encouraging.

Also, I find it hilarious that all of the diets get really big spikes around January of every year.

Sunburns, Allergies, and IBS

There's a lot of claims flying around out there in the low carb/paleo/primal communities, and I wanted to address some of my own personal observations on some of them. 

Back when Chad and I first started our low carb journey in September of 2012, I was so excited about it and believed that it could pretty much cure anything.  So when I heard that going low carb/paleo could actually help with certain things I was suffering from, of course I wanted to see how it would actually affect me.  So here's three things I've been personally paying attention to to see how our diet has affected them.

Sunburns:
The theory is that going low carb/paleo will make you less susceptible to sunburns, possibly because you're replacing unnatural vegetable oils with natural saturated fat.  I really had high hopes for this one.  I'm literally the whitest person I know, and from a very young age, I have had a lot of problems with sunburns.  I've had at least one, but possibly two, incidences of blistering sunburns when I was a child, which of course scares me to death thinking about what that means for my future.  Chad is also quite white and covered in freckles.

Since we started low carbing in the autumn, we didn't really get much chance to test out the sunburn theory until this summer.  It's been a pretty craptastic summer here, but we did get a couple of weeks of nice sunny warm weather to spend frolicking in the sun.  At first, I thought the theory was right!  We seemed to be tanning instead of burning, which is something that neither of us has really done in the past. 

But as we spent more time in the sun over those couple of weeks, we started having issues.  Just 10 minutes in the sun one afternoon brought on a bright red burn on the back of Chad's neck and my chest.  After that we tried to be more careful about our sun time, wearing hats and staying in the shade.  But one day I went out to pick raspberries, and I must have forgotten the time, because when I got back inside, I had the worst burn I've had in years.  It healed up within a couple of days and never peeled, but after that, I decided not to play any more games with the sun. 

My conclusion: clearly our way of eating has helped somewhat; we do tan instead of burn if our sun exposure is only for short periods of time, or in the early morning or evening.  But eating low carb/paleo isn't going to make you completely protected from the sun, especially if you're a ghost like me.

Allergies:
Another popular theory out there is that going low carb/paleo will rid you of your allergies, most likely from being wheat free.  This is another one that Chad and I had to wait on, since our allergies don't really get bad until mid to late summer. 

Well, it's that time of year again, and we're waking up sniffling, sneezing, and rubbing our red itchy eyes.  Chad has the luxury of going to an air conditioned office during the day, but I've been at home, with the allergen laden air all around me.  I don't like taking allergy pills for the same reason I don't drink; we're trying to have a baby, and I could be pregnant and I don't want to do any harm if I am.  Since I'm not taking any pills, and I get to feel the full effects, I can tell you that my allergies are just as bad as usual. 

I do have to say that Chad and I still eat dairy, and there are people out there that say that dairy could be a trigger for allergies.  But people also say eggs could be, and nuts (especially peanuts), and nightshades, and shellfish, and who knows what else.  Maybe some summer in the future, I'll stop eating dairy and eggs and nuts and see if I still have itchy eyes and sneezing.

My conclusion: At least for seasonal allergies, and with us still eating dairy, there seems to be no change.

IBS/Bowel issues:
This is something unfortunately that I used to have to deal with.  I didn't even know it was a problem, honestly, because it was just the way I'd always been.  If you've ever read the book The Meat Fix, I can describe my issues as milder versions of what John, the author, was going through.  If you haven't read the book, I recommend it, even though the author goes into great detail about his gross bathroom problems.  I'll refrain from going into equally gross details.  I will say that I think it's interesting that the author of The Meat Fix also says that he had no idea that his problems were even problems, because he was so used to them.

Something else interesting about The Meat Fix is that it's written by a man that used to be a vegetarian and who ate a lot of soy burgers and soy bacon and soy sausage, tons of rice, and other whole grains, which is pretty much how I was living as a vegetarian before going low carb.  Literally a few days after I started to eat meat again and gave up the soy burgers and the seitan (meat substitute made from wheat gluten), my IBS issues just vanished.  For the first time in what seemed like my whole life, I no longer had bowel problems. 

When I misbehave and eat wheat or soy, or when I eat too much fiber (usually in the form of too many coconut flour baked goods), my IBS will act up again, but it's never as bad as it used to be.  It's sad to think that I went through so much of my life suffering from that problem and I had no idea it was within my power to stop it. 

My conclusion: At least for me, it has completely fixed my bowel issues.  This reason alone is enough to keep me eating this way forever.


I can't say that low carb/paleo will fix everything anymore, because it's clear that some things aren't fixable for everyone.  A ghost-white person is never going to be sunburn-proof, and sometimes seasonal allergies are just a part of life.  But I can say with certainty that a low carb/paleo/primal diet is the healthiest diet I've ever eaten, and I'm healthier now than I've ever been in my whole life.  Maybe it can't fix everything, but it's sure fixed a lot of things.

Condiments

I love condiments.  Don't you?  They make the world seem a little happier, and your food seem a little brighter.  Creamy mayo, tangy ketchup, smokey barbeque sauce....  What would life be like without condiments?

Well, most of us who are low carb, paleo, primal, and generally whole foods know exactly what it's like.  The only store bought condiment in my refrigerator is mustard, and I was never really a mustard fan to begin with.  But everything else in the store is loaded with crap; vegetable or seed oils, HFCS, sugar, artificial flavors, preservatives you can't pronounce.  And don't get me started on salad dressing. 

Chad and I went without condiments (except mustard) for quite a while, and salads were out of the question.  Which is sad, because I love salad.  After a couple of months of this, I finally said to myself THAT'S IT!  I'm going to make my OWN condiments!  And I did!

Today I make my own mayonnaise.  I use this recipe for regular mayo, except I use Linda's method from Linda's Low Carb for mayo, which is to put the all the ingredients except the oil into a quart mason jar, stir, pour the oil in, and then blend with an immersion blender.  Works every time! 

And when I'm feeling frugal/decadent, I use a modified version of this recipe for BACONNAISE.  Yes, baconnaise, a delicious mayonnaise created with saved bacon fat.  It's a great way to save money since the bacon grease is practically free.  But I only make baconnaise once in a while, because it's quite bacony, and you don't want to overdo that. 

Fresh hot bacon grease.

Now ketchup can be tricky.  There's such a subtle balance of sweet, tang, and spices that need to be just right.  My attempts to make it in the past have been pretty ugly, but then I came across Linda's recipe for Better "Heinz" Ketchup.  This is a winner!  You don't have to use Splenda.  I have used stevia and also xylitol.  Personally, I like it with xylitol better.  I bet honey would work well, too, if you allow that in your diet.

I've tried a few times to make barbeque sauce, but that's eluded me so far.  My next attempt is going to be Linda's Favorite BBQ Sauce recipe.  It looks like it should be very good.  I just don't know what to do about the liquid smoke; I'm not sure I want to use it.  I DO have a ton of applewood smoked sea salt I could use instead of regular salt, though, and maybe get some smoked paprika. 

What about salad dressings?  Those I make, too.  Mostly they're vinaigrettes, using whatever kind of spices or seasonings sound good when I'm making it.  We sometimes buy the Good Seasons Italian dressing mix in the store.  Even though it does have sugar in the ingredients, most of the rest of the ingredients are surprisingly not terrible.  But lately, I've been having fun making creamy dressing.  I've tried this recipe for ranch dressing, using my own olive oil mayo, and the other day, I just whipped together a Thousand Island dressing from the top of my head.  I knew it was basically mayo, ketchup, and relish.  Since I already had homemade mayo, and homemade ketchup, and I even had homemade pickles made from my own home grown beans, I thought what the heck!  And it came out so delicious!

I even used home grown lettuce for the salad.

I try not to think of my way of eating as restricting.  It's not, really.  I CHOOSE not to eat the yucky seed oils, or the HFCS, or the sugar, or nasty preservatives and colors and flavors that are in store bought condiments.  And because that's a choice I make, I get to go experiment in the kitchen.  How cool is that?

Paleo Make Believe

Back in April, I read a post on Robb Wolf's blog entitled Veggie Burgers, Meatless Chicken and Paleo Bread.  It was a pretty interesting argument against the paleo folks who accuse the vegetarians of being silly for eating meatless meat, because in all honesty, that's no different than paleo bread. 

The most amusing thing to me was how annoyed some of the commenters were with how, OMG, paleo bread is so fake and why would anyone want to eat something that's not a whole food?  And why are there only paleo treat recipes out there?  And who would want to eat anything but hunks of meat and vegetables anyway?

I was a vegetarian for almost 14 years, so I get it why other vegetarians want to eat fake meat.  I hated it when anyone would make fun of me about it, because they just weren't listening to me when I would tell them I wasn't a vegetarian because I hate the taste of meat.

Of course, I found out that vegetarianism wasn't doing me any favors, and I switched over to a low carb diet.  And you know what?  When I first switched, I needed those substitutes in order to stick with my new way of eating.  I drank diet pop, and I ate low carb cake and sugar-free jello.  It was a really hard switch for me, because I was addicted to sugar at the time.  If I didn't have those low carb treats on hand, I'm almost certain I wouldn't have made it this far.

That's why it bothers me when people look down on folks who eat sugar free candy, or paleo bread.  It's not your place to decide what another person eats, and if you make them feel like a failure because they're not living up to your perfect standards, then they won't stick with it.  They'll think, "I can't eat this way if it means I have to give up everything I love.  If I can't be perfect, I may as well not do it at all," and they'll quit trying all together.  Isn't it more important that people are improving their health?  So what if they're eating paleo bread or low carb cookies?  It's their choice to make, and if it helps them make the transition, then all the better.

Also, to the commenter who complained that there are only paleo treat recipes on the internet...  Seriously?  How many ways are there to cook meat and vegetables?  Who gets excited by pot roast recipes?   Paleo/low carb treat recipes are popular because they're really hard to make and it's a niche category, whereas you can open any cookbook or cooking website and find out how to cook meat.