LB(A)N Challenge Is On! 7

A HUGE thank you to all who attended the Thursday night first draft of Nutrition and Recovery at MDF. I think we have everyone enrolled, at this time we have 29 people, 16 men and 13 women participating! I will post a list at the gym and I would like you to check it and make sure that you are on it and if you need pictures or to pay do so as soon as humanly possible.

The Basics
This is NOT a weight loss challenge. When you are successful on this challenge, you will have learned a way of eating that enables you to look, feel and perform better. To do that, you must learn to gather (shop for), cook and eat real food like our ancient ancestors did. While I will go into this in detail later, that means limit any food that comes in a package or is processed (including shakes, “nutrition bars,” protein powder). The majority of the Paleo/Primal diet can be eaten raw, but don’t necessarily have to be eaten raw, and are found on the periphery of your grocery store or at your local farmers market. More on what foods will enable success later this this post.

This is NOT a weight loss challenge. The food log you will use has five areas to input food for each day and you should be using at least three of them and probably all of them. There are several reasons that you should not skip meals. I will discuss why you shouldn’t skip meals now on another post, but for now just believe me, you will reduce your progress, and increase your suffering, if you skip meals.

This is NOT a weight loss challenge. Some people will lose weight, some will gain and some will stay the same. The main thing that I would like to happen is that you gain a solid understanding of what you eat, what the composition of that food is and what you can do to improve your diet, one step at a time.

This is NOT a weight loss diet (am I making my point here?). You are training your body to use a different fuel source (fat). This takes between 2 and 4 weeks. There will be some rough days physically and mentally, plan on havng them and they won’t be as bad.

What Can I Eat?
This is the most concise description I can find:

Reduce intake of the following:

• Grains- including bread, pasta, noodles
• Beans- including string beans, kidney beans, lentils, peanuts, snow-peas and peas
• Potatoes
• Dairy products
• Sugar
• Salt

Eat The Following:

• Meat, chicken and fish
• Eggs
• Fruit
• Vegetables (especially root vegetables, but definitely not including potatoes or sweet potatoes)
• Nuts, eg. walnuts, brazil nuts, macadamia, almond. Do not eat peanuts (a bean) or cashews (a family of their own)
• Berries- strawberries, blueberries, raspberries etc.

Yes, there are a number of different takes on the above description and many people, will be fine on milk, for instance, but others will notice a huge difference eliminating milk. In the coming weeks, I will post some links that explain why the author(s) includes some of the above mentioned foods on a limited, or maybe not so limited, basis. In the end, you will have to decide what works best for you because what works best for me, may not work for you at all. While you may see some differences in the different versions of the Paleolithic diets, all of them call for a significant reduction in grains, legumes and sugar and an increase in “good fat” consumption. More on good fats later.

Sample Menu
Here is a great sample menu that Susan put together.

Food logs
Use your log to keep track of everything you eat, every day. In addition to what you eat, record the quantity of each food and how you feel before, during, and after you eat it. The way foods make you feel is a really important piece of this exercise – you’ll gain insight into which foods work best in your body and those that might be good to eliminate from your diet.

Don’t beat yourself up if you forgot some of the details of the meal, just write what you remember and do a better job next time.

If you don’t like using computers, use this log that you can record with a pen and paper, old-school-style.

If you don’t mind using a spreadsheet, check this out.

I am going to save commenting on the online food logs until tomorrow; however, I think these are a good way to go for several reasons.

Finally, I am trying to find a place to store the food logs online. Bear with me for a few more days until I get some thing set up.
Please post questions or comments and I will get to them as soon as possible.