I ate something tonight which I’m sure satisfies on a level that most food simply can’t manage. Here’s what I did:
Take a leg of lamb, on the bone.
Season simply with a little oil, mixed herbs (or rosemary if you prefer) some pepper and salt if you must.
Bang in the oven at a high temp say 230 degs C for 20-30 mins.
Reduce the temp to 140 degs and cook for another 45 mins (more or less as you prefer)
Take out an leave to rest, covered in kitchen foil, for 15 mins.
Now as I was cooking this for cold meat to eat over the next few days, I took a small sharp knife and cut of most of the meat. Actually I cut off all the meat I could, and you can get a reasonable amount off if you take your time.
But here it comes. When left with the still warm bone, pick that sucker up and get to gnawing on it! Go on, get those teeth in there, in all the nooks and crannies. Use those incisors and canines for what nature intended and rip that meat off.
I tell you, there is *nothing* more satisfying than chewing on a warm roasted bone (don’t forget to suck the marrow out of the bone too!). What really shouldn’t be amazing either, is that your teeth are far better at getting the last bits of meat off, than a knife will ever be. It’s almost like they were designed for the job…. spooky!
I’m experimenting with dropping my carb intake a bit and upping my fats. I’m still doing about 15 blocks per day of protein, but only 8-9ish of carbs and about 30 of fat. And to be honest, I’m feeling pretty good this week.
Did 2 major WODs this week, yesterday’s Crossfit Snatch workout which was damn hard but I managed it. And today I did:
- Clean & Jerk singles up to 3 x 90kg. Just concentrating on technique.
- 5 Rounds For Time
- Run 400m
- 30 Box Jumps
- 30 Wall Balls 20lbs
I only had an 11lb ball, but that didn’t stop it taking 37:59 minutes. Not a great time, but I’m not displeased considering how few proper Crossfit metcon workouts I’ve done in the last 3 months.
As ever, whilst I’m actually doing the workout, I’m thinking “Why the hell am I doing this to myself?” About 30 minutes later, I think “That wasn’t so bad.” and an hour later I think “That was great, can’t wait to do it again!” It’s a total Statler and Waldorf moment! Lol.
Whilst on Facebook recently, I came across a friend who has just started Crossfit and was being advised by his mates to start taking supplements, e.g. creatine, and eating plenty of carbs, specifically bananas were mentioned. I couldn’t help but give a balancing point of view and quoted the Crossfit 1 sentence diet of: “Eat meat and veg, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar.” I got a typical mainstream dietary advice response.
However I decided not to feed the troll and replied privately to my friend refuting the high carb advice he’d been given. Dr Sears was right when he said that trying to change someone’s diet, was easier than trying to change their religion! Anyway, I thought it would make a good blog post, so here it is, the other blokes advice is preceded with a “>”:
Of all the books I’ve read, this one is a really good one to start with. It’s a relatively concise, cheap book that’s very accessible, and unusually for diet related books, written by an English Doctor as oppose to an American one. Further, he has no diet (or supplements!) to sell, so has no stake in the game other than the search for truth. You can pick up a 2nd had copy off Amazon marketplace for a £fiver.
> there is a difference between refined and fruit sugars as well as how they are processed within the body.
Nope, all carbohydrate is just sugar in transit. It’s all processed ultimately to the same end: it gets broken down and shoved into the blood. Some manages to get out of the food and into your blood stream a bit faster than others (which is where the Glycemic Index (GI) diet comes from), but fruit sugars have a pretty high GI and are accessed pretty quickly. High GI means a spike in blood sugar, which is dangerous, so your body produces insulin to bring it down quickly. Insulin converts blood sugar to fat. This is why a high carb diet makes you fat. Do this over a few decades and your pancreas (which is where your insulin is produced) packs up and hey presto, you have diabetes.
> [A banana has] as much sugar as a snicker bar maybe, yet less than a quarter of the calories and easily digestible….
That statement is only significant in you think both A) calorie counting is important and B) fat is bad for you. I don’t believe either A or B. And “easily digestible” just means “gets the sugar into your blood quickly” which as I’ve already said is bad. So pretty much an own goal there.
> And too little starch is dangerous as many so called *bad* starchy foods contain the very fibres that prevent colon cancer.
Starch is just highly concentrated carbs and yes you do need some carbs, but get most of it from nutritious veg and some fruit. You get loads of natural fibre from eating real vegetables and fruit. Fibre (or just roughage) is the stuff you can’t digest and is just bulk to clean out the bowels. Even if you entertain the idea that eating less starch might increase the chance of colon cancer, however small that increase might be, it is vastly outweighed by the reduction in chance you’ll die from heart disease, which is responsible for about 1/3 of deaths every year. How many people do you know who’ve died of colon cancer? His argument is akin to saying: you shouldn’t do exercise because moving increases the chance you might lose your balance, fall over and break your neck.
> You don’t have to go far into the internet to find out what a predominantly protein diet does for the metabolism and eliminatory system.
I certainly never suggested a “predominately protein diet”! That would be madness. However a balanced diet, has a little more protein than mainstream dietary advice advocates. Baring in mind that mainstream dietary advice says you should eat a huge pile of carbs (about 80% of your diet) and low fat, and errrr normally says very little about protein, assuming it will somehow magically look after itself.
> The diet you advise is not varied enough to have long term health benefits… Yes rapid weight loss, but the second you deviate the weight will pile back on and then some…
So taking out bread for example, which is low in vitamins and minerals, high in salt, sugar, (and fat lol) and preservatives, and replacing with vegetables and fruit is “not varied enough”…?!? I eat in the region of 10-15 portions of fruits and vegetables each day, instead of bread, potatoes and pasta. Which looks like the “not varied enough” diet now?
And yes he’s right, go back to a high carb / high sugar diet and you’ll pile the pounds back on. Nice of him to argue my point for me! Fortunately most people who realise the truth about diet, see the evidence in their own body, look great, feel great and have a full, varied, flavoursome and abundant diet that doesn’t leave them hungry, rarely go back to their old stodgy high carb ways.
> Diet change is ‘gaming’ mother nature so a holier than thou statement won’t wash with someone who has worked WITH mother nature for years….
Don’t know where to start with this. Eating a diet of natural, unprocessed food is gaming mother nature? WTF?!? Taking synthetically produced supplements, as he originally suggested, is hardly working with nature is it?
> High protein diets are one of the greatest lies… Just another Atkin’s variant and we only have to look at what that evidence shows, diabetes, heart disease all through wanting a quick fix…
It’s stupid really, but take a look at all the diets, and they all get their knickers in a twist over the definitions of “high” and “low”. Yes, eating a diet that contains >50% protein (let’s say by calorific value) is probably not good for you. I don’t know anyone who would suggest that. Atkins bashing is another own goal. Dr Atkins (who was originally a cardiologist remember) treated tens of thousands of people for decades and the evidence showed not only a reduction in heart disease, but many of the diabetic patients that came to him, were either able to massively reduce their medication, or come off medication altogether. An impressive result.
The issue with the Atkins diet was this. There are 4 “stages” to it. Stage 1, which should be strictly limited to no more than 2 weeks, was a very low carb diet (just 20g per day) which Atkins himself said was unsustainable, hence the 2 week time period. No one should stay on stage 1 Atkins for any length of time, it’s bad for you. He advocated it to give your body a good old jolt, to kick in physiological processes that your body is designed for, but likely never used in your life: specifically burning fat for energy.
Stage 2 sees you constantly increase your level of carbohydrates week on week, until you stop losing weight, ending up eating many times more carbs than stage 2. Now you know your carb limit for weightloss, stage 3 sees you reduce your carbs to a level you’re happy with which sees you lose weight at the speed you want. Once you reach your ideal weight, stage 4 puts you back at your maximum carb intake without gaining weight.
Sounds like a simple plan huh? But here’s the rub: if you are a high carb dietician, and this doctor is rubbishing everything you’ve ever been told about nutrition and diet, and saying your whole career is a sham, and you want to hit back at this diet… which stage are you going to pick when you do a nutritional comparison of his diet? Obviously you hold up stage 1 Atkins and laugh. Which is what all the Atkins bashing studies do. It’s a shame as they throw the baby out with the bath water.
> Creatine is already in the body,
Ah, nice that he admits that the body can create its own creatine. Don’t you think that given the correct natural resources (in terms of the right amino acids from your diet) your body is perfectly attuned to work out how much of something it needs and creating just the right amount of it? Or do you think it likely that after 3 million years of an active lifestyle we evolved to not produce enough creatine to manage the after effects of exercise? Rather our lofty science, in the last 20 years or so, has spotted nature’s mistake? It’s laughable really.
> However noone can deny that having a diet rich in vitamin c would enable iron metabolism which boosts the balance of energy within the body.
Are we getting into Chinese mysticism now? What does “boosts the balance of energy” mean? How in fact can you boost a balance?!?
I’m not sure why we got onto vitamin C, but you get more than enough from fruit and veg, e.g. a few satsumas. Actually I had a friend round the house this morning, who has been very worried he’s got bowel cancer or similar. He’s been to the quacks and hospital several times for a battery of tests in the last couple of months and they can’t work out what’s wrong with him. After doing some research, he decided to stop taking his vitamin C supplements: guess what, all his symptoms cleared up in a matter of days! Scary stuff these supplements, even with something seemingly innocuous as vitamin C.
To be clear then, the Crossfit diet as I quoted at the start is basically the Paleo diet, which could also be described as the Caveman diet, or summarised succinctly like this: “Don’t eat anything that was invented in the last 10,000 years.” So the Paleo diet says what you should eat. If you follow the Zone diet for example, that says what proportions you should eat it in. Which in summary is 40% carbs, 30% protein and 30% fat. Ironic isn’t it that this so called low carb diet still gets most of its content from carbs and 30% protein could hardly be called a high protein diet. Sadly, the naysayers rarely bother to look at the facts before they try to rubbish it.
When I said one of my news year’s resolutions was to go sugar free, I was mostly thinking about sweets and chocolate. But I also had in mind to minimise the amount of food I ate that had added sugar.
Now I consider that I most eat a Paleo type diet anyway i.e. meat, veg, fruit etc and little processed food; but I have been surprised by just what sugar turns up in. Take this morning’s breakfast for example:
- cold roast chichen
- cherry tomotoes
- pickled onions
- black olives
- almonds
- and a pickled gherkin
I don’t know if my sugar abstinence is making my taste buds more sensitive to sweet foods or not, but I noticed that the gherkin and pickled onions tasted a bit funny. My suspicions raised, I went to check the labels. You’ve guessed it, they both had added sugar! These are savory foods! Why is sugar being added to a savoury food? *sigh*
One of the things I’d like to do diet wise, is to cut down my consumption of fruit. Not something you hear too many people say I’m sure. On a week day however, I eat somewhere in the region of 12 portions of fruit, which make up about 80% of my daily carbohydrate intake. I’d like to get this % down and increase my intake of vegitables instead.
That job is not made easier when sugar is added to pickled veg, grrrrr! As I don’t have time to cook veg for every meal, fruit is the easy option, but what veg can be safely (and appitisingly) eaten raw I wonder? Apart from the obvious lettice / salads, any suggestions?
I really can’t make up my mind if I think that New Year’s Resolutions are: A) A load of old cobblers, or B) A useful annual reminder for self improvement. Some years I don’t bother and some I do, like this year for example. However I do know that written goals can be a powerful thing, and I also know that sharing your goals brings culpability, so thanks for reading this as your participation will help me to achieve my aims. In fact, if you feel so inclined, you can do be a huge favour, I want you to hold me to account an what I’ve written below and challenge me if I don’t do it. Feel free to let me know you will to.
Without further preamble, I’m going to dive straight in and list this year’s resolutions, in no particular order:
Give up booze for the whole of 2010, no exceptions.
Give up sugar in all its forms. Yes that means chocolate, for all of 2010!
Earn enough money online to be able to give up paid office work by the end of 2010.
Taking these in turn then:
1) Give Up Booze
I drink too much, simple as. If I realistically think about what might kill me first, I’d put some kind of liver issue top of the list. I’m not going to say how much I drink, partly because it varies from week to week, but also actually I think I’m probably rather ashamed of the truth. It is something of a middle aged man’s disease and there have been times when I’ve wondered if I’ve got a problem. I don’t think I have by the way, but the thought has occurred to me and that in itself is warning enough.
Indeed December has not been a good month at all on the booze front. Hangovers over Christmas are one thing but when you’ve had a bad day at work, buying a bottle of wine on the way home is never a good idea. Whilst it may take your mind of things in the short term, alcohol is a depressant I’ve not felt good this last month and the booze has contributed, not helped that.
Now giving up completely sounds rather drastic and maybe it is, but it’s also a reaction to knowing myself. I know I can have an obsessive compulsive personality and I struggle to do things by halves. I know that if I have a glass of wine, I’ll drink the rest of the bottle for example. Or that if I have a drink today, I’m more likely to want one tomorrow. As a result, I can control myself better with abstinence than with moderation.
So that is what I’ll do, no more wine, cider, beer, spirits, or any other form of alcohol for a year. Then I’ll see what I will do in a years time.
2) Give Up Sugar
This is in some ways both more and less controversial. As I’ve posted previously about paleo eating, my diet is 90% sugar free anyway, but it’s that 10% that has got out of hand. Ironically going hand in hand with the all too frequent trips to the off license for a bottle of wine, first there was one chocolate bar, but that soon became 2, then 3, then 1 of the big ones, then more! It’s not just chocolate either, I can easily dispose of a litre (2 pints) of ice cream all to myself of an evening.
The really sad reality is, that the sugar never satisfies me. I am satisfied only whilst I’m physically chewing it. The moment I even thing about swallowing, I’m already reaching for the next bite, and I’ll do that till whatever I’m eating is gone, usually in less than 5 minutes from start to finish.
Nicole Carrollwrote a great article entitled Getting off the Crack in which she equates sugar to crack, and I really think it is that addictive. And you know what? It’s ok to be addicted to sugar! In fact, we have a million years of evolution that has highly specialised your body and taste buds to seek out and crave the stuff, so it should come as no surprise to anyone who finds themselves binging on sugar occasionally, or *cough* more regularly.
As with my reasons for going cold turkey with the sauce above, I have similar issues with sugar. Not only does it not satisfy me, it doesn’t make be feel good about myself. Also that’s the whole putting on weight issue that comes with the empty calories with alcohol and chocolate etc brings. I can tell you know, I weigh more today, on the 1st Jan 2010 than I have for over 2 years, and that’s not good. I certainly don’t have the abs that Nicole had, but I’ll find those suckers!
3) Give Up Work
I honestly think dealing with (1) and (2) will drastically improve my state of mind and feeling of well being… but why does it need improving? The honest answer is I’m not currently happy with the way life is panning out. Yes I have marketable skills and earn a very good salary selling my soul, but there are 2 major problems: 1) It’s desperately dull work and 2) In order to get the best freelance rates for my skills, I have to work away from home, and I miss my family terribly.
There is a solution though and the annoying thing is, I’ve known about it for some time: this wonderful thing called the internet. Sure everyone things about making money online, but the annoying thing is, I know how to, I just don’t do it. Let me give you one example: I had an idea 12 months ago, on which I spent 1/2 a day researching it, I paid someone £50 ($75 USD) to do a bit of work for me and spent another 1/2 day getting it up online. I then left it untouched for 12 months. To day, that one small and insignificant idea, has made me £250 (about $400 USD). That’s a 500% return which is completely zero touch and I have no reason to believe that same idea won’t make the same money next year.
Ok that’s small fry, so here’s another example. 2 years ago I setup an eCommerce store selling drop ship items. My site took the order and some other company delivered that to my client. In the first month I turned over £15,000 (about $22,000 USD)! My profit margin was about 20% and I was quite pleased, but for several issues, the most serious of which was a new UK law that made it illegal for most of my target market to buy what I was offering… doh! And no, it was nothing dodgy, but a fall out of the climate change Kyoto agreement on green house gasses. Bummer.
My point is, I know how to make money online and I have a list of ideas as long as your arm, ideas are easy to come by. Even this insignificant blog makes 3 figures a year off the adsense (the Google adverts) from people who are kind enough to click them. What I lack though is the motivation to implement them. OR more specifically, when I come home from a job that bores me, with a bottle of wine and a fist full of sugar… motivation is very low to spend more hours sat in front of my laptop on my own in my small room in my digs. And at the weekend, I want to spend time with my family, not shut up in my study.
So…. I’m giving myself a year to be earning enough online cash to be able to give up work. Note, I’m not going to try to match my current income from consulting in 12 months, I think that’s unreasonable, but I should be able to get to the point where I’m making a take home profit enough to justify quitting work. I’m going to define that as £100 per day and because we’re talking about the net, that’s 7 days a week not 5 for an office job, i.e. £36,500 (about $50,000 USD). Again, I’m not saying I have to have earned that in 12 months, but be earning at that rate per day by 31st Dec.
Now to the hard part, what am I going to do to make this happen?
I’m going to be mean and say: I’ll tell you later! Due to the length of this post (and the fact it’s nearly midnight), I’m going to split this post into 2. I will give a detailed explanation of how I’m going to give up work in 12 months in my next post in a few days time.
I hope that 2010 is going to be as exciting for you as it is for me. Don’t forget, if you want to help me out then do so by letting me know that you will hold me to account on these commitments. Feel free to ask me how I’m doing, on a regular basis. I will as ever, answer honestly.
So this time last week, I had 1/2 stone (7 lbs or 3 kg) to lose in order to get down to my required weight for the Yorkshire Open weightlifting competition on 21st Nov. I’m lifting in the 77kg (169 lb or 12 stone 1) category, but was tipping the scales at 80kg (176 lbs or 12 stone 8). 1/2 stone in 3 weeks seemed like it was doable so I wasn’t too worried.
Last week started well and I lost 3 lbs from Mon to Friday (mostly water I imagine) leaving just 4 lbs over 2 weeks. However a combination of a fireworks party at home on Friday, followed by a night on the razz in Manchester with the boys from Crossfit Manchester, and I put that 3 lbs straight back on. It doesn’t sound too bad, until you see the graph:
That’s not good! So for the next 12 days I’m zoning for all I’m worth. I’m also reducing my fat intake to about a half, dropping the pint of milk I normally drink each day, and cutting my intake to 12 zone blocks per day. Hopefully, that should do it. We’ll see…
Had 2 weeks off holiday, which was great. Got to spend some quality time with the family, going to sea side resorts, the zoo, stroking deer, watching otters, going down caves, playing games, buying fireworks, doing the whole Trick or Treat thing, going out for meals, eating too many sweeties, reading books, karate gradings, buying and playing Wii games… etc etc. It was all good. (It was also why I forgot the weekly Friday Fun post last week, doh!)
Speaking of fireworks. I have once again spent far too much money on top quality fireworks this year. I get all my fireworks from Quick Silver in Denton. Here’s this years stash, which I am very much looking forward to setting off this weekend:
A day at Blackpool saw an extremely happy Jadzia hit the jackpot on a sweetie machine. If I’d realised that was all it took to make her happy, I’d have gone sooner! But then, when the boz of chocolates is the size of your head, I suppose that’s something to get excited about… when you’re 8.
That reminds me, this is a great photo of Jadzia at @Bristol:
Weightlifting wise, it’s time to knuckle down as the weight lifting competition is only 19 days away. More alarming is I’m 1/2 stone over weight (7 lbs / 3 kg) , so strict adherence to the zone is required for the next 2.5 weeks. Not helped by a night out that’s planned for this weekend, ho hum.
Training has been sporadic too; I only managed to go twice last week. This week I’m planning on at least 3 trips to the gym. But more to the point, I need to see if the focus on the weight lifting has paid off, so this week I’ll be going for max lifts at both the Snatch (Tuesday) and Clean & Jerk (Wednesday).
To get my body back in the mindset, I did a short 10 minute Crossfit style workout at my Newport digs today:
10 x one minute rounds of:
15 squats
10 sit ups
5 press ups
It wasn’t too strenuous, which was the point, but it got things moving and a good stretch session should sort me out for max snatches tomorrow. Really I need to be lifting 75kg (165 lbs) comfortably, as I’m thinking of opening with that on the 21st. Then I’ll be aiming for 100kg on the C&J on Wednesday, which is what I also want to open at (or maybe 95). Fingers crossed!
At the beginning of September, I decided to have a go at the Paleo Diet. In brief, you could call this the caveman diet, the stone age diet, the “don’t eat anything invented in the last 10,000 years” diet. So you can see that there’s a lot of things that you can’t eat when eating Paleo(lithic)ly. No:
Bread
Pasta
Grains
Cereals
Flower
Dairy (Milk)
Cheese
Sweets
Chocolate
Alcohol
etc etc
Now I should say, that I agree with most of that, but I wasn’t doing the Paleo for the reason most do. I wasn’t doing it to lose weight. There’s no doubt at all, that if you follow a classic western diet, or even the recommended high carb, low fat diet, you will definitely shed the fat on this diet. No question. Not only that, you will feel full of energy and probably the healthiest you’ve felt since being a hormonal teenager.
But I am already at a good weight. In fact, many of my friends and family think I should be putting a few pounds on! I also have good energy levels and rarely feel tired. That’s what 2.5 years of the Zone Diet has done for me, a story I’ve told a few times on this blog. So the reason for trying Paleo, was to see if it would make me feel even better… and the short answer is: it didn’t.
You see my diet was already close to a Paleo Zone diet, as recommended by Crossfit. The Crossfit dietary recommendation is simply:
“Eat meat and veg, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar.”
However for me, I would have to rewrite it slightly, to be more like:
“Eat meat, fruit and dairy, nuts and seeds, some veg, little starch, occasional sugar, no wheat.”
Yes my balance of fruit to veg is probably off, but that’s down to lifestyle and lack of time to prepare veg for every meal. I also don’t eat wheat as I’ve discovered it simply doesn’t agree with me. The major addition is the dairy though. I drink a pint of milk a day + eat cheese regularly. That was the thing that really put the stopper on a proper paleo diet. Removing dairy would mean no:
Milk
Cheese
Yoghurt
Chocolate *
Ice Cream *
Cakes, even wheat free ones *
Even salami!
* = these foods can be “zoned in” on the Zone diet, and so are not taboo from a Zone perspective.
Milk crops up in a lot of places that I must confess, I hadn’t originally thought about. I like the zone diet, because you can eat anything you want, so long as you adjust portion sizes to compensate. So that occasional chocky bar, whilst not condoned, can be fine, so long as you balance it with some protein. Or indeed, a few glasses of wine are ok with a meal, as long as the meal is light on carbs to compensate. The point is, with the exceptions of bananas, offal and egg yokes, nothing is off limits on the zone. (And they are only strongly advised against, at least in most circumstances.)
Whereas a straight Paleo diet is the opposite. It heavily regulates *what* you can eat, but places no limits on when or how much you eat. The zone diet is quantitative; the paleo diet is qualitative. So ironically, doing a Paleo Zone diet is actually the worst of both worlds, you are restricted in what you eat, and you can only eat certain proportions!
Either way, I simply decided, that for the gains the paleo might have brought me, it simply wasn’t worth the sacrifice. That’s a personal choice and I applaud the Paleo diet’s goals and ideals and heartily recommend it, if you are hoping to lose weight and currently struggling. Personally, I’d try the Zone diet first, it’s worked for me. And indeed I mostly follow a paleo zone diet, but with dairy and the occasional sugar and wine, however 90% of the meals I eat are simple meats, nuts and fruit & veg. A healthy and balanced way to live in my opinion.
Today marks the start of a one month dietary experiment with the Paleo Diet. In short, you could call this the Stone Age Diet, or Caveman Diet if you will.
It’s allegedly the diet that evolution has designed us to eat, that the evolving human has been eating over the last few million years, but noticable before agriculture was invented in the last few thousand years. So there’s no grains of any kind on the Paleo Diet, which for me isn’t such a big deal, as I’ve mostly cust grains out of my diet already any. The Zone diet has helped with that, but also I don’t eat wheat for personal reasons.
But what is going to be a big deal for me: is no dairy! I routinely have at least a pint of milk a day + cheese and yoghurt. So cutting out the dairy is going to be tough.
This is why this is a month’s experiment. I am totally unconvinced that we shouldn’t eat (or drink) dairy products. Yes it’s cows milk, but it’s also very close to human breast milk, and that as we all know, is very good for us. Yes there’s an argument that today’s mass produced milk is poor quality, but I only buy organic milk, and have whole milk as often as not. (And raw unpasturised milk when I can get it.)
However there is only so much reading you can do on a subject and so much canvasing of other’s opinion, before you have to take the plunge and give it a try. I figure that 4 weeks out of your life is a small amount of time to invest in testing out something new. If you find it’s something that works for you, then you’ve made a wise investment. And if nothing else, it gives you something to talk about!
Personally I suspect that most of the health claims that the Paleo diet makes come from reducing the starchy carbs and processed food associated with a western diet, rather than a lack of dairy. As I eat a pretty clean diet anyway: mostly meat, veg, fruit and nuts (+ dairy atm), I suspect that I won’t see much difference. However I know enough people who eat Paleo Zone to make me think giving it a go is a good idea.
So I’ll report back at the end of September, and we’ll see if I feel better, worse (unlikely) or the same, and of course if my Crossfit workout performance has improved or not.
This video from Sky, starts with a short report on dementia research that has shown that those with a high BMI in their middle age, have physically smaller brains later in life! Ok, we all know that BMI is a very flawed system of measuring obesity for anyone who resembles an athletic type, but for the masses, it works well enough.
wrote a great article entitled 
