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I’ve been maintaining radio silence for a while because life has been a wee bit stressful. After years of daily gut-clenching, heart attack-esq moments, I’ve decided that the best way to deal with the stress of working is… to stop working for a while. Genius!

I had tried yoga, deep breathing, bio-feedback, pretending that I didn’t care, chocolate… Well I’m done with “dealing” with stress and am taking a break for at least 6 weeks. Today is my first day as a free woman and naturally being the spastic geek that I am, I’m making spreadsheets with goals, plans and tasks for my time-off. Which hopefully isn’t as counter-productive as it sounds.

My big goal is to learn to take care of myself and figure out if I can feel good every day. Here are the steps I’m going to take to perform this miracle:

  • Focus on Health: I may have been avoiding doctors for the past few months. My blood sugar has been creeping up, I’m in pain almost every day again and am back to having random unbearable days. If I lose weight while getting my shit together, that’s a plus but isn’t the main driver.
  • Spend Time With Family: Right now I feel like I have so little time to myself that I occasionally resent driving out to see family or ignore my husband when I come home from work because I’m burnt out. Since I actually ENJOY hanging out with my family, now that I have tons of time I’m going see a lot more of them and hopefully be a happy “June Cleaver” when my man brings home the bacon each night.
  • Meal Planning: I will hit the grocery store 1x a week with a good idea for the meals I’ll be enjoying for the next week. This should reduce unplanned eating out (which is bad for my blood sugar, waistline and wallet).
  • Sourcing Better Food: Find a farm or farmer’s market where I can obtain pastured eggs, meats and fresh veggies. While I love US Wellness Meats, I’d rather support a local farm and save myself some $$$.
  • Kill the Clutter: Like the ebb and flow of the tides, during the week the house backslides into filth and chaos then each weekend I make an half-assed attempt at not sucking at being a human being. It will make me feel better to get the house fully cleaned and throw/give away junk that takes up physical and mental space.
  • Beef Up Nerd Skills: I love dorking around with new tech and I plan on using my time to try out all the new stuff that has come up in the years that I’ve been heads down at work. This will also give me a sense of purpose each day, preventing Pants are Bullshit syndrome.

Wish me luck!

 

People are fed by the Food Industry, which pays no attention to health,
and are treated by the Health Industry, which pays no attention to food.

Wendel Berry

Will Eating Red Meat Kill You?
Denise Minger (famous for her debunking of the China Study) clearly shows why the study isn’t worth the internet paper it’s written on.

Science, Pseudoscience, Nutritional Epidemiology, and Meat
Gary Taubes discusses “scientists” in the nutrition field and their abuse of the term science.

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I had heard about epigenetics many times before but THIS time it made sense. I guess all it takes to force “young people these days” to learn anything is to put it on YouTube and keep it short!

So if you have 9 minutes, it’s easy to understand and funny to boot.

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I had a dirty little secret up until a few days ago… I had terribly high cholesterol even while on my low-carb paleo diet. *gasp* Yes, I know that the internets abounds with people who say “Cholesterol doesn’t matter but even if it does mine is amazing!” Well I was NOT one of them. My total LDL was 280, triglycerides were 130 and my HDL was an abysmal 24. This was after 10 months of following a strict low-carb (usually ketogenic) diet and the last 6 months I was also paleo.

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What is Paleo?

Paleo is just an approach to eating that minimizes inflammation that casts one eye toward our genetic heritage as hunter-gatherers but keeps the other eye on modern biomedical developments so that we can weld together the best offerings that we have out of the past and the present, to live the most optimized life that we can.

-Robb Wolf

  • How Do You Know It’s Paleo? A handy flow-chart!
  • Wheat and Type 1 Diabetes The connection between wheat intolerance and Type 1 diabetes is pretty strong. It would be interesting to find/fund a study looking at type 1 diabetes diagnosis’s between children who eat wheat and those who don’t.
  • Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? Evidently your brain can “bonk” when it runs out of glucose, leading to some pretty poor decision making. I wonder if a ketone adapter brain would do any better?
  • How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body I used to follow yoga because I thought it made me more flexible but I’m starting to think that super slow or high intensity (HIT) may give me the same results without the back pain.
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Since I was one of the first 150 members of Chris Kresser’s Personal Paleo Code, as a bonus I received a free seminar on advanced weight loss. The concept behind this 4 week series is to share the tactics for battling stubborn weight problems that have worked in his medical practice. It is intended for people who have tried low-carb or paleo and either didn’t lose weight or have stalled out with a significant amount still to go. Sounds right up my alley!

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Dad just called me today with the results of his latest blood tests. He had been on cholesterol lowering medications for years and decided to stop because it was causing excruciating leg cramps. He has also recently been really sticking to a low-carb, mostly grain free diet. *drum roll*

Measurement Old Value New Value
HDL 38 56!
Triglycerides 500+ 76!
Total Cholesterol 240 191

 

I am SO proud of my dad! These are excellent numbers, I wouldn’t change a thing about them.

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The theory that cholesterol directly causes heart disease is like a turd that won’t flush. Cardiologists moved on years ago to suspect inflammation. But many general physicians, high profile doctors (like Dr. Oz) and the media continue to spread misinformation. Well not anymore!

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I have been having a rough time with my diet lately. After being stalled out since June, I started seeing a bariatric physician in November who put me on a 1,200 calorie diet.

Summary: Calories don’t count and my pancreas is feeling perky lately.

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Many people new to low-carbing a pretty quick to hunt down low-carb “look-a-likes” and the most infamous is Dreamfields pasta. They claim it’s only 5 digestible carbohydrates while most diabetics quickly realized that it seems to raise their blood sugar just as much as regular pasta.

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