It’s been nearly a year since I made some changes in my diet. To recap, I started with Tim Ferriss’ Slow Carb Diet as outlined in his book, The Four Hour Body and dropped 20 pounds of fat in 40 days. Despite looking and feeling better, I was still nagged by painful gout flareups after nearly every sugar-bathed “cheat day.” Then I watched Dr. Robert Lustig’s lecture, The Bitter Truth. From there, I started my Sugar-Free Summer Experiment to see if I could eliminate both gout flareups and medication.
It worked perfectly. I dropped a few more pounds by going sugar-free, eliminated the medication, and haven’t had a flareup since.
Over the course of the last year, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on Paleo and Primal-style eating. Each style has its own recommendations, but it really comes down to this:
Eat real food.
Paleo/Primal styles focus on quality meats, seasonal vegetables, seasonal fruits, and healthy fats. The styles also generally avoid grains, legumes, and dairy. Enter the new experiment:
I’m already virtually gluten-free, so that’s already covered, but for the month of January, I’ll eliminate legumes and dairy as well. The point of this part of the experiment is to see if the elimination of dairy will clear up a long-standing skin condition. Years ago, a doctor told me that the reddened, occasionally flaky dry patches I get were from seborrheic dermatitis. He said there was no known cause, but prescribed a steroid cream to manage the symptoms. The danger of the steroid cream is thinning of the skin at the application site. That doesn’t sound like a side effect that I want, so I want to see if I can resolve the problem in another way. As a secondary experiment, I’m interested to see if the change restarts my plateaued weight loss.
To add to the experiment, I’ll also do what’s called The Primal Blueprint 30 day challenge. Click on the link for more detail, but here are the basics:
- Eat lots of plants and animals (high quality paleo/primal food)
- Avoid poisonous things (no junk food)
- Move frequently at a slow pace (3-5 hours/week of walking, biking, etc)
- Lift heavy things (2 bodyweight or weightlifting workouts/week)
- Sprint once in a while (1-10 minute sprint workout/week)
- Get adequate sleep (whatever your body needs to wake up refreshed)
- Play (shoot baskets, toss the football around, surf)
- Get adequate sunlight (15 minutes a day of full sun, no sunscreen)
- Avoid stupid mistakes (don’t push through injury, for example)
- Use your brain (engage your brain in problem-solving)
Join me?
