diet

2018 – S.M.A.R.T. or not?

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At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.

Or rather, I wanted to make sure that I would be more likely to achieve my goals, so I resolved to be smart and make ’em S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.

Did I succeed? Yes and no.

Chess: ✅ I played every day for a month and got the rating I had set my mind on. (Then promptly lost it.)

Reading: ✅ One non-fictional book per month. Done.

Piano: ❎ I did play, but didn’t learn as many pieces as I had hoped. The temptation is to stick with the ones you know…

French: ❎ I didn’t learn anywhere near as much as I had planned, mainly because I had to focus on Danish.

Travel: ✅ I went to Morocco, Egypt, the Seychelles, Norway, Italy (thrice), and Denmark (plus Sweden), which is less than usual, but still acceptable, especially since Egypt, Italy and Norway was with the kids.

Fitness: ✅ The year was marred with injuries – first recovering after the paragliding incident, then a wonky neck, a messed up Achilles’ tendon, a tennis elbow, and finally a slipped disk – so running and biking and swimming suffered. I did manage the Paris marathon, and a runstreak of 100 days, but I’m nowhere near the distance goals I set myself for runs and biking. Nor did I learn to crawl, but I’ve racked up some 100 gym sessions, including an ironstreak of 40 days or so, which has meant three or four extra kilos’ worth of muscles.

Challenges: ✅ Apart from the aforementioned run- and ironstreaks I’ve successfully given up coffee, tried intermittent fasting for a month, I’ve become vegetarian, and I’m currently on a no sugar diet, so that’s gone well. Less well went my attempt at keeping a diary – I kept it up until Denmark, but then fell out of habit, unfortunately.

Work: ✅ I added Danish to my language combination, and continued working in Communications. In addition to that I MC’d a couple of conferences using participatory leadership, which was fun, too.

Blog: ✅ I increased my readership quite spectacularly this year (from just shy of 3,000 readers to 5,500, and from 5,000 views to nearly 10,000), which is really gratifying.

So. What worked and what didn’t? Some goals turned out to be insufficiently specific, such as “learn a piece of music”; others were unattainable due to factors beyond my control (the fitness targets) or had to be downgraded in terms of priority (French, when I was paid to go learn Danish), but overall it’s a sound principle, and one I will continue to use in 2019.

Now all I have to do is decide what those goals should be…

-W-h-i-t-e- Christmas

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One of the first challenges I ever undertook was going without sweets and candy for a year. My parents came up with that one, and the gauntlet was eagerly picked up by me and my sister, since there was pecuniary compensation involved – money which was then spent on an obscene amount of chocolate on January 1st the following year.

That one-day indulgence aside, we did very well to avoid sugar, since there is a great deal of scientific evidence that it is very, very bad for you – and the more refined it is, the worse it is for your organism.

Alas, we didn’t keep this up for more than three years. Now fast forward 35 years and we’re headed towards the end of 2018, a year during which it’s safe to say that I haven’t been abstemious so far (at least not where sugar is concerned), so I will set myself one last challenge for the year:

Starting today and until the end of the year, I will eat no sugar. Not candy, nor cookies, chocolates, cakes, and whatever else is brim-filled with brain-addling white poison. If I can manage that, then I will continue throughout next year. It won’t necessarily make for a Merry Christmas, but it will bring a healthier and Happy New Year!

Diary of a cave man (1/2)

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The usual suspects. I'm somewhere in the middle, I guess.So for the month of May I challenged myself to go on a paleo diet, in order to see how this might affect my well-being and physical performance. Here are some of the highlights of what happened:

Day -1: Panic. I’m supposed to not have any sugar for a month!?  

The healthy thing to do would have been to research recipes and prepare. What do I do? I run out to the local night shop and get an overpriced bucket of Haagen-Daez ice cream and down it all in one sitting, then – predictably – feel horrible about it. At least I didn’t have a beer as well.

Day 1: Breakfast is made up of bullet-proof coffee (black coffee with a dollop of coconut oil in it) and left-over oven-baked chicken with mozzarella; how’s that for high fat, low carb? It feels a little weird, eating chicken first thing in the morning, but hey, embrace change, right? Only I have the same thing for lunch AND dinner, and now I do feel a real need for change.

In terms of training I don’t do anything more strenuous than a short run, which a post-workout banana covers just fine. It remains to be seen how longer bouts of exercise affect me…

Day 2: Reading up more on paleo, I discover  all legumes are banned. No beans. I literally had cans and cans lined up on the kitchen counter to make a big batch of chili con carne! No sweat, old bean.

Also, no dairy is allowed, so my buffala mozzarella yesterday wasn’t caveman kosher either, in spite of the fact that trying to milk a buffalo is a pretty Neanderthal thing to do. Crud. Two days in and I’m failing. There’s a learning curve to this, clearly. 

I buy a spiralizer to make zucchini “pasta” for dinner and find it surprisingly edible. The kids threaten to go on hunger strike, then devour almost an entire cheesecake with raspberry coulis for dessert while I watch. 

Day 3: Weight-lifting after an English breakfast goes well. A banana, a date and some walnuts plus lemon water with a shot of flax seed oil replaces my usual (milk-based) protein shake. So far so good. 

In the afternoon the kids have an hour each of breakdance (L) and hiphop (R) with an hour in between, so the plan is to run while they dance. First hour is no problem, the second one I struggle, but more because I’m tired from this morning than anything else. And three workouts in a day is a fair amount, caveman or no. 

Day 4: Brought carrots, strawberries, dates and walnuts to work to tidy me over until lunch. Worked well. 

Dinner I’m invited to an Italian friend whom I’ve completely forgotten to inform about my new habits. Shit! In my mind’s eye I see a mountain of Parmesan-powdered pasta looming, followed by troughs of tiramisu, but my gracious host is very understanding, and beyond the guilty pleasure of a smallish plate of spaghetti vongole I don’t stray from the path. 

Day 7: I want to test myself (and the diet), to see if no carbs for a week will mean bonking when keeping up a sustained effort. So I do an hour of swimming (2k) followed by a three hour walk (13k), stop for lunch, then go biking one hour and a bit (25k). Admittedly this isn’t anywhere near as much as a marathon or triathlon, but I do it all without getting particularly tired or feeling any need for carbs. Yay!

Day 9: 16k run. No problem. 

Day 10: Becoming accustomed to eating “nuts and roots”, as my sister put it. Breakfast is dates and cashew nuts, carrots and hummus, plus a couple of eggs. Apart from the coffee, it feels like something the first guy to climb down from the trees might have eaten. He probably didn’t read his New York Times daily briefing while doing so, but so what?

Day 12 I run equal parts nuts (pecan, walnuts and cashew) and medjoul dates in a blender to create the simplest and best “cake” ever (1 cup of each; calories: approximately 1 gazillion). Who said troglodytes didn’t know how to party?

Ate it all in one sitting, and a good thing too, because Day 13 I swim 3,000m for the first time since I was 18. And then do an hour of weights.   

Day 14: Brunch with a friend. Half of what they serve is bread, or sugar, or both. I try a teaspoon of tiramisu (which I normally adore) and it’s so sweet I can hardly bring myself to swollow. Luckily the other half is made up of yummy veggie dishes, so emerge quite sated.

In the afternoon I run a half marathon on nothing but water. 1:52:50. Good time, given previous day’s workouts. Still don’t feel the need to refuel during the run. Scales show I’ve lost three kilos in two weeks.  Not a bad first half! 

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(A friend objected that people get paleo wrong, in that they eat meat a lot more often than our palaeolithic forefathers and -mothers did; this is an objection I would say is probably correct. Even so, I’m buying a lot more veg than usual, and I feel good: slimmer, lighter, never quite as ravenous nor as zonked out before or after meals as I normally get.)

May, me eat meat.

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Urgh. Gruff. What is this M&M’s of which you speak?


Remember the bit in Pulp Fiction where Marcellus Wallace promised to get medieval on someone’s ass? Always sounded like a good threat to me. (I imagine it would involve building cathedrals and trading in relics…) 

However, the whole world seems to be hellbent on going much further back in time, with Trump wanting to bomb everyone into primordial soup (presumably to level with his intellectual discours). So in keeping with that spirit, I figured the month of May might be a good time to challenge myself in a new way: by getting Stone Age on my own ass. 

It’s not as mad as it seems. I’m not proposing to go live naked in a cave and hunt mastodons for breakfast (although that would be fun, too), no, what I will do is go on a Paleo diet for a month, to see what happens. Paleo is essentially about eating the way our earliest ancestors did, in an attempt to get away from starch, sugar and carbs – something which those early hunter-gatherers didn’t find much of on their menu.*

It will require quite the change to my eating habits: no more oatmeal and milk for breakfast, no pasta, beer or pizza post long runs, no sushi on Fridays, and certainly no sneaky Haegen-Daaz ice cream orgies late at night. 

I’m getting hungry just writing about these guilty pleasures, and chances are you are, too, which is due to the fact that our bodies are hard-wired to like this kind of food. The problem is it used to be a very rare treat back in the palaeolithic, whereas now there’s sugar everywhere, and our bodies cannot deal with such quantities of the stuff – hence diabetes, obesity, cardio-vascular diseases; the list goes on and on.

The physical effects of switching to paleo are interesting for another reason too, because after a while – anything from a few days to a few weeks – the body goes into a state where it stops craving carbs and starts using fat as its  prime source of fuel. This will supposedly make you much more efficient in long distance races, as the body’s supply of fat is vastly bigger than its stores of sugar (the difference between your muffin top and the muffin you just ate, if you will). 

Now, I experimented with this prior to running Ultravasan, but chickened out during the race. But my triathlon is coming up, and if I can do that without craving sugar then this diet must be the real McCoy. 

As always, there will be an update afterwards to account for how I did during the challenge – the practical aspects of it as well as any changes to my physique/performance. Now, what’s the best way to cook mastodon for breakfast?
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*This sounds like an excellent idea to me, particularly since some studies show dementia to be caused by an accumulated inability to break down sugar, similar to diabetes, and I really don’t want to go down that path. 

Eating order

It’s December already. Who’d have thought way back in January? I’m still working on my to do list, though, which I guess is a result in itself.

I did say I would try something new and challenge myself every month, and since I cannot go travelling (no more holidays, plus December is a busy month as it is), I have decided to challenge myself at home: I will try to improve my eating habits. 


Now, I already eat fairly ok. No eating disorders or anything like that, but altogether too many carbs, too much sugar – and the holiday season hasn’t even begun yet. So… I have begun writing down every last thing that I eat and drink. Nothing fancy, just a list that I keep in my phone. 

To my delight I find that the act of writing it down is in itself really useful, because I can no longer hide from myself what I’m eating. It’s culinary mindfulness, if you will. Knowing I will have to write down whatever I eat, I hesitate to allow myself treats that I would normally turn a blind eye to, or justify as “deserved”.

That last statement is particularly absurd, if you think about it. You don’t “deserve” something unhealthy for having done good. First of all, you’re not a dog, you shouldn’t reward yourself with treats, and secondly, surely a good deed should be rewarded with something good, not something you know is bad for you?

This one simple act has other knock-on effects as well. Suddenly I’m more keen on vegetables and clean protein (vegan ultra runner Scott Jurek’s book Eat and Run helped with the former, if not the latter!) and preparing meals in large batches makes more sense, since having ready-made food at hand reduces the likelihood of my straying from the path, be it at home or at work. 

So Sunday saw me making oven-roasted sweet potatoes and other veggies and frying up lots of lean chicken, and yesterday I made a double batch of lasagna (admittedly a carb fest, but working out hard you need some carbs, too), and I’m looking forward to trying other stuff as well.


I figure the worst is yet to come – Christmas and new year’s aren’t exactly known for being bastions of healthiness, after all – but I reckon this way I will at least think twice before going Cookie Monster on any of the upcoming feasts.

I’m not going to publish the list itself, but I will let you know if it has any effect. I started this month of traditional gluttony at 83,6kg, which is well above what I feel comfortable with. Changing nothing else in terms of training, it will be interesting to see if this one act of documenting my food intake will have any discernible effect on the scales. Can I get down to my match weight of 80kg whilst eating well and orderly? Well, we’ll see. 

One Challenge without fries, coming up!

 

Sober October

So I decided to quit coffee and alcohol for October. From a habit of five to ten espressos per day and the equivalent of a bottle of wine per week, I would go cold turkey on both. The results? Well…

First of all, actually doing it was surprisingly easy. I taped my Nespresso maker shut just in case I would need an extra second to reconsider in moments of weakness, but those moments never really materialised. People around me were generally supportive, even though they often couldn’t – wouldn’t? – understand why I was doing it. I was worried about becoming a social pariah, but I spent pleasant evenings out in wine bars and cocktail bars without feeling awqward or any need to sample their wares (the Latvian creationist/lesbian porn star/children’s book author I encountered may have been a figment of delirium-induced imagination, I guess, but I doubt it.). I will admit visiting Rome and not having neither cappuccino nor limoncello was difficult, but apart from that I was fine. 

And how did it feel? I had light headaches for a week, and wasn’t able to concentrate too well during those first days – something which my chess partner took good advantage of. But apart from that I was unaffected, really. And I experienced less heart burn, muscle soreness and pain in the liver (although I might have imagined that last one in the first place), plus felt better rested and energetic overall, so that was a big bonus. 

Add to that the pecuniary aspect of easily saving 10€ per week on coffee and twice that on alcohol, and you’re looking at savings to the tune of 1500€ per year, or three roundtrips to the US annually. Not bad as exchange rates go. 

So what now? Should I continue my abstemious lifestyle? I honestly don’t know. I still yearn for that first shot of espresso in the morning, and a glass of Rioja with my entrecôte, and a cold lager after a good, long run in the sun… My problem is I don’t do things half-heartedly, so there’s a risk that one coffee doesn’t remain one coffee very long, and the same goes for drink. So for now, like a good goalie, I think I will just keep the zero for as long as possible.