Just look at that delicious vein of fat! Can you believe the boy won't eat his?? And he doesn't even offer it to me while it's still warm (hint hint!!)...
My mother is fairly lean, and always has been. When she was young she was essentially a beanpole, and during her twenties and pregnancies she developed a normal hip-and-thigh roundedness. However, these days she is far more worried about her middle, so when the Drs. Eades came out with their new book, a crash diet no less, entitled The Six-Week Cure For The Middle-Aged Middle (although it looks like it's coming out again in December retitled Lose Your Middle-Aged Middle...), I immediately thought of her. I have already encouraged her to go low-carb, and as primal as possible: she currently eats almond pancakes for breakfast practically every morning, she cooks with coconut oil or butter, she eats meat and veg for her dinners (although Dad persists with cooking potatoes and buying processed foods), and she only eats chocolate occasionally (or so she says - she's a bigger choc addict than I ever was). She has probably dropped a bit of fat, but her belly bulges (a tiny little roll of fat, really) continues to bother her. I'm more bothered by the idea of her suffering from osteoarthritis, etc, since the big six-oh is just around the corner...
The Eades' plan sounded suitable for both our agendas - upping the protein intake and focussing on saturated fat, while tapping into and applying science supposedly specific to weight loss during middle age. I bought the book today (after a tedious and tiresome battle to find a retailer of the ebook that catered to non-US customers), and have already read half of it in detail after originally skimming the lot to see whether Mum could fit the programme into her schedule. Well, the 3 shakes + 1 meal fortnight is a big ask of her, although once she hits the meat-only weeks I'm sure she'll cope easily (although she might miss her pancakes), and the final fortnight matches up with how she already eats, really. How to encourage her that following a somewhat extreme diet for the first two weeks might be worth it...
Give her proof. Well, hopefully. Yep, I'm going to have a crack at losing my middle-aged paunch... Except that I'm 24 and probably don't have much in the way of visceral fat given that my waist-to-hip ratio is already 0.7, with my remaining fat sitting as a muffin-top/love handles, which the Eades' say is very much a marker of teen/youthful subcutaneous fat. So hopefully any fat loss will be enough to demonstrate the usefulness of this plan, even if it's not technically around my waist but perhaps below my belly-button instead. This does mean I have to add dairy back into the mix (I could not find any egg protein powder, so it had to be whey, and while I might give coconut cream another shot as the 'cream' in the shake, dairy cream is a safer bet), but I guess we can't claim protein powder to be 'not primal' if we accept vitamin and mineral supplementation to be perfectly reasonable. It's just two weeks. My one meal will be meat meat meat, referring to the plan's recipe section for guidance on portions (although they do say that they essentially leave it to the individual to eat as much protein and fat as they need, especially during the second fortnight, but the first fortnight is supposed to be calorie-restricted...) And then I get to go back to being a proper carnivore for another two weeks (and beyond - the Eades' are bright enough to know never to claim that we need to eat any form of carb, so huzzah!).
I have my protein powder and my cream, but my ordered leucine powder will take a couple of days to get here from Sydney, and the DAG oil is a no-go in Australia, it would seem. I might have a look in the body-building health food store in the local shopping centre the next time I'm in there (rarely these days), but otherwise I'm not worried about it. I haven't worked out when I'm going to have my meal - I'm thinking that dinner makes the most sense so I can cook for the beau at the same time, but since Mondays are super-long I might have a meaty brekkie tomorrow... And then there's the entire lack of time or resources at work with which to make the shakes, so at best I'd have to bottle some and take it with me...
Wish me luck! I'll be sure to make fully fleshed-out primal meals for the beau so you still have something pretty to look at beyond one pic of meat & eggs per day!
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