Trying To Find Equilibrium...

Without going on and on about the whole drug-induced hyperphagia bizzo, I'm still experiencing surprising bouts of deranged eating frenzies, as well as mood swings. However, my weight is holding steady, either because the six-week cure is doing its thing, or because the weight is mainly water-retention and my cells are full. My average food intake over the week is still much higher than I would like it, but I'm feeling a bit slimmer and have been receiving some leptin signals after particularly large meals (i.e. a protein shake with extra cream and water). The message might not last long, but it's an improvement. So that's the good news, but the bad news is that I'm still being taken over by the feed-demon every few days, and the best I can do is remove myself from all access to food. Last night I actually left the house at 10pm and went walking in my Vibrams, but ended up with such bad stomach pain that I had to call the beau to come rescue me after just an hour. Also, it seems like everyone but me has knowledge regarding the link between anti-depressants and weight gain. No wonder my doctor was always very keen to know whether I was having any 'reaction' to the drugs we were trying. I always thought he just meant fatigue...

Anyway, even if I've been eating what I'd class as too-much food some days, it's always been good food!

Thursday

Protein shakes for breakfast, recess & lunch:


Dinner - entree: salmon sashimi with a dollop of my Lemon & Macadamia Mayo


Dinner - main: kangaroo steak fillet, cheesy scrambled eggs, and chipollatas from Jonathan's, served with a bit of butter


Friday

Protein shakes for breakfast, recess & lunch.

Dinner: White Fish Fingers, bacon, sautéed red cabbage, and an avocado! I've been scared of avocados since a nasty sushi incident in 2004, but after watching this avocado slowly ripen in my fridge after being purchased for my Dips Recipes experiment, I decided to give it a go... Yum! If it weren't for all the fibre, I'd seriously consider putting avocados on regular rotation...


Saturday

Breakfast: Tasty beef snags from Jonathan's


Lunch: snacked on brie cheese, blueberries, strawberries and a nuts & seeds mix at a friend's place. The beginning of a very bad appetite domination - makes me wonder about the role of carbs in this reaction...

But amidst the inhalation of Nola, lots of double cream, saganaki, and macadamia nuts, I managed to whip up another Oopsie Pizza for the beau and I. The eggs were freshly bought and therefore were at room temperature, resulting in a VERY fluffy crust. Yum!




Sunday

Like a good little catch-up faster, I ignored food for a solid 24 hours after breaking away from the pantry on Saturday night (and putting a couple of kilometres in between myself and the fridge), eventually breaking the fast with some leftovers from the lunch I made for the beau - a succulent preparation of roast chicken thighs using a lot of coconut oil and lots of chopped basil, plus other herbs & spices...

Before cooking:


After cooking (with a sprinkling of almond flour added mid-cooking):


I served the beau's share on top of sautéed red caabage and red capsicum, which itself was on top of romaine lettuce leaves.


I served my post-pushup dinner 'plain', although the flavour was anything but!


Yes, I said post-pushup. Why? Because, to help keep my beau to his plan, I have joined him in the Hundred Push-up Programme, which states that you can improve you push-up ability through adherence to their six-week programme. I finished Day Two today, managing to eek out 12 push-ups in the fifth set. I'm going to be sore tomorrow...

Due to today being a push-up day, I decided to wash dinner down with a protein shake, trying the Macha Green Tea flavour of Natural Factors' Whey Factors powder range. Interesting taste, and noticeably lacking in sweetness - a good thing in case a sweeter shake would have sent me running for the kitchen! So despite my fasting, I've met my protein intake minimum - no lean mass loss for me, I hope!

Back to work tomorrow, with shakes in tow, and a tasty meal already planned for tomorrow's dinner...

Until next time, I wanted to share with you a recent post of Melissa's Hunt.Gather.Love, where she presents a fantastic starting-point for discussions with non-paleo eaters, focusing primarily on health (right where the focus should be!). Her Human Health Quadrants diagram is a little hard to make sense of at first, but is an interesting way of looking at how particular lifestyles link to nutrition and environmental hazards. A very neat way to shut down the usual 'paleolithic people only lived til 30' bollocks, and a pithy picture to point out the realities of today's choices. I love it when the primal/paleo community works to make the info we amass more accessible to the average SAD-eater; a dynamic grass-roots movement is the best way to propel health understanding forward. Keep it up, team!