Monthly Archives: February 2011

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ThankYouLanguage-main_Full

In a day or so I’ll be adding a funky little Feed Burner subscriber meter up on my blog so I can see how the readership of my blog is doing.

At present the meter reads zero because I never set up the blog properly to gather the information. I think it is an important little gizmo to have on a blog. According to his meter, my good friend and co-author Dr. Michael Eades has nearly 10,000 subscribers.

If you like my blog, I would greatly appreciate if you’d subscribe to it. There’s a button on the top right that says, aptly enough, subscribe.

Not only will it help me to know if my readership is growing (meaning that I am saying things that are worth saying), it will also help you to get my blog in your chosen inbox so that you don’t miss anything in the future. I do this with several blogs I like and it makes for great morning reading over BLACK coffee.

Thank you so much for considering it.

Paleo Elimination Diet Day One

journey

In my last post on going totally paleo to see if my osteoarthritis (as well as my wife’s issues) could be resolved, I neglected to mention that we are both starting today. We are coming of mid-winter school break and chose to start after the kiddie festivities ended.

So far today I’ve had:

Breakfast:
Black coffee
Can of mackerel in olive oil (~24 gms protein)

Lunch:
2 grilled chicken breasts with the skin with olive oil (~60 gms protein)
Really small salad of lettuce and cabbage
Half a yam with olive oil
Can of seltzer

Dinner (will most likely be):
2 small grass fed rib eye steaks (~80 gms protein)
Several ounces of beef or chicken livers (if Linda feels up to cooking it) garlic, onions, olive oil (~20-30 gms protein)
Salad of leafy things, apple cider vinegar and olive oil dressing (grain vinegars contain gluten)

Dessert/snack:
Clementine orange or a piece of some really dark chocolate

Plenty of fats, plenty of protein, all good carbs and ZERO gluten or harmful lectins.

No wine or spirits like tequilla for now. Even though these drinks are gluten free, alcohol itself, sadly enough, is a gut irritant. Bo-hoo.

The one question I have that has not been answered yet by any of the experts I have consulted is, if after a month or so of sticking to this way of eating to the letter, when I do reintroduce a food like eggs, how will I know the food is an irritant if my gut is healed? Do I keep eating it until I re-damage my gut to know that it is a food I should avoid?

I also read that, instead of avoiding these foods for a long time, you should instead avoid them for only 7-10 days then reintroduce and see if you have adverse reactions. I suppose this is enough time to “calm down” your body yet not fully heal the gut so that when you reintroduce a food or drink, you’ll know that the substance is a no-no.

All thoughts are welcomed!

Elimination Paleo Diet Here We Come!

knee_pain

My knees hurt. They have been hurting now for almost 2 years. They hurt so badly that I can no longer do the things I love to do that require knees. The diagnosis – severe medial osteoarthritis caused mainly by being bow-legged (genu varum) which leads to deforming arthrosis. I remember as a kid people would often make comments to me like “Hey fella – did you just get off your horse?”

deforming_arthrosis

The X-ray above is not my knee but it might as well be. If you look at the inner part of the knee, you’ll see that due to the varus bend in the inside of the knee, the inside of the bones are completely on top of one another. This leads to premature erosion of the knee cartilages. The result of this is a deformation of the tendons – it stretches them across a greater surface area – and as the tendons fray, excruciating pain results.

The real pain started after a fall I took a few years ago in my backyard where my right knee bent so far backward I almost passed out. We have yet to put Bilco doors atop the hole that leads to the basement door. One day as I was carrying something large and unwieldy passed the hole and down I went.

But the years of running and martial arts also took it’s toll. After seeing my xrays and MRIs, my friend and former business partner who is also an orthopedic surgeon said “Fred it’s a good thing you’ve stayed strong over the years or all this would have come to haunt you sooner.” He also said that there is nothing he or I can do to resolve this. He said what everyone who is in my position fears to hear – you’re gonna need a new knee.

Well, I like my knee. He has been with me for quite some time. He’s been with me through thick and through thin and, may I say, I have grown quite attached to him. Parting is not an option.

One doctor told me that the condition could have been rectified as a youngster with proper braces. My parents, it seems, never noticed how bad it was.

So as you might guess, I have been doing everything possible to address the pain, but to no avail. You name the herb, I’ve taken it. Physical therapy is useless of course as I am 10 times stronger than any therapist could make me and no therapy can straighten the deformity. I have had Synvisc injections which did absolutely nothing. I tried a steroid injection which helped for 1 week but the pain came back with a vengeance (I know that steroids are bad but when you are in pain…).

I am now doing what is called Prolotherapy,. Prolotherapy is a series of injections, performed by a physician, of dextrose and Lidocaine designed to induce an inflammatory response. This response gets my body to put a little giddy-up on the healing process in the tendons so that the pain becomes manageable. Here is a video of a physician administering PT:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtEdOBb5PDc&w=540&h=390]

Wish me luck.

But there is another reason for the degradation to my knee joints and may very well be the reason for the deformity in the first place. It’s called called “leaky gut” and when you have this, all bodily hell can break loose in the form of autoimmune disorders.

Leaky-gut-autoimmune

Autoimmune disorders occur when they body attacks itself for one reason or another. My understanding of the conditions is that of a layperson, but I think I have a decent grasp on it. Essentially, elements that should not be in your blood stream enter the blood stream via a compromised gut wall (see the above diagram) and are attacked by the immune system. However, some of these invaders are so similar to the tissues and structures of our bodies that the immune system gets confused and attacks what it should not like knee cartilage, brain stems, etc.

Sometimes the disorder results in disorders as benign as acne. Sometimes the disorder results in disorders as horrific as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, multiple sclerosis or severe forms of rheumatoid and osteo-arthritis. It can either cause or exacerbate an existing condition like it is doing to me. Here is a decent video describing it:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GoIcGcx3Wg&w=540&h=390]

Enter Hans Keer, author and creator of Cut The Carb. He is an engineer by trade, but really knows his stuff with respect to paleolithic nutrition. I’ve been reading his blogs for a while now and I find them short, sweet and very informative.

I asked Hans a few questions regarding arthritis – osteoarthritis in particular – and he suggested I try an elimination diet. Essentially you remove all foods that are known to be potentially responsible for causing a leaky gut. You do this for 30-90 days or so and after this time, the symptoms you are experiencing should greatly decrease.

Certain foods you eliminate forever, others can be reintroduced to see if they cause a flare up. Here is an excerpt from his blog:

During a period of at least one month, but preferably three months, you abstain totally from the following foods:

1. All cereal grains like wheat, rye, barley, corn and rice and derived products like bread and pasta
2. Legumes like beans, lentils and dry peas, including soy and peanuts and derived products like oils
3. The nightshades like potatoes, tomatoes, (bell) peppers and eggplant (sweet potatoes are not nightshades)
4. Eggs
5. Dairy
6. All plant seed oils except coconut oil and some virgin cold-pressed olive oil
7. Nuts (they also contain a lot of the proinflammatory omega-6)
8. Processed and canned foods
9. Starchy foods, sugars, artificial sweeteners, soft drinks, candy, fruit juices
10. Alcoholic beverages
11. All additives

Number 10 makes me weep. I love my evening wine. But its worth it to see if my body will heal by adopting such a healthfull diet. Both my wife and I are going to give it a go.

Maybe you should try it too?

When you start the Paleo Diet, you may choose to count yourself among the dietary elite – knowing that about 6 billion people on the planet aren’t eating this way. And yet just 10,000 years ago – a mere drop in the bucket of geological time – there wasn’t a single person who did not follow the Paleo Diet – Loren Cordain, Ph.D.

Low Carb is Healthy – But Healthy Doesn’t Mean Low Carb

cereal

First let me preface this blog by saying that I am not calling people who eat cereal stupid. Nor am I suggesting that clowns are stupid either. But breakfast cereal is stupid. So don’t eat it.

OK, on with the blog…

I was speaking with a new client the other day and I wanted to share the conversation we had with you all. It might shed some light on how difficult it is for some people to understand what eating healthfully means. I hope it will also indicate how careful a fitness instructor or other type of health care provider has to be when attempting to educate a client and how important it is as a client to listen closely.

Let’s call her Mary. Mary just started the Serious Strength program a few weeks ago and was waiting to start her 15 minute, Serious Strength “Lite” training session. I created these short, sweet and powerful training sessions to accommodate people who found the 30 minute signature sessions too intense and who found the longer session too expensive.

She was looking at the low carb cook books we have out for people to flip through when waiting to hit the iron and I started a conversation with her. This is pretty much how it went:

“How are you Mary? How’s the training and eating going for you?”

“Good, great in fact!” she said. “I love the training, I feel stronger already but I wish I could lose this flab a little faster.”

Mary has about 30 or so pounds to lose. We do our best to teach all our clients that fat loss is 99.9% how you eat and adopting a low sugar, low carbohydrate, real food diet is the healthiest way to lose unwanted flab without having to count calories – and counting calories is an unhealthy and dead end road to fat loss.

I said “Well, tell me what your eating. What did you have for breakfast this morning?”

“Oatmeal!” she said with glee.

“Oatmeal?” I said – “But Mary, oatmeal is really nothing more than a bowl of sugar – a bowl of pure carbohydrate.”

“Oh.” she said with confusion. Her brow furrowed. “I had a bowl of oatmeal with a banana. I thought that was a healthy breakfast. You said that eating a low carb diet was the healthiest way to eat.”

I was struck a bit dumb for a second as what she said burrowed into my brain. And I realized yet again that I failed another client in educating them.

She thought that since a low carb diet was healthy, anything she ate that she thought was healthy was, ipso facto, low carb.

It continues to amaze me how nutritionally brainwashed people have become. And it starts early. Even in my kids school there are posters and drawings that display completely scientifically incorrect nutritional information. It’s going to take a long time and a lot of careful educating to get people on the right track.

So remember, what you hear may not be what was said and what you say may not be what is heard. Choose your words carefully. Listen closely to what your being told. It can make all the difference int he world.

Grain and Gluten Free Biscuits

almond flour biscuit

OK low carbers – this low carb biscuit is to DIE for. Each one has only 6gms of carbs and 3 gms of fiber so a net carb load of only 3gms!

Here is the link to the recipe.

It’s crunchy, gooey, soft and luscious. The pic above was my breakfast this morning. In between the two scrumptious buns are 2 eggs, 3 slices bacon, raw milk, grass fed, organic cheddar cheese (Parmesan would be a good choice too).

With a nice cup of espresso with raw cream I was in breakfast bliss.

Enjoy!


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