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When I went on the Paleo 30-Day Challenge, I suspended my workouts because I wanted to see what effect the diet would have, independent of exercise. Is the 80% rule true? I found that it was.

Before continuing, a few points:

~  When first hitting the paleo road, go as close to 100% strict as you can for those first 30 days. Don’t even give your self a “cheat” option. Make it an all-or-nothing proposition. That’s really the only mindset that will enable you to be successful.  You must give your body a chance to heal up as even minor gluten exposure once every two weeks will stall the healing process. To think of it another way, just show some discipline (This 30-day Challenge from The Whole 9 sums things up pretty well).

~ I’d also recommend weighing yourself and taking tape measurements of the areas you’re concerned about (hips, waist, thighs, etc.). I also tested my blood pressure at Dominick’s.

~ Pick a 4-week period where there are no birthdays, parties, weddings, or special events of any kind. Stay away from those events like the plague.

Want to know what’s the hardest thing about going paleo/primal? Breakfast. Cutting wheat, dairy, and refined sugars from your morning menu is a Herculean challenge. I’m at my least disciplined first thing in the morning, and breakfast is the meal requiring the most discipline.

You have been forewarned.

So, what’s it like being on the 30-day Paleo Challenge? Like anything else in life, people will experience it differently.

My first few days were actually OK, thanks to the novelty factor. You become highly attuned to how pervasive and accessible crappy foods are in our everyday diet (and, conversely, how tough it is to find paleo-friendly alternatives).

Granted, this assumes the 30-day challenge is something you really want to do.  If you don’t really want to do it, but just feel like you should, it’s BRUTAL from Day 1.

Anyway, because I’d gone gluten-free on a few occasions over the years, my body adjusted fairly well to their absence. But many people do experience sharp pains, headaches, and dizziness. This is because, as Robb writes, glutens act on the same nerve receptors in the brain as heroin and other narcotics.

In other words, if you experience these physiological symptoms, it’s because you are going through withdrawl… just like a crack addict.

That’s why when you ask people to give up corn chips or white rice, they typically can do so without much complaint. Take away folks’ crusty bread and pasta?

‘Sup Charlie Sheen?

Anyway, at some point between days 2 and 4, you may start having what I call ”convenience cravings.” Those never really go away. Ug. You just wanted to eat a friggin’ english muffin, not scrambled eggs again, for the 4th day in a row. I was so, so sick of eggs.

How did I make it through? 2 words: left overs. To be successful, it helps tremendously if you can reorient yourself as to what constitutes breakfast food. I make a mean beef stew that doubles as a truly satisfying and filling breakfast. In fact, I made it during the challenge specifically to have on hand for a week’s worth of breakfast. My wife likes it too.

Just so you know, the first weekend is the place the 30-Day Paleo Challenge goes to die.

Your family’s around constantly, and you realize just how often you snack on all the crapola you aren’t allowed to eat anymore. Cheese and dairy seem like they’re everywhere. The first Saturday morning breakfast is a horrible experience. Sunday is even worse.

By the end of the first week, you’ll be depressed, thinking that you still have 3 more weeks of this shit. It is especially hard when your significant other and your kids aren’t on the program (as I said, you have to want to do this in order for it not to be abject torture). There are always girl scout cookies, pop tarts, bread, cheese, and the like laying around. It sucks.

Don’t weigh yourself yet. Don’t break out the tape measure yet. Give it more time.

The second week was like February – it never seemed to end. At every meal, especially breakfasts, you are so annoyingly aware of what you can and can’t eat. The upside for a lot of people (not me, but most people) is that they start feeling much better. Acne begins to clear up, quality of sleep improves, bread/gluten cravings begin to subside.

But the family is sick of eating stews and meals made in crockpots, and the kids keep asking when you’re going to start eating ”normal” again, as they finish off their third piece of crusty garlic bread. It’s the worst – the constant reminders of your past life.

The upside: now, when you get hungry, it’s not that sharp pain that can only be remedied by a slice of bread and butter. The sensation is more like an awareness of hunger that you can either act on or ignore. If paleo options aren’t available, it gets physically easier to just say no.

But the convenience cravings are as powerful as ever.

(An aside – my struggle is that food just doesn’t affect me, physically or emotionally, in same way it does other people, apparently. Once I was off the crack for a few weeks, then relapsed, I felt a little bit queasy, but not bad by any stretch of the imagination. I wouldn’t have even known had I not been paying close attention to how my body reacted.

Some people feel really, really crappy, and I kind of wish it affected me that way – it would make it easier to avoid making bad choices. However, if eating right doesn’t make that much difference in how I feel, it makes all the difference in how I look and perform.)

That second weekend is harder than the first, because you’ve been so strict, so “good” about what you’ve eaten, you feel as though you deserve some kind of treat. Constant Vigilance! Discipline! Remember, your gut needs a minimum of two weeks to heal up. A moment of weakness and you’ve just reset your 30 days.

Don’t weigh yourself yet. Don’t break out the tape measure yet. Give it one more week.

The third week.  You’re over the hump and it gets easier. Much easier. You are grooving. You’ve found the breakfast foods you can live with (for me, it’s Amylu Chicken Apple Sausages and Amylu Chicken Apple Maple Sausages [available at Whole Foods], pan-fried honey ham, eggs once a week, leftovers, coffee).

The weekend still sucks, but you see the light at the end of the tunnel. OK. Go ahead and weigh yourself, but hold off on the measuring until the end. Get on the scale at the same time of day and in the same clothes as at your initial weigh-in.

At the end of 3 weeks,  I’d lost 8 pounds.

The last week actually feels less like a “diet” and more like a lifestyle choice. It’s easy-peasy.

My final numbers were 9.7 pounds lost. My blood pressure was 113/63 (down from 125/80) – so much for the correlation between high-fat diets and high blood pressure.

The key to success is finding the choices you can live with. I have to admit, I was never better than about  98% on the challenge. My cheats:

~   I ate 3-5 squares of 78% dark chocolate (low-carb by definition) for dessert every night. It’s a Robb Wolf-approved cheat, and since I’m not a sugar addict, I can have something sweet and not fall off the wagon entirely. Baked goods are another story, however, so I studiously avoided them like the plague.

~   I skipped coffee the first two weeks, then used a splash of French Vanilla non-dairy Creamer for my coffee in the second two weeks (not paleo, but also not dairy, which seemed to be more important). I’ve since transitioned to heavy whipping cream. I can use much less and still get the same creamy effect with no GI problems. I hate black coffee.

~    I ate a 3 squares of thin crust frozen pizza the third weekend.

~   I had a few cocktails (Cuervo, the juice of 1 whole lime, splash of soda, no syrups or sugars). Another Robb Wolf–approved cheat (“Let’s not turn this into a religion,” he says).

~ I had a half of a microbrew when friends from out of town came to visit in the third weekend. It’s the only time I cheated and felt physically ill. I could feel the glutens and the alcohol slowly seeping into my bloodstream – imagine your stomach as a lava lamp. That’s how I felt.

And that’s where I am now. In the two weeks since I finished the challenge, I’ve had two cheat days – not meals, mind you, but days. Day-long orgies of Krispy Kreams, cookies, pasta, etc. It was the best. Not surprisingly, my progress stalled.

The last two weeks? No further progress.

I was quite piqued about that 2-week flatline, so I’ve cleaned up my diet again and have resumed my main page CrossFit workouts. For an example, here is what I ate the other day (when I’m trying to get my diet dialed in, I keep track of it on fitday.com). Here’s a screen shot (click on image to see fill size):

Not super-duper strict, but I’ll take it.

If any of this is remotely interesting to you, spend the $10-$15 on one of the books at Amazon, and hit Robb’s and Mark’s sites. That’s where the real information lies.

And I know I haven’t talked much about specific foods that are “good” and “bad.” Maybe I’ll do so in a later post. But for now, read the books; go to the sites.

I’d also recommend signing up for Mark’s e-newsletter, and then downloading these free documents:

Intro to the Primal Blueprint

Primal Blueprint Fitness

Reader-Created Cookbooks

  And head to the Tools page of robbwolf.com for quick guides, FAQs, articles, and other great resources.

And finally, Mark has what he calls the 80/20 Rule:

Align your life with primal living 80% of the time and you’re good to go.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Great advice.

~ Lost 9.7 lbs (according to the trusty Wii Fitness)

~ Dropped 1.5 inches off my waist (according to the tape measure) (Given that my waist is the last place I lose weight, it means I went through all the fatty deposits on my shoulders, legs, etc., and still pulled a significant amount of fat from my waist.)

 OK – to the post. I thought I would mix things up a bit here on my own personal blogosphere and talk a bit about exercise & nutrition.

How did I come to the Paleo Diet in the first place? It all started with CrossFit.

I’ve always loved working out, be it for volleyball, health, or simple vanity. For about 20 years, my routine was: bench-incline-militaries-flies-curls, with some long-distance running thrown in for good measure.

Then about 4 years ago, a buddy of mine turned me onto CrossFit. At first, I was turned off by the overbearing military-law-enforcement-gun-lover-hyper-testosterone aura which suffuses the site (it’s gotten better in recent years, but I find it’s still irritatingly macho and “ain’t we so cool.”) But after 20 years, I’d grown tired of my old grind and was looking to do something different.

After 6 months of CrossFit, I went back to my old workout, just for fun one day. Though I hadn’t done a single bench or military press in about 9 months, I was crushing them, doing sets of 205 & 225 on the bench, and 95 lb. military presses.

Needless to say, I was sold on CrossFit after that.

CrossFit’s philosophy is best described as “general physical preparedness,” or specializing in not specializing. It combines powerlifting, olympic lifting, and gymnastics (bodyweight exercises), often combining them in a way that produces a high-intensity cardio component to boot.

The workouts are randomized (before that became a trendy workout buzzword), and though you may do a given exercise (such as pull ups) several times over the course of two weeks, you would not see the same combination of exercises more than once every 6 weeks, at best.

Anyway, on the CrossFit message boards, there was always a ton of information on nutrition. The Zone Diet was, and still is, the official nutritional program of the site. I’ve tried it off and on, but the tediousness of weighing my food and worrying about carb, protein, and fat blocks, and eating everything in proper proportion was too much of a hassle.

Over time, I became acquainted with the “paleo,” or “primal” diet philosophy. I tinkered with it for a long time, but never really stuck with it because I   1). love dairy, and 2). love bread, rice & pasta even more. By the time one reaches his or her late-30′s, early 40′s certain things are hardwired into the brain, and food preferences are certainly one of them.

(A note on the CF boards. At its best, it is an amazing resource of fitness and nutritional information and advice, lots of it empiric, but just as much anecdotal. It can be a truly supportive place when you are trying to figure out just what the hell you’re doing, or more importantly, doing wrong. But at its worst, its members have competing agendas, a truly annoying know-it-all-ism, and a rigidly inflexible view of “what is fitness” and “who is fit.” Caveat emptor.)

I came to realize that as long as I’m kicking my ass in the gym, I may as well look like I’m kicking ass. And the best way to achieve that is via proper nutrition. That, and I’m getting old.

There are two gurus of the paleo/primal school that I became quite familiar with: Robb Wolf and Mark Sisson.

Robb is a biochemist-turned-fitness trainer and author who gets his hands really dirty in the nitty-gritty of how the standard Western diet is basically killing us.

His site, robbwolf.com is a great resource of information, though recently most of the new stuff has been in podcast form (which I personally find annoying – not just at Robb’s site, but in general. I prefer reading this stuff as it’s easier to find over and over again).

Mark, while well-versed in the ins-and-outs of the biochemistry of it all, is more of a lifestyle guru, with a fantastic site, marksdailyapple.com,  and a book whose focus is on how to incorporate all of this “stuff” into one’s daily life.

If you really want to know the gritty details of Paleo, read Robb’s book, The Paleo Solution. If you’re more interested in the lifestyle aspect of Paleo/Primal living, Mark’s book, The Primal Blueprint, is a better choice (though Mark does hit all the science stuff as well).

Personally, I would recommend reading Robb’s book, and using his strict prescription for 30-60 days. On the message boards of Robb’s site, I wrote, when someone asked if there is a difference between “paleo” and “primal”:

“In my mind, Paleo is where you start: getting hardcore about cleaning
yourself out, getting healthy, etc. Primal is where you end up when it’s time
to make this whole healthy eating thing a long-term lifestyle change.”

As I said, I’d recommend reading Robb’s book, get “hardcore” about cleaning your gut out and recalibrating your hormones, then turning to marksdailyapple.com for the day-to-day advice and ideas on how to make this whole healthy living thing work.

But what does it mean to eat Paleo?

The best way to describe the paleo/primal diet is to say it mimics the diet our paleolithic ancestors evolved on.

(Now, if you believe the earth is 5,000 years old and that man roamed the world alongside dinosaurs, you can stop reading here and go get yourself another fried chicken biscuit from Chick-Fil-A).

Evolutionary changes take place over hundreds of thousands and millions of years. Genetically, we are identical to our paleolithic ancestors (let’s call him ”Grok”- Mark Sisson’s term, not mine), only they were taller and stronger than we are today (based on studies of the size and density of Grok’s bones).

Grok ate meat (both lean & fatty – whatever he could hunt & kill), foraged for vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds. He typically “worked” about 15-20 hours a week, and chilled the rest of the time. Grok went to sleep when the sun went down, woke up when it rose, and spent his life outdoors, socializing with friends and family. Absent accident or injury, Grok’s life expectancy was about the same as ours (though a broken foot or a infection could easily kill him, so life wasn’t completely idyllic).

 The Agricultural Revolution, which introduced domesticated grains into our diet, occurred 5,000-10,000 years ago and changed the fundamental manner in which we ordered our lives. Finding food was no longer the organizing principle of human life. Freed of that burden, civilization was allowed to flouish, and set us on the path to our modern world.

I think the most appropriate parallel would be if suddenly we invented Star Trek-style replicators and transporters. The replicators could make anything we needed out of thin air (food, blankets, building materials, clothes). The transporters could instantly deliver us and cargo anywhere in the world – no cars, planes, trucks, or trains. No pollution.  No need for money.

After a period of gluttony, human kind, with want and privation banished from our world, would have to find a way of organizing itself other than competing for resources – which, at its core, has been the story of human life on this planet.

Wrap your brain around that one, and you get the sense of the importance of the Agricultural Revolution.

Anyway, the point is that our bodies have not had enough time to evolve to be able to digest grain-based foods. What’s wrong with grains? Well, lots, but the two big ones are that they

 1). provoke a very strong insulin response from the human body (fat doesn’t make you fat – excess insulin production does), and

2). glutens and similar proteins are basically poison.

It sounds a bit dramatic, but the truth is, like poison ivy, whose oils mess you up if you come into contact (or eat) them, grains have similar defense mechanisms (Robb hits all of this in his book).

In short, you can’t digest them properly. And they provoke all kinds bad responses inside your gut & intestines over the course of your life.

I’m not going to get into “All the Evil” that comes with eating a grain-based diet, as it is much better explained by Robb & Mark in their respective books and websites. However, a short list from The Paleo Solution includes:

1. cardiovascular disease
2. high blood pressure
3. osteoporosis
4. cancer
5. infertility
6. type 1 diabetes
7. skin disorders, like eczema and acne
8. fibromyalgia
9. MS
10. rheumatoid arthritis
11. lupus
12. vitiligo
13. narcolepsy
14. schizophrenia
15. autism
16. depression
17. non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma
18. Huntington’s Disease
19. hypothyroidism

Obviously, not everybody gets these conditions because they eat grains and dairy (which has similar proteins to grains). But if you do have them, it could be that your diet is a likley culprit.

So anyway, after a year or so lurking around marksdailyapple.com and getting familiar with Robb’s work, I bought The Paleo Solution and read it in early January. I then committed to going “strict paleo” for 30 days, from mid-January to mid-February. Why?

For me, part of it is that I’m gettting older, and I’m thinking that perhaps it’s time to stop treating my body like a sewer. Athletic performance and aesthetics are strong considerations as well. Like I said, if I’m training my ass off, I want to look like and perform like I’m training my ass off.

Before I get to my life on the 30 Day Paleo Challenge, I want to mention a powerful observation. Mark says that,

80% of your body composition is determined by diet.
Another 10% is exercise, 5% is lifestyle choices, and 5% is highly specialized training.

So that means if you, in a perfect world, want to lose 20 pounds and get to a sub-10% body fat (for men), or sub-14% (for women), diet can get you the first 16 pounds. The rest is training, stress reduction, sleep, & healthy lifestyle choices (smoking & boozing come too mind). To really lean out requires that last extra bit of effort (or time) most of us haven’t had since college. That’s why few of us look like Olympic athletes, even if we work out all the time.

It all sounds great, but does it work?

In my experience? Yes.

Click here for Part 2.

Confirmation bias is the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their opinions, regardless of whether the information has a basis in fact.

People thus gather evidence and selectively remember information, interpreting it in a biased way. The biases are more intense as the issues and established beliefs are more emotionally-charged.

It is really the only context in which I can comprehend the loyal followings built by the Glenn Becks, Sarah Palins, and Michelle Bachmanns of the world, given that what they espouse are at best, uncouth, and at worst, flat-out lies and conspiracy theories unworthy of the most jaded Kennedy skeptic.

This comes to mind every time I  hear Sarah Palin criticizing Michelle Obama for encouraging kids to eat healthy and exercise, or for that matter, Democrats attacking Texas Governor Rick Perry for misspeaking about Juarez being the most dangerous city in America.

It is really frustrating, especially when on Meet The Press, when Speaker Boehner was given the opportunity to tell all the teabagger conspiracy theorists that the President is a Christian and was born in Hawaii, he demurred, saying instead that, “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think. ” 

Nice display of leadership.

Take a look at Bill Clinton telling off 9/11 truthers, or even John Friggin’ McCain defending Obama’s christianity and try to deny that one of the definitions of being a leader is standing up for the truth.

Confirmation bias has to be the only explanation for the massive outpouring of misleading and completely fictitious political advertising in recent years. Why educate people about the issues when you can simply feed into their fears and prejudices?

I can readily understand why Wisconsin Governor Walker thought breaking the unions would be a slam-dunk—the Right has done a remarkable job since the Reagan Administration of blaming unions for the decline of the standard of living of American workers.

The real blame, of course, lies with our government’s tax policies and manufacturing companies offshoring jobs to countries where they can pay workers a few cents on the dollar.

Ugh. I have a headache.

From my recent postings, there’s little question that my political leanings have been solidly Democratic in recent years. It’s not so much that Democrats have the best policy prescriptions in every case (they don’t, IMO), but at least they are being honest about what they want and why, and seem to operate from position that reflects a measurable reality.

Since George W. Bush was elected in 2000, the world described to me by Republicans just didn’t match the world I lived in and knew. Sure, some of the disagreements were familiar (tax policy, abortion, stem cell research), but was increasingly about things like “is torture OK?”, “is it a good idea to invade other countries without provocation” and “do we really need to follow the Constitution and the Bill of Rights when they become inconvenient?”

Debates went from things honest people could disagree about, and have morphed into things like, “is Obama secret Muslim,” or “the government is taking over our healthcare system,” neither of which has ANY basis in fact.

Honestly, my opinion of the whole Tea Party movement is that they are whiny, xenophobic, and in many cases deeply uneducated about both the issues they oppose (see: healthcare debate) and the real-life consequences of their policy prescriptions (not raising the debt limit and shutting down the government).

But the events in Wisconsin are a nice trip down memory lane. The differences are stark: should workers be able to unionize and bargain collectively for wages, benefits, and workplace safety?

If you think so, great, pick up a sign and march on the capitol.

If not, great, pick up a sign and march on the capitol.

But Gov. Walker is ruining this delicious fight between:

1.workers who, on average, make less than their private sector counterparts, have already agreed to the pay and benefit cuts demanded by the governor, but want to reserve their traditional collective bargaining rights; and

2. Republican politicians and business owners who want to see the last vestiges of unionism wiped out.

Again, these are reasonable debates that can be really instructive, but not when one side isn’t playing by the rules. Walker keeps insisting that the unions must accept the changes for budgetary reasons, even though he’s the reason why there’s a budget problem. His tax policies created the state’s deficit. (For a counter-argument, click here)

Yes, he campaigned on these issues, and won the election, but he never articulated how they’d be paid for (and based on polling, it’s unlikely he would have won the election had he been forthright and said what his plan actually was).

UPDATE 2/23/11 - Politifact has this analysis on Walker’s claim of a mandate for the union-busting.

Now he’s trying to break the unions and become a hero to the conservative movement.

C’mon, Gov. Sure times are tough, and the unions must make concessions (which they have), but what the hell does collective bargaining have to do with future budget crises? When the time comes, just renegotiate it all again. Inconvenient? Sure? But fair? Absolutely… unless you hate unions.

(BTW – one common complaint is that public workers make too much, relative to private sector workers. I dunno - maybe private sector workers should be paid more. Just sayin’…)

So man up and say what this is really all about – you think unions suck and want them gone. Then union supporters and opponents can actually engage in a debate on the same ground.

Like DeNero said in The Untouchables:

I’m gonna tell you something. Somebody messes with me, I’m gonna mess with with him. Somebody steals from me, I’m gonna say you stole. Not talk to him for spitting on the sidewalk… I pray to god if I ever had a grievance I’d have a little more self respect. One more thing, you have an all out prize fight, you wait until the fight is over, one guy is left standing. And that’s how you know who won.

Just look at the productive week they’ve had:

1. Declare war on women’s reproductive health and introduce a new term into our political discourse: “forcible rape” (as though there is another kind); 
2. Pass measures to defund the Planned Parenthood, Title X, and community health care centers which serve the poor;
3. Speaker Boehner saying, “so be it” if budget cuts cost 1 million public workers their jobs in the middle of a recession;
4. Defunding the Affordable Care Act; and
5. Bust the unions (just Google “Wisconsin Protests”)

All in all, a really productive week helping the average American worker get back on his/her feet.

Sarcasm aside, good for the Wisconsin public employees unions for standing up for themselves. And a double bravo to the Wisconsin cops & firefighters who, despite being exempted from Gov. Walker’s assinine power grab, are standing with their union brothers & sisters.

By the way, anybody else think that screwing with the unions may just backfire against Republicans in 2012? Talk about poking a sleeping tiger.

No doubt most of the chatter about the new projections of a $1.5 trillion deficit (!!!) will focus on spending. But spending is just one part of the problem. The other side, of course, is revenue, and any honest debate over the deficit needs to take that into account, especially in light of this:

    Tax revenues are projected to drop to their lowest levels since 1950, when measured against the size of the economy.

In the short-term, the best thing we can do to reduce the deficit is to increase economic growth, not reduce spending. In the long-run, we need to continue bringing down the costs of health care, end the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, and reallocate war expenditures on domestic investments and/or debt reduction. But we also can’t ignore that current tax policy — in particular, the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy — have brought tax revenue to their lowest levels in six decades.

Nobody, and I mean, NOBODY, likes taxes. Unfortunately, solutions to our financial problems must address both sides of the equation. In other words, we have to begin increasing revenues and not just cutting spending. Poll after poll show that few Americans want to cut spending for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or national defense. The problem is that those 4 programs account for the vast majority of federal spending.

So if nobody wants those programs cut, we’ll have to pay more in taxes to keep them going (unless we have a massive, sustained explosion in economic growth that would replenish the coffers at existing tax levels… but that ain’t happening.)

It’s a fairly stark, easily understood either/or proposition: cut benefits or raise taxes. The tough decisions are about what to cut and whom to tax, and those choices are much less clear.

And sorry, but cutting spending on energy assistance for the poor and food subsidies for poor women & children isn’t the way any rational, compassionate society should go about things.