Our bodies are not on FedEx Time

Day 4
August 11, 2011
Wt. 258.2
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 180
Blood Pressure 167/104 60 bpm.

Our bodies are not on FedEx Time

Well...Fooo. I was hoping for dramatic changes. I wanted to see a significant drops in blood sugar and blood pressure. Instead I got a bump upward on both and a bit of a drop on weight. What is going on?
Just a reminder: just because you want something does not mean it is going to show up overnight like an order from Amazon.com. My diabetes probably got its start somewhere around 1991 when I began to put on weight and really started eating the bad stuff in large quantities. It showed up as a danger sign in my 1997 physical and then as fully developed in 2002. In other words it has had 14 years to become a part of my body and four days of doing what I’m doing here is not going to make it go away. What is going to make it go away is my dedication to making it go away over the next month, the next six months, the next year. Even after I begin waking up with normal blood sugar numbers it is a thing that is always lurking about, just waiting to return if I return to the ways that opened the door for it in the first place.

I was looking over my Rules and realized that I should have added one more. This one has to do with quantity of food in a given meal. So Rule 11 is: No meal should be larger than your fist and more of it should be vegetables or grains than meat or oil.

Last night’s dinner was chili-I love chili, the hotter the better. I have a bowl that is just about the right size to put my fist in with a little room to spare. I have big hands but the nice thing about using your own fist as a guide is that it is always about equal to the size of your stomach. I make my beans separately and don’t mix them until I am ready to eat my chili so the beans are a little more than half of the bowl. I then add the chili part. The chili consists of tomatoes, spices, onion, potato and meat. The meat is maybe a quarter of the total volume of the chili. I put this in the bowl. Mostly I am eating vegetables with a small amount of meat.

One of the things I learned when I did the 30 day fast was that the human body does not need as much animal protein as the meat industry would like us to believe. In the course of a 30 day fast the average person will lose about three pounds of muscle mass. That is 48 ounces or 1.6 ounces per day. So as little as three ounces of high quality protein a day is plenty. You don’t need a 12 ounce rib eye steak for every meal. Vegetarians would argue that cows don’t eat steak at all. They become 800 pound meat on the hoof by eating grass and there are lots of very healthy active vegetarians out there as proof of their argument. Still, I like a bit of meat or some eggs from time to time and I feel like we have about four million years of evolutionary history as omnivores behind us that tells our bodies to eat a bit of everything.

Back when we were species that relied on being hunter/gatherers we ate what nature provided and what we could scrounge. Men and boys went hunting and often came back with nothing but some fruit for vegetables they happened across by dumb luck. Women and girls went out and brought in what they could find as well. Seeds, roots, berries, nuts, and in all probability small game they trapped. Meat was not a guaranteed part of their diet though there were probably times when it was plentiful and that was all they ate. For the American plains Indians a buffalo hunt was a huge deal. Vast quantities of meat, hides, bone and everything else they could take from the kill but it took everyone working on the kill to process it before it went bad-so no time for finding vegetables other than what had been dried and stored.

We have been successful as a species because we could eat just about anything, from bugs to grasses to bears but until recent times, the last hundred years or so, dinner was not a given. Even on successful farms there were lean times. A while back I made a Christmas pudding called, "Spotted Dick." It is a traditional English Christmas steamed pudding that I read about in Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories about Captain Jack Aubrey. I found a recipe for it on-line and got all of the ingredients together. One of which is suet-the hard fat from beef or mutton. Sounds icky, I know. As I mixed all of the ingredients I realized that this is what would be left at the end of the year. Dried fruits and berries, nuts, suet, flour, honey or sugar. It is a high fat, high starch, high sugar desert and after four hours of steaming it, I realized I had just made a......fruit cake. Great!! I have 20 people coming for Christmas dinner and I made a fruit cake for dessert. However, I was committed and figured that maybe the novelty of eating Spotted Dick would be enough to get them to give it a try. I was amazed to find that they were coming back for seconds and thirds. At the end of the evening there was nothing left, not even crumbs.
In the dark of winter our bodies want the things that went into that recipe, it needs them. In times past, when food was scarce this was a treat beyond compare-even if it was English cooking.
Back to Rule 11, we don’t need as much protein as we’ve been told and it can come from lots of sources, beans, meat, eggs, grains but it is probably better to eat lower on the food chain than higher as it is easier to digest even if it doesn’t provide the quick sources of amino acids and fast access to protein.

So–smaller meals made up of more vegetables and less meat or oil. Pretty easy. Tomorrow-energy dense foods and manufactured foods and how they are the source of what is trying to kill us. Bob says, "Hi," and that he wants a soda and a candy bar and some ice cream.

More tomorrow,
Jim