My Two Months on the Slow Carb Diet - A Qualified Success

So a combination of factors lead me to try the Four Hour Body's Slow Carb Diet (a version of a Paleo diet) for a few months. For those unfamiliar, it's basically a sugar, starch, dairy and fruit-free diet where most of the additional carbs are made up for by beans, and an eat-anything cheat day once a week. I had definitely changed my life in drastic ways, as you will see.

Here's the Executive Summary:

Things that changed over two months on the diet:

Pros:

o Consistently lost a small amount of weight despite eating like a wild boar on crack once a week.

o No longer crave snacks, sugar, starches, bread, etc. Despite previously being a huge fan, most lust-feelings for these items have been magically transferred to more healthy foods.

o Eating meat and fats not only provides at least as much pleasure as eating carbs once did, but levels of satisfaction and feeling "done" at the end of a meal are *much* higher.

o Much more even energy levels than any point in my adult life

o Overall lowering of food cost

o Finally a solution to a life-long chronic oversleeping problem!

o Tiny little aches and shooting pains I've experienced for years have almost completely evaporated

Cons:

o Still low overall energy level, though some minor consistent improvement

o They pulled all the great low-carb food out of restaurants just in time for me to want them there. Fuckers.

o It is now almost *completely* impossible for me to buy food at coffee houses, one of my favorite places to spend time. Where I would previously stay at one all day and order a lot of food, I am now the asshole who buys on tea/coffee and stays for hours, because they literally serve *nothing* on my diet. I often smuggle in Paleo snacks, and have started to talk to coffee house owners about the potential benefits of having, say, at least one salad.

Metrics over two months:

Starting Weight: 167.8 lbs
Ending Weight: 164.4 lbs
Starting Waist: 35.1 inches
Ending Waist: 32.5 inches
Starting Hips: 37.4 inches
Ending Hips: 35.6 inches

The Paleo people generally think that Everything Went Wrong with the development of agriculture and the coming of grains in large quantities to the human diet. They feel that diabetes, many forms of cancer, heart disease, and most auto-immune and inflammatory diseases (in which they include Alzheimers) are caused by grain consumption (at all) and chronically insulin insensitivity levels caused by overeating of carbohydrates. The biochemistry isn't *that* complicated if someone is really interested, and in his book Robb Wolf does a good job of breaking it down, with generalities for the impatient and details for those who want them. After reading that book and several others that deal with the biochemistry of digestions, I really think these people are onto something. I don't know if it's quite the Total Solution they believe it to be, but based on my own results over a few months, particularly to really persistent long-term problems, I'm really have to fight to remain as skeptical as I should be. I look around at the people I care about, and their eating habits, and the problems they have, and I can't help but wonder, how might things change if they ate Paleo for a month? It wasn't *that* hard, though some people might find it more difficult than others.

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When Animals Attack

I was just attacked by a squirrel.

I was at Mozarts, and there was a cute squirrel dirt-bathing in a nearby planter. I got out a piece of walnut, and held it out. Sure enough, the squirrel approached cautiously, took the nut, and proceeded to do the adorable, patented, "squirrel eating nut beneath busy tail" routine.

That's when the horror began.

The squirrel, intrigued by this considerate new food source, decided to investigate more closely. Leaping to my table, it quickly home into the smell of the remaining walnut in my hand. It jumped over my laptop, landed in my lap, scrabbled up my arm, and tried to steal my nut. My impotent flailing narrowly prevented theft of the nut, but earned me a painful bite! I was then forced to shoo my assailant off of the table, which took substantially more intimidation than one would guess.

Brief research online suggests that getting rabies from a squirrel is pretty unlikely, and getting shots is only advised if the squirrel is clearly behaving strangely.

In this case, I asked for it.

When Animals Attack!

I was just attacked by a squirrel.

I was at Mozarts, and there was a cute squirrel dirt-bathing in a nearby planter. I got out a piece of walnut, and held it out. Sure enough, the squirrel approached cautiously, took the nut, and proceeded to do the adorable, patented, "squirrel eating nut beneath bushy tail" routine.

That's when the horror began.

The squirrel, intrigued by this considerate new food source, decided to investigate more closely. Leaping to my table, it quickly homed in to the smell of the remaining walnut in my hand. It jumped over my laptop, landed in my lap, scrabbled up my arm, and tried to steal my nut. My impotent flailing narrowly prevented theft of the nut, but earned me a painful bite! I was then forced to shoo my assailant off of the table, which took substantially more intimidation than one would guess.

Brief research online suggests that getting rabies from a squirrel is pretty unlikely, and getting shots is only advised if the squirrel is clearly behaving strangely.

In this case, I asked for it.

So bad.

The music in Ladyhawke is truly horrific.