One month ago I gave up alcohol. And caffeine. And pretty much any food discovered or invented more recently than the stone age. I did make an exception for dairy products, because I tend to do pretty well on dairy products. It’s the beer, bread and potatoes that have always been my problem.
So I live on meat, fish, eggs, nuts, fruits and vegetables. Supplemented generously with milk, cream, yogurt and cheese. Of course I try to go fresh, raw and organic whenever possible.
It was almost one full month before that that I took my oath to begin eating right and drinking right every day. As usual with these kinds of changes, getting started was the hardest part.
Now that I’m rolling, I don’t know why I didn’t do this years ago. I feel fantastic. My nascent beer belly has disappeared and my recovery from exercise hasn’t been this fast since I was seventeen. Most Importantly, I no longer feel depressed and tired all the time. When I go to work now, I’m actually at work, not just counting the minutes until I get to go home. When I have to wait a little while for my dinner now, I just feel hungry instead of turning into a werewolf and biting everybody’s heads off.
What does my kooky new diet have to do with Magic and Heathenism? Well, nothing. And everything. I’m a strong believer in the principle that you should eat as your ancestors ate. It’s what your body’s genetically adapted for. I’m also a strong believer that poor diet can have a radical negative effect on a person’s mental well-being. It certainly works that way with me and I’ve seen plenty of evidence that it works that way with many others, too. Finally, I’m a very strong believer that a diet is not something you should go on temporarily. A healthy diet is something you can thrive on for life.
There’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there. Some of it is even published by our own governments. Of course, I don’t necessarily know everything there is to know about human nutrition, either, so you’ll need to do your homework and make some educated judgements for yourself.
http://www.paleodiet.com/
http://www.westonaprice.org/
http://www.ppnf.org/catalog/ppnf/
http://www.healthrecovery.com/HRC_2006/Depression_06/D_sadness_inside_you.htm
Impressive!
It’s easy when you know how.
Hey Clint I also am one month into a similar diet.
It’s the eat right for your blood type.
Being O+ I cant eat any dairy or grains and all my protein has to come from meat and all i can drink is water ,green tea or guava juice.
Gone are my headaches and I lost 5kg in 1 week without trying. I have more energy than I know what to do with.
I am now doing weight training at 4am go to work then do brazilian jui jitsu in the afternoon.
It is funny the harder I train the more energy I get.
That’s awesome!
I don’t know much about the blood type based diets, except that being A Neg they’d have me on a high-carb low-fat diet and I already know that doesn’t work for me. My main philosophical influences as far as diet is concerned are the Paleolithic/Hunter Gatherer/Evolutionary diet, the work of Weston A. Price and The Metabolic Type Diet.
The logic behind the Paleo Diet is that the healthiest foods for human beings are likely to be those which are most natural and which people have been eating for the longest time. This is largest supported by the findings of Weston Price.
The logic behind Metabolic Typing is that different people have different fat,carb and protein requirements depending on how quickly their body breaks down and uses food. I strongly suspect ethnicity would be the largest factor in determining one’s metabolic type, but they usually use questionaires to determine type on a case-by-case basis.
The book “The Metabolic Typing Diet” by William Wolcott and Trish Fahey is pretty damn good, if anybody’s interested.
BJJ is a blast, huh? I remeber when I started out, I had years of prior experience as a bouncer and in a variety of traditional arts, including Classical Ju Jutsu, and these skinny little Brazilian guys still threw me around like a rag doll for at least the first three months.
I’m jogging and running sprints three days per week at the moment and doing a full-body lifting session 2-3 days per week. I make sure to go for a long walk on the days I don’t “work out”, but the real problem is holding myself back. I feel like I have so much energy, it’s very tempting to overdo it.
I’m itching to get back to a regular grappling class…and a kickboxing class…and some hardcore self-defence training. I’m not really sure how my schedule’s going to work once my son is born, so I’m kind of treating this as my pre-season conditioning phase.
How’s your boy doing?
Oh, I’m not sure if you’re still in “beginner phase” (Your previous extensive experience aside, I don’t remember you having mentioned BJJ before) but if you want some cool free stuff, this book’s pretty good…
http://www.beginningbjj.com/free-bjj-training-book.html
…the current US Army hand-to-hand program is heavily based on BJJ and the field manual doubles as a pretty good introductory guide…
http://moderncombatives.org/
http://www.selfdefenseresource.com/combatives/articles/Combatives%20FM%203-25.150.pdf
…and I just love this page…
http://judoinfo.com/other.htm