Glennith's Journal, 26 February 2015

The epic battle with the scale! Glennith - I bet you can be just as stubborn as those scales! Remember also, you have time on your side.  

Thank you Buffy, I tend not to weigh myself too often, you can become a slave to them if you are not careful. And yes I do have a stubborn streak at times! I hope you enjoy the snow with your puppy. 

Puppy liked the snow his first time out - but now he doesn't want to go off the deck. Must be he discovered it makes his paws cold. If we lived in a colder climate I'd have to invest in boots.  

Did you tell your doctor that you are eating ~100g of fat per day? 

It just does not pay to tell your doctor everything. If my doctor had her way she would have me lose another 3 stone, no chance baby no chance at all. Keep up the good work Glennith and remember the scales can alyway be thrown through a window (just make sure it is open first) 

Definitely did not Giles, my doctor is old school. Now, before you say anything, that 100g is probably less than I have been eating daily over the past 2 years. And I was about 2 stone lighter. My doc would not take into consideration that I've not had a cold or tummy bug or anything else in that time. He is a bit perplexed by the reversal of my granulated goitre - he couldn't find it at my last review. In fact, the only reason I see the medical profession is because of the physical injury to my ankle. @I will win, thank you for the advice. I've opened the window. (It's very windy out there!). I am coming to the conclusion I need to take myself off the medication. Buffy, my Glen Dog is desperate for some snow. And he is 13 this year! 

My reason for asking the question was an objective one. I understand that these new ideas are against the mainstream and so wondered if your doctor was in support of the diet you have chosen. Furthermore the doctors reassurance that your lack of weight loss is due to your medication, might be informed by the assumption that you are on a regular diet. 

oooh you Paleo Glennith, me Primal!! my doc was happy i am eating real food, but frowned on the fat intake, but he is willing to see how it goes, he is dying to tell me my cholesterol is up but at last check (last month) it was down . he also agrees (all be it grudgingly) that when fat is the major source of energy and isn't hindered by high insulin levels, it is metabolized more efficiently by the body. keep up the good work and don't get down, we all have plateaus they are never permanent if you are determined. onwards on downwards (on the scale)!!  

Thank you drullae, it's great to hear from someone who thinks along the same lines! And to hear how well you are doing! Giles, my doctor has never once questioned what food I'm eating, lack of interest there I'm afraid!Due to said lack of interest, I'm not inclined to ask his advice on dietary matters one way or the other. Which may be me being a bit bull headed but there you go. 

what makes me laugh is paleo/primal/real food what ever you want to call being described as "new". this is not a dig at you Giles but this way of eating is older than the hills!! (which i know doesn't necessarily make it correct). but it is only in the last 50-60 years with the meteoric rise of the food industry and processing foods that people have eaten what you describe as a "regular" diet. coincidently in that time obesity and diabetes have become epidemic and heart disease is on the increase. yes i have become a bit OCD about ingredient lists and have managed to purge my kitchen of them (kept oxo cubes and my sweetener!). never again will i touch frozen veg not when a sweetheart cabbage is only 45p and tastes like heaven it is an emotive subject and i do get carried away but in the end it comes down to this - real food tastes better 

Hear hear drullae! Whatever happened to food? So much of what is on the supermarket shelves these days was dreamt up and made in the laboratory, end product, massive profits for the 'food' industry giants and massive health issues for the consumers. We have become so obsessed with food, probably because the majority of us don't eat it. Let's dispense with the labels of paleo/primal, whatever, and go back to calling it and eating it. Real food. 

Lets not confuse a High Fat Keto diet with "paleo" diet, and lets not confuse either with that which people ate in the palaeolithic period. Firstly we don't have a very good record of what proportions of food people living 2.6 million years ago ate. We know from fossilised remains that paleolithic hunting and gathering people ate varying proportions of leafy vegetables, fruit, nuts and insects, meat, fish, and shellfish. Meat would likely have come from smaller game animals such as rabbit, pheasant, chicken, maybe even animals as big as Deer. These animals are very lean and have little saturated fat. Fish and shellfish also contain very little saturated fat. So to say that eating high quantities of saturated fat is "older than the hills" and therefore more natural or indeed good for you, and that the cause of the obesity epidemic in the past 50-60 years is due to people not eating enough of it, I think is a bit absurd. The idea of eating grass fed beef, instead of corn fed beef, seems equally strange to me since neither would have been part of a palaeolithic diet as cows were farmed in the Agricultural era. Not eating frozen vegetables, because (I presume) the pesticides, or refinement processing done on them, and instead opting to eat highly refined and processed vegetable oils such as coconut oil, seems a bit unconventional. So the opposite of unconventional is really what I mean when I talk about a regular diet. 

Geeeezzzzz Giles.... I now feel so old :) 

I hold my hand up to trying the keto diet but it can still be classed as following primal lines, I still ate meat, leafy greens and yes, fat. I'm not sure where you have been buying your coconut oil for it to be highly refined and processed. Mine is organic, 100% raw, first pressed with no heat from fresh coconuts. You can't get m less refined. As I've said elsewhere, I'm sure our ancestors ate a huge variety of things, sometimes lots of plant, fruits and nuts depending on season and location. Sometimes purely protein. Sometimes not a lot of anything. Pheasants, chickens are a fairly modern breed, and bred to be lean for modern tastes. There is very good evidence from traditional tribes still following their ancestors way of life, that if they catch game, they prize the fattier parts above the lean. As does my cat! The rabbit's head always goes first, she will go back to the rest if nothing else is available. I don't think I said that the cause of the modern day obesity epidemic was due to people not eating enough fat but by eating heavily processed foods, or foods which are purely manufactured and have never seen a plant or an animal in the process. The low fat food industry does have to hold it's hands up, if they take the fat out of foods, they have to replace it with something else to maintain structure and taste. Usually sugar and fillers.  

Well by refining I mean the process of taking raw ingredients, and extracting a particular sub component. So in the example of coconut oil, you take 20 or so coconuts and cold press them until only the oil is left. If you were really eating raw coconut oil you would be eating the whole raw nut. That is what our pre-agricultural ancestors would have done, and they would have never been able to get the equivalent amount of coconut oil in a single sitting, unless they sat down and ate 20 coconuts! Secondly chickens are a modern breed of "red junglefowl", while its true that they have been breed for taste, they have actually been breed to be more fatty than less fatty. Pheasant are not a domesticated species. Finally, you say that the fatty parts of the meat were the prized part above the lean. Why are things valuable? Why is gold valuable for example? Its because its rare and difficult to find. If the fat were abundant it wouldn't be prized. Furthermore part of the reason we consider fat tasty is because at some point in our evolution it was advantages to eat fat because it is a nutrient dense source of energy, so we evolved to find fat tasty so that we would seek out this rare source of energy. These days you can go down to your local supermarket and get copious amounts of fat, be it in the form of cream, butter, coconut oil, lard etc. I think its this modern abundance of, and an evolutionary craving for these foods that is the cause of an epidemic. Sugars are even worse, since we've evolved a desire for highly sweet tastes for much of the same reasons, and sugary foods are also abundant these days. 

oh for goodness sake its just a name!! i call myself Primal because i take most of my advice from a source i trust which is Mark Sissons and his diet is branded as "Primal". i'm well aware i'm not going out clouting wilderbeasts over the head with a big stick.  

Well you should really start doing that drullae as there seem to be a few on FS in need of a bashing with a club lol 

if i want coconut oil i will go out and buy it i'll try to get organic yes, i'm hardly going to sit and extract the oil out of 20 fresh coconuts But if i want a bit of almond butter i'm quite prepared to grind some whole almonds, i won't be sitting outside a cave with a couple of rocks, i'll be in my kitchen with my Kenwood. we do not believe that we are eating like our ancestors (even though my Grandma was very paleo!) we are not that naive. its about REAL food and not highly processed, pre treated, pre cooked, packaged with added god knows what because the refining and treating has taken out all the goodness and taste so they have add it all back in with chemicals and additives. the lengths you want to take this way of eating to up to you. i was ketogenic and Primal (easy ketosis lends itself well to paleo), i know vegan paleo-ers and high protein ones (many body builders). there are some paleo-ers who wouldn't be in the same room as me because i won't give up Oxo cubes or Splenda sweeteners. then theres the low carbers who think i'm a saint coz i make my own moisturizer. the reason i won't touch frozen veg is that it doesn't taste of anything i might as well suck an ice cube.  

Do you want to borrow my rocks drullae? I promise I did wash them after bashing the mastodon - sorry bull, over the head this morning! We get far too bogged down in names and far too wound up about food, it's surely counter productive. Who wants to stress about every morsel? The idea is to do your best to eat as healthily as possible, whatever diet lifestyle you choose to follow and above all, enjoy the food that you have chosen to put on your plate. I choose to eat, as drullae, food which is as minimally processed as possible (important word that, minimally), with the proviso that I live in a very modern world where that is not always possible. And I won't be giving up my red wine easily for anyone. Nor my slow cooker or my rotary iron. We do the best we can. 

But surely the whole purpose of FS is to tell everyone where they are going wrong and what to eat and how to eat it and when but only using fancy words which nobody understands anyway. How can you complain when you are surrounded by such amazing experts :)