an endless journey of self-something

I seem to be blogging on Tuesdays. How very odd.

I've been following this primal / paleo / caveman diet thing lately, for the sake of the fitwit "food fight" competition. If you've never heard of it, you can peep it here and here, but it's basically like, if you can't kill it with a spear or hack it out of the earth, you can't eat it. Oh and also you can't eat any grains or legumes for some reason. (Sigh) I hate diets that aren't really based on anything, but this one seems to be working and seems to be keeping me relatively fed, so I guess it is based on something, I'm just not 100% sure what yet. But you know, don't sell it like it's some caveman trip when oh, but if you come across beans or corn don't eat that shit for God's sake. It's all a lot easier to swallow (wah-wah) when there's some kind of basis behind it. Like Gittleman's stuff - I could understand that. I get the glycemic index. It seems to make perfect sense. If I eat something a little too sweet, I can totally feel it causing more cravings. This diet I don't really understand that well yet, but it's the fitwit way, so I've been giving it a whirl. Oh yeah, no dairy or alcohol either. Guhhh...

So, here are some things I've discovered on my foray into paleo-ism.

• Dehydrated ginger tastes like hair on fire.


• There's this thing called a Tanka Bar that's basically dried buffalo and dried cranberries that someone came up with, and it's the big / main / only? paleo snack food. Now in spicy pepper flavor too. Hey guess what? They taste pretty amazing. Not as in, "I'm starving, oh wow suddenly kale tastes good," either. I mean they actually taste good.


• I love canteloupe and hate honeydew.


• I knew 'sugar makes me hungry' before, but I did not know that fat is what makes me feel full.


• Apparently saturated fats are righteous now? This one is still confusing to me, but doing this for a few weeks probably won't kill me. Right?


• You just can't make kale taste good. Eating it raw is tolerable, making it into chips by tossing oil and salt and roasting is tolerable, but it cannot be made good.


• It's damn near impossible for me to eat enough protein in a day to be the beefcake my body is trying to be.


• Coconut water tastes like stale water. There's a weird meatiness to it. It tastes the way that it smells when you're sitting near someone with bad breath. Not horrible breath, and not right in your face, just bad. But when you splash it into a big glass of water it tastes nice and apparently rebalances your electrolytes wonderfully.


• Coconut oil works like regular oil but smells like coconut. I do love that smell. And I'm so happy to not be reading any recipes that call for vegetable oil. That stuff smells disgusting.


• Coconut meat tastes fine, but not as good as I had imagined it would. I love dessicated coconut, even unsweetened, and it seems like if that has been ligin in a big sphere with coconut milk then it would taste amazing, but no. It is pretty filling, though.


• My stomach lacks the ability to signal for "full." But lately I've been trying to at least take a stab at guessing, instead of ignoring the problem altogether. That's progress, I guess.