Want Pretty Shoes with Less Pain? Try a High Fat Diet

I've never been a shoe horse. Being wide, my feet don't fit into most shoes of the right length. I went barefoot whenever I could as a kid and even now I prefer tennis shoes and flat sandals to ballet flats and stilettos. But tall boots are handy this time of year. I have a pair of Italian leather boots that are a little too long for me and rubbed my heels--until recently. Now, they're as comfortable as socks. Since I hardly ever wore them, it's hard to say when the change happened. But I've also noticed that I can brush hot grease off my skin and forget about it where it would have left a burn before. Several years ago, a grease splatter from a pan of Moroccan chicken left a trail of blisters up my left arm.

I don't have unassailable evidence that a low carb, high fat diet made my skin more resilient, but people on such a diet often find the same thing. Maybe it's better absorption of fat-soluble vitamins A and D and higher intake of zinc that make a difference. It can take awhile. If I remember correctly, it was about a year before I could go outside for long without sunscreen.

Shopping for shoes today reminded me of this. Granted, I was selective about the shoes I tried on, but everything I could get my hoof into felt great. No, I didn't try on any granola girl hiking sandals.

Comfy as a tennis shoe. Image from Dillards.com.

These don't come in a wide size; they were a quarter-inch too long. Nevertheless, nothing hurt, even with nothing on my heel.

Speaking of shoes, Stacy London of the TV show What Not to Wear, is (or at least was, as of July this year) embarking on the paleo diet. It sounds like it was a difficult transition for her (as it is for just about everyone); maybe she can start a new show called What Not to Eat.

ETA: I wore these shoes to the office. The sole is fine, but the uppers make these some of the most painful shoes I've ever worn.

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

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