Pain, Pain, Go Away!

It's day 2 of being back on a very low-carb diet. I'm off the sweet potatoes (you know, those wonderful safe starches) and I've cut back the dark chocolate. I thought it would take a couple of weeks to keto-adapt and get back to feeling good, but I'm already feeling like my old self: no more upset stomach, no dragging myself out of bed late this morning, no nap on the bus tonight, and no mid-afternoon grogginess. And no more humiliating thought that Alice Cooper , who started his band before I was born, could probably run circles around me. Blogger Kia Robertson could use some shame. She's the activist who made a useful idiot of her nine-year-old daughter at a McDonald's shareholders meeting. Mrs. Robertson, through her spokeschild, whined about McDonald's food and marketing. I doubt the Robertsons are shareholders in McDonald's. Call me a traditionalist, but a shareholders meeting is for shareholders, particularly grown-up ones who understand the b

Dark chocolate and sweet potato fries are taking up too much of my diet--so much that I probably got up to about 70g of carb a day. That's probably too much carb to make ketones and too little glucose to feel energetic. Walk down the middle of the road, Margaret Thatcher said, and you get hit by the traffic from both sides. This might be the reason I've been tired and my stomach is upset so often these days. (Upper GI problems were the original reason I started a low-carb diet.) I overslept by an hour this morning after forgetting to reset my alarm, even after nine hours' sleep and my dog trying to get me up. My dog is going on a stricter diet, too, since she's up to 70 pounds. She eats low-carb home cooking, but needs to eat less of it. Bye-bye, balanced diet. I'm going to use pork rinds and emulsion sauce* instead of sweet potato fries as a vehicle for fat and salt. And no more denial about my chocolate habit. I was good today--I had about 30g of carb--and

I hope I have this much energy when I'm 64. I know people my age who complain that they feel old. I just hope I look better and don't have to get any body parts chopped off.

What a relief to be finished!

That's what I gather from my sniffling, sneezing coworkers. Accuweather.com says dust and dander levels are high now. Huh. I suffered so long and so badly with allergies that it's strange to feel fine while others are going around with sinuses packed tighter than a 200-pound woman in size eight pants. Since I started a wheat-free diet, I've been mostly free of allergies. (My hay fever last year might have been brought on by drinking almond milk laced with carrageenan, a thickener and inflammatory. If your sinuses are inflamed, it won't take much mucus to fill them up.) I also don't use any dairy besides butter; it can cause congestion. To paraphrase an old saying, nothing tastes as good as a clear head feels.

I'm getting the sense that human ancestors were serious meat eaters. I'm reading The Wisdom of the Bones by Alan Walker and Pat Shipman, a contemporaries and colleagues of Richard Leakey. They discuss evidence that humans moved up in the food chain: increased sociality, territorial expansion and decreased population density, and smaller GI tracts. Sociality As Leakey noted in one of his books, if you live on raw vegetation, you can just grab a leaf or a piece of fruit and eat it. You don't need a tribe to do so; in fact, you might want to hide your booty from everyone else so they don't bug you to share it. Hunting big game, on the other hand, requires cooperation. Richard Wrangham says in Catching Fire that some hunter-gatherers have strict rules about women sharing their vegetables only with immediate family members, while men are supposed to share their meat (hunted cooperatively) with the group ( Catching Fire, page 163-164). He who eats alone is an orangu

Much more endnoting is needed! -Cindy Hoffman, one of my high school English teachers It's a shame that vegan activist Dr. Neal Barnard didn't learn English composition from Mrs. Hoffman: maybe we could see where he got the numerous pro-vegetarian quotes from paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey--enough to fill half a chapter in The Power of Your Plate . Leakey, according to Barnard, says that hunting in modern times isn't very important except as a macho male thing (page 175), that meat accounted for a small part of the diet on the African savannah (page 174), that the "excess of meat" from domesticated livestock is unusual (page 174), and that we wouldn't have had the teeth to deal with tearing flesh and hide (page 171). These statements are attributed to the same Richard Leakey who said, just two years before The Power of Your Plate came out in 1995, The expansion [of diet] involved making meat an important food source, not just an occasional items