Weekly Weigh-in (Week 55)

Sunday yet again and time for the weekly weigh-in.

This week I've been eating a lot differently than I was the last month and I can feel the difference. Other than that life is settling down and looking up and I'm feeling good about it.

So, last week I talked about what eating Primal is all about, a little about why you'd want to do it, and mentioned that I had. This week, in a shorter post, I'll talk about the results that I got eating this way during January, and what impact it's likely to have on my eating going forward.

So, firstly some of the more "intangible" benefits I found eating primal last month. At no point, except once on a cheat day, did I ever get a bloated feeling of being too full that I had gotten rather often on similar amounts of food before. Likewise, I noticed that I had fewer intestinal disturbances during this month than I had in previous months, not that the other months are really that high but still, none is better than even a small number. I felt full without being bloated, had no trouble later on, more energy with fewer crashes in my energy level, and felt more rested on the same or in some cases less sleep per day. Now maybe not all of that comes from diet, but those are all benefits I like and I feel confident that I can track at least some of them to the change in diet.

Now the numerical things I can report. I will admit these cannot be entirely tied to the shift in diet, January was also when I switched from running as my primary exercise to resistance training to fill the same niche which will impact these numbers somewhat. Also beginning the middle of the month I was experimenting with some other things that may have improved my results slightly. Regardless of either of these other factors, diet is the cornerstone of any sort of body recomposition, you can't outrun, or in this case out-lift, a bad diet, and you for sure can't ice it away.

So, numbers. At the first of January I weighed 206.8, at the end of January I weighed 199.5, which is a decrease of 7.3 pounds in total weight. Start of the month my body fat percentage was around 18.6, end of the month it was 14.3, a decrease of 4.3%. So using those numbers and some easy multiplication my lean mass went from 168.3 to 171.0, and my fat mass went from 38.5 to 28.5, which for those of you keeping up at home means that in January I lost 10 pounds of fat, and gained 2.7 pounds of muscle.

Looking at graphs of the values I track over time I can say that this didn't start showing up on the graphs until probably 10 days into the month. Now part of that is because the way I do my tracking smooths out local fluctuation intentionally so any small changes take a while to accumulate while big changes show up faster. Looking at the day to day instead of the trends which I graph I can say that it looks like there were noticeable improvements almost immediately, but I can't stand as confidently behind their accuracy as I can the trend numbers quoted above and of which I reference the graphs.

Would I recommend this dietary plan to others? Absolutely, if you are at all curious try it out and see what happens, you might feel better, you might not. Worst case it will at least give you a different appreciation for your food than you have now. What am I planning to do with these results in the future? Well, I can't say that I will commit to going fully primal from now on, that would be too difficult to do in practice and I don't like any solution that causes me to feel deprived if I can avoid it. So what I will probably do is a complicated split of meals which are Primal, meals which are "cheat" meals, meals on which I just plain fast, and meals which meet my adapted psuedo-Primal plan.

What is that plan and what does it look like? As little gluten as possible, I will still let myself have it on my cheat meals but for my pseudo meals I want to try to keep it out entirely, related to that minimal grains glutenous or not. I don't have any open reactions to corn so I'm going to allow it at least in moderation, but in continuation of my reduction/elimination of processed sugars I will be avoiding corn syrup and especially HFCS. I like rice and will be allowing that in my adapted plan, though with a preference for wild rice, and behind that brown rice.  I'm going to continue to avoid peanuts in favor of healthier and tastier nuts, and reduce and ideally eliminate potatoes from the pseudo meals as most applications of potatoes tend to be rather bland or merely nutritionally devoid. Soy will be allowed, though the less processed from it's natural form the better.

Well, that should about do it for this week. Next week, barring any other things coming up, I will have some stuff to say about the other experiment I mentioned.

So what does the scale have to say for my return to a "normal" diet? 199.6, up .2 from last week. Moving in the wrong direction sure, but only barely, and my body fat is still moving in the right direction so I'm not at all concerned. The future holds many wonderful things in both the long and the short term, stay tuned to see what some of them are. Until next week, be the you you want to be.