My favorite verse in the Bible is Mark 9:24, which ends with the phrase, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" That pretty well sums up my spiritual journey. This blog is for recording my thoughts, ideas, insights, struggles, battles, blessings, stumblings, hopes and victories on my road to salvation. Oh, and just random life stuff, too.
It hit me while at dinner at Table of Grace on Saturday night that I have a valid reason for being overweight! Because in Christianity hospitality is not just a nice thing to do, it is an important part of the theology!
Nah, I didn't buy it, either. :)
5 comments:
This month marks 2 years that my wife and I have been eating more or less paleo. Not strict paleo, mind you, more like "Perfect Health Diet" paleo, and we can't imagine ever going back.
It's more about being healthy and energetic than losing weight, but we've certainly had no trouble maintaining lean body mass as a pleasant side-effect.
I realize you didn't ask, but this is the comments section, so just throwing that out there. :-)
CH,
I've had another friend recommend paleo. I don't know if I could live without cheese. :)
Well, there is a wide variety of options within the general "Paleo" community, including a pretty good number who think dairy is fine.
In fact, the one that got me started on this general pathway was Primal Blueprint, and that one thinks cheese, full-fat dairy, and fermented dairy are all acceptable (with a few minor caveats related to processing and raw/pasteurized state of the source).
Interestingly, cheese was probably one of the top foods that I was concerned about as I started, and thought I could never give up. I ate quite a lot of cheese for the first several months of the diet.
But even as I started to feel much better overall on the diet, I still had a few lingering things that were bothering me, and the symptoms were pretty consistent with those reportedly caused by dairy sensitivity. So I gave up cheese and most other dairy (not pasture butter though, which is all fat anyway and doesn't have the proteins that are typically the source of dairy sensitivity), and lo and behold, found that I felt much better without cheese in my diet. Mainly this had to do with mucous production (a well known side effect of dairy even for people who tolerate it well as a staple of their diet). Now I enjoy waking up without a stuffy nose, and also eliminated my sensitivity to seasonal allergens by stopping dairy consumption.
I'm not a complete abstainer/avoider of cheese, and still use it as a topping or to add something to certain dishes, but I just don't eat huge chunks of cheese as a dietary staple any more.
If you have a little time and the interest/inclination to do so, I'd recommend reading up a bit on the whole paleo/primal diet thing. I researched a couple months before considering actually doing it, and even as I started, was quite skeptical. I've never limited my diet in any way my entire life, and didn't initially believe the claims I was reading about which foods to avoid and why to avoid them.
I suggested to my wife that we try the diet, and to my surprise she was immediately and completely on board with me. She was very smart, and knew that you WILL eat what is available in the house, so we gave an entire kitchen and pantry of non-Paleo foods to friends and neighbors and went all-in with the new diet.
As I said, the results were great, we both feel much better, and my wife in particular has literally cured/healed a number of conditions that we thought she was always going to have (as a result of genetic inevitability, so we were told), like arthritis, diabetes, and chronic stomach/intestinal problems, which had gotten so bad at one point that I took her to the ER in the middle of the night.
So anyway, this comment is getting too long. Consider this a second friend also recommending the diet. :-)
CH,
I will have to read up on it. OTOH, one of my problems is I am in a household of five other people, all pickier eaters than I (and all in different permutations), and I am the primary cook for them all. So the whole "clean out the pantry" thing won't work for me. Got any "paleo for picky teens" books? :)
I completely understand that. Getting family, friends, social acquaintances, and other members of the household to cooperate is typically the most challenging area that people face on any diet that eliminates entire portions of the standard American menu.
As you begin to research this diet, there are an increasing number of bloggers and websites that offer helpful suggestions for these types of issues. I see a lot of parents who have had great results with the diet and are wondering how to raise children that also want to eat this way, which is naturally MUCH harder when the kids are accustomed to eating another way entirely, and have additional things like peer pressure and constant exposure (even at school!) to massive amounts of cheap, tasty, addictive crap.
I will say this though -- I was a pretty picker eater previously. I hated vegetables, and had a huge list of "I can not and will not EVER eat THAT!" foods. Yet within just a few months of eating whole real food, my tastes had completely changed. I love most vegetables now, greatly appreciate subtle things about the taste of food and spices, and can no longer handle most of the things I used to enjoy that had exaggerated amounts of salt, sugar, and other such things that are typically heavily overused to hide the poor quality of most of the ingredients beneath it.
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