Rev yourself with Ben Greenfield

       What if you could be strong, healthy and fit on the outside AND the inside? Ben Greenfield thinks you can, and he's ready to show you how. Join Ben for an unprecedented event as he talks to 24 world-class experts about how to achieve peak potential. If you're ready to see what you're really made of, sign up for REV Yourself and start getting the best from your mind and body!

REV Yourself with Ben Greenfield streams FREE starting November 17! Sign up here

Starch reset revisited.

I've had some people interested in the potato hack again. Here's the information:

Primal Starch Reset

Here is how to do the Primal Starch Reset:

- Buy 10-20lbs of high quality potatoes
- Wash and cook 5lbs at a time. Boil or bake and store in fridge.
- Plan on eating 2-4 lbs a day to your hunger. Munch cold ones for a snack.
- Use salt, pepper, vinegar and maybe a little ketchup or mustard.
- Eat nothing else. Don't use fat or oil to cook with.

That is the hard core version.

Here’s a little easier version, but you may not get as good as results. Maybe you’ll get better results; especially if it helps you stay with the hack.

Eat potatoes, it doesn’t matter which kind. Sweet potatoes are good using them to help break up the boredom can help.

White rice works too. You should have beans with it to get a complete amino acid profile.

If you need variety you can use these vegetables:

Artichoke, arugula, asparagus, bell peppers, bok choy, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, celery root, collards, cucumbers, endive, fennel, garlic, green beans, jicama, kale, leeks, mushrooms, mustard greens, onions, peppers, radishes, green leafy vegetables of all sorts, and watercress.

You can use ketchup but make sure it has sugar for the sweetener not HFCS. Don’t use too much.

Mustard is fine too.

“No fat” broth is good.

The idea is too have very little to almost no fat. No fructose. Absolutely No alcohol.

Eat when you are hungry. Don’t eat if you are not. Eat until full. Wait until you are hungry to eat your first meal of the day instead of rolling out of bed and eating breakfast. Wait until you are hungry before you eat again. Don’t snack out of boredom of some other emotion. Don’t eat because everyone else is eating. Don’t eat by the clock. This means don’t think because it is noon or 5 o’clock that you need to eat. Eat when you are hungry, don’t if you are not. Remember we are trying to break old eating habits.

End of the Greens Challenge

    My 30 days of Greens challenge is over. I think I had 1 day of no greens, 2 days of only a couple cups of greens, and 2 days with only 4 cups of greens. The rest of the days I consumed 5 cups of greens per day. I feel great!

Greens challenge

    Yesterday and Wednesday I didn't eat enough greens. It was day 21 and 22 of the challenge. I'm blaming it on job change, stress, and avocado season.

Interview with Ray Cronise on No Meat Athlete

Can you handle the truth? Ray Cronise is interviewed by Matt Frazier on the No Meat Athlete podcast. They cover Ray's paper that was recently released, "Metabolic Winter Hypothesis". Ray explains his food triangle and how it works for weight loss. But, be ready to be smacked with the truth, "we eat too much and stay too warm".

 http://www.nomeatathlete.com/radio-29/

Greens update

    I'm really busy so I'll make this quick. I missed out eating 5 cups of greens this weekend. On Saturday and Sunday I only had 4 cups of greens each day.

Day 6 & 7 of greens challenge

    My weight bounced up to 171lbs after a couple days of eating too much. Especially dairy and meats. I'm back down today to 167.5lbs.

Day 6, Tuesday 7/15/14

The cooler weather took a minute off of my pace. My heart rate stayed much lower in the coolness. I ran 50% of my time in zone 4 and 30% in zone 5. My heart rate was lower and my pace was much faster.

Day 7, Wednesday 7/16/14

I wasn't very active on Wednesday. I didn't meet goal on my steps. I didn't sleep well again either. I'm thinking about investing in a better sleep tracking device to see if the Loop is accurate. Also, with a better sleep tracker I can't look at more aspects of sleep such as dream cycles and brain waves/states.

    I'm still not having any problem getting 5 cups of greens a day. Here's the deal, ya have to eat lots of vegetables, especially greens. Vegetables are bulky and take up room in your stomach. They are nutrient dense and calorie sparse. Eating vegetables will push the other nutrient sparse/calorie dense foods, like meat and dairy out of your diet. This way you can eat more, get more nutrients, and consume less calories. There, I just gave away the key to the kingdom. But, do you have what it takes to use the key to get into the kingdom of a healthy lean body?

Day 5 of greens challenge

    I'm finding it very easy to get 5 cups of greens a day. I have a couple of meals with 2 or 3 cups of greens and I'm good. So I might have to up the challenge some how. I know I want to get some more sulfur containing vegetables in my diet so I might add that to the mix. I had pizza yesterday. It was a lunch that was provided for me. It was good, but my face was puffy this morning. I also went up in weight a half a pound. I weighed 168lbs this morning.

My morning salad. I had to substitute grapes for my pineapple. It was good, but not as good as pineapple.

Lots of calories and sodium yesterday. Wow! over 4,000mg of sodium! No wonder I'm puffy today.

I'm really surprised that I didn't have any inactivity warnings yesterday because I was sitting in a class room most of the day. I guess we got breaks often enough to prevent an inactivity alert. I had really poor sleep last night as you can see from the picture. Lots of tossing and turning.

    Today I had a really good run. Check back tomorrow to see what a 30degree drop in temperature can do for run time.

Day 3 and 4 of greens challenge

    I've been busy lately and still am. So I'll make this really quick. I've gotten my greens in every day. I weighed 167lbs this morning.

The above was day 3 in pictures. I had grilled salmon, salads, and grilled peaches. I logged 18,864 steps and burned 3,044 calories.

Day 4 in pictures. I ran my 6 miles course. It was a hot tough run. I took my Loop off a couple times on Sunday and forgot to put it back on.

Day 2 for 5 cups of Greens

    Yesterday I was able to get my 5 cups of greens. I had a big salad for breakfast and enchiladas espinacas for supper. Along with the enchiladas I had lettuce on my tacos and a small lettuce salad.

This is how I measure out my greens for my salad. I have two cups of spring mix and 2 cups of Dole Classic Romaine mix. Then I put on the fruit and berries.

I love fresh pineapple. A big thanks goes out to the companies that produce pineapple and the workers who work for those companies.

Cookies for lunch? Yes, that is right, I filled up on cookies for lunch. But these were healthy cookies. :-). These are the sweet potato cookies I promised I would share with you today. They turned out really good IMHO. Here's the recipe:

Fruit and sweet potatoe cookie

    1 1/2 cups old-fashioned oats
    1 cup coconut (shredded)
    1/4 almonds (ground)
    1/2 cup mixed nuts (such as walnuts, pistachios, or peanuts)
    1 cup dried fruit (mixed, such as dates, raisins, or blueberries)
    1/2 tsp salt
    1 tsp ground cinnamon
    1/2 tsp ground ginger
    ground cloves
    1 1/2 cup of sweet potato
    1/2 unsweeten applesauce
    1 tsp vanilla extract

   

Preparation

 1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
 2. In a bowl, add the oats, coconut, almonds, mixed nuts, mixed dried fruits, salt, cinnamon, ginger, and a pinch of cloves. Mix well.
 3. Mash the sweet potato in a separate bowl. Add the applesauce and vanilla and mix well. Pour this mixture into the other bowl and mix until a "dough" forms.
 4. Make small circle shapes with the “dough” by hand and place them on a baking sheet.
 5. Bake the cookies for 45 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool.

I also made another batch of the PB + J cookies. Actually, I made a double batch, but these little suckers don't have a chance if I'm around. They are highly addictive.

I had Enchiladas Espinacas at El Charro's last night. That is spinach enchiladas. I also had a couple of beef tacos on the side. So the enchiladas and the lettuce was the finished off my greens for the day.

I was active for almost 9 hours yesterday. I logged 24948 steps and burned 3288 calories. But here's a crazy thing. I was so restless in my sleep that the Loop thought I was active between the hours of 1am and 2:30am. I was in bed between those times. I must have done a lot of tossing and turning.

I ran yesterday and this time everything worked. I ran 6.32 miles in 1 hour and 8 minutes. It guesses that I  burned 893 calories on this run. I ran in zones 4 and 5.

I ran almost an even amount in zones 4 and 5. I hit zone 6 a few times and I had to slow down. That is what  I really like about running with the HRM, but ability to monitor my heart rate and match up my pace.

Ok, so here is the shameless selfie that I've been promising. Yeah, the dog is looking at me like I'm crazy too. Vegetables do a body good.

Day 1 of the 5 cups of greens a day, 30 day challenge

     Yesterday was the start of my new 30 day challenge. I will try to get 5 cups of green leafy vegetables a day. Pretty ambitious I know. I was only able to get in 4 cups yesterday. I ate potatoes for lunch and I didn't get hungry again. I had a protein drink at the end of the evening to bump up my protein intake a bit. I was at 30grams of protein and I wanted to get 60 grams, so I had some whey protein with almond milk.

I ate just a little over 1,700 calories yesterday. I had a few too many carbs in the way of sugars from the fruits. It rained all day yesterday and I was on the computer most of the day.

    Despite it raining all day I still managed to stay fairly active. I had one activity warning. I logged in 14565 steps and burned 2727 calories.

     I'm being more active today and I've already gotten 4 cups of green leafy vegetables in today. But I'm baking cookies again. I've got a new sweet potato cookie baking. I'll post the results and the recipe tomorrow. Ok....first batch is out of the oven and they are good.

Day 30 of 30 day plant-based challenge

   Yesterday was the last day of my 30 plant-based challenge. I weighed 165.5lbs again today. So I lost about 8.5lbs in 30 days. There were days when my weight was up and days my weight was down. I was at 164lbs before the 4th of the July.

Look at the black squares to see the trend. The white squares shows my daily changes.

I had a lot of calories yesterday. Lots of my healthy cookies. :-P

      I wasn't very active yesterday. I had one period of inactivity. 6 hours and 5 minutes active time yesterday. Only 9708 steps. Estimated to have burned 2442 calories.

    I feel great, which is more important than the weight loss. I feel much better with a lower consumption of animal products. My next challenge is to eat at least 5 cups of greens a day. I'm going to increase my greens intake to 5 cups a day for the next 30 days. Who's in?

Day 29 of plant-based challenge

      Yesterday I did more exercising and I spent some time in the kitchen making some treats. I tried out 3 new oatmeal cookie recipes. I Googled "no sugar low fat oatmeal cookies" and one of the first hits was a site called Yummly. The page had a lot of recipes. I picked out 5 recipes I liked but I only had time to try 3 of them.

    I wanted to find oatmeal raisin cookie recipes that contained no added sweeteners, low fat, vegan, gluten free, and tasted good. It turned out that the recipes all use banana as their base ingredient. Two of the recipes were under 30% fat, but the third one was 38% fat. This is a little higher in fat than I like, so I will tweak the recipe a little to cut some of the fat. Some of the recipes called for vegetable oils. I used extra virgin coconut oil.

These are called Healthy PB + J oatmeal cookies. Its a super easy cookie to make. They only have 4 ingredients; oatmeal, peanut butter, bananas, and jelly (if you want). I used strawberry preserves and wild berry preserves. These were probably my favorite but the running was really close. These are 25% fat.

Link to the recipe

This is how mine looked. They didn't last long. All gone in a day.

These are Banana Oat Breakfast Cookies. These are really tasty and only 22% fat. They are also easy to make. In fact all three recipes are super simple. I baked these for about 40 minutes to dry them out. 

Find the recipe here

Fruit and Oatmeal Cookies. These are like a soft trail mix. Crazy good! They aren't hanging around long either. The only problem is that they are 38% fat. All three cookie recipes have raisins or other dried fruits which are pretty high in sugar. 

Here's the link to the recipe

I had quite a few calories yesterday and most of it was from the cookies. Oh the things I have to put myself through for self experimentation. Its rough. You can look at each cookie in the picture and see the break down for their calorie count. 

    Treat or meal replacement cookie? I'll let you decide how you use them. If you have these on hand you don't have to make oatmeal in the morning. Just grab a cookie. My problem is I grab 4 instead of 1. But they are plant-based. I did nuke them in the microwave this morning for 20 second, yum.

    I taught Kickboxing yesterday and I wore my HRM while I took the class. I also ran a little over 6 miles.

I used my Polar Flow software during the Kickboxing class to record my heart rate. My heart rate stayed in fat burning zone most of the time. It estimates I burned about 475 calories.

Me or my phone messed up yesterday and we didn't record the path or distance yesterday. All I have is the time and my heart rate for the run. I ran the course I've plotted out near my home. The distance is a little over 6 miles. It took me just over an hour to complete.

I ran mostly in zone 5 yesterday. I felt really good and I started off fast. But it was hot and I think my heart rate reflects that more than my effort.

    Today is day 30 of my challenge. Yay!!! I weighed less today than I did yesterday. Check back tomorrow and find out my final weight after 30 days of a mostly plant-based diet. I'll also be starting a new challenge! See you tomorrow.

Day 28 of plant-based challenge

    Last night I had an unplanned meat cheat. We went to Rib Crib last night. I had the beef brisket and a side salad that had cheese on it. So I had some beef and dairy. I also had corn on the cob and broccoli. The early part of the day was all plant-based.

   I thought my sodium intake would be a lot higher, because when I looked in the mirror this morning my face was puffy. It looked like I had had a ton of salt. So the three things I'm blaming the puffiness on are; beef, dairy, and the tortilla strips that were in the salad. The barbecue sauce did have a lot of sodium in it. I might have under estimated how much sauce I used.

     I wasn't very active yesterday. I taught a primal class and I did a little bit of exercising at the house. I was only active for 6 hours and 18 minutes. But I was in the pool yesterday for a while and didn't have the Loop on. That was when I had the inactive alert as shown on the circle. I only recorded 10579 steps yesterday. The Loop estimated that I burned 2474 calories.

    I weighed in this morning at 167lbs. So I lost weight despite overeating and not exercising much. I think if my sodium was higher I wouldn't have had such results.

   Tomorrow will be interesting. I taught a Primal Aerobic Kickboxing class and ran over 6 miles. But I made oatmeal cookies. I'll be posting links tomorrow of the recipes I used to make the cookies. I used 3 different recipes. I liked them all.

Day 27 of plant-based challenge

    Mission accomplished, I weighed in today at 168lbs. My goal for the weekend was to stay under 170lbs.
    I ate at my parents house yesterday. We have roast with all the vegetables and cole slaw. I had a couple tablespoons of cool whip in my coffee for dessert.

This time I included the totals and my goals in the picture. Low sodium yesterday, high on protein and fats.

I had 6 hours and 16 minutes of activity yesterday. This doesn't include my one hour run. See my run below. I had 17623 steps and burned 2920 calories.

I ran for 1hour and 6minutes. It wasn't a fast run. It was a nice easy pace. It guesses I burned about 820 calories on this run. My distance was 6.20 miles.

I ran mostly in zone 4. The zones on the app are probably a little low for me. 

    Only 3 days left on this challenge. Let's see if I can make it back down to 164lbs on the last day.

Day 26 of plant-based challenge.

      We went out last night with some friends to Bravo's Mexican Restaurant in Tulsa. Really good food. I had chicken fajitas, queso, guacamole, and cervesa. Lots of chips too. But the early part of the day I was all plant-based and healthy. We went to the horse races in Tulsa after the dinner.

Once again I ate over 3,000 calories and had too much sodium. I'll be glad when this weekend is over.

I wasn't very active yesterday either. I did a weight training session and worked on the pool. Then I laid in the pool and listened to some podcast.

     Today I started with my run. Don't forget to check back tomorrow and see if I stayed below 170lbs through the weekend.