Category: Fitness

Primal Blueprint Podcast #114 – Adrenal Fatigue & Cortisol issues

Just thought I would give this podcast a go and it has so far given me two things which may prove to be profound. The first was eating carbs before an evening workout then none after; coercing the body to become more efficient with protein and fat, which showed results for athletes. The Second I have linked below and relates to Adrenal Fatigue & Cortisol issues.

I have be having a really acute sugar sensitivity for quite a while. I have slowly been figuring this out which lead me to the Primal diet after watching Mark Sisson’s episode of JRE. Initially I lost interest as soon as he said no grains, but after mood crashes at inopportune times I needed to try something new. So I wondered if there was a primal podcast; there is and this episode I think I have listened to for probably 3 times it’s length. I was looking for the the part of what to do about adrenal fatigue; which is the start point of the video.
They talk about Vitamin C, B, D and ‘full spectrum salt’… Which I started yesterday. I might go to the doctors later today and see if I can get some tests done, specifically:
  • Vitamin D
  • Thyroid
  • Cortisol
  • blood glucose

Would be interesting to see how these change after a week, since I started Vitamin B and salt yesterday and D a few days ago.

Also may need to look into DHEA and D12 levels (or something)…

Refining my new diet

The scale I bought for ~$15 has been coming in super handy, I can measure food to the gram basically which in my case is pretty important, being that currently I’ am so sensitive to sugar and carbs. It’s pretty cool that I can put a cup of tea on the scale, zero it and add 10g of coconut oil. Also I can do the same when eating, take a container of food and watch the scale go negative when I take food off.. super handy.
I’ve been having at least 15g of olive oil the past few days due to the whole MCT thing which I haven’t really looked into.
Also potatoes are a great source of carbs, so I’ve been having ~40g of sweet potato once every 1-2 hours the last couple days.. just to avoid an insulin spike.. which has been working. Yesterday I only had ~60g carbs the whole day, and no food after 90 mins of BJJ.. which was fine through till the morning -an I idea I pulled from a recent Primal Blueprint podcast.
To make the potato I bake it with onion and olive oil at ~200C for 1 hour and the result is really impressive.

nutrition log – doing it my way (MS excel)

I give up on myfitnesspal.com and fitday.com, they’re both crap as far as I’m concerned.
I just entered broccoli for lunch on myfitnesspal.com and its coming up with different values for different meals. no deal. So I went back to the Excel sheet I downloaded from some apparent Australian nutrition authority, and made my own Nutrition Calculator in Excel.. This required learning the INDIRECT function in excel, which was a fruitful exercise in MS Excel. It’s pretty handy in that regard.

excel-imageSo this should be fine, looks like it’s working just fine 😀
I’ve checked the function values and yer seems all good.

All I have to do is search for a food in the database, and enter it’s row number into my foods sheet, then add that to any day. The file is here for any use requirements:

My nutrition plan-Excel template

Keeping up the diet

Without looking too much like a stereotype Instagram post.. I’m making a bunch of healthy food + coffee. If I can get a routine of good food going, even meal prepping it – which I think would be my best use of time, then that sounds good. Currently. Also I need to figure out how much this is all costing me. Mood and energy wise I’m feeling the best I’ve ever felt, despite feeling kinda hungry a lot of the time and sad when I walk through the various baked goods in the market.. Doughnuts and croissants :'(
Early dinner of:

  • ~220g steamed potato (steaming is the best)
  • Fried spinach with garlic on olive oil Maybe ~150g
  • ~100g steamed carrots
  • ~40g fried onion
  • 180g salmon trout

And I’ve got extra stuff left over tomorrow for breakfast including eggs. Sounds good to me.

This took ehh too many hours walking around the central markets…

Have to emphasise that mood results are something to put on a postcard, it’s been less than a week, so my joy is somewhat hesitant, none the less I am indeed joyous (rejoice). The feeling is a narrower band of mood, which I feel is less stressful. I had a carb load session for dinner before Martial Arts and a coffee and didn’t feel super energetic. But I had an excellent bjj session. Relaxed and capable. So despite feeling not super energetic after eating my potatoes and carrots, I felt capable enough. This in a subtle way feels like new territory. Many new experiences of new territory in the past year or so. Rejoyce. Do it.

So I feel my Carbs and Protein levels agree with the Primal recommendations.

Here’s a screenshot of today’s food. foodI feel that the scales I got yesterday seem pretty good for keeping carbs and protein within those narrow bands talked about in the Primal diet.

 

Where are the Carbs?!

So with this new Primal Diet thing, I haven’t got to reading any of The Primal Blueprint, although I’ve got the free sample on my kindle ready to go. I’ve been doing this diet for a few days, and I’ve noticed a few things. My crashes are more psychological than physiological, which is a giant relief. It’s very early days, we’ll see how this whole thing goes. Which means that while I might feel a little crappy, I don’t feel like my systems are off line, I guess the crashes are just smaller.. ehh we’ll see, but yeah its interesting to note that I haven’t had my afternoon crashes, I don’t want to go sleep around 4pm. I’m just chugging along at 45% energy, which leads me to today. It’s Monday and I wanted to go to the gym, but this diet isn’t giving me the energy. The idea of that was not possible, I knew I didn’t have the energy. I was looking at the food logs (initially using fitday.com but then myfitnesspal.com which I’m still not entirely satisfied with) I had done over the past few days and I was not getting any carbs.

I looked at this page on marksdailyapple.com which had the much talked about carb curve. I wasn’t getting my 100g. So I google primal carb sources and eyoo, on this (awesome) page I see that sweet and normal potatoes are going to give me ~20% carbs. fukn yes.
So, steamed chicken, broccoli, cauliflower and maybe a good half kilo of potatoes at 5pm and I here I am sitting after a mild session at the gym.

Continue reading “Where are the Carbs?!”

New diet (marked mood and energy results)

So around last Wednesday I decided to give this Primal Diet thing a go.

Seems pretty interesting to me, especially since my Doctor told me I have 2 out of the 3 gluten intolerance genes. When I first listened to this episode I was hesitant, I was following along until he said giving up all grains. Hold the phone, jettison the baby and bathwater. I love my grains. Every day I would have a huge bowl of oats as well as rice for lunch and dinner. I’d just bought Tupperware for both these grains. I mean come on. Anyway for whatever reason I tried to give it a go, I started reading the new book on my kindle, which I subsequently returned since The Primal Blueprint was more what I wanted (the new one focuses on health and fitness for endurance.. I just want the diet). So the reason I wanted to start the diet is basically the results I was really hoping for. I’m actually super happy with the results. I had a bit of a read on marksdailyapple.com which basically had everything I wanted from the book.

Continue reading “New diet (marked mood and energy results)”