That's right you better not pout, you better not cry, you better not fart I'm telling you why! I had some time to re-evaluate and design my new plan of attack to achieve my nutrition and health goals. I will continue a similar approach to the last six weeks, with the following modifications outlined below. The following are tweaks that I am going to try for a month and re-evaluate Dec 1st:
I am going to work on my sleep. Currently I am sleeping 7 to 8 hours a day. I want to increase that to 8 to 9 hours a day. The change to the WCCF schedule is going to help out a lot. It was hard finishing lifting at 8:30/9 pm Tuesday and Thursday and going to sleep before 10:30.
My biggest meal will be breakfast. My lunch will be big as well, but smaller than my breakfast. And, dinner will be the smallest meal of the day.
I am going to add cheese and heavy cream into the rotation, moderately. I will make sure the quality is high.
Increase the diversity of vegetable intake.
Increase the amount of fish consumed. Fish, pound for pound, is the heavy weight champion of proteins. It has tons of minerals and vitamins, high in protein, and has great fat profile. The one problem with Seafood in Chicago is that it is flown in frozen, and it is expensive. I am going to research the quality of fresh fish from our great lakes. Also, I need to hone my skills on preparing fish. Currently, I don't have much confidence in my ability to prepare fish, but I see this as a challenge for the next month. Difficulty, I hate Salmon.
The Paleo Challenge has come to a close and I feel great. In under six weeks my body fat percentage decreased by 3.1% - which is freaking awesome. I think the biggest thing I learned is that Paleo can be part of a BALANCED lifestyle and you don't need to be in a Paleo prison to succeed (or at least that is the case for my body). As dutifully chronicled here, I wasn't always the perfect Paleo person and certainly had red wine once if not twice (on rare occasion) a week. There may have been some other failures as well (champagne, pizza, BREAD!). However, my eating habits overall changed for the better including cutting out glutens and dairy - both of which I credit for my fat loss. I have done the Paleo/Primal thing in the past but maintained a pretty steady diet of cheese and dairy and didn't see near the gains I saw this time around. Live and learn!
So the biggest question is will I keep this up? I think so. It has become routine now and frankly, I don’t really think about the things I no longer eat/drink (other than pizza). That said, I also won’t let myself get to a place where when I do cheat I will go crazy. That is probably the biggest lesson of all.
If any of you following this blog are on the fence about challenging yourself this way I encourage you to go for it. Even if you aren’t perfect, I guarantee you will make improvements – and isn’t that what life is all about?
PS - for anyone interested, we are going to keep up this blog - mostly as a place to share recipes, resources, websites, progress reports etc. I loved seeing what everyone out there was doing and want to keep it going! I even loved Suburb's fact checking! Keepin it real Suburbs!
