You'd better be running!

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle; when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.” - Herb Caen

I'm back from a week's holiday and I've hit the ground running! So excited to be training again, I've attached one of my "Bionic Woman" shots - trained with Mrs Biologica this morning and I'm still on such a high from a good solid pasting with this new program including 5 sets of bench presses, neutral grip incline DB presses, pronated grip seated rows and posterior trap raises. We also got into some core work and both of us were pleasantly surprised by how easy we found our side bridges (have to remember that all of that heavy sh*t we lift has a strengthening effect on the core!)

I've also really been enjoying my chow - as I blogged previously chicken thighs have been on the menu as well as a yummy prawn stirfry with lots of vegetables and a few nuts sprinkled on top. When I was in Byron I stocked up on fresh seafood (the local seafood place is amazing) and bought fresh Yellowfin tuna, bream, trevally and local prawns. The best part is taking these amazing meals to work - I get several comments on them from the staff and think that there is nothing nicer than this beautiful healthy food I'm eating. Don't get me wrong, I still like the odd bit of Dirty Diana, but a Dirty Diana treat for me now is creamy natural yoghurt with Metabolic Drive and freshly sliced strawberries and the occasional Horley's Carbless Crunch bar.

I'm amazed by my shift in thinking as I used to think of Paleolithic eating as a prison sentence - but I can see how much more clearly I seem to be able to think and how much calmer I feel and know there's definitely advantages in the "eating cleaner" pathway for me.

Don't Wanna, Not Gonna'!

After having a perfect delicious dinner of oven poached fish in garlic and lemon and a rainbow of vegetables, not to mention raspberries for dessert ( the point here is that I'm not suffering AT ALL) I sat down to watch Desperate Housewives and I wrestled with Inner Gollum telling me that Paleo was boring and that the best thing to eat would be a bowl of cereal or a piece of toast and honey or peanut butter crumpets...all glutenous problem foods for me.

However he was masquerading as someone else which made it initially difficult to see it was him - he was masquerading as my body, telling me that I "needed" comfort carbs. When I looked rather dispassionately at my food log, it told me that a) I was nowhere near malnourished (calories fine) b) I was nowhere near carb depleted (despite the myth that Paleo is low carb, my carb intake was 47% of total cals yesterday) and the kicker c) that I had only eaten dinner less than an hour ago.

Using cold hard facts, I was able to determine that my thoughts were simply phantom hunger cravings - in fact the real truth was that I'd been putting off watching a DVD that is part of the Bootcamp experience - I had been finding it hard to get it to work. I managed to set the DVD player up to make it work and I got to watching an interesting program from the History Channel about the "Seven Deadly Sins". The series goes through each "sin" from a historical perspective and this particular program was about gluttony - how it seemed like a "soft" sin but how in reality, it was one of the most dangerous. eg a person in hell - gets to choose to live with one of the sins as punishment, so thinking it would be the least harmful chooses gluttony. Gets drunk and accidentally kills someone..."living hell" . Take home message I got from that one was to keep life simple, treat every now and again with gratitude and that is not just for food - it's for everything.

In the end I chose to honour myself and not go for the very foods that seem to be causing me such odd reactions - and woke up feeling much better for it. I didn't have to say "wrong way d..head" to the scales this morning - just had to get up , do my workout and enjoy the busy day of clients I had.

Workout was "D" - "Do what you can!" - shoulder is playing up and there's some crappy movement going on in there so the strength training was more rehabilitative than hardcore but I'm OK with that. I am still jumping up on that stage although my delts may not be bulging as much as I'd like.

Dirty Di to Queen of "Clean"?

Reporting in to say that I am still having trouble with swelling in my extremities and am turning into a human pincushion in attempts to work out what is going on. My joints have also been very achey - so as I mentioned in my last post I have been eating Paleo style to see if I can eliminate any variable in my nutrition that may be contributing to this. Paleo eating harks back to the Stone Age through to the period before Man discovered agriculture - the simple premise being that we're not evolved enough to eat a lot of grain, let alone any grain that has been highly processed eg breads, noodles etc etc. Paleo eating is based on what man did to survive during that period, eating unlimited quantities of vegetables and fruits (in season), lean protein, eggs, nuts and seeds etc. Dairy was limited until animals were domesticated by man..ie ever try to milk a wild yak? Didn't think so...

From the fat loss perspective, Paleo is good in that you require more energy to digest all of those vegetables and lean protein - but it's no magic bullet in that regard - rather it's illuminating in how you can learn to eat so much more and not overconsume calorically speaking. It's much easier to get your calories level out of whack with incorrectly measuring grain portions (should be weighed on a kitchen scale - my half cup of oats comes in at 56g others are at 40 - significant difference) as opposed to accidentally eating 2 cups of broccoli instead of one (unlikely as broccoli here is ten bucks a kilo...)

I'm still eating my 40/40/20 ratio of P:C:F - and when you're eating Paleo style that is a truckload of vegetable and fruit. I have kept my morning oats (50g ) and protein powder in though - a girl's gotta have her oats!

I think it's done me the world of good psychologically speaking - my head feels clear and I feel good with the world.

Not that being a Dirty Diana is a bad thing - I think it's important to be able to factor in a wide variety of good healthy foods and some that may not be in a Paleo plan. My reasons for doing Paleo are to try and nut out a health problem I'm having. The resultant weight lost will be a bonus.

Training: Yesterday: Teach RPM/participate Bodystep
Today: Chest/Serratus work (limited due to left shoulder now being hinky), biceps and putting together the beginning of my routine (now that is interesting...lol!)