Updates Coming Soon

Updates are coming soon. I have been too busy to put together a good post.

The weather has been nearly perfect, and a nice little visit from family have made the idea of a blog far from my thoughts. I get to play Navy quite a bit coming up, so it may be a week before i can get all these thoughts lined up together. Family, beaches, fishing, weddings, the Reserves, springtime, and Beaches (did I already mention the beach?) make for great reasons to get out of the house and away from the blog. I will return when I can.

Louisiana Saturday Night

Twist the tail, peel the tail, pinch the head and suck the fat, eat the tail meat. Sip frosty cold adult beverage. Repeat.

this was about 5 pounds for round 1

The best part about the Louisiana Cajun culture is most definitely the Crawfish. Every spring the mudbugs start getting big, and the rice ponds are filled with the suckers. It blows me away how many are in a sack, and we boiled two sacks or 72 pounds worth of crustaceans. I don't know the chef's personal recipe, and he wouldn't tell me if I asked, but I know it was awesome. The smell of a pot of boiling crawfish is like nothing else, and once you smell it, you will say the same. The closest thing i can think of is lobster. Crawfish, however, are more tender and there is the "fat" in the head. The real cajuns and folks in the know will suck the head, and maybe even give a little pinch to extract the flavor. If they are big enough you may even be able to get some meat out of the claws. Down here people don't look at you sideways if you shove your pinky finger into the head and pull out the fat, either.


Round 1. We could only boil so many at a time!

I am spreading the word about the Paleo movement one belly at a time. I know the seasonings that go into a boil may be considered off limits, and some of the paleo reenacting purists could get on my case about this, but honestly this is one of the most traditional and most primal meals in Cajun culture. Crawfish were a meal handed down by the Attakapa and Chitimacha Natives to the first Acadian settlers when they immigrated to the area in the middle part of the 18th century after the French and Indian War. These little guys are mostly shell, and what meat is there is delicious and nutritious. It takes about 5 or 6 pounds of crawfish to make a pound of tail meat, and each ounce of that meat according to nutritiondata.self.com, leaves you with 15g of protein and plenty of zinc to keep your pirogue in the water. A pirogue is a boat not a potato dumpling in case you were curious.

Either you hate 'em or you love 'em, but I know I love dem bugs.

Fresh Kill Like a Boss

Richard Nikoley at Free The Animal posted this. I love the camera angle when the three hunters stand up and stroll up to the lion pride like a boss. No fear. They just casually and confidently walk up top hundreds of bloody teeth waiting to tear into some flesh. I mean, what's a little twig of a human to a lion compared to a wildebeast? It's like the primal version of Office Space. "I can't say I've been missing work, !gembeh" Absolutely brilliant. This is what human is. We are the Top tier of the food chain.

Is it bad that I start thinking of ways to cook a Wildebeast shank? I wonder if they smoke the hock to throw in with some cassava? Do they have tony Chacherere's in Africa?

Mega Dinner

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I have been working out hard again now that the weather isn't nasty, and my ankle is getting back to normal. I haven't been blogging as much lately for more excuses than i can think, but I am here now. Yesterday was the first time in a long time that I can honestly say I was really hungry. I made homemade veggie soup for dinner, and i could Just. Not. Get. Enough. I ate soup until it was coming out of my ears, and then had another bowl. I was full, but still hungry. When I woke up this morning, I knew it was a legitimate hunger, and not just the occasional morning empty that passes after the first sniff of coffee. Luckily, there was a banana pancake waiting for me and a cup of coffee! My trailer mate had extra bananas and threw together a paleo pancake on accident. Basically: mash-up two ripe bananas, a whole egg, and some nut butter into a batter, and fry in butter. These were so good, and blew away any attempt at a paleo pancake I have ever tried before. Dumb luck.

After a hard workout at noontime, I was STARVING. Legitimate, depletion of bodily needs hunger. I checked (with a ketostick), and I was still in ketosis even after breaking a fast earlier in the day. I had planned on eating ad libitum today after last night, so it worked out, but I downed 3 eggs and a whole ham steak! By three in the afternoon the headaches started kicking in, and I was already hungry again, so I could tell I needed some starches. I ate an avocado.

It was dinner time shortly after, so I made this feast: I had a giant ribeye with the bone on, a boat-load of broccoli and some roasted vegetable medley. It was a dinner of such epic proportions so as to not be contained by one single plate. The steak covered one plate on it's own merit. I usually only eat like this on holidays. The only thing I would have added was a glass of wine, but unfortunately on call, I am unable to imbibe.

I will make an observation on fasting with a Paleo diet. You HAVE to make sure you can listen to your body to interpret your caloric and dietary needs. Eat when you are hungry, but don't when you are not. If you are lacking in something suck as Iron or Magnesium, or Potassium your body will tell you. I know when I start getting serious headaches that don't go away, I NEED starch to replenish my glucose reserves. If I eat something sweet I just feel like ass anyway, so this is where rice and root vegetables come in. Rice has never given me problems, so i never omitted it completely; but potatoes I use VERY sparingly. I limit them to rare occasions and never eat them alone. I always throw in some fat and usually other veggies.

With fasting most days, I have managed to curb my issue with boredom eating, push past the plateau at 200Lbs, and really figure out what works for me. The more I drop, the better I feel and perform. I also have had to adjust as i get lower in Bodyfat. I attribute this to having less of a store to draw from. When I was 230 and 20%BF, I could stand to have a few nutritious meals derived of my own bodyfat stores. I wish I knew the physiology of ketosis prior to then, but that's all hindsight being perfect and all. I still try to stay pretty low on the carb scale most of the time, and I use the headaches as a guide as to when I need to refill the tank. I passed my weight goal, but it was based on my bad math skills trying to figure out my lean body mass, and my body fat percentage still isn't where I would like it to be. I also want to push it a little to see how far this method takes me. I could look as good as I did after graduating from SAR school when I was 20 years old. That is pretty cool.

Ulysses in Iceland

Ulysses from Christopher Herwig on Vimeo.

a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson recited by Alastair Humphreys while crossing Iceland by foot and raft in July 2010