Eat like a Cavewoman

September 29, 2013October 27, 2014 / takinglibertys / 1 Comment

“When are you due?” was a common question women in Texas would ask me. My response would be a stern look while saying in a deadpan tone, “I’m not pregnant, just fat. Thanks for noticing.” No matter how many times I was asked this offending question I never thought I needed to lose weight. I like my body just the way it is. I earned this body, flaws and all.

Thats why camera angle matters animated gif

However, in a few months I will enter into a new age bracket that comes with more body responsibility. So it’s time I start taking better care of it so I can avoid some genetic pitfalls like diabetes, glaucoma, and cancer. Plus, one of my best friends is getting married next year and I want to look kickass in my bridesmaid dress.

hghghg

To accomplish this I have decided to start The Paleo Diet, which I am basing off the book Paleo for Beginners: Essentials to Get Started by John Chatham. It’s the 7-day beginner plan. Other diets have never seemed to work for me. I figured this one might because as a kid my mom made meals that were heavy on the protein and vegetables and I was a skinny thing.

Plus, the diet seems reasonable and easy to follow. Meat, vegetables and fruit are the staples of this diet. No bread, dairy, grains, legumes or starchy vegetables are allowed. Which means no potatoes, and I love potatoes. This diet may be harder than I thought because I also can’t have high–salt meats and snacks such as beef jerky or hotdogs. Good thing baseball season is almost over because I can’t go to a game and NOT get a hotdog.

Batman Hotdog

This 69-page book covers a lot of information. It gives a brief synopsis on the history of the Paleo Diet, which was actually created in 1975 by gastroenterologist Dr. Walter Voegtlin. At that time it was called The Stone Age Diet. Voegtlin documented how his patients with Crohn’s Disease and Irritable Bowel Syndrome showed “significant health improvements” when they followed a diet that included “large quantities of animal fats and proteins and very small quantities of carbohydrates.”

This book claims that this version of the Paleo Diet “intends to closely duplicated the nutritional makeup of a Paleolithic diet without being unrealistic, difficult or complicated.” Even though some people wanted to be more authentic: “While there are a few Paleo followers who do literally hunt, gather or forage all of their food most people don’t have the motivation or time for that level of authenticity.”

Ain't nobody got time for that

The book states that the reason this diet works is the “Paleo methods align your diet with your body’s historical genetic programming. You can boost your metabolic rate, speed healthy and complete digestion, regulate some of the hormones related to energy and fat storage and reduce hunger and cravings for unhealthy foods.” Don’t worry it has an easy to follow list of all the allowed and not allowed food.

It also has a chapter titled, “Set Yourself Up for Success” that gives you “the tools to get geared up, motivated and ready to begin.”

There is also a chapter that gives you 7-daily steps to help you prepare for the diet. My favorite was the “Clean House” step. Instead of giving away the forbidden foods I just went ahead and ate them all. It was a great week! Just in case you haven’t heard Twinkies are now in stores!

Twinkies

The book helps you out even more by having recipes and eating plans.

To keep myself accountable I will log the weight I have lost from the previous week in a blog post. Feel free to join me on this less-fat adventure and tell me about your journey.

THE CAVEMAN BLUES

The Road Back (part 2)

November 7, 2012 / takinglibertys / Leave a comment

Evenings seem to be the times I think of my dad the most. Since he became ill this is the time we would talk on the phone. He would talk as much as he could before he “ran out of air”. Since the liver cancer had spread to the lymph nodes around his heart and the morphine caused fluid to buildup in his lungs he was unable to speak for long periods at a time.

I remember the last time I spoke with him. My mom had gotten him a new I-Pad 3 so he could continue to email while in the hospital. His laptop was too heavy for his already weak body to hold. I called him through the FaceTime Feature and showed him my apartment; told him about my day; and how my thesis paper was going. He could see me and everything I was showing him but he didn’t or couldn’t hold the I-Pad correctly and all I saw was his hospital gown for most of the conversation.

It was a great conversation, however, I didn’t know it would be our last. I guess you never know when your last conversation will be with a loved one.

Graceland Mansion

Lisa Marie Plane

During my tour of Graceland and Elvis’ Car Museum I kept earmarking things to tell him about Elvis.

Gold sink on plane

I heard a rumor that the inside of Elvis’ plane, the Lisa Marie, was made of gold. It’s not. The seats are leather and there are television sets all over the place. The only thing that I saw that could have been made of gold are the sinks in the bathrooms.

Jungle Room chair

According to the audio tour, The Jungle Room was decorated by the King himself. He decided to put green shag carpet on the floor, walls and ceiling. He picked a great big round chair that was Lisa Marie’s favorite chair to sit in.

The wall-to-wall shag carpet insulated the room so well that Elvis moved his practice sessions into the room.

Outside the building that housed The Colonel’s office was a swing set for Lisa Marie. Connected to the same building was an indoor shooting range. I thought it was weird that out of all the places it could have been placed on Elvis’ 13 acres of land the swing set was place outside a shooting range. Different times I guess.

Spent his final morning.

Elvis loved racquetball so much he built a court on his property. The court also contained a room with leather couches and a piano. On the day he died he was at that piano playing songs and singing with family and friends.

Out of all the pictures of Elvis there wasn’t a single one where he had gained weight. It was all the fit or “skinny Elvis”. I was told the family didn’t want visitors and fans to remember him that way. I can see how they would want everyone to see and recall happy memories of Elvis.

Elvis’ Final Resting Place

The Meditation Garden is where you will find Elvis Presley’s grave; along with his mother’s, father’s and grandmother’s grave. His grandmother, Minnie Mae, outlived her son, Vernon, and her grandson, Elvis.

Pink Cadillac

At the car museum I saw Elvis’ Pink Cadillac. According to the audio tour Elvis was very generous with his vehicles, usually giving them to friends and even strangers. But the only car he would not give away was his mother’s favorite… the Pink Cadillac.

At the end of the tours and museums I picked out a postcard for my dad and then remembered he was gone. I’ve been told that may happen for awhile. It depresses me when I forget he is dead and then remember. But it saddens me more to think that at some point his death will be normal to me.

Visiting Graceland was a great way to wait out Hurricane Sandy. At least so I thought, I spent three nights in Nashville because of the snow from Sandy.

In part three of The Road Back I will tell you some things about our 16^th President Abraham Lincoln you may not have known, including he may not have been as poor as we thought.

Abraham Lincoln Bust

(NaBloPoMo: I’m still counting this as a post for November 6^th. I got caught up watching the election coverage and posted late.)

The Road Back (part 1)

November 2, 2012 / takinglibertys / Leave a comment

After my dad’s funeral I was unbelievably tired. I hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night in weeks and it had been more than a year since I had a full night’s sleep. My dad’s illness consumed my conscious and unconscious life.

But through it all I truly believed my dad had years left even though the doctors kept saying he only had months… then weeks left. I believed that my father who had always been the strongest man I have ever known and who could do anything would beat the cancer coursing through his body.

It wasn’t until arrived in Texas the second week in October and he was already in hospice that I realized that the man who I thought would always be there for me wouldn’t make it to see another week. He looked so frail.

He was given pain medicine but the nurses had to sedate him because he kept moving when he was in pain and the doctors feared he would break one of his fragile bones. When he breathed it made this horrible sound; some call it a death rattle.

I spent days and nights at the hospice. I wanted to be there for him. Then my mom came and said I had to go home and the doctor made me leave too. She said that my presence could be making him hang on instead of moving on. A few days later my father died.

After the funeral I start getting ready to fly back to NYC when my mother decides she needs to get out of the house for a while. We make a plan to drive across the U.S. Then Hurricane Sandy happened. The Super Storm had already battered the Caribbean and now it was making a beeline up the east coast.

We should have left earlier than we did but we were waiting to see what Sandy was going to do.

Our first day of travel we drove from Houston to Memphis, TN. You can’t visit Memphis without paying your respects to the King of Rock-n-Roll. I had a lot of fun learning about the Elvis but dad was never far from my thoughts and neither was Hurricane Sandy which was heading straight for my home in New York.

In my next post I will let you know if the plane made of gold rumor is really true, pictures of the room that Elvis decorated all by himself and some other facts that you may or may not have known.

R.I.P. Dad

October 28, 2012October 30, 2012 / takinglibertys / Leave a comment

On October 19, 2012, my father succumbed to liver cancer after fighting for three years. The last nine days of his life he spent unconscious and unresponsive. The only time he made a sound was when he was touched. Even holding his hand caused him pain. The cancer had traveled to every single part of his body.

Before he got sick he loved riding his motorcycle all over Texas and across the U.S. He planned for his retirement by getting a new Harley-Davidson Road King and a RV trailer so he could travel further. He specifically picked out this trailer because the back would lower like a drawbridge and he could load up his motorcycle and use his brand new Ford F-150 to haul everything around.

His retirement dream never came to fruition because of cancer.

According to the American Cancer Society, this year alone more than 28,000 people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with primary liver cancer and bile duct cancers and more than 20,000 people in the U.S. will die from this cancer.

His death is still not real to me but I will spend the rest of my life remembering the time I spent with him.