Paleo Changes You: High Fructose Corn Syrup Smells Bad and Tastes Worse

     I remember my first encounter with high fructose corn syrup. I was taking a shopping trip with my mom, and we stopped to get a snack. I loved chocolate milk, so I grabbed a small snack-sized carton and some crackers. I opened the carton and drank, and then I wondered what was wrong with the milk. I read the ingredients to find that it had been made with HFCS. Within a few minutes of drinking the milk, I started feeling sick, and my head started hurting.

     Soon, high fructose corn syrup started popping up everywhere. There was no escaping it in the land of junk food. I began to grow accustomed to the ill feelings and headaches. I even, eventually, got used to the strange taste.

     Then I switched to Paleo. We switched in January of 2014, and by Halloween, everyone was ready for a break. The kids wanted candy. I wanted candy, so we broke down, and I allowed the kids to save a couple of pieces of candy before tossing the rest. I grabbed a little something myself and immediately regretted it. I've since found that I'm mildly allergic to corn products of all kinds. What happened? Well, it tasted terrible, my tongue became a sore in my head, my skin broke out, I got an instant headache, and my stomach cramped up.

     I'm not saying that I'm immune to cravings. I still want candy every once in a while, but every time I give in, and the candy contains HFCS, I regret it immediately.

Paleo Changes You: Dairy Smells Bad

     I grew up on skim milk. I drank it every morning in my cereal and every night before bed. And if I had some cookies, there was a glass of milk. There were only a few time (when the milk was really fresh) that I would say it tasted great, but I enjoyed it.

     Then Ray and I decided to cut dairy out of our diets. I can't begin to explain the excruciating process that I went through. There were times I thought I might die from the stomach cramps. I felt like I was going through what I've heard addicts go through as they get off drugs. There were times that I felt like the only thing that would help me was to drink some milk. I would lie on the floor, curled up, and cramping.

     Then things changed. I started to feel better. I started to realize that not only was I addicted to dairy, but it also didn't agree with me. When I had dairy, I got bloated and gassy. After dairy, it just didn't happen anymore.

     Then last Halloween, we took the kids trick-or-treating on the square, and Alex had to go to the bathroom. One of the stores open that had a bathroom was an ice cream shop, so we went in, and the smell was disgusting. The entire place smelled like milk gone bad. Yuck! Ray said something about it, and I told him that dairy had been smelling bad to me for a while, but the ice cream shop was worse because of the concentration of dairy.

     These days, I prefer coconut milk. It's rich, creamy, makes a great ice cream, and it doesn't smell bad or make me feel terrible.

Paleo Changes You: Grains Smell Bad

     I used to love to bake bread. I would start my yeast, mix and knead my dough, let it rise, punch it down, let it rest, shape it, bake it, and eat it. I was a bread geek. My favorite loaf in the whole world was an Ethiopian honey dabo. I would make it and take it to gathering where we would eat it with butter and honey, and people would fight over who could take the leftovers home.

     What I'm not telling you is that while I loved the smell of bread and the taste of bread, the pseudo-food would grow in my mouth causing me to drink massive amounts of liquid just to get through a sandwich, but I ignored the feeling. I ignored the gagging.

     Last winter, we were trying to get more people to get flu shots at our pharmacy, so we were promised a reward if we would ask people to get their shot. The "reward" was pizza. The pizza was brought in, and it smelled pretty bad, but I figured it was just the type of pizza.

     Then last spring, I walked into a restaurant that bakes fresh bread daily, and I was horrified. The entire restaurant reeked! I had never smelled anything quite like it. I looked to my family, and they looked just as appalled as I did.  I looked around at the people eating, wondering if they could smell the same thing. Then someone behind me said, "That bread smells delicious." It was then that I realized that I was smelling fresh, baked bread, and that I was no longer enamored of its smell.

     Now that I've been Paleo for over a year, and bread doesn't even smell good anymore, it's so easy to continue to eat this way, and I'll never go back.

October: A Wrap Up of the Month (with lots of pictures)

 

     October is always a crazy month around here. It starts with my birthday and ends with Victor's birthday and Halloween.  This year, I turned 38, and Victor turned 9.

     My birthday was truly awesome because I have such a wonderful family. Lydia made me a fall/Halloween candle mat; I got several Disney Infinity 3.0 figures; Ray gave me a wax warmer with a spider on it; and the boys made me cards and Lego sets. Ray made me egg salad and banana pancakes for breakfast. We spent most of the day outside because it was so beautiful. We walked along our back country roads and in our woods. The fall in Alabama is like a second spring. There are beautiful flowers everywhere and bees buzzing around. The only real difference is the colors. For my special birthday dinner, I had an Elvis burger with baked sweet potato and cookie dough fudge for dessert. Then we had my birthday with my parents, who fixed me shrimp with salad, sweet potato chips, and steamed veggies. Then we had my birthday with Ray's parents. Since we were already doing the 21 day sugar detox by this time, we had to order pretty carefully at our favorite restaurant, but we got a steak burger and steamed veggies with butter, and it all worked out well.

     After my birthday, we had a Marvel Movie Marathon, which you can read about here.

     Then it was time for our local museum's Pioneer Days, which I hope to put a post out on A Geek Girl's Guide as well.

     Then I decided that it was past time to clean out the closets, so with the help of my children and the hope of finding the controllers to my old Nintendo, we tackled the playroom closet. We didn't find the controllers, but we did find several pictures, a few missing books, some smaller jeans that Ray can almost wear now that he's lost weight, and we managed to condense a closet-full of crap into three boxes of stuff we just can't get rid of.

     With the end of the month drawing every closer, it was time to get our costumes done in time for Halloween and plan Victor's ninth birthday. The boys wanted to dress as Mario and Luigi, and we found their costumes. Ray, Lydia, and I wanted to go as character from Adventure Time, and we wanted to make our costumes. They turned out really nice, and while we were out and about on Halloween, we got asked a few times to have our pictures taken with various people. It felt like being a celebrity. It was such a blast!

     We had a cookout for Victor's birthday dinner the day before his birthday because we had a full day planned the day of. He wanted hamburgers, hotdogs, sweet potato chips, and cookie dough fudge, but I also made some marshmallows. He got a few Lego sets, a stuffed elephant for his collection, some papercraft toys, and some Minecraft figures. Then on his birthday, we went to a local arts and crafts fair, then ate lunch at Earth Fare, where we made ourselves some great big salads, then we headed over to Toys 'R' Us to look around before going trick or treating. Then we finished off the day with a pizza movie night and watched Hocus Pocus.

     All-in-all, it was an awesome and exhausting month. I hope to get more writing done in the next few months, but we'll see. I hope your October was awesome as well.

Paleo Changes You: Sweets Taste Sweeter

     If you are what you eat, then when I was little, I was made of sugar. I ate something sweet every day. When I was a toddler I would ask for a cookie, and when my mom said yes, I would say, "Can I have 'twofum'?"

     Just recently I wrote a story on another blog about going with my dad when he would get his haircut and then going to the nearby store to stock up on candy. If you read it, you're probably wondering how I could eat that much candy, but that amount of junk food would last me a month or two. I would hide it and only eat a piece or two at the time, but I would eat some every day.

     Don't get me wrong, I could have eaten it all, and occasionally, I would binge on candy, believing the consequences to be well within the range of acceptable in view of the reward of eating all of my favorite things and then drinking a large glass of milk because I'd be so thirsty and craving protein to counterbalance to sugar surging through my system.

     I got my sugary addiction from my dad. He and I would eat dessert with our meal. We both felt that we couldn't eat a meal without something sweet to help the rest of the food go down.

     Then over two and a half years ago, I was fed up with feeling bad and looking worse all the time, and I decided to do a sugar detox right after Christmas. Believe me when I tell you that it was a tough decision to make. I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to do it. I was terrified that I would gag on my food, but I knew I had to do it.

     In my search to find tasty recipes with only natural carbs, I stumbled upon some Paleo cookbooks that were free on Kindle, and had some delicious-looking recipes. I made it through that detox, and I've never looked back.

     The weird thing is, when I started the detox, it said something to the effect of eating dates if your sugar cravings got out of control because they are naturally sweet, so I bought a bag of dried dates and tasted one. It had NO flavor at all! I tried a couple more, just to make sure I hadn't gotten a bad one, but I kept getting the same results. I was so disappointed. Then two weeks into the detox, I was craving chocolate like the world would end if I didn't get it, so I popped a date in my mouth, and it exploded with sweet, delightful flavor. My craving was satisfied, and I could move on.

     After that, I started to realize just how sweet other foods were naturally. Broccoli, lightly roasted, danced with a light sweetness in my mouth. Herbal teas tasted amazing, even without honey. If I needed a little extra flavor, I could add coconut aminos, avocado or mayonnaise (instead of ketchup, honey mustard or maple syrup) and be satisfied.

     Once you're used to that way of eating, going back to regular, processed or even natural sugars can throw you for a loop. You start to realize just how sugar makes you feel. (For me, it makes my feet and back hurt, can give me a headache, and just generally makes it harder to make it through the day.) And then there's the taste. Going back to sugar of any type will make you realize just how much of a tolerance you had built up for the sweet stuff. In fact, the other night we tried out a recipe for cookie dough fudge to see if it was suitable for a birthday treat. It was delicious, but no one could eat more than a piece because it was so sweet, it verged on cloying.

     This is the very reason that I and my family see Paleo as a way of life. Once you get over the initial detox period, you wake up to a realization that you don't feel deprived. You realize that on top of feeling like you have superpowers, you just don't need as much sugar in your life. You can now pass when someone you work with brings in two bags of candy and a bucket and says, "Happy fall. I got this for us to share." Just saying.

Homemade Shave Soap

     You may think that this shave soap is just for men, but you'd be wrong. I use this on my legs, too. It lathers well, and leaves your skin feeling nourished and pampered. You just need some really hot water nearby, and you can create a truly decadent shaving lather with a natural-bristle shaving brush. Ray has always hated shaving until one year at Christmas, I got him this shaving set and made him this shave soap. Now he loves to shave, and it's pretty simple to make.

Ingredients:
1/4 cup unscented glycerin soap
1/2 tsp. almond oil
1/4 tsp. 100% pure shea butter
1/4 tsp. aloe vera gel
5 drops favorite essential oil (optional; we use patchouli)

Directions:

1. Melt soap in a double boiler over boiling water, or in a microwave safe dish, heat on low for about 20 seconds. Check. If not melted, try another 20 seconds on low. Continue to do this until completely melted.

2. Blend in almond oil, shea butter, aloe vera gel, and essential oil. This could take about 30 seconds or more to get the aloe completely incorporated.

3. Pour in  clean shaving mug or jar, or grease a muffin tin and pour in. Let sit until cool and set.

4. Use with a shaving brush. Hot water gets a better lather, especially water heated to the temperate you'd heat your coffee to.

Our Whole Thirty: Wrap-Up and Assessment

     Over thirty days have passed, and I'm happy to say that we not only survived but thrived. Ray has been taking less insulin, I've had learned a few things, Lydia has had more energy, Alex healed a canker sore in a day, and we think we've figured out why Victor breaks out on his arms and back sometimes.

     Ray is now taking almost half of the insulin that he was taking. He also learned that most of what he thought was hunger throughout the day was actually cravings for carb-y things. This makes sense when you learn about how hormones play such a huge role in our hunger signals. I like to think of the brain as being like my dad, and I'll explain: one day, I had to take a reading comprehension and speed test (which is a pretty harsh thing to do to someone with dyslexia). This particular article was about the health benefits of tomatoes and the discovery of lycopene. I went home and told my parents about what I'd learned, and my dad would not believe it. He said that while tomatoes were tasty, they couldn't be good for you because they were too acidic. It wasn't until he read this information himself that he decided this was a huge discovery and had to tell me all about it. Our brains are just like that. We can look in the mirror and at the scale and see ourselves getting fat, but until the brain gets this information from leptin (which it cannot do if the brain is swimming in too much sugar and cortisol), the brain will ignore what it sees in the mirror and on the scare and insist that we're too thin. These signals from the brain are so much stronger than our willpower that it takes restricting carbs from sugars and sweeteners and only getting carbs from our fruits and veggies to get these hormones back into balance. If you want to learn more about this, I highly suggest you read Melissa ad Dallas Hartwig's It Starts with Food.

     I've learned that my stomach and head do not handle chocolate well, be in in the form of cacao in my chili or 75% dark chocolate yumminess. I've learned lots of new information from my new books. And I've learned that even though I'm fat, I'm in better shape than some of my smaller co-workers. After the tornado, we worked really hard to get our store up and running a week later. We were in the heat and moving heavy stuff, and I was barely breaking a sweat. I kept hearing various people say that it was man's work, or we needed men over to help us, or other misogynistic things, and I'd just pick it up and move it. I was throwing around 35 and 40 pounds of sugar and dog food, and after getting back into the pharmacy over a week later, I was asked how my back felt after all that, and I said, "Fine." The only ill effects of working that hard for that long was that I was exhausted at the end of every day.

     Lydia says that she thinks the Whole 30 was worth it because of Ray, but that she didn't notice a difference. I say that I noticed a difference. She was waking up earlier and with ease, and she had more energy throughout the day.

     The boys would go to the grandparents' house to have some cheese sticks and the occasional piece of chocolate, but they did pretty good. We were even able to identify what was making Victor break out on his arms and back pretty easily because it was only happening after he ate the cheese sticks, and Alex was able to heal a pretty bad canker sore that appeared on his gum within a day after taking and with one dose of L-Lysine. They say that felt pretty good, but that they feel so good most of the time that it was hard to tell. They did crave a lot and constantly asked what day we were on.

     So my examination of the rest of Melisa Joulwan's "30 Reasons to Whole30" in her Well Fed 2.

• "You'll learn about yourself." I definitely learned about my appetite triggers and even more about what I can and cannot tolerate.
• "You'll slay the sugar demon." I'm the girl who ate dessert with her meal, and felt I had to have something sweet at every meal, so if I can get over my sugar cravings, anyone can.
• "You'll make new friends." I've definitely gotten more follows on Instagram, but I wouldn't say I made new friends. I would say that the friend I did this with became a better friend, and that's better to me than a new friend.
• "You'll positively influence others." I don't know if this is true. I definitely don't feel like I've influenced anyone, but I did sell a friend on my new dressing recipe which should appear on my other blog: A Geek Girl's Guide to Love, Life, and Happiness pretty soon.
• "You'll learn more about how your body works." I feel I explained this adequately earlier.
• "Your skin will be brighter." I don't know if this is true, but I do feel like my skin was a little better during the Whole 30.
• "Your hair will be shinier." I've gotten so many compliments on my hair lately, and I'm not sure if it's the Whole 30, my new shampoo, or a combination of the two.
• "Your tummy will be flatter." That will be revealed in just a minute. Be patient. Stay with me.
• Your workouts will feel invigorating." I didn't get a lot of workouts in, unless you count what I did at work, and I do, so I'd have to say that this is true. Cleaning up after a mild disaster is pretty invigorating.
• You might get a pr." I guess my personal record for this Whole 30 is being able to sling around up to 40 pounds of product for hours, even at the end of a really long day.
• "You'll feel accomplished (or maybe even smug)." I do feel very accomplished. I did something that scared me to death. I went 30 days without eating a bunch of sugar.
• "You might lose weight, or gain muscle, or both." Again, I'll reveal that in a minute.
• "Your body image will improve." I don't, at this moment, really feel any better about how I look than I did when I started. I know I look better than I did 5 years ago, and that makes me happy, but I'm still far from where I want to be.
• "Food will become both more important and less important." It is more important to me that I get tasty, nutritious food, and less important that I fulfill every craving that crosses my mind.
• "You'll stop dieting and just eat." I don't count calories, and I haven't since I started eating Paleo. I just eat real food, and I know if I've done pretty good or pretty bad by the way that I feel.

      Now for the reveal:



Debra:
Weight before and after:
173.1 - 169.8 Loss of 3.3 pounds
Waist before and after:
43" - 42" Loss of 1 inch
Chest before and after:
44.5" - 42.5" Loss of 2 inches
BMI before and after:
30.66 - 30.08 Loss of 0.58 points




Ray:
Weight before and after:
264.3 - 251.8 Loss of 12.5 pounds
Waist before and after:
49.5" - 48.75" Loss of 0.75 inches
Chest before and after:
49" - 46" Loss of 3 inches
BMI before and after:
37.01 - 35.25 Loss of 1.76 points