Low So Paleo

Another in my “Discount Paleo” series… cut your own damn food!

Seriously people, why on earth are you spending extra money for food processors to cut your food up for you?  Pre-shredded cheese, pre-cut broccoli & lettuce, carrots that are whittled down to tiny nubs and labeled “baby”.  These things add extra overhead to your grocery bill, often taste less fresh and frankly, you can cut your own food just fine in a few minutes with a good sharp kitchen knife.  I’m assuming that if you eat even halfway paleo you’ve passed up on the pre-packaged meals with sauce packets, now it’s time to give up on someone cutting up your food for you.  You’re not in kindergarten anymore, (wo)man up and use a knife!

Even simple, low cost veggie staples like carrots, cabbage & onions have substantial cost savings if you buy them whole and cut them up yourself.  When you look at higher priced options like salad greens or bell peppers the mark up is insane.  Yes, it is ever so slightly faster on a busy week night, but spend about an hour on Sunday pre-chopping some veggies, and you’ve saved big bucks over a year’s time.  Yes, it’s slightly boring, but put on a good podcast or radio show, and you’ll be done before you know it.

Now there are some exceptions to this rule… first of all, if you have arthritis or are missing some of your fingers, you are excused.  I’m happy that the grocery store supplies pre-cut veggies to make your life more comfortable!  Yay modern convenience!  Exception #2 is frozen veggies, they are cut as part of processing, but are usually still quite inexpensive, fresh tasting and convenient… plus they occasionally go on sale.  Yay sale!  The final exception is meat, while it might be cool to break down your own cow or pig once or twice, it’s simply more efficient to let the butcher do it for you and it doesn’t add substantially to your cost overhead.

Poultry is a special case… you’ll save some cash if you roast a whole chicken, but the mark-up isn’t very high for bone-in thighs & drumsticks, so it’s reasonable to buy pieces.  OTOH, stop buying boneless skinless chicken breasts!  They’re expensive, they cook up dry, and hello… they are the most expensive part of the chicken.  Now I do love breast meat over dark for chicken salads, but bone-in is usually a few bucks cheaper and when you’ve eaten your chicken salad you have bones to make stock with.  But the most cost effective thing is to just roast the whole chicken, use the dark meat in soups & stir fries, the white meat in chicken salad, the bones in stock, and snack on the wings & crispy skin while you’re breaking the whole thing down.

First off, let’s talk about intelligent cheating.  Many people associate the “paleo” label with the work of Robb Wolf and Whole9′s Whole30 plan, which are very strict interpretations that can powerfully heal your health.  However, if you don’t have serious health problems, or if you have a good strong handle on what foods cause you problems then often you can get away with some flexibility.  Hence, in the Primal style of eating, many people talk about the 80/20 rule.  Typically, it’s an escape valve that relieves a little stress, people feel better transitioning over if they feel like they can sometimes have some beer or ice cream.  I’m going to propose that if you’re really struggling with the financials of eating Paleo, that you can intelligently use the 80/20 rule to save some money.

If you think of really, really low budget foods you’re probably thinking beans, rice, corn, oatmeal and white potatoes.  Super cheap starchy foods that can make a small serving of meat and generous veggies into a filling meal.  However, these foods are typically out on a strict paleo eating plan because they often cause health problems for people.  I propose that if you know what works for your body and your family, that 20% of these foods can stretch your budget far more than devoting your 20% to scotch & fine chocolates.

Step 1 is to think carefully about your health.  If you have Celiac disease you might want to stretch your budget with rice and potatoes, but probably not oatmeal or barley (which both have gluten).  If you have joint problems or an auto-immune disorder, steer clear of beans & white potatoes which both contain natural chemicals that can aggravate these conditions.  If you are diabetic or have blood sugar issues, you would want to stick to beans, which release starches into your system very slowly.  For me personally, I know I need to avoid corn and all corn products (corn tortillas, corn chips, tamales) because they aggravate my digestion.

Once you’ve identified whether any of these super cheap starchy foods are appropriate for you and your family, then the idea is to use them to stretch out your meals NOT to replace nutrient dense meats and vegetables on your table.  The goal is not to replace a thick steak, or grilled salmon fillet for “meatless Monday” but to add these foods to nutrient dense scraps and leftovers to stretch them out into meals.  For instance, say I roast a chicken for dinner on Friday.  Saturday I can turn the carcass into chicken broth, and use a bunch of scrap veggies from the crisper drawer to make a soup for weekday lunches.  Say I’m able to pick about 6oz of cooked chicken off the carcass… that doesn’t make for a terribly filling soup, but if I stretch it with 1/2 cup of rice or beans it becomes a more robust meal that can get me through a work day.  Or say, shrimp is on sale, I buy enough to make my family’s favorite paleo coconut shrimp and a cheap cole-slaw, but there’s 5 or 6 leftover shrimp… another night I can combine the leftovers with rice, a couple eggs and some veggies to make fried rice.

There’s four keys to making this work:

1. Keep the focus on nutrient dense meats, veggies, fruits, eggs and optional dairy.  Don’t let super cheap starches dilute the nutrient quality of your diet.  If you notice in my examples above, meat, veggies and eggs still feature prominently, and I do not eat these “stretching” foods every meal.  
2. Know thyself.  Keeping to a budget is no excuse for eating foods that aggravate any health problems.
3. You still want to eat real whole foods.  Think of bulk dried beans and rice, 5 pound bags of russet potatoes.  Avoid canned beans, microwave rice pilaf mixes, and frozen french fries.  Sticking to real foods not only sidesteps damaging additives, it is much cheaper.  Canned beans may seem inexpensive, but for the same price you can get a pound of dried beans that makes up equivalent to 3-4 cans.
4. These foods are your 20%.  If you can’t eliminate splurges on craft beer, fancy chocolates or meals out at nice restaurants then you need to re-think your food budget (and your eating) from the ground up.  I’m still flexible for the occasional In-n-Out protein style burger, and an occasional ice cream with my kiddo, but these are cheap indulgences that still have some nutritional value.  If you’re adding rice to your otherwise  paleo diet, but then also splurging on a fancy Starbucks drink every day after work you’re kind of missing the point.

That all being said, my family’s favorite super cheap starch is beans.  Mark Sisson may think that kidney beans are less exciting than cheese, but my family actually likes a nice bean salad at a BBQ, or some cuban black beans alongside pork.  However if you’re not used to cooking with beans, they take some planning.  I strongly advocate buying dried beans and soaking them before cooking, not only because they’re cheaper but because it nearly eliminates the lectins (a phytochemical that can cause problems with absorbing nutrients).  It’s not complicated, it just takes some planning ahead.  Measure out your beans the night before, and throw them in a bowl or jar with double the volume of water.  In the morning, drain them and cover with more water.  When you’re ready to use them, drain them again, put them in a pot and fill the water 1″ over the level of the beans.  Simmer for 1 hour and voila: cooked beans!  They can then be chilled for bean salad, or added to soups or stews.  You can even soak/cook double quantities and store the cooked beans in the freezer for later use.

39. It’s my age. It was also my fasting blood glucose this morning. Dangerously low.

Let me backtrack a little bit. I’ve been playing around with a shorter term version of nutritional ketosis (NK) again, for a few reasons.
1. I’m part of a biggest loser style competition with some friends that ends a week from Monday and I found out I was 2nd and within spitting distance of first. And first is my husband. Yeah. I’m a pretty competitive person, so I decided to gun for him.
2. Before I quit my previous bout with NK, I had been reading some on the possible cancer fighting & cancer prevention aspects of a ketotic diet. It’s some interesting stuff, but it was looking like that would require a higher ketone level than I had achieved (at least since I was tracking it via a meter). I wanted to see if that was possible for my body.
3. I also was curious to verify some things I had suspected about how coconut fats affected my ketone levels.
But I wasn’t really going to blog about it here, because I’d like this blog to be more generally about eating a moderated sodium paleo diet and awesome recipes, not really my personal diet diary. And then this morning I woke up severely hypoglycemic. And I think this is something that should be discussed in public.

Basically, I had been doing something very similar to my eating through January and most of February. Around 50 grams of total carbs a day, 35ish net carbs (subtracting fiber), cutting back calories by 250 a day. Nothing extreme. And then after a few days of the normal plan, I was going to take 4 days and do a very high coconut version of this same plan… coconut custard for breakfast, coconut curry soup for lunch, a snack of dried coconut and then one of my normal dinners to see if that did anything extreme to my ketone levels. Wednesday was day 2 of the coconut plan and frankly I wasn’t very hungry that day, so I undershot my calories quite a bit (probably a 500-600 calorie deficit rather than 250), especially since it was a training day. I felt fine that evening, but Thursday morning I woke up and I was HUNGRY. I was in ketosis, but my body was clear that I needed MOAR FOOD (ketosis is not a magical hunger suppressor, if it was, humans wouldn’t be motivated to look for sufficient food and we would die). I ate more that day, but still kept my carbs down (31 net carbs) and that evening when I tested ketones it was the highest ever at 2.6. I was feeling a little off even before bed though. When I woke up this morning, I felt fairly sketched out and had a gut feeling to use up the last of my glucose test strips to test my fasting blood glucose. It read 39.

Yeah. That’s dangerously low. The recommendation for cancer patients who are trying to starve a glucose dependent tumor is 55-65. I was well below that. And it’s not like I had a day planned of lounging on the couch. I was going to take my son to the pick-your-own strawberry farm to see the Easter bunny and play on farm equipment, and then in the evening I had a trapeze class planned. It would have probably been unsafe for me to even operate my car when extremely hypoglycemic, much less run around in the hot sun hunting eggs. So I supplemented my coconut custard with a couple tablespoons of cooked rice and felt a little better. I waited about an hour and still didn’t feel totally right, so I mashed about 1/2 a banana into some full fat yogurt and slowly ate that over about an hours time. By the time I finished I was back to my usual self. I’ve carried on the rest of my day as planned foodwise, except I enjoyed a couple strawberries with my son, without a care for the extra carbs.

So what happened? Well, given my extremely poor reactions to super low carb diets in the past, and my adequate, but not excessive protein intake this round (average 82g a day), I hypothesize that my body is less efficient at most than converting protein to glucose. I haven’t been taking in enough carbs to cover my brain’s minimum needs, I’m not carrying any extra in my liver, and my body is doing poorly at making enough from the few extra grams of protein I have laying around. Now this isn’t a hypothesis I want to test in any way shape or form (unless someone can do it in the lab without me having to drop into hypoglycemia again) because frankly it just doesn’t feel healthy to keep messing with it. Chasing deep levels of ketosis is not for me. Dr. Georgia Ede has asked,
“For people without cancer or seizures, who are just using this diet to lose weight, improve function/performance, manage mood swings, or manage appetite, does the degree of ketosis matter?”
And I think for me, it doesn’t. I saw benefits from mild ketosis in the 0.5-1.2 range, and my body has problems higher than that. Today, I clocked in at 86 total carbs, 66 net, and after trapeze class I got a 1.1 ketone reading. That’s pretty reasonable, I feel fine, not hungry and not messed up in the head. I see no reason to chase higher ketone levels, I do not believe they are “therapeutic” for me.

I want to bring this up publicly because I may not be the only one out there who can have this kind of reaction. Yet I see many places people talking about how zero carb and very low carb diets are safe. They may work for some people but be unsafe for others. If I had been in Steve Phinney’s bicyclist study, I would have been pulled out of the study as an “adverse event” with glucose that low. My advice in this situation is not to avoid a reduced carbohydrate diet, nor to avoid ketosis at all costs… but if you are chasing ultra high ketones for a particular performance or therapeutic reason, please double check your blood glucose from time to time to make sure you’re not so depleted that you can’t keep your glucose in a healthy and appropriate range.

Incidentally, I have one Meniere’s symptom that varies a lot with my seasonal allergies, the “fullness” thing in my bad ear. It feels like an ear infection, but without the sharp pain… all the time. For me, this is actually more irritating than the tinnitus, since my brain has learned to tune out the tinnitus most of the time, whereas I can’t shake the uneven feeling when my ear feels full. My allergies have just started to act up this year and my ear was bugging me, within a couple days of popping back into mild ketosis the fullness diminished quite a bit. I think the changes in sodium metabolism that come with ketosis have the same effect on me as diuretics do, without dropping my blood pressure like the meds would. It’s handy to know for when the fullness gets out of control. The more control I have using my diet the happier I am.

More changes ahead.  I’m pulling the plug on my nutritional ketosis experiment.  Since January 1, I’ve lost 14 pounds, without significantly impacting my athletic performance or struggling with hunger or cravings and I’m calling that a win.

So why am I stopping? Well, I went with a friend to get a water dunk bodyfat test today.  .  My bodyfat?  A rock solid 18.2%.  That’s fairly lean for a woman.  I might want to get a couple points lower for swimsuit season, but not a whole lot lower; and that’s perfectly comfortable for the winter months.  Now I had done this test before a couple times in 2010 when I was first working to get off ye olde baby weight, so I have some “pretest” numbers to compare. And comparing my 2010 numbers to currently, I did lose a small amount lean muscle mass, as well as fat over that time.  The woman who runs the testing center said it wasn’t too bad, but she advised increasing my calories a small amount and slightly increasing my protein.  But I honestly think that if I want to get in really good shape for summer, psychologically I would be better just easing off on the weight loss for a month or so.   I need a little mental break.

But also, I don’t think that long term nutritional ketosis is actually best for my body and my goals.  You see, I’ve never shown any evidence of glucose/insulin dysregulation and I don’t do an endurance sport.  NK is useful for me with regards to improving my strength:weight ratio… in fact I haven’t come across any other eating approach that’s been as effective at preserving my performance while losing weight.  But there is a limit to how much I can improve that ratio just by shedding fat.  I’m not an endurance athlete that can hammer myself into the ground and then refuel… I need to lift my own bodyweight, repeatedly, with grace, precision and proper form, both for artistic reasons and to avoid injury.  I can’t see how long term chronic ketosis would be the correct approach for what I do with my body given my perfectly healthy blood sugar.

All that being said, I’m not jumping feet first back into moderate carb paleo eating.  I’m increasing my overall calories and protein a bit, and then slowly stepping up my carbs.  I don’t want to play havoc with my fluid levels, since that can bring on a vertigo attack.  A week or so with a piece of fruit every day, maybe a small square of dark chocolate and then maybe I’ll pick up a sweet potato here and there.  Nothing crazy…

Oh and P.S. I think the budget might appreciate cutting back on the macadamia nuts in favor of some apples & sweet potatoes too.  At least in the short term.

Well, I guess we’re buying a house!  I know!  It’s exciting!

However, there’s a twist, as always.  The house needs some updating, it doesn’t want some updating, it needs updating.  The bones of the house are great and we don’t even want to remodel it, but there’s some work that we have to do.  Things like a range where only half the burners work, leaking grout in the bathrooms & a stairway banister with spaces too wide for safety’s sake (and we have a 4 year old, so anything he can get himself hurt on, he will).  There are some wants too… cabinets that have not been dented by 40 years of hard use, a solid surface countertop, but not a full remodel by any means.  Still, these things add up.  So what does this have anything to do with my food blog?

It’s simple.  We gotta scale back to save some cash.  Not anything crazy, but I need to be locked down about planning meals.  Eating out is now going to be In-n-Out.  We’ll be just buying ground beef from our rancher, no more full sized roasts (much less fancy steaks) because the per-pound price is so much higher.  I think we have a box of Vital Choice low sodium canned salmon… salmon cakes & salmon loaf are going back into regular rotation to use that up without spending more cash for meat.  When I use up the pricey almond flour in our cabinet, there will be no more paleo muffins.  And I’m going to hit harder on the cheap veggies, harvesting kale & turnips from our garden, and sticking to the cheap, conventionally grown, veggies in the market.  I already know where to get the best deal on quality canned coconut milk and unsweetened coconut flakes.

Anyway, if anyone is interested in the meal planning and other “paleo on a budget” issues, let me know in the comments.  I can outline some of the stuff.  It’s not rock bottom “paleo  poverty” level, but definitely we need to cut WAY back on the eating out and clear out some of the luxuries.