Creamy Italian Dressing

So I made homemade mayo the other day and was shocked to see how easy it was. I was curious about what else was in the fridge and easy to make too. One of the family staples is creamy Italian Dressing for salads. Using the HomeMade Mayo as a base, it took no time at all, it was all natural, and it tasted awesome.The original recipe (from PaleoFood) called for dried herbs, I have fresh growing in the garden. So you could use 1/8 of a tsp of crushed dried Italian herb blend, oregano, rosemary, or basil) or raid your garden for a pinch of oregano, basil, rosemary, marjoram and thyme, chopped very small.

Creamy Italian Dressing

Serves 1 dinner, or 2 side salads

Treating Unborn Babies for Obesity

In the past four years, the rates of "sumo" babies, born weighing over 11 pounds, in the UK have risen 50%. In the US, last July a texas woman, delivered a baby weighing 16 pounds!!  These babies being obese at birth, tend to grow up and remain obese.

To prevent these babies from being born obese, doctors are now medicating them with diabetes medicine while they are still in the womb. How do they know which babies to treat? Their mom are obese. Not so shockingly, obese moms give birth to obese babies, they then raise those children, who become obese adults.

Creamy Scallop Soup

1 pound medium-size sea scallops (save money by buying sea scallop pieces instead of whole)
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
1 large onion, chopped (about 1 1/2 cup)
2 carrot, chopped (about 2/3 cup)
3 celery stalk, chopped (about 1/2 cup)
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2 bottle (8 oz.) clam juice
2 cup heavy cream

Season scallops with salt and pepper.
Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the scallops and sauté until golden, about 2 minutes per side. (If using pieces, saute the scallops.) Remove from saucepan and set aside.
Melt remaining tablespoon of butter. Add onion, carrot and celery and sauté until softened, about 4 minutes. Add tomato paste and sauté 1 minute more.
Add clam juice, water and a pinch of cayenne (optional). Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook to heat through.
Add scallops, heat through.
Add cream, stir and remove from heat. purée soup in batches until very smooth. Return to saucepan and simmer to warm through. Season with salt and cayenne pepper to taste.

I Have Been Duped, Lied To, Baboozled! Were you?

I really dislike franken-foods. Back in the day, when it really was a low-carb 'craze', every food company was coming out with low carb foods. I remember getting a loaf of low carb white bread. It had an odd taste, but I thought I could live with it. That loaf of "bread" was later found behind a box of crackers. It had to have been there for 6 weeks. That bread looked, smelled and felt like it did on the day I bought it. I knew food was not meant to be preserved like that so I tossed it and stayed away from "low carb" versions of food I shouldnt eat.

There was one exception, Dreamfields Pasta. I have been a loyal customer for YEARS. It tastes just like the real thing. Yes it is twice the price, but we are talking pasta. Pasta is really cheap. That $2 can feed four people  It definitely stretched the food budget. I stopped eating it about a year ago when I started the Primal 30 day Challenge. But the kids, well every once in a while I would get a request for some mac and cheese, or spaghetti and meatballs. I thought I was making the better food choice for them. The propiatry protien blend and their patented process that made the carbs undigestable would be "ok" just once in a while.

I was lied to and so were you!

Blood Sugar readings after eating different foods

Recently there was a low-carb cruise with many speakers incuding a doctor named  Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt . At the end of his lecture he briefly spoke about Dreamfield's and the blood sugar spike that mimics the spike you get from eating 'regular' pasta.

They did two studies, the first was with 5 "older people" and the second from "young people". None of the subjects had diabetes. Weather young or old, it didn't matter, the glucose curve remained the same for each group. Dreamfield's sugar spike is almost the same as regular pasta. 

I have learned my lesson for good this time. No more franken-foods for my family! I have to thank Jimmy Moore for bringing this to my attention.

Blood glucose response following ingestion of pasta.
Study #1, Old people (top).
Study #2, Young People (bottom).

Quit the The Finish your Plate Club and Lose Weight! ~ video

Most of us, growing up were told by our parents to clean your plate at meal times. I know I was threatened with that there would be nothing else to eat if I didn't eat what was served to be at that time. Told that I wasn't allowed to leave the table until I finished my dinner or that I was being wasteful for throwing away perfectly good food. Sometimes I would be told of starving children who would be more than grateful for the bounty that I had before me. Eventually I would comply, until I didn't have to be told anymore. Dinner would be served, weather it was a huge plate of Thanksgiving dinner or going to a restaurant, my family and I would finish our plates.

I was desensitized to what the 'full' or 'satisfied' feeling was. I learned to eat with my eyes instead of my stomach, ignoring the signals to my brain that I had ate enough. I would 'see' the food on my plate and eat most of what I saw or all of what I saw. I would eat when I was told to, three meals a day plus snacks, weather I was hungry or not.

Things you already know:

1. Starving children in 3rd world countries will not benefit from the last few bites on your plate weather or not you eat them.
2. Eating too many calories is wasteful to your time and your wallet. If you have too much to eat, you will join diet clubs, buy books, join gyms, take pills or might even get lipo.
3. If you made too much dinner, you can save it for another meal, or maybe later that night. If your body is hungry, you should eat.

Quitting the Clean Plate Club, takes practice. It doesn't matter how much food is left on your plate as long as you leave just some of every item. Chew your food slowly and after every swallow, ask yourself if you are still hungry. If the answer is yes, then have some more. Leave some food on your plate at every meal so you can get used to it.

Below is a video clip of the Diner Experiment. Six people went to a diner and all got the same breakfast meal. On the first day, almost everyone of them cleared their plates. The second day they went back to the same place and fed the same meal, but this time they were blindfolded. They had to rely on their stomachs to tell them to stop eating instead of their eyes. Not one of them even came close to finishing their meal. Not saying that you should eat blindfolded, but you should try to learn to sensitize your self to the feelings of satidfaction coming from your stomach.

Orthorexia

Orthorexia; driving from the Greek word ortho meaning 'correct' and 'orexis' meaning diet. It mean an unhealthy obsession to eat healthy food. 


It is not a diagnosis and I have had my fun with the word, even made it my religion on facebook. I thought we could take a serious look at it though. 


Being active in sports and an amateur fighter, I have to watch my diet. I make sure I eat my protein, stay away from refined carbs in all forms, and have definitely passed up a meal at a fast food place, even when hungry until I could find a better choice.

Primal Fitness > Fighting?

Second Place
Karate World Championship
Montreal Canada

What is more primal to man's survival than the will to fight to survive. It is definitely what our ancestors had to do.  Weather they were fighting off lions and bears, or each other in a war over women and territory, the strongest among them survived and procreated to make me and you.

We are past fighting to survive. Sometimes I think it may be a detriment to our gene pool if you have ever visited People of Walmart.

Fruit while losing weight

I am in a quandry. I am trying to lose a few pounds. I love fruit and there is nothing wrong with fruits, in fact they should be in everyones diet. The fresh or frozen fruits, not so much the canned with all that syrup. Neolithic diets sites and  every low carb site list berries as a fruit you may eat. Which is awesome because I like berries. I love eating frozen raspberries right from the pouch on a hot summer day.

So the quandry is, which fruits are better to eat while shedding weight, and which should I avoid? The search for information has made me very confused. Some places on the net, list the net carbs ala Atkins, carbs minus fiber equal net carbs. Other sites list just the carbs, as if all carbs are equal. Others still list a glycemic load or the glycemic index, but I am unsure which is a better measure.

Getting Primal for January ~ A Revolution ~ A New Challenge

Are you ready to be healthy and fit the way nature intended? I propose another challenge. A challenge where you get real for 30 days. Lets skip the notion of 80/20 and think of it as 100% primal. If the occasion comes around where it is "eat bad or go hungry", eat a little bad, just as much as you need to comfort your tummy and then go back to 100%.

I have slipped a lot this season becasue there has been a lot of stress in my life and I have taken the simple way out. Sometimes I have been getting prepackaged meals for lack of time and planning. That ends today.

I am taking my measurements, taking pictures, and will be posting them here. Then for the next month, i will post food I cook, my primal fitness, adventures, and what is trying to set me back.

Are you ready to be fit? Join me!! I would love your recipes, your stories, your help. We all need some support.

Fat Head - You’ve been fed a load of bologna.

Fat Head - You've been fed a load of bologna. Starring, written and directed by Tom Naughton, Fat Head is an eye-opening documentary about why we are really fat. Contrary to the current scientific community, it is not from McDonalds, meat, fat, or a host of other "bad' food that we have been told to avoid. 

The movie starts out much like many news stories about obesity, overweight people walking around with the cameras intentionally cutting off their heads, as to not embarrass them. Tom then compares himself to the 'obese' population. Tom is obese but he doesn't look like the rolly polly people that the news portrays as 25% of the population. At 5'11" and 206 pounds, Tom is OBESE

Raw Food Diet is not Primal

When I tell people that I eat like your hunter-gather ancestors, I always get a look. 7 times out of 10, they think I am eating raw everything. It is not the same thing. 

Yes I only eat foods that a human can digest in it's raw natural state.

What about chicken? You can't eat that raw.

Primal Hypnosis - Paul McKenna

I love reading nutritional books. I sometimes get some that actually make me laugh. For example, I got a book on self-hypnosis for weight loss. I am reading it and after the first 2 chapters, I realize that the book if full of 'feel-good' sayings, like how you are not at fault for being fat. The reason you are fat is that the food companies have actually hypnotised you to eat their crappy food. If you listened to the accompanying CD you will be deprogrammed. Plus the other reasons for being fat, like it is your genetics, family life, and a plethora of other reasons besides, "you eat too much and/or too much crap food". She also advocated no exercise. She said she hated it and she is thin without it. She was going to show all of us how to be thin without even taking an after-dinner walk. Bunk!

The End Of Overeating by Dr Kessler

 The End Of Overeating By Davis Kessler

I thought that today I would write about a book that changed my eating habits. It is one of my  favorite books when it comes to nutrition. I picked it up at the library. I opened it thinking it was a diet book. I was very wrong.

The End of Overeating has more to do with how our food is processed and how the processing effects our bodies. Knowing how certain food can effect your desire to eat too much is very powerful to learn how to stop overeating.

Dr Davis Kessler is Harvard-trained doctor, lawyer, medical school dean and former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. That is a lot of credentials. Even armed with all that knowledge, he was overweight man and a yo-yo dieter since college.

Kessler was on a mission to find out why he just couldn't resist certain foods. He enlisted labs and scientists from around the world. He read every medical paper regarding food consumption. He even went dumpster diving in the middle of the night as some of our favorite chain restaurants, like Chili's and Appleby's. His booked is littered with footnotes pointing back to some study or experiment.

What Kessler found was that the body craves fat, sugar, and salt. When these three things combine in certain proportions, the body wants to have more than it needs. The food labels at these chain restaurants revealed a lot more than they want you to know. Some appetizers have 8 or 9 different types of salt listed on the label as well as different fats and sugars. An average appetizer in a chain restaurant is 900 calories and that is before you get you meal.


Foods that are highly processed, like that grilled chicken breast you always order because you are looking out for you weight, may not be the best choice on the menu. These pieces of meat are marinated in sugar, salt and fat and then tenderized to the point that you don't have to chew your food. The foods have become hyper-palatable, according to Dr Kessler. He says, “A hyper-palatable food that requires little chewing and goes down easily”. It also make you want more to eat than you should.

This book has no diet plan. It is just full of knowledge to helps you understand what goes on in your body and your brain when eating certain foods and why they make you want to overeat when clearly you have had enough. It is a must read!