Feeling great

I'm feeling great these days. I try to convey this to The Man, but it's just hard to describe. I feel like Super Woman. Eating all this grass-fed and pastured beef, butter and chicken, lots of liver and no grains or sugar or vegetable oils makes me feel like a completely other animal. I'm not the same person at all.

I have been taking a core fitness class twice a week. We do things like squats, sit-ups and push-ups. In the 50 minute class only about 20 minutes of it are the hard strength things. So it's not too bad. I do everything the wimpiest way possible so far. Knee push-ups and knee planks, for example. It really helps though. It has made me feel so much stronger while hiking. I feel great.

I continue to lose weight slowly. I can wear my PCT 2009 hiking pants again. I can wear lots of stuff I buried in the closet again. This diet is great. Lose weight and put big hunks of butter on your mashed celery root and sweet potatoes. Eat roast duck until you are ready to puke and lose weight.

What I do now is I drink a "bulletproof" coffee that is made with melted butter, coconut oil and unsweetened chocolate, emulsified in the blender, for breakfast. Then I eat canned fish for lunch around 1 or 2. Sardines or salmon usually. Then I eat dinner. I like to make meat of some sort with a starchy root or tuber and some veggies and plenty of butter. The Man tends to make lighter fare like skinless chicken and steamed veggies. I just put a ton of butter on it. The bulletproof coffee with the fish is kind of austere but I don't feel hungry. The total calories for the day is probably pretty low. But I feel great all day, energized, focused and not hungry.

I just ordered a bunch of pemmican from US Wellness Meats. I looked at making it myself but it looks too difficult. Pemmican is just beef tallow and dried meat mixed together. Theirs is not completely dry so you have to keep it refrigerated or frozen. Sounds like you can carry it for a few days in a backpack, so I figure this will make great backpacking food. You can eat it as is or melt it into a soup for dinner. Some people spread it on crackers. Apparently it takes a bit to get used to the taste. It was quite expensive. I hope that I like the taste.

Finally my hiking huaraches are dialed in

At long last my homemade hiking huaraches work.

I found these little buckles at Art from Scrap. I was able to loop one end of the buckle into the side strap piece with the leather lacing. It's at the inside, which would seem like a problem but actually isn't. Then I wrap the lacing around my ankle a few times, loop it through the front toe strap for security and buckle it in. No adjusting, no having it come untied. The buckle never touches my skin so it does not chafe and it's in the right place to give the sandal good lateral security. Feels really secure and comfortable.

I could actually cut off a lot of that extra lacing and simply slip the lacing under the front toe strap and then buckle and make these really simple. I had to order these laces and have not wanted to cut them yet in case I made a mistake and wanted them long again. Perhaps I will order another pair so I'll have a back-up in case I make a mistake.

Here's a close-up of the buckle:

These are not exactly minimalist huaraches. I purposefully used 1/4" of cushioning so that they would be more comfortable for hiking and for faster walking. In regular minimal huaraches I have to run to keep up with my friends and that gets annoying. To me the big benefit of the huaraches is no raised up heel and not having my toes be all cramped. Nobody makes shoes wide enough at the toes.

The other thing I have done is purchase a pair of Zemgear ninja booties. I usually wear my huaraches with socks when I am hiking because my skin chafes very easily at the side straps and sometimes between the toe. But socks pick up too many stickers and foxtails. The Zemgear booties are like thick spandex socks. They do add a bit more stiffness to the sole, but the idea would be to use them for backpacking. Our backpacking trails have a LOT of foxtails.

Here they are with my Zemgear nija tabis. They are sort of like thick spandex socks. There is a plastic sole on the bottom. I should have bought the indoor "wellness" version. Next time I will. So far they feel really cold when it is cold out. I hope they aren't too hot when it's warm out. I will need to see if I can wear socks with the tabi. Otherwise, they are comfortable with the sandals, feel secure like hiking boots and the plastic sole really doesn't bother me when coupled with the sandals. I even tried it with Dirty Girl gaiters and it works great. Can't wait to try these on a real hike.

How my diet is going

I haven't posted for a while. I am still following my low-carb primal diet. I have been upping my carbs a little bit with more sweet potatoes every now and then, maybe some bowls of frozen blackberries once in a while. Otherwise, I mostly eat meat and liver, chicken, eggs and fish, duck a couple of times, leafy greens, roots and other vegetables all cooked in butter or duck fat or ghee. I went a long time without losing weight but I think recently I may have started losing again.

The best part is how I feel. I feel amazing. I have never felt like this before. I feel calm with a radiant happiness inside me. I feel strong. I don't need to eat all the time and yet I have continuous energy that doesn't wane. I can go hiking on an empty stomach and eat after the hike.

Lately I've been making a special coffee for breakfast. I make espresso that has extra water in it, melt some ghee, coconut oil and baking chocolate in a mug. About a teaspoon of coconut oil and a little more than a tablespoon of ghee. Just a small amount of chocolate. I pour it all into a pre-heated blender and blend it for about 20 seconds. The chocolate helps keep the butter suspended and preserves the bitter flavor without adding sweetness. It's pretty good. I drink one of those for breakfast and eat my first meal sometime between 11 and 2. Lately I've been having sardines for lunch.

But back to how healthy I feel. It occurred to me that we started a national experiment in processed, industrial food way back in the 20s. My grandparents were the first to experience it. They had olio, which was a margarine, instead of butter. As we've gone on through the decades, our food supply has gotten more and more industrialized and manufactured. People eat a lot of sugar, a lot of fake fats and a lot of fake food that's been super-heated (ultra-pasturized) and otherwise compromised. They shun animal products for fake low-fat products.

In my grandparent's time, hardly anyone had type II diabetes. Now it's pretty common in people my parent's age. Both generations got it as adults. Now people who would be in my grandparent's great grandchildren's generation get it as children. There's a thing you see in animals where sometimes bad traits are induced in the 2nd or third generation by what a grandparent generation is exposed to. I think we are seeing that now in humans. Soon we will have a generation that is incapable of reproduction.

I think people have no idea how health really feels like. I certainly didn't. I thought I was healthy because I was able to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. I feel infinitely more healthy compared to how I felt on the trail. It is hard to convey. I will never listen to a modern doctor's dietary advice ever again. They are all wrong. They are all influenced by industries, by the drug industry and by the agricultural industry. We should all be eating saturated animal fat, meat and green vegetables. Stuff you can't make in a lab. Those animals should be raised to eat the foods and live the lives they were also meant to. We were never meant to live this way. This is why we get sicker every generation.

My hope is that we as a society eventually can't reproduce and this helps us realize the terrible mistake we've made with our industrial culture that is killing the planet with toxins and pollution and over-consumption. And those of us who have found the secret to true health can show the rest the way out. Maybe someday we will be able to live in a land with prairies of bison again instead of acres of oil-fed corn and soy that kills people and whole ecosystems.