So What did I Eat?

Several people have asked me about what I ate on my 30-day clean Paleo experiment that helped me to bust through my stall. So I thought I would elaborate.

First of all, let me say I am a tall (6'3"), 50-year-old male. My goal weight is between 215-220 pounds. Also, I tried to keep it simple. I ate very palatable foods, but choices low on food reward. For example, steak, which is very palatable, but does not cause me to want more, as more rewarding foods do. So here is the menu.

Every morning, I ate two fried eggs (cooked in coconut oil) and either some homemade sausage or thick sliced bacon. Plus water.

Lunch was a bit more varied. I would often take a soup made with beef or chicken stock, that contained some meat, but lots of veggies and a safe starch (white potatoes or rice). I tried to have something made with bone broth every day. I would also take a salad, with tuna fish, olives, olive oil, and Balsamic vinegar. Sometimes, I would take a piece of meat that was leftover from dinner (e.g., chicken or ribs) instead of either the soup or salad.

For dinner, I would eat a piece of meat (beef, pork, chicken, salmon or other fish) plus vegetables. If I hadn't eaten a safe starch for lunch, I would also include a small sweet potato. The only condiments I used were salt and pepper.

I rarely snacked, but if I did, it was usually berries of some sort. Upon occasion, I had some herbal mint tea, unsweetened. And I made sure I drank adequate water.

In addition to all of that, I would eat two to three Brazil nuts per day, plus take liver pills. That is, frozen pieces of raw liver that I had chopped up into pill-sized shapes that I could swallow (thanks Chris Kresser for that great idea; I have a hard time with liver). I would also supplement with other vitamins, as per the Perfect Health Diet.

Whenever possible, I practiced intermittent fasting. Sometimes for as much as 24 hours, but mostly I would go 13 to 16 hours between eating. Once dinner was over (usually around 6:00 p.m.), I didn't eat anything else until breakfast the next morning (around 7:00 a.m.; later on weekends).

And it worked beautifully.

Liver and Onions

Yesterday marked a full week on the Perfect Health Diet, my new take on low carb living. Each day, I had been taking my multivitamin, eating three Brazil nuts, getting enough sun, etc., everything except... eating liver. But I committed to doing the Perfect Health Diet correctly, so, on the last day of the week, we made liver and onions.

And I lived to tell about it. Actually, it wasn't that bad. I followed Sally Fallon's suggestion of soaking the liver in lemon juice for "several hours" prior to cooking it, then cutting it into small pieces, as per the Nutty Kitchen suggestion. I cooked it outside on my Camp Chef stove in a cast iron skillet so as not to stink up my kitchen (we had visitors coming over after dinner).

Cooked this way, with lots of onions, butter and garlic, it was... tasty. And I discovered that my aversion to it was mostly psychological, probably leftover from my teenage years when I was a cook at Perkins Cake & Steak, where we cooked really smelly liver. I like pâté de foie gras, goose liver, and chicken liver pâté, so I wonder what my problem was with beef liver.