Ten things I learned in Costa Rica:

1.    It is very hard to eat primal if you are relying on traditional Costa Rican food for sustenance.   The national dish is Gallo y Pinto (rice and beans).  Although the small, casual Costa Rican cafes tended to have meat on the menu, they mainly serve up a lot of sandwiches and other bready fare.
2.    It is easy to walk around in the rainforest for hours and never see an animal bigger than an insect.   But you won’t care because it’s worth it just to check out the incredibly huge moss and vine laden trees.
3.    There are a lot of wealthy American and even wealthier European, young twenty-somethings hanging around on the beaches down there getting stoned.  It seems that entire towns, complete with yoga studios and sushi, have evolved to cater to their trust funds.  Over time, some of these kids have presumably been cut off from financial support back home.  They have rubbed their stringy strands into dreadlocks and moved in.  Either out of financial necessity or else a deeply repressed sense of work ethic they have learned to weave friendship bracelets that they sell at impromptu ‘artisan markets’.
4.    It is possible for a leaf to grow the size of a large dog.
5.    I can no longer tolerate very cheap hotels.  Maybe some kind of switch gets turned off when you hit 30 or own a house of your own because back in college I used to do very well in hostels.  Now I really want my own bathroom and for there not to be any strange hairs on the sheets.
6.    Costa Rican coffee is incredible!  We had some truly amazing cups of coffee while we were there.  Disappointingly, however, if you buy some and take it home and make it in your own coffee maker it just tastes like regular coffee.
7.    Costa Rican women tend to be overweight.  Not any more than your average American but since the fashion there seems to be low rider jeans with tight- fitting shirts it was easy to notice.  In all honesty, I found this devil-may-care attitude towards rolls of abdominal flab sort of refreshing.
8.    In some parts of the world, monkeys really do swing impishly around bus stops and outdoor cafes eating bananas.
9.    While plane fare to Costa Rica is pretty reasonable, it is otherwise not extra-special cheap to be there.  Just something to think about if you ever plan to visit.  It was easy to spend $2 for a cup of coffee and $25 for a meal.
10.    A zip-line canopy tour is not really about exploring the rainforest canopy.  Instead,  it is all about the adrenaline rush that comes from flying through the air strapped to a metal cable.  I highly recommend it!

Various photos from the two places we visited outside of San Jose - Montezuma and Monteverde. Clockwise from lower left: me on a zip line, beach, suspension bridge, walking along the beach in my Vibrams, Dave and I sunburnt on a bus.

Before I started eating primal, I used to sit down with my cookbooks on the weekend and plan out each meal for the upcoming week.  I would make a detailed grocery list that included every ingredient I didn’t already have.  Then I set out on a mission to buy everything I needed as cheaply as possible.  In retrospect the meals seem disjointed.  They were not only disconnected from each other but totally irrelevant to the season: chicken enchiladas on Monday, stir-fry on Tuesday, spaghetti on Wednesday, etc…  Furthermore, it was exhausting!  I mean, some Sundays I just didn’t feel like spending hours planning meals and buying food.  Then, despite all my preparations, at some point in the week the inevitable happened: take out.  Chicken ceasar salad night would be pushed to some indefinite future date so we could collapse on the couch with a pizza after the kids were in bed.  Come Saturday I’d throw out a crisper full of rotting vegetables and start the whole crazy cycle all over again.

I’m doing a lot of things differently these days.  Obviously, vegetables are the foundation of my diet and I don’t include grains and starchy vegetables in my usual fare.  But aside from (although perhaps as a result of) these dietary changes, my entire approach to daily cooking and meal planning has changed.

First of all, I make it a point to buy and enjoy quality foods.  Americans spend proportionally less of their income on food than any other industrialized nation.  Since the money we spend on groceries is one of the most flexible portions of our monthly expenses, we naturally appreciate the idea of getting a bargain on food.  Unfortunately, coupons and store discounts are oriented towards the sale of processed food ‘products’.   And, as you might have heard lately, the meat from your average supermarket is of questionable quality.  I know most people just aren’t used to thinking about it this way, but it does seem a little strange that we would care so little about the substances we are literally putting inside of our bodies throughout the day.  I think this comes from a lack of understanding about the impact eating real food has on your health.  I’d rather live in a smaller house, drive a cheaper car, and forego a lot of comforts before I’d resort to feeding myself whatever is on sale that week at Kroger.  Oddly, I don’t spend that much more on food now than I used to.  This is mainly because I buy less and don’t waste as much.  I also stock up on good quality protein when I see an opportunity.

Second, when you pay $6 or more for a pound of beef, or get the red peppers yourself from an organic farm just outside of town, dumping a jar of Ragu Light Parmesan Alfredo Cheese Creations Sauce all over it just doesn’t seem right, even if you do have a coupon.  So, I end up making my meals from scratch, and an alfredo cheese sauce creation, under normal circumstances, is more trouble than it’s worth.  Instead of fussing with lots of different recipes, our meals tend to be simple, and focused on a few great-tasting components.  Steak, fish, shrimp with whatever vegetables we received that week from our CSA, some butter, some salt and pepper, a spice or herb, a simple sauce or pesto.  It’s good, it’s simple, and it never gets old because it is limitless in possibilities.  Eff you, Ragu.

Finally, I don’t do big weekend grocery shopping trips every week because if I want to do something else on Sunday afternoon, I’m not setting our family up for a week of drive-throughs and pizza delivery.  Luckily for us, our freezer currently contains 20lbs of ground moose and even more halibut that Dave’s parents killed and butchered themselves and sent us from Alaska.  But even in the absence of such a windfall, there’s usually some meat in the freezer.  For 5 months of the year, I get a lot of produce from our CSA farm share.  If we’ve got a pound of moose, a head of cabbage, and a few staples on hand, we can have a pretty good dinner.

In summary, here’s a rundown of how my old routine compares to my new approach:

Then: I wasted a lot of weekend time that could have been spent on more interesting activities.
Now: I go to the supermarket irregularly and less frequently and make quick trips to the little market in town when I run out of something.  I get to take my kids to a farm on Wednesdays to get our produce.

Then: Instead of having fun and being creative with my cooking, I was boring myself to death by executing recipes.
Now: We seldom eat the exact same meal twice.  Perhaps contrary to what one might think, making use of whatever we have on hand and keeping our meals focused on a few key ingredients allows me to be more creative and innovative in my cooking.

Then: In order to spare myself more boring time in the kitchen, I would buy processed convenience foods which weren’t healthy for me or my family.
Now: I can spend as little or as much time in the kitchen as I feel like because I am not beholden to a weekly plan that requires I make enchiladas on Tuesday no matter what.

Then: I was buying cheap food of questionable quality in order to compensate for having to buy such a huge diversity of ingredients.
Now: I buy higher quality food and I buy less of it.

Then: I was wasting food because I didn’t stick to my plan or the recipe didn’t call for all of what I had bought (green onions, anyone?).
Now: I waste less food because I don’t rely on recipes to use the food we have.

Now that I’ve said all this, let me be sure I am not giving the wrong impression of myself.  I probably sound more organized than I really am.   Sometimes I don’t feel like cooking and I give my kids cottage cheese and deli turkey for dinner.  Sometimes a bunch of green onions still rots in the crisper.  Sometimes I bust open a packet of McCormick Bearnaise Sauce Mix just because I can’t resist the yummy MSG.  My point here is that overall I’ve found a way to not only eat healthier foods but also increase the enjoyment I receive from preparing and eating while greatly simplifying related processes.

I believe that a lot of people will find familiar elements in my old routine because it is a common approach to mealtime management.  To be fair, my heart was in the right place.  I wanted to make delicious and interesting meals for my family every night.  I was making reasonably nutritious food and was trying hard not to rely on fast food or take out meals.  Turns out, there’s a better way.

That said, I am not interested in living up to an impossible ideal of healthy kitchen efficiency and I hope you’re not either.  What works for me might not be the same thing that works for you.  For that matter, I’ll likely be doing things somewhat differently five years out.   If I’ve given you an idea or two, then I’m happy.  Likewise, if you have tips or an approach to weekly meal planning (or un-planning as the case may be), leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you.

Pardon my absence as of late.  I haven’t been feeling like posting much mainly because I haven’t been cooking much.  Here it is the fall harvest season and I’ve done little more in the kitchen this last week than whip up a few meals for the kids and cut up a rotisserie chicken.  The reason?  In a very un-primal manner I have been drinking protein shakes for breakfast and lunch followed by a simple meat-based dinner followed by another protein shake.  I gave up whey protein earlier in the year when I decided I’d rather eat actual food following a workout.   But now I am, temporarily, subsisting off them as I conduct a 6 week experiment following the dietary guidelines in the Eades’ new book The 6 Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle.  The fact is, since starting this blog, I have put aside my body composition goals for the sake of expanding my primal cooking repertoire.  As nice as it is to know how to make a primal-friendly muffin or cake, I am generally better off without either.  So I am taking a month off from any serious cooking and am back to a regular weight training schedule.  Oh, and did I mention I’m going on vacation to Costa Rica next month?

For someone like me who spends a good portion of their time planning, procuring and preparing food, it can be a relief to devote attention to other endeavors for a while and just let someone else decide what’s for dinner.  And who better to decide than Michael and Mary Dan Eades, that friendly, low-carb husband-and-wife-doctor-team from Arkansas?  The Drs. Eades, authors of the NYT bestselling book Protein Power, are on-board with primal principles and from what I can gather, it is somewhat unusual of them to be recommending something like a protein shake in lieu of real food.  What they’ve devised is a high-protein regiment that supposedly gets the liver in optimal shape so that maximum fat loss can occur without the usual losses in lean body mass too.  By the way, I have absolutely no idea whether the Eades can back up their claims in the book with actual research.   I’ve read some criticisms that call it gimmicky.  I decided I didn’t really care.  Here’s how the diet works in a nutshell:

Stage 1 (2 weeks): 3 whey protein shakes a day and 1 meal consisting of protein and some veggies.  No caffeine, no alcohol (ouch!).
Stage 2 (2 weeks): 3 meals a day consisting mainly of meat.  Limited veggies, no dairy.
Stage 3 (2 weeks): Maintenance mode – your standard low-to-moderate carb diet.

Mark Sisson makes an appearance in their book, although I’m not completely sure why.  The Eades recommend an abdominal exercise called Laplace.  After describing it’s execution they show a shirtless photo of Mark and tell us that he achieved his current physique through no other abdominal exercise than this one.  Of course, not only was Mark Sisson never overweight but he also didn’t come to look the way he does by virtue of some funky sucking-in exercise… but whatever.

I am not yet middle aged (I checked!) and I also don’t have a lot of visceral fat so I may not be the target audience for this diet.   Even though I am already at a good weight for my height I still wouldn’t mind leaning out a little.  In less than 2 weeks, I’ve lost nearly 5lbs of scale weight.   I took into account an initial drop in water weight, so as far as I can tell – that’s real poundage.  So, yes, this diet ‘works’.  But just to be clear, there’s nothing magical going on.  Switching things up can help when you’re at a plateau, but there’s definitely some plain old calorie restriction going on here.  Also, in an effort to stay compliant with this temporary plan, my eating behavior has changed in that I haven’t been eating out, snacking, drinking, or partaking in small indulgences that I might not resist otherwise.  If you are interested in losing fat and are at a standstill, you might give the 6-week cure a shot.  I’ve also learned a few things, such as that I can survive without fruit and sugar in all of its forms (at least for a while), and that it might not be so bad to try intermittent fasting again at some point (hated it).

Once these shake weeks are over after Wednesday, I’ll be back to posting recipes.  After the two ‘meat weeks’, I’ll look forward to resuming my usual primal eating style – in Costa Rica!

I am most proud of my Quotable Quips entry. I’ve never felt particularly adept at writing tag lines or clever one-liners so I was very proud of myself when my entry received an honorable mention.  Dave thinks it would make a great primal t-shirt:

Stop killing wheat; eat more meat

I also entered the Show Your Lunch contest. The prize is a mace. I was pleased to discover that the modern mace doesn’t have spikes. If I win, I’ll be sure to post a video of my new garage mace workout. I took a picture for the Show Your Breakfast contest but in typical fashion, never got around to submitting it. Unbelievably, I did manage to enter the Show Your Groceries contest. I wish Dave could have been in the photo but he was at work and I felt I had to take advantage of the fleeting moment of motivation. Finally, I also entered both of the Primal Video contests. You can see my recipe video on the Garlicky Squash Fritters post and also on YouTube. Here’s my primal fitness video, which is also on YouTube.

My entry to the Primal Blueprint Health Challenge "Show Your Lunch" Contest - kielbasa, sauteed egglant and summer squash with basil

My entry to the Primal Blueprint Health Challenge "Show Your Groceries" Contest. Check out that basil plant!

I hope the Primal Blueprint Health Challenge is achieving its goal of motivating people to try a primal diet and approach to well being. Regardless, it’s been a fun distraction during these long, August days and an interesting glimpse at a diverse group of people.

Now on to a few other matters. First of all, please go to the 2 Blowhards blog for an excellent, recent interview with Mark Sisson. You may have to scroll down a bit to get to the interview as I am late in posting this link. To give you a sense of some of the funny and informative material in this interview, here’s a short excerpt:

Read the whole 2-part interview at 2 Blowhards.

Next, you may have noticed that I’ve started to include a few advertisements in the right-hand sidebar. I have gone through some trouble to ensure that the advertisements are only for companies and products that I trust and feel proud to support. Some of these advertisements can generate a small amount of revenue,  and others are just organizations that I support.  Writing this blog has turned out to be more time-consuming than I anticipated and it would be nice if it could contribute a little something towards groceries. If not, though, I’m having enough fun with it that I’ll probably keep writing it anyway!

Finally, I spent a good chunk of time yesterday experimenting with some new primal recipes!  Some were definite winners so check back soon for new recipes or, if you haven’t already, subscribe to This Primal Life via email or RSS to be informed of new posts immediately.

Ideas have been swarming around in my head for weeks about things I’d like to write about.  I even started making a list until Dave could get this site up and running for me.  Unfortunately, when it came time to actually sit myself down and write this first post, I experienced what I can only imagine is some bizarre form of blogger’s stage fright – which upon reflection is pretty pathetic since my readership is zero at the moment.

Before I get to my other ‘first’ for the day, let me tell you a little about what I hope to do with this blog.   I have been following the advice of Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple (albeit with a few jumps and starts) since the beginning of 2009.  Initially I just wanted to look thinner.  I had been lifting weights for a little while at that point and although I was getting stronger, I was frustrated that I wasn’t losing more fat.  I was researching this problem online when I stumbled across The Primal Blueprint.  It is a little hard to imagine now, but at that time I still held this irrational attachment to bread and pasta.  I couldn’t imagine eliminating them from my diet.  So, I started with small changes.  I decided I would only eat grains at one meal a day instead of three.  Once I started eating more closely to how humans evolved to eat I started losing fat at a much faster rate.   As a bonus, I started noticing all sorts of other ‘side effects’.  Most noticeably I had a lot more energy. I realize that ‘having more energy’ sounds like a tired cliché when describing the effects of a diet but I don’t know how else to put it.   It started to get easier to fit my workouts into my day because I had the energy and desire to do them.  Although I hardly recognized it at the time, I used to spend most of my time feeling pretty sluggish.  Now my body craves a physical challenge and I actually have fun doing hard physical work in the yard, or taking an impromptu run along a path in the woods.   Even more surprisingly, I started to feel happier.  I wouldn’t describe myself as unhappy before, but I certainly did not experience the enthusiasm for the day that I do now.   Don’t get me wrong, I still have my moments, but am much less prone to feeling overwhelmed by normal life events or else bored by the routine.  I also used to get really grumpy and irrational whenever I had to wait too long eat.   This doesn’t happen anymore.  Even if I skip a meal, I feel fine.  Hunger is no longer an emergency.

Eventually I stopped focusing so much on fat loss and become more motivated by the health benefits of primal eating.   Although I am still losing fat, The Primal Blueprint has become a guide for how I approach other aspects of my life too.  I have re-evaluated how I exercise, play, handle stress, and prioritize the most important parts of my life.   I hope that through this blog I can help spread the message of The Primal Blueprint while also sharing my experience of implementing its principles in my everyday life.

Green Smoothie

Now on to the green smoothie.  I’m not sure why it took me so long to find out about these.  Maybe its because I don’t tend to make smoothies very often, but it never would have occurred to me on my own to put kale in my smoothie.   Smoothies have traditionally been little more than a medium for whey protein in my life as I prefer to eat my food than drink it but green smoothies are going to be a great way to incorporate more of my CSA greens into my diet this summer.  I don’t know about you, but when I think “snack” I rarely think “spinach”.  Until now!

I was anticipating something slightly bitter or salad-y but this drink was light and refreshing.  Dave pointed out that you probably can’t go wrong as long as you throw in some banana but if you don’t want the added carbs, I think the almond milk gave it all the sweetness it needed.   Green smoothie variations are endless.  This one was pretty tame but I plan to incorporate some more exotic ingredients in smoothies to come.