Jack is three years old, or at least he will be in a month. We had a check up today which included some shots. A couple quick pokes, and we were done. On to the cookies, bubbles and promises of stopping for milk shakes. Pretty soon, Jack was blaming the bandaids for his misfortune.
I am about 10 times Jack's age. I've been dealing with some bandaids of my own. After a long history of knee related injuries, I had, guess what, another knee injury. It wasn't anything major, requiring little more than rest and rehab. Thankfully, no surgery this time. It turns out that I was fighting against two universal truths; humans are not meant to weigh 500 lbs, and also not meant to lift 500 lbs. Even if there is two of you.

I strained my PCL lifting a rather large patient. No fall. No accident. Just a loud pop. Thankfully I was already in an ER when it happened. Now I am getting ready to start back to a workout routine, but I've been doing some reading in my down time, and I am also going to start doing a couple of things. First I am going to experiment with TIm Ferriss' 4Hour Body diet, AKA the Slow carb diet. It is simple in it's structure and doesn't even attempt to limit total in-take.
It works like this:
Rule #1: Avoid “white” carbohydrates
Avoid any carbohydrate that is — or can be — white. The following foods are thus prohibited, except for within 1.5 hours of finishing a resistance-training workout of at least 20 minutes in length: bread, rice, cereal, potatoes, pasta, and fried food with breading. If you avoid eating anything white, you’ll be safe.
Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again
The most successful dieters, regardless of whether their goal is muscle gain or fat loss, eat the same few meals over and over again. Mix and match, constructing each meal with one from each of the three following groups:
Proteins:
Egg whites with one whole egg for flavor
Chicken breast or thigh
Grass-fed organic beef
Pork
Legumes:
Lentils
Black beans
Pinto beans
Vegetables:
Spinach
Asparagus
Peas
Mixed vegetables
Eat as much as you like of the above food items. Just remember: keep it simple. Pick three or four meals and repeat them. Almost all restaurants can give you a salad or vegetables in place of french fries or potatoes. Surprisingly, I have found Mexican food, swapping out rice for vegetables, to be one of the cuisines most conducive to the “slow carb” diet.
Most people who go on “low” carbohydrate diets complain of low energy and quit, not because such diets can’t work, but because they consume insufficient calories. A 1/2 cup of rice is 300 calories, whereas a 1/2 cup of spinach is 15 calories! Vegetables are not calorically dense, so it is critical that you add legumes for caloric load.
Some athletes eat 6-8x per day to break up caloric load and avoid fat gain. I think this is ridiculously inconvenient. I eat 4x per day:
[...]
Rule #3: Don’t drink calories
Drink massive quantities of water and as much unsweetened iced tea, tea, diet sodas, coffee (without white cream), or other no-calorie/low-calorie beverages as you like. Do not drink milk, normal soft drinks, or fruit juice. I’m a wine fanatic and have at least one glass of wine each evening, which I believe actually aids sports recovery and fat-loss. Recent research into resveratrol supports this.
Rule #4: Take one day off per week
I recommend Saturdays as your “Dieters Gone Wild” day. I am allowed to eat whatever I want on Saturdays, and I go out of my way to eat ice cream, Snickers, Take 5, and all of my other vices in excess. I make myself a little sick and don’t want to look at any of it for the rest of the week. Paradoxically, dramatically spiking caloric intake in this way once per week increases fat loss by ensuring that your metabolic rate (thyroid function, etc.) doesn’t downregulate from extended caloric restriction. That’s right: eating pure crap can help you lose fat. Welcome to Utopia.
[http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/06/how-to-lose-20-lbs-of-fat-in-30-days-without-doing-any-exercise/]
Simple.
I like it.
I am going to see how it will mesh with the 4 lists of Alton Brown tonight. The big plus, though, is that it allows (in theory) for a lower level of physical activity while I get my knee back in shape.
This is why I call this blog Action Geeks. It isn't about mental prevarication about the bush. This blog is about doing, and about measuring and about being geeks with mud on our hands and grass stains on our knees.