Sunday...

We went to Whole Foods late yesterday afternoon because I decided that I really wanted a slice of their cheesecake and D wanted to pick up something to grill for dinner. We went through the huge meat department oooing and ahhhing at all the possibilities, me still on my anti-red meat kick.

Me: CHICKEN.

D: BEEF!

Me: Mmm, chicken.

D: Mmm, BEEF!

Me: Did you SEE that movie? I can't stomach it!

D, to the WF meat specialist a few feet away: Pardon me, madam... (ok, he didn't really say that, it was more like Hey, lady... because he is oh so charming...) Are you able to tell me and my wife how these animals died and how they were treated while alive?

Meat Lady: Certainly! We have a strict policy about only selling humanely treated animals. Most of our selections are free range, and the cows are put up in the cow equivalent of a penthouse suite where they have room service twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. They are then lead unsuspectingly to a quick, virtually painless death and are not traumatized beforehand in any way....

She went on to talk about how for their pork products, the piglets are kept with their mothers rather than separated, and it was at that point that I mentally stuck my fingers in my ears and shouted lalalalalalalalala I CAN'T HEAR YOU!, all the while nodding my head intensely. Which, I DO care, I just can't handle the truth. Just hearing her say the word piglet (Wilbur!) (Babe!) made me scratch bacon off my list of yummy foods.

I went to their website and sure enough, they have wonderful policies in place that make me feel much better about eating meat. I wanted to explain all that before telling you that I had the most delicious pepper-crusted sirloin steak ever for dinner last night. Happy, humanely treated animals really do taste better. Anyway, I think I'm going to only purchase meat from Whole Foods from now on because they actually care about animal welfare. That's really important to me. I definitely won't be buying this shirt anytime soon, but I'm not giving up red meat afterall. I'm just going to be super picky about where I buy it.

::

From a comment on my last post:

I'm curious, but does PN require you to measure and count everything and are you working out 2 hours a day? That eat every 3 hours never worked for me and I'm finding as I get older I can't pound myself with the extra cardio.

Sort of and no. I weigh/measure things like nuts, oil and nut butter (doesn't that sound perverted? Nut butter? Heh.) because they are high in calories, delicous and very easy to overdo. It's really not necessary, though. You need to learn what proper portion sizes are, but that's true for any diet plan, and I think it's good for people to measure things out from time to time to see what a true serving is. Otherwise eyeballing your food is fine. No need to carry around a set of measuring cups and spoons or anything.

And no, oh holy hell no, I hardly have time to put on make-up in the morning, let alone work out 2 hours a day. That sounds like hell to me, a real recipe for burn-out and disaster. Working out that much can actually work against you metabolically, and it increases your risk for injury as well. I do 20-40 minute cardio sessions 3-4 times a week, and weight training for 60-75 minutes twice a week. The trick is to make every single minute count so that no time is wasted. At my gym there are always people on the cardio machines puttering away for 60+ minutes but barely breaking a sweat. I come in, push myself as hard as I can (you have to DIG DEEP!), and leave 20 minutes later soaked in sweat and red-faced while the other slow and steady cardio bunnies have another 40 minutes to go. If you push yourself and use high-intensity interval training, you can get a lot done in very little time.

As for eating every 2-3 hours, the science behind it makes total sense to me, but even if it had no effect on fatloss I would continue to do it. I have energy through the roof because I'm constantly nourishing my body, and as someone who JUST.LOVES.TO.EAT, it's perfect. The trick there is making sure you're not eating 5 or 6 giant "normal" sized meals each day, but 5 or 6 balanced mini-meals of around 200-300 calories each instead. I can't imagine eating any other way. My mom is naturally a grazer and I've always thought that was pretty cool. :)