One Man One Pan: Herd II eats fish and digs it
27 February 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Herd II is doing so well that I gave them off from weight training Sunday afternoon: these past two weeks of weight training have been a virtual progressive resistance rocket ride. Untrained individual under expert guidance are able to make quantifiable progress in every successive weight workout and this is mind-blowing for folks ignorant about fitness in general and progressive resistance specifically. It fires them up to improve those reps and increase poundage every session and see and feel those dormant muscles spout. I am working with seven new people and in each case the squat/bench press/deadlift poundage has gone through the roof. Body weight losses have ranged from a 14-day high of 22-pounds to a low of 5 with 10-12 being the average. Cardio is doubly tough on account of the inclement weather and the fact that most of these folks work real jobs and need to be to work by 7 to 8AM. Since it doesnt become light enough to see until 7AM, early morning outdoor cardio is pretty much out of the question. Eating is always the toughest of the three legs of the Purposefully Primitive Triad for heavy people to conquer. Last Sunday at the end of the training session I asked what aspect of the PP Triad they would most like to go over: it was unanimous; acceptable food meal preparation. Yesterday they all showed up ready, willing and able to weight train but I surprised them by announcing weight training would be cancelled and instead we would have a sit-down meeting to discuss where weve been, where we are at and where we need to get to. I began the dinning room table meeting by reiterating the 33-33-33 concept I discussed in detail in a blurb earlier in the week. Weight training is wonderful and they all were knocking the lifting ball out of the proverbial park cardio effort need be redouble, regardless the extenuating circumstance. Eating had to be tightened up. As Purposeful Primitives we eat more to lose weight and to shore up that counterintuitive proposition I related a snippet from an interview I had with a tough-as-nails Alaskan old-time bodybuilder named Lindsay Knight. He shared with me a metabolism analogy that will stick with me the rest of my life.
Living in a cabin in remote Alaska requires you heat with a fireplace. When you get up in the morning at 5:30 AM, the fire has burned down to nothing from the previous night and its chilly. You look in the fireplace and the only thing you see is orange embers. So the first thing you do is put a log on the embers to rekindle the fire. That gets the fire hot and gets the cabin warm. Think of the first log thrown onto the embers as breakfast after a night of sleeping. All the fuel from the previous day is about expended and eating breakfast is like throwing a log food fuel into the fireplace. Then, in around 9AM you throw another log onto the hot fire. If you throw a log on to an already hot fire, the new log catches fire quickly and burns completely. Think of that second log as your second meal (or feeding) of the day. By eating that second meal the metabolic fire stays consistently hot; there is little if any waste and the cabin the basal metabolic rate stay elevated. You repeat this process at noon, 3 PM, 6 PM and perhaps at 9 PM that night. The next morning you might feel lazy and dont bother to get up at 5:30 and throw that initial log on the fireyou just lounge around the cabin in bed and by noon the fire is totally out, not even a single ember remains. Now you have a cabin thats 10-degrees. Its freezing so you throw three logs onto the fireplace and have a hard time starting the fire. When the fire finally starts burning it burns inefficientlythe fire burns the logs but while the ends of the logs burn and drop off, the centers of the three logs remain intact.
This is analogous to skipping the first couple meals of the day then loading up with a huge amount of the wrong kind of food because youre starving. Since its not a steady series of feedings, rather a triple serving of bad food all at once, the excess, that portion of the logs that did not burn completely, ends up stored as body fat. Compare the two days: the first day in the cabin the fire was consistent and the cabin stayed warm all day. The second day the fire was either totally extinguished or blazing hot. It burned but burned in an inefficient fashion. On day two you didnt burn near as many logs, the cabin wasnt very warm, you had a lot more waste left over and you didnt have a consistent fire.
This wonderful analogy explains perfectly why you need to eat in a regular and methodic fashion. Lindsay explains in plain-speak.
The body is like the cabin: the stomach is the fireplace that heats the body. The logs are food that you burn and the resulting combustion is body heat the heat is the metabolism, the metabolic rate, metabolic heat, and thermogenesis. To keep the metabolic rate elevated you have to stoke the fire continually. I personally eat nine to eleven times a day!
If there has ever been a finer homespun analogy as to why we need to eat often, Ive never heard it! So I herded the Herd into the kitchen and told them that I would prepare a mountain of seafood and fibrous carbohydrates inside 30-minutes using a single pan on top of the stove. I placed a huge chunk of salmon into the non-stick Teflon skillet over high heat. I took the extra-light olive oil right to the 375-degree smoke point. Id peppered the salmon filet with Paul Prudommes Blackened Redfish seasoning and seared both sides. I covered the skillet for ten minutes, BAM! The fish was ready for plating. The outside was crisp and delicious while the innards remained moist and succulent. Into the remaining oil, now mingled with that great omega II fatty acid drippings from the salmon, I slid a boat load of broccoli crowns, minced red onions, mushroom slices, red and yellow sliced bell pepper, four minced garlic cloves, a jalapeo pepper and a handful of spinach. Keeping the heat red hot, this sultry mixture was done in ten minutes stirring with a wooden spoon often. I splashed the fibrous potpourri with dose of balsamic vinegar with a minute to go. I plated that gigantic panful of veggies and immediately threw into the same skillet a pound of tiger shrimp still in the shell. Those babies turned red inside a few minutes and were done and ready. Total elapsed time for a mountain of salmon and shrimp plus a heaping helping of fiber carbs was 24-minutes. The smiles on their faces said volumes and that predictable refrain I never get tired of rang out, This is too damned good to be diet food.
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