Thought I’d throw another food update real quick. Can’t sleep anyway.

I’m now a week into Phase 3 of the Maker’s Diet. The last post I made was during the violent throes of Phase 1 after a busy week of shows and rehearsals. Well, I survived. Phase 2 was good because I got to add in a bunch of heavier foods that made my body much happier. Still had to fight a losing battle to get enough protein though.

I haven’t measured, but I know I lost a fair amount of weight and (for me) a significant amount of body fat during the first two phases. I was very close to dropping the diet when I noticed that. As it is, I just barely landed on the side of staying on the diet.

So now I’m in the ‘final’ phase. I think the diet suggests staying on the third phase as a life-long diet, but there’s no way that’s happening for me: 1) Budget 2) I like to bake things 3) It’s annoyingly non-specific.

1) Good food is expensive. Eating at this quality level is not sustainable for this (lately sometimes literally) starving artist.

2) I like baking – this diet does not. Being gluten-free makes this interesting – but actually more healthy in the long run. What is a disallowed ‘baked good’ when certain types of bread are allowed? What about baking with certain grains that are allowed?Sorry diet, my hobby wins out on this one.

3) Going through this experience was annoying in a few specific areas. There was a lot of research and argument presented for organic food, non-commercial agriculture and ancient eating habits. However, the diet guidelines were vague to my mind. More importantly, why was each food chosen to be in a given phase?

The diet almost casually mentioned pH, insulin, and inflammation once or twice in it’s several hundred pages – which, upon an annoyance inspired study binge, proved to be the major decision factors for each food. Low glycemic, mild pH and easy to digest foods were the only ones allowed in the first phases.

Once I knew the criteria for choosing foods, I had a much easier time making dietary decisions. The book is nice, but it doesn’t list nearly enough foods under the Eat/ Don’t Eat categories, especially when I have to look out for gluten-contaminated foods as well. The book also didn’t mention anything about portion sizes or meal composition, which would have been helpful. Aside from 4 days of suggested recipes for each phase, you were up a creek.

The good thing about all this is that I ended up figuring out that an unbalanced pH level was my primary issue. I was eating a fair diversity of foods but most happened to be on one side of the pH chart. Figuring that out, I managed to organize my meals so that I got my pH back on track and have noticed my most significant improvement since then.

Anyway, the final phase is pretty open. I finally get to eat grains again, which has reintroduced my beloved quinoa – the almighty source of vegetable protein and tastiness. Planning meals is much more simple and I have enough energy now to start adding back in all the extra activities I’ve intentionally cut out for various reasons over the last month. Noticeably, one of those activities is blogging.

I think it might be fun to post up a list of dishes I’ve learned to cook over the last few weeks. I’ve gathered quite a bunch. I’ve also been beefing up my baking database, so that should be a lot of fun once I can get back to it. I’ll see about getting to that a little later…

I’m finally getting sleepy, now. Sorry if you made it this far. I basically typed myself into oblivion tonight. Any and all spelling errors are the result of internet gremlins, not me. Grammatical and syntactical errors are arbitrary and bite me.

G’night!

Hey, the website was down for a while there. Everything’s back up and running now, hopefully better than before.

Look for new posts in the near future.

Wierd, I just realized that the last few posts that I thought I put up didn’t go up. Oh well…

So, one of the many reasons I haven’t put up anything here in a while is, of course, the fact that holidays take me out of commission for a while. However, holiday recovery has been accomplished for a while now and I still haven’t put anything up.

The reason has more to do with the fact that I haven’t been able to sleep well for months. I have actually no idea why this wave of insomnia has hit, I didn’t significantly change anything about my life when this started, strangely suddenly, in September. (Just woke up in the middle of one night without any trouble going to sleep before)

September was not a good month for insomnia to start, although possibly appropriate since we were rehearsing Dracula at the time. I though it might have something to do with that project, but the insomnia has continued well after the vampires went to sleep. Since then, it’s been varying in intensity for a while. I don’t have the problem where I can’t sleep at all, I do sleep. It’s more along the lines of waking up repeatedly in the night and a general degradation of the quality and type of sleep occurring.

You can imagine that this has had a detrimental effect on concentration and energy levels. Depending on how things were going on a given week, I was not a necessarily safe person to have around the studio for a while. People got bruises to prove it. The problem eventually drove me to try medicating myself (sleeping pills) which had mixed success. For those of you who know my aversion to consuming medication, that tells you how extreme the problem got.

Sleeping pills only shut your body down, which was apparently not my problem. I also apparently don’t like shutting myself down artificially because the first few nights I took sleeping aids, I fought them off and woke myself up, which was super-creepy. I also had trouble waking up because the pills keep you down for a certain amount of time, whether your body wants to be down or not.

So, on the advice of a neuro-biologist friend of mine (cool friend to have, I say), a few days ago I switched to using melatonin, which is the chemical your brain uses to tell itself to go to sleep.

Which brings me to why I’m writing today – I have energy! A couple days of going to bed because my brain tells me to is great. It’s still hard to get out of bed in the morning, but that is starting to fade as I get further from pill-induced habit.

Yay for modern science! Now I can see if the melatonin will get me into some good sleeping habits and I can go to sleep completely drug-free. Also, now that I have energy maybe I can try to figure out why I started having this trouble in the first place.

We’ll see.

This summer I started doing something… well that’s not strictly true, I’ve been jumping over/under/on things for a very long time. Maybe a better phrase is, “This summer I found a means to do something in a socially acceptable context.” Unfortunately, this is a long and cumbersome phrase, so I won’t use it.

Let’s try this: I joined a local Rochester community of traceur’s this summer. “What’s a traceur?” That’s the word French-speakers use to describe a person who practices parkour (also a French word – I guess the French get to name things that Frenchmen invent.) Parkour is a bit more difficult to define than traceur (and I kinda cheated with that one, anyway). You can check out the group here: Rochester Parkour

There are several ways to define parkour. First off, it’s a non-competitive sport. It’s all about community; pushing yourself and encouraging others to increase their ability. There are flashier spin-off sports like free-running that aim for more spectacular movements, but parkour focuses on efficiency and economy of motion. Parkour is also described as training the ‘flight’ portion of our ‘fight or flight’ response. Martial arts will train you to confront someone, parkour will train you to get away, unless you’re being chased by James Bond. In which case, your best course of action is to become an iconic arch-villain and hope to be resurrected in a future movie. (See the Casino Royale opening for a traceur who did not apply the appropriate response).

Aside from escaping super-agents, parkour has been a great addition to my life. I still love to perform and move with PUSH, don’t get me wrong. There’s just something about the lack of pressure with parkour that is very freeing. Freedom is the key word, actually. I’m free to have fun with it,the movement itself is meant to provide freedom in an environment and leaping up and off a 10-ft wall is probably the next best thing to flying.

And even though that last stunt may sound kinda dangerous, the guys at group (and girls, too) are very good at controlling the safety factor. You never do anything that you aren’t comfortable with, and there’s always someone around to watch you or help you achieve a new skill.

Oh yeah, the people are pretty fascinating, too. Most of the traceurs are local college students, which probably isn’t a great surprise, but there are also a lot of locals who spend their weekends and free time training. All ages,too. It’s a pretty cool thing.

I do end up with a higher number of scrapes and bruises than I would have otherwise, but I have yet to see or hear of anyone in our group picking up any injury worse than a sprained ankle. Plus, the scrapes are just added manly/cool factor: “How’d you get that nasty scrape?” “Jumping up a 10-ft wall and then Kong-vaulting over a 5 -ft long concrete block.”

Totally worth the 3″ scratch on my arm.

All photos are courtesy of Graham Musler. They were taken this summer during one of our training sessions at Manhattan Square Park.

Been busy for the past, oh, month. And by “busy” I mean, “without downtime and away from most telecommunication access.” Therefore, will write soon.