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!

I’ve made it halfway through the second week of my diet and have discovered that I have very hobbitish qualities. Every time I sit down to have a meal, I do alright. Very yummy, filling and all those good meal-like things. The issue I’m having is that just as I put everything away, store all the goodies. I’m hungry again. Breakfast… 2nd breakfast! Whee!

Which brings me back to the Starflyer reference. The only album of theirs I actually have is called “Can’t Stop Eating”, which is currently my motto. From what I can figure (and from discussing this with a few others), basically my metabolism is asserting itself in the absences of certain foods.

The diet has been keeping me off of starches and complex sugars – which isn’t bad. But what those heavier foods do is give my body something to chew on. By eating only lighter foods for the past week or so, my body processes everything lickety-split and wants more. Instantly. Exercising ridiculously only exacerbates the problem. In fact, I screwed up my sleep schedule pretty bad by napping for several hours a day during the first week: exercise – sleep -eat – sleep – wake up – exercise -sleep – etc… It was pretty boring, let me tell you.

Everything else seems to be going great. I have to cook more, so I’m getting more used to making that part of my daily habits. The energy levels are higher, all that jazz. I’m just hungry all the time.

The second phase of the diet doesn’t add in all that many heavier foods, but there are some. I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to potatoes and bananas so much before.

Anyway, I just ate dinner about 30 minutes ago, so I’m hungry again. Time to go raid the fridge for some more berries.

However, I’ve been struggling with flagging energy levels and a few other issues even with the gluten-free diet. From what gluten-free friends and family have told me, the first year is a rough one. Your digestive system takes at least 6 months to repair itself from the gluten-poisoning – a mark I passed a few months ago.

The tough spot now is that most of the semi-healthy eating habits I’d developed over the years aren’t compatible with my new diet. Add the fact that over the last few years I’ve really upped my physical conditioning means that I need a lot more healthy food intake than previously.

Enter the latest effort. I’m trying a health diet called the Maker’s Diet. It goes through three phases meant to purge your system of toxins and re-balance insulin and pH levels. Also, it tries to instill good eating habits while the diet is in effect. The eating habits are the big draw for me. Getting rid of toxins – great. Finding ways to get my energy levels back up to normal – much better.

So, off I go. I’m starting to feel the detox effects – which bite. Hungry all the time because I’m trying to fit a health diet into an active dancer’s work habits. When the book mentioned exercise it had a grand total of 30 minutes a day. It also considered meditative breathing exercises as… well, exercise. Don’t think several hours of conditioning, rehearsals and performances count as meditative breathing.

Anyway. Should be all better in another week or so when the next phase kicks in. I can eat a couple more things then!

After 6 months of being gluten-free (minus periodic poisonings) I’m starting to realize just how sensitive my body is to environmental and dietary factors. Concentration, energy and mood are major factors that I can usually trace to inadequate nutrition. Contrary to my usual opinion that pain only means you aren’t trying hard enough, I’ve decided that I need to start looking at my long-term diet structure as means to fix these problems and get on with the other methods of delivering pain to myself (parkour anyone?).

A friend has recommended that I try the Maker’s Diet, which is based on what we know of Biblical diets and the failings of modern agriculture. The cincher is that this friend is also gluten-free and had other health problems that have been largely mitigated by the Maker’s Diet.

Now I’m not fully on board yet. However, the Maker’s Diet has this handy little 40-day experience thingy that’s meant to detox your digestive system and reset your body. I plan on giving that a try and seeing how things turn out. At the end, you end up on what is essentially the long-term Maker’s Diet. If it works well, I guess things speak for themselves. If it doesn’t, I’ve eaten really healthy food for a month.

The biggest item I hope to get out this is finding a way to think about nutrition in a more structured fashion. At the moment, I live by the “surrounded-by-health-conscious-people bachelor” code: i.e. I buy better quality ingredients, but still eat like crap.

We’ll see what cute hyphenated label I give myself after this

For the curious, the move was just down the road, but I ran out of funds to furnish the place until about 2 weeks ago. Two months of sleeping on an air mattress while working, training and performing will pretty much wreck your season.

Anyway, the place is furnished now and my back thanks me profusely. Things are sort of getting back in the saddle now – rather than hanging on to a stirrup and praying the ground is level. As I was thinking of updating this thingy I came across a poem that kind of speaks to me right now. Hope you enjoy:

The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure;
the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair;
the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring:
these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings.
If we refuse to hold them
in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain,
we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.

– Parker Palmer, from A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
<img src="http://jonathanlowery.com/files/2010/11/shadow-3.jpg" alt="Shadow" width="300/" /

via imonk

Look for new posts in the near future.

Basically, I can’t eat grain products anymore. It’s a genetic condition called (among other things) celiac disease. My sister was diagnosed with this a few years ago, so I’ve been on a semi-cautious lookout since then. Gluten is a protein found in grains that has basically gotten way out of hand since farmers invented cross-breeding to increase harvest yields. Over the past couple hundred years the gluten content of grains has gone nuts. We’re talking multipliers in the hundreds. The human digestive system isn’t designed to handle that much gluten, so an autoimmune disorder has arisen that basically destroys your small intestine – making you unable to absorb nutrients and and generally turning you into a sickly person.

A few days ago I was attempting to go to sleep after a rough day when the thought occurred to me that I was exhibiting a lot of the symptoms for celiac. In the morning I cut the grain products out of my diet and almost immediately noticed a difference.

I hadn’t realized how bad I had been feeling until today. When I woke up, feeling great, I thought to myself “Gee, I like feeling this good. Sure beats being sickly.” Then I ate a protein bar I thought was gluten-free. I was incorrect. Within a few minutes I started feeling the ‘sickly’ symptoms coming back and double-checked the label. Yup, trace amounts of wheat involved in the manufacturing process.

So now I’m embarking on the new diet. It’s a big lifestyle change, especially for a bachelor “starving” artist. The hope is that by switching over, I’ll regain a lot of the energy that I haven’t had for a few months now. Even in the few days I’ve been testing the gluten-free diet I’ve felt more alert and energetic. The improved mental state is awesome. We’ll just have to wait and see what sort of long-term effects the change has in store as well.

In conclusion: Big life change, but don’t bake me a cake to celebrate

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.

And now, over a year later, we’re in the final rehearsal stage for PUSH’s re-telling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Our version of Dracula departs from the original novel for mostly practical reasons. We don’t have the numbers to fill out Stokers’ main cast, much less all the supporting roles. We also don’t have a good way of staging a weeks-long cross-European chase with trains and boats. At least, no way that wouldn’t leave the audience catatonic from intense boredom.

The central liberty we’ve taken with the story is to tell it from the perspective of the madman Renfield. In Stoker’s novel, Renfield is a sort of motion sensor for Dracula, his actions parallel Dracula’s movement and desires. Renfield also serves a crucial plot point by becoming the weak link in the defense of the asylum he is housed inside. A local writer/actor and friend of ours, Danny Hoskins, wrote and speaks Renfield’s part on stage with us as we alternately become his nightmares, fantasies and actual characters.

(YouTube doesn’t seem to be working with me today. Video’s are here.)

On the spiritual side of things, Dracula is an interesting story to tell. There have been a lot of sidelong glances from many church friends who ask “Why Dracula? Isn’t it all about EVIL?” The short answer is: yes it is. Our ‘Dracula’ is a story about absolute evil. In a society where morality is more of an opinion than a standard, we felt this would be a particularly compelling idea. It breaks the social norm and makes our vampire story a bit different what pop culture is producing. It’s a conversation point, which is what we always hope will occur when people watch PUSH perform.

We’re pretty excited about Dracula, if you couldn’t tell. This is by far the biggest project we’ve ever worked on – the show is almost an hour long. It’s also a chance for us to merge the many worlds PUSH draws our art form from. The narrative of Dracula draws out our classical story-telling mime background. The horror element allows us to indulge the more extreme movement training. There’s even a moment where I get to bring out some of my old circus training and hang from the ceiling.

We’ve got more videos and pictures up on our Facebook page if you want to take a look (which I’m sure you do). We’re using social networking pretty heavily for this show, so there will be plenty of updates before the show goes up.

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.