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!