Hey Yo Matt: Ground Beef
Matt,
So I saw a while back you asked on PaleoNow for a new name for your “Dear Matt” blogs, so “Hey Yo Matt… is my suggestion. But my question is… Say I buy some 80/20 Ground Beef from the Publix and brown it a skillet then drain all the fat out. Then lets say I buy some lean ground beef (95/5) and cook and drain it the same way. How does the fat content of the 80/20 ground beef (after cooking) compare to the fat content of 95/5 ground beef (after cooking)? Also do you have a Jedi cooking techniques to reduce the fat content of not as lean types of ground beef.
We have a winner. I like Hey Yo Matt a lot more than any of the other ideas. You have to say it with a sort of Jersey accent. Like Rocky. Do it.
Isn’t that much cooler.
Ok, time for the question.
I think, and maybe this will require some form of Mythbusters testing, that even if you drain it you are going to have more fat in the 80/20 no matter what you do. The simple fact is that you are starting with less fat in the other one. Also, it would be hard to cook that much fat out of a fatty cut of meat without turning it into absolute shoe leather.
The second question sort of boggled my mind, but than I remembered that my buddy is not bombarded by my constant Paleo badgering like people at the gym are. So, let me say this again: Fat is good.
Fat is the building block of every hormone that your body releases. Without fat you cease to work as a human being. You either go into Rabbit Starvation and die or your body turns super catabolic and stops performing a vital function and than you die.
You need fat, but you specifically need essential fatty acids.
So, if you are trying to do this to reduce the amount of pro-inflammatory Omega-6′s in your diet to improve your Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio than that is a completely different conversation. Actually, maybe that’s what he was asking. I may have underestimated how annoying I am for a second.
Fat leaves meat when it reaches a melting point. This is where it becomes liquid (think the juicy part of a juicy steak) and can drain from the meat.
The higher the heat, the more liquid it will become. This also means that the drier the meat will become.
If you are really that worried about your fatty acid ratio than I think there are other ways to go about this. There is no point in eating meat that tastes like charred butt. Keeping a little of the sub-optimal fat is not the worst thing.
You just need to realize that you should not eat very fatty cuts of conventional meats for every single meal. Throw some fish in the mix. Supplement with fish oil.
This is not optimal, but its very practical. My Jedi suggestions would be anything on a grill would be the most efficient and best tasting way to reduce the n-6 heavy fat content of conventional meat.
The real key here is variety.
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Book Review: Peroidization
I finished reading this book weeks ago, but it was so information dense that I haven’t been able to blog about it until now. Not that I’m less busy now, but that I’m finally sick of seeing this book sitting on my floor as a reminder that I need to write about it.
First and foremost, this is a text book. It looks, smells, weighs, and reads like a text book. The full title is: Perodization: Theory and Method of Training by Tudor O. Bompa and G. Gregory Haff. It can be found on amazon here.
Each page in this book is information dense enough to require a full blog post. I will, over the course of time, blog in greater detail about some of the specifics from the book.
I read the entire book with the mindset of a Crossfit coach who coaches with a sport of fitness bias. Granted, that is not the majority of people that I work with, but that is what peaks my interest right now.
Bompa, for those of you who don’t know, was the Romanian weightlifting coach during the Cold War and was responsible for going all Ivan Drago on the Olympics and European championship with his lifters. The main crux of the book focuses on preparing athletes for a specific competition.
This sort of smacks in the face of the new sport that we are trying to figure out. There is no off season in Crossfit. At least not a formal one. Regardless of if you go to the Games, the Atlanta Affiliate League, or just to the 5:30 am class you are training and competing to your maximum capacity all of the time.
This is what leads to the great gains and rapid progress that we all associate with Crossfit.
Every other sport in the world has periods of base, building, peaking, and recovery. Crossfit is able to skirt around this issue because of the constant variance. Since we do not do the same thing everyday, we can eliminate the need for an off season by focusing on a different aspect of fitness.
Before the Garage Games in February, I listened to a talk from James “OPT” Fitzgerald about programming for performance. This book should have been a prerequisite for the talk and I’m glad that I took detailed notes because it all came back to me and more clearly.
People more and more are beginning to notice a plateau at about a year of Crossfit training. This is the time where they will either reach a state of adrenal fatigue or burnout. The other normal outcome is that the general programming will play to one of their strengths over another.
It is impossible for a gym to program to the best adaptation for both a novice with no training background who barely knows what the movements are called and an athlete with years of endurance training and no strength and a former gymnast with no engine.
This is something that the book addresses in it’s peroidization plan. Oddly, there is a period or block of training called general physical preparedness (which should sound really familiar). This is critical to the development of an athlete in their opinion. Its also the reason why American athletes are spending more time injured and preforming worse on the world scale now than the previously did.
A result of training a single sport (think a baseball player who plays in the summer, fall ball, takes pitching lessons in the winter, and starts again in the spring) is major imbalances and a lack of overall athletic development.
This is why Crossfit is so potent for athletes, it exposes their weaknesses and forces them to train imbalances.
The final thing I will say, is that it is becoming apparent that you can overstay your welcome in the GPP block and that is called adrenal fatigue and/or plateaus. This is the reason more advanced athletes will either follow individual programming or supplement their current programming with something they are bad at.
It will be nearly impossible to figure out how to do this to train for the Games until all of the kinks are worked out with the sectionals/regionals systems. Thankfully, we at least have training competitions such as the Garage Games which serve the same purpose as pre-season for the elite levels and gives scrubs like me a chance to compete.
Read MorePaleo Meal Grading Rubric-A Work In Progress
I was originally going to keep this under wraps until I could unveil a finished product. A few days ago I saw a twitter post from my RKC, Paleo-blogging, Georgia buddy Jenn about grading food logs and I figured I’d ask if she wanted to try it out.
The last time I did food log reviews, I took some flak for how I graded some meals. This was to be expected because everyone has a different set of food priorities and looks at things slightly different. It will always be more subjective than objective, but it should not be a random shot in the dark if we are trying to give people a good idea of what to shoot for.
Jenn sent back some really good ideas, and so I figured it would be best to make this project more open source. Especially since I started a few weeks (months?) ago and haven’t made too much headway on it.
So, to kick start this I want to do another round of food logs and use this grading sheet. It’ll be a fun and interesting field test. Hopefully, it will at least start a good conversation on the topic.
I definitely know that I don’t want to turn this tool into something that people obsess over or as a fancy excel-based means to give someone an eating disorder.
So, email me your food logs at paleonow@gmail.com and lets try it out.
Here’s how it works:
I’ve never tried to upload an excel file before, so let me know if it doesn’t work and I’ll try to figure out how to fix it.
So here are the big issues I’d like some feed back on:
1. Number of occurrences. There needs to be a quantifiable way to define how much you are getting. I think the standard serving size is a smart place to start.
2. Value assessed. Really, how much worse is gluten than zein or how much better is grass-fed than grain-fed. Obviously, this is way above my level and would take Manhattan Project levels of research to truly define, but I think we can reach a happy medium.
3. What did I forget. I’m sure there is plenty, so fire away.
4. Adjusting it for individuality. The Robb Wolf Fish Oil calculator does. This does not and its a critical failing.
5. Thoughts on the whole idea. Maybe its a dumb concept that should be abandoned and forgotten about. I don’t think so, because it sets a standard for people new to Paleo. Maybe its over complicating things or overkill on orthorexia.
Post thoughts to comments, facebook, twitter, my email, or burning effigies.
Read MoreIntegrity’s Revenge
I’m fresh off of an amazing (partial) weekend in Charleston, SC for Integrity’s Revenge. It was a very wild weekend and I wish I could have been there for the full thing.
I have been making a lot of poor life choices recently, and all of last weekend is pretty indicative of that. According to my car’s GPS, the drive to Charleston from Friar Drop Zone takes 9:30. So that’s a pretty long car ride to make just to do two WODs.
Other bad life choices: Jumping out of an airplane on a Saturday morning.
If only it were that simple. The Thursday before the competition, I worked a 24 hour shift doing my first graded patrols at Ranger School and Friday I had to do basic Airborne Refresher. Needless to say, by the time I landed feet-ass-head I was a little tired.
I made the trip in six hours (fast) without any stops and got there in time to do the workout on the Yorktown. I’m not only a Paleo and Crossfit dork, but a Military History major. Needless to say, all you needed to add was pretty girls and bacon and I was in heaven. (There was a girl with a fantastic squat butt wearing knee high socks that said “bacon” on them that I saw right as the WOD ended. I may have been hallucinating).
The atmosphere was amazing. I don’t know that I’ve ever competed in a venue with that much energy and certainly not in any one with that much history.
The workout was an 8 minute AMRAP of 12 wall ball shots and 5 ground to overhead at 155lbs. These are probably my two least favorite movements. I am short, so I hate wall ball. Also, I am weak in the shoulder area so the ground to overhead were hard. I split jerk all but my first rep. It was the right call, but slow and made me feel like a bitch when I saw the guys in the top heat touch and go snatching every rep.
I showed up too late to get an official score card. Well, I could have but I have a lot of empathy for the judges and event organizers following the Rumble by the River. I would have been like third or fourth from the bottom in that workout for RX men.
The Sunday work out was way more in my wheelhouse. It was a chipper of 60 box jumps, 40 hand release push ups, 10 deadlifts at 315lbs, 20 burpees, 40 GHD sit ups, and a 60m overhead walking lunge with a 45lb plate. I love chippers. Especially with lots of body weight movements and I high suck factor. I also like deadlifts because I am short and have long arms. I won my heat and had a pretty competitive time.
The crew from Crossfit Inception did amazing.
Erich Roberts took 8th and had a couple big personal records. Especially his 20lb PR in the overhead squat.
Meg and Jamie on Team HotXBuns took 3rd for scaled teams and Bill and Justin took 4th.
We also had a strong showing from our other RX male Ned, our RX Team Jesus Freaks, and Talon who was doing his first competition. I think he was in the top 3 or 5 for scaled, but don’t quote me on that.
Either way, I wish I had more time there. It had the most scenic venues and some of the hardest programming that I’ve seen in the Garage Games.
I love traveling somewhere new and connecting with old and new friends in some shared suffering. I almost didn’t pull the trigger on driving up, but it was more than worth it.
Read MoreRecipe Review: Offally Fantastic Paleo Liver Chili
Hiding The Liver
As perviously proven with many, many catastrophes I do not like the taste of liver and am a failure at cooking it. Its hard and I didn’t learn how to do it growing up. I’ve determined that until I acquire the taste (if ever) the best way to use this nutritional powerhouse is by hiding it like my Grandmother hid vegetables in the meatloaf.
So I was pretty excited when I saw Lindsey’s Paleo Chili Recipe. It used liver (I substituted chicken for beef because that’s what I had on hand). It also makes four pounds of food at with about forty minutes of work. So take that and shove it for Paleo being too time consuming.
So I made the chili and hoped that the taste of liver wouldn’t ruin the three pounds of ground chunk I bought.
It was delicious.
It’s lasted me for five meals. Its also provided dinner for my roommate and our friend Ben.
It has survived taste tests from the three of us, plus four Ranger Instructors who tried it. Even after I admitted to the presence of liver they admitted it was good.
So not only is it Paleo, but its basically Neanderthal tested and approved.
The recipe can be found here: Offally Fantastic: Paleo Liver Chili
I meant to take some good pictures, but instead I took these pictures:
A Good Amount of Hot
Into the Pot