Why I could never be a vegetarian!
15 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in My Training Updates Tags: Beef, Eating, food, Laverstoke Park Farm, Meat, protein, Steak, Sunday roast, Vegetarianism
I love meat - right from the start lets just nail my colours to the mast. I have always enjoyed meat, my family are meat eaters (my 
brother briefly flirted with being a vegetarian for a couple of year but he came back to the fold!) and my children both love meat!
Long before I started trying to eat healthily or getting fit meat was always a staple part of my diet but, in reality it probably consisted mainly of chicken and the odd piece of beef when my parents cooked a roast dinner. I was never that keen on steak – I would always have salmon rather than steak – and whilst I have always enjoyed meat, a full varied meat-eating diet wasnt a high priority. To be honest, I was kind of sick of the sight of chicken we had it so often!
So, when I tried to eat healthily, my protein consumption from animals was pretty poor at around 40g per day and I was eating dairy and a few nuts to try and compensate. When I upped my protein intake to around 80-100g per day and started HAVING to eat protein at every meal I rediscovered my passion for meat and now I am a complete convert – given a choice I would rather have a nice hunk of beef than almost anything else.
This week I took the levels of yumminess from ordinary standard beef to another level when I discovered some fantastic grass-fed beef; there is a farm near my parents called Laverstoke Park Farm which sells the most amazing grass-fed beef but also sells free range organic pork, lamb and chicken and I am completely hooked!
The steak I had on Friday from there was probably the best, tastiest, piece of beef I have ever eaten and knowing how well the animals are looked after, how much care goes into the production of organic, grass-fed beef just makes it taste even better. I also bought an organic free range chicken as well and in all honestly it looks nothing like the bland anaemic looking birds you see in the local supermarket – just writing this is making my mouth water!
Meat in general is now centre stage in my diet and I probably eat steak at least three times a week (usually for breakfast); I love the protein hit I get from a good piece of beef and I am slowly widening the variety of meats I eat – saying that, I just can’t stand the taste of roast pork so that will not be making a reappearance, yuk!!
One of the reasons behind my newly discovered passion is that the more I learn about food, health, diets etc, the more I understand 
that the foods we should be eating are the ones that are unadulterated and the ones that we genetically evolved to consume. Part of our evolution did not involve eating white bread or grains (they are relatively recent additions to out diet) but we developed to eat meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, nuts and berries and they should form the cornerstone of our diet. We evolved to be able to run at a high intensity for brief amounts of time, to run slowly or walk for great distances and to be able to handle periods of intermittent fasting or no food.
All of which is about a million miles from the average western diet which is packed full of highly processed foods, steeped in sugar, preservatives and chemicals, with little or no actual nutrition – combined with a highly sedentary lifestyle it really is no wonder that we have such an epidemic of obesity sweeping the western world.
Rant over (for now) off to go and enjoy a nice buffalo steak and some salad!
What’s for breakfast?
10 Apr 2012 2 Comments
in Blogs from other people, Diet and Nutrition Tags: Breakfast, Charles Poliquin, Health, protein, Steak, weight loss
A while back I posted about good breakfast choices and my change of eating habits from carb based breakfasts to something including more protein Steak, chicken or salmon for breakfast?
It took a bit of a mental adjustment to start eating animal protein that early in the day and I know other people find it really weird that I love steak for breakfast (people expect you to eat sugary cereals as if that’s what we are MEANT to eat – I mean what did we eat before Sugar Puffs were invented???). Have just seen a recent Charles Poliquin post on the subject of breakfast The Meat and Nut Breakfast and its good to see a post advocating a high protein breakfast and outlining the things that I love about it; it keeps me fuller for longer but I feel so much sharper and alert and for longer.
Had my steak, eggs and broccoli this morning…yum!!
Like this:
Steak, chicken or salmon for breakfast?
20 Feb 2012 3 Comments
in Diet and Nutrition, My Training Updates Tags: Breakfast, chicken, Clean and Lean Cookbook, diet, Eating, fitness, healthy eating plan, James Duigan, protein, salmon, Scrambled eggs, Steak
At the beginning of my diet, health and fitness search I wouldn’t eat breakfast at all thinking that I was saving calories and convinced that I ate less overall by not eating first thing. The days when I did actually manage to eat breakfast were when I had been awake for hours and breakfast would usually consist of yet another cup of coffee accompanied by (on a good day porridge with butter and sugar) or on a bad day white toast, crumpets or something similar. Always followed up a couple of hours later by something sweet and hoping I could just get through until lunch!
A very early change to my diet was getting my head around the concept of eating breakfast (a) at all and (b) within an hour of waking up both of which were a real challenge to the way I thought about food. I have been slowly changing my diet over the last year and trying to get better at eating clean – I never ate lots of processed food or ready meals but the culprits for me were flour (in anything from bread to pasta), white rice, potatoes and obviously sugary stuff.
