I care about my health and I believe that what you eat makes a huge difference to your health over time. So I am very careful about what I eat.
I am careful to eat what I think is good for me rather than what tastes nice or what other people think I should eat. Most of the time, I reason that a moment’s enjoyment is not worth the consequences (I do let my hair down at Christmas, however).
So, I’ve given up more foods than I can count, I can’t remember the last time I had a piece of cake or a biscuit and I have been known to eat broccoli at breakfast time to get more green vegetables into my day. Weird, I know.
But I want to live a long life without being plagued by the so-called “diseases of civilisation”. I don’t want diabetes, I don’t want heart disease and I certainly don’t want to spend old age hobbling around with gout or hitching a huge belly over my belt buckle before I can pull my trousers up.
I don’t want to take so many pills that I rattle when I walk and I certainly don’t want to die of what Carl Lanore inventively calls “polypharmacy” (being given so many medications that your system just shuts down).
And I don’t want to be a human guinea pig for medications whose sole purpose is to keep certain levels of cholesterol within certain “acceptable” limits, while the same medications wreak havoc on my testosterone levels and cause memory loss similar to that cause by Alzheimer’s disease.
So I try to follow the paleo diet as far as I can. (For a great introduction to the paleo diet, you can check out Anna’s blog.)
However, I do have an Achilles heel. I confess that Just like Dan John, I like beer.
The three beers I enjoyed last Saturday. The one in the middle is brewed in Derby, which is not far from where I work. The one on the right is brewed in Oakham, Rutland, which is not that far from where I live.
I like beer too much
I know that beer is bad for me. Not only does it contain alcohol, which is basically poisonous, but it’s also based on grains, which are decidedly not paleo.
But I still drink it. Why? The same reason that you might tuck into a chocolate bar after lunch every day or take sugar in your tea. We have both decided that the short-term enjoyment we gain from eating or drinking something that is bad for us is worth more than the long-term benefits of not eating or drinking it.
But if you can get the sort of hallucinogenic enjoyment out of a chocolate bar that I get out of a pint of beer, then your pancreas is probably faulty. Or you’re five. And if you’re five, what the hell are you doing reading my blog? Go outside and play in the garden or something…
A damage limitation strategy
So during the winter, when it’s grim outside and we can’t go for walks in the evening, I maintain a damage limitation strategy of only drinking a maximum of three pints, two days a week. It’s usually Saturday and Sunday evenings, as I tend to do my hardest workouts on these afternoons and then collapse in front of a film. In the summer, I usually drink less than this because the weather and the light permit being outside more.
I also drink only darker ales, which are very bitter and have almost no sugar. You know that sugar is bad for you, right? But darker beers also supposedly have more resveratrol, which is good for recovery.
Will my strategy work? Only time will tell.
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