Saturday, June 29, 2013

Happy gut bacteria and a New Life Plan

I've been pretty good about sticking to a Paleo diet lately, and decent about getting to the gym, but I'm starting to get frustrated. I've been feeling a bit stiff and sore, I pulled a muscle a few weeks ago playing softball—which has never happened—and it seems to me that I just might be gaining some weight.

(I didn't weigh myself to find out, since I've evolved beyond the need for scales, but this might be the type of case where it would be helpful to have that information. Not in an obsessed-with-the-meaningless-number kind of way, just in a clinical, detached, is-there-a-problem-here-and-what-can-I-do-about-it kind of way. You know.)

Anyway, I'd been thinking it might be time to experiment some more to see if what I'm eating really is the optimal diet for me, and just now I ran across this article: "Are Happy Gut Bacteria Key to Weight Loss?" Well, you know how question headlines work as well as I do. The answer is always, "Yep. Looks like."

A gross oversimplification of what I just read would be that the real culprit behind everything bad (including the bad things that are happening to me) is inflammation, and since your body is 90% bacteria, you would be wise to keep them not inflamed.

And so a gross oversimplification of my New Life Plan would be that I'm going to keep researching things that cause inflammation, and things that decrease it, and act appropriately. The first step is going to be to give the ax to dairy again. I'd convinced myself that it had no effect on me, but I think maybe that was just the cheese talking.

1 comment:

  1. I started to read this, but parts of it were "hidden" by a graphic and on the second page the first half type was vertical. I don't read vertical very easily and gave up. I sort of got the gist of the article but wasn't able to read its conclusion. I'll try again on a different computer.

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