So far so good...

Well, it's awfully nice to still be noticed after my long absence. MoMR commented, April noted my reappearance in her blog today. I half worried that I'd fallen off everyone's radar because of my long silence.

I'm sure my initial posts will be a bit dull, since I'm basically working to psyche myself up to vigorous CRON practice, so I'll be focusing a lot on my food, and less on my Gratuitous Musings. Beside, I can't write those on demand--they are the result of something hitting me in a certain way that I simply must write about it.

So if you are in the mood to be bored, here's how my Re-CRON-ized life is starting out today:

I had my usual favorite breakfast, which I'm not sure if I've ever listed, so here it is:

Chris's Breakfast Smoothie

• 1 cup egg whites (pasteurized, from Trader Joe's)
• 1 cup fat-free yogurt
• 1 cup frozen blueberries
• 1 scoop vanilla Spiru-Tein (more on this below)
• 1 tbsp flax seed oil
• 2 rounded tbsp Lewis Labs brewer's yeast
• 2 tbsp psyllium husks

Nutrient Info for Smoothie

General (33%)
Energy	620.7	kcal	34%
Protein	65.4	g	48%
Carbs	64.7	g	30%
Fiber	18.4	g	48%
Fat	15.3	g	25%
Water	461.2	g	12%
Vitamins (91%)
Vitamin A	5080.7	IU	169%
Folate	496.7	µg	124%
B1 (Thiamine)	2.8	mg	235%
B2 (Riboflavin)	4.7	mg	359%
B3 (Niacin)	31.2	mg	195%
B5 (Pantothenic Acid)	12.1	mg	242%
B6 (Pyridoxine)	3.0	mg	229%
B12 (Cyanocobalamin)	7.3	µg	306%
Vitamin C	66.3	mg	74%
Vitamin D	400.0	IU	200%
Vitamin E	33.1	mg	221%
Vitamin K	25.7	µg	21%
Minerals (74%)
Calcium	629.4	mg	63%
Copper	1.1	mg	125%
Iron	6.9	mg	86%
Magnesium	171.9	mg	41%
Manganese	5.3	mg	229%
Phosphorus	463.9	mg	66%
Potassium	1564.5	mg	33%
Selenium	138.0	µg	251%
Sodium	714.6	mg	48%
Zinc	18.0	mg	163%
Lipids (30%)
Saturated	1.5	g	8%
Omega-3	7.4	g	464%
Omega-6	2.0	g	12%
Cholesterol	2.7	mg	1%

Some notes about this meal: yes, it's pretty high in calories, and the Spiru-Tein ups the carbs more than I'd like, but it also ups the protein, vitamins, and minerals. I've also used whey protein in the past--or just left it out altogether. It also functions as a supplement for vitamins and minerals, which if I'm supplementing, I prefer to take with food and an oil (the flax oil here), for better absorption.

I should be more sophisticated in my supplementation approach, and somewhere I have notes from Michael Rae on how to do this better, but right now I just don't have the time nor energy for it, and it's more important for me to get started and ease my way back into CRON.

Also, I am never hungry in the morning. This is a meal I can get down, because it's a liquid and mildly sweet tasting. I'm no good for chewable food until late mid-morning. I think coffee is somewhat responsible for my a.m. "anorexia" since it's an appetite suppressant, but I am unwilling to give it up--and it has niacin!

For the rest of my day: I'm eating more fruit right now than usual. Why? Because about half the time, I work outside in the sun all day, and my appetite is not good in these circumstances, while dehydration is a real risk. So today's food, which I've been grazing on all day is: an apple, a grapefruit, 400 g of wonderful cantaloupe from my local farmer's market, some almonds, some white-meat chicken, and 10 g of 85% cacao chocolate.

It's 2:45 pm, I've been munching all day and still have the melon left to devour, and then a whole dinner still tonight! It's amazing how much food you can cram into a calorie-restricted diet. I can't imagine why people eat low-volume, calorie-dense foods when they are on a weight-loss diet. No wonder they are hungry all the time. I bet 90% of my food is 90% water--and I'd say that's a good approach. Granted, CRON is not necessarily intended as a weight-loss diet, but still, if you DO want/need to lose weight, is there a better way?

Tonight I'm cooking up a bunch of veggies on the grill that I will eat on all week long (yes, I'm aware there are some unfriendly compounds produced on the grill...I'm willing to risk it for the taste, at least this week when I'm craving barbecued pulled pork and worse nasties!). And I can hardly wait for tonight's dinner! I'll make wraps with the grilled veggies and my previously mentioned whole sprouted multigrain Fat-Flush tortillas, a Quorn Naked Cutlet (jauntily sliced on the bias), a couple tablespoons of guacamole, and just a smidgeon of Sweet Baby Ray's Barbecue sauce. Delicious!

All of this will get me very close to my 1800 calorie goal, but I'll be short on protein. This seems ever to be the case for me--I have a hard time getting enough protein, and I don't like egg whites much (except uncooked in my smoothie). A calorie goal of 1800 might be too low for someone my size, but that was my target before and I was hardly withering away. I have proven to be resistant to weight loss in the past. I will be all too happy to increase my caloric load in a few days if I start melting away. I can hardly wait to eat dried figs with goat cheese...but I'm gonna wait until need 'em! I'll check in again later.

Supplementation, Redux

Did I really get a comment on my blog from Michael Rae? Isn't that like a bike racer having Lance Armstrong comment on his blog?

It seems all I need to do is propose a reckless supplementation program to get individualized attention!

His response was so thorough that I felt compelled to repost his initial recommendations for anyone who is reading my blog and maybe didn't read the comments. Also, I'm finding it difficult to do much original posting now that the semester is in full swing AND I'm working. I'm also not eating as well--I'm having "growing pains" as I figure out how to do CR on the run. I do believe establishing that "quotidian diet" will help with that. And the MegaMuffin!

The good news, I suppose, is that my weight loss stopped, and that's good while I figure out what I'm doing. No sense melting away at too fast a pace for good health and longevity.

MR says:

Congrats on doing this carefully, supplementing nutrients that you need based on detailed nutrition analysis rather than just shotgunning everything. Do have a look at the following for some principles for supplementation:

• CRON-WEB's Definitive Guide to Supplementation
• Lates Science in Vitamin & Mineral Research

... and the products based on this research (whose writeups give much of the above info in more compressed form):

• AOR Essential Mix
• AOR Multi Basics 3
• AOR Orthocore

See my important disclosure here:

http://lists.calorierestriction.org/pipermail/crcomm_lists.calorierestriction

[link currently broken :( ]

Wow--thanks MR!

Supplementation

Sorry I've been quiet the past couple of days. Just busy and/or tired. Today's entry will be dull, I'm afraid. No Gratuitous Musings today (though I have a a few in the works, so stay tuned).

I've decided, after a few weeks of CR, that it's time to add supplements to my routine--but just a few. I never knew much about vitamins and minerals because I never really paid much attention to what I was getting from my food. Food labels would have you believe the only things you need to pay attention to are Vitamins A and C, and the minerals Calcium and Iron. Sodium is the only mineral labels report by actual number of milligrams, while the rest just give percentages that may or may not reflect my needs.

Like most people, I always assumed that I was getting everything I needed if only because of the sheer volume of food I was eating (wrong), much of it artificially enriched.

What nutrients have I been lacking?

Like every other aspect of my eating routine, CRON-O-Meter has radically affected my understanding of my micronutrient needs and intake, and revealed some potential problems:

• Vitamin D: Unless you delight in eating sardines on a daily basis or consume large quantities of fortified dairy products, it's extremely difficult to get adequate vitamin D, and recent list chatter suggests this vitamin is more important (and required in greater quantities) than we have thought in the past.
• Zinc: I never knew before that men require so much more zinc. It's roughly analogous to a woman's need for iron, and like women, related to our reproductive equipment. But I'm not happy to eat oysters every day (or any day, really...I have not yet acquired the "taste" for these snotty little globs of grayness).
• B's: I regularly find myself short on various B vitamins, but never the same ones, so determining one that I'm typically short on was impossible.
• Biotin: While it's extremely unlikely that I am biotin deficient (especially since I've given up on my recent "discovery" of using raw (pasteurized) egg whites in my breakfast smoothies, when I read the list of symptoms, I had to acknowledge that it got my attention: hair and skin problems similar to ones I regularly experience. (I still wonder of pasteurization makes it safe for biotin: cooking egg whites denatures their protein in a way that prevents its binding to biotin, but since the pastuerized egg whites won't "whip up," I wonder if the process also makes them safe for biotin. I don't know how I'll figure out the answer to that one.)

How did I decide which nutrients to supplement?

I reviewed CRON-O-Meter nutrition reports that averaged my intake over the period that I've been doing CR, and looked at which vitamins and minerals were lowest, especially below 80%. This included the following:

• Various B's (occasionally)
• Vitamin D (regularly)
• Vitamin E (occasionally)
• Potassium (regularly)
• Zinc (regularly)

Some others that I suspected I was low in were actually quite high on average. The only ones that remained low were zinc, Vitamin D, and potassium.

I decided that it was most important to supplement Vitamin D and Zinc; probably safe to supplement B's with a B complex (just to be sure); and to tweak my quotidian diet to fix the vitamin E and potassium deficiencies, which was pretty easy to do with a little attention and a daily MegaMuffin.

Here, then, are the supplements I am now taking:

• Vitamin D, 400 IU, from fish liver oil
• Chelated Zinc, 50 mg
• B-Complex
• Biotin, 1000 mcg

I'm interested in any tips and/or advice, and especially if I'm making any big and/or dangerous mistakes here. I'm especially concerned about zinc--is this the best form? What about balancing it with copper--that's something I don't understand very well yet.

It's a learning process, and I want to treat supplements as something very specific and deliberate, rather than the "one a day multi" approach most people take.