The Tripe Ration

Day Thirty: diet complete. The Whole Thirty has been vanquished. It’s been a rough thirty days, but this just goes to show you what grit, determination, and fighting spirit can do for you.

I imagine there may be certain pressing questions being asked by the faithful readership right about now, among them such gems as “How much weight did Matt lose in total?” and “What are you going to do now that you’re free?” and “Wasn’t yesterday Day Seventeen?” This last one I feel deserves some slight attention. You see, as I explained to you previously, time dilation effects are in play here. What we have is a serious gravitational field in the vicinity of the Whole Thirty diet, caused by the immense vacuum in my interior. When I realized that time was actually passing more swiftly for those outside the effects of the field than it was for me, I thought immediately of my blog and knew that in order for these posts to make any sense I would have to compensate for the time differential, as the day count would not correspond to that being kept by those following along at home. Doubtless the differential was already in play and you’ve been confused all along why I was calling day twenty a mere twelve and so forth. Thus, via the careful application of advanced mathematical calculation and a bottle of wine, I have determined that this instant in time is the correct one on which to post the Day Thirty summary.

My summary of the Whole Thirty diet is that it is a crock. It did not cure heartburn, it did not make me feel like a tiger, and I officially class the proponents of this madness alongside those runners who claim that running makes you feel good. I agree entirely with a good friend who expresses the candid opinion that most of the alleged health benefits gained by our paleo ancestors was not from their diet but from their habit of alternately chasing and fleeing from sabre-toothed tigers.

Unfortunately, it seems that I’m not yet entirely in the clear, because now my personal medical advisor has a new dietary plan for the treatment and cure of my pernicious heartburn. It has now become apparent, to those looking in the right places, that taking heartburn medication for the rest of my natural life will unduly shorten it via cancer, or ulcers, or salmonella, or some such disorder of the inner workings. Thus, it’s time for a new quacky diet to manage heartburn! This one is called FODMAP, or FODCIAKGB, or some such acronym which I have difficulty remembering. I couldn’t quite follow the details the first time through as they were explained verbally and rapidly by my medical advisor, but I believe the gist is it’s like Whole Thirty but you swap some fruits and vegetables for sugar and cheese. And on top of that, I’m taking some more pills filled with hydrogen chloride and pepsin (whatever that is) and I’m practically awash in apple-cider-flavored cleaning product and vitamin B solutions. The bottom line is that I’m still not allowed to eat any grain products, but I can (and did) consume two chocolate-dipped cocoa-nut patties this evening accompanied by a glass of wine. The ideology behind this diet also encourages fermented foods, though while hops are thoroughly approved of (as a bitter aiding digestion!), beer itself remains conspicuously absent from the recommended eating list. I feel like the omission of this most noble fermented beverage is a frequent and curious oversight amongst these fad diet practitioners.

I’m not actually sure what weight this Whole Thirty diet has cost me because my wife informs me I must weigh myself first thing in the morning and I keep forgetting to do so. I think it fluctuates greatly. Probably I didn’t lose anything important.

Hello again. It’s the conclusion of Day Seventeen. That’s about all that can be said for the day. I’m alive. I’m still quaffing apple-cider-flavored cleaning product. I’m still thinking about glasses of wine with the excellent steaks for dinner and about largish bowls of chocolate chip cookie dough to follow them up. In other words, it’s Business As Usual.

The most curious thing about this diet is that it’s not over yet. I’m pretty sure we’ve been at this for a month or two already, but I keep this here blog which reminds me of the day and it says only seventeen days have passed. I wonder if time dilation is a factor. I understand this time dilation stuff comes into play with respect to objects moving at high rates of speed, and it can also come into play with respect to an object’s proximity to a gravitational field. I’m going to suggest a third situation, that being an object’s proximity to a Whole Thirty diet. The closer one is to a Whole Thirty diet, the slower the clocks run. It’s possible the people attributing long life to eating paleo-style diets have completely mistaken the true agent of causality.

It’s Day Sixteen, commonly touted amongst the crazed Whole Thirty advocates as a day filled with Tiger Blood. As such, I feel that this is obligatory:

But when it comes right down to it I’ve gotta say, “bro”, I ain’t feelin’ it. Maybe my problem is that I’m not banging 7-gram rocks.

Instead, today I woke up with a headache along with other vague symptoms of the onset of a cold. Do tigers even get colds? I don’t think tigers get colds. On the other hand, I’d sooner eat a breakfast of bacon and eggs with a cup of coffee than devour a raw wildebeast. And in fact, today I did so. Had bacon and eggs and coffee, that is.

I’m also reading some wild theories about heartburn and how it’s caused by not enough stomach acid instead of too much stomach acid, and also how taking omeprazole will cause cancer, salmonella, and generally rot your insides out. I find these assertions vaguely disturbing and likely credible but not sufficiently credible to convince me to start drinking kombucha anytime soon. And by “anytime soon” I mean “anytime on either side of eternity”. Nevertheless, at the suggestion of the general population of quacks on the Internet, maybe I’ll start doing some acid. Not that kind.

Despite this being Día del Tigre, this afternoon I heard worrisome rumbling of mutiny in the ranks. The two other hapless characters, who are either dragging me through or themselves being dragged through this dietary purgatory (the situation is not clear) are talking open rebellion. Turns out they’re not feeling like tigers either, for better or for worse, and they are ready to utterly throw over this entire experiment and trample upon it with hobnailed boots, afterward scattering its ashes to the four winds as a warning to other diets. In my characteristic ineffably effervescent manner, I explained that the thing is already halfway over and besides who wouldn’t want to eat this way for the rest of their lives simply out of solidarity with our supposed ancestors living amongst the primordial goo and woolly mammoths. This rather touching soliloquy was met with what I can only describe as a chilly demeanor. At the end of the day, one of these two mutineers is my personal chef, and if she goes on strike then the grand adventure will have unquestionably come to a sudden and abrupt end.

Until then, this your humble and distinctly non-feline correspondent will continue to supply reports from the front.

Here draws to a close Day Fifteen of the Thirty Days of Serious Dietary Inconvenience. Morale on this particular evening is good, but this past weekend brought troop morale to the breaking point.

I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m the sort of plain fellow who likes to start a Saturday with four or five pancakes of no insignificant size. Following that, I rarely eat much (if any) lunch, and then am accustomed to a rather generous dinner (particularly when Saturdays are spent in physical labor). Following a double bacon cheeseburger with all the fixings and fries, there are Saturday evenings on which I consider having another bacon cheeseburger, and even some evenings on which I actually do so.

I’ve been told that eggs and bacon do have calories in them, and that said calories are of a special variety designed for long-term sustaining energy rather than the short-burst energy that pancakes provide. However, the Whole Thirty diet has apparently not yet repaired my metabolism to the extent that it knows about this fact. Saturday breakfast left me satiated at the time, but hungry by lunchtime. At lunchtime I made the mistake of just poking around at leftovers and not really going wholeheartedly into the thing. By dinnertime I was ready for about one and a half of those bacon double cheeseburgers, but it was not to be. Instead, the dinner was three hamburger patties and a pile of spinach topped with raspberry-flavored cleaning product.

It was at that moment, staring at children with delicious slabs of cheese and actual store-bought white bread hamburger buns, that morale nearly cracked. I sat there, a sort of bleak look on my hollow face to accompany the hollow feeling in my bleak stomach, feeling wan. This is not worth it, I thought. This is ridiculous. But I ate my blighted Whole Thirty dinner anyway. And afterward I could have eaten three more hamburger patties on the spot, but I didn’t, because I saw no point in it. I’d have felt the same hunger after eating them anyhow. I don’t know why this is, but meat alone has never made me feel full.

Next morning was Sunday, and instead of starting it off right with a solid stack of pancakes, it was eggs and bacon again. An even half-dozen of the former and two strips of the latter, and I was hungry all the way through church. That was followed up by a birthday celebration for my daughter, featuring (at her request!) a salad bar. (She loves salad. I cannot understand it.) I had two sizeable plates of salad generously topped with chicken, mushrooms, eggs, and more raspberry-flavored cleaning product. After that, I felt exactly the same as I did when I started. I could have eaten two more plates of the stuff, except my jaw was tired of chewing. I probably had a net loss of calories from that meal just from the chewing and work involved in digesting lettuce.

However, the story has a happy ending. (Well, “happy” as relative to the Whole Thirty diet.) My kind wife took pity on me and cooked up what she says was about two pounds of ground beef with seasonings and mushrooms and a can of tomatoes plus two large yams. I ate it all except about half a pound of the beef and a child’s portion of diced yam, and at last my stomach was full. In fact, that glorious feeling carried over into today, wherein I ate an average Whole Thirty diet and yet am not starving unto death.

On a sidenote, I learned that tobacco is actually verboten on this blighted diet, which just goes to show you that the rules are really only about the authors’ personal prejudices. I imagine Whole Thirty adherents will latch onto the two pipes I smoked earlier on as the reason it’s not curing my heartburn.

Though actually, heartburn hasn’t been so bad today, so maybe it is curing it after all. I’m not sure whether I would be happy or sad about that. But I’ve already decided that if this ordeal does cure heartburn, I’ll just have to take omeprazole for the rest of my life, because I’m for dang sure not spending the rest of my life eating this kind of diet.

Tomorrow is supposed to be “Tiger Blood” day. I’ll let you know if I find myself mauling any safari hunters.