Meat, its what's for dinner

 

Eat one of these and call me in the morning.

I started reading a book called The Butcher and The Vegetarian and had a realization. The author was talking about her symptoms of fatigue and inability to lose weight no matter what she did. She was a life long vegetarian and the solution: Eat Meat. The book is delightful thus far but it also made me  realize that I had been forgetting something very essential to my own success. I was writing a post on my other blog but I think the portion that follows really fits here as well...

From the delicious journey:

For the last few months of training and life, I have been working incredibly hard. I have run numerous 100+ mile weeks, ate healthy, been smart and on top of things. And yet, I have not really been feeling good. If anything, I feel like I am back to where I was in the twilight days of my veganism. Training hard, eating healthfully and tired as a corpse and not seeing results that my training and diet would indicate. I realized then that I needed to start eating meat again. I did, I felt better. Wahoo. Problem gone! Energy returned. Training gains achieved. I have the type of constitution that thrives off a diet consisting of fruits, vegetables and meats (and fats) and all parts of that are necessary for me.

But somewhere over the past year, I started eating less meat again. I would eat meat when dining out or special occasions, but slowly and surely meat dropped out of my diet for the most part until I was having it only 2-3 days a week. And lo and behold, for the last few months (since November) I have been feeling like dirt. My energy is low, my body composition is not changing (for the better) and my training gains appear lack luster. Today I realized that in an effort to work towards my training goals that I have been more strict about my diet during the week and basically eliminated meat during the week. My logic was poor on this choice as somehow I decided that regular meat consumption just meant added calories to my diet, when the fact of the matter is, I eat less when I eat meat (because I am satisfied) and that is just plain dumb anyways. I eat meat on the weekends or if I dine out, but in comparison to my needs from training, it is not enough, especially in the last month. I don't think I need a lot, but I need to have a modest portion on a nearly daily basis. If that means I need to swap out something else to make room on my plate, so be it. It WILL make a huge difference. No wonder I feel so good at the beginning of the week and crap by the weekend, I have eat meat on the weekends and not during the week. Thus, I need to eat meat and be good about including it in my diet.

For those of you who aren't familiar, I was a vegan in addition to being gluten free but ended up in really poor health. I discuss this topic in previous blog postings on my food website Fast Foodie cooks, this post and this post discusses the above further. And I think they illustrate that I have not and do not make the above statements in an unconsidered way.