Yes We Pemmican, Part 1

Friday, November 9, 2012

Check out Mobility Craft Night at the box coming up on November 18th! Click HERE or to the right on Upcoming Events to sign up!

Warmup/Mobility:
Row 500m 
10 PVC Dislocate / 10 Sotts Press with PVC 
Thoracic Spine (keg drill or t-spine smash), 1 minute
Assisted squat, Groiners, Gristle,  1 minute each

Barbell Gymnastics:
Perform 1 high hang snatch + 1 Overhead Squat @ 80% 1RM Snatch, every 30 seconds (total of 10 reps and 4:30)

Conditioning:
3 rounds for time:
Run 400m
21 Chest to bar Pullups
12 Deadlifts (275/185)

-18 min cap-

Cool Down:
Posterior Chain Floss, 1 min each side
Sampson Stretch, 30 seconds each
German Hang, accumulate 1 min 

It’s a bird…it’s a plane…it’s Super Clive!

I recently read NeanderThin: Eat Like a Caveman to Achieve a Lean, Strong, Healthy Body, by Ray Audette.  I picked it up after listening to him promote an updated version of his book on a podcast that I follow.  I was extremely impressed by his arguments and research, and even further impressed by the fact that his book was published in 1999.  He was definitely ahead of his time and one of the original paleo advocates.

His diet is very similar to Diso’s and that of other contemporary hunter gatherers, advocating for a low carb, high fat diet.  For high fat foods he is big on almonds, avocados, bacon, coconut, fatty cuts of meat, and you guessed it, pemmican.  Our blog has posted tons of articles on pemmican and the benefits of eating this “superfood”, plug it into the search engine and see.  Here is a post by G talking about how much she loves it.  I’ve tried it a couple of times, and liked it a lot, but never really committed to buying more than five or ten at a time.  Even though I never ate it consistently I always was a little curious and even fascinated by what this food might be able to offer.  So when I read the following excerpts from Neanderthin, of course I nerded out and got excited:

“Many aboriginal North American and European explorers ate an exclusively raw red meat diet in the form of pemmican.  This high-energy food is produced by mixing extremely dried and powdered raw lean meat and hard animal fat in a one to one ratio.  Eighty-five percent of the calories in pemmican are derived from fat, making it the closest nutritional equivalent to human mother’s milk.  Pemmican will keep for decades without refrigeration and can sustain a person without vitamin deficiency (scurvy, beriberi, etc.) indefinitely.  It provides those who eat it with very high energy from very little consumption (½ to 1½ pounds per day if eaten exclusively).  Because pemmican is almost entirely absorbed by the body (without the assistance of intestinal bacteria), very little waste results from its digestion (one sixth normal solid waste).”

“It provides quick energy without filling your stomach.  It’s easy to digest (95 percent absorbed in digestion) and produces almost no waste.  Since the digestion of pemmican requires no intestinal flora, eating pemmican exclusively for several days will greatly reduce bacterial presence in the gut.  Pemmican is almost totally absorbed by the body.  Very little waste remains from its digestion.  As such, pemmican is an excellent first solid food for infants, and a good choice for anyone suffering from gastrointestinal disorder.”

“It’s the perfect food when you don’t have enough time to eat a full meal.  It’s also the perfect workout food for the NeanderThin athlete who can’t carbo-load.  The taste of pemmican may be unfamiliar at first, but most people who try it eventually find themselves craving it.”

Are you kidding me! That’s all the convincing I needed, and it was time to put all the benefits and hype to the test.  I decided to conduct my own experiment; eat pemmican exclusively for seven days, and see how I feel.  I would not eat anything else, or take any vitamins (except for Vitamin D which comes from the sun and not from food anyway), and drink only water (no alcohol, coconut water, tea, or coffee).  I admit I am very biased on this subject and believed one hundred percent that everything cited above would be true.  More specifically, I wanted to prove that I would lose bodyfat, go into ketosis within a couple of days, feel full, produce little waste, all while feeling and performing well in the gym.

I basically wanted to prove to myself that a ketogenic diet wasn’t a big deal, and I wasn’t too worried because this experiment has already been conducted in our gym by Diso, which he detailed on the blog last year (Too Much Information, Part 1 and Part 2).  His experiment was way more sound than mine because he did it for six months and followed up with blood work to prove no nutrient deficiencies.  The only good thing about my test is that the food was completely controlled and easy to measure since it came from a single variable, pemmican, while Diso ate a variety of fats and proteins, and added minimal carbs along the way. 

To be continued…