A few months ago, though, some people on a mailing list that I participate in (including the author of the gnolls.org blog) started sharing their experiences with paleo diets, and in particular a few people reported somewhat remarkable results from cutting down on non-rice grain consumption. The author of that blog recommended the book Perfect Health Diet (and its companion blog), so I gave that a read.

Which was quite interesting. A lot of it meshed nicely with what I’d been trying a few years back: in particular, they agree that many fats are just fine, and that many carbohydrates are bad. A lot of the details differ, however: the Perfect Health folks don’t think that it’s good to avoid all carbohydrates, they focus more on specific ones (non-rice grains, fructose, probably others that I’m forgetting) but not all. (In particular, they don’t have much truck with glycemic index, and prefer white rice to brown rice, claiming that the latter can leach nutrients.) Also, there are some other details: they don’t like a lot of standard vegetable oils (though they’re fine with olive oil), but quite like some less common ones, most notably coconut oil.

Spurred by that, I decided to cut down a bit more on my wheat consumption. (Though I’m certainly not going to give up bread entirely, I like it too much!) Which raised the question: what to do about breakfast, if my previous habit of oatmeal wasn’t recommended? At first, I alternated between eggs and bacon or salmon (if I had time), plain yoghurt and fruit (if I had less time), and reheating leftovers. But then a funny thing happened (which other people had predicted): I found myself feeling a lot less hungry in general in the mornings! Before, I would eat a full breakfast and feel like I wanted to start snacking again at around 11am; these days, though, I’m fine not eating anything until lunch time, and in fact on two days at Defcon I didn’t eat anything until around 2pm and felt great. (Which was convenient, there weren’t great food options and the mediocre ones were crowded.)

Also, I’m finding myself feeling full more often. Which is one of the big points of gnolls.org: your body has a feeling for what nutrients you need, and if you feed it the right stuff, you just won’t feel as hungry. The idea of paying attention to signals your body is sending makes a lot of sense to me; and if those signals mean that I’m not eating as much because I’m not feeling as hungry, I’m willing to take that as a sign that I’m doing something right!

I’m not planning to go all-out paleo—like I said, I like (good) bread too much! But it’s also great to not have to worry about eating breakfast, and to not feel hungry as often, so I do think I’ll stick with these changes, and possibly go further with them than I have been.

• When I was thinking about getting an iPad, I wondered what format I should buy books in. I was thinking the contenders were Amazon’s proprietary format versus ePub books (sadly largely with encryption in both cases); but when I actually got the iPad, I discovered that it’s a really great PDF reader. (Don’t get me wrong, I’d love a retina screen on it, but it works quite well as is.) And, as it happened, some of the early books that I bought were from the Pragmatic Programmers, which lets you get books in PDF and ePub (and Amazon’s format, but I don’t have a Kindle yet, so no reason to choose that if I’m not buying from Amazon). And, for now, I’m liking PDF books a lot more than ePub. I just hope that the book industry doesn’t take as long as the music industry to start embracing non-encrypted formats, so I can get PDF books from other sources.
• Having said that, non-page-based formats do have their uses. A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Nicola Griffith’s Always on the Kindle app on my iPad. And then I found myself out of the house with some time to kill, so I pulled out my phone and switched over to reading the book on that. (I didn’t have my iPad with me.) And that worked great, much better than reading a PDF on my phone would have or sitting around being bored would have.
• Another unexpected electronic book benefit: our dog Zippy is getting rather old, and wakes me up squeaking a couple of times a night on average. (For better or for worse, I’m a much lighter sleeper than Liesl is.) Sometimes he needs to go out, but sometimes he’s achy and just needs cuddling for a while. And I like being able to read while cuddling with him without having to turn on a light.
• Speaking of Nicola Griffith, I’d forgotten just how amazing an author she is. Or rather, I’d been somewhat reminded of that when I read her memoir, and I like her blog as well, so I’d been meaning to dig back into her fiction, but I hadn’t gotten around to it until the last month. I don’t think I’d reread Ammonite since it came out, but it’s quite good; better still is Slow River, and rereading The Blue Place was eye-opening. I’d never read Stay or Always, but I’m quite happy to have remedied that omission.
• Speaking of omissions, I’d somehow stopped reading Madeline L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journal after the first two books. No idea why I stopped then; I went back and reread them just now, and they’re rather wonderful. Though so far I’m not enjoying the third one as much; maybe it will grow on me (it took a while for me to appreciate the first one, I seem to recall), or maybe it’s just more targeted at Christians?
• I’m very glad to have been reading a lot of fiction these days. I’d been weighting my reading rather heavily towards technical books over much of the last year; partly for good reasons, but partly because I’d been swayed by sales of electronic books at a couple of publishers. And while electronic books don’t raise exactly the same inventory concerns as physical books, they’re still inventory, and the fact that I own them still unduly influences me to read them. I’ll have to be more vigilant about that in the future.
• Sad that Borders is going out of business. I like independent bookstores, but to me it’s much much more important to have a large selection of books available for purchase, and Borders did a great job of that as a chain; I visited the local Borders about as frequently over the last few years as any other physical bookstore. Their time has passed, but I salute them and will miss them.