I had a little R & R, played some golf, and just enjoyed myself in general.  Had all the same kinds of food I wrote about in a post last year, so I returned well fed.  Now I’m tanned, fed, fit and ready to type, so it’s back to the grindstone.

Thanks to the poor economy, this trip was a little more exciting than previous trips.  At least the golf part.  When we pulled the carts up to the first green on the first day we played, the caddy told us to pull off the cart path and park the carts down by the green.  When we asked why, he replied, “Banditos.”

Turns out that hard times have driven many desperate people to turn to crime to feed their families.  According to the caddy, ‘banditos’ hide in the jungle along side the cart paths and come out while the players are on the green and steal anything they can get their hands on.  A few weeks before we got there, there was an actual armed robbery on the course.  Fortunately, our trip was without incident, so I returned home with all my belongings.  Didn’t even lose anything to the airlines, which is probably a more likely way to lose valuables than to banditos on the golf course.

Aside from banditos, there are other dangers on the courses in Mexico.  I took the photo of this guy shown below as I drove by him in the golf cart.  Anywhere there is water on the Marina Vallarta course, there are crocidilos lying about.  You’ve also got to keep an eye out for snakes whenever you hunt for lost balls in the jungle bordering the courses.  And there are iguanas everywhere.

One of the things I like about Mexico is always coming upon the unexpected.  The giant head in the photo above was half buried in the ground just off the tee box of one of the holes.  I caught a glimpse of it through the trees and couldn’t figure out what it was.  I walked around and through the brush until I could see it and snapped a photo with my iPhone.  What is it?  A football player? Why is it there in the middle of nowhere?

While I was south of the border my web guy was hard at work, which is a nice segue into a couple of blog housekeeping issues.  Those who read the comments have discovered that my comments are now up in a salmon color.  And my tech guy has installed a plug in so that I can answer specific comments and end up indented right below them so that I don’t have to use the @[insert name] business.  Anyone who wants to reply to a specific comment or even to a reply to a comment can do so by clicking the blue highlighted ‘Reply.’

This makes the entire process much, much easier for me, and will help – I fervently hope – me to keep up with the comments in a more timely fashion.

At long last the 6-Week Cure blog is finished.  All I have to do is have the tech guy click it on and you will be able to click on it from the menu at the top under ‘Blogs.’  All it is right now is an empty template.  MD and I have to populate it with a little content before it goes up.  I’m hoping it should be up with some content within a week.

I’m having trouble getting MD to focus on anything but the wretched Choral Society (of which she is the president) right now because of her big event coming up in about ten days, so if there is going to be content, I’ll have to create it.  And I’ve got a lot of other posts I want to do that aren’t 6-Week Cure posts.

MD has been working on an extravaganza that will be performed on Feb 13th and 14th in Santa Barbara that may well be the social event of the season.  I’ll post more on it as the time draws nearer, but just to give you an idea as to what’s going on, her group is singing the world premier of a choral piece written by Sir George Martin (yes, he of The Beatles fame), and, as it turns out, Sir George himself is coming from London to conduct it.  Along with the choral piece, Sir George will conduct the chorus in a version of Eleanor Rigby that he scored as a choral piece.  The rest of the performance will be Beatles tunes scored for chorus accompanied by a world premier ballet choreographed for this occasion.  So, she has a lot of work to do to pull this all together.  I suppose I’ll cut her some slack in the blog-content-creating department. At least until Feb 15.

As for my own content on this blog, the next post will be the long-awaited and promised post examining and critiquing Anthony Colpo’s Fat Loss Bible.  It will actually be a two-part post with the first part devoted to showing the errors of Anthony’s thinking vis a vis the metabolic advantage, and the second will be an in-depth look at a famous paper that Antony has dismissed out of hand but which, as you shall see, is really a brilliant study.  With these two posts, I’ll put paid to Anthony Colpo and hope to never mention him again.

I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t posted a lot, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about posting.  I’ve got a number of things I’ve been wanting to write about that  I plan to have up as soon as the Colpo deal is finished.  I want to add my two cents worth on a bunch of the problems some Paleo dieters seem to develop.  And I’ve got a post cooking on the thyroid and iodine.  One on fructose, and one on saturated fat.  Plus the analysis of the next stupid study that will inevitably pop up and seize the imagination of the mainstream media types who will shout it from the rooftops.

As I type these words, we’re at 37,000 feet somewhere between Chicago and New York.  After all the complaining I’ve done in previous posts about my disastrous experiences with a multitude of airlines, I’ve got to say that this tour has gone without a hitch.  We’ve flown U.S. Air, American, Alaskan Airlines, and now Delta, and all flights have been on time on both ends.  We’re traveling with a crew of nine, so I am thankful for all the airlines we’ve flown and the weather gods for allowing all this to come off on schedule.

I planned to post about the different venues as we went from city to city, but as I said, the time constraints have been such that I really couldn’t do it.  I’ve got a zillion photos that I’ll post in due course and a lot of info about cooking that I’ve learned from the best.

Richard Nikoley, of the Free the Animal blog, came to the San Francisco event and posted on it, so you can read his take, complete with photos, here.

Another writer who attended the San Francisco event wrote about it after.  It’s a good article but I object to the word ‘shilled.’  In my obviously biased view, ‘touted’ or ‘promoted’ or ‘recommended’ would have been much better choices.  Other press reports that are much better (from my perspective, at least) are here, here and here.

As you can see from the above articles and blog, Heston Blumenthal, chef of The Fat Duck, one of the world’s best restaurants, is traveling with us and helping us introduce the Sous Vide Supreme to the world.  Heston and team (several of whom are with us, too) did the testing of the Sous Vide Supreme in The Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen in the UK.  As one of the preeminent and most knowledgeable sous vide chefs in the world, Heston is also doing cooking and teaching demos with the unit on this tour.

At this point in my narrative breakfast arrived.  It is pictured below.  You can see to what depths airline food has fallen.

Low-fat yogurt, 2% milk, Raisin Bran, fruit, a bagel and coffee.  How nauseating.  I will admit, however, that I ate almost all of it, middle-aged middle be damned.  I did leave over half the bagel because it was totally tasteless, much like eating cardboard and as cold as stone.  I haven’t worried much about diet on this tour because we’ve been eating one meal a day – if we’re lucky – so I’ve been viewing the experience as an intermittent fast.  We get little shards of the foods prepared for the demo, but that’s about it.  The rest of the time we’re on the run and haven’t eaten much at all.

So you can see how the demo events are set up, I’ve put up the schedule and menu to the left below.

MD and I introduce ourselves and talk about how the Sous Vide Supreme was developed, much as I did in a recent blog post.  We then introduce Heston, who shows a video of the preparation of Mock Turtle Soup, which I also blogged about not too long ago.  He follows that with a short video of a dessert composed of all the essences of smoke, apples, leather and tobacco and four different whiskies – all incorporated into a flaming sorbet.  He then talks about how he started The Fat Duck with just himself, a dishwasher and a couple of waiters.  Then he moves into the different foods prepared using the Sous Vide Supreme and talks about all the extensive testing he did of the unit at The Fat Duck.  The staff passes around tasting plates of the food selections to the guests, most of whom are media people, food writers or chefs.  The food is absolutely beyond compare.  When I have more time, I’ll post a description of how each different food is prepared and show photos, of which I have a multitude.

After the event in New York is over today, MD and I have to do a little Middle-Aged Middle promotion tomorrow with some radio, then it’s off to Las Vegas (of all places) for a couple of days.  My niece is getting married there on Sunday (she lives there and is a graphic artist for one of the casino operations), so we’re stopping on the way back to attend.  Then, finally, home on Monday.  At which point, after going through all the mail and other stuff that has stacked up while we’ve been on the road, I’ll get back to more regular posting.

I got word yesterday that the 6-Week Cure blog is set up and ready to go, but so far we haven’t been able to post anything to it.  If you’ve got a 6-Week Cure question or comment, hold it for just a couple more days ‘til we get that blog up.  And if you’ve had a question languishing in the emails, we’re working on that, too.  We had an unexpected glitch, when the new email contact points got mistakenly routed to an email that we never use by the web gurus.  There they sat for about a month before we realized that was why we weren’t getting any emails from the new site.  We apologize and as soon as we get back to Casa Eades we’ll get busy answering those we can answer.

I’m working on another fun post that I’ll maybe be able to get up before we get back, but I can’t promise.  At any rate, it’ll be up soon after we’re home if not before.

Thanks for hanging in there during my absence.

I had hoped to have a new blog for The 6-Week Cure up by now, but our tech people have been working on other projects and unable to get to the blog. They have been working on the Sous Vide Supreme website, which just got up late last night in it’s full and operational form. Now they have one more Eades-related project to do, then they can do The 6-Week Cure blog. I hope it won’t be much longer.

I’ve had no end of comments stacking up that I will deal with as soon as this post is posted, so if you’ve had a comment languishing in ‘awaiting-moderation’ purgatory, it should be up soon. I’ve promised this before and failed, but my time commitments are now such that I’m going to have to stick to it: I can no longer answer specific comments. I’m going to post them as they come in, and if I feel the need to answer a specific one, I’ll do it as I did in in Tim Ferriss’s blog and do so with a comment of my own.

Numerous people have written comments/questions asking about why they’ve stalled or why they’ve gotten diarrhea or why they’ve gotten constipated of why [fill in the blank] on The 6-Week Cure. It is extremely difficult to answer these types of comments because I don’t (and can’t possibly) know the whole story of what is going on. In the office when these kinds of questions arose, our staff was trained to ask specific questions to ferret out the problems. MD and I could go over with patients an entire list of questions to figure out what is happening, do appropriate lab tests, examine the patients first hand. But we don’t currently have a clinical practice and we can’t do that over the internet. Many of the questions we asked in person are basically designed to tease out what the patients are really doing. Many people think they are following a specific program to the letter, when the truth is that they are not. They have misunderstood something or only heard part of what we told them to do or are confused or have had any number of things happen that are causing them not to be adhering to the regimen we thought (and they thought) they were adhering to. If we can’t figure out what specific diet our patients are following, we can’t possibly figure out why they are having whatever problem it is they are having.

I’m sure most of the people who have written asking questions about their experience with The 6-Week Cure think they are following the program exactly as presented in the book, but it has been my experience that as often as not they aren’t. Let me give you a couple of examples that I know about personally so you can see what I mean.

Out of the many people (friends, relatives, etc.) that MD and I know personally who are on the 6-Week Cure, two spring to mind who demonstrate clearly how easy it is to misread or misunderstand instructions as written. The first is a lady who has done well on the program, but who kind of over thought what she read – or we didn’t write it clearly enough. This lady is very smart and runs a successful company employing hundreds of people. She read the part in the book about adding a pasteurized egg to the shake and followed the instructions to the letter. Before I tell you what she did, however, I want to clarify what the whole pasteurized-egg-in-the-shake deal is. We’ve had a number of questions about this, so it obviously isn’t as clear as it should have been.

In the book we make the case that dietary cholesterol is important to the body for numerous reasons and we recommend that people get some good, unoxidized cholesterol in their diet daily. A raw egg is a great source of good-quality cholesterol, so we recommend the option of adding a raw egg in one of the shakes each day for those who don’t get cholesterol from another source. We give this recommendation only for those who, for whatever reason, don’t eat red meat or don’t get their cholesterol from other sources. If you do eat red meat for your meal or if you eat eggs as part of your meal, you don’t need to add the egg to your shake. It’s primarily intended for those who don’t eat red meat or eggs for their meal. And even for those, it is only one egg per day, not one egg per shake.

Since we advocate adding one raw egg (or egg yolk) to one shake per day (for those who don’t get the red meat), we have to advise that the egg be pasteurized for safety’s sake. Most people can eat raw eggs that are not pasteurized without incident, but there is a slight risk of food poisoning. The risk is much higher for those who are immuno-compromised, who shouldn’t be exposed to the possibility (remote) of infection from consuming eggs that aren’t pasteurized. Since we have no way of knowing who is buying our books and reading them, we have to err on the side of safety and recommend that the eggs be pasteurized to cover all contingencies.

Our friend read this as that she needed an egg in each shake (despite the fact that she almost always ate red meat as her daily meal) and so, like many people who have written to us, she used one raw, pasteurized egg per shake. But she went further. She decided that since we said the eggs should be pasteurized in the shell that we meant that she should add the whole egg – shell and all – to her shakes. Which she did. She was throwing an entire raw egg into her blender and whirring it up. She didn’t have a problem, but in conversation with MD, she mentioned that she really had to run the blender a long time before she could get all the shell ground down to where she could drink the shake without crunching on egg shells. MD, of course, told her that she didn’t have to consume the whole egg complete with shell, that just the contents of the shell would do.

Neither MD nor I could have imagined that someone would throw an entire egg in the blender, but this very intelligent woman had done so.

Another friend who is extremely bright made a mistake that was a little more consequential, at least in terms of his weight loss.

This friend is a pretty good size, muscular guy who was a world class college athlete. He, like many of us, put on a little belly as he aged. He decided to go on The 6-Week Cure. He called and peppered us with a bunch of questions about protein powder and leucine before he started. Once he got started, he did fine, but he also said that there was no way he could get three shakes down per day. Two, max, is what he could consume, and even then, he had trouble with the two.

He progressed fine on the program although he wasn’t losing weight as quickly as he figured he would (nor as fast as we assured him that he would), but he was losing around his waist and he was happy. He had some blood work due to be drawn, so he decided to stay on the shakes and a meal regimen for longer than just the first two weeks. He stayed on it almost a month so that he could get the maximum effect before his labs were drawn. When he got his labs back, all of his lipid parameters had improved, so he was thrilled.

In conversation with MD and me over dinner, he started talking about how expensive it was to do the shakes. MD asked him what kind of protein powder he was using, assuming that that was where the expense came in. He told her it wasn’t the protein powder that was expensive – it was the coconut milk. It was costing him a fortune even through he was buying it by the case. Buying it by the case?

MD, thinking there must be some miniature-sized cans of coconut milk she didn’t know existed, asked him what size cans he was getting. He told her he was getting the normal sized cans available at his natural food grocer. Then she asked him how much he was using.

“A can per shake, just like the instructions say,” he replied.

A can per shake?!?! MD was incredulous. “The instructions don’t say a can per shake. You are supposed to be using an ounce of coconut milk per shake, not an entire can,” she told him.

‘Hmmm,” said he. “No wonder my shakes were so thick I could eat only two per day.”

Indeed. Especially since each can contains 14 ounces of coconut milk, meaning that each of his shakes contained 14 times the recommended amount.

And no wonder he wasn’t losing as fast as he thought he should have been. As you can see from the nutritional facts from a can of the coconut milk he was using, at two cans per day, he was getting an extra 26 ounces (2X13) of coconut milk per day, which meant he was getting an extra 1560 calories per day along with an extra 91 g saturated fat and an extra 52 g of carb. And he was still losing weight, not to mention improving his lipid values! Who says saturated fat makes your lipids worse?

These two really smart people misread the instructions and didn’t really follow the program as written, even though they thought they were following it to the letter. I’m sure they aren’t the only people who have unknowingly veered from the path as presented. Had one of them – the guy with the can of coconut milk – written me through this blog and asked why he wasn’t losing as fast as I said he should be, I could have racked my brain trying to figure out why, when the real reason was that he was using the wrong amount of coconut milk. I can attest from the comments and letters we’ve received that he isn’t alone in having a hard time getting all three shakes in each day, so there may be others out there making the same unwitting mistake, and it would previously never have occurred to me to ask ‘how much coconut milk are you using in your shakes?’

So, the point is, if you are having a problem or not getting the results you think you should, go back to the book, look up the recipes, and make sure you are making them exactly as written. If you have questions about the recipes, go to the forum and ask your dieting compatriots. They will be more than willing to give you the benefit of their experience. You can post a comment here, and if I get a bunch asking the same question, I’ll do a short post or a comment of my own about it. But for the next few weeks, I’m not going to be able to be as responsive as usual, so the forum is probably your best bet for quick answers.

While writing this post I got word that a rudimentary 6WC blog should be up in a day or two.  Don’t hold your breath because I’m not holding mine.  But keep checking because hope springs eternal.

One final note.  If you have gout or want to learn more about gout, take a look at this post on Tim Ferriss’s blog.  He published one of the many parts left on the cutting room floor when Good Calories, Bad Calories got edited down to publication size.

I’m getting a lot of comments on these last posts from people who have read our new book and have questions. I don’t want this blog to transmogrify into the blog for the 6-Week Cure, so after much consultation with the bride, we’ve decided to start another blog for the 6-Week Cure that we’ll both moderate. Problem is, we’re still in the throes of getting the current blog and website as it should be, so it may be a day or two before we get the thing up. On the 6-Week Cure site we will post the schedules for any media appearances and book signings we will be forced to do, so anyone interested can keep up there. We will also answer the questions that come in and use the questions to develop an FAQ. And we will use the blog to disseminate any messages or info we need to get out that is specific to readers of the new book.

Speaking of which…a journalist from First magazine is interested in talking to women who have done the 6-Week Cure, and who would be willing to give testimonials and allow their names and photos to be used in a magazine article. If you are interested, you can contact Lisa Maxbauer at lisamaxb (at) yahoo (dot) com. You can check out her Twitter site at twitter.com/FIRSTmagLISA as well.

I’ll have the meat-eater post up as soon as I’ve got a little consolidated time to finish it.

And the post immediately after the meat-eater post will be the post on our change-the-world project MD and I have been working on for a year and a half.

Feel free to comment on this post about what you would like to see on the 6-Week Cure blog.  Thanks.