Moroccan preserved lemons

Here's a look at some Moroccan preserved lemons I'm making. I used these old fliptop caning jars that Country Home Candles used to sell their candles in. These things are great, and they seal air-tight. I love this style of gasket-sealed canning jars, and I think I'm going to buy myself more.

I think I bought fourteen lemons. I was able to fit about four and a half lemons in each of these jars. Three of the lemons in each jar are sliced nearly to the end in quarters (but held together at the end by a bit of flesh). I sprinkled coarse salt into each lemon as I held the lemon bottom slightly open. It probably took 1 to 1.5 tbsp of coarse salt to 'fill' between the cracks of each lemon. 

I then sliced up another 1.5 lemons completely in quarters, and tucked them down into the spaces in both jar between the whole lemons. There's probably an additional 4 tbsp of lemon in each jar, for a total of maybe 8 tbsp in each jar (maybe more). 

I used a wooden spoon after adding each lemon to sort of mash each lemon and each lemon quarter down, releasing their juices and compacting them in the free space of the jar.

I had bought 14 lemons, so I juiced the remaining 5 lemons and split the juice (and seeds, I'm lazy) between both jars. They JUST filled each jar to basically at what I'm going to call 'the lemon line'.

You're supposed to keep the lemons completely submerged, but the lemons don't really soften up until a few days in, so every day, I'm going to have to take these out of the cool dark corner cupboard, open them up, and tamp down the contents to try to get the lemons to stay under the juice.

They sit for six weeks in a cool dark place, and you are supposed to turn the jar occasionally to distribute the salt and juices. 

I've had these before and they are phenomenal. I can't wait until these are ready to use!

Day 6: Urine Ketones

I'm on day 6, and my urine ketones are finally up around 4 mmol/L. The urine ketones should be in this range for about a day or two, then when my body figures out it should use blood ketones for energy, it'll drop down to be nearly absent in my urine.

Yeah. Love talking about pee.

Let's talk about poo.

One of the common questions (and past experience for me on this diet) is "How do you deal with the constipation?" My answer previously was to eat more fibre, which ended up increasing my sugar/starch carbs since I was eating my fibre in veggies, and that screwed up my macro balance (I was eating too many carbs). NOW I know that I need to: EAT. MORE. SALT. So I make sure I'm getting 4g /day or thereabouts in salt, and miraculously there is absolutely no constipation even though I'm not going out of my way to eat tonnes of servings of veggies. In fact, I might eat 1 or 2 servings of veg a day and that's all.

Pretty darned happy with the state of my excrement. That's not something you hear every day. Or ever. Who says that?

Recipe: Orange Chocolate Cheesecake Fat Bombs

Ingredients
1/2 cup coconut oil (I used Ziggy Marley Organics Orange Almond Coco'Mon Oil, for orange flavour)
1 100g bar of milk chocolate, in pieces
1 8 oz package of cream cheese
1/2 tsp of coarse sea salt

Instructions
Melt the coconut oil in the microwave on 15 second bursts. Stir between each.
Add the milk chocolate pieces and continue melting and stirring on 15 second bursts.
Add the package of cream cheese, in chunks, continue melting and stirring on 15 second bursts.

Whisk vigorously to remove lumps (or be lazy [smart?] and use a hand blender).

Pour into 8 muffin tins.

Divide the 1/2 tsp of sea salt among the tops of all 8 cheesecake bombs.

Refrigerate.

Makes 8 servings.

Macronutrient info per serving:
29.3g fat
263.5mg sodium
8.1g carbohydrate
2.9g protein

I heart salt.

Time to Get Back on the Wagon

Fatty fat fatness. I fell off the wagon following a miserable heartbreak and hating the world.

I weighed in at 288 lbs.

Wow.

I'm back on high fat. I'm four days in, I'm starting to drop already, and I'm sticking the hell with it.

I realized I fell off last year because I (a) wasn't eating enough salt and (b) was eating too much carb.

I know I definitely wasn't eating enough salt. I was working out in the mornings three days a week, sweating my ass off, and feeling like a sack of shit all day. I even have an older post where I point out that I hit 4300 mg of sodium and I say in the post that it was too much. It's twice the recommended daily intake according to Health Canada. That recommendation, however, turns out to be a fairly poor recommendation. It seems that sodium levels near 4.5 g a day are actually the ideal in terms of heart health, according to an article in NEJM.

O'Donnell et al. 2014. Urinary Sodium and Potassium Excretion, Mortality, and Cardiovascular Events. NEJM, 371(7): 612-623.

Having sodium targets is a thing. Who knew?

Lesson: take in 5 g of sodium a day.

The other thing, the eating too much carbs thing, came about because I was incorporating small amounts of fruit. Well, forget fruit. Fruit doesn't exist for me anymore, unless it's in sugar-free fruit gelatin format.

What did I eat today? 

morningtime beverage/noms
1 tbsp of coconut oil before leaving the house

3/4 c of half and half in my morning coffees (3) at work
a few shakes of salt in each cup (salt improves shitty coffee, also, I heart salt)

lunch
5 cheddar cheese sticks
1/4 cup salted roasted macadamia nuts
10 big Brazil nuts

dinnerishness
1/2 cup cream cheese
1 shallot, chopped
2 pieces of artichoke heart (maybe 1/2 a heart?), chopped
2 tbsp shredded parmesan

blended into a dip to eat with
1 head of broccoli

I'm going to have a cup of boullion now.

Numbers of the Day
160g of fat
42g of carbs (10.5 were fibre so they don't count)
52g of protein
3900 mg of sodium