Can you stomach this? Part three

A turd that reminds you, as you grasp hold of it, of the handle of your block splitter, surely can’t be good for you? That’s what happened to me a month into my high saturated fat and high protein breakfast.

You’ll be wondering why on earth I felt the need to handle it. Is it some kind of fetish, I can hear you thinking. Well no, not as far as I’m aware.

I did it out of necessity. To my horror, when I glanced down after delivering it, the thing was wedged between the front and back of the bowl. I tried flushing but to no avail. The offending object may as well have been an iron rod for all the movement and erosion I could get out of it by flushing.

Desperate measures were called for. I know people like my brother Paul, a motelier, have seen it all when it comes to cleaning toilets, but I consider myself well toilet- trained. Rolling a generous wad of toilet paper round my right hand – I’m right-handed and I always use my right hand to wipe my bum – I gingerly grasped the turd rod, dislodged it and broke it up so that it would go its merry way on a single flush. Success!

Success was short-lived. I endured several more episodes, if I can euphemistically call them that, before I abandoned the diet altogether.

You can imagine what it must have been like getting one of those turds along the production line in the first place. Not to mention the sensation that a screw cap plug needed to be forced out somehow before the finished product could drop down (literally) from the production line. Talk about straining at your stools. I used to go to a yoga class and the teacher was always reminding us “to strengthen our core”. My core muscles stood me in good stead over this trying time; I’m sure I would have herniated otherwise.

I also noticed that on the high saturated fat and high protein diet I wasn’t evacuating my bowels as often. Before the diet I used to go once every twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Now it was more like forty-eight hours if I was lucky.

Still, nothing like the cowboys of the Wild West! I remember reading about the food cowboys took with them during the early days of American cattle drives: mostly dried meat and beans. (From the 1860s onwards it became the norm for the food or ‘chuckwagon’ to accompany the cowboys.)

Moving 2,000 or more head of cattle from the ranch to a railhead where the cattle could be corralled and made ready for shipment to stockyards took anywhere from several weeks to several months. The combination of sitting in the saddle for up to fourteen hours a day and eating large amounts of dried meat led to constipation that could last for weeks.

It is our good fortune to be able to eat our meat fresh. We rear goats and cattle. The goats for milk and meat and the cattle solely for meat. Our meat freezer is full of chevon (goat meat) and beef. Those are the meats that we provide for ourselves and so they are the meat component of our diet.

I was eating either a steak and two eggs for breakfast or chevon chops and two eggs. I’d fry them in lard rendered down from the fat around the kidneys of one of our cattle beasts. A meal tailor-made to fit our ‘self-reliance’ mantra.

However, I was also losing weight on this regime. Mr Skinny has hovered at around 65 kg since his early twenties. I’d lost over a kilogram after a couple of months on the fried steak, chops and egg breakfast. And I know my cholesterol might not be the lowest at around 5.5 but other markers like good cholesterol and triglycerides were fine. Anyway, cholesterol is essential for a healthy hormone balance. I didn’t get my cholesterol checked while I was on the diet but there was that niggling worry that it might tip the good/bad cholesterol ratios the wrong way.

I was looking gaunt. Not quite at the stage were you look in the mirror first thing in the morning and wonder whether you’ve just taken the skeleton out of the closet, but the head, neck, collar bones and ribs weren’t far off. It didn’t help to learn at about this time that my body type was classified as ‘ectomorph’.

An ectomorph is a typical skinny guy. Ecto’s have a light build with small joints and lean muscle. Usually ectomorphs have long thin limbs with stringy muscles. Shoulders tend to be thin with little width.

www.muscleandstrength.com

‘Ecto’ and ‘morph’ are from the Greek: ‘ecto’ means outside or external and ‘morph’ means to gradually change from one thing or form into another. Mr Skinny was gradually changing into Mr Skinnier and getting closer to wearing his skeleton on the outside!

I persevered with this breakfast for another couple of weeks, and with the consequent alarming evacuations. But for me, this obviously wasn’t the right diet.

I began exploring other options and came up with the unorthodox porridge breakfast I wrote about in my last blog post. My turds, within a week, were curling and slithering round the toilet bowl in a snake-like manner. What’s more, I was back to going every twenty-four to thirty-six hours.

I began to put a bit of flesh on my bones again and currently weigh in at my normal 65kg. And these days, what with all the added fruit and other ingredients that form part of my breakfast it is unusual for me to miss a day. “Hallelujah!”