Melissa's blog

I've been on the hunt for the "perfect" minimalist sandal for years. For me that means a couple of things:

Sometimes I think about deleting this blog. After all, I started it to talk about "paleo," a diet I no longer follow. Largely I eat what I want now. I eat a lot at restaurants and when I'm not I eat a lot of simple satiating foods– full fat yogurt, cheese, crispbread (I like the rye kind from Finland), pickles, jerky, smoked fish, that kind of thing. I get a lot of exercise from walking (usually 2-6 miles a day) and do some body weight workouts and yoga nearly every day.

Sometimes you just realize how much of a bubble you've ended up in. When you're in the health/diet/fitness world sometimes you are liable to forget that there are plenty of people who do nothing particularly special with their diet or exercise who are extremely attractive. When I moved from writing about food in light of diet to more general restaurant writing I was exposed to more of these people. Because a lot of them work in front of the house positions as servers or bartenders. I met people who have lifestyles and diets that would horrify most personal trainers and diet gurus.

A little off topic from the usual content of this blog, but thought I might as well post it here :)

Yesterday marked the first day in Chicago of cold autumn rain. And certainly not the last. Being an avid walker in all types of weather, that means I have to have footwear that can handle 

wet weather -- any kind of wet weather from hot rain to snow. Of course you can get rainboots anywhere, but traditional rainboots have some serious issues. 

Writer David Gumpert reports on a controvery at The Weston A. Price Foundation over fermented cod liver oil, particularly the Green Pasture brand that the organization promoted. 

A chronic and frustrating, but not deadly, disease like IBS is a perfect one for experimentation. However, I’d never considered alcohol as anything but a trigger. And that wasn’t really borne out of experiences, but a cultural bias against it. It was just unhealthy, right?

Recently a post on LinkedIn titled "25% of the people have a 4th cone and see colors as they are ;p" by Professor Diana Derval has gone viral and probably because the "test" in the post tells a lot of people they are tetrachromats.

You see between 33 and 39 colors: you are a tetrachromat, like bees, and have 4 types of cones (in the purple/blue, green, red plus yellow area). You are irritated by yellow, so this color will be nowhere to be found in your wardrobe. 25% of the population is tetrachromat.

Increasingly I see a lot of articles deriding the “gluten free” fad. I wonder if people writing them have actually talked to people who are gluten-free despite not being diagnosed with celiac disease. I’ve talked to many of them. And almost always, behind their gluten-free diet is a story of the failure of our medical system.

It’s funny because when I blogged about health and diet I was often accused of being a shill for meat or dairy or whatever. I wasn’t, but now writing about restaurants I actually am now in a minefield and worry I might become a shill if I’m not careful. That’s because of something few people are willing to talk about, which is comps: free meals or other food products paid for by PR companies, restaurants or other food and drink producers.