The Great Buffet Abuse Tour - Part 1

Buffets. You've got to love them. Yet I have to travel all the way to the US to get any decent action. The UK should be ashamed.

For Paleo folk, buffets are great. For an incomparably greedy Paleo person like me, they are beyond compare.

The timing of my recent trip to the US seemed especially good. I was in the final few weeks of a training experiment ('Leangains') that involves daily fasting and the consumption of a large number of calories during an eating window. This was destiny.

Previously, my posts about gluttony have typically been in the context of shame, documenting falls from grace after too much booze. In those cases I had eaten too much of the wrong kind of food - a very different proposition.

Could I play the buffets buffets of Vegas like a professional, or, as with gambling, did the house always win?

As I prepared for the trip, I decided that the Paleo buffet master does two things differently. First, he or she sticks to the foods they would normally eat, instead of being sucked into a vortex of indulgence.

Paleo buffet mastery rule #1: eat good food, avoid the junk

Second, he or she makes their gluttony pay for itself, becoming warrior-like in their meal frequency and timing - one large meal a day.

Paleo buffet mastery rule #2: make your gluttony pay for itself

My plan was to apply the principle of daily fasting to holiday gluttony. It should be possible, I reasoned, to enjoy unconstrained dining without returning home at the end of the holiday with a ruined gut and 3 lbs of extra fat. I would eat bucket loads of Paleo buffet food and regularly fast in between.

This would be effort and reward in perfect harmony - instead of (as on previous occasions) reward, reward, reward, and that creeping feeling of wanting it all to stop.

It didn't quite go according to plan, but I learned a few things along the way. In part 2, Boston, where my opening gambit was unfeasible amounts of smoked salmon at the breakfast buffet.

See Also:

The Great Buffet Abuse Tour - Part 2: Boston and LA
The Great Buffet Abuse Tour - Part 3: Vegas Begins
The Great Buffet Abuse Tour - Part 4: The Weakening
The Great Buffet Abuse Tour - Part 5: The Collapse