Month: April 2016

I’ve been asked from time to time (as recently as yesterday!) where to start: Whole30 or Paleo. Well, it really depends on what your goal is. If you want to get healthy, learn about how to eat foods that are whole, natural, and good for you, and possibly find out if you have any food allergies you’re unaware of, then Whole30 is the way to go. If you want to change to an eating plan (they’re known as diets) that you can live on for the rest of your life without suffering, starving, or counting calories, then Paleo is the way to go. Now (and follow me here) if you want to do what I did, and which I believe was the best way for me, then you would do a Whole30 and follow it with the Paleo diet. Why? I have a bunch of reasons why I did it for myself, and some of these may hold true for you, too.

• I wanted to cut myself off from sugar. I’ve heard from many people that sugar was the root of our weight problem in the US, so I did some reading and found that they were not only right, but our understating the evils of sugar and its effect on our brains, on our cravings, and on our overall health which includes heart disease, high cholesterol, and even cancer is only growing daily. I knew that I was (as most Americans are) addicted to the high sugar content in my foods, and I knew that a Whole30 would help me break the cycle. Yes, it was painful for the first week, but I haven’t looked back since (and it’s been over seven months).
• I wanted to learn to enjoy whole and natural foods again. Eating on a Whole30 is a new experience after a lifetime of eating anything and everything. Do I miss bread, pasta, and beans? You bet I do! But I’ve also learned to love things I never really enjoyed before: sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and asparagus. My ability to taste delicate flavors is something I never knew I had; the extreme sweetness of sugar dulls our taste to some of the most amazing flavors out there. No wonder so many kids don’t like broccoli; it’s actually quite delicious!
• I wondered if I had a food allergy I wasn’t aware of. It turns out that I don’t (at least that I know of), but it’s good to know. My wife, on the other hand, found that she has milk allergies. She’d been drinking milk her entire life and feels much better now without it.
• I wanted to realize health benefits and weight loss quickly. Doing a Whole30 can be a pretty dramatic change in one’s diet, and it certainly was for me. By going straight to a Whole30, I made a clean break with all foods that are bad.
• I wanted to create good habits. There are so many foods that you can make that are Paleo substitutes that one could almost eat anything they could eat before (even pasta, bread, and cakes!) while staying Paleo. The problem is that you need to change your eating mindset to stay way from the bad foods, and it’s hard to do when you’re substituting the bad foods with a healthier option of the same food. Case in point: desserts. Whole30 really emphasizes not eating desserts. They should be treats; something you do at special occasions or holidays, but not after every meal. Sherry and I have embraced this during our Whole30. Every now and then, we will reward ourselves for doing so well on our new eating plan by having a single almond cup (like a peanutbutter cup, but made with almond butter and chocolate sweetened with honey). Otherwise, we very, very rarely have dessert. We never have appetizers anymore, either.

With all that said, I know that Whole30 is hard. It’s extremely hard to get past the first week for many people. I had an easier time of it than Sherry did for no other reason than I have never been a snack food eater or much of a dessert eater, both things Sherry used to enjoy regularly. I also used to eat once or twice a day, but huge portions. This forced my body into a constant state of starvation which guaranteed that my body would store as much of the calories as possible whenever I ate. Now that I eat three times a day and my portions are smaller, my body seems to process the food better, and if my weight loss is any indication, I’m not storing as much, either.

What should you do? I would start with going to the Whole30 and Paleo websites and reading about them. If you are on the fence about doing a Whole30, I would say try it. If it gets too hard, you can always fall into a Paleo diet. If you want to ease into it, then maybe going Paleo first and then doing a Whole30 is the way to go. Either way, just going Paleo is great, and the benefits to you, your health, and your weight will be immense!

I recently underwent what is supposed to be an annual physical. My last physical was about three years ago, and I was scolded by my doctor for not coming in sooner. He has been worried about my health due to my weight and was quite surprised to see me weight over one hundred pounds less than I weighed the last time I saw him.

What was interesting to me was that when I told him I did a Whole30 followed by switching to a Paleo diet, he was incredulous. He thought there had to be something else wrong with me to have lost over 80 lbs in six months, so he not only had me do the regular tests, but he had them take extra x-rays, extra samples (eww!) and run more thorough screenings on my blood to check for cancer.

Well, I received the results to all my tests in the mail, and I have to say, I’m very pleased.

The list of health issues I had prior to losing the weight is as follows:

• Type 2 Diabetes
• Fatty liver
• High cholesterol
• Blood pressure started to be troublesome, getting high
• Declining vision due to Diabetes
• Nerve tingling due to Diabetes

Since doing the Whole30 and transitioning to Paleo, everything on that list has gone back to normal. I literally went from a person whose health was horrible and was at-risk to being not only healthy, but based on my blood work and stress test, in excellent health.

I’m not selling you anything. I don’t make any money off making recommendations or telling my story. I just want you to have a chance at being healthy like I did. You can do this. It’s not out of reach. It just takes some dedication and motivation.

I often get asked for recipes, product links, or recommendations, etc. My wife put together a great list of products we use and enjoy on her blog. I thought I’d post a link to it from here so you, too, can check them out.

Full disclosure: she does get a small percentage (which does not raise the price on Amazon!) if you buy from the links she provides.

I’m a loser.

Stop laughing.

But seriously, I’m a loser again. For the past two days, I’ve lost weight, and it feels great to be on the losing part of my weight loss journey. In an earlier post, I talked about how I have a cycle that goes something like this: lose weight for 10 days, then lose size for 10 days. Wash, rinse, repeat. Well, I’m done with the 10 days size loss and back to the 10 days of weight loss. It’s especially satisfying after a day of eating well but comfortably. I ate three meals every day this week, and each was delicious and satisfying. The important part for me is the satisfying. I never felt hungry or as if I didn’t eat enough after each meal. My weight is now 204.5 lbs (85+ lbs lost since September 1, 2015!). Just 4.6 lbs to Onederland (for those of us who weigh over 200 lbs and are working our way down into the 100’s, we call it “Onederland.”).

My body fat percentage is also down a lot now: 24.1%. When I started, it was over 47%. That’s a staggering loss! I’m two belt holes from needing a size 34 belt, and my 36″ trousers feel very normal and almost loose now. My size large t-shirts don’t fit me quite as snug now. The size large Duluth Trading shirts I love are almost too big now. I may need to buy a medium to see how it fits.

Every one of those little facts is a little victory for me, and helps me keep my head right and stick to being a loser. Sometimes, it’s good to be a loser.

As I sat at the doctors office waiting to take my physical, I thought about the changes in lifestyle I have made recently. These changes weren’t easy, but they were necessary. I know a lot of people tell me that they could never do what I do. I’ve discussed that in the past. But what I thought about was the fact that it wasn’t nearly as hard as I had made it out to be. I used to be one of those people who would say I could never get rid of breads, pasta, etc. Now, I find that the sacrifice was actually quite trivial as compared to the better health and weight loss.

It helps that Sherry makes amazing foods for us. It helps that we are in this together and we are accountable to each other. It helps that we are there to support each other when we are psychologically beaten or feeling down. It helps that success breeds success; our experience with Whole30 was so successful that transitioning into Paleo has been easy and actually, quite nice.

We ultimately decide how we want to live. Sherry and I decided we no longer wanted to be fat people who were out of breath, out of shape, didn’t fit into booths at restaurants (me), and generally just didn’t look good. These things were all within our power to change, and we’ve done that and we continue to march forward. I have 40 more lbs to lose to my final goal, but now, it seems like an attainable goal versus a fantasy.

All it takes is for you to commit to making the lifestyle change and make it permanent. Once you do that, things fall into place.

 

This is a brilliant article about how health professionals and scientists actually helped bring about the health disaster we’re currently facing through bad advice rooted in the flawed hypothesis of a scientist at the University of Minnesota following the heart attack of President Eisenhower. I highly suggest reading it.

Here is an important excerpt from the article: “…It is a biological error to confuse what a person puts in their mouth with what it becomes after it is swallowed. The human body, far from being a passive vessel for whatever we choose to fill it with, is a busy chemical plant, transforming and redistributing the energy it receives.” A person does not get fat from eating fat. Our body has to create that fat in a way that is efficient; it takes sugar and turns it into fat. “Cholesterol, present in all of our cells, is created by the liver. Biochemists had long known that the more cholesterol you eat, the less your liver produces.” Think about that last sentence. Re-read it if you have to. This is key.

The Reader’s Digest version (a gunnery sergeant I used to work for in the Marines would say  that) is that humans have been consuming and digesting fats since we’ve been around; it’s even in breast milk. Sugar, on the other hand, has only entered our diet in the past 300 years which, from an evolutionary standpoint, is very recent. The health issues we are seeing that have cropped up in the past 60 years is directly related to our consumption of sugar. It is not fat, as believed, that is the culprit. Worse yet, a scientist in 1972 tried to warn us and he was run out of his field, ridiculed, and eventually discredited. Only now are we realizing how right he was and how wrong everyone else was.

Here’s something pretty convincing to me: “France, the country with the highest intake of saturated fat, has the lowest rate of heart disease; Ukraine, the country with the lowest intake of saturated fat, has the highest. When the British obesity researcher Zoë Harcombe performed an analysis of the data on cholesterol levels for 192 countries around the world, she found that lower cholesterol correlated with higher rates of death from heart disease.”

But don’t take my word for it. READ THE ARTICLE. The life you save may be your own.

Fat people are easy marks. We don’t like being fat, we would like to get thinner and healthier, and we want to do the least amount of work in the least amount of time to lose the weight. Don’t lie to me or to yourself by saying otherwise. Our lack of exercise and, in many (but not all) cases, our lack of self-control when eating is what led us to where we are now. Seriously.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s get to the solution: eat less and move more. It is that simple. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to themselves. This is where someone invariably says, “But I have a thyroid problem…” or some other such ailment. Well, I’m here to tell you that I know people first-hand and very close to me who used to say the same things before they lost 50+ lbs in six months. They used to rest on their excuses and be content with being unhealthily heavy*.

What happened to make them lose weight? Mindset.

It wasn’t a grueling workout routine or a restrictive diet. It was reasonable movement and a reasonable diet that eliminated added sugars, high-carb foods, and focused on eating healthy alternatives.

It is easy.

People don’t believe me. They say they can’t give up certain foods like breads, rice, or beans, yet they complain that they can’t lose weight. They don’t want to commit to a little bit of exercise every day yet complain they can’t lose weight.

You get nothing in life for free unless you are Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian. For the rest of us, to get anything at all, you have to work for it. Weight loss is no different. There’s good news, though. By losing weight, you do get something for free: better health.

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*Yes, there are people with legitimate health issues that preclude them from losing weight the way most people can and they should be working with a doctor, PA, or nurse to find a way for them to lose weight, if that’s even possible. Reading blogs isn’t going to help.