Month: July 2016

When I graduated USMC boot camp, I weighed 138 lbs.

Near my maximum of 311 lbs.

Recently at 191 lbs.

This is something I came to the realization of months ago, but never really thought much about it. Fat doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of a flawed lifestyle. When Sherry and I decided to do something about our weight, we decided to take a different approach from any we had tried in the past. We tried South Beach, low-fat, and even moderation, and all of our attempts failed. We also tried exercising it away, but that obviously wasn’t enough to counteract the flawed lifestyle of eating whatever we wanted in whatever quantity we wanted. We needed to change the basis upon which our nutrition was based. We needed a new lifestyle.

Here is where it gets real. Sorry/not sorry if you are offended by the following.

Look; I don’t care what got you here. I won’t tell you you’re dumb, stupid, or lazy because you’re none of those things. If you’re here, it’s because you recognize one or more of a few basic facts.

• You’re fat and want to not be fat anymore
• You have health problems that aren’t serious yet, but can get there if left unchecked
• You’ve tried to lose weight before and failed
• You’ve lost weight before and gained it (and then some) back
• You want straight scoop on how to get healthy. Losing weight is a bonus.
• You searched Google for “Really sexy Marine guy talks about Paleo.”

Ok, so that last bullet probably accounts for 0% of the people who visit this site, but I’ll keep thinking it in my mind. Some delusions are fun.

But seriously, if you’re searching the Internet for information on losing weight, getting healthy, and Whole30 or Pale0, you’re taking the EXACT SAME FIRST STEPS I DID! You are already on your way! THAT’S EXCITING!!!!

Bring it on!

The next step is planning. Plan on starting by setting a date. Look up some recipes and find some that appeal to you. Then, put together a grocery list. This will take some time and will be strange because some of the ingredients are very different than what you’re used to and may be difficult to obtain. Amazon is your friend in this regard; a lot of what we use in our Paleo cooking can be found there. Surprisingly, many Kroger’s, Aldi’s, and the more obvious Sprout’s or Whole Food Markets have lots of Paleo ingredients. Once you have your ingredients together, clear out the bad foods from your refrigerator and pantry. Set the date a week or three from now and use all the added-sugar or high-carb foods up. No need to waste ’em, and you won’t really do any more damage to yourself in a few days. Or, start sooner and donate any unopened foods to a local food bank or give unused food to friends who would use it.

Then, GO! DO IT! Eat good food, eat regular portions, go for a walk (if you are able), and get the right amount of sleep. It’s that simple.

Make the foods, package leftovers for lunches, and make sure you get lots of sleep. It’s important to adopt the entire lifestyle for maximum efficacy (which is a fancy way of saying to make sure you get the most out of it).

The title of this post is Fat doesn’t just happen. Well, losing weight doesn’t just happen on its own after you’ve gained it (unless you’re ill, and in that case, please go see a doctor). You need to work at it, and by work, I mean do some good eating, solid sleeping, and get on your feet and do some walking or any exercise you can do, even if it’s a little. A start is a start, regardless of the size step you can take. It’s a step in the right direction; you getting healthy and losing weight.

Don’t forget to enter the drawing for the free Paleo Cookbook!

Adopting a new lifestyle is tough, but it’s even harder when you’re one half of a team that doesn’t want to adopt the same lifestyle. For so many people, this is a very real situation. It’s the second most cited reason I hear from people who explain to me why they can’t go Paleo or do a Whole30. Having to cook one meal for dinner is hard enough, but two? And then multiply that by two for breakfasts and dinners? Add to that lunches for the Paleo person? That’s a lot of extra work, and can be a pretty huge reason to just not do it.

I was facing the same battle. Although Sherry got us into eating better and adopting what we believed at the time were healthier ways of eating in the past, after our multiple failures, I think she had given up and resigned herself to a life of being heavy. When I mentioned to her that I wanted to do a Whole30, she scoffed and told me I was crazy. When I suggested Paleo instead, she thought it was ridiculous. I kept reading and looking for options for me, but the more I read, the more I was led back to Whole30 followed by Paleo. Finally, one evening, I had a very frank discussion with her.

“If we don’t do something, anything, to help me lose weight, I will be dead within the decade.” I wasn’t being passive-aggressive, nor was I using hyperbole. This was what I was being told by my doctor based off declining medical markers. I was at the precipice and my health was still at a point where the damage could be reversed. Another year or two? I would be doomed with conditions that you don’t or can’t come back from.

I told her, “I will abide by whatever you want to do, but I want to be around for a long time to molest and annoy you. I want to see grandchildren. I want to be a part of their lives. I don’t see a way for me to do that if I continue on the path I’m on now.” It must have hit home with her, because she relented and said she would read into it and strongly consider it.

Let’s do this

After a week or so of reading, and Sherry is a voracious reader, she came to me and said, “Okay, we can do a Whole30, but we aren’t starting until after my birthday.” This was in late July and her Birthday is at the end of August, so that meant we had a month to prepare. We stopped buying foods with added sugar and started getting rid of all the foods we had on-hand that had added sugar or forbidden ingredients in them. We also went to restaurants and ate food we would no longer be able to eat. Sort of our “Goodbye to Bad Foods Tour of 2015.” We would indulge in these high-sugar foods and reminisce about how much we loved the foods or about the memories we had associated with those foods, and then we said farewell to them. We might visit them again sometime in the distant future, but only in strict moderation, and only after we’d reached our goals in weight and health.

When we started, the day after her birthday, we were filled with doubt. Not so much in our resolve, but in the efficacy of Whole30. We were incredulous, but hopeful. We had both read at length about what to expect on our Whole30, and sure enough, we were going through the classic symptoms. Our mindset was good, though, and we supported each other when one of us was faltering. There were days when Sherry would feel like no progress was being made, or that she was feeling far worse without sugar than she did with it, and I would have to encourage her. There were days when I really, really wanted pasta. I have Italian DNA in me; it’s a thing. She talked me off the ledge more than a few times.

I think one of the major breakthroughs in her mindset fully adopting the healthier lifestyle was when she stopped drinking milk and noticed she was less inflamed, or “puffy” as she called it, than she was before. She used to start her days with a glass of milk. The last time she lost weight, she lost 40 lbs but was still always “puffy.” This time, after losing just 10 lbs, she looked thinner than after losing 40 lbs. She felt great. She had more energy. Her mind felt clearer. The only thing she changed aside from getting rid of the sugar was dairy. When she tried to reintroduce it, her body swelled and her joints ached. She had learned, thanks to Whole30, that she had a dairy allergy that she had been unaware of. It wasn’t serious enough to cause easily recognizable symptoms, but now she was certain.

For me, I knew we were onto something good when I started feeling better, more energetic, and my mind seemed clear early in the mornings, even before my coffee! I no longer awoke in a fog. My mind was sharp and I was able to concentrate and think while in the shower, something I hadn’t been able to do in many years.

Where do we go from here?

As we completed our Whole30, we looked for what to do next. Whole30 is a way of eating that can be sustained, but it’s very limited. Something Sherry and I were both adamant about is that whatever healthier lifestyle we adopted, it had to include food that was delicious. We finally understood that food is fuel, but that fuel should at least be tasty. We thought back to our pre-Whole30 research and found that Paleo was the logical next step. We decided to try it and see how it went. Never in our lives did we expect it to work so well.

I’ve talked about the benefits, how our experience has been with Paleo, and even the effect it’s had on our friends. What I only touched upon in the past, however, was just how important it was for my wife to be on my team.

As I stated earlier, we pick each other up when the other is down. We continually cheerlead each other. When Sherry has a bad day on the scale, I remind her that she looks amazing and that while the scale may not be her friend that day, the fit of her pants sure are! When I beat myself up for having eaten a bit more than I should have, it’s Sherry who reminds me that it’s likely because my body was craving more calories. She reminds me that I still look good, and that the scale is still rewarding me with results. When I am up in weight, she asks me how my pants are fitting. When I tell her I’m down a belt hole, she smiles and reminds me to stop worrying about the scale.

Venus and Mars

It’s a constant give and take, and it’s that support that makes the lifestyle not only successful, but possible for us. It enriches our lives, and I have to say that an unexpected consequence of this is that we have grown closer in ways I never thought possible. We are both more engaged together in our meal plans and execution. We discuss our fitness more, our health, and anything out of the ordinary. We talk about our successes, but also our challenges as we look to each other for ideas and solutions. Heck, the fact that my wife solicits solutions from me is a huge step.

So, how do you get a partner to engage? This is a difficult question to answer, because each person and each relationship is different. What worked for me may not work for everyone. There are many different tacks you can take when addressing this with your partner, but one that is very hard to argue against is, “I need your full help and support to be successful at this.” It is the passive-aggressive argument and really brings a lot of risk with it. The implications of someone who refuses this argument has larger consequences than adopting a diet plan or lifestyle, so it should be used with caution. If you’re using this argument, you should be prepared for the emotional backlash of your partner refusing to help you. That’s something I risked, but I went into it with the knowledge that I may have been asking too much or have been too selfish, and that she may have had just as valid a reason for not supporting me. It was a gamble for me that paid off.

An option is to join a support group, forum, subreddit, or online community of people who are on the same path. While this won’t help with the double meal prep or having to watch your partner eat foods you can’t eat (or at the minimum, shouldn’t eat), it will help keep you motivated and moving forward.

If you’re having to make meals for or with your partner who refuses to go Paleo with you, perhaps you can make meals that incorporate Paleo elements that can easily be removed and eaten without the non-Paleo components. Grilled chicken sandwiches: your partner can have the bun while you eat the chicken without. Spaghetti and meatballs; you can eat the meatballs with sauce and perhaps spaghetti squash while your partner eats the pasta and garlic bread.

What if they threw a war and nobody showed up?

The last option is to just make Paleo-friendly foods without telling them. Why fight about something that doesn’t need it? There are so many options and alternatives that can fool most anyone that are tasty and filling that you may be fighting a battle that doesn’t need to be fought. At our last holiday party, my wife made a Paleo chocolate tort and some non-Paleo cupcakes. Many of the people were shocked and surprised to find that the delicious, moist, and amazing tort was Paleo. If we hadn’t told anyone, they would have never known that it was Paleo. The same is true for many of the dishes we serve our guests.

Help and support are important to everyone; patients in recovery, people training for marathons, and college-aged kids, for example. Adopting a new lifestyle like Paleo is no exception. In many ways, I think it may be more important than most support situations; eating goes to the core of who we are, is a large part of the human experience, and is the root of our culture. We are changing something that is very intrinsic to how we see ourselves and literally what we’re made of. Going about it alone is difficult at best. Get a partner, a buddy, or at least a person in your corner to help you and to answer questions when you have them or to pick you up when you need it. If that person can’t be a partner, engage someone who can help. It may be the difference between success and failure.

So, according to this study, it is believed that Diabetes reversal after bypass surgery is linked to changes in gut microorganisms and not directly due to weight loss. They believe this is due to bypass surgery improving glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity.

“Our research showed that duodenum-jejunum gastric bypass (DJB) surgery may be applied to cure diabetes of both genetic (mutation) and environmental (diet-induced) origin,” explained lead investigator Xiang Gao, PhD, of State Key Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and MOE Key Laboratory of Model Animal for Disease Study, Model Animal Research Center, Nanjing Biomedical Research Institute and the Collaborative Innovation Center of Genetics and Development, Nanjing University.

This is pretty interesting. Both Sherry and I were Diabetic before losing our weight but now we both have normal blood sugar levels yet neither of us had gastric bypass surgery. We lost weight by doing a Whole30 followed by adopting a Paleo lifestyle.

I guess it is possible that by not eating processed sugar, grains, or anything with added sugars has changed our gut flora. Basically, we changed the diet of the microorganisms in our stomachs and evicted the bad ones while attracting the good ones in the same way changing the menu in a restaurant will change the clients who come to your establishment.

Regardless of how it happened, it did. I no longer have blood sugar problems, nor do I need to monitor or take medicine daily. This has been a huge improvement in my life, and my body is healthier for it.

One factor in weight loss and improving my health that I’ve overlooked in the past has been sleep, or rather, getting the right amount of sleep. It’s a part of any weight loss program that is rarely discussed. In the past ten months, I’ve kept track of my sleep with a Fitbit Surge, and I’ve been able to reliably track down the times I’m not losing weight by looking at some inputs: How much food did I eat, what type of food did I eat, how much physical activity did I do, and how much sleep did I get? These four factors make up the formula for successful weight loss.

(Food volume+food type)² – physical activity (-sleep amount)² = weight loss

We’ll call that the PaleoMarine Formula for Weight Loss (I put it into some fancy formula formatting because it looks pretty cool). I’m certain that the real formula is far more complicated and takes into account far more factors, but for our purposes here, these are the factors we have under our control and that most greatly affect our weight loss success. In order of importance, they are:

1. Food type
2. Food volume
3. Sleep
4. Physical activity

Just like with any formula, if you throw in a bad value into any of the variables, you will get weird or bad results. The same is true in weight loss. If you eat a reasonable food volume, eat good food, and get in some physical activity but not enough sleep, your body will not lose weight as well or as quickly. If you get lots of sleep and physical activity but eat a lot or eat bad foods, you won’t lose weight. Food volume and food type are the more important parts of this formula, in my experience.

How much sleep is right for you? That depends on many factors including your age and sex. I’ve found that for me, while 6.5 hours of sleep is enough for me to feel rested, I don’t lose weight unless I sleep for at least 7 to 7.5 hours a night regardless of how well I ate the day before. My non-scientific reason for this is that sleep deprivation greatly affects what happens to the food you eat the day before on a metabolic level.

According to PaleoLeap:

Study after study has shown that if they’re allowed to choose their own diet, sleep-deprived subjects will eat more food, especially more junk. Assuming you aren’t living in a metabolic ward, you too have the ability to choose your own diet – and you too will likely go for the “comfort food” in the face of sleep deprivation. Specifically, sleep deprivation is a huge risk factor for sugar cravings and overeating high-carb junk food (think cookies, pretzels, pasta bowls…)

As for sleep and metabolism, PaleoLeap has this to say:

• Reduces insulin sensitivity. Insulin sensitivity is the metabolic capacity to handle eating carbs – to use them for energy, instead of storing them as fat. A reduction in insulin sensitivity means that you’re more likely to store food as fat (and then still be hungry afterwards).

• Changes the composition of the gut flora. Nobody is totally sure yet exactly what the relationship is between the gut flora and obesity, but we know there is one.

• Creates inflammation. In this study, for example, either sleeping 5 hours a night or sleeping at the wrong time (the shift work pattern) increased markers of inflammation. This study makes it even clearer: “sleep deficient humans…exhibit a proinflammatory component; therefore, sleep loss is considered as a risk factor for developing cardiovascular, metabolic, and neurodegenerative diseases (e.g., diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and multiple sclerosis).” Nothing that promotes diabetes is helping you lose weight.

It’s interesting to see that sleep deficient humans exhibit a proinflammatory component: I find that my fingers are puffy when I don’t get enough sleep. Now I know why! Perhaps I can use that as another indicator as to whether I get enough sleep the night before or not. I will start checking the fit of my wedding ring in the mornings after sleeping to see if I can collaborate this as well.

Adopting a Paleo lifestyle is a change. Part of that change should be getting enough sleep. Some things you can do are:

• Set a “Do Not Pass” time for when everything is done at night. Do not go past this time with any tasks. This leads to the next step.
• Set a bedtime and stick to it. I did this, and it’s helped me get more sleep every night.
• As part of that bedtime, have a routine that you stick to. Mine is to make sure the doors are locked, lights are off in the house, and once in my bedroom, I make sure things are laid out so I can find them easily in the morning as efficiently as possible. I then raise the back of my bed slightly (helps eliminate snoring for me) and then I turn out the lights as I tuck myself into bed.
• During the bedtime routine, eliminate electronics device usage. Studies have shown that using electronics before bed can cause you to not get good rest.

I know, we feel like we need to finish things before we go to bed, and many of us don’t want to keep putting things off, but perhaps look at how much you procrastinate earlier in the day. If you find that you put things off earlier in the day to try to get them done before you go to sleep, perhaps start writing lists of To-Do’s so you can tackle these tasks earlier in the day to allow yourself an earlier bedtime.

Some people (myself included) have medical issues that can preclude them from getting a good night’s sleep. I had sleep apnea and used to wear a CPAP at night to get a good night’s rest. I believe my weight had a lot to do with my sleep apnea as now that I’ve lost the weight, I don’t snore or suffer from sleep apnea anymore. However, there are lots of people who are not aware they have medical issues that keep them from getting a good night’s rest. If you do all of the above steps to try to ensure that you get a good night’s rest and you still can’t, perhaps speak with your doctor or physician’s assistant to see if you qualify for a sleep study to try to identify the reason(s) for your lack of quality sleep.

Get enough sleep. Make time for it. I know you’re busy, and I know you have stuff to do. We all want to get as much done in a day as possible, but sleep is important to our overall health.

Current stats:
Weight: 190.5 lbs (Started 289.9 lbs on 9/1/15)
Body fat: 20.2% (Started 47% on 9/1/15)
BMI: 29.9 (Started 45.4 on 9/1/15)

It looks like Sherry and I have inadvertently started a Whole30 again. We started on Wednesday last week, the day after my birthday. We were talking Thursday night, and we both realized that as we both rededicated ourselves to sticking very firmly to the rules of the Paleo lifestyle, every meal we ate has been Whole30 compliant.We had been planning on doing another Whole30 in September, but the more we talked about it, the more it seemed like a good idea to just do it now. Also, she’d reacquired some bad habits mostly in the form of snacking and eating more and more foods with sugars in them, so she felt it was time. She has always been such a strong supporter of me and my health that I decided that I was going to do this with her. Besides, I could use a reset, too.

This time around, it’s been a lot easier for us to get into. Since we have already eliminated foods with added sugars in them, and we very rarely ate anything sweetened with honey or maple syrup, we aren’t experiencing the sugar withdrawals. Sherry has had some snacks here and there while I have not, however, and this round of Whole30 is going to help her reset her cravings and her food amounts.

For me, it’s more about just reiterating the fact that food is fuel, and that I need to stick with the basics. I thought about this while eating my two eggs and two slices of bacon this morning. I realized that I felt satisfied and full after eating, it made me think of how far I’d come in the past ten months. It also reminded me that if I eat slowly, and I eat good, filling foods, I will be fine and my body will be sufficiently fueled until the next meal.

I haven’t picked up any really bad habits in the past nine months since my last Whole30 other than perhaps eating past when I feel full or satisfied (I’m looking at you, baked sweet potato!), but I figure it can’t hurt to be a little more strict with my diet for a month. Doing a Whole30 once a year may be a good thing. We’ll see what my results are afterward, and if I feel any different. I am predicting that I won’t really feel as much of a difference this time around, but it’s a good exercise to go through to just reset things a bit.

So far on this Whole30, I’ve lost all the weight I gained over the holiday weekend and I’m once again back to my lowest weight. I’m ready to get into the 180’s and then onto the homestretch. I have two more months to go before my one year anniversary, and I’d like to have this done by then. It’d be a great accomplishment, and one I will be very proud of.