Month: July 2017

After a run a few weeks back, I weighed in at 161.8 lbs. That’s my lowest yet since doing my Whole30’s and going Paleo. I didn’t expect for my weight to get this low. Ever. My goal was 165 lbs, and I figured I would stop losing weight there, but it seems that my body has other plans (and I’m totally okay with that).

You see, I’m not starving myself and not depriving myself of either quantity or content of food. Sure, I eat only Paleo-friendly foods (except for a few dinners during my birthday week), but I eat until I’m full and comfortable. I eat foods that are delicious, and I am not hungry between meals, nor am I craving anything. I’m not going out of my way to actually try to lose weight. Any weight loss that is going on right now is purely organic in the sense that it is an equalization of my body mass as supported by the food and nutrients I’m eating. Exercise plays a role, but I’m not certain that it plays a huge role considering I only run three times a week.

My body is evolving, and continues to make changes as I move forward on this journey toward good health. My fitness levels are at their highest in over 20 years, and I feel great. If my body decides that I need to continue to lose weight, so be it. I just hope I don’t get too thin; I like the clothing I have now and I don’t want to have to replace everything one more time.

Today, I ran into two sides of having become a thin person.

On the one hand, I was walking and an obese person looked at me and then immediately looked down toward the ground with a look of shame on their face. This person was embarrassed by their weight. I recognize this because it used to be me. What I never knew when I was on the other side of it is that it doesn’t feel good, cool, or awesome to be the thin person in this exchange. I felt sad for them. Not because they are overweight, but because they feel that way about themselves.

I thought I was trapped forever being a heavy person, so I would feel sad, embarrassed, and envious of thin people. I thought it was just not my lot in life to be fit and healthy. I’m glad I was able to break out of that mindset and make the changes necessary to get where I am today.

The flip side of that first encounter was being told by someone else that they’ve noticed I have lost more weight and that I look more fit. It’s true; I’ve lost about 7 lbs in the past month, but I didn’t think it was that noticeable. I felt happy that someone recognized it, and it felt good in sharp contrast to how I felt earlier in the day.

Getting healthy and fit is great. I am often asked for advice, and I readily give it. I never just push it on anyone, and I surely don’t want to make anyone feel badly about themselves. Ever. That’s not what I’m about.

It’s weird. The capacity of my stomach is greatly reduced 20 months after I started my first Whole30, and I’ve worked hard to change my relationship with food, how I view food, and the reasons I eat food. Every now and then, however, I still get the urge to eat more than I need. To just gorge myself. I don’t act on these impulses, but they still happen.

They are a hold-over from 48 years of bad eating habits and not caring about what I put into my mouth. Like muscle memory for athletes, it’s a psychological rut my mind settles into every now and then. I’ve found that it mostly happens when I am bored or not doing anything in particular, and that if I occupy my mind with something, the desire to eat goes away. That’s how I know it’s not hunger or a standard craving.

I was asked today if I wanted to eat some flan, and I said no. The person offering it said, “Sometimes, you just gotta have some because it’s what you want.” I patted my belly and said, “But I want a six-pack more than I ever want flan!” We laughed, but it’s true. I have set my mind to being healthy and fit and nothing is going to get in my way if I can help it.

After completing our third Whole30, I stopped losing weight again. It’s okay, though. The weight stopped at between 163 and 165 lbs, and that makes me happy. That’s a full 10-12 lbs below the max weight for my height according to Army standards (and USMC standards), and it is a comfortable size for me. I say comfortable size, because my body fat percentage is very low, and all that weight is 100% Grade A PaleoMarine.

Sometimes, it’s a little sad that I can’t seem to lose any extra weight, but I have to remind myself that I met my final goal of 165 lbs and then some, so anything more at this point is bonus weight loss and extra. On top of that, if my body wants or needs to lose the weight, it will. I don’t eat anything with refined sugar, added sugar, grains, beans, soy, or dairy, so the nutrition I get is pretty basic but adequate. I eat enough to be full at each meal, but I don’t count calories. I know when enough is enough through nearly two years of monitoring my weight closely (sometimes even more than once a day), and the amount I’m eating now is the right amount for my body and allows me to have enough energy and to feel full after I eat and between meals.

I see some people struggle to lose 10 lbs for months or years, and they are unhappy. Perhaps, their bodies have reached a happy point where nutrition and fitness are enough. We need to learn to accept certain things about our bodies. You can be healthy and not stick thin. I am a healthy 163.8 lbs, and any less, I may end up looking ill. I don’t want that.

Those are the two things we need: food and nutrients. The body doesn’t know where those calories are coming from. It just cares that it gets them. Why do I mention this? Because there are those who believe that a “Well-balanced diet with foods representing all the food groups is necessary for a healthy, complete diet.” They couldn’t be more wrong.

What is important is that we give our bodies food that contain calories to fuel us and nutrients that aid in the maintenance of metabolism. That’s why it’s so important to eat quality food that is nutrient-rich. Calorie dense foods tend to be poorer quality foods overall and even contain anti-nutrients (grains).

When we eat good, clean food, our bodies extract the nutrients through a complex process that takes energy. That energy comes from the very food it’s digesting (or from the food you ate prior to this meal). The more complex that food is for the body to break down, the fewer net calories you will get, which means you will not store as much. Some food storage is necessary for the periods between meals, but when we eat calorie dense foods and foods that are very easy for the body to digest, more of it gets stored as the body can’t use the energy fast enough. This leads to weight gain. In my case, I ate so much carb-heavy food that I got a condition called Fatty Liver Disease. My body was literally having to turn the sugar into fat so fast that the fat gummed up my liver. Fortunately, this has been reversed, and I now have a healthy liver.

FOOD:  Any nutritious substance that is consumed in order to maintain and sustain life and growth and to repair and furnish energy.

NUTRIENT: A substance that provides nourishment essential for growth and the maintenance of metabolism and life.

The food groups? Marketing made up back in the 70’s to get people to eat a more varied diet to boost purchasing of foods that the government was subsidizing. It literally has no bearing on how healthy a diet is. All that matters is that you eat foods that are clean and nutrient-rich.

I’ve tried to lose weight and get healthy many times before I was successful at it. I tried different methods, different diets, and even different fitness and exercise plans only to come up short each time and, to my horror, end up gaining it all back and then some! After years of trying, I began feeling defeated and hopeless. It wasn’t until my cousin got through to me and told me about Whole30 and Paleo. I was so beat down by feeling tired, embarassed by my appearance, and fear for my mortality that I figured what the hell; might as well give this a go since it worked for her. It changed my life.

Why did Whole30 and Paleo work when all the other diets failed? It comes down to a number of reasons, first and foremost of which is my dedication to sticking with it, but not in the way you’re thinking, though. I truly believe that when people set out to change their diets and to start an exercise plan, they do it with the same amount of dedication and motivation I had when I started. They truly want to make changes, and to even start any program takes a level of motivation those who don’t even try don’t have. The problem is that once they get started, they start facing some challenges that are truly difficult to get past and are way beyond what they thought they were getting into. Some of these things include:

• Exercising too hard, too soon results in pain and sore muscles. Taking it easier and allowing the body to heal between workouts is a much better way to get into an exercise plan. Someone going from sedentary lifestyle to a 5 or 6 day a week workout schedule is asking for lots of pain, discomfort, and possibly (hell, even likely) injuries that will keep them from being able to continue.
• Palate fatigue which comes from eating a very limited selection of food. I know people who were hugely successful eating chicken breast and salad for every meal. Every. Single. Meal. I couldn’t do that. After a few days, I’d be going crazy. I need variety in the food I eat, and that food also needs to be filling, something that salad just doesn’t do for me.
• Bad diet plans that concentrate on limiting calories instead of limiting bad sources of excessive calories. Sugar addiction is where a lot of our obesity problems come from, and any diet that avoids or doesn’t address it is already going to make it more difficult to succeed due to the continued cravings one will experience.

When I look back at my previous attempts to get healthy, lose weight, and get fit, they all ended with exasperation. I felt that I had done the work, I was following the rules, and each time, I ended up defeated. I wouldn’t see the results I was looking for based upon the effort I was putting in, or I felt so bad, that it just wasn’t worth the discomfort. Heck, we want to get healthy not ust to weigh a certain amount, but because we want to feel better. When I was feeling far worse than any time before I started these diets or programs, why would I want to continue? Humans seek comfort; living in constant discomfort goes against the very grain of our existence.

That’s why Whole30 was so important to both Sherry and me. It allowed us to change our lifestyle by eating clean foods with a transition period that had discomfort, but it was well-documented and up-front. We knew, based on all the information, that this discomfort period would be short and that when we got past it, we would feel amazing. The great part was that the information we read was correct; we felt amazing! THIS was what healthy eating was all about! Even if we didn’t lose weight, we FELT BETTER.

Then, a crazy thing happened. I started losing weight. A lot of weight. Once we we completed our Whole30 and transitioned into Paleo, that trend continued at a steady rate for another 10 months. In all, I lost 110 lbs in 12 months. Since then, I’ve lost another 40 lbs, but that involved a lot of running as well.

Why didn’t Calories In/Calories Out (CICO) work? Because not all calories are created equal. 100 calories of apple is a lot different than 100 calories of a donut. Our bodies process them differently, use or store the energy differently, and the net calories after digestion are very different, not to mention the additional nutrients the apple has over the donut. Trying to live CICO was difficult for me because I never felt satisfied with the number of calories I was supposed to be eating. It was also very easy to overeat on CICO, and I’m pretty sure I overate all the time.

Adkins and South Beach: tried them both. They were bland and limiting in a way that kept me from being excited about food, and never got me past the cravings. Regardless of what I ate, I found myself wanting snacks between meals. I was in a constant state of hunger, and it’s one of the prime motivators of human activity: acquire food. That’s why it’s one of the strongest feelings we can experience. Food equals survival. If you can get rid of the cravings, you allow yourself to be free from centering your life around eating and making food something that merely fuels you instead.

Exercise for weight loss? I tried that, too. There are some who are able to push themselves to physical discomfort day in and day out, for weeks or months at a time. Physical activity burns calories, and yes, you can burn a lot through some strenuous exercise, but when you’re obese, that’s both dangerous and difficult. Obese people eat a lot of calories to keep from feeling hungry, and that number of calories is hard to make a dent in through exercise alone. I never was able to quite break the proper ratio of calories eaten/calories burned through exercise alone. I know many people who continue trying to do this, and watching them fail year after year is heartbreaking. I think they are amazing for sticking with exercise for so long without the results they are looking for, but with a diet change, they could see so much improvement in a very little period of time.

Mistakes were made. I’ve learned from them, and I hope to inform others of my experiences so that they can avoid making the same mistakes and find success in getting healthy, losing weight, and getting fit. It doesn’t take any programs, products, pills, powders, patches, shakes, or crazy exercise regimens. All it takes is clean eating, cutting out some foods that are hyper nutritious and detrimental to our health, and a reasonable amount of movement three times a week. That’s all I’ve done, and I’ve lost 150 lbs in a year and a half. 

I’m in maintenance mode on my weight which means that I am still sticking to the Paleo Diet, but every now and then, I have decided that it’s okay for me to eat non-Paleo food. I only make the exceptions in the following situations (and even then, I try to make the most Paleo-friendly choice I can):

• Special events
• Professional settings
• Night out with friends
• Holidays

The reason I don’t do it more often, however, is because of how my body responds to non-Paleo foods now. When I eat something with wheat or dairy, my stomach ties itself up in knots, I get really gassy, and the pain just isn’t worth it. Besides, the vast majority of my favorite foods are either Paleo or have Paleo analogues that are easy enough to find or can be made.

What maintenance doesn’t mean to me is eating lots of non-Paleo food in smaller portions. I am not reintroducing anything non-Paleo into my diet for consumption on a regular basis. I’ve learned a lot about food and my body in the last two years, and I’ve found that my body is very amenable to the Paleo Diet. I feel energized, youthful, and I don’t gain weight. I always feel full after meals, and I never have cravings between meals. The only non-Paleo food I ever really get hungry for every now and then is chocolate. Fortunately, I like bittersweet chocolate, so eating 80% chocolate is fine for me (which many Paleo people say is Paleo-ish enough).

I’m not done with Paleo. I will never be done with it. I’ve found a diet that my body does well with, and that is psychologically sustainable and ecologically and ethically friendly. If anything, having reached maintenance mode has only further strengthened my love of the Paleo Diet. It got me to where I am today in terms of health and fitness, and I never want to go back to the life I lived before. This is too much fun!