Month: January 2018

I kicked the sugar dragon.

Seriously.

Whether the sugar came in the form of grains, alcohol, or soft drinks, I quit them. Using that one crazy trick, I’ve been able to live a much healthier, fuller life.

Want to lose weight?

Let’s start with drinks. Stop drinking sodas. Stop drinking fruit juice. Stop drinking energy drinks or vitamin water. All of these things have sugar in them. If you saw just how much sugar was contained in some of these drinks, you’d be shocked. In some cases, the sugar content is so high, it’s almost to the point of saturation.

Next, let’s move to savory foods. Things like bread, pasta, pizza, chips, crackers, and just about anything in the center aisles of the supermarket have lots of sugar in them. Take a look at the nutritional information sometime. Why some foods have sugar in them (and as a second, third, or fourth ingredient) is because when fat is removed from foods, it tastes bland, so they have to replace it with something to make people think it tastes good. Enter our enemy: sugar.

Finally, there’s the easy to identify sweets: desserts, candies, donuts, and treats. The vast majority of these are full of sugar. What’s interesting to me is that American desserts are so over-sweetened as compared to the desserts of other cultures. I remember, at the height of my sugar consumption, my mother made some traditional Hungarian pastries for me, and I commented to her that I thought she didn’t add enough sugar to it because it wasn’t sweet. She replied to me that it was sweetened as she always had made it, and suggested that I ate too much sugar and was desensitized to sweetness. I scoffed at the time, but I think she was completely right. When eating the very same pastry this past Christmas, I found it to be plenty sweet; almost too sweet for me, now.

My crazy trick to losing weight: cut the sugar as much as you can. Some doctors go so far as to say that sugar is a toxin to humans. While I won’t go that far, I do believe that it is the root of our obesity epidemic. Coupled with the horrible advice recommending low-fat and grain-based diets, it’s a perfect storm for poor health.

Kick the sugar dragon. Life is amazing when you don’t have it on your back!

Another full night of sleep! That’s great news. It meant that my weight stayed the same, even after eating a pretty full dinner the night before.

Breakfast: Poached eggs, ham slices, and a waffle made of sweet potato. I know it sounds weird, but it was tasty and filling.

Lunch: A really delicious and spicy Paleo Jambalaya that Sherry makes. It has shrimp, sausage, and chicken in it and served over spaghetti squash.

Dinner: A bowl of butternut squash soup. This was a standard-sized soup bowl. I easily could have eaten another bowl because it was so delicious, but it did fill me up.

I’m going to start taking pictures of my meals starting tomorrow morning. I hope I remember! I will start showing what my serving sizes are.

As for my weight, it was the same today as yesterday. I will take that as a win!

The secret to losing weight is that there is no secret. We know how to do it. We’ve known for hundreds of years, even. Broken down simply, it is eat fewer calories than you take in. But, calories are not all created equally. Food that is easy to process will be stored more easily than food that is difficult to break down in our bodies. For that reason, it’s important to take in quality calories. That’s where whole, natural foods come in.

Can you eat wheat right off the blade? No. It gets stuck in your throat. I tried it as a kid, and I had wheat stuck in my throat for the most part of a day. It was an unpleasant experience, to say the least. It should have been a warning to me.

If you can eat it with nothing more than cutting and cooking, it’s most likely okay to eat. If you have to process it like wheat, rice, or sugar, chances are it’s not good for your body. But why would that be the case? Because our bodies were made to digest foods readily available to us: meat, vegetables, and fruits.

When we process foods, we make it much easier for our bodies to extract energy from. This is a great thing if you are running a marathon, but not so good if you are living anything other than a very active life. That means your body will extract the energy from the food with little effort and then need something to do with the excess energy. Our bodies take that extra energy and store it as fat. The more extra energy you put into your body, the more it stores it. Our bodies don’t want to be wasteful, so they hold on to every bit they get their “hands” onto.

So, to take it a step further, it’s not good enough to just eat fewer calories than  you expend because it’s difficult to limit calories alone. Calories in/calories out (CICO) diets fail the majority of the time because they don’t address the most difficult part of such diets: cravings.

Cravings come from the brain sending signals to the body to consume food to acquire energy. The problem comes in that sugar doesn’t suppress or even satisfy cravings; it actually intensifies them. So, the more cravings you experience and satisfy with sugar, the more cravings you will get. It’s a vicious cycle. It explains why I would literally be planning my next meal as I was eating one.

The secret I found was low-carb/high-fat (LCHF). By eating whole, solid, and good foods, I was able to lose 110 lbs in a year. I didn’t have to starve myself, and cravings went away within a week or two of starting my first Whole30.

If you’re looking for an easy way to lose weight, I hate to break it to you, but there is none. The multi-billion dollar diet industry isn’t in it for helping you. They are in it for the dollar. They sell ease and comfort when in reality, their products fall short of the promises and will leave you worse off than when you started. The truth is it takes some serious perseverance, motivation, and dedication to a healthy lifestyle to lose weight and to keep it off. Notice I didn’t say a fitness plan. That’s not necessary for losing weight. But the exercise industry won’t tell you that, either. They want you to try to sweat it all off. If you’re like I was, over 150 lbs overweight, there’s no amount of exercise that will get rid of that without changing one’s diet.

So, the secret is: eat good, whole, natural foods and avoid sugar, alcohol, grains, dairy, and soy. It works. And honestly, it’s no secret. It’s just not making anyone rich, so the info isn’t as easy to find or is often discredited.

I got a lot of sleep last night, and I felt great when I woke up. I had a friend come over to help me build some shelves for Sherry, and it was a busy day full of running up and down stairs, painting, drilling, cutting, and otherwise doing general construction. It turned out to be a good time, though.

Breakfast: Sherry made us two eggs sunny-side up and three slices of bacon. No fruit or veggies on purpose. With coffee.

Lunch: Sherry made us quite the dandy lunch consisting of two apple and chicken sausages, some red cabbage, and some zucchini. It turned out very well, and was delicious and filling.

Dinner: This was a surprise from left-field that was absolutely incredible. She made a chipotle and onion shrimp served with spiralized zucchini. It was probably one of the tastiest meals I’ve had in a long time. My friend, who doesn’t normally like vegetables, raved about how delicious the food was, and he said his wife needs the recipe. The coolest part: Sherry made it up tonight! I hope she will be posting this recipe to her site, soon. It’s worth trying!

I felt good all day. Even though I was running up and down stairs and active for a very long time, I felt really good. I got to bed very late due to playing video games, but Sherry let me sleep in, and I got enough rest.

That’s what I told myself one morning as I looked in the mirror and stepped out of the shower. I remember it as clearly as if it were this morning. I wanted to cry. The big guy looking back at me in the mirror looked old, tired, and completely out of shape. I didn’t recognize him. The eyes were there; the same eyes I’ve looked at since I was a kid. But the rest of the guy was someone else completely.

I had to make a change.

But with what I knew at the time, I didn’t think there was any way I could make the changes necessary to help me lose weight. With the education I received from public schools, the military, and all the ad campaigns through the years telling us how to lose weight and get fit, I was left a fat and unfit guy in his late 40’s with no prospect of making a meaningful impact on my unhealthy weight.

I was taught, “Low-fat! Eat more grains! Calories in/calories out! Get more exercise!” I tried all those things, and they all failed. Miserably. Each time I lost weight, I would eventually fall off the wagon and regain the weight I lost and then some. None of these “Sure fire” methods were working for me. Something was wrong with me; I was convinced of it.

So, I had resigned myself to an early death due to my unhealthy weight. I figured there was no use in fighting it any longer. I just didn’t have the energy to do it anymore. And then I learned about Whole30, the Paleo Diet, and the low-carb/high-fat diets.

That’s when everything changed.

When my cousin Sarah, a physician assistant, told me that I could lose weight and get healthy just by changing my diet and without exercise, I was skeptical. But, she told me what she did and how much weight she lost and how much healthier she was, and I have to say, the evidence was compelling. I trust her, so I decided to look into it some more. The more I read, the more I found that maybe there was something to this low-carb/high-fat diet, and that it would be worth giving it a shot. Sure, I’d have to give up some of my favorite foods, but I’d still get to eat other favorites, so what did I have to lose besides some weight?

A year later, I found myself 110 lbs lighter and starting to run as I began the process to enlist into the National Guard. Throughout the process of losing weight, I felt like somehow I had unlocked a cheat code to life (Cheat codes are codes used in computer games to allow you to make fast/easy/immediate without doing a bunch of work). I literally felt like I had hacked life. How else could I explain eating bacon and eggs for breakfast, sausage and veggies for lunch, and steak or ribs or pulled pork or lobster and veggies for dinner every now, never experiencing cravings between meals, and still losing weight steadily? What’s more, is that my health had improved remarkably. I was no longer diabetic, no longer had fatty liver disease, numbness in my feet had gone away, circulation in my feet improved, and my blood tests repeatedly came back normal. All because I changed my diet (and nothing more).

I want to say it again: All I did was change my diet.

Some people say that low-carb/high-fat diets are restrictive. They are, by definition, restrictive of sugar. That includes any source of sugar, whether that’s grains or certain fruits. So yes; these diets are restrictive, but they are not restrictive in a way that also restricts you to certain foods. As someone who follows the Paleo Diet, I avoid anything with added sugar, grains, legumes, soy, and alcohol. I can eat literally anything else, and there is more I can eat than I cannot.

Most people worry that being on a low-carb/high-fat diet means they can’t eat tasty and enjoyable foods. Well, they couldn’t be more wrong! I eat some of the tastiest, and most incredible food I’ve had in my life since going Paleo! My wife has made it her mission to find new and exciting, delicious foods for us to eat so we never get bored eating the same things over and over again. The downside is that I often have to lobby pretty hard to get her to repeat dishes that I really like. The Chipotle-Chorizo Meatloaf is a dish I could eat forever!

I wish I could go back into time and give myself the low-carb/high-fat talk when I was 24. It would have saved me a lifetime of difficulty with my weight, and would have kept me far healthier than I was. It would have allowed me to do so much more physically, and to really enjoy more outdoors with my kids.

You don’t have to live fat anymore. You don’t have to feel helpless. There are diets out there that you can adopt long-term that allow you to eat delicious foods that you make (no need to buy a subscription or packages of foods) and that fill you up and keep you from getting between-meal cravings. Look up Whole30, the Paleo Diet, Keto, low-carb/high-fat, or Atkins. Any of these will really, honestly, and truly go a long way to getting you healthy, and as a bonus side-effect, will help you lose weight.

Not much sleep again last night. My plan was to remedy that in the evening. Otherwise, still feeling great, still feeling energized, and still feeling strong. I wasn’t able to run the day before due to attending a funeral, but my plan was to run after work and before friends came over for dinner and TV watching (our Friday tradition).

Breakfast: Two eggs sunny-side up and two slices of sugar-free bacon. No fruits or veggies by choice.

Lunch: Sherry’s amazing Whole30 chili. I can eat this stuff for every meal for the rest of my life. It’s delicious, and satisfying.

Dinner: We decided to take our friends to a new local favorite: Nadia’s. The food there is all natural and made from whole foods, and it’s a great place to go to get a healthy meal. I had the Kafta kebab and some shawarma served with some grilled vegetables and a green salad. It was tasty as always, and filled me up. I almost felt I ate too much.

The following morning, my weight was at its lowest all year: 168.3 lbs. I’m down almost 10 lbs in two weeks! I know, I know: you’re not supposed to be weighing yourself during a Whole30, but I do. It has been teaching me a lot about how my body reacts to certain foods in type and volume. This was surprising for me, however. I thought it would take me much longer to drop this much weight on this Whole30. I’m pretty happy about it!

I am not a person who snacks. I never really was, but during the holidays, I developed a pretty bad habit: I’d go to where Sherry had cookies and brownies stacked up in boxes, and I’d eat some whenever I felt like it. Why? Because she made them, and it was the holidays.

The end result was I developed a bit of a sugar craving problem that I am taking care of with this Whole30. The other side effect is that I had to deal with some cravings between meals. Most of these, I can get rid of by taking my mind off of eating by drinking some coffee, tea, or water, or making my mind busy by writing another blog post, doing some work, or reading an article or book. Anything that engages my mind normally takes my mind off food.

But for the times that the aforementioned strategies don’t work, I have some tricks up my sleeve to sate the cravings: nuts. I particularly like almonds or cashews. Raw, unsalted, nuts. I grab a handful (6-8 nuts) at a time and I eat them one at a time. I completely eat one nut before eating the next, and continue until they’re gone. I find that typically by the time I’m through the handful of nuts, my cravings are gone for at least another hour or more.

I also like freeze-dried blueberries, and I’ll eat about 3-5 of these. For whatever reason, the small amount of these little freeze-dried blueberries typically does the trick for me. I’ve also been known to grab a cooked slice of bacon and eat it slowly. That little bit of protein and fat goes a long way to making the cravings go away.