Paleo Marine

Here it is. The final day of our Whole30. I hoped to have a lot more weight loss than I did, but I can’t say I’m unhappy: the 10 lbs lost in the first two weeks were the only weight loss I experienced. That’s okay; my clothes all fit better. I’ll take that anyday. I will work on my weight somehow.

Otherwise, I feel great. Lots of energy, good sleep, and I got over the flu in three days versus the week everyone else is taking to get over it. I’ll take that as a win!

My final Whole30 meals were:

Breakfast: No surprises here: the pork, apple, and egg casserole. No fruit or veggies because I forgot. Seriously, this morning I intended to have a few pieces of cantaloupe, but I forgot.

Lunch: A wonderfully tasty Tikka Masala that Sherry made in the Instantpot. It was yummy!!!

Dinner: I’ve mentioned before how much I love Sherry’s Chorizo and Bacon-wrapped Meatloaf? Well, that’s what I decided to wrap this Whole30 up with. It was very filling, delicious, and satisfying.

I fight with my weight sometimes. I want to weigh under 160 lbs, but it hasn’t happened since I was about 20. I am pretty fit at about 12%  body fat (according to measurements; admittedly, not determined by immersion), but I weight a lot for my size. People are always surprised I’m as heavy as I am.

Try as I do, 165 lbs seems to be about my lowest without starving, and my weight typically hovers between 168 and 170 lbs regardless of how hard I work out, how well I eat, etc. It’s maddening, but it’s also something I’ve had to learn that isn’t going to change unless I were to make drastic and unhealthy changes that I’m unwilling to undertake.

I have to be content with a low bodyfat percentage, with being able to fit into the same size clothes as I did when I was 19, and feeling much more energetic and youthful. I have to be happy that I can run 3x a week, that I am in the National Guard, and that I am healthier than most 50 year old men. I have to take solace in the fact that eating well allows my body to be healthier, and in turn, may give me a longer life. It may help me avoid some health problems I was headed right into.

They call those NSV’s, or Non Scale Victories. I have to focus on those now as the scale pretty much has stopped giving me any sort of victory. I still weigh myself daily because I monitor my weight due to Army requirements, but I more closely monitor how I feel in my clothing, how well it fits, and how energetic I feel. Those, to me, are more important feedback data points than the scale. I have felt amazing and my rings are falling off my fingers all while the scale says my weight is up. PHEW! I spit on you, scale!

Don’t use the scale as your only measure of success. Use it as one of many, and try to find other matrices by which to measure your health and success in your healthy lifestyle. In so doing, you will find yourself much happier and less stressed out about progress or the lack thereof.

I added the ability for people to support this site through Patreon. This can be done via one-time donation, or a subscription.

I have no plans for any private or subscriber content, and I never will. I hate paywalls, and nothing turns me off from a site faster than having to pay for an article. Therefore, this site, and all its content, will remain free of cost for everyone.

What I am doing, however, is asking that if you find value in what I’m writing, if I inspire you, or if I help motivate you, consider supporting the site. I do this for free, but it does cost money to keep up. From the custom domain to the web hosting, it all adds up. If I can get enough supporters, I’d love to be able to do contests and giveaways. My ultimate dream would be to be able to do this full-time and write more than one or two articles a day. Perhaps produce better videos, talk to others who have used Whole30 and Paleo to get healthy and lose weight, and to offer more information.

In the end, it’s up to you. I will not be offended if you don’t support the site financially. Just leave a comment every now and then to let me know if what I’m doing here is helping you. In the end, that’s what I’m really after: getting the word out about healthy lifestyle through diet.

How long do you actually enjoy eating a meal or dish? Really think about this for a moment. How long can you savor a dish? For me, it’s probably 10-15 minutes, tops. And that’s if I’m eating very slowly.

Now, you typically eat three meals a day. That’s 45 minutes of gratification and savoring.

Forty-five minutes.

The rest of your day is spent doing other things. Walking, sitting, working, reading, cooking, etc. The rest of the day, you aren’t eating. You are doing the stuff in-between meals that we call, “Life.” I had to make a conscious decision in September 2015 that I valued that time in-between the meals more than I valued the meals themselves. It’s not that I wanted to eat bland food; I didn’t. But I didn’t want to sacrifice my in-between meals time for very short-term and short-lived gratification. Said another way, it seemed ridiculous to me that I would feel tired and be so overweight and unfit all the time just so I can enjoy eating pizza, bread, or pasta for very small parts of my day.

As good as those foods are, they aren’t worth the bad I felt the rest of the time.

And therein lies the crux of the matter for me. Such a little bit of pleasure isn’t worth the huge amount of pain, no matter how good the food is.

Think about what is more important to you: what you eat, or how you feel the entire rest of your day.

So, this one starts off different, because Day 27 of this Whole30 started with me being sick. It looks like I’ve got the flu. Sore throat, headache, achy muscles, low energy, and sleeping 18 hours.

This made my diet very strange today.

Breakfast: Two eggs sunny-side up and three slices of sugar/salt-free bacon. So far, so good, right? Now it gets weird.

Comfort Food: Cantaloupe. For some reason, eating cantaloupe makes me feel better when I’m sick, whether it’s a cold, a flu, or a stomach flu. Today was no different, and I ate an entire medium cantaloupe. I figured I could use the fiber, anyway.

Lunch: Slow cooker chicken with mushrooms and broccoli. This is one of the meals Sherry made for us last week that we had in the refrigerator. It was tasty!

Snack: For some reason, I feel hungry a lot. I think it’s because my body is fighting this flu, and it’s using up a lot more energy. Oh, and I have a fever, too. So I had two hand fulls of cashews.

Dinner: Sherry made us a slow-cooker pork with Whole30 barbecue sauce, onions, and apples that she served with some baked sweet potato cubes. It was really good. I ended up eating the leftover apple and onions.

Sometimes, we slip. We fall. We get behind.

Sometimes, we need help. We need someone to pick us up. We need someone to bring us back to the fold.

Sometimes, we need to be motivated. We need to be reminded of what’s important. We need to be told we’re doing a good job and someone is there to support us.

We are all, afterall, human.

I get my motivation from a few different sources at different times. Sometimes, that strength comes from within, from that burning desire inside of me that refuses to fail and wants to succeed. I have to admit that part of that motivation comes from having failed before and never wanting to fail at weight loss again. I never wanted to have to say that I tried and couldn’t do it. Other times, my motivation comes from my wife who supports me in every way, loves me, and sacrifices for me. When I told her I needed her help to do this, she accepted. Sometimes, I’m motivated by the people who read my blog and comment or email me. I feel like I can’t let them down, either. Ultimately, I am motivated by my love of my family. I don’t want them to have to deal with burying me early due to a weight-related ailment. I want to give myself the best chance of sticking around as long as possible for them.

Look to people you love, people you trust; friends and family. Look to your spiritual advisor, minister, priest, rabbi, or shaman. Look to people you admire, or to people who have walked the path you are on before. Look to them for motivation, for inspiration, and for some words of strength to get you back to where you need to be.

Once you realize that your new, healthy lifestyle is 90% mental and 10% actual eating, it gets easier to tackle. Food doesn’t materialize in your mouth; you have to put it there. It takes discipline to ignore cravings, but with strength and motivation, you can get past cravings and live a life that consists of normal meals without the hunger in between. Without that overwhelming desire to eat and eat and eat.

I got a decent amount of sleep but that meant I woke up a little later than usual. For this reason, while I had the same breakfast, it was reduced in portion. I didn’t realize that this would be a mistake.

Breakfast: Pork, apple, and egg casserole, but a little smaller than usual. The thinking was that we’d be eating lunch at normal time, so I could get back “On schedule” with Sherry.

Lunch: Lunch happened about three hours later than planned which meant I was very hungry. I split a Larabar with Sherry at around noon, and we ate our late lunch at around 3 pm. I started with a side salad with oil and vinegar and then I ate a filet of Red Snapper with lump crab on top which was served with asparagus. It was delicious, but not very filling. I don’t know if it was because I had waited so long to eat, but I was still hungry. After lunch, we went and had some coffee at which time Sherry and I both split another Larabar.

Dinner: This is where I gets really weird. We decided not to eat a regular dinner since our lunch was so late in the day, so Sherry and I had some cashews. I had about 6 oz of lightly salted cashews that I ate while drinking some coffee. It filled me up and allowed me to go the rest of the day without eating or without being hungry.

This was a very weird day of eating, and this is not recommended as it is not Whole30. It was a weird day that, while I ate all Whole30 compliant meals, it wasn’t standard by any stretch of the imagination. I will be back on a normal meal schedule tomorrow, I hope!

According to articles released in the past few weeks, Whole30 ranked as one of the worst or most difficult diets to undertake. This came as a surprise to me because it has changed the way I eat and improved my health. The articles said that they ranked Whole30 lowest for a few reasons

• Difficulty to maintain.
• Expensive
• No real evidence (yet) that it is effective (aside from what is called anecdotal).
• Restrictive.
• “Any diet that says bacon is good for you has to be suspect.”

I have thought about it long and hard because the reasons they stated for ranking it so low all made it successful for me.

Difficulty to maintain

Whole30 didn’t seem difficult for me to maintain. My wife and I did the necessary pre-work to get ready for our Whole30. We did (and still do) food prep on Sundays. It wasn’t easy in the beginning, but it taught us about how important it is to make our food from whole, natural ingredients. It taught us that feeding ourselves is hard work, and that the shortcuts that go into making our food fast and easy are bad for us and our bodies.

Expensive

This has been debunked before, but shopping for whole, natural foods is no more expensive than buying pre-processed foods. Almost dollar for dollar, you can spend the same on good foods as you can on the processed foods for the same number of people and the same number of meals. Eating grain-fed, free-roam, and organic can cost more, but if you stick with meat, vegetables, and fruit in their natural form, you can find deals on meats and vegetables and fruits on sale almost all the time. We find that our dollars spent on natural ingredients goes farther.

No real evidence that it works

Evidence is based on scientific studies, and these take years or decades to conclude. Anecdotal evidence, in the scientific community, refers to experiences people have and report on. It doesn’t take into account all the factors to isolate the diet as the cause for the improvement in health and loss of weight. Fair enough. But nearly everyone I know who has done a Whole30 or has gone Paleo has gotten healthier and lost weight. This is well-known now in the medical community. The studies are being done; it will take time.

Restrictive

This one made me laugh out loud. For real. If you are going from an, “I eat everything and anything” diet to Whole30, then yes, it’s very restrictive. Our diets NEED to be restricted. Our obesity epidemic is due to the lack of restraint and the horrible information we’ve been fed by nutritionists, doctors, and the government regarding “Balanced diets” and the over-use of sugar and grains in our diet coupled with the vilifying of fats. I learned to restrict my diet to only meat, fruit, and vegetables. This is a good thing, not something that should be considered bad.

“Any diet that says bacon is good for you has to be suspect.”

This one also made me laugh. It told me everything I needed to know about the person(s) writing the article(s). They didn’t understand that fat is not bad, and that the myth of a balanced diet was just that: a myth concocted by pseudo-scientists passing off their ideas of nutrition as fact based on nothing more than a theory from a doctor in the 50’s. The idea that fat in our bodies comes from fat we eat is laughable and ignores the complexity within our bodies to create usable energy and how our bodies store that excess energy.

The irony is that everything the article listed as being shortcomings were all what got through to me and helped me succeed in getting healthy, losing weight, and maintaining my health and weight loss. Nearly two and a half years later, I’m still at my lowest weight, and maintaining it easily.