Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012
I kind of hit a milestone number this month when my weight
dipped below 160 pounds. Until this summer, the lowest I ever remember my
weight to be was the 163 pound low that I reached while following the Weight Watchers
program in my late 20’s. I am going to leave my goal range at 160 to 165 pounds
for now and hope that I can replace body fat with muscle.
In my post last month I referenced The Engine 2 Diet book by
Rip Esselstyn. I finished the book and
found it to be really well written with just enough technical information to be
credible. Rip spells out his food plan as well as providing weekly planners and
recipes before laying down his 28 day challenge. In the 28 day challenge Rip encourages
readers to follow his food plan for 28 days. His food plan is all plant based food
and no oils. He encourages blood testing for cholesterol and blood sugar both
before the 28 days and after to see the impact of a plant strong diet.
Rip states in his book a total cholesterol reading below 150
and an LDL reading below 80 tends to be the point at which one is heart attack proof. Since my numbers were a little higher than
that in May, I decided to take his challenge even though I do not want to lose
any additional weight at this time. Rip’s suggestion is to eat more of the
calorie dense foods on his plan such as nuts and avocados if ones weight drops
below the desired range. I was able to obtain blood work orders from my doctor
and had blood drawn for labs this past Saturday, September 29th.
Below is a table showing the results of my most recent blood
work in May compared to the results for the blood that was drawn this past
Saturday. Interestingly, total
cholesterol remained the same, LDL and Triglyceride went down and HDL went
up. I think the change from May could
reflect some of the dietary changes that I have made in the last few months.
|
|
5/24/2012
|
9/29/2012
|
|
Total Cholesterol
|
161
|
161
|
|
LDL
|
90
|
77
|
|
Triglyceride
|
53
|
34
|
|
HDL
|
61
|
77
|
|
Glucose
|
|
88
|
My target food plan for this time frame will be gluten free vegan with no oil. Since I
know there will be some deviations from the target plan, I have gone back to
recording everything I eat in my Calorie King diary so I have a record of how many
times I am consuming something not on my target plan.
Hopefully I will be able to stay real close to my desired
food plan for the month and will have some exciting news for next month’s post.
Time will tell.
Regarding the tofu that I mentioned in last month’s post,
the product we had in stock was actually Twin Oaks brand Italian Herb tofu. We
ended up finding a recipe on the Twin Oaks website for Quick and Easy Italian Herb Tofu Ziti. Deb prepared this with
gluten free pasta and we both thought it was excellent.
I also read this month about a practice called “de-aging” developed by Zen Master Kazuaki
Tanahashi. My impression of what I read on this topic is that each moment we
age or de-age based on our choices. So I
guess a simple explanation would be that healthy choices lead to de-aging and un-healthy
choices lead to……. ah, let’s just not go there.:)
