My new favorite color is........

Green as in Green Smoothies. Due to my interest in plant based foods, I kept coming across references to green smoothies so I decided to do a little reading and find out what all the buzz was about. I started with Victoria Boutenko's Green Smoothie Revolution and then moved on to Kristine Miles The Green Smoothie Bible which I am not quite through with yet. Both are informative books with plenty of recipes to try.

The premise is that since humans and wild chimps share 99.4 percent of the same genes, and that wild chimps do not have all of the diseases of modern civilization, lets compare typical diets and see what the difference is. It turns out that the typical wild chimp diet is about 50% fruit and 40% greens and blossoms. The remaining 10% would be pith, bark, seeds and insects. OK, I know there has to be a line in the sand somewhere so why don't we all just put pith, bark and insects on the other side of the line and move on.

It turns out a green smoothie starts with fruit and gets its green color from the leafy greens that are blended with it. While the color is green, the flavor is fruit. It is a great way to get all the fiber and nutrients of the fruit and leafy greens in a cool refreshing drink. On weight training days I add a scoop of plant based protein powder.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention my weight. My weigh in information for the last month is in the sidebar on the right. It took a week to get back to my goal range of 160 to 165 after vacation and I have stayed there for the weeks since.  So I am back to my program doing the things I need to do to remain a healthy weight. I hope to keep my weight in this range for at least 12 months and then will decide if I think any future changes are desirable.

Change ........

I finished reading "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg this week and near the end of the book when the author was explaining how people change habits, I started thinking about change. I started wondering why we humans are so resistant to change when it is constant and ongoing. After all, its when we decide to change that we have the opportunity to become the person we want to be.

On June 11th, I changed from vacation mode to work mode and what a shock that was. You can see my weight information in the bar to the right. At 169.2 pounds my weight was up almost 9 pounds from my pre-vacation weight. I figured that if I got back on my regular program I would get back to my goal range rather quickly which is what happened the following Monday.

I've also been examining my ego lately. It seems rather ego centric for me to sit here and write about my weight all the time. I realize the world is not centered around me. I guess my feeling is that while I have changed quite a lot over the past 40 years, I know that my abilities are quite average. My message is, and the purpose of this blog is, to let others know that the type of lifestyle changes I have had some success with over this time are quite achievable. It all starts with the decision to change.  

On Vacation

I weighed myself on a Saturday this week because this is the last full day before the start of our vacation. As you can see from the weigh in information on the right, at 160.8 pounds, I am very near the bottom of my 160 to 165 goal range.

While on vacation we will be traveling to Indiana and eating mostly in restaurants over the next two weeks. We will be able to visit many familiar restaurants where we have an idea of what we might eat that will fit into our respective food programs. We will also visit some restaurants that we have not dined at in the past and have the opportunity to try things from their menus that sound interesting. I am especially looking forward to The Mark Dine & Tap and Aladdin's Eatery in South Bend.  To those of you surprised by my interest in Aladdin's, I am very interested in the options they offer with plant based protein.

While in central Indiana I will celebrate my upcoming birthday with my twin. She has arranged for us to have possibly the best birthday cake ever. She's good at that, very good. I will eat cake and very likely enjoy it. I plan to have some generous servings of ice cream with it as well. Actually, I plan to enjoy all my meals. I usually do. However, for the next 2 weeks, I am on vacation. I am going to relax, try to get caught up on my reading and try to sleep in some.

At the beginning of this month I shared a frozen dessert recipe from Dr. Andrew Weil's Natural Health, Natural Medicine. As I read further during the month I came across what he calls his 5 word diet advice. "Eat less and exercise more"  While this is great advice for probably 90 percent or more of our population, I found it to be a little over simplified as nutrition advice. First off, I really don't like to use the word "diet" when referring to a food plan. I have heard it said that "diets are like horses, people get on them and get off them" Secondly, I think a lot of people just don't realize how our food supply has changed over the past 40 to 50 years and how damaging added sweeteners and specifically High Fructose Corn Syrup can be to the health of humans.

So my next weigh in will be Monday June 11th. I will try to post to this blog shortly thereafter. Hopefully my weight will not exceed the top of my goal range. 

At the beginning of the year I set a goal of reducing my body weight 10% which I have now done as of my weigh in last Monday morning.  Since I am planning on a maintenance range of 160 to 165 I am going to take a few more pounds off to get to about 162.5 or the middle of my goal range. 

I wish I could report that all my food choices were healthy and well planned in April. Unfortunately I cannot. What I managed to do was make healthy food choices most of the time.  

When I started using Calorie King a couple years ago I found the exercise portion of the diary a welcome addition. When I input my exercise for the day I was told that I could have additional food items. After a while, realizing I was not losing much weight and in fact having a hard time maintaining, I started putting in 50% of my estimated calorie burn.  My weight generally trended lower using this formula but was not satisfactory weight loss.

At the 1^st of this year, knowing my Basic Metabolic Rate (BMR) or the number of calories I burn in a day at rest to be about 1,700, I lowered my calorie target for each day from 1,750 to 1,650 and stopped recording exercise in my food diary.  As you can see from my weigh in information on the right, this change has produced the desired effect. 

On many days I have been able to do just fine within the acceptable calorie range. I think CK has a leeway of around 100 calories before it throws up a red flag. On days with high calorie burn such as bike to work days or long run days, my calorie total would often go into the red. On these days, I just tried to eat when really hungry.  I find with cycling and really any aerobic exercise, it is way too easy to replace more than the calories burned. 

During April I found a recipe in the back of Dr. Weil’s Natural Health, Natural Medicine that sounded interesting so I gave it a try.  I will share it below:

 

Cocoa-Banana Frozen Dessert

4 very ripe bananas

4 tsp unsweetened cocoa powder

1 tsp pure vanilla extract

Rum or maple syrup, optional

Peel bananas and place them in blender or food processor with 4 heaping tsp pure unsweetened cocoa powder. Add vanilla. If you like it, add a few tbsp. rum or maple syrup. Blend till very smooth. Pour into individual cups or small bowls and freeze until just frozen.

And the finished product:

 

Also in the Dr. Weil book is the suggestion to eat a large variety of foods. This serves not only to ensure that one is getting the nutrients provided by many foods but also that one is avoiding any possible negative effects or components of eating the same food repeatedly.  I found this to be a very reasonable suggestion and since I have been having processed turkey lunch meat at my mid-day meal for many years thought I might benefit from this advice. So, in April I set about adding variety to my mid-day meal. In addition to avoiding processed lunch meat I am trying to find meals that are not highly processed foods high in sodium.  I am having some success in this regard and may do a post on my mid-day meal rotation at some point in the future.

Now after sharing a good sweet dessert with you I will tell you about my project for May. I have long believed that eating sweetened food causes one to want or crave more sweetened food. I believe one of the chief culprits is sweetened beverages. Whether sweetened with sugar or corn syrup or artificially sweetened, I believe these beverages cause us to want more sweetened food in our diet. So starting in May, I plan to eliminate the main sweetened beverage in my diet which happens to be caffeine free Diet Coke. In June I will let you know how I did in this regard.

April 2nd - Weigh in

Here we are at the start of April and today my scale reported a number that I have not seen in a while. I haven't checked the records but I believe it has been a long time since I have been below 170 pounds. As I have pushed my weight down this year, I have been weight training regularly to minimize muscle loss in the process.

For the record, there were several times during the month of March that my food choices were maybe not as good as could be. We celebrated Debbie's birthday during the 3rd week of the month and then just last week, the sinister frozen food manager at our local Publix put Bryer's ice cream on a BOGO special.  So while there are times that I don't follow my program perfectly, when I venture off the program for a special event,  I get right back on the program that seems to work for me when the event is over. I have found that it is how I eat most of the time that really matters.  

The upside of being 25 years old and 263 pounds...............

It’s hard to believe that it was 31 years ago when I was 25 years old and even harder to believe that I had allowed my weight to reach 263 pounds. I write this with the perspective of looking back on what has happened since as a young real estate agent I found myself struggling to climb stairs while showing houses and decided that I needed to do something about it.

It took about 11 months on a popular weight loss program and much discipline for me to reach a goal weight of 168 pounds. Although my main strategy was to find foods and meals that I could eat and then stick with them, eating the same thing over and over, I did learn a lot along the way. I learned much about reading food labels and became willing to experiment with foods that I would have never considered eating before. After a couple months at goal weight I was awarded a life time membership.  Then the hard part started. Fully participating in life and maintaining a healthy body weight.

Since I had previously had problems climbing stairs I knew I needed to do something to improve my fitness. As a boy, I had jogged with my father along the bank of the river in the town that we lived. I believe that my father had encouraged my participation because he recognized that I was having weight issues. I set about jogging laps at the local high school track. At first, I couldn’t complete a full lap while jogging.  I worked up to completing a full lap, then a lap and a half and so on.  I saw a 5K running event advertised a few months down the road and thought that I might be able to finish that distance if I worked up to it. I put the check in the mail and can still remember the pride I felt when I crossed the finish line of that 5K. Jogging the entire distance.

This of course kicked off a running period in my life in which I made running friends, ran longer and longer distances, worked on getting faster and maintained a healthy body weight.  Inevitably, as happens to so many, I was plagued with knee injuries which forced me to take time off for the knees to heal from time to time.

At some point a few years later when a career change led to extra emphasis on learning new skills and then a cross country move my workouts became more scarce until they just fell to the wayside.  It was probably a combination of an injury time off and other life changes that led to a sedentary period where I found my weight climbing again. When I reached a point that I became uncomfortable with my weight I found that I could draw on all the things that I had learned in the past to deal with my increasing weight.

My weight has gone up and down a few times over the course of my life. I have used words like struggle, fight and battle to describe my relationship with food and the scale in my bathroom. Perhaps the word I should use is journey, for each time I have struggled or battled or fought with food choices and maintaining a healthy body weight I have engaged myself in learning how to make healthy choices.

The benefit of these struggles is that now in my mid 50’s I am more knowledgeable regarding nutrition than my average peer and in better physical condition than many. The scale in my bathroom said 172.6 this week. My training journal has running, cycling and weight training listed almost every week. I look for ways to fit these activities into my life because I enjoy them and the health benefits they provide.   

The knee pain that plagued me during the 1^st running period of my life is no longer a problem.  I found that increasing leg strength with weight training and cross training with cycling has pretty much resolved that issue.  Sure I have aches and pains from time to time but as a friend recently said “You can exercise and have aches and pains or not exercise and have aches and pains. The choice is yours”

I can now look back and see that struggling to climb stairs one day in 1980 may have been the best thing that ever happened to me.

What happened to February ........

Well here we are at the end of February already.  I knew February would be a challenging month for me because we had guests visiting and we celebrated Valentine’s Day with treats from our favorite gluten free bakery.  I took the stance that I would participate as much as possible but try to be careful about food choices to limit the damage.

I did loosen the reins on my program a bit and backed off on recording everything I ate in my food log, however, my weekday meals during the workday did not change much from the month before.  In the end, I am happy to have made it through the month with no change in my weight.

During February I eased back into my running program with no apparent ill effects and have also been able to resume cycling to work one day per week and weight training. I believe I have pretty good leg workouts that I can do at home a couple times per week figured out and hope to get in 2 to 4 upper body workouts per week over the lunch hour at the little gym my employer provides.  

My goal does remain the same as stated at the beginning of this year and that is to lose 10% of my body weight which was 185 at the time and then maintain that weight.  I hope to make good progress toward that goal during March and started the month on Sunday February 26^th with a return to my food log. I hope to someday be able to link my food diary to this blog have not figured that out yet.