OK, Rip, I'll take your challenge............

Tuesday, October 2^nd, 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 29^th.

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.:)

 

Laborless Day 2012

Here we are in September already. It seems like such a short time since I stood on the scales on January 1^st, 2012 and saw the 185 pound reading. My recent weight information is in the sidebar to the right and you can see it has been quite erratic. I will say that looking back on the weeks that showed increases I could easily figure out the reason for the increase.

I have written before of my interest in a plant based diet. I recently finished reading Forks over Knives: The Plant Based Way to Health. The knives referred to in the title of this book are ones belonging to surgeons. No doubt we all want to stay away from those.

Currently I am reading Vegan Bite By Bite by Marilyn Peterson.  The focus of this book is how to make the transition to a plant based diet. As the title implies, it is done bite by bite.  Marilyn comments early in the book that the transition will be easier if the entire kitchen or house hold is vegan. This caused a light bulb to go off for me because I realized that since Deb was diagnosed with Celiac disease in June 2008 our kitchen/household has been part gluten free and part not so much gluten free.  Based on this I have decided to make the switch to a gluten free diet.  I do think that, when dining out, if presented with the choice of an animal based gluten free meal and a plant based meal containing some gluten, I would opt for the latter.

Marilyn suggests that in the 1^st part of the transition to plant based foods one should merely start looking for plant based substitutes for the animal based products one already enjoys.  To this end, we tried SO Delicious Cultured Coconut Milk as a replacement for our daily yogurt this weekend. We started out with a flavored yogurt and added more fruit to it. While the consistency was a little soupier than the dairy based yogurt that we are used to, the flavor was fine. Next I will try the SO Delicious brand in an unflavored plain yogurt with added fruit and see if it will work for me long term.  We also have some vegan cheese and tofu to try. Not sure yet what to do with the tofu. Any suggestions?

Up next on my reading list is The Engine 2 Diet by Rip Esselstyn. Rip uses the term “plant strong” to describe his eating program.  I’ve had a sneak peak at Rip’s website so I am very anxious to get to this book. Hopefully I will be able to make some additional comments about the Engine 2 food plan when I weigh in at Fear No Scale around the 1^st of October.

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.