15 Pounds in a Month

So Cynthia and I have decided that it’s really time to do something about our health. We’ve attempted losing weight a number of times, using Diet Power, which is a great tool for tracking calories, nutrition, etc., but in the end, like most diets, we gained it all back.

A friend of ours told us about Dr. Fuhrman’s books, “Eat to Live” and “Eat for Health” and we decided to take the plunge.

To say it’s not your normal diet would be an understatement. Like most diets that really work, it’s not a diet, it’s something you should practice for the rest of your life.

The books don’t really focus on counting calories, reducing fat, or any of the normal diet things, they focus on only one simple thing: eat foods with a high nutrition-to-calorie ratio. When you turn everything around and look at it from that perspective, it gets a whole lot easier to know what you should eat, not just what you can eat. I know that when I was dieting previously, a significant part of my daily thought was how many calories I just ate, how many calories I will be eating, and most importantly, “if I have this bad thing right now, I can make up for it later.”

When you’re calorie-counting, you can do that kind of stuff — and lose weight if you’re careful and work hard at it — but in the end, you’re still doing no good for your body.


Those kinds of tricks are not so easy when you are actually eating “nutritarian,” as Dr. Furhman has coined the phrase. The books do a good job of hammering the science into you. Thousands of studies, and patients, who have reversed things like diabetes, or even lupus, just by eating lots of veggies, nuts, and fruits.

So, for the last month, Cynthia and I have been basically eating vegan. Will I eat vegan forever? No. I still love meat, and I intend to eat it occasionally in the future, but first I want to get to my target weight. The evidence points to small amounts of meat (less than 15% of calories or so) in the diet having no measurable effects on lifespan; the important thing is getting all the nutrients I wasn’t getting before by focusing on vegetables. It’s hard not to eat all those things that are bad for me (that I love), but I’m finding it’s surprisingly easier than any other “diet” I’ve been on before. Maybe because I’m much more aware of the health repercussions of it, maybe because I’ve been eating so many vegetables I’ve lost the cravings a little, I don’t know. At least this time, it’s doable, and I am much more confident that in the end, I can keep the weight off.

We technically started this a little over a month ago, on July 21st, but that first week I was at Dev-Jam, and I wasn’t really eating properly yet. If you take Dev-Jam out of the equation, I’ve lost 15 pounds in a month, and it’s been steady. Not just 4 or 5 pounds at the beginning and then a hard slog through losing weight the rest of the month. I’m stuffing myself with veggies, coming away from dinner full (if not always satisified), and the pounds are just flying off. The exhilaration of how (relatively) easy it’s been this time around is making it easier to stay on it.

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August 27, 2010  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: Nutritarian  5 Comments

Hello!

So, uh, this is my new blog.  It’s like my old blog, but for things that aren’t for the mac/opennms/open-source geeky crowd.  Will I ever do anything with it?  Who knows.  But… Here’s a start at it.  🙂

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August 27, 2010   Posted in: My Blog  One Comment