Well I am down another 2 lbs and just shy of 4 inches. Although that seems like a stall when I was loosing 7 lbs or more a week, I don't feel like it is. The key for me is to not transition back into the other direction again. I have to be sure that I have made a change in my life, a true "repentance" in the Greek sense of the word, a change of heart, and mind. There are lots of people who can stay on a diet for a month but then they start adding the lbs back on and end up bigger than they were to begin with, so I am just trying to keep things moving in the right direction.
What have I learned?
Well I thought I would learn that as soon as I added milk or vegetable protein back into my diet that I would be lethargic and sick. I thought that maybe when I added gluten back into my diet I would get sick. Fortunately that is not what I learned. On the contrary, I think those things actually were great. My big takeaway is that diets that thrive on large exclusions are inherently flawed. God has put everything on this earth for our good. There are people who have created healthy diets in every corner of the globe based on everything from grains, to greens, to grubs, and everything in between, even animal blubber. Even refinement is not an evil thing, for example, yogurt, cheese, soy sauce, tempe, are all refinements that took some whole food and modified it in a reasonable way to make it more healthy, or tolerable for human consumption.
In the end I think it is more about the inclusion of foods that we know are beneficial than it is about excluding certain foods.
If I distilled it down to a mission statement, I would say:
Eat foods as close to their whole state as possible. Favor less refined alternatives over highly refined foods when they are reasonable. If you struggle to pronounce the ingredients, then be cautious. If you can make it at home then you should. Eat as many whole foods, mostly plants, as you can on a daily basis.
Here are some specific choices I am making in my life:
- Home made yogurt is much better than store bought, so take an hour and make a weeks supply, gogurt is not yogurt!
- A vinaigrette can be thrown together in a few min, and is far better than store bought ranch, so is home made ranch!
- Favor unsalted butter over hydrolyzed oil margarine.
- Fresh squeezed juice is better than pasteurized juice that has been trucked across the country.
- Home grown bread is better than hostess, make friends with local producers if you are going to buy instead of bake.
- Grow veggies in your garden. Even if you start small, you've never had better tomatoes!
- If great grandma would have recognized it as food, I can too.
These things all contribute to how we see and consume food. I am so grateful for the help and inspiration that I have gotten on this recently. It is great to know that so many people, some of whom I have never met, are so supportive of me and my well being.
Great books that I need to write reviews for related to the topic:
In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan
Eat and Run - Scott Jurek
The healthy Green Drink Diet - Jason Manheim
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