Down 20+ pounds, now under 200 and shocked at how fast!

[rosehebrew]

Wow that is awesome. I am also over 200 and would be thrilled to see the scale at under 200 pounds. What does your daily menu look like?? What have you been eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner?? I need to get back on and living this lifestyle for good. I am 4'11" and 220 pounds, yuck!!! You have been losing pretty fast which is awesome. Have you been doing any exercises??
Keep up the great work.

Thanks lilliangimmelli,
My daily menu varies a little but is quite simple. I don't eat breakfast because even though it goes against some advise it really does make me consume a greater amount of food during the day. By noon I am pretty hungry so I eat steamed red potatoes with veggies, or maybe a bean based soup or chili with a few small potatoes and mock sour cream. Some days I may just have a "fruit lunch" of a banana+3/4 c soy milk+cherries+1T cocoa or other fruit (all frozen) made into a big bowl of ice cream in my high speed blender. That fills me up. Then for dinner I usually have a soup+potato or some starch but last night I had church late so I made tempeh burgers for my hubby and I using gluten free hamburger buns. They are from white flours (if my family did not have to be gluten free it would be the whole wheat berry kind) and are just done once a week for a quick treat on Sundays. I love tempeh tacos those so we do have those once in awhile. The other day my lunch was a whole bunch of veggies boiled and then I ate them with their broth made into a miso soup (I used low salt veggie broth powder and powder shitaki mushrooms in the cooking water). That was very good and filling so it is very flexible but just try to keep a sort of calorie limit in my head and try not to go over about 1300 a day but I am sure I do at times. That helps me stay within some eating limits though.
I don't do any exercise because of some leg pain I was having but that is better so when I can I will start walking some.
You can do it if you just decide that you are going to take one day at a time until it becomes what you eat and then make sure that you focus on never giving up and feel good about your path. Just stay motivated and don't let what other people eat or do sway you off your course. Don't even talk about it with them! Oh and do something in your life you are passionate about, I am a musician and am very involved in my church so that keeps my mind of bad things and I believe that mental health is so important to success.

[lilliangimmelli]

Thanks that is awesome. You have done so wonderfully and are such an inspiration. Keep up the great work and keep posting to motivate us too. Thanks.

[Gramma Jackie]

Congratulations. I am from the south where everyone is a hunter. I consider myself fortunate to have married a techie nerd who hates hunting. He's a big guy, but tears up when he watches Bambi. Nevertheless he does love to eat meat. However he's gained at least 75 lbs in the last ten years, so I am hoping to get him on the McDougall program. Since he doesn't cook, he doesn't have much choice.

I know you are very proud of your family and rightly so.

[rosehebrew]

Just to update,
I was in the a local eatery that is known as a "Chinese Barbecue" and chose not to eat because I had eaten at home. It is one of the only places where we are able to eat approved foods because it is basically a buffet line that you choose your ingredients and then they are cooked on a large hot flat grill for you. We always choose a bunch of veggies and then tofu. So, my hubby comes back from getting his food done and tells me he was talking to a man in line who was a vegan also. Well you wouldn't have guessed it because he looked like a tall fireman. My hubby was telling him about how he like the nacho cheese noosh I make for his air popped corn and other things. I just was reflecting on how things have changed to his struggles to accept his new strange foods to now where he can say, "I don't miss the other stuff at all because the food is so good." I can say that it blessed me.

[Rosey]

Just to update,
I was in the a local eatery that is known as a "Chinese Barbecue" and chose not to eat because I had eaten at home. It is one of the only places where we are able to eat approved foods because it is basically a buffet line that you choose your ingredients and then they are cooked on a large hot flat grill for you. We always choose a bunch of veggies and then tofu. So, my hubby comes back from getting his food done and tells me he was talking to a man in line who was a vegan also. Well you wouldn't have guessed it because he looked like a tall fireman. My hubby was telling him about how he like the nacho cheese noosh I make for his air popped corn and other things. I just was reflecting on how things have changed to his struggles to accept his new strange foods to now where he can say, "I don't miss the other stuff at all because the food is so good." I can say that it blessed me.

What is nacho cheese noosh?

[rosehebrew]

What is nacho cheese noosh?

It is a powdered topping I make by putting 1 cup of nutritional yeast (can get it at health food stores) the flaked kind, 1 T chili powder, 1 tsp dried oregano, 1 t cumin, 1/4 tsp onion and garlic powder, in a blender and whirling it up really well. I use a high speed blender so if using a reg blender you will have to make sure it is well powdered. I put it in a shaker used for parm cheese and we top potatoes, soups and other things with it. We also use it to flavor popcorn after spraying it with a little Bragg's Aminos.

[blondie]

That sounds yummy! thanks for the recipe

[Rosey]

that sounds yummy. I've been spraying tabasco sauce on and then sprinkling nutritional yeast.

[MixedGrains]

Rose, you mentioned a leg vascular issue in your original post and expressed hope for improvement. I don't know the details of your issue, but I wanted to mention that I had some issues of that sort that have improved dramatically since I began the plant-based diet and lost a lot of weight.

My family has what we've always called a "varicose veins" issue that affects predominantly the left leg -- my grandmother had massive surgeries for it, and it was severe enough to keep my dad from getting drafted for Viet Nam, though it never slowed him down much. In my case even though I've been obese all my life, it manifested as a couple of bulging purple blood vessels that never hurt or bothered me...

... until about five years back when I got diagnosed with diabetes, and eventually put on that nasty Avandia med. The weight gain side effect of that drug caused me to quickly gain another hundred pounds or more, and the poor circulation in my left leg quickly got worse, to the point where I had five or six square inches on my left shin that turned black and sunken and dead-looking. Obviously this was terrifying, especially given the issues that diabetes can cause in the extremities. My doctors seemed to think it was of no particular moment ... not good, but not something meriting specific attention either.

Once I got off the Avandia ... which took far longer than it should have due to conservative doctors ... I started losing a little weight and the circulation in my legs improved considerably. But the black patches remained. And then I got started on the plant-based diet. I don't know how much total weight loss I've had, because I had no way to weigh myself at my peak. I suspect I've lost more than 160 pounds since my peak, I know I've lost 110 pounds since last Christmas when I got a scales that could weigh me, and I've lost 84 pounds since I eliminated meat, dairy, oils, and (most) refined grains on March 19, 2011. (I was reading Esselstyn at the time, not McDougall -- but the differences, though significant, are subtle and hard to see from any great distance.)

The relevant point: the "dead" patches on my shin are healing rather dramatically now. They are still visibly discolored, but the color is much lighter and the area is receding from the outer edges inward.

Given that I'm still morbidly obese (at 398 pounds -- yes, I truly was somewhere north of 550 at my worst), and still losing about two pounds a week fairly effortlessly, I'm quite hopeful that the healing will eventually be complete. I'll still have some varicose veins, or "venous insufficiency" as my doctor calls it, but with better vascular health and lower body weight, there seems to be reason to hope that circulation will once again be sufficient.

[blondie]

I'm so happy for you that your leg problem is getting better, mixedgrains. Interesting that you mentioned this as I was kind of daydreaming and looking at my legs (wearing shorts) as I was on one of the resistance machines at the gym yesterday and coulda sworn that my little spider veins (had them on my outer thighs since I was a teen) are not as noticeable. I couldn't imagine that they would start to go away -- could the McDougall diet be doing this? I think they are actually getting smaller and lighter.

[rosehebrew]

Mixed Grains- Wow I am so impressed hearing about your progress. It shows me that you have great strength of character and wisdom. I am at a loss to know what my vascular problem is. When I had insurance and was involved with those Dr. types, they did not really know either but my cardiologist seemed to think it could by my microvessels spasming but he did not know why. He said there was a big study being done on that. I feel that if they figure it out they will just come up with some poison to deal with that and it will not be effective so it does not really matter why. I do not have any varicose veins at all but my mother did. I just have a lot of pain when I walk more that a slow pace and I have a lot of other body pain. I have lost about 40 pounds and am now at about 180 at 5'5' . I really don't know what the problem is but I do think maybe there has been a tiny improvement but the pain in my feet has gotten so much worse I cannot walk hardly any distance at all now which makes me very sad because I love to go for walks with my dog. I am so happy about your weight loss and improvements. It is a wonderful thing when people have the courage to take the high road in a society that is declining so much in health.

[MixedGrains]

I was kind of daydreaming and looking at my legs (wearing shorts) as I was on one of the resistance machines at the gym yesterday and coulda sworn that my little spider veins (had them on my outer thighs since I was a teen) are not as noticeable. I couldn't imagine that they would start to go away -- could the McDougall diet be doing this? I think they are actually getting smaller and lighter.

Blondie, I'm no doctor, but I do think the McDougall diet could improve your spider veins. If I understand properly, they are a symptom of (possibly quite minor) vascular insufficiency. If you've read Dr. Esselstyn's book, there's quite a lot in there on why our way of eating could be expected to improve the function of our vascular system -- obviously the book is focused on heart vessels, but there's nothing heart-specific in the benefits of reducing vascular inflammation, increased nitric acid production in the vessels, and reduction of plaques to improve blood flow. It's true that circulatory issues in the legs often involve valve issues as well, and I'm somewhat unclear what effect on valve issues the diet has, but it still stands to reason that better vascular health should have a positive impact on circulatory issues in the legs. Can I prove it does? No -- but I sure wouldn't be surprised.

[MixedGrains]

When I had insurance and was involved with those Dr. types, they did not really know either but my cardiologist seemed to think it could by my microvessels spasming but he did not know why.

Yeah, no insurance here either -- I go to a tiny rural public health clinic and get a poor-folks discount on my health care, but there's still a sharp limit to the visits, tests, and meds I can afford. I'm thankful to have any access to services, but eyes open, I have to admit the quality of care isn't top-drawer.

Great sympathy here for your leg/foot pain -- when I was at my heaviest and my leg circulation at its worst, I was starting to get some of that. Having now lost maybe a third of my surplus weight, my feet are great again. You're already a tiny person by my standards but since you say you've still got 40 pounds or so before you get to your goal weight, I'd think there's considerable room to hope that by the time you get there, your pain will be greatly lessened.