howardt wrote:I don't know that I will post any more. Unless something unexpected happens, what is there to say? I was making myself fat and sick, and now I'm cured.
I decided to post one more time. It's been a little over a year since my first post. My weight is 148, BMI is 21. I've lost over 60 lbs., about 5 lbs more than the last time I posted. I was surprised to lose the additional weight. I was in the low 150s for quite awhile, and figured I had bottomed out, but I guess it was just a lengthy plateau.
I quoted the line from my last post above to highlight the fact that it wasn't true. I am not "cured". I wound up eating vegetarian SAD one day, and all the old food mania issues came back, just as if they never left. The out-of-control feeling, the unquenchable hunger, the need to eat one junk food after the other. Fortunately it didn't last and I was back to myself the next day, but I no longer consider myself "cured". I'm a recovering SAD addict.
I don't have any outrages to report. No one has said anything stupid or offensive to me in awhile. On the other hand, two of my friends, independently tried to commiserate with me on their age-related aches and pains. I answered honestly. "Nope. That all went away a year ago when I started eating healthy." It's true. I feel great.
I used to be confused why this WOE is still on the fringe. I don't volunteer information about my diet, but if comes up people at first assume I'm on a low carb diet. When they find out I'm vegan, they recoil. I think people are simply adverse to giving up meat and dairy, and don't want to hear of an alternative no matter how healthy. One relative seems genuinely frightened by my woe. His wife has him on weight watchers because he has diabetes, high cholesterol, macular degeneration, is 70 lbs overweight and needs a machine to keep his body from strangling him while he sleeps. Yet the thing he fears most is not blindness or a heart attack. It's that she might take his beef away.
I wonder if there is some metric to measure how well the Plant Based doctors are doing, spreading the message. Clearly it's not impossible to find, we've all made our way here. Yet it's kind of like finding Shangri-La. Some hidden healthy valley that no one knows about. If you started at Pritikin and worked forward, has low fat, high carb grown or shrunk in terms of popularity and public awareness? Would be interesting to know.
Let's go invent tomorrow, rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.
-- Steve Jobs