The Beginning of my Whole100

[larryinmaryland]

So, I introduced myself four days ago on Day 27 of my Whole30 and I just posted my Success story on Day One of my post-Whole30 life.

 

I'm a 59-year-old individual and couples counselor and psychotherapist, with specialties also in anxiety and adult ADHD. I've accepted the fact that if I want to look good and be really healthy and optimally alive in my (ahem) senior years, which are coming up fast for me, I have to let go of wheat and flour and sugar almost completely. At least that, and probably dairy as well. And I've decided that's a small price to pay not to be grossly overweight and to feel like there's sludge in my bloodstream and like all my joints are rusty hinges.

 

So I'm going to go for a Whole100. That will be over on Sept. 16, by my calculations. 

 

I'm making a few small modifications to make this work.

 

First, I'm going to weigh myself once a week, on Wednesdays, to avoid the temptation to either pig our or starve on weekends. I think this will help my progress, since I didn't really know how I was doing the last three weeks. I'm also going to take periodic measurements, maybe every two weeks, and photos every 30 days (and I'll post them). I'm going to post my progress and any of my experiences every Wednesday, and maybe more often. 

 

Second, for the next two weeks my wife and I are living with vegan friends. So while I'm here I'm going to add organic tempeh (made with flax seed, not millet or barley), organic extra firm tofu and lentils.

 

Likewise, my older daughter who is at an internship right now is a vegetarian. I very much want to get her to drop the grains, dairy and sugar -- she has been a vegetarian for ethical reasons since she was four year old and declared that she didn't want any animals to die for her! My wife and I have supported her choice all these years, but when I consider many of the problems she has suffered over the years, I wish I knew 10 years ago what I know now! I am the cook in the house, and I was the one making her all of her veggie dishes all those years. When she comes back home from July 26 until Aug. 21 (with one week away with friends), I want to cook her the healthiest veggie meals I possibly can, and maybe influence her to change her diet a little. And in order to do that, I will need to eat some of those meals with her. So for that time, I will add the tempeh, lentils and extra firm tofu (and maybe chickpeas and black beans, since she loves them so much). 

 

Finally, I MAY add hazelnut stevia to coffee-with-almond-milk. I'm not sure yet.

 

But -- no sugar, no other sugar substitute, no carageenan or sulfite (no wine!), no dairy, no flour or soy except for tofu, no grain. No chocolate.

 

I want to keep going strong.

 

I want to know if maybe by the end of the summer I can be almost thin-looking.

 

I have a hope and a goal that on my 60th birthday on April 12th, I will be under 150 pounds again, like I was when I was 30. Or maybe if it's possible (and healthy), I could be 141, which I weighed when I got married, back when I was 26.

 

My chest started at 45" and is now 42.5. I wonder if I can get it to 36". My waist started at 43.25 and is now 40." I'd love to see it go to 32".

 

My sugar level was pre-diabetic and my cholesterol was far too high, something my doctor has been telling me for years. I'll see her again in August. I'm eager to know if they've gone down to normal (I hope so!).

 

I hope to get to know other people on this journey and to support others, and I look forward to hearing from you. I will share the best ideas and tips I can come up with along the way.

 

Hello, and take care everyone. 

 

Larry

 

 

 

 

 

[theheywhohaa]

Hi Larry,

How wonderful that you have gained so much from doing a whole30. Your plan sounds pretty solid, the only thing I would say is maybe try a reintro period for the off-template foods you are going to incorporate before you add them back in. Just in case one of them is a trigger for inflammation or a wake-up for your sugar dragon (that's right stevia, I'm looking at you). At least then you would know what was causing the issue instead of trying to play detective. Congratulations on all your success and I hope to hear great things from this thread for your next sixty-something days of w30 eating. You are a rock star.

Rose

[larryinmaryland]

Thank you, Rose. Rock star I'm not so sure about. Though I guess I do look better than Keith Richards does these days. I know I look better than Steven Tyler, the guy from Aerosmith who was on American Idol. He looks like a cross between a drag queen and a horse!

You're right about being careful. Last night the people whose house my family and I are staying in came home, and of course we all had to sit down together to eat. I made a flaxseed tempeh and vegetable stir-fry for my wife and me (she just finished the Whole30 as well) and we seem to be able to eat that with no problem. But just to be polite I ate some Mock Tuna Salad which my host said she made with chickpeas and her lentil-and-carrot salad. Yikes! I had a stomachache, headache, bloating, constipation -- the works! I still don't feel totally over it.

I hope it wasn't the lentils or that cooking them more takes away that feeling. I have this wonderful lentil soup recipe that I used to love and my vegetarian older daughter who's a college student loves it so much so I have to cook it.

At least we're going to be eating with my Paleo niece and her husband and kids tomorrow night.

Thank you for your support. I'd love to hear more from you.

[MeadowLily]

"I know I look better than Steven Tyler".   True.

Larry,  for some reason, my sister and I cannot see enough of Steven Tyler's face.  There's something so fascinating about it from every angle.  Younger or older, we never tire of that face.

 

I've often wondered how a true vegetarian feels after about 20 years.  Hope you have good reports in August.

[theheywhohaa]

Good morning Larry,

I'd say (and I'm not a mod, so you definitely don't need to listen to me) that you should try the lentils on their own in a couple of days and see how you fly with that. It could have been the chick peas, or the lentils, or both. Its hard to cook things you like for other people that you don't eat, but possible. I made a Swedish summer cake for my husband's birthday on day 19 of my w30. I also made my kids cookies and pasta during, and it wasn't too much fun but it was manageable. The hardest part is not tasting things while cooking when you are used to testing that way for flavouring. I made a very substandard batch of nutella that way, but such is life (and BTW, after the initial horror of cooking things I find magnetically attractive and not eating them, I got over it and I don't have any interest in those things now at all. Its all in our heads, isn't it?)

Hope you are feeling better today, and don't worry about anything stealing your happy feeling, its just a lentil and it has no power, you OWN that lentil.

Rose

[larryinmaryland]

Thank you, Meadowlily and Rose for your responses! So, I weighed myself yesterday (having decided to weigh myself once a week on Wednesdays and was 171.2, just one pound less than the week before. Which was really surprising, because ALL my clothes, both shirts and pants, were much looser! So something good is definitely happening and I'm not getting messed up by the scale.

I really can't say I've been completely Whole30 by my own standards this past week. Between living with my vegan friends and then leaving directly from here to visit my 18-year-old vegetarian daughter at her internship in Virginia Beach for the weekend, it was tough to stay pure. We didn't have a kitchen and we couldn't even cook some hard-boiled eggs for the road, and taking our daughter out to eat,(she's in a very edgy stage that I hope ends in a year or two) was challenging. We did manage to go to a Thai restaurant with lots of options and I asked them to cook my dish without any added sweeteners.

Despite the challenges, nary a cracker or single wheat product or sugary anything has touched my lips, nor milk. OK -- I had about 4 oz of iced coffee yesterday with half-and-half. My tastes have changed; I actually prefer the taste of coffee with almond milk.

I seem to tolerate lentils with little problem. I agree that they don't feel as satisfying as meat or fish or eggs as a protein source. Likewise tempeh. But a crazy thing happened this past Tuesday. I relented and went out with my wife to a Japanese restaurant for a sushi-and-sashimi lunch. The minute I had two sips of the miso soup, I noticed that it was slightly sweet; they put some kind of sweetener, I don't know what, in it. I stopped eating it. A few minutes later I felt a bit dizzy and lightheaded. I had the sushi and sashimi dipped in soy sauce as I normally would. I had a horrible headache and stomachache the rest of the day. I couldn't eat almost anything the rest of the day and I even went to bed early.

I have no idea what happened. Was it the tofu? Or something in the soy sauce? Or whatever the sweetener was?

Which leads to a biological and philosophical question: Are we really discovering our own body's sensitivities, or changing our gut bacteria so much that we no longer can digest things that we used to digest, with the help of gut bacteria that helped us digest those foods? And the philosophical part is this: I always felt a little bit superior to people with food sensitivities, thinking they were fussy, prissy people (and, well, they were always women too, making it seem quite unmanly).

A "strong stomach" is synonymous with the ability to ability to handle difficult but necessary things. Is it less manly not to be able to "handle" foods I used to handle?

Nevertheless, I'm a lot thinner and look and feel better. And I feel more confident, more attractive to the world personally and professionally when I don't have that huge round belly protruding from me. Maybe that's in my head and maybe it's a prejudice that our society has drummed into me, but in the end it doesn't matter. I'd rather be this way than the old way, and I like not being so "into" eating all that extra food. And not needing as much food in general.

I'm looking forward to getting back to my own kitchen on Sunday and cooking up my own meals again, especially all of those wonderful recipes I've been discovering.

[theheywhohaa]

Hi again Larry,

Japanese restaurants always add sugar and vinegar to sushi rice. You reacted to the sweetener in the miso, sounds like sugar might be your problem. I discovered that sugar is a major problem for me by reintroducing dairy, which I thought was a problem for me. Turns out it was the chocolate I liked to stuff down with the glass of milk. Live and learn. Sounds like you have been doing great considering the limitations you have been facing. Good for you and here's to even better experiences going forward. Oh, and btw, some of the 'manly' side effects of food intolerance include the delight of flatulence and a bloated midsection. Things we can all live without.

[Hutlifr]

It could also be MSG...I got those symptoms even pre whole30...

[MeadowLily]

Still clipping along, Larry?