KillSwitch wrote:Drew,
Thanks so much friend for those links and for talking to me. The thread that outlines your eating patterns are things that help me immensely and inspire me. I like to emulate successful ppl. You look fantastic btw and I bet you feel great as you have indicated. There is no better feeling than being healthy and feeling energetic each day. You also look fairly young. I am 59 years old, so I am trying to undo many more years of unhealthy eating. I did start in 2013 and I am over 95% compliant now. I wish in hindsight I had started much younger, but I had no clue as to how important diet was to health and well-being. I was simply ignorant about optimal human nutrition and thought as long as I exercise and keep myself slim, I can eat whatever I want and be healthy. Now I know this is not true. Altho exercise does play an important role, food is the #1 thing when it comes to health. Had I known that back then, I would have easily converted to a WFPB diet.
I have a few more questions Drew when you have the time. Do you eat nuts? Do you take any other supplements besides B12? Which one plant food would you say you eat the most of? Do you eat oatmeal and how often? Finally, do you have any past lipid panel results that you up can share with me? Thanks and I hope you are enjoying your weekend.
Hi Killswitch,
I am thrilled to hear that you found that motivational and that it serves to keep you on the right track. You are right that there is no better feeling than being healthy and energetic. They say
"A healthy person has a thousand dreams and aspirations, while a sick person only has one." Of course, the sick persons only aspiration is to be healthy. Our health truly is our wealth. The fact that you are 95% complaint and have been leaning in this direction since 2013 is remarkable and you deserve a lot of credit for that.
To answer your questions, yes I do eat nuts - I will include walnuts, pecans, brazil nuts, cashews, and pretty much any nut that is in its unadulterated state (and the same goes for seeds). My preference is for them to be raw to reduce the amount of advanced glycation end products that are caused when high-fat/high-protein foods are cooked/heated. My only struggle is that raw nuts are one of the food groups that are difficult to get organic where I live. I also do eat some avocado and some organic cocoa powder, though not at the moment since I am not currently consuming caffeine or stimulants including theobromine. At times I have included some supplements, but this is generally the exception rather than the rule. I have supplemented with B-12 from the beginning 11 years ago and will continue to do so moving forward. I do live at a northern latitude equivalent to London, England, which means that the angle of the sun makes it so that I cannot obtain sufficient vitamin D for 6 months per year. Thus I supplement with 1000-2000 iu's of vitamin D daily. A few times per year I pick up a few bags of seaweed to include in my diet for the purposes of iodine, but it is certainly not clear that this is necessary and it is somewhat of a whole food. There is the odd supplement I have tried (i.e. magnesium for sleep), though nothing that I have stuck with for any measure of time worth mentioning.
It would be hard to pinpoint which food I eat the most of. Currently, about 50% of my starch (~750 calories per day) comes from legumes, lentils, and other foods in that genre. I do eat generous amounts of either steel cut oats or rolled outs too, and as I said in my anniversary post, there have been times where I have basically lived off of oatmeal as my starch for long periods. Having said that, my fridge often has generous amounts of other starches like sweet potatoes, quinoa, brown rice, potatoes, and so forth as my family prepares and consumes them. I have a few rules I loosely adhere to as well (loosely being the key word). They might include:
-Eating generous amounts of leafy greens each day
-Eating generous amounts of cruciferous vegetables each day
-Eating allium family vegetables each day
-Eating berries each day
-Eating spices (including turmeric) each day
-Eating as a large variety of plants as possible on a weekly basis
-Eating food in a limited time window (I've experiment with various forms of TRF and intermittent fasting)
There are probably more guidelines I have... that's what comes to mind offhand though. I will be the first to say that some people around here will criticize me for getting lost in the minutiae with some of these matters but I am happy to live with that criticism (i.e. a reductionist mindset). My non-starchy plant intake is probably about 3 pounds per day.
Last but not least, below are the four lipid panels I have access to. With the first three you will notice how consistent the results are.
https://ibb.co/CQXf3nRThe last test is an outlier since I conducted an experiment to see what would happen if I introduced a small amount of animal products into my diet. It is literally the results of eating a total of just 12 eggs spread out over 8 weeks.
I acquired a dozen eggs from a friends backyard chicken during this time. I should point out that these eggs are as high quality as you could possibly get. They were truly free-range, well cared for, and properly fed chickens who produce eggs that are nothing like eggs you find in a store. The eggs themselves were blue or brown in colour and had yokes that very richly coloured. Well long story short, that small number of eggs sure affected my lipid profile. It's funny since I wondered if my very high-fibre diet (often close to 100g per day) might bind to the cholesterol and flush it away, or if all those phyto-nutrients in my high nutrient plants foods might obliterate the cholesterol rather than raise serum levels, but that was not what happened. It is the only time I have ever conducted such an experiment.
(I converted the metrics to the standard US measurement that most people are familiar with - they are in red).
