Starting!

Today is the day! We are going to start this journey to becoming healthy. While we don't have all the details worked out, we have a general idea of what our plan is going to be. So I will run through our general guidelines we came up with:

1. High protein (we want to get a protein source in with every meal) and a healthy protein, beans, chicken, and turkey are going to be our main sources

2. Cheat day: Saturday. This is what works best for us because it is the day we are most likely to go out to eat. Although days like Christmas, birthdays, and super special occasions that only happen once a year will also be considered cheat days. 

3. NO MORE JUNK FOOD. This is going to be a big one for us. Not only do we run out for dinner every night to the nearest fast food place, but we are also very guilty of stopping at the Seven Eleven for snacks throughout the day. Also soda is a big player in our lives, and that has to go. 

4. More Veggies! Our goal is to get some kind of food or veggie in every meal we eat

So now that you know the general plan we have, I will be updating this at least once a week with our progress as well as reviewing anything new we tried (food, recipes, etc) and keep you up on any resources we find along the way. 

I have updated the "Before" and "Goals" section of the site, so feel free to check them out. But here is a short sample (I will be adding pictures probably in the next few days). Some short background first, I am the overwhelmingly overweight person in this house and I will be referring to myself as "girl". My husband is the healthy work out everyday person in the house and he will be referred to as "boy". 

Girl: Weight: 234.6      Bicep: 16"      Waist: 44.25"   Thigh: 26"     BMI: 40.3

Boy: Weight: 184.6      Bicep: 15"      Waist: 35"        Thigh: 22"    BMI: 25.7

Wish us luck! 

Forks Over Knives

Now that the site design is up and running, it is time to get my diet up and running too. 

My diet is going to be a huge DIY experiment, I plan on taking elements of as many diets as I need to, in order to figure out what works best for me. So to do that, I am doing a lot of research. I want to make sure all of my readers are able to go along this journey with me, so I want to go over all my research here on the site. 

A couple of people have recommended the documentary Forks Over Knives to me, and I figured now was the time to watch it. This is one of those really interesting documentaries about the history of how we eat as Americans. It looks at the time before processed food, to the beginning of fast food and processed foods, and where we are today. 

They go over how eating so much animal protein and processed food has shown a huge increase in cancer occurrences. Basically what they figured out was that the "western" diet is not working, there are more cancer deaths and more heart disease then there are for those people who live in more rural areas of in countries that are less processed food centric. There was this really interesting study in Hawaii and how the people who had immigrated there stayed on their diets of rice and vegetables, and their children started migrated to the processed food culture and ended up getting fatter and sicker. 

I really liked how they showed the relationship the human body has with the kind of food we eat. Doctors actually classifying the processed foods we eat a low grade addiction. That's because when you removed the fiber and nutrients from food and replace it with sugar, fat, and salt it activates the pleasure centers of the brain much like drugs do. I really like how they talk about the stomach receptors. 500 calories of plant based food triggers the stomach to tell the brain that you are full, because the stretch receptors and density receptors are both convinced your stomach is full. If you look at eating processed food 500 calories only fills the stomach to "full" status at 1/3 to 1/2 of the size of your stomach, so you have to eat 1 to 2 times more food to reach full. And 500 calories of oil based food barely registers in the stomach. How crazy is that?

So what I really took away from this movie is that a whole food plant based diet is really the way to go. They show an entire firehouse in Austin, Texas who switched their diets to whole food diets, and they thrived on it. I think that's really cool. 

So what I take away from the movie is two fold, 1) I really want to get a physical including blood tests so I can see where I really stand and 2) I really need to incorporate more plants in my diet. I am a person who does not tolerate dairy or meat well, I don't digest it well, it makes me feel run down and sleepy, and in general the way it's cooked (the amount of fat and grease) sometimes make me physically ill. But I love meat, I've eaten large quantities of meat my whole life, I know every time I eat it that it is going to make me feel bad, but I do it anyway. I have to find a way to cut back. 

If you have time and Netflix you should totally check out the documentary, it's one of the few food documentaries that didn't gross me out and make me say wow the whole time.  

New Beginnings

Like a lot of people I have started and stopped diet for so long, I don't think I know any other way. And while I am fortunate enough have the ability to spend a lot of time fixing my health, I have actively decided not to. But now that I am getting older and I am thinking about having a family and planning out the rest of my life, the one thing that is staring me in the face is my health. 

Weight. Such a terrible word. I was never a skinny girl, but I was never overweight, I was always in he normal BMI bracket until college. My first year at college was my first ten pounds, and then another 10, and then another. And now here I am at 245 pounds. I should weigh (according to BMI) somewhere between 110-150 pounds. That 100 pounds! I have to lose like an entire person in order to just be considered healthy. 

As much as it bothers me on a self-image level that I am overweight, it really isn't about that for me this time. I was never the picture of health, I got sick every once in a while, but these days I have asthma, allergies, lung infections all the time, bad back, you name it I have it. The only correlation I have been able to draw is that the more weight I put on the more health problems I have. 

Don't get me wrong, I am not going to sit here and say I am not in it only to be healthy, I want to look good to. No girl likes growing out of jeans and then having to go shopping for another pair that are the next size up and then looking terrible in them. I would never expect to be a size 0, hell I wouldn't want to be. But I would love to be on normal side of sizes, 6-8 is my goal. 

I think another reason why my diets in the past have failed is that my husband was never on the same diet he is. He is blessed with one of those metabolisms and bodies that can eat anything and still weight 180 at 6 feet. But this time he announces to me that he wants to be on the exact same plan I am. To say I was shocked would be an understatement, but that's the kind of awesome guy he is. 

So over the next day or so I am going to post pictures of our current state and our current measurements, and then outline our diet plans. We will tell you what works for us, what food we like, what books we read, and everything health related. I also plan to get a physical when I can get into the doctor's office and I will give you an update on where I stand health wise. I hope that anyone who stumbles upon this blog finds something that helps them along their own personal journey. I can't wait to engage with people and compare notes. Let's all try and beat this obesity epidemic together.