One great side effect of a diet is you have a lot of energy in general. The downside of a diet is you wake up at night, or at least I did from being hungry. After the first few weeks I became used to it, and it became a normal part of the night. Feeling hungry and getting cravings also is part of the process. I also felt pretty poor the first few weeks, and I was told it is not uncommon to feel ill for the first few weeks.

Reasons for feeling ill ranged from going without food to my body using fat that had bad things stored in it that I either ate over time, or breathed in. What the truth is I do not know, but I became ill feeling at any rate.

One of the things most diet programs also do not tell you is what happens to the fat on your body. I have forgotten the specifics, but generally we do not ‘burn’ fat as the commercials tell us we do, other than in a general sense. Our bodies use the fat for calories of course, but we do not burn it up and it is gone. What happens is the fat is used by our bodies and the remains that our body can not use is converted into water and air.

That sounds pretty simple, writing water and air. What that means in reality is dieting will increase your trips to the bathroom, and it will increase your gas output. Not a big deal, but I thought I would mention it. Also it should be mentioned that what your body uses and discards leaves in the liquid for the most part, and what it can not use is generally solids. So you may notice a change in your bathroom routine while dieting.

Instead of sending a list of seven days eating I thought I made a composite list. I ate almost the same foods every day anyway so it made more sense. My diet mainly came from the the book, “The Thirty Day Diabetes Miracle”. It was a diet that I thought I could maintain which is crucial for dieting. If you find any diet ‘severe’ you will not stick to it.

A few last items: First is the reason for the walnut oil. What I ate was almost zero fat, and our bodies need some fat both for maintenance and to burn fat (or so I was told after weight loss stopped). I was told to get a nut oil that was not cooked or heated. It worked well.

FInally, eating this way is cheap! It is a good healthy way to save money. The walking is crucial to speed up the process, so don’t skip it.

Two previous posts you may find helpful:

How I Lost 56 Pounds

Weight Loss, Happy Eating, And Celiac Disease

As with any change to your life style, use you own judgment. I am not a health care professional, and have no idea if what I did to lose weight is healthy or safe for you.
Breakfast:

Most days – 1 cup oatmeal, 1 cup pinto beans or other beans, 1 cup blueberries, six whole almonds, 2 teaspoons walnut oil.

Once in a while – Two scrambled eggs or Tofu scrambled ‘eggs’ w/ onions, bell pepper, and chili, two slices Ezekial 4:9 bread toasted w/ almond butter.

Lunch:

Most days: 1 cup 3 bean chili, one serving Rosarita corn chips (about 10), salad w/ lowest fat strawberry dressing, and some days some steamed chicken breast.

Once in while: McDonalds Southwest salad grilled although the Asian salad is about the same, only it has higher sodium.

Ezekial bread and soy burger, corn chips, and fruit

Dinner:

Most days: Lentil, vegetable, pea, beef and barley, or other soup, less than, or about 30 carbs, and fruit, lately a whole pear

Some days: Ezekial bread and soy burger; chicken wrap and ice cream from McDonalds; steamed chicken on tortilla and fruit at home, beef or sockeye salmon, and either asparagus, or peas, and one slice Ezekial bread; two fruits

That’s about it. Sometimes I make the lunch chili and chips into an almost frito pie. Occasionally I drink some soy milk with these meals, although I use soy milk for refrigerator made oatmeal. The people who wrote the book [thirty day diabetes miracle] have a cookbook coming out, though they also have a weeks worth of menus, but I am lazy….

I walk twenty minutes at least after each meal, and on my days off I like to take a four or five mile walk about an hour after eating, and then walk after lunch and dinner. My after meal walks are about 1 – 2 miles, usually closer to 1.2 – 1.5 miles.

The bad news is just about everything imaginable has some form of wheat product in it. If you eat what is dubbed as, “The Standard American Diet”, you are going to feel pretty SAD. Not only where is that good old standby, white bread, but where did everything else go that people love to eat? Cookies, donuts, candy bars, ice cream, most breakfast cereals, almost everything that is part of SAD. That could make one quite sad indeed.

So what is the problem I wonder? If you read my post about my own journey down the weight loss road, you know I am no stranger to limiting eating choices. What I find exciting about a celiac disease diet, is it is no longer a choice to leave most foods we do not need to eat anyway alone. How liberating it is to be able to erase a whole plethora of calorie packed artificially created foods from consideration as part of, “…what am I going to eat”.

A friend told me when I mentioned celiac disease to him, “Man, I know a little about that, you are going to lose a lot of weight fast, because you can’t eat hardly anything! What you can eat is expensive, so your food bill will probably double.” I sure have not found that to be the case. In fact, except for a few cookies, and peanut butter sandwiches, and some occasional pieces of fried chicken, not much has changed in what I eat, or how much it costs.

From my weight loss experience I learned to eat a lot of fruit, vegetables, and whole grain foods. The whole grains that I was used to eating are out, but everything else is just a little shift in the menu planning. Home cooked beans are cheap and very healthy. Fruits are very healthy and they change with the seasons, vegetables are limited by imagination.

Instead of whole grain foods, corn cereal and corn tortillas are the easiest and cheapest substitute. Although a corn tortilla does not quite take the place of a fresh sopapilla with honey, it is not a big sacrifice. Living with celiac disease for the average american will feel like punishment.

On the other side of things, if one eats a diet rich in vegetables and fruits, plus foods from other cultures, and is not scared of eating a raw unprocessed piece of fruit, eating is no more of an issue than it was before. It just takes a little more planning and for forethought.

If you are looking for a way to eat healthier, especially if your goal is weight loss, the celiac disease way of eating may be your ticket to diet satisfaction and healthy weight loss. You can eat more of some of those foods you like because the list of foods you must ignore is so large. With a little optimism, a celaic disease diet, can be seen as The Joy Of Celiac eating is one road to better long lasting health. Happy eating and remember life is what you make it!

If you are thinking about dieting, but scared of starting this may be a blog entry for you. If I can do it, so can you.

Between last Christmas and last May I dropped 56 pounds. I learned a couple of things along the way I am happy to share with you.

Eating less of the same food(s) does not work!

For the first two to three weeks I was feeling poorly. I have a friend who’s wife is a dietician, and he told me that is normal to feel fairly ill the first couple of weeks.

For the next weeks, I was teetering between hungry and very hungry. It goes with the territory. I wanted to lose weight at an optimum rate, so I chose to be very hungry. After about three weeks of very hungry it does not bother you any longer. It is like having a sore toe, you get used to it.

I woke up a some nights because I was hungry. I also needed less sleep because I was hungry. Hunger must make us want to go and find food to eat. You get used to it.

I also went through different types of cravings. Calcium, salt, vitamin C, etc. I imagine it was my body adjusting to new foods and not getting vitamins and minerals from junk food. This too does pass.

Over the months, even when I felt really ill in the first few weeks, I remained consistent, both in my eating and my exercise which was twenty to thirty miles of walking each week. Three times a day after eating I hit the pavement for anywhere from a mile to a six mile slow walk depending on how much time I had free.

I can honestly say, that other than the first few weeks when I felt like I was going to fall over from a puff of air, I never ran out of energy walking. I think I may have tanked out from running, but at walking speed my body was able to convert fast enough that I always had enough energy.

If you plateau, it may be you are not getting enough good fat in your body. I had to increase my extra fat intake to two teaspoons of walnut oil a day, up from a little less than one teaspoon to keep the weight loss going.

I find now that many foods I used to love, look and taste terrible! That is a good thing, although I know from experience you can make yourself like them, but the pounds will sneak back on.

Find a diet you can live with, and forget about the word ‘diet’. Think instead, New Lifestyle. Find a plan you can eat/live with/on the rest of your life. There is no going back to the way you used to eat, once you arrive on the other side, so make sure your choice is enjoyable, easy, and simple. Be creative when eating out, a few sides and some mixing makes a good meal too!

I picked the 30 Day Diabetes Miracle Diet, which is a plant based diet. I lost between 2.5 to 3.5 pounds a week. I like it because I like oatmeal, beans, and vegetables, and you can get them anywhere. It is cheap and healthy eating. I enjoy eating these foods even now, and will mostly eat this way the rest of my life, with some meat in the mix now and then.

McDonalds salads and wraps are good choices when you need to eat and are away from home. Salad bars are as bad as burger joints if you do not watch what you are eating – they hide fat and too many calories in soups and bread stuff.

Once you start losing weight, dieting experts will come out of the woodwork and tell you how you are doing it all wrong. Stick to your plan, and politely tell them you are happy with what you are doing. A doctor and a dietician argued against my diet, even though they could not argue with the results, or find anything lacking in it.

Fat breaks down to water and air, so get comfortable to the idea that there will be more output liquid than input.

Mar 06, 2009: I posted a recent entry on diet and weight loss that may be of interest to you if you found this post worthwhile.

I started out well, at least I thought I was starting off well. I traded the man sized burgers, fries, and a coke for the woman sized portions, and the sugary soda for a diet soda. I added more vegetables to my meals. I ate a little less white foods, making up the difference in meats. Over the following two months I had lost about ten pounds. I lost that by eating little for dinner and waking up very hungry. Of course over the two months, I started making up for being hungry at night by eating more for breakfast.

It is really an interesting situation we Americans have ourselves in when it comes to eating. We generally eat more in some meals than we should be eating in a whole day. I won’t go on with what those meals are, other than to say they meet the taste requirements of the new American food groups are: grease, sugar, and flour. The more of these bad foods in combination the more we like them.

I used to work with a guy whose diet consisted of: Twinkies, canned vanilla pudding, and pop. That is all he ate every day. We all knew he was not going to live to long on a diet like that. We would talk about his poor diet while we ate burgers and fries. Later I worked with a woman who lived on toaster pastries and coffee. I was sure she was not going to make to another birthday. I thought these thoughts as I was giving up eating most pork, and all gravy – with a few exceptions of course.

Now it was my turn to really look at myself and help myself eat better. I thought maybe if I made sandwiches instead of burgers and had some corn chips, and diet coke my diet would be better. After a month of sandwiches, nothing had changed. Somehow my idea of eating better just was not working.

I did what I think I do best in these and similar situations. I decided I was suffering a case of wrong think. All I was really doing was substituting one poor food choice for another poor food choice. All the while thinking I was really changing my eating habits. All I was doing in reality was changing the composition of what I ate, while not changing what it was all made of. That was a hard pill to swallow, but it was better to admit I did not have a clue how to eat healthy, than to continue eating what I was eating. One meal out of the house I have always enjoyed was going to a salad bar. Watching other people at the salad bar, and their food choices started me down a whole new way of eating.

It is important to remember the idea that salad bar sounds healthy. Everyone there should be slim and trim, but they were not. Just like anywhere else, there was a mix of sizes. I grouped the people at the salad bars into two main groups. Those who were over weight, and those who were not. I started watching what the two groups ate for their meals. What I discovered really took me by surprise!

The more rotund people were eating about the same things I ate, a small plate of salad, followed by muffins, pastas, and ice cream with toppings. When I looked at the slim people they were eating salad, light soups, and one bread or muffin, and perhaps a small amount of ice cream for desert. What a difference in eating habits! I knew right then I needed to start eating like the slimmed down people were eating. I also knew I did not have a clue how to eat like they were throughout the day.

I found a book that promised to get me on the right track. The book suggested I would lose all the weight I wanted in the process, plus I would feel better each passing week. I had to ask myself, how many books make that promise? Well, when I went online to the bookstore, I found eighty-seven people gave this book an overall four point five stars on a five star scale. I thought conspiracy right away, what else could it be? There is no book that good. I read through some parts of it quickly and decided I liked what I read. It was straight forward, talked to me in a way I understood, and it made no frills attached sense. Except it was a vegetarian diet! A VEGETARIAN DIET! Who in the world ate like that? Obviously the authors and eighty-seven other people eat that way.

Thirty plus pounds later, I can attest to everything the book says is true, for me at least. Besides losing a lot of weight, I am still losing weight, and generally my health has improved more than I ever thought possible. I can’t say I am total vegetarian even though I ate tofu scrambled and spiced to look and almost taste like eggs today, along with a bowl of three bean chili and some bread that contains no grain, toast with almond butter, and an orange, all for breakfast! I still enjoy some chicken now and then, and I ate two pieces of beef, and two eggs, in the last month. Overall I can say I really enjoy the way I eat now, for no other reason than I am getting the results I want. I am also learning what it means to eat healthy, to eat right, and it feels so good!

I don’t have any intention of selling you on my new way of eating. Friends and family find it pretty bland, and can not believe I can eat the way I am learning to eat. For me it is the first of many baby steps as I learn how to eat right without following a manual of eating. What I am suggesting, is if you are willing to admit what you are doing in any area of your life is not working, there is hope and help waiting when you are ready to change. All you have to do is want to change bad enough that other things in your life become second to achieving your goal. If I can do it, anyone can do it.

That means you can do it too if you are willing to set aside what you think you know, and admit what you know does not work for you, whether it is eating, relationships, or life in general. Go to the book store, get on the net, or talk to people who seem to be doing it better than you do. When you want it bad enough, you will find a new way that works for you.