Day 1 of the great transformation.
For a long time, I have experienced a call to change my diet. I’m 20 pounds overweight and my body isn’t feeling well. I have tried different diets, been in weight watchers, tried anti-inflammatory diet, Low calorie, Raw food, KETO. Everything works for a short time but does not last. What I probably made the greatest effort was to eat Raw Food., I managed to do that for about three months with the help of https://www.fullyraw.com/.
It’s been a while since I tried it and I’ve forgotten alot about it. Me and my husband often talk about changing different parts of our life to get more out of life, and live healthier, but we do not manage to get it right. We start with something that is quickly forgotten and then we are back in the old habits. I am convinced that it is something that most people who have tried to change something in their life recognize. It works for a short period, and then as quickly as a night it is forgotten and the old habits return. I have understood for a long time that the Food industry and the pharmaceutical industry serve each other and thus, I can also count on the food that the food industry wants me to eat can be harmful. Many years ago I understood this with additives in our food, I understood what the so-called E-numbers (Swedish) or product ingredients were, I understood that margarine was very toxic to the body, but still it is served in schools to our children. I had understood that milk was for calves and not for humans and that it could also be purely harmful to humans. I already had an open mind that the food may not be as good as we think and that there is more to learn.
This is my story.
This means that you who read do not have to agree with me or consider my opinion to be the right one. I just want to share my story.
So a year ago when I tried to eat raw food, something happened to my understanding of the food that we buy in stores. There is not much of it that’s actually good, and of course there are always two sides to a perception but again, this is my opinion. Somehow it feels like food raw materials are not allowed to be clean, but it must always contain something that is harmful to the human body and with a whole plethora of different researches and people who think they know, it is difficult to take in what opinion I want in all this. I have felt a call towards switching to plant-based diet but I don’t know where to start, I probably haven’t really understood what it means fully either and what will be required of me. Yesterday my husband showed me the documentary “Fork over knifes”( On Netflix). The documentary is about 1.5 hours long but it took me six minutes into it to understand that it is time to really try to switch to a plant-based diet once and for all. They address all the health effects, which I am convinced that all perceptions in diet can show, but this appeals to me and I experience a conviction when I listen to it. So yesterday I decided change to a plant-based diet.
I have sought advice and found https://plantifulkiki.com/ ,she has lost weight and managed to keep the weight off with plant-based diet. She writes cookbooks, has a YouTube channel and Instagram. I’ve bought her 28 day weight loss program and I’m stating now.
Continued… About 2 weeks later…
I can’t say for sure when I wrote the first one, I was interrupted and didn’t get started again. My belief that eating only a plant-based diet is stronger than ever, but my body is not keeping up with this transition. I started my first week as so many times before. The first week is always the easiest but then things come up that make it more difficult to change. After all, humans are a creature of habit and it is said that it takes at least 30 days to change a habit. In some cases, extreme cases it can take up to 120 days. I got so very tired when I was approaching week two, it was almost an unpleasant fatigue and I had a strong cravings for meat. I bought ready-made grilled ribs and ate with a good appetite. My energy soon came back so I started to question how it could be. From what I had heard, I would get more energy from eating plant-based. I didn’t know who to ask for advice so I turned to interest groups on Facebook and asked the question. I’m in the change phase from being a carnivore to eating plant-based and I’ve experienced extreme fatigue, I’ve eaten meat and got my energy back. Why do I feel this way? I received so many tips and ideas.What stood out a little extra,was that I had eaten too little protein and was given guidance on eating more nuts and beans. I haven’t really found my way back to the plant-based dieting, but I’m trying. I buy vegan if I buy fast food on the way home. There have been vegan sandwiches and salads. Ready meals are not easy to buy. Many salads contain some type of meat or cheese.
Now I’m trying to figure out how to move on from here and have decided that I should choose vegan recipes that appeal to me. I can still choose to eat low fat, because one of my main reasons to start eating vegan is to lose weight. BUT that will not be my main focus right now, my focus will be to find some vegan meals that can become some kind of “parade menu”, or menu that I feel comfortable to prepare, and understand that I can cook so well and that tastes great. I need to learn how to cook vegan so that it tastes good and I am satisfied by the food. If I get tired again, well then I will eat more nuts even if it gets too many calories, it will not be my main focus right now but just learn to cook vegan. Nuts and vegetable oils such as avocado oil and olive oil are good oils and contain important proteins, but it has a high number of calories.If you want to lose weight so you should try to avoid them. I’m not going to really care about this now, just get started cooking vegan meals. I’m going to focus on that for 30 days and then we’ll see how it’s going, and if I’ve been forced to change the way I think about this. Today is Apr 13-2022 so May 13th I will be wondering if I could have done something different.
This is a pretty bad time for these changes because my husband will come home and he will want to eat Swedish sandwich cake, which he cannot get in the USA . It may be time to try to make it vegan.
I listen to people talk about starch and non-starch.These are the foods that contain starch that make it more difficult to lose weight with the help of plant-based diets. Examples of such foods are: sweet potatoes, corn, potatoes, beans, peas, lentils, squash and I also think pasta and rice are included there even if they are not on my list. The vegetables that do not contain starches or have low starches are dark green leaves vegetables, such as spinach, lettuce and cabbage for example, various other plants as zucchini, onions, green beans and mushrooms. Some of the vegetables included in the list of non-starches can be difficult to find in Sweden or it is not the season for it now, I will discover over time what ingredients I can use during the seasons. My thought then is that I divide my plate into 50/50 so that on one side I have the low calorie vegetables, and on the other side I have starch, such as: rice / pasta / potatoes or something else.
One of the things that is very controversial is exercise when it comes to losing weight. There are those who claim that you have to do cardio every day, some say a few days a week and some say that walking is enough, I have no knowledge of this whatsoever. Whether it’s going for a walk or having a spinning session at the gym. As a rule, I have no less than 15,000 steps a day, I have a dog that wants her exercise. If I’m going to have time to work out for an hour or two at the gym, it’s going to take too much time and it’s going to be more of a compulsion than something that feels good and then I end up in this thought pattern that is more harmful to me than useful about having to train to achieve something.
What I do know is that the way we think plays a very big role in our reality. It is as if we look at exercise as a way to “get healthy”, it will counteract the opportunities to lose weight and feel good. The important thing is to feel good and feel that you are doing something good for yourself, your body and your soul. I don’t feel overweight, and I’m happy with my life, my weight and my poor health becomes a fact when I stand on the scales or when I look in the mirror. Before that I feel nice and I want to continue to do so because I think it’s important to come to terms with health or a lack of a healthy lifestyle. I have two other activities I work to bring into my life and I have been doing this on and off for many years. It’s yoga and meditation. If I then go back to what I wrote above about exercise and feeling good, yoga is just a form of exercise that makes me feel good. I practice it a little on and off but it’s not a daily routine. I hope I can change this to a daily routine and also complete a daily meditation. It is so powerful and has such good effects when implemented. I am so good at waking meditations, when I go for a walk in the woods or when I sit on the bus I still have the visual impressions and my perception is that it can sometimes be useful to turn off the visual impressions and just listen for a while.
I believe that with everything that is happening around us in our world, you can make two basic choices, either listening to the media and living by what is being said or you turn off the media and listen to yourself. It may seem insensitive not to care about what’s going on in the world, but I have a perception that if it’s something that I really need to know, the information comes to me one way or another. I think there are a lot of people who have made that choice now that we have gone through a period of pandemic and now there is a war going on. I don’t deny that people suffer but I can’t do much about it. So if I start putting but energy into it I will probably suffer some kind of poor health and that’s what I don’t want. It’s easy to say focus on what you want in life and let go of what you don’t want in your life. I know it’s easier said than done, I can focus on the fact that my husband is not here and that I miss him. I miss him, in other words, it’s a lack of him. I don’t want it to be an absence, I want him to be here because I love him and chose to share my life with him. I struggle with just being happy and grateful to be his wife can spend some time together, maybe not as often as I would like, but I see him more often now than I did before we were married.
So what do I want to say about this? I am not an expert by any means, but I have lived for a while and I have some experiences I can share, besides I am also changing and want to learn new things, the diet is such a “thing”. I’ve been working for a while on thought patterns and how it affects me and there’s a lot to be said about it, I’ll very likely come back to it over and over again. What I now want to focus on is learning how to cook vegan food, yoga and meditation. I practice Ashtanga yoga and it is very focused on breathing and spirituality, so the meditation does not become a main focus because it is automatically in my waking meditations and yoga. I will still sit down a little and meditate to expand with consciousness a little more.
As the title suggests, it will be a change.