Category: Diet

My Almost-Vegan Diet

High carb, high fiber, high protein, but low fat (except Omega 3); GBOMBS (Joel Fuhrman); plant-based with a small amount of turkey each day for the lysine (thus the “almost”); dairy-free except for the use of Pillars Greek yogurt as almond-milk substitute for cereals (ditto “almost”); no processed foods with the exception of Dave’s bread, cereals (Alpen, Muesli, Grape Nuts), and Pillars, which has live culture, but low fat and no added sugar (unlike most commercial yogurts where they add so much sugar that it’s practically candy). Macros: 50% carb, 30% fat, 20% protein — fat has been trending down and protein trending up, intentionally. Incorporate all high-nutrition foods and avoid or minimize low-nutrition or downright unhealthy foods. Therefore, say yes to all vegetables and fruit and various fermented foods, and say a big fat no to almost all processed foods. Avoid or minimize saturated fat, salt, and sugar — the 3 demon S’s. Reduce meat consumption to an absolute minimum, especially processed meats (carcinogenic) and red meats in general. No alcohol except red wine for cooking. 19:5 intermittent fasting every day. Learn how to make plant-based dishes that are nevertheless delicious — garlic, onions, tomato paste, lemon juice, and curry powder are your allies.

You’ll live to be 100 but in good health.

I use Cronometer each day, and it will tell me if I’m weak or outright deficient in anything at a very granular level. For instance, it has shown that my diet was weak in lysine, calcium and iodine, and so I’ve take measures to address these shortcomings.

Don’t but negligent. Be good to yourself. Eat healthy food.

Nutrition Challenge

Nutrition Challenge

Make your meals as intensely nutritious as possible — as in way over-the-top nutritious — but still be savory. I practice the GBOMBS diet, and Cronometer is indispensable to achieve super duper nutrition. It’s your body…you are in charge of it, no one else.

Super-duper nutrition involves two very different elements — finding the foods that have powerful nutrients and including them; identifying the foods that undermine your health and avoiding them. You have to do both.

Weight Loss

Weight Loss

Weight loss from 198 to 155 in one year. Nutritarian diet (Joel Fuhrman) with intermittent fasting.

I’ve recently found that baked potatoes are also a useful tool, as they are filling and very low in fat. Having days with a very low number of grams in fat really accelerates weight loss. It may not be true that “fat makes you fat,” but it is clearly true that low fat will make you skinny because low-fat days tend also to make for low-calorie days.

What Don’t You Know?

You Don’t Know What You Need

If you use Cronometer religiously, you can find out what your diet is deficient in, and then make the adjustment either with foods that have the missing nutrient or with supplements. Without Cronometer, you won’t know. For instance, I now know that I’m routinely deficient in iodine, choline and lysine and often low in calcium.

Cronometer even has a function where you plug in the missing nutrient, and it will tell you the top 25 foods that contain it.

Over 60?

Oils

All the oils, including olive oil, are considered processed foods that don’t have enough nutrition to justified their excessive calories from all that pure and concentrated fat, so most plant-based eaters avoid or minimize oils (for instance, instead of cooking with oils, use vegetable broth or even water). Instead of olive oil, eat actual olives instead — they have those good fats (monounsaturated) but also the very beneficial fiber.

Tofu from non-GMO soy is a high quality source of protein, despite what the meat industry would have you think about soy products. The magic of tofu is that it marinates in whatever foods you want to use — I use it for curry/turmeric/pepper.

Consider getting that particular combination, turmeric/pepper, into your daily diet for health purposes. Turmeric without some pepper is absorbed by the body less efficiently so you don’t get all the health benefits.

Losing Weight

Losing Weight

Have lost 30 lbs. in about 12 months with 19:5 intermittent fasting and the GBOMBS diet.  The weight loss also has targeted fat, that is, ketones, so my waistline has gone down noticeably.

Cronometer has been a valuable tool because it helps me not go over a calorie limit each day, and I can manage each day’s intake so that I come in a little under the number of calories it says I should be eating for my age and activity level — I never before knew what that number was.  Cronometer also has given me a much better sense of how caloric each food actually is.

Don’t even think about 19:5 intermittent fasting anymore because it is just the way I eat.  Losing the weight slowly over that 1 year period has been easy to do.  I haven’t felt like I’ve been missing out on food at all, but the focus has been on nutritionally dense food.   No processed food at all, 98% plant based, a very small amount of meat (white meat/turkey, which is very lean meat and low in saturated fat) each day.  Lots of leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, and beans.

One thing that has become very obvious to me with Cronometer is that everyone should be taking a general vitamin pill, as it is so common to be deficiency in many of the micronutrients when one doesn’t take such a pill.  So it’s just a kind of insurance policy to avoid those several likely deficiencies, which you won’t even know you have without using such a tool.

Vitamin Pills and Fat

Lysine

I’ve discovered the protein issue with a vegan diet is more nuanced than is commonly realized. Yes, a well rounded vegan diet will give you plenty of overall protein. But if you use cronometer every day and see how such a well rounded vegan diet breaks down relative to each of the essential amino acids (essential in that you have to get them from food, the body doesn’t make them), then you will see that one is often chronically short of lysine and somewhat short of leucine despite the well rounded plant-based diet. So a more sophisticated question for the vegan diet, isn’t where do you get your protein, but how do you get the RDAs for those two specific essential amino acids? Lysine in particular is a serious problem for vegans imo.

I’ve been on a straight, plant-based vegan diet (Joel Fuhrman’s GBOMBS) for the last few years, but this experience with conometer has made me modify it to include a small amount of turkey to address the lysine/leutine issues.  Interestingly enough, even with the addition of a small amount of turkey, my lysine and leucine numbers still come in somewhat below their RDAs, which makes me think the change was even more justified.  Now I call myself an “almost vegan,” due to this modification to my diet.

Thrive Market

Toasty Potatoes

Small gourmet red potatoes. Wash and cut in half. In a big bowl, pour balsamic vinegar, apple cider vinegar, mustard, almond flour, curry powder, and stir. Put the halved potatoes in bowl and swirl with your hands (this is the fun part, a la playing in mud when you were a kid) until they are thoroughly soaked. Put potatoes smooth side down on a large baking pan with parchment paper. Sprinkle on rosemary and sesame seeds. Bake at 425 degrees for 35 minutes. Eat some hot that day but put the rest in a paper towel lined container and put in frig. Eat the rest cold for the rest of the week. Tart taste with a lingering curry aftertaste and toasty from the sesame seeds and the almond flour.

Are You Deficient?