This is how I eat.

This is a letter I wrote to my niece. She wanted me to lay out in black and white exactly how I eat to give her a starting point on taking control of the way she eats. Again this is just a starting point, and this works for me, everyone is different and everyone needs to find what works for them. Hopefully this will provide enough information to get someone started.

Delia,

First off, I would do a hardcore month. The first 2 weeks your body will be making the change over, letting go of the things that it has gotten used to that haven't allowed it to function at 100%, and adapting to run on the proper fuel. The second two weeks are when you are going to begin experiencing results.  With me, I felt the results first, mostly because I had so much weight to lose that it showed up on the scale long before I could discern anything visually. With you, though, you will probably “see” results much quicker. What I noticed  was how I felt,  that ineffable feeling known as better, mood, joints, sure, I felt the improvement there,  but I’m talking something different, my body now just feels “right”.  I’m not sure that you will have as pronounced of a feeling here, as you are still in your youth. I on the other hand have the experience of racing from my youth, into old age, careening past death to arrive back at my youth again. But it is the way that I feel that has made it easy for me to maintain eating the way that I do.  The other key is to find tasty things that you really like. Let’s face it, we like food, and if you find things that are really tasty, then it is easier to avoid things that you shouldn’t have. Ideally, you’ll know you’re on the right track if you find things to eat that you really look forward to.  It really helps to break away from the norm; anyone would get bored if they stuck to carrots, celery and lettuce. I’m continually trying new vegetables and spices, root vegetables and spicy greens are my favorites. I eat a lot of gold beets and radishes, (watermelon radishes are the best, but they’re not available all year), I was recently surprised to find that parsnips have a really unique, distinct flavor, they’re best when really firm. For greens, I’m always eating watercress and mustard greens along with baby bok choy.  Watercress has a surprising almost peppery flavor, and bok choy is loaded with calcium and doesn’t turn to mush when you add it to soups or stews. What I’ve been doing recently is buying these brown rice mixes from Lundeberg’s, they’ve got mainly brown rice with a mix of other grains. I cook up enough for several days and then keep it in Tupperware in the fridge.  I’ll only cook it about 75% of the way initially then I use about a tennis ball size scoop for a stew base. I then add either a half can of lentils (I like Westbrae Natural, Organic Black Lentils) or chili (Eden Organic, Black Beans and Quinoa chili is great). Then I add either water or low sodium vegetable broth and toss in my vegetables.  Tonight for instance, I had 1 gold beet, 2 carrots, 1 yellow, crooked neck squash,( all cut into ¼” thick slices) a head of baby bok choy, about 15 shitaki mushrooms (good for removing toxins from your system) 3, ¼” thick slices of field roast cut into small cubes and then at the end  I toss in about half a bunch of watercress.  I heat everything until the squash and mushrooms start to soften, the beets and carrots will be heated all the way through but still crunchy. Then I sprinkle some Rice Shreds “cheese” on top and I’m ready to eat. You can do endless variations on this just by using different combinations of vegetables. Sometimes I’ll just do the vegetables in broth, and then pour everything over a bowl of uncooked Mustard Greens, other times I’ll just cut everything up and eat it raw with a little salad dressing.

You already know all the things that you just should not eat, PERIOD. Beef, poultry, pork, milk or anything derived from it, eggs, margarine and ALL oils. And of course anything with added sugar, flour, or anything that’s been processed like tofu should be limited. I read labels obsessively, I’m trying to get your mom away from vegenaise so I got her to substitute mustard, she picked up a Sweet and Spicy brown mustard from Safeway and when I looked at the label, sugar was listed on the ingredient list before mustard seed, a lot of bad things show up when you check the ingredients of seemingly innocuous items.  Avoid anything with empty calories, the aforementioned oils and vegenaise, also things like sodas (alcohol gets a pass here, because all studies show  that anything short of heavy boozing is better for you than abstinence. Not to mention that red wine is good for the heart and the spiritual benefits that the Irish get from consuming libations). My main soda substitutes are different probiotic drinks, Kombucha, which is a cultured tea which comes in all kinds of different flavors, and Kvass, which is a cultured vegetable juice; I really like the Carrot Ginger and Beet Ginger flavors. Kvass is made by Zukay who also have probiotic salad dressings at about 5 calories per two tablespoons. Try to stick to breads and cereals that are made without flour, usually with sprouted grains. For breakfast I usually have one of several different cereals, Natures Path makes several good ones, Smart Bran with psyllium and oat bran is my current favorite, it looks similar to Rice Krispies but tastes better and has 13 grams of fiber. Any of the Ezekiel 4:9 cereals are good, they’re sprouted grain cereals.  I have the cereals with a handful of raisins and a couple spoonfuls of chia seeds which give you all your omega-3s and I have them with our 365 brand organic Almond Milk. My other alternative breakfast, I cook up several days of steel-cut oatmeal and then have it with a tablespoon of peanut butter, chia seeds, a little almond milk, some raisins and maybe a little cinnamon. If I have a piece of toast with it, I usually eat Alvarado Street, Fundamental Fiber sprouted grain bread, with 5 grams of fiber per slice. Ezekiel 4:9 also makes some good sprouted grain breads.  For lunch I have 3 or four pieces of fruit, varied according to what’s in season, with either a Kambucha or a Kvass. This week it’s a banana, an apple, a pear and a peach. The Taylor Gold pears are in season right now and are really good. My typical dinner I already described to you. I keep things interesting by varying my spices, one day maybe a couple tablespoons of horseradish, the next hot curry powder, which I make half and half, curry powder and cayenne powder. Other times I use savory spices, basil, dill, and a mix I make with granulated garlic and dehydrated onion. I also sprinkle in some kelp granules to get my iodine.  I just keep playing around with different veggies and spices, the variations are endless. When I have dinner with your mom we get fancy and try recipes from the cook book, “How It All Vegan” or something simple like soup made with a natural tomato soup base and a bunch of veggies and mushrooms thrown in, or spaghetti squash  with marinara sauce with field roast Italian sausage and shitaki mushrooms added to it. For supplements, all you should need is vitamin D, we’re too pale and can’t spend enough time in the sun to get a proper amount, and one Emergen-C  which gives you all the vitamin C you need plus several other nutrients, including B-12, which is the only nutrient that you cannot get from a plant source, unless you eat carrots straight from the garden without washing all the dirt off.  Last bit of advice to get you started, no artificial sweeteners, or anything with a bunch of chemicals on the ingredient list (you should be hardly eating any packaged food anyway and if you shop at Whole Foods we don’t allow foods with a whole list of verboten chemicals on our shelves). Artificial sweeteners and other chemicals have to be remove from our system by our liver which make it less efficient at it’s other function, which is metabolizing fat. I expect that this is enough to get you started but figure this will be an ongoing dialogue as you come up with questions as you go along. Good luck and of course don’t forget daily physical activity, be it walking, running or beating the crap out of a tire with a sledgehammer.
Jim

Happy Re-Birthday to me!

Here is the rest of my health story for those who haven't heard it yet. I first posted it September 25, 2010.

Happy Re-Birthday to me!

A year ago today, I died while at work. I really wasn’t aware of it at the time; I just knew that something wasn’t right. It had been a hot week and I was really feeling the heat. I had been slowly trying to get myself in better shape since I had quit construction and started working at Whole Foods a year and a half before. I had dropped from 325+ lbs to around 265, so I felt pretty good about that, little did I know how far I had yet to go, I was about to get a major dose of motivation. As part of trying to live a healthier lifestyle, I had started to ride my bike to work. On average it was about a 35-45 minute ride. The day before I had started off on my way to work, it was pretty hot and I was about a quarter-mile into my ride when I started to get a little light headed. Soon things went almost completely black and I had to get off and walk my bike. After I had walked for a few minutes my vision came back and I hopped back on my bike and started riding again. I did this repeatedly, ride 50 yards, walk100 yards, ride 50 yards, walk 100 yards. When after an hour, I wasn’t even half way to work; I began to see the futility of it. I called in to work and told them I was going home sick, and then I called for a ride home. When I got home I couldn’t stay awake no matter how hard I tried; I slept through till the next morning. The next day, attributing my spell of the day before to heat, and maybe a “bug” of some sort, I decided to not push things and drove my car to work. Things seemed okay for the first half-hour or so of my shift, and then things started to get a little haywire. I began to get a little dizzy, my vision started to swim around and I started to get holes in my sight, bottomless black areas where reality seemed not to exist. I told my supervisor and he told me to sit down for a few minutes and see if I felt any better. After sitting for a bit, I started to feel okay, so I got back on my register. After helping a couple customers, things started to go wrong again. I started to get tunnel vision; It felt like I was pulling back from myself, receding from my eyes. The scene through my eyes became two circles in a field of black, I felt as if I was looking out through them from a point several feet behind myself. I could see my hands sliding items over the scanner and tapping codes into the keypad but they seemed to be doing it on their own, I couldn’t feel them and they seemed to be moving without any input from me. I could hear the conversations between myself and the customers, but I was just an observer, the voices came as if through cheap speakers from a long ways off. The realization started to come to me that something was seriously wrong. It felt as if the world existed in a very separate place from where I was, oddly this realization didn’t cause me concern, I was more worried about making a mistake cashiering. After helping five or six customers I knew I could never make it for another seven hours, I had to get things checked out.  I told my supervisor that I couldn’t go on any longer. He offered to drive me to my doctor, but after sitting for a few minutes I felt okay and insisted on driving myself. I got to my doctors office which was only about a mile from work. Once I told my doctor the symptoms I’d been having she gave me an ECG. As soon as she saw the printout she said that I needed to get to the ER immediately and offered to call me an ambulance. But being the idiot that I can sometimes be, I told her that I felt fine when I was sitting, and insisted on driving myself. So ECG printout in hand I drove off to the hospital.
I walked into the ER and handed them my printout and before I had a chance to sit down, or give them my name, or even give them my insurance information, I had someone next to me with a wheelchair. I was whisked back and into a bed while people were scrambling around sticking electrodes all over me, including a large patch, chest and back, defibrillators so they didn’t have to look for a crash cart if I flat-lined. Soon I had a group of doctors huddled around my heart monitor screen; there was much discussion amongst them with occasional puzzled outbursts. There was a constant parade of doctors through my room; it seemed as if everyone that worked at the hospital wanted to see what was going on with my monitor. I kept getting asked how I felt by doctors with confused looks on their faces, as I was laying down, I actually didn’t feel that bad. I found out later that my monitor was actually showing several different things. Without getting into too technical of an explanation, I was experiencing atrial fibrillation, and ventricular tachycardia, compounded by Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome which is a congenital condition whereby you have an extra nerve in you heart which sets up a kind of feedback loop allowing your heart to race virtually out of control. I found out later that my heart rate would get up to between 400 and 500 beats per minute, I would go into cardiac arrest, and then I would suddenly regain normal sinus rhythm. It kept doing this repeatedly and I was conscious the whole time. My cardiologist said later that he had never talked to someone with an ECG like mine before, because he had never seen someone conscious, if I hadn’t been awake and talking to them the whole time, there were several points where they would have zapped me with the defibrillator. He also told me that he had never seen anyone with the combination of things wrong with their heart that I had outside of an autopsy. To make a long story short, they managed to get things under control with the right combinations of drugs. I spent the next ten days in the hospital; I had two heart catheterizations, where they fish wires up into your heart through your femoral arteries. One was to remove the Wolff-Parkinson-White nerve; the other was to do an angiogram to check how clear my coronary arteries were. I’ve since had two more catheterizations to get rid of the causes of the atrial fibrillation.

  To say that this was all a life changing experience would be kind of an understatement. The angiogram showed that only one of my coronary arteries had significant blockage. For my age and family history and my heavily carnivorous life style, I figured this wasn’t too bad, but it was time to make some changes. By the time I got out of the hospital gone were nicotine and caffeine from my life. I then started systematically changing my diet, slowly eliminating sugar and refined wheat, then meat, dairy products and oils. I started adding more vegetables, whole grains and fruit. Now one year later, I eat an almost completely vegan diet, I’m down under 170 pounds and my type 2 diabetes is gone. I’ve gone from extremely high cholesterol (over 300 total cholesterol) to readings that according to everything I’ve researched make me virtually heart attack proof (116 total, LDL 54). I used to take my lunch at work in my car because the break room was upstairs and it was too much for me to walk up them every day, now I spend at least 45 minutes on a Stairmaster every day and hike 12-20 miles at least once a week. There have been other changes. A year ago my sister and I had been estranged for a couple of years, many reasons, we both had things going on in our lives that caused us to lose touch and lose our way. She came to see me in the hospital and in the year since we have rebuilt our relationship and now we probably are closer than we have ever been. Most important is the change in perspective that I have gained. I have done a lot of thinking in the past year, about where I have been and where I am going. I am going to savor and make the most of my new lease on life. The future is coming and I’m liking the look of it!

Jim Stack- September 25, 2010

Eating For Life

My mid-life crisis was physical rather that psychological. Being physical, survival was never a foregone conclusion; actually the odds were heavily stacked against me being alive today. Having survived and realizing just how long the odds were, it’s hard for me not to look around and say ”Okay, I’ve got a second life, now what do I do with it?” Looking back over my life, this is only the latest time that I’ve cheated death, if I was a cat, I’d be on my second set of nine lives at least. Several people have pointed out that maybe the fact I’m still around means I’m supposed to do something with my life. I also see, on a daily basis, people that tell me that what I have done with my life has inspired them. Many of them have been so inspired that they have made changes to their own life, some with already fantastic results themselves. Between the feeling that I need to really do something with my life, and people telling me that I could help a lot of people by sharing my story with them, my path has started to become defined for me. Working for Whole Foods, a company that truly cares about the health of it’s employees and offers incentives and many tools to help them improve their health, I began to think that maybe I can find a way to begin to share my story through my work. Towards that end I’ve talked to and sent my story to someone in Regional leadership and offered to share it with as many team members as possible, so far I have gotten positive feedback and I’m cautiously optimistic. My intent is not to tell people how to take control of their health and weight, there is much good information out there already.  I can tell people how I have done it and what worked for me, but everyone is different and part of taking control is finding what works for you. My intent is to prove by example that it can be done, that even at 50 years old it is possible to come back from the brink of death and get yourself in the best shape of your life. Truly, if I can do it, anyone can. As part of my effort this is going to be the first post in a tandem facebook group and blog that I am starting. I want this to be a place where I can share my story and where others can share their stories, kind of an online support group for people who have made the decision to journey forward into lives of healthy eating.  My intention is to keep all posts about the connection between nutrition and health, be it weight loss, cancer, mental health or just the general feeling of wellbeing that comes from properly feeding our bodies. Therefore if you have comments about the politics of food, the immorality of using other animal for food or the evils of Monsanto, etc, I would ask that you take them elsewhere, there are already many forums out there dealing with these issues. So thanks for joining me, here we go…

Eating For Life

Eating for life can mean many things, in my case even more so. Foremost is the fact that eating consciously has saved my life. If I had not changed the way that I eat and the way that I look at food I am sure that I would not be here today. A 2007 came to an end I was tipping the scales at over 325 lbs. I’m not sure how far past I went because that’s where my numbers on my scale stopped. I had never had very good eating habits. I grew up in the Iowa in the ‘60s and ‘70s and every meal revolved around meat, steaks, pork chops, pot roast, beef stew, bacon and sausage for breakfast.  The only times we had meals that meat wasn’t the main course was Fridays (we were good Catholics and meat wasn’t allowed on Friday) then we usually had pancakes or grilled cheese sandwiches accompanied by tomato soup with plenty of American Cheese melted into it, my mom didn’t like fish. Other than mashed or fried potatoes the only vegetables we had were frozen or came from a can, then they were boiled into a soggy green mass which was then covered with melted cheese to make palatable. I completely refused to eat them and didn’t eat my first vegetable until I was in the Marine Corps. When we had bacon on the weekends the greese would be poured into a large jar on the stove and this was used to fry everything else throughout the week. This diet took it’s toll on my family, when I was 8 my father died at 38 and two grandparents died in their mid 60s, all from heart attacks. For most of my early life I remained lean, as a youngster we didn’t have video games and all our playing was outdoors and very active. This was followed by 4 years in the Marines and then a career in construction. Between a young metabolism and active lifestyle I remained outwardly fit into my 30s, however there were signs that I should have been more concerned about, my blood pressure and cholesterol levels had started to creep up. Truthfully I never worried too much about my health because with my family history I had developed a fatalistic viewpoint, why bother to take care of yourself if you’re not going to live that long anyway. Besides, I could just take a pill every day, problem solved.  As I moved through my 30s, I was more and more running larger jobs so I started spending larger parts of my day on the phone talking to owners, architects and sub-contractors. But I continued to eat like I did when I spent the day scrambling around hauling lumber and framing, this was when my weight steadily started increasing. The health problems started to multiply also. I developed gastro-esophageal reflux disease (GERD), I added Prilosec to my daily regime, another pill, another problem solved. I did end up with severe stomach problems at one point. I had all the GI tests done, CAT scans, cameras shoved in bath ends, all the fun things associated with getting older. The results were not encouraging, as a result of the GERD I had developed Barrett's esophagus, a pre-cancerous condition involving changes to the cells lining of the bottom of the esophagus due to contact with stomach acid. They also found that I had diverticulitis and colon polyps. I wasn’t too concerned though because I still was convinced that a heart attack would take me out long before I had to worry about cancer. It was soon after this that I started experiencing transient ischemic attacks, otherwise known as TIA or mini-strokes. My countdown clock was definitely starting to tick faster.

As 2007 turned to 2008 it was becoming clear that I could no longer continue in construction. The demands of the job combined with the hours spent sitting in the car were physically becoming too much for me.  The TIAs were coming more frequently, sometimes 2 or 3 a week, I would be driving or talking to a customer when I would lose control of the left side of my body and my left eye would take off on its own, rolling around aimlessly, at these times it was very hard to function at all much less focus. In January of 2008 I walked away from construction for good.  I had no idea what I was going to do and entertained many different ideas.  In 2001 and 2002 I worked for a time in a grocery store and had really loved the experience, so I put in applications at every company that had a store in the area. At this time I took the first small steps towards improving my health.  Not being on the road every day, I cut out fast foods and sodas, the weight slowly started coming down from my peak.  In April of 2008 I got a call from Whole Foods to interview, I got the job, I wasn’t aware of if, but my life had just been saved.  Even though I had probably lost at least 40 lbs from my top weight, I was still huge and still had the health problems. My cholesterol was well over 200 and I had added Type II diabetes to my list of problems, no big deal, just take another pill. At this point I’m going to change subjects as I have already written an account of what happened with my health from here on, it will be my second post, titled “Happy Re-Birthday to Me”

I want to get back to the topic of Eating For Life, eating properly enhances our everyday life. One huge difference I have noted is my mood. I haven’t been depressed at all since I have changed my eating habits; I think that this is a huge point. Like many people I had a tendency to eat when depressed. But the foods I was eating were making me depressed, so I ate more because I was depressed, which made me fat, which made me depressed, which made me eat more, which made me depressed….and so on. When you combine this with the similar yo-yo effect that eating refined carbohydrates have by stimulating your body to release insulin, which signals your brain that you’re hungry, which causes you to eat more… It’s no wonder that the more weight you gain, the harder it is to lose it. But it can be done, and the same systems work in reverse.  When you’re eating properly, you begin to feel better, as you realize the connection between feeling better and eating well, this reinforces and encourages you to continue to eat well. As your body becomes properly fueled and you lose weight you gain energy. I went from sleeping 10 hours a night and feeling always tired to sleeping 5-6 hours a night and having all sorts of extra energy. When I started at Whole Foods I took my breaks and lunch in my car because our break room was on the second floor and it too hard to walk up the steps. Now I spend at least an hour a day on a stairmaster because I can and it feels good. I also hike 10-15 miles at least once a week and have gone as far as 25 miles. All kinds of people will tell you that the key to weight loss is exercise.  I think these are mostly people that do not want to change their eating habits. For people that have become as morbidly obese as I was and have a range of health problems, exercise is out of the question.  If I had tried to lose the weight by exercise alone, the exercise would have killed me.  I think that the key is overwhelmingly nutrition. Anyone, no matte what their size and physical condition can change the way they eat, as you lose the weight and your health problems begin to subside, you find that you have the urge to become more active, as you become more active you begin to feel even better which makes you want to become even more active.  So I think the key here is changing negative feedback loops that reinforce unhealthy eating and behaviors, into positive feedback loops that reinforce positive nutrition and behaviors.  I’ve found that once you pass a certain point, any desire to go back to your old lifestyle completely disappears.

Lastly Eating For Life means to me finding a way that you will eat for the rest of your life. Anyone who has struggled with weight issues has probably tried the latest diet, lost a bunch of weight, and the had it all return and then some, when they have returned to their old eating patterns.  If eating a certain way made you fat once, it will again. Only an irreversible lifestyle change will truly transform your health for the rest of your life. This is something that is not easy, but it is something that I’m hoping to make easier by us all doing it together, If I can do it, anyone can.