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If you look at my chart below, you can see an initial drop as I got rid of all animal products and went vegan, trying to follow McDougall. Then the drop leveled off as do most weight losses as you dig deeper into your stored fat. But if you notice, around the middle of August my weight starts to plummet rapidly again. This is the point where I committed 100% to no processed foods including flours and sugars albeit minimal. Mostly this meant no more fat-free homemade hummus burritos, Uncle Sam cereal with no-fat Soy milk, glass of wine at night, the occasional whole wheat pasta, and (horror!) no more Soy Latte's from Starbucks. No flour at all. Green and yellow and starch veggies, tomatoes and whole grains (mostly oatmeal). On a side note, giving up animal products and garbage food was hard starting out and it was hard, but less so, giving up the processed flour foods.

Although I did this to lower my Triglyceride levels prior to my next bloodwork rather than weigth loss I was surprized at the rate of loss.

I present this to encourage others to go this route if looking for maximum weight loss. It really does work and I have enjoyed eating as much as I care for. Getting rid of the cravings is indeed hard, but if you stick with it, it gets easier.

Healthy eating to you all.
Brad

What a great post Brad. There have been many folks lately feeling like "its" not working, who are stalled, and having problems with "slips" here and there. Your experience, with a clear visual to look at, is encouraging that MWL really can work when followed.

Curious about how your blood work turned out. My cholesterol still hasn't dropped enough. I wasn't following MWL strictly because I wasn't really overweight to begin with and I lost another 10-11 lbs just from cutting out most processed food and added oil (I'm female, 5'7" and now 125.5) but my TC was 197 as of a couple of weeks ago (234 when checked two years ago). So I may have to cut out the avocado and olives, maybe the bit of almond milk on bran flakes. We'll see, I'm going to have it checked regularly now to get it down.

Low thyroid function can also cause elevated cholesterol. Just sayin'.

Great going, Brad.

Thanks, to_our_health, I got into it because of coronary artery disease, just dodging a stent. So I did no-oil vegan. My next bloodwork is in a week. My cholesterol went down from 180 to 140 but LDL's are still high even though I excercise. Triglycerides are the problem now (for the doctor, who btw is looking like an endangered species) which apparently is normal with starch diet initially. So, I'm looking to reduce that to just make sure. I'm not concerned about the numbers too much because of how much better I feel and I hear they don't go down till the weight is near what it should be. But I'll post the results when I get them.

Good point. Thyroid functioning was tested and found normal. I'm genetically impaired in some other way..

Sorry I don't have a link for it, but Dr. McDougall did an article on thyroid. The "normal" that your lab uses might be the higher range and you should question your doctor about it to make sure you really are not hypothyroid. If you have ANY symptoms of hypothyroidism at all and your TSH is above 2.0, you need to get more information.

Okay, now you're just showing off! Thanks for the tip and I'll do a search on it, read up, and look into it. Now..where did I put those results.....

Great post Brad!

Oh, I am SO not showing off. I had symptoms of hypothyroidism for at least 20 years and no one caught it. Including the doctor that took care of me that whole time. Obvious symptoms, and I should have known something was wrong because I'm a registered nurse. I just want to make sure anyone that might need to know this reads that bit about the thyroid stuff. It's so common but because of the lab values not being right, it's not diagnosed because doctors don't look at the patient, they look at the labs.

I'm always told mine are fine. So what are the obvious symptoms?

www.stopthethyroidmadness.com <----a wealth of information

Weight gain, tiredness, hair loss including loss of outer third or so of eyebrows, irregular menses, infertility, low body temperature, feeling cold all the time, dry eyes.

Thanks. I have a few of those symptoms. I had low thyroid many years ago and was on Armour. I felt better than I ever had in my whole life. Mainly the fatigue went away and also stopped gaining weight every time I looked at food. But then I became so hyper on the lowest dose and was taken off. I'll have a blood test in 3 weeks and see what the numbers are.

Debbie - you had all your problems with in-range numbers!? Wowza... somehow I assumed your numbers were way outside of normal. Definitely shows you need to know and trust your own body.

Brad - VERY interesting post about how tweeking the diet to get rid of the rest of the processed foods made such a difference. I've heard it before, but your chart really does make it very clear to me (I am SUCH a visual learner! LOL!)