Lost 131 pounds in 13 months

[Adrienne]

Congratulations! Not only are you experiencing dramatic weight loss and improvements in your health, but as you said, you actually enjoy your food! This is the essence of the mcdougall diet, really. It works and people love the food so it is sustainable long term. The best of both worlds.

[Rosey]

Congrats. I love hearing about others that are succeeding with this lifestyle change.

[kirstykay]

What a beautiful story! Your hope and joy come across in your writing, and is contageous! Congratulations on your success, and I know you will continue on to be a Star McDougaller! I can't wait to hear more. Keep us posted.

[rosehebrew]

Just keep on keeping on because I want you to live!

[MixedGrains]

Heh, oddly enough, so do I.

Thanks!

[carollynne]

I Loved reading all your success story here. You are really doing it up great. Amazing that no doctors will tell you to eat a starch based diet etc, and you had to hear it from a friend, thank god for our friends!!

[healthnut13]

MixedGrains...what an incredibly inspiring story!!! I'm going to forward it to someone who was told that unless he made "radical changes" he would be dead w/in a yr! Way to go and thanks for sharing your journey w/us...I know you will meet ALL your health goals, and please include us in the celebration!

[MixedGrains]

thank god for our friends!!

Oh, yeah. This friend is a keeper -- we met on the first day of our freshman year of college, and got into an argument about politics on the shuttle bus between the airport and our dorms. A quarter-century ago...

[MixedGrains]

Well, it's been about a month since I started this topic.

The main news: I seem to have hit a bit of a plateau. My weekly weights since I posted this (at 394) have been 395, 391, 393, and 393.

I have all sorts of things I can tweak; I just haven't needed to, previously. The most obvious is exercise -- I don't do very much. There are very good excuses -- aren't there always? But still.

I haven't been having a big problem with excursions and departures from the plan; there have been a few restaurant meals where I wound up eating some greasy cooked veg, but only about three in the month, and that was also happening periodically while the weight was dropping steadily.

On the energy density front, I did grow more habitual in the consumption of plain dry-toasted corn tortillas, and in the consumption of potatoes. Should not matter ... but I really like potatoes. A lot of potatoes (albeit, with a lot of butter, back in the day) were central to my diet when I was getting fat in the first place, as an adolescent, and so they are on the very top of my "round up the usual suspects" list of problem foods.

So, there's that to work on.

In other news, I've managed to find some "before" pictures, including one a friend shot on Thanksgiving, 2010 (right about when I got off the Avandia, and showing me at what has to be close to my peak weight, though it was down a bit since the previous June.) It's just shoulders-and-above, but it captures all the puffy chins and wattles in unforgiving high-res detail. I need to get them digitized and organized, and then I'll be posting some befores and a current.

[ETeSelle]

On the energy density front, I did grow more habitual in the consumption of plain dry-toasted corn tortillas, and in the consumption of potatoes. Should not matter ... but I really like potatoes. A lot of potatoes (albeit, with a lot of butter, back in the day) were central to my diet when I was getting fat in the first place, as an adolescent, and so they are on the very top of my "round up the usual suspects" list of problem foods.

Potatoes are NOT a 'problem food'!! You should eat as many taters as you like, as long as you aren't putting anything off-plan on them.

At your weight you should be losing easily, though. If you're eating a lot of bread (tortillas, etc) THAT would be my main suspect. Maybe you could post a few days' worth of meals so we can see what else might be a problem?

[MixedGrains]

Potatoes are NOT a 'problem food'!! You should eat as many taters as you like, as long as you aren't putting anything off-plan on them.

Well, that's the doctrine, all right. But I still have to include them on my list of suspects because they're one of only two recent changes in my diet that I can identify. Scientific method, right? If you get an experimental result you didn't expect, look at the variables that changed, and try the experiment again with controlled changes to those variables until you can confirm or exclude a specific variable. (Of course with weight loss, there are so many variables, including confounding ones that are hard to notice.)

However, the tortillas are, per the doctrine, more suspect. So maybe I'll exclude them first and see what happens. Upon reflection, for much of the last month I've been eating at least three, and not infrequently, six a day.

I'll have to take notes in order to post some daily meals, my memory isn't that good. In general I have resisted keeping a food diary, but as a temporary diagnostic measure it could make sense.

Thanks for the suggestions!

[blondie]

My weight loss has slowed considerably too. I only lost 4 lbs. in September, and had a plateau for several weeks in August. I have been following the regular McDougall plan and for me it's looking like maybe I need to soon commit to MWL to continue to see good results. I would also suspect the tortillas -- I've had my best losses on the weeks when I've eaten lots of taters.
I ordered a cheap used copy of MWL from Amazon, to be delivered Monday.

[ArchiesBoy]

Wow! Heartiest congrats on the weight loss! You inspire me, and show me that McD works! I have about 100 pounds to lose, and you convince me that the McD approach will let me do that. For the first time in my dieting life, it appears that I have found something that will really work for me. You're a champ!

As for your suspicions about potatoes, see Mary McDougall's mini-diet:

http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2006nl/june/marys.htm
and
http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2006nl/july/marys2.htm

ArchiesBoy

[MixedGrains]

Hey, glad my example is proving interesting/useful! Thanks for the kind words.

Thanks for the links, too. Although I'd seen 'em before, it was good to review, and somewhat reassuring. But sometimes there's a tendency on this forum (which I imagine the McDougalls themselves would not encourage) to assume that what works for most people will work for everybody. That's a good rule of thumb and it's always the way to bet, but it's capable of failing in particular cases. Thus, although it's reassuring to know that the smart money is on "don't worry about potatoes", I still feel I should retain them on my "eat with care" list until I've got more trial-and-error evidence that they aren't getting in the way of my goals. Even knowing what we know about them, it's hard to shake the emotional power of the post hoc ergo propter hcc fallacy, which is gripping me at the moment due to "eating a lot more potatoes" being one of only two changes I can identify in my diet during the month my weight loss stalled.

For this week, my goal is to cut out or radically cut back on the corn tortillas -- the more likely culprit. If that's not shifting me off my plateau in a week or two, next on the chopping block is the whole wheat pasta. I'm in no hurry here, and these are not difficult experiments ... I've got lots of other things I like to eat. The same will be true if/when I decide to see whether there's any merit to my individualized and particular suspicion of potatoes as they may or may not affect me.

[ArchiesBoy]

...although it's reassuring to know that the smart money is on "don't worry about potatoes", I still feel I should retain them on my "eat with care" list until I've got more trial-and-error evidence that they aren't getting in the way of my goals...they may or may not affect me.

Absolutely, you're absolutely right! How anything affects you, never mind anyone else, is always what counts!

ArchiesBoy