What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

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What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby MixedGrains » Thu May 23, 2013 2:00 pm

It's possible to blather at length, and I've proved it here. So let me start this thread with a raw numbers post. For background, I'm diabetic, obese, hypertensive, and have some cardiac valve disease. I've been eating plant foods exclusively (with the usual challenges and setbacks of course) since March 19, 2011. A lot more detail about that is in the linked thread for those who are curious, including meds info, which has changed a lot for the better over the period.

A1c -- measure of blood sugar control
Nov-16-05: 7.1
Nov-28-06: 7.9
Mar-28-07: 7.6
Dec-18-07: 6.1
Mar-05-08: 6.2
Jan-08-09: 6.7
Oct-26-09: 5.9
Mar-03-11: 6.0
Mar-19-11: ---- started eating plant foods
Aug-30-11: 5.5
Oct-20-11: 5.4
Dec-28-11: 5.3
Apr-17-12: 5.2
Aug-20-12: 5.2
Nov-26-12: 5.2
May-21-13: 5.0

Total Cholesterol:
Nov-23-05: 245
Oct-26-09: 246
Mar-19-11: ---- started eating plant foods
Aug-30-11: 142
Oct-20-11: 152
Dec-28-11: 133
Apr-17-12: 126
Aug-20-12: 195
Nov-26-12: 161
May-21-13: 158

HDL Cholesterol (the good stuff)
Nov-23-05: 23
Oct-26-09: 25
Mar-19-11: ---- started eating plant foods
Aug-30-11: 25
Oct-20-11: <15
Dec-28-11: 27
Apr-17-12: 29
Aug-20-12: 31
Nov-26-12: 26
May-21-13: 34


LDL Cholesterol (the bad stuff)
Nov-23-05: 188
Oct-26-09: 168
Mar-19-11: ---- started eating plant foods
Aug-30-11: 75!
Oct-20-11: not calculable due to HDL non-detect
Dec-28-11: 69
Apr-17-12: 71
Aug-20-12: 130
Nov-26-12: 83
May-21-13: 90

Triglycerides:
Nov-23-05: 169
Oct-26-09: 263
Mar-19-11: ---- started eating plant foods
Aug-30-11: 211
Oct-20-11: 200
Dec-28-11: 185
Apr-17-12: 130
Aug-20-12: 169
Nov-26-12: 259
May-21-13: 170

Weight:
Nov-23-05: 450
June 2010: 575-600? (peak weight, est)
Dec-25-10: 518
Mar-18-11: 482
Mar-19-11: ---- started eating plant foods
Jun-17-11: 441
Sep-16-11: 395
Dec-25-11: 375
Mar-15-12: 370
Jun-22-12: 347
Sep-21-12: 362
Dec-14-12: 360
Mar-29-13: 379
May-23:13: 376

I'm not going to write a long essay about these numbers. To me they demonstrate the benefits of plant-based eating ranging from spectacular (blood sugar control) to pretty awesome (blood lipids) to fairly damned good (initial weight loss plus partial maintenance).

For those wondering, my compliance in terms of avoidance of animal products has been very strong, except for some dairy creeping in during part of 2012 (and you can sorta see it in the lipids numbers). I'm currently eating very cleanly and my level of contentment with my food is high. The stall and partial giveback on the weight loss I'm attributing to a variety of factors, including my ongoing problems with volume eating, some laxity (currently suppressed again) I was allowing myself about refined grains and oil contamination in public settings, and an unholy combination of stressful life and too much alcohol consumption. (Fixing those are works in progress.)

It's not a perfect picture by far, and the last year's been rough in all kinds of ways. But I've been amazed by how comfortable and easy it's been to stick with the plant foods, even when other factors have caused me to eat too much of them, exercise too little, drink too much whisky, and generally stumble through life. And the measures of well-being that the plant foods way of eating have enabled for me remain quite dramatic: much better mobility due to reduced weight, radically reduced quantity and expense of medications, visibly improved circulation in my legs, ability to walk much further and spend much more time on my feet, improved digestion, a more justifiable optimism about my cardiac issues.... I could go on, but that's enough to be getting started with.
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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby MixedGrains » Thu May 23, 2013 3:07 pm

My doctor is a funny man. He tries really hard, but he practices in a poor rural area that has really an astonishing amount of diabetes. I think it demoralizes him, to be honest.

So today when he walked into my exam room, he was beaming about my lab results. My A1C was 5.0 -- the lowest it's ever been. Last time I saw him, six months ago, when it was 5.2, he cut my last diabetes med (1000mg Metformin) in half to 500mg, and told me we could eliminate it completely if I got to 5.0 and stayed there. Considering that my A1C was once almost 8 and I was taking a horse's dose of Avandia plus 2000mg Metformin at the time, this is progress. So now he wants to see me in three months so that if I'm still 5.0 or below, we can take me off my last diabetes med.

So of course I had to tease and troll him by talking about having "cured" my diabetes. He always cringes at that word (his mantra is "you'll always be a diabetic") but today he was almost ebullient at how well I'm doing at keeping it controlled. And then, in a back-handed way, he admitted why he was having such a strong emotional reaction to it. He said to me "I don't want you to think I'm telling people your name or anything, but you're the one I talk about when I'm trying to convince my patients it's possible to do this." He didn't quite say outright that I'm the only patient he's ever seen do it, but he hinted at it from a couple of different directions. Of course I think by "do this" he means "eat better and lose weight" rather than "plant foods" specifically, but oh well.

Later in this conversation I wondered aloud why more diabetes patients don't get told that diet can completely control (not just "improve some" their diabetes) and his mood soured immediately. He didn't answer me directly, and in fact I thought he wasn't going to. He turned and sat down at the computer to do my prescriptions, and then a phrase came out of his mouth in a low muttered voice. I honestly wasn't certain if he was speaking to me, or if part of his frustrated internal monologue just escaped him, unawares -- but the words he spoke were "Diabetics are so... it's terrible."

It can't be easy doing what he does.
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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby MangoMama » Thu May 23, 2013 5:48 pm

Nice going, Mixed Grains!! This is an inspiration to all of us.

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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby ~Beth~ » Fri May 24, 2013 9:10 am

How wonderful
You are being consistent, even with the slipups we all seem to struggle with, and it is showing in your numbers
Keep up the good work!
Great numbers
:-D
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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby JulieS » Fri May 24, 2013 12:13 pm

Great job! I'm sorry but doctors like that make me angry!
LOST 55 POUNDS! From pant size 14 to size 4, BMI:21
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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby MixedGrains » Fri May 24, 2013 4:03 pm

He's a good guy, JulieS. But like all of us, he's constrained by imperfect knowledge, and he's dealing with the special kind of hell that is an endless stream of poorly-educated working-class or impoverished patients with diabetes who mostly just expect to be cured effortlessly with pills. These are the sort of people who smoke while on oxygen, or go wheeling their diabetic double-amputee-butts up to the drive-in in their Scooter Store Medicaid-paid scooters to buy 60-oz milkshakes at half price during happy hour.

He's no Dr. McDougall, but he's working hard in a low-status corner of his profession and suffering (I'm sure) an enormous amount of frustration because his patients mostly just get sicker until they die. He doesn't make me angry at all; I've got a ton of empathy for him.
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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby liam13 » Fri May 24, 2013 6:13 pm

Can imagine that MD is struggling against the tide. Great work though. Hope you inspire a few of the other local folks to make some needed changes. Liam
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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby Melinda » Fri May 24, 2013 7:16 pm

Congratulations MixedGrains! You must be feeling so much better. I do feel sorry for a lot of these doctors - so many people just seem to want a pill. I read recently that doctors are often frustrated here in Canada because people come into their office and just request a prescription.
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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby frozenveg » Sat May 25, 2013 7:02 am

Mixed Grains, it is great to see you back communicating with us again. I am rooting for you! And I have some sympathy for your doctor, although in my experience, it has often been the doctors who want to give the pill or potion, mostly to get you to shut up and get out of their office. My doctor's very happy about my weight loss, too, but has absolutely no interest in how I did it. Even though I told her, I will bet you that she would tell people that I just "ate sensibly" and exercised. It's not easy to get the starch-based idea out there.
5'3", 74 YO. Started Jan. 11, 2010
Starting weight: 222.6
Current weight: 148.2.0


Success Story:
https://www.drmcdougall.com/articles/st ... -rockwell/
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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby Caroveggie » Sat May 25, 2013 12:54 pm

Congratulations. I feel for your doctor also. As you said, we all have imperfect knowledge. I'll never know why I attached myself so well to this website and the knowledge in it when I did. I do remember at the very first feeling it was too extreme. I had to come back to it and do a lot of learning. I think it's truly a paradigm shift that people have to get to change from thinking meat, dairy, and even oils are healthy to the opposite. So many people are afraid of starches and think they are the culprit. Starches and sugar. So I agree your doctor would have a tough job even if he was completely on board with a starch based solution.
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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby MixedGrains » Tue Jun 04, 2013 4:45 pm

Norm, I've been impressed by your white-knuckling ability ever since you first reported it. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have any (yet). Every attempt I've ever made to just ignore my eating compulsions has failed abjectly. I do notice that my "eating frenzies" don't get triggered so often when eating the "right foods" but when they do, I still can't seem to beat them off. Obviously I do a lot less damage to myself when I eat two turnips and a zucchini and a red bell pepper and a couple of small apples and a handful of Roma tomatoes and... you get the idea. It beats the hell out of my old bad habits (cubed cheese and lunch meats and greasy crackers and nuts) but it's still not right for ongoing weight loss. It's a bigger problem when I have pots of tasty cooked legumes or grains in the fridge, so I am trying to do less of that and more "one-meal" cooking -- so that when the frenzy hits, I can't just spoon up "Dinner #2" with 30 seconds of effort.

Like I said, a work in progress. If I could just make myself *stop* by force of will, I don't think I'd have ever rocketed upwards past 500 pounds in the first place. That said, I've learned a lot of new tricks since going plant-based (eating and enjoying all kinds of stuff that I previously despised) so maybe the next effort (or the one after that) will succeed where all previous have failed. Your recent pictures next to your old ones are very inspiring.
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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby theresaann » Wed Jun 19, 2013 11:17 am

Chef AJ posted this website on another thread, about how to deal with emotional eating (aka food addiction). She said she woudn't have been able to stick to the low fat plant based diet Dr. Lisle referred her to and experienced her recent, life changing weight loss if she hadn't found this program. I signed up immediately and downloaded the ebook and ALREADY (in 2 days) its helping me immensely. Sure beats white knuckling it!

shrinkyourself.com
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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby CHEF AJ » Fri Jun 28, 2013 10:39 pm

So glad you found it helpful. I keep the 3 things he says in the program on a large sign on my frig. Heard him lecture in person twice, great guy! I'm doing Julie Simon's program now. www.overeatingrecovery.com. She wrote "The Emotional Eater's Repair Manual".

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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby MixedGrains » Thu Aug 29, 2013 3:27 pm

Three months ago in this thread, I posted this:
MixedGrains wrote:So today when my doctor walked into my exam room, he was beaming about my lab results. My A1C was 5.0 -- the lowest it's ever been. Last time I saw him, six months ago, when it was 5.2, he cut my last diabetes med (1000mg Metformin) in half to 500mg, and told me we could eliminate it completely if I got to 5.0 and stayed there. Considering that my A1C was once almost 8 and I was taking a horse's dose of Avandia plus 2000mg Metformin at the time, this is progress. So now he wants to see me in three months so that if I'm still 5.0 or below, we can take me off my last diabetes med.

So: last week I went in for more labs, and saw my doctor today. He walked in to the exam room with a harried look, and didn't have my labs in hand. When he pulled them up on his terminal, sure enough, I still had a 5.0 A1c.

Him: "We might need to cut your meds again."
Me: "If you cut 'em too many more times, they're going to be homeopathic."
Him, laughing: "What are you on, 1000mg tablets of the Metformin?
Me: "500mg tablets."
Him: "Twice a day?"
Me: "Nope, just once."
Him, after a pause: "Well, then, just... QUIT!"
Me: "That's where I was going with this conversation..."

So it's official. I suppose you could say I'm in medical limbo -- a diabetic with no symptoms and no diabetic drugs. I might as well be a purple unicorn; it's clear my doctor has never seen anybody in this status. He keeps telling me "you're my best diabetic patient ... nobody else has done as well as you with this disease." When I asked if he'd ever even heard of another diabetic getting their A1c this low and getting off all diabetic meds, all he'd say was "It's rare. Very rare."

He wants to check my A1c in two months -- I don't think he's got a lot of faith in my little miracle -- but I'm good with that. My own prediction is that my A1c won't have budged.

Plant foods continue to be very very good to me. I haven't lost any more weight since my last update (I'm still fluctuating in a band between 370 and 390) but the reasons are no mystery; I just haven't found the personal reserves of will and energy to solve the relevant problems. I eat ridiculously healthy food, just too much of it. And I still drink booze.

I did visit my cardiologist about six weeks ago, for the first time in almost two years. I have some mild-to-moderate valve disease and he'd like to look at it every six months, but I can't afford that. He wanted my heart rate a bit lower and upped my tiny dose of beta blockers, but he says that -- according to the cardiac ultrasound -- my valve disease has not progressed at all. Obviously I was pretty happy with that news too.

Near the end of my visit today, in response to another "I wish all my patients would do as well as you" type of remark from my doctor, I sort of half-in-jest growled at him "Tell them to eat more plants. No, tell them to eat nothing but plants..." That made him look kinda sour, and he changed the subject. I'm not sure how to parse that. My gut tells me he doesn't really believe my explanation for my success, but in that case, I don't know what he does attribute it to. My other theory is that he just can't imagine any useful way to try to sell my explanation to his other patients.
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Re: What 26 Months Of Plant Foods Have Done For Me (So Far)

Postby CHEF AJ » Thu Aug 29, 2013 4:00 pm

theresaann wrote:Chef AJ posted this website on another thread, about how to deal with emotional eating (aka food addiction). She said she woudn't have been able to stick to the low fat plant based diet Dr. Lisle referred her to and experienced her recent, life changing weight loss if she hadn't found this program. I signed up immediately and downloaded the ebook and ALREADY (in 2 days) its helping me immensely. Sure beats white knuckling it!

shrinkyourself.com


True North really helped me go into recovery.

http://www.lanimuelrath.com/diet-nutrit ... til-chili/
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