Blog in Progress – Updates Soon

This blog is a list of resources and expansions for the Lets Get Started!

First Steps

Weighing yourself: Our goal here isn’t weight loss. Our goal is changing your lifestyle to become healthy although a byproduct of that may be weight loss. But weight is one of the easy to track things you can do to see progress. Weigh yourself at the same time every day. For me it is in the morning in my PJs before my first glass of water or coffee. You can choose the frequency with which you weigh yourself, but I recommend at least weekly. When you weigh yourself every day, you will see fluctuations…a lot of fluctuations. Don’t stress! If you weigh yourself daily you get used to seeing those fluctuations and they become less important, but you may start to see helpful trends. If you weigh yourself less than once a week, it is hard to see if you are making progress.

Before and after pictures: https://theprogressapp.com/blog/before-after-photos-weight-loss/

Podcasts: https://www.pcrm.org/podcast

Whole Food Eating Basics

Whole Food Definitions

Michael Pollan is a journalist who has a passion for nutrition. He is chock full of some of my favorite sayings:

“Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants” and “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t” are two of my favorites. He gives a 7 rules for eating:

1. Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. “When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can’t pronounce, ask yourself, “What are those things doing there?” Pollan says.
2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can’t pronounce.
3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.
4. Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot. “There are exceptions — honey — but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren’t food,” Pollan says.
5. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. “Always leave the table a little hungry” Pollan says. “Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, ‘Tie off the sack before it’s full.'”
6. Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It’s a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. “Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?” Pollan asks.
7. Don’t buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.

I love the 100 Days of Real Food site. They are not plant-based, but if you are a plant predominant and not strictly plant-based, it is a great website. https://www.100daysofrealfood.com/real-food-defined-a-k-a-the-rules/