The Diet Jouney - Part 1

It has been quite some time since my conversion to plant powered and I've been reflecting a bit on my diet and the road I've taken getting to where I am today.  I realised it is quite difficult to separate the improvements brought about from my not eating animal products from the general improvement due to my taking more care with what I put in my body.  Applying conscious thought to what I am eating is almost as important as what sort of thing I decide to eat...

Those who know me will already be aware that I went from some 99kg down to 80kg using a low-carb diet called the TNT diet from Men's Health.  For a year and a bit, I cut down my carb intake to less than 20g a day, started going to the gym to do resistance training and a bit of cardio (primarily the elliptical initially, later more running).  While the diet was massively successful for me, I wouldn't recommend this diet to anyone, as I believe it isn't particularily healthy.  The near-daily fry up breakfasts of bacon, eggs, tomato, cheese (yes, melted onto the bacon) and mushrooms will probably kill you.  It will be a delicious death, granted, but possibly not worth it in the long run.

Like this, only not as healthy looking...

All that said, it was successful.  However... why did it work???

I think the success came down to three main things:

1. It broke my sugar addiction.  Since I couldn't have carbs, I finally gave up casual chocolate, muffin and chocolate-muffin consumption.  This alone probably accounted for 50% of the weight loss, due to the removal of low nutritional content, high calorie and low satiety foods from my diet.  
2. I started to learn what is in or added to food.  I found out about the evils of HFCS (high fructose corn syrup), learnt to read labels and generally become more aware of the crap I was putting in my body. Companies put a lot of stuff in food to make it taste better, make you want to eat more of it and make it cheaper to produce.  Almost none of those things are aligned with a goal of making anything healthy.  So I learnt to read labels and start being much more picky about what I bought.
3. Exercise.  Doesn't matter what sort you do, but do as much of it as time allows.  You will feel better, live longer and be able to do more in life.  As a certain mega-corp admonishes - just do it.

Each of these opened up new processes - I could eat a muffin as a special occasion (making it all the more delicious), or choose a healthier option when out shopping, or actually enjoy group physical activity without being the guy at the back gasping and wheezing - that changed my life for the better.

After I lost the weight, I dropped that diet and went back to a "balanced" diet, keeping the knowledge I'd gained and employing it in a more natural way.  I stayed off chocolate for the most part, kept exercising and always checked the labels of anything I bought. I also stopped the fry up breakfasts.  Seriously, after a year I was utterly sick of meat and cheese.

In the next post I'll go into why I think the vegan diet has been the logical progression from this and how it has taken me from somewhat healthier to truly healthy.