Happy New Year! Other than recovering from last night's festivities, I haven't done a whole lot today. I mainly just wanted to get an initial weigh-in and start to plan out what it is I would be doing.
Back in 2008 when I had lost a bunch of weight, I was doing two things. First of all, I was doing some pretty strict calorie counting, keeping my daily intake between 1200 and 1500 calories. In addition, I was doing a lot of walking. By the end of that summer, I was walking up to 8 miles a day.
I wasn't really considering nutrition. As long as I could keep under my calorie counts, I didn't really care what I was eating. This time however, I'm planning on focusing on it more.
I mentioned a couple of documentaries in my last post. For what I'm trying to do, I think that Forks over Knives is the one that most closely describes what sort of diet I'm planning on following. This film basically suggests a plant-based whole foods diet, and explores the idea that "most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting animal-based and processed foods".
Now, I'm certainly not planning on becoming a vegetarian, but I think it's clear that the standard American "meat and potatoes" type of diet along with vast availability of processed convenience foods, is essentially unhealthy.
For now, there's a few different things I'm going to be trying to do:
Back in 2008 when I had lost a bunch of weight, I was doing two things. First of all, I was doing some pretty strict calorie counting, keeping my daily intake between 1200 and 1500 calories. In addition, I was doing a lot of walking. By the end of that summer, I was walking up to 8 miles a day.
I wasn't really considering nutrition. As long as I could keep under my calorie counts, I didn't really care what I was eating. This time however, I'm planning on focusing on it more.
I mentioned a couple of documentaries in my last post. For what I'm trying to do, I think that Forks over Knives is the one that most closely describes what sort of diet I'm planning on following. This film basically suggests a plant-based whole foods diet, and explores the idea that "most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting animal-based and processed foods".
Now, I'm certainly not planning on becoming a vegetarian, but I think it's clear that the standard American "meat and potatoes" type of diet along with vast availability of processed convenience foods, is essentially unhealthy.
For now, there's a few different things I'm going to be trying to do:
- Incorporate more whole, raw foods.
- Reduce consumption of food from animal sources.
- Eliminate (as much as possible) consumption of processed and fast foods.
I suppose I need to work in some sort of exercise as well. I'm not really looking forward to that, because I haven't really done any walking in a while. I know that it the past, I usually takes me a week or so to get used to the increased activity. Also, I usually don't do much in the winter, although an unusually warm and snow-free winter in Minnesota this year should make things easier.
