Health

Eating to Live Healtier – Goals

17th February
2011
written by Andrew Orr

For most of my life I have been overweight and even obese. I know I was skinny at one point back when I was like…five years old, but that's mainly from pictures, I can't actually remember being skinny. I've tried so many times to diet from doing Weight Watchers to just trying to eat with more portional control. There have definintely been some times where I succeeded for a while. For instance, one time I tried Weight Watchers and at the same time did some Urban Rebound several days per week and I easily lost 20 pounds. But it seems each time I always gain the weight back and then some. My first summer at Camp McCall without trying to eat healthy at all I lost 20 pounds just because being a First Year Guy is so intensive.

As I talked about in a previous post, I recently watched a screening of the movie Forks Over Knives, a documentary on the studies done on the negative effects of animal protein and dairy on our bodies and how it can in fact trigger cancer growth and other diseases. It spoke on the importance of eating a plant-based diet to stop and even reverse such diseases that are everywhere in America. For a while now, my mom has also been trying to teach our family about how to eat in this way, telling us about all of the stuff she has learned form Dr. Joel Fuhrman in his books, Eat To Live and Eat For Health, which also strongly focus on vegetarian lifestyles and show the scientific evidence and personal success stories to support such claims.

So all last week I've been trying my best to stick to a plant-based diet. For breakfast I have been having plain Special K with Silk soy milk. For lunch I've tried to make a salad with chopped almonds and dried cranberries and take it to work with an apple or clementines and some veggie straws with red pepper hummus (which interestingly and appropriately enough comes from the arabic word for 'chickpeas'). A few times when I was too rushed in the morning to prepare lunch, I went to subway and got a veggie delight sub or salad.

While I did really awesome last week, this week has not been as great. I set myself up too do poorly because of not getting up with enough time to prepare lunch, not wanting to clean dishes and so I ran out of the tupperware that I like to use for taking salads to work, and just being tempted to go out for supper because it is much faster than trying to come up with a plan for making something at home after a long day of work.

My goal is try again and hopefully get a little better at it, develop a plan with some recipes to try instead of just winging it like I have been. On the one hand I get depressed thinking about lunch now, I don't really look forward to eating leaves for lunch, but I have noticed that afterwards I do feel a lot better. I do feel full afterwards but it seems like it does go away a lot faster, I get hungry sooner. I will continue to write about my progress, struggles, and hopefully successes here.

I might try some of these recipes from the first link below. They are some "Vegan Dishes" from Weight Watchers, though I think they kind of stretch the definition of vegan since a few of these have some cheese in them, but the way I see it, they are probably a lot healthier than I have previously been eating, so it's still a heathful direction for me. Besides just eating healthier I'd like to lose about 100 pounds, that'd be great!
 

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Health

Forks Over Knives

7th February
2011
written by Andrew Orr

This past Saturday April and I went with my parents, sister & her boyfriend, and my mom’s siblings to a screening of the upcoming movie Forks Over Knives that was hosted at the Sharon Seventh Day Adventist church in Charlotte, NC. The only thing I can guess as to the meaning of the title is that we should look to nutrition to cure our diseases, instead of living a life that puts us at risk of needing surgery to save it.

The movie Forks Over Knives “examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods.”

It followed the journeys and research studies of two renowned nutritional scientists, Dr. T. Colin Campbell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, who on two totally separate paths began to come to the same conclusion that the mainstream idea in America that we need animal mean for protein is a complete mistake and that it is indeed the reason that cancers and other diseases run rampant amongst our society.

Now, I personally absolutely love eating meat! However, the movie definitely helped open my mind to the fact that it really isn’t healthy for us. It included a vast variety of research that the doctors did, such as experiments with rats in which 1 group was fed a diet that had 20% casein (a milk protein used to represent a ) and the 2nd group fed a diet of only 5% casein. After 12 weeks, the first group showed significant growth in early cancer clusters, while the 2nd group showed no signs of cancer at all.

What was even cooler was that a test was then done in which the amount of animal protein was changed every 3 weeks from 5% to 20%, back and forth. The findings were amazing….not only did the increased animal protein trigger cancer growth, but decreasing it actually reversed cancer. In other words, the American diet of tons of animal meat and processed foods triggers cancer growth, but changing our diet to one based on plants can reverse such diseases…essentially curing people of their ailments and removing the need of medications and strongly reducing the risk of needing expensive medical procedures just to save our lives.

Personally I hate the idea of giving up meat, but I know for certain that I am not in good health. I am obese, have high blood pressure, and just have aches and pains. I’ve decided to try being pretty hardcore for 6 weeks to see if I can break some of the horrible eating habits that I have and try to change my mindset from “living to eat” to “eating to live”.

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