I began making dietary changes on April 17, 2008. The template for my diet has been
The Sonoma Diet. It is essentially a modified Mediterranean diet. It generally does not exclude any one group of foods, at least not permanently. The first ten days you are encouraged to avoid some foods, but after that you can even enjoy a glass of wine every day. (I usually go for 6-12 ounces of ale...) If I was to boil it down I would say that it emphasizes a balanced diet of high quality fresh, unprocessed food eaten in reasonable amounts.
My wife came upon the diet in a check-out aisle at Albertson's grocery, of all places... It was one of those little $4 booklets in a rack next to the horoscope books and tabloids. For some reason it intrigued her so she bought it. Then she bought the main book and recipe book, and we were hooked. The recipes are really very good and they were like the food we were already eating. There is also a relatively inexpensive support system available through the Web site, including being able to communicate with a registered nutritionist. If I remember correctly it costs around $4/week. We used the service for about three months.
I estimate that I now eat approximately half the amount of food that I did before I began the diet. I have no food cravings and unhealthy food has no attraction to me at all. During the recent holidays and all the parties and sweets at the hospital I ate two tiny chocolate chip cookies and one rum ball. And my wife and I made and hand-rolled over twenty batches of our "signature" rum balls... I continued to lose weight during November and December. (I should note here that in Ayurvedic medicine the late fall and winter months are notable as being very difficult times to lose weight, so it is generally not advisable to attempt to do so. While I continued to lose weight the process did slow down noticeably...)
I modified the diet a little by slightly increasing the amount of carbs even at the beginning... I'm one of those people that require sufficient carbs to stay healthy and regular. When I tried the "South Beach Diet" I developed terrible lower G.I. problems because of the lack of carbs and fiber. I stayed on the "Atkins Diet" for less than a week... You name a diet, my wife and I have tried it.
We don't eat junk food or drink soft drinks, we drink a minimal amount of alcohol and we always eat freshly-prepared meals of whole grains and organic meat, dairy and produce. (In my Younger Years I was a vegan for seven years; I was my leanest and healthiest during that time... until now.)The only concession we make regarding convenience food-wise is that we will prepare sufficient food so we can freeze the "left-overs" and eat them on the days when we cannot cook for one reason or another. Our two weak spots are that we are relatively sedentary and we love to eat.
The other major component was to get my hormones balanced using bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. A little over two years ago I developed a disabling hormonal imbalance that was an unusually severe form of what most men experience as they get older. (Developing a "gut" and finding it difficult, if not virtually impossible to get rid of is one of the symptoms of a lack of sufficient testosterone. And excess fat in a man generally leads to the production of excess estrogen, which is definitely Not A Good Thing in a male!) Until I got the hormones balanced I was unable to lose weight no matter what I tried.
If folks are interested in that part of the formula I’d be happy to post some links to various books and articles on the subject. (You can also PM me.) I have been interested in hormones for over thirty years and I have been seriously researching the subject for two years. (There may be a book in me yet!) As of this writing I have around 180 medical studies, articles and books indexed in DEVONthink. While my primary focus has become male HRT, my initial research included female HRT because it has been going on for years, while it is safe to say that male HRT is on the cutting-edge of medicine.
