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Whole Foods for Health and Weight Loss Make All the Difference

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Kathy’s Weight Loss Success Can Be Yours Too

At age 65, Kathy Keller is more active than many people half her age. Although recently retired, she rarely takes time to pause. Her pursuits include chasing after her energetic 3 year old granddaughter, overseeing a major remodeling project, frequent travel, and almost daily volunteer commitments.

Kathy describes the typical foods she grew up with as “the standard American diet of the Midwest.” Her childhood staples included white bread, whole milk, meat, fried chicken, eggs, Velveeta, canned fish, ice cream, and pies. She also developed a taste for some

Kathy is an inspiration for the power of commitment

healthy foods, though, in peanut butter, home grown vegetables, and salad.

In the late 1980s, Kathy’s teenage son became vegetarian, and she decided that was the food path for her to follow as well. Six years ago, she discovered macrobiotics and became “more rigorous” about a whole foods diet based on organic, locally grown food and including miso, umeboshi plums, and sea vegetables. Here, in Kathy’s words, is how lifestyle choices impacted her health and weight.

“My health has been generally good since becoming vegetarian 22 years ago. However, having a sedentary/high stress lifestyle while I worked (retired 2007), over-indulging my sweet tooth, continuing to eat fish and dairy foods, not getting enough exercise, and aging all contributed to a 30 to 35 pound weight gain over the last five years. The Perfect Formula Diet has been instrumental in reversing this negative trend. I lost 10 pounds in my first three weeks of following this diet scrupulously… With The Perfect Formula Diet, I’ve lost weight that I needed to lose; I enjoy what I eat and am more satisfied after eating; I no longer get ravenously hungry between meals; I take pleasure in cooking for myself and others; and I feel good about the food choices that I make.”

Commitment has been absolutely critical to Kathy’s success. She makes sure she always has whole plant foods available and charts her success to maintain her resolve.

Kathy’s caring for others shows up in her food choices as much as in her service in a soup kitchen for the homeless. “Our small planet is burdened in so many ways: lower yield per acre than is optimal to feed an ever-growing population; environmental damage from (more…)

Tags: getting healthy, Janice Stanger, Kathy Keller, lose weight, making a difference now, Plant-based nutrition, process of change, weight loss, whole foods
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Commitment Is the Engine of Weight Loss

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Easy Tips to Strengthen Your Commitment to a Whole Foods Diet

A whole foods diet is the vehicle that will deliver permanent, hunger-free weight loss. Commitment is the engine that makes this vehicle move. Knowledge of the weight and health benefits of unprocessed plant foods will make you comfortable with this top-of-the line diet. But facts alone are static and are not likely to get you to your goals.

Commitment is a drive that you consciously build. At first, this can require much effort. Later, commitment becomes more of a habit and worldview, reinforcing itself every time you make a positive choice.

Willpower is different, and necessarily short term. When you rely on willpower, you force yourself to do something you really don’t want to do. For example, if you don’t like your job, it takes enormous willpower to show up every day. Taking the unwanted, even

Commitment makes choosing whole foods this easy and fun

dreaded, action becomes harder each time you do it.

In contrast, commitment becomes easier over time. Eventually your choices are as effortless as floating in a refreshing pool on a hot summer day.

Commitment will keep you consistently on track to take actions you desire, but which may be drowned out by other choices if you don’t stay focused. Consider moving toward a whole foods diet as one example. You actually want to eat healthy food and learn to build your taste for crunchy vegetables, sweet fruits, and whole grain breads. To get there, you need to break old habits, overcome lazy inertia, and retrain your appetite. So commitment moves you from longing to success.

Many strategies enhance the dedication that real commitment requires. One of the most effective methods is to focus on a cause outside your own self-centered concerns. The power of caring is enormous. If weight loss is your goal and a whole foods diet is your method, choose the cause that has the most emotional impact to keep you on track. You can focus on slowing climate change through a sustainable diet, ending animal suffering, or feeding hungry people with grain otherwise destined to become animal feed.

The more methods you use to foster commitment, the sooner and more completely you will succeed. Visualization is a readily (more…)

Tags: getting healthy, global warming, greenhouse gases, Janice Stanger, lose weight, perfect body, Plant-based nutrition, process of change, visualization, weight loss, whole foods
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My Best Decade Ever: Life with Meaning

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

A Ten-Year Adventure in Plant-Based Eating

I feel younger, healthier, and more vigorous now, when the clock is within striking distance of 2010, then I did back in 1999. In that year, I was more worried about my health and weight than I was about Y2K. Aging felt like it was overpowering me. Even though I was only 47, I was tired of coping with chronic pain and fatigue, weight that had a mind of its own, and ever-tightening clothes.

In 1999 I was meat-free, but still ate eggs and dairy products. I knew the remaining animal foods were at the root of my health issues, but simply did not feel ready to give them up early in that year. Partly habit held me back, partly fear, and partly laziness. What would the “center of the meal” be without some kind of animal foods?

I remember the last time I ate eggs for breakfast. They lay in my stomach all day like a chunk of cement. Finally about 4 in the afternoon I could feel them clearing and moving on to make room for me to breathe. I decided right then to never eat chickens’ reproductive materials again.

Finally, the big breakthrough for my health came at the end of 1999. I collected enough plant-based cookbooks and recipes to know I could make

Me hiking in gorgeous Northern California this summer

satisfying food all day with many delicious alternatives. The last animal food to go for me was ice cream. I discovered soy-based frozen desserts in yummy flavors and never looked back. My prefernce quickly changed to these new frozen desserts, even if they tasted a little different at first.

Within months of going plant-based, I lost 25 pounds and have never regained them! My chronic pain episodes, sinusitis, and ear infections evaporated. Every day I felt more energetic than the last. How unexpected but how welcome.

Ever since 2000, I’ve felt like I’m aging in reverse. My body is detoxifying – this process takes years, not weeks. Toxic chemicals stored in fat are well incorporated and dissolved in the body. If you are still in the throes of an animal-based diet, you have no idea how fantastic it feels to give your body the time it needs to truly heal.

I keep setting new standards for myself in terms of health. This has been a gradual and highly fulfilling process over the last decade. Watching my two daughters also choose a plant-based diet, with vast improvements in their mood and energy, has also been deeply satisfying.

I am physically active every single day now. I’ve deleted virtually all manufactured foods from my diet, including trans fats, bottled oils, chips and any deep fried foods, white bread and bagels, and (more…)

Tags: aging in reverse, family, getting healthy, gratitude, Janice Stanger, lose weight, making a difference now, perfect body, Plant-based nutrition, process of change, reverse chronic disease, weight loss
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Global Warming Uncertainty: Here’s Help

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

Where Does the Weather End and Climate Change Begin?

Weather is simple – rain, snow, hail, sun, wind, temperature. You can look out your window and see what it is right now.

If you’ve lived in the same place for a while, you can probably guess what the weather will be like in a few hours, too. You may even be able to predict ahead a day, and be right as often as the weatherman is. Unless you live somewhere with monotonous weather, though, you will have a hard time projecting the specific temperature and rainfall next week without help from scientific measurements.

Climate, in contrast, is a billion piece jigsaw puzzle. Climate is a pattern. Unless you keep detailed records over a long period of time, you can’t really tell for sure if the climate is changing. This is because the day-to-day weather

The gathering clouds of climate change threatens life as we know it

will bounce around all over the place.

You may have a hard time seeing the overall climate picture even for your own little corner of the world. So you can understand how much more difficult it is to determine climate patterns over millions of years for the entire planet. Yet a world wide network of scientists is engaged in this urgent task.

Climate scientists are not all on one formal team. Instead, these researchers are a loosely knit and shifting network communicating by email, published journal articles, data exchange, conferences, telephone, and meetings.

As with any group of people, climate scientists will have their differences of opinion. Sometimes a few of these researchers will say or do something that they wish would never be publicly aired.

Think about any team you’re a part of, whether at work, on a sports team, in a club or neighborhood committee, at your church, or even an informal circle of friends that meets for lunch every once in a while. Really, aren’t there differences of opinion, people who are less (more…)

Tags: Climate change, environmental degradation, global warming, Janice Stanger, making a difference now, Plant-based nutrition, process of change, stolen emails
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Halloween – Fun, Sweet, and Healthy with the Power of the Surprise

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

Halloween Nostalgia – How You Can Have More Fun Than the Kids!

We adults may pretend Halloween is for the kids, but deep down there is nostalgia for the excitement of our own childhood on October 31. For me, the best part of Halloween was the anticipation. What costume would I wear? How about my friends? Would it be raining on that crucial night?

Healthy and fun Halloween

Most of all, my anticipation was all about what our neighbors were going to hand out as treats. How many houses could I go to? What goodies would layer our table when I dumped out the Halloween candy bag?

Actually eating the candy was anti-climatic. Much of our sweets collection ended up in the trash.

You can get that same anticipation now by leaving yourself open to chance, stepping out of the ordinary. The fun is in the process of change, seeking the new the same way a kid plans a cool costume for trick-or-treat.

Step into the world of whole foods, healthy eating, and permanent weight loss. Yes, you can still enjoy that sweet surprise of Halloween. Open your favorite plant-based cookbook to the dessert section, close your eyes and choose a recipe at random, cook and enjoy.

If you don’t have a suitable cookbook, online is just as good. Head over to the dessert section of Fat Free Vegan and let your mouse randomly choose the recipe that was meant for you. Halloween can get better every year if you make this your new tradition.

Intrigued? Now you can use our Whole Foods Blog Finder to target informative, fun postings on plant-based nutrition. Quick information at no cost!

Blog posting by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, the smart person’s nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.

Tags: Halloween nostalgia, healthy desserts, healthy Halloween, Janice Stanger, process of change
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Posts Tagged ‘process of change’