June 9, 2011
To be honest, there isn't much middle left to my age. On the verge of achieving some seniority, I'm finding both pleasant surprises and creeping horrors about getting older. It's my hope that I can use this blog to keep track of some of the changes and how I'm learning to embrace them while still being an active participant in my own life.
Currently, I'm on a quest for a diet I can live with. I cringe when I hear people extol a diet by claiming it isn't one. "This is not a diet, it's a way of life." Or a lifestyle, or a mindset, or whatever buzz word they think takes the sting out of learning to make choices about food that are sometimes contrary to our cravings. Americans have come to hate the word diet for what it connotes, not what it actually means. I don't share this aversion to the word diet. Your diet is simply whatever you usually eat, and I'm trying, as I've tried most of my life, to learn to make my diet a matter of good decisions rather than responses to impulse.
After lunch with a much younger friend last December, I decided to investigate veganism as a possible life choice. While a vegetarian diet is known to have many benefits, especially for those of us in our heart-attack years, veganism is also gaining popularity. Ultimately, my decision to become vegan (which I have to confess has been anything but perfect) was as much for health reasons as it was my humble way of sticking it to the factory farming industry and its overlords McD's and KFC. Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals was the catalyst for my ethical decision, and Austin firefighter Rip Esselstyn's The Engine 2 Diet gave me the information about health that swayed my decision.
But, of course, no matter how much I wish I could find the book that ends all my problems and answers all life's questions for me, that hasn't been the end of it. I've lost about 30 pounds in the last 6 months, but still find weight loss to be a demoralizing challenge. At about 5'7.5" and 211.5 pounds (according to the weird electronic scale at Gold's Gym), I'm something like 62 pounds overweight. A guy with a little self control would say, "That ain't right," and just eat less, right? Not this guy. One of the big selling points for me of a diet like The Engine 2 Diet is the gold medallion with white lettering emblazened on the cover of the book that proclaims, "Eat More, Lose More." Now that's what I'm talking about! At least, until that doesn't work anymore.
Gym or no gym. Meat or no meat. If left to my own appetites, I can eat anything to excess and will. I'm especially plagued by night eating. It's not like sleep walking. I know I'm doing it. But hunger will wake me up out of a dead sleep and torture me just enough to get a binge going. Not the kind perhaps that necessarily causes me to gain weight, but the sort that will definitely prevent weight loss no matter how healthily the pantry is stocked.
So that's the current state of my dilemma. I am intrigued at the moment by the DASH diet you might have heard about in news reports recently. While Weight Watchers tops the list of effective weight loss diets in a recent U.S. News and World Report article, the DASH diet, which stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, was number one overall of the 20 researched diets. And you can get the skinny on the DASH eating plan free from your government (now isn't that refreshing?). The crazy thing is that the brochure is light on information for vegans, not giving substitution information for dairy and meat products, and the Boston University creators of the diet say that this is because the diet is a "compromise" for people who find a vegetarian diet hard to follow. The diet is laid out in the government's brochure in what looks like a damn easy way to follow with number of daily or weekly servings and portion sizes. But non-dairy substitutes for milk and cheese aren't listed. The fact that no meat substitutes are listed isn't all that big a deal since only six ounces of meat is permitted daily, but there's no info on how TVP or processed foods like tofu can be used.
I'm going to make an effort to follow the DASH plan with vegan foods and I'll report back how it's going. I'd love to hear from other recent middle-aged and older vegans on a similar quest.
