What I Learned During A One Month Radical Nutritional Overhaul

I’ve been on a radical new nutritional plan (OK, a diet) for the last 5 weeks, and wanted to report back on my thoughts and impressive progress!

While I started out as a very skinny kid, over the years I’ve slowly gained weight. I’ve never considered myself obese, but definitely a couple dozen pounds heavier than would be ideal for my height, and technically in the obese zone, according to the CDC, with a BMI in the low 30’s for much of 2013 through 2017.

As a long time runner (I’ve run 22 marathons and my running log is a bit over 20 years old and has 10,220 miles!) my approach has always been that I can eat what I want and by staying active, I’d keep my weight under control.

Slow weight gain over the years

And it has stayed ‘sort of’ under control over the years. I never really had a period of time where I had out of control weight gain. Sometimes it would be higher than I’d like and I’d cut back and lose a few pounds. But over the years my weight has slowly crept up the scale.

I’ve also been aware of my weight for many years and long ago got in the habit of weighing myself almost every day and noting it in my running log. There have been some stretches where I fell out of that habit, but for the most part, since January 2007 I’ve been recording my weight. I also have some data from the years 2001 to 2003.

Looking back on it now, I can see that my weight started going up into the unhealthy range in 2010 when I took on a big job promotion, and topped out in late 2016, while I was preparing to transition out my corporate executive job, a stressful time.

With weight gain over the years, I’ve developed a few heath concerns probably related to my weight and eating habits, including sleep apnea and mild hypertension. I also have had worsening back issues over the years including several instances of sciatica, and periodically would break out in hives for no known reason.

In the 2 years after I left my corporate job, I was able to trim my weight a bit, losing approximately 20 pounds over that time, due to a combination of eating more healthy, having more time to exercise, and generally having less stress. My bad eating habits at work (intake of massive carbs for breakfast and fast food or pizza for lunch) came to an end when my daytime meals shifted to mostly at home.

A radical new nutrition plan

With 20 pounds of weight loss over the last 2 years I have been in a much better place. My sleep apnea has improved, my running injuries have dialed back, and my back was feeling much better, although I know that had something to do with the chiropractor I’ve been seeing.

The last I had seen my weight at that new level was 6 years ago in 2013. But I felt like I was still too overweight and had room to lose more, so I decided that to start 2019 I would go on a full body cleanse.

For the next few months I will try to avoid gluten, dairy and eggs, and focus instead on eating mostly fruits and vegetables, lean meat (mostly chicken, turkey and fish), different kinds of nuts, and generally try to avoid processed foods.

I’m eating some grains like steel cut oatmeal, brown rice and buckwheat (which is technically a seed and not a grain), but trying to stay away from gluten.

It will be impossible to do this continuously, but for the first 3 – 6 months of the year, I expect to have at least 3 weeks per month where I can focus on this new way of eating, with the only thing really stopping me is occasional travel.

So how am I doing after 1 month?

After 5 weeks, I am down 18 pounds, and the weight I am at now is one I have not seen since 2002! I haven’t really taken photos of myself, so the best you can see of my progress is above, the left taken in March 2018 on the beach in Costa Rica, and the right taken last week on the beach in Costa Rica. My weight last March was about the same as it was when I started this diet, so it is a good comparison.

A lot of the weight came off in the first week, where I lost 10 pounds. After that I’ve had modest loss each week, just 1-3 pounds per week.

Last week, Caroline and I took a 1 week trip to Costa Rica where I did not restrict myself at all. I came back 3.5 pounds heavier, but that was mostly because our last day (the travel day) was a bad eating day and that extra weight was gone within a day, and I’ve already dropped another 2.5 pounds after that!

What I have learned about eating healthy

Not as expensive as I would have thought

One of my main concerns going in would be the cost of buying fruits and vegetables. We live in New York City, where prices are generally pretty high, and the local grocery store near our apartment is terrible, with poor selection of produce and high prices.

On the first day of my diet, we decided to canvas 4 different stores, a grocery store a little further away from our apartment that is big and has a much better selection that our closer one, a fruit market across the street from that grocery store, Whole Foods, which is about 20 minutes away from us, and Trader Joe’s, which is even further away at about 30 minutes.

We were immediately very impressed by the fruit market across from the grocery. It is a huge store, not only with tons of fruits and vegetables, but with reasonable prices, and with a big cheese section, which Caroline loves.

They even sell packaged ‘old’ fruit, usually containing 6-8 pieces of fruit, for only $.99, which is great for eating that day or running through a juicer. They have a great selection of meats at reasonable prices, and also impressive is that their milk is about 25% less than what we’ve been paying at the grocery store near our place.

I’m not buying organic because that does get pricey, and perhaps my cleanse isn’t perfect because I’m possible ingesting more chemicals via fruits and vegetables, but I just don’t want to pay the 2x or 3x premium on organic.

Exciting to me is now that we found a great fruit market that has everything at reasonable prices, it is much easier to buy food. We typically go once per week to stock up for the week and then I’ll make a second trip to pick up a few odds and ends I run out of.

Juicing is a lot of work

I start many days with celery juice, which essentially consists of a full bunch of celery run through the juicer. In the afternoon I try to also drink cucumber juice, which is essentially 2 large cucumbers run through the juicer. Most days I’ll do at least one of these, if not both.

A big challenge I’ve had is that juicing is a lot of work. The first couple of weeks I used a Magic Bullet my daughter had bought for me, which is a great little personal sized blender. Due to it’s small size, a lot of extra work was required to juice the quantities I needed, and I also needed to use a straining bag to squeeze the actual juice out of the pulp produced by the Magic Bullet, which was strenuous work and messy. Each juicing session took a good 30 minutes between the chopping, blending, squeezing and cleaning up.

About halfway through the month, I purchased a masticating juicer. These are the kinds of juicers that produce “cold press” juice because the juice is squeezed out. This is the alternative to the easier to use centrifugal juicers, which rely on spinning the fruits and vegetables at high speed to extract the juice, which heats the juice and causes loss of healthy enzymes.

The juicer has saved me time on the blending and squeezing compared to using the Magic Bullet, but I still have to cut the fruits and veggies, and the juicer has a lot of parts to clean. Depending on what I’m juicing, I can still expect a minimum of 20 minutes from the time I start until the time I’m done and can enjoy the juice.

It is a lot of work.

Eating right is much easier when you are working from home

Juicing and dieting is another benefit of the FIRE lifestyle! I don’t think I’d be able to make these changes if I was still working a corporate job and in an office every day.

It would be really hard to find the time to make the juices and difficult to bring my own food to work every day. It is definitely doable, but just difficult.

At home it is easy to make enough food to last for awhile and then just heat up a little bit at a time for a meal. As long as I have fruit or raw veggies around at home, it is easy to grab a healthy snack. At work, there simply isn’t enough room to carry and store so many items, especially in New York where you commute by public transportation rather than by car.

While doable with a job and going into an office, it is another obstacle and one that I don’t think I’d be able to overcome.

I am able to eat enough food so that I’m not hungry

I was expecting to be hungry all of the time, but that simply hasn’t been the case. I make sure there are always lots of fruits and raw veggies around so any time I get hungry I have a banana or an apple, or eat a bunch of carrots or celery sticks, or grapes, or peanuts, or simply drink water.

I’ve also found that if I just ignore some of the signs of hunger, it goes away. The mind is very powerful and I do believe you have to do a little bit of training of your mind so that it can understand the new way in which you are eating.

I’ve had 2 main challenges. First, I sometimes spend a half or full day in Manhattan running errands or killing time around a drop off or pickup of Caroline or my kids. If I have too much idle time away from home, I have to make sure I bring healthy snacks with me.

The second challenge has been combining the nutrition plan with my running. If I have a long run planned, or a race, then I’ve come off the diet a bit to make sure I have enough energy. I also have a supply of mini Lara Bars, which are gluten and dairy free, which also helps when I’m in a pinch or planning a run.

Changes I’ve seen

Besides visibly looking skinnier, I’ve experienced quite a few beneficial changes so far:

• Gone down in pants size and belt size – I have purchased new pants and belt at a smaller size. When I first got the belt, I bought a smaller size in anticipation of continued weight loss, and initially was squeezing to the first hole, but now I’m comfortably on the 3rd hole. There are still 4 holes left, so I think this belt size will last awhile.
• Resting heart rate the lowest it has ever been – I’ve been wearing a fitbit for awhile, and since January 2016 I’ve had a model that tracks heart rate. My average resting heart rate in January was 55, well down from the low to mid 60’s that was typical in 2016. I’ve even hit a new low of 52 a couple of recent days.
• Blood pressure now in the normal range – my blood pressure over the years has been borderline high. Not to the point where I needed medication, but something to watch. I record my blood pressure probably around once per week with an Omron device I have at home, and now it is consistently in the normal range and under 120 / 80.
• Sleep apnea significantly improved – my sleep apnea had improved a bit in the last 2 years with my initial weight loss, but in the last few weeks, with this additional weight loss, Caroline reports that I’m no longer snoring loudly at night, or not nearly as much as before, and I’m no longer using my CPAP machine or dental device. I can also tell from my nightly heart rate that I’m getting much better quality sleep.

I wonder how far I can go

I didn’t necessarily go into this with a goal in mind, other than to try it for 3 months and see how much I can lose. My initial weight loss this month is definitely greater than I expected, and while I look much better, there is still a lot of fat in my body to trim, and muscle I can build, so I’m not done yet.

Given that I have not found it terribly difficult to eat healthy, especially since I allow myself cheat days here and there, and am not restricting myself when travelling, I plan to continue for the foreseeable future.

Another 14 pounds, and I’ll be at a number that I know I have not been at since I was in college, which at this point was 25 years ago! So I guess that is my goal, and I have a few months to get there.

My BMI is still around 27, so that needs to drop to 25 to get myself into the normal range, rather than overweight. That would be another fine marker.

Realistically, it will be difficult to continue when Caroline and I start long term travel in August. But even if I revert back to old habits and start gaining weight again, I am very comfortable with the knowledge that with a month of focused nutrition, I’ll be able to find time in the future to pare back again.

As a reader of running and biking magazines, I’ve always been impressed by winter-time features of people who have lost lots of weight, and never thought I’d be one of them. I certainly won’t lose 100 pounds because I simply wasn’t that heavy to start, but given that I’ve already lost 36.6 pounds since 1/1/2017, with 18 of those pounds in the last 5 weeks. A total loss of 50 pounds from my heaviest is very much within range.

If I can get there, I’ll be very impressed with myself!

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Have you made radical nutritional changes? How did you do in your first month?