All of a sudden things have gotten easier.

The first three weeks of the Perfect Health Project were extremely hard. Most of the pain was emotional. It is kind of embarrassing to admit that I had such a rough time giving up certain foods. I mean… it’s food. Fuel for the body. Not exactly something worth getting all upset about. Yet changing my habits made me grouchy, depressed and angry.

But that was the first three weeks. As of two weeks ago, everything suddenly became a lot easier. I stopped craving sugar, found a rhythm in my eating habits and even started to enjoy a lot of the foods I used to turn my nose up at. Who knew steamed peas and corn mixed together could be so satisfying?

This relief could not have come at a better time as last weekend I caught a plane for Austin, Texas to attend a conference for my business. Five days of figuring out how to eat healthy while on the road and I was more than a little nervous. I thought about packing a bunch of food to have with me or hitting up a grocery store once I arrived but in the end decided against this. One of the goals of this project is to see how much of a “normal” life I can lead while living in perfect health. That means picking up food at the conference and eating out every day.

I figured out, surprisingly, that it is pretty easy. Almost every restaurant has at least one healthy option. Airport food stalls regularly carry things like fruit and Naked juices (which are amazing by the way). The conference I attended had large fruit cups available for breakfast and the Mexican restaurant across the street from the conference center had amazing spinach burritos on their lunch menu. While there were still times that I could not find something readily available to eat, finding something that fit my diet was much easier than I expected.

There is, though, a dark side to trying to eat out while cutting out 95% of what most American’s eat from your diet. You become that customer.

“I’d like the cobb salad. But I don’t want the chicken on it, I’d like grilled salmon. And I don’t want the bacon bits either, so can you just put some extra avocado on there for me? Oh yeah, and I need the vinaigrette dressing instead of the ranch and I’m going to need that on the side.”

The waitresses were loving me…

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As I’ve now finished out five weeks of the Perfect Health Project, I am also starting to see some changes in people around me.

One night in Austin after dinner, my friend sat back, looked at his empty plate that had recently held fried chicken and french fries and then looked at my plate where I was finishing up the above cobb salad, and sighed heavily. His stomach had begun to ache and he was feeling sluggish. He confessed that he wished he had gone with the salad as well as it would have made him feel much “cleaner”. And that is exactly what he did the next night at dinner.

I have also seen several people in my life start eating better. My wife has decided to cut out sugar (her kryptonite) and refined wheat from her diet. Joseph, a guy I work with, has also decided to eat more balanced with more whole foods as opposed to the processed kind he eats on a regular basis. And my kids are asking for fruits and vegetables as snacks after lunch and dinner instead of animal crackers or pretzels. It is exciting to see this little project I have taken on impacting the people around me. Hopefully I keep inspiring people to give this stuff a try!

My doctor’s visit on Wednesday lasted over an hour even though he checked me for less than ten minutes.  He was fascinated by this little project of mine.  We talked the whole time about everything surrounding my manifesto.  He gave some really good advice and also offered to help anyway he could.  Some changes he suggested include adding yoga to my routine, so I get some strength training, along with integrating fasting occasionally as well.  My doctor fasts once a week and has also done extended fasts as well, all for health reasons.  He suggested I experiment with extended fasting that lasts at least a week so I’m going to research that a little more and possibly work that into this project at some point in the future.

We also went over my blood work and there were a couple concerns.  First off, my LDL (bad) cholesterol is at 130. This is considered “borderline high” by the American Heart Association.  My doctor is not too concerned since I am only 28 years old but said we would be having a different conversation if I was in my mid-thirties or older.  He is also pretty confident that my new diet will cause it to drop significantly over the next couple of months.

The second issue with my blood work is my vitamin D levels.  Vitamin D deficiency is one of those things that doctors have just recently realized is a major problem.  According to my doctor, one in six people are vitamin D deficient.  Since it is such a new issue, doctors do not know all of the ramifications of vitamin D deficiency, but symptoms include colds and flu, periodontal disease and cavities, depression and seasonal affective disorder, osteoporosis, heart failure and cardiomyopathy, high blood pressure, lung cancer, ovarian cancer, colon Cancer, asthma, breast cancer and multiple sclerosis. The healthy range of vitamin D is between 50 and 80 ng/ml. Doctors get pretty concerned if you’re in the 20s and I’m sitting at a solid 18.3 ng/ml.

The recommended daily intake for vitamin D is 1000 IU/day.  For people like me that are deficient need to be taking a lot more.  My doctor recommends I get 2000 IU/day.  You can get some vitamin D from food.  Certain fish contains a decent amount of vitamin D, but otherwise it’s really hard to get it by eating.  For instance, I would need to eat 100 eggs or 13,300 grams of beef liver every day to get my 2000 UI.  Fortified milk contains vitamin D but I would need to drink 20 cups of milk a day to get enough which goes against the manifesto and my lactose intolerance.  So the other options left are eating a bunch of herring everyday ($$$), getting more sun or taking a supplement.  Since supplements are also against the manifesto, I’m going to opt for getting more sun every day.  With spring quickly approaching I’ll be spending much more time outside so I am going to wait and see what my levels are in two months before I start taking a supplement.

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Eating the right amount of calories every day continues to be the most frustrating part of this diet.  The combination of consuming food with much fewer calories plus only eating until I’m 80% full make it mentally taxing to keep track of everything.  If I skip a meal, which I’ve been prone to doing in the past, it makes it very hard to catch up on calories.  Or, if I eat a lot of food but it is all low in calories, I get 80% full quickly but end up with days like Monday where it’s 8pm and I’m lightheaded and grouchy because I’ve only consumed 900 calories so far.  Then I end up sopping up extra virgin olive oil with whole wheat bread just to get enough in my system.

Emotionally, the hardest part of this new lifestyle is when I go to the grocery.  Today I was wandering around looking forlornly at all of the food I can’t eat.  I even stopped in the bakery section to see what kind of donuts they had available.  I think I would have gone for the jelly filled today.

I’m pretty much regulated to the produce, canned beans and bread aisles when I’m shopping for myself but I have to veer off course when picking stuff up for the rest of the family and that’s when I start to get frustrated again.  I miss my old habits of eating whatever I want.  I also miss not having to constantly think far in advance about what I’m going to eat.  Three weeks in and living a healthy lifestyle is proving pretty difficult.

That is also one thing that makes this hard.  Three weeks in.  That means I have forty-nine weeks left.  There is currently no light at the end of the tunnel.  I’ve done thirty day experiments before and they usually go well but by this point I’m nine days away from the end.  Instead of 344 days from the end. Easter is just around the corner, a big time of feasting and celebrating in our family and I get to tackle it with no meat, candy or cake. Soon after that we’ll move into our family’s birthday season, again with none of the usual fare on my plate.

Why is this so hard?  That is a question that I will spend some more time on in future posts, but it is a question that is resounding in my head on a daily basis. Why is it so extremely hard, both emotionally and physically, to live a healthy lifestyle in this country?  Until this changes, we’ll continue to have the highest obesity rate and highest percentages all of the diseases that come with that.

The week started off bad with a major fail in observing the Sabbath. You would think doing nothing for twenty-four hours would be relatively easy, especially since a good chunk of the morning was spent at church. Instead, I couldn’t sit still for more than a few minutes. I worked around the house, wrote for this blog, went to the grocery and, in general, treated the designated time of Sabbath just like any other day.

What does it say about my life that I can’t take one day a week and relax? There was nothing that had to be done, yet I felt like I needed to be constantly moving and accomplishing something. The rule “I can do anything as long as it accomplishes nothing” got thrown out the window almost immediately.

As I moved into the work days things were going much smoother than the week before. I was eating enough calories, drinking my wine every night, getting my exercise in, etc. But by Wednesday, just as I predicted, the novelty of the new diet had worn off. My withdrawal from the sugar addiction had set in pretty hard and I was in a foul mood.

Wednesday evening I stopped by the grocery to pick up a few things and as I rolled the shopping cart through the bakery section I glanced over and saw the doughnuts. I shivered a bit and the Pavlov effect kicked in as my mouth filled with saliva.  I longed for boston cream, apple fritter and chocolate covered, cream filled goodness.

I paid for the groceries and drove home where I started chopping up the peppers for my veggie and bean quesadilla on whole wheat tortillas that I’d soon be eating without sour cream.

I began to curse everything and anything that had to do with this idiotic project I’d heaped on my own shoulders. I cursed Dan Buettner for giving his talk at TED that put this idea in my head. I cursed TED for inviting him to speak in the first place. I cursed myself. And I especially cursed all the vegetables I’ve been eating.

I just wanted a doughnut.

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While I would have been hard pressed to find anything good about this project around the middle of the week, some really exciting things have started happening as a result of this new lifestyle.

Thursday night after dinner Candace, Conner, Max and I crowded around the counter to make some whole wheat bread from scratch. Candace showed us how to do everything while Conner helped me put all the ingredients together. It was such a fulfilling time and it’s becoming a regular event around the house. It’s amazing what happens when the television is turned off, the computer is powered down and the phone is on silent. You’re stuck having to spend time enjoying each others company instead of being endlessly distracted by useless stuff.

The frequency at which I forget to do things is going down as well. One evening this week Candace asked me if I had remembered to do a few things that needed to be done that day. I had done them all. This is an extremely weird thing for me. I’m the epitome of the absent minded professor yet this past week I’ve followed through on almost everything that I needed to get done.

A big part of this project is that it forces me to slow down and actually consider what I’m doing. I can’t mindlessly stop at whatever fast food establishment is close by. I can’t skip meals anymore because I have to eat the right amount of food at every meal to maintain my calorie intake without eating past 80% full. I have to think about when I’m going to exercise, spend time with my family and drink my glass of wine.

This is an incredibly satisfying feeling. Instead of being constantly controlled and jerked about by my food cravings, work stresses and distractions, I’m now making choices at every part of the day that I’m proud of. The shame of shoving a bunch of donuts down my throat in the grocery parking lot is gone. I feel good about how much I’m exercising. I feel like a good husband and father with how much time I’m spending with my family. So many things I always wanted to be a part of my life are being forced into it by this striving to live in perfect health.

If you had asked me half way through the week, I would have said I was ready to abandon the whole thing for some artery-clogging pastries. But as I step back and take notice of all the ramifications this project is having on my life, I’m seeing so many more good things that are making it worth it.

Photo by: gypsygirl09

This morning Candace and I decided to take the boys to an indoor play park. We knew we wouldn’t make it home in time for lunch so we decided to stop and pick up some food at a fast food restaurant. Since there are very few items on the menu that abide by the manifesto, I went for the side salad, opting for the honey mustard dressing, to hold me over until we returned home and I could eat something more substantial.

After the boys played for awhile, we sat down to eat and I pulled out my very small, very manifesto-abiding bowl of veggies. As I prepared to rip the dressing packet open, the one thing that made me okay with eating a side salad while the rest of my family enjoys hamburgers and french fries, I stop to check the ingredients, just to be sure. Then my eyes settle on the first ingredient on the list and my hopes sink: “high fructose corn syrup”

As I munched on my dry salad I began to realize… this is going to be hard.

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I’ve done diets before.  South Beach, Atkins and vegetarian meal plans have all been a part of my life at one time or another so this first week of following the manifesto hasn’t been too painful.  Substitute almonds for ice cream and fruit smoothies for sausage McMuffins and I’m good to go.  But as with all diets, over the next couple of weeks I’ll grow weary of this and start pining for my old eating habits.  I see significant complaining ahead for Weekly Updates #3 and #4.

So I’ve dropped refined sugar and bleached flour from my diet, haven’t had a single soda or cheeseburger in over a week and am quickly burning through the vegetables that have been sitting in our freezer uneaten for months.  The other thing I’ve dropped from my diet is the amount of calories I’m consuming.  After a few days I started noticing that I was waking up refreshed but barely making it into bed at night out of extreme exhaustion.  I had a hunch that I wasn’t eating enough and after I began keeping track of my calories I found I was only consuming around 1200 a day.  Quite a bit less than the recommended 1800 to 2000 that I should be eating, especially with the additional exercise I’ve been doing.

Poor planning and laziness were the cause of my self-inflicted starvation.  There were several moments of hunger that I would skip since I had prepared nothing to eat.  Instead of taking two minutes to heat up some broccoli, I would drink some water and ignore my stomach’s soft pleas for food.

And therein lies a significant issue when switching from eating whatever is available to consuming only healthy, unprocessed foods.  Snacking requires actual thinking instead of staring into the fridge slack-jawed until I find something tasty.

What further exacerbated the problem was not planning ahead for the weekly grocery trip.  On Monday I declared my new perfect health diet and then made no significant changes to the grocery list.  So when I got hungry I didn’t have anything to eat and would just put off eating until later and try to forget about it.  Not exactly a well thought out plan.

And speaking of well thought out plans, my forgetfulness has been the bane of my existence as I try to stick to my new set of rules.  I’ve forgotten to exercise and frequently checked my email during my daily family time.  Old habits die hard.

Finally, after realizing I forgot to drink a glass of wine the night before (supposedly the easy rule), I decided I needed to do something a bit different.  On the advice of my incredibly wise wife, I started putting reminders into my calendar.  Now at 8pm every night my phone announces it’s time to eat some nuts and drink a glass of wine.  At noon my phone asks “Have you exercised yet?”.  And when I get home I turn off the computer and put the phone in a drawer to keep from absentmindedly checking in with GMail.

One thing I was hoping to report on were the results of my first physical.  The surprising issue I ran into here was how hard it is to find a doctor in my town that is accepting new patients.  After calling all of the recommended doctors in town and being turned away, it’s looking like I’ll be giving a second rate doctor a chance this week.  Hopefully have something of value to report here next week.