[SSLance]

So I'm 3 months into my new eating lifestyle so I thought I'd update you all. What I've learned is grains are bad...and also one of the hardest things to avoid. It was much harder giving up bread, tortillas, pizza dough, and oatmeal than cookies and sugar in my coffee every morning...but I can tell it's working fantastically.

I'm averaging right around 160# on the scale every morning, have hit a low of 158 and high around 163. It's interesting, couple weekends ago I had 4 Mich Ultra beers Saturday night, gained 4 pounds next morning and it took 5 days to get back down to my normal range. The following weekend I drank a bottle of wine myself and didn't gain a pound.

I've settled on two main meals a day and one filler light meal, we mix it up when the light meal happens and doesn't really seem to matter. Some times it's smoothie for breakfast, other times its just a salad for lunch or dinner. We eat a ton of seafood, some white meat, hardly any red meat, and lots of vegetables be it from salads to sweet potatoes to carrots and cucumber slices for snacks.

I could NOT do meatless...my body rejected that idea wholeheartedly. After weeks of light headedness and dizziness every time I stood up we added meat and eggs back in and the symptoms went away. We now eat a portion of eggs just about every day and some sort of meat protein once a day minimum. We are getting creative how to mix things up and in reality, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. Portions are back up from the low but still way down from where I was before.

The 15-20 pounds I've lost have all come from my belly. Everything is is virtually the same...arms, legs, face...all still appear close to as before. This is supposedly the hardest weight\fat to loose and what I've determined is by not flooding my body with bad food it is given it the time and energy to burn off the bad fat instead of overworking processing the junk. And by junk, I mean mostly grains... Physical activity really hasn't changed other than I'm more diligent about getting two 1.5 mile walks in twice a day and averaging 10,000 steps every day.

I'll go get my blood tested again soon, very curious how my triglycerides and cholesterol have changed with the diet modifications.

The wife has hooked up with a holistic Doctor and is starting the process of blood work and testing on her to see where she's at and which direction the Dr wants her to go. Depending on how that goes, I may switch over to her as well. We've learned a ton about the natural way for one's body to heal itself and want to continue down that path vs just pumping pills into one's system to mask issues. So far the Doc seems pretty positive about the lifestyle choices we've made and wishes more of her patients started at a point like that vs well past the unhealthy stage most of them are in.

Anyway, happy summer everyone. Our car stuff has pretty much stopped for the summer, Barney has been driven once in the last month so not much to report on there. We are concentrating now on fixing our new truck up for off roading and will spend the summer messing around in it instead of the car. Hope you all are doing well...