Eeeee-ha!!… after 30 days of faithful adherence to the Project Waistline Low-SOS vegan plan (party days (Woo-Hoo!) & ocassional extravagant XL items included) I have lost enough mass to reduce WAIST-TO-HIP RATIO from .77 to .70!
Lost 9 pounds, and a total of 5.5 inches:
3 inches from my waist
2.5 inches from my jelly-belly
Wonder why none were lost from hips or bust? I suppose our body knows where to shred first… yeah, get rid of that nasty visceral (abdominal) fat, then deal with the rest later. Who can’t live with that?! It may also be that bumping up weight lifting intensity in those particular areas (upper & lower body sessions four tough days per week) is actually doing its job – trading out fat for muscle! Again I say go for it nature, do your thing!
SAVING MORE THAN CALORIES
I like this lifestyle. First change I noticed was that I was saving boat loads of money! When I stroll the grocery store processed food aisles (who am I kidding?… most ALL grocery stores aisles are processed food aisles) I feel like a foreigner in some strange country. Have you noticed that, too?
Corporate food giants make their mega-profits by not only spiking our supper with addictive ingredients (salt, oil, fat), but by storing them nearly indefinitely on grocery store shelves. Okay, I’ve got an answer for that! I find myself buying institutional sized bulk quantities of brown rice, beans, lentils, green peas, oats and storing these dry goods in food grade buckets with easy open gamma seal lids
lined with mylar bags. My kitchen pantry looks like a virtual apocalyptic doomsday prepper headquarters, LOL!
Out here in the wild west we get the best deals on dry goods at our (employee-owned) Winco supermarkets’ bulk food section:
Be sure to ask the manager to order large sized bags of your favorite items. If they don’t have it in stock they’ll have it available for you fresh off the truck in a few days. But if you don’t want 15 or 20 pounds at a time, just scoop what you need from the bins. They sell at the same unit price as buying in bulk!
I also save time & $$ by ordering a weekly basket of fresh organic produce from our local farmers:
Unboxing my weekly farm haul feels like Christmas! 🙂 (Whoa… look at those lunch sister! – fatty underarms – gotta get those babies down, dip-dip-dip on those triceps!)
On those rare visits to sit down restaurants I find little interest in their menu items. It’s so obvious that their biggest promos are items drenched in salt-oil-sugar for the sole reason of toying with our addictions. (See Dr. John McDougall’s review of the Michael Moss book SALT, SUGAR, FAT: How the Food Giants Hooked Us) If you don’t believe me just try ordering something without it. Tell the waiter you’re allergic to SOS (which, of course, we all are to some degree since it’ll kill us if we overdo it!) and see if he/she can come up with any reasonable on-the-menu offerings. You’ll most likely end up ordering low cost off-menu side dishes (unembelished baked potato, bowl of beans or rice, etc). So yeah… processed foods are pricey. Somehow I didn’t get that tweet in my pre Project Waistline days!
FULL TUMMY / HAPPY HEART
Satiation has not been an issue for me over these past 30 days. I do not limit quantities on these healthy foods, so although I may list the item only one time on my daily journal I make no mention of how many servings I am consuming. I just keep eating until I’m satisfied. That was a big problem when my food choices were calorie-dense / nutrient-sparse / high fat foods!
(An exception to my all-u-care-to-eat mantra is applied to those serious XL indulgences. When I list an XL-12oz cola for instance, I really mean 12 ounces! In the next 30 days I’m going to try cutting this one indulgence in half to only 12 ounces every other weekend.)
In the spirit of full disclosure I want you to know that (although unlisted in my food journal) I am taking vitamin B12 supplements, and adding a small amount of coconut water based probiotic, along with 2 teaspoon of ground flax seed to my morning smoothie. And by the way, that smoothie is morphing dominately green with multiple fistfulls of kale, spinach, chard, collards… whatever is on hand!
At the beginning, back in week one, I found myself gorging. I suppose I feared insufficiency… but I ended up making myself nauseous! It took a few weeks to recognize when the “satiation complete” signal had reached its destination from my belly to my brain! Now I know better & I surround myself with an environment of visually seductive ready-to-eat snack fruits & veggies to tamp down those satiation insecurities.
FACING FACTS
Although I have reached the .7 Waist-to-Hip ratio, I know my body. It’s not where it should be YET. There’s just too much jiggle in my jangle… (know where I’m coming from?)
Because I tend to carry most excess weight in my lower body I’m thinking a more accurate reflection of body fat composition (for my body type) would involve taking at the very least an average of my two waist measurements (upper + lower) ÷ 2 , then dividing the results by hip measurement. Doing it this way with week 4 measurements yields…
AVERAGE waist-to-hip ratio
Step 1. (30 + 38) ÷ 2 = 34
Step 2. 34 ÷ 43 = .79 wth ratio !
Yep… I gotta tell ya, that figure feels closer to the truth. And it passes my jiggle verification filter! I’ll be including this averaged calculation, in addition to the regular one, in future statistics posts.
COMING ATTRACTIONS
Speaking of the future, get ready for upcoming Project Waistline vlogs (video blogs) on my new Youtube channel! There will be meal prep segments from my kitchen:
as soon as I get my retro Aunt Bee style apron shipped from Ebay!
Produce promotions from my orchard/garden:
Simple skin & haircare hints to steer you far away from the cosmetic surgeons knife:
And there will be a whole series of exercise workout routines like this one from a recent visit to the Magic Kingdom (who says you can’t workout at the happiest place on Earth??)
So stay tuned to Project Waistline…
Keep saying NO to corporate foods!
Keep saying YES to simple stress free living!