This page still needs some editing, but below is my first draft.
My parents raised me as an omnivore. I was always a little heavieer than my friends, but looking back, was a pretty normal kid, not excessively overweight, up until about 17.
When I left home for college, I began making my own food choices, and stayed primarily with fast food. I continually and gradually gained more weight and was diagnosed with obesity sometime within my first two years of college, around 19 or 20 years old. This continued until after visiting the doctor, due to feeling truly sluggish around 30 years old, when he introduced me to a dietician.
The dietician put me on a 2000 calorie diet, which I successfully managed, constantly counting calories, and joining step aerobics. I went from 280 pounds to 198 pounds in 6 months. At 33, I met my wife, got married and starting having kids.
From this point on, there is some dispute about what happened next, but I stopped counting calories and gained all the weight back, plus some.
About 6 years ago, at the age of 44, after a visit with my sister, who was vegan at the time, my wife did some reading. One day, she came to me and said that she decided to become vegan. I think I said I could become vegetarian (as I thought I could at least live on cheese pizza) but that was as far as I could go.
Around the age of 48, I read Skinny Bitch.. I was appalled at the information I read in the book, and became motivated to change my diet further and become vegan. I found it easy to do, especially since my wife was already there, and I had already successfully become vegetarian. After going vegan, I felt much better, but did't really lose much weight, if any.
I loved the vegan diet. Nowadays you can get foods similar to the comfort foods you are used to and that you love, but you are also removed from any guilt of having to kill poor animals to do so. Also, you become exposed to so many other foods that you never may have tried before.
We live in a small town, and it was difficult to find some of the items we needed to make the recipies we found in the wonderful vegan cookbooks we were accumulating. We found a co-op that was 30 miles away, which we frequented. We finally got our own co-op, and my wife began writing articles in the newsletter about the vegan lifesytle.
My wife found out about a symposium in a neighboring city and the organizer was kind enough to send us some videos from previous symposiums, along with other similar videos. We were astonished at what we saw. Aside from being unhappy with the goverment, food and drug industries, we learned that it was good to be vegan, but necessary to go low fat. However, the benefits from such a diet were astonishing. You could lose weight, eat all you want, and avoid the most common killer American diseases. Soon after, the movie, "Forks Over Knives," came out. We loved it and were amazed at what we saw.
I read a number of books and went in full bore. The plan was, you could eat all you wanted of and anything from the four food groups; fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes, and basically no oils were allowed, or at least severely limited. At age 50, I went from 310 lbs to about 280 lbs within a few months.
Unfortunately, I got stalled there. I also got discouraged. I expected weight loss like when I was 33 years old. It didn't happen. But I was also eating all I wanted, limiting myself to the four food groups, and not counting calories.
Next, my wife sent me a link of a video to watch, "How to Lose Weight, Without Losing Your Mind." This movie, let me understand why I struggled with weight loss, and gave me another key piece of information that lead to additional pounds removed. I needed to watch out for breads and their cousins. I have curbed breads back severely, and I am again losing weight.
In addition to minimizing breads, I learned that starch is an essential component of a good diet. This came from examining Dr. McDougall's Free Clinic on his website. So I began incorporating a staple starch in every meal. This helped me stave off hunger from meal to meal. The rest of each meal would compliment the starch with fruits, vegetables, and legumes.
Since curbing (not fully eliminating) and keeping starches as the staple of my diet, I have gone down from 290 to 275 lbs. I hoping to continue to lose weight, while eating all I want.
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