Would you still be comfortable being called ketchup when it's so full of sugar/hfcs? /s
The great irony of my handle is that used to consume copious amounts of ketchup, and now that's been brought down to very little.
sweet potato brownies???
I was surprised too. I haven't actually made them in a few years, but they are great. Very moist.
So do you mind sharing - what has led you to your current whole food plant heavy diet?
Welp, partially stolen from a different thread I told this in:
I grew up eating starch, peanut butter, and fat-free dairy (seriously, 95% of what I ate was cereal, skim milk, peanut butter, bread, pasta, and ketchup; 95% might be a *low* estimate) until age 20~21. I was incredibly stubborn about food and nutritionally very apathetic, and didn't broaden my horizons *at all* until moving in with my girlfriend.
GF grew up in an *interesting* household. Her mom had/has extreme narcissism, and actively tried to basically get her daughters to gain weight as teenagers so that she would always be more attractive than them (it sounds fucked because it is; I didn't quite believe it until I met the woman). This meant tons of soda/candy/cookies/muffins/cupcakes lying around the house ALL THE TIME, and CONSTANTLY PUSHED ON HER and her sisters EVERY DAY. She ate some real food, but supplemented with mountains of normalized garbage. This led to her gaining weight in her teens.
After moving in together, she (slowly) introduced me to cooking and actual food, I read Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, found Mark Sisson's blog, other similar resources, and basically fell into that mindset of health and learned a lot while still not quite eating that way. At some point, I tried to do a grain-free month just to see how it would go (since Mark Sisson in particular is so flamboyantly anti-grains), but since I was the only member of the household doing it, that basically just lead to me eating way less, and turned my then-skinnyfat self into just plain skinny (152 at my lowest, and I'm a 5'11 dude). GF flipped out and basically said to stop that before I wither away into nothing. Peanut butter sandwiches and ketchup-pasta returned, supplementing our real food plus some junk.
Then GF started learning about the same sort of nutritional things, kickstarted from wanting to improve her skin with weight loss as secondary, and we pretty much hard switched over to 100% low-carb paleo in September 2013. We also bought a squat rack and a barbell and started lifting.
She yo-yo'd a bit on weight (it not being her focus) with the trend being downwards , but then decided to focus on it, and since September of last year has so far lost 74lbs. To that end she started guestimating calories with a defined cap, striving to eat less while maintaining nutrient density, 18:6 intermittent fasting (broken somewhat when traveling for work, but still pretty close), 10k steps/day no matter what, HIIT 1-2x/week, and a return to lifting 3x/week (she fell off the wagon with that after about a year of paleo). Based on weight loss, she's been at about an average 650 calorie daily deficit over the past 398 days.
Personally, I feel way better on low-carb paleo (now that I'm actually eating nutrients and not just taking a multivitamin and pretending that's enough), and was eventually able to put on some of the good kind of weight (and a bit of the bad; hope to shed that this year). I'm definitely in the don't-care-when-I-eat-during-the-day stage now. It's incredibly convenient. I don't intermittent fast specifically, but I wind up in that pattern sometimes.
These days, we basically eat vegetable-heavy low-carb paleo. Right now, she's pretty much straight keto with rough macros tracking and pretty defined calorie/activity goals. This was after her weight loss stalling about two months ago (at 63lbs down), and then a week-long protein-sparing modified fast about a month ago, kicking her back up to speed, and transitioned to keto after that. Since starting the PSMF, she's down another 11lbs.
What do we actually eat these days? Giant salads and tons of roasted/sauteed vegetables (sometimes I'll literally eat 2lbs of roasted broccoli out of the toaster oven at work) with an emphasis on greens, crucifers, and colors, healthy fats, and yes, meat, fish and eggs. A little fruit, mostly berries or bananas. Oatmeal when we're feeling indulgent (typically an hour preworkout for stuff like that). I know our dietary ethos is not 100% compatible with most in this thread, and that's fine; I'm not looking to debate that. We probably eat a lot less meat than most "paleo" or "keto" folks, as many seem to think it means an all you can get bacon and butter buffet and that you need a billion grams of protein per day.
Fun fact: GF used to have cavities all the time as a kid. I don't know how many she had total, but she mentioned a time that she had nine *new* cavities at a dentist visit. She chalked it up to "bad teeth" or "bad genetics." Since moving away from family in 2012, she didn't see a dentist until sometime in November of 2017. When she finally went to the dentist, she braced herself for typical very bad news. Instead, they said no new cavities, and they "barely had to do much of a cleaning." She was shocked. That's what years of no-soda and minimal sugar will do after a lifetime of tons of soda/sugar. It makes a huge difference.