Hey, there! Dr. Alan Christianson here. Let’s talk about your diet. Let’s talk about when to add and when to subtract. I think this is the most important question you can answer to a get a good sense of where you are. I will tell you why this is relevant and give you a quick story of my own background in dieting.
As an adolescent, I was obese. My first step was subtracting. I read some books about health, fitness and nutrition, and I subtracted sugar from my diet. I also cut out bread. These were two of my first, big steps. I added in quite a bit of exercise, but that is another topic. With those changes, I was able to improve my body composition, my fitness and lose a bunch of weight, so that was real good. Somewhere in my teens (I think my senior year of high school), we lost our home to a fire, and it was a pretty stressful and painful time. After that, I really relapsed on my dietary patterns, and I gained a bunch of weight back. In fact, quite a bit, and I was a very unhealthy kid coming up to my high school graduation. So, I spent the next few years regaining my health. I first cut out some of the common foods I did before, and it was helpful. Then, I read more books. This was in the late 1980’s when there were some newer ideas coming out. I started subtracting more and more from my diet. I thought, “Hey, if I did this well by cutting out some junk food, what if I cut out all animal protein? What if I went vegetarian?”