Well, today marks the end of my 30-day trial of changing my diet to significantly reduce or eliminate pop (especially Coke), eggs and meat from my diet.  How did I do?  Not perfect, but I’m very happy with myself.

There were 30 days in April and I normally only eat 2 main meals a day which means I had 60 meals during the month at which I had to decide whether or not to stick to my “diet plan”.

Right from the start I knew that what I eat at home and at lunch will be the two areas I’ll have the most amount of control over so I wanted to hit a near-perfect score there, but as far as eating dinner at someone else’s house (Easter Holidays etc.) I pretty much knew I wouldn’t be able to be too picky there just yet.

Here’s the results I got from my trial:

I started off really good sticking to the “no meat” and “no pop” diet throughout the first two weeks of April (1st - 13th).  Out of 26 meals, only 1 broke the rule which was when I had chicken noodle soup at my mom’s place which was cooked from scratch and had chicken in it.  I didn’t actually eat chicken meat, but the broth was made from chicken, so I wouldn’t consider this a “no meat” meal.

During Easter breakfast on Sunday with my family I had eggs, and a bit of meat.  The next day on Monday I decided to take a day off from the diet as I had a turkey dinner to go to at my fiance’s parents house.  I ended up going to the mall for lunch and had crappy Chinese food which had some meat in it and a Coke to drink.  Neither of which tasted very good at all.  The turkey dinner was really good though.

So far, at this point (15th April) I was at 27 meals “on track” and 4 “off track”.  From that day until the following Sunday I had 4 more “off track” meals which had some meat in them (but no pop) at other people’s house’s and one at a restaurant which I ended up ordering fish at.

I believe that was the end of meat from that point forward since I’ve mostly been eating at home for the rest of the time, so if my addition is right, I ended up having 8 “off-track” meals out of 60 for the month which is a  87% success rate for staying away from meat.

As for Coke, I normally drank an average of 2-3 cokes a day so I’d say about 80 a month which I brought down to 1 for the month.  That’s a 98.75% success rate for staying away from Coke.  Nice!

What did I learn from this:

1) Not eating meat is actually surprisingly easy.  I didn’t crave the stuff as much as I thought I would.  Keep in mind that during this time my fiance and room-mate were eating meat around me the whole time.  They cooked ribs, chicken wings, BBQ stake, etc.

2) It is difficult to stay away from meat when you’re eating at someone else’s house.  If you go to someone else’s house and they eat meat, chances are they are going to serve that for dinner so it’s going to be hard to eat something else.

3) Last time I tried to give up Coke it was very hard.  This time, instead of going from Coke to water I went from Coke to drinking freshly squeezed fruit juices.  MUCH easier transition.  Now I can go from fruit juices to water from this point, but while I work on that fruit juices are probably nowhere near as bad as Coke is for me.
 
4) Pack your fridge full of good veggies and fruit juices.  If you don’t have healthy food, it will be hard to eat healthy.

5) Veggie pizza is really good!  I never thought I’d like veggie pizza but now I love it better then any meat pizza!

6) Forget trying to be 100% perfect.  If you slip up, like I did 8 times during the month, just re-commit and keep going.  It’s not what you do once in a while that matters, it’s what you do all the time that matters.   I’m pretty sure that even if I ONLY maintained a 87% success rate on eating healthy for the rest of my life I’d be MUCH better off than giving up completely after the first time I miss perfection.  Getting out of the perfection mind frame is very important.

7) In the first two weeks where I didn’t eat any meat, I went down from 185lbs to 178lbs losing 7 pounds in 2 weeks or 0.5lbs a day.  During this time I was also eating like a horse, just staying away from meat and pop.  I ate lots of salads and veggies and the same amount of carbs as I normally do, except maybe a bit more potatoes than normal.

During the week where I had turkey dinner / Chinese food / fish at the restaurant I gained 6 lbs back.  I haven’t weighed myself today to see where I’m at now, but there does seem to be some link between eating meat and gaining weight for me.  I haven’t been below 180lbs for years now and was able to hit 178lbs after just 2 weeks of “no-meat”.

Summary:

I’m happy with my results and the success rate I’ve been able to get.  I did realize that there is a lot more about diet and nutrition that I still don’t know and during this month I actually decided to take a course to become a nutritionist.  I want to learn, once and for all, what really IS healthy to eat and what isn’t.  I got my course materials last week and I began study already.  As I’m learning nutrition I’ll try to implement what i learn into my own life and this 30 day trial has given me the confidence that I can do it.

I got the idea of doing a 30-day trial from Steve Pavlina after reading his article “30 Days to Success”.  If you’re interested in making a positive change in your health, you might want to have a read and try it out as well.

-Paul

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