Have held off on replying to this as I was on holiday when it went live and I was bUgg3red if I was typing up on an ipad
Woof, congrats on taking control. I myself did something similar at the beginning of the year and I haven't looked back. I hurt my back quite badly almost 10 yrs ago and have been going from issue to issue for the last 10 yrs. Having a long term injury like that breeds a sickness in the mind that becomes 'used to' not feeling good, attributing all ills to the injury and also a bizarre convincing to yourself that things are actually 'getting better'. I have struggled to find doctors/physios anyone who could help me well at the beginning which led me to lose faith and figure that I was my own best doctor and I had some success and some setbacks. The lack of trust and willingness to keep pushing for help was probably my downfall. I've bought a lot of exercise kit and was doing at least a couple of hours a day and slowly grinding myself into the ground until I really didn't care whether I woke up anymore or not (just turned 38 this year) and felt like I was about 90. The last few years have been tough with the death of my mother, work not being great as well etc and it all felt like it would never turn around.
So I started by going back to the doc in March 2012 and explaining exactly how I felt and got sent for back x-rays...nothing major going on. To a foot specialist as my ankle kept swelling up where I was told that I had a flat left foot (my weak side) and that was a lot of the issue, then he took me to a physio as well. The physio couldn't pinpoint anything major, but said my body was working so oddly, it was hard to isolate what was wrong. He honed in on one thing with my lower back, prescribed simple core exercises and that combined with insoles made a marked difference.
Come the beginning of this year, I still wasn't feeling good, no energy, headaches from 4pm each day, totally flat and wiped out when I got home from work etc etc etc and was still attributing that to my back, then I read an article about the Harcombe Diet which struck a chord with me. There's a book called 'Why Do We Overeat When All We Want To Be Is Thin' that it described and it is largely about food addictions and the havoc that it plays on your body. It struck a chord with me and I bought the book, plus the Harcombe for men book (all you need) and got started on it. I had some heavy withdrawals on the first couple of days, v. thirsty etc and after 5 days (the time it takes apparantly for your body to clear anything it takes on) I was feeling a lot better. Six months on I haven't looked back, a lot of the aches and pains are gone and it has surprised me that my back wasn't the cause for an awful lot of my complaints.
I dropped almost 2 stone in 2 months and then started to plateau, but the key thing is the way the book explains how food interacts with your body chemistry and how to manage that in easy ways for the rest of your life. Some of it has been touched on here, but in a way that is a little bit in line with the way everything health related is sold to us....if it's true, how come so many people have problems? Basically it explains that any carb causes immediate insulin generation and insulin goes to town on breaking the carb first. Anything it doesn't break in 24 hrs it stores. So if you eat steak and chips, the insulin will work on the chips and if you need no more energy than that provides, it will store the steak as fat. Generally all low fat diets are high in sugar and thus we are all walking with huge amounts of insulin in our systems, insulin goes up, we have a sugar crash, the body program informs us to eat in order to get up again and often that's sugary as well, so we end up in a vicious crash/high cycle throughout the day, which is why we're so exhausted at the end of the day and have headaches etc. On top of that we've not gotten the nutrients we need etc etc etc and we're storing a lot of fat.
Her solution is easy, you have 3 food types:
Did it have or come from a face - fat
Veg - Fat/Carb
Everything else - Carbs
She sees veggies as neutral as the fat content is so low and says you have to keep combinations of the 3, so Steak and Veg is ok, Steak and Chips is not. Veg and potatoes is fine. The idea being that with Steak and Veg, the body is deriving energy from the steak only. With veg and potatoes, you're eating a carb, but mixing it with nothing harmful and it will burn off by itself and not cause any major storage problems. I am paraphrasing a lot, but that's the gist. Once you have this rule in your mind not to put all 3 together, you're good to go. A colleague of mine tried it with me and gave up his diabetic medicine from the start and his blood sugar levels have been stable since. He lost about 1 1/2 stone too and kept it off.
Just after this, I watched Forks Over Knives on Netflix, then Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead with Joe and joe's story tied a lot into what I was experiencing. I started juicing as well alongside the diet and I have to say that a lot of my complaints that I was attributing to my back have cleared up and I am a juice enthusiast. I gave up quickly on the fast juicers that they're selling on Amazon etc as they damage the juice too much and you don't get much out of your produce. I invested in a slow juicer from Hurom, which is well pricey, but as it's part of the lifestyle change I have made, I am ok with that. I noticed through this change that my rubbish (trash) output has at least 1/2'd if not more through the process and I spend less in general than I was before. It was weird starting off as you feel like you miss things like bread and coffee a lot, I can only tell you that 6 months down the line I hardly give it a 2nd thought. The other nice thing is that I now feel that if I do go a little bit wayward with the eating, I can pull it back together quite quickly and easily. for the first time in a long long time, I don't feel like food is controlling me and that is a great feeling.
So people summarising on here saying you lose weight cos you have temp changed your intake, I 1/2 agree with it. What I think you have done is changed your body chemistry and the secret to maintaining that is understanding how to keep your chemistry on an even keel from now on. The reason you feel better is 2fold in my opinion, the first being that you have removed a bunch of stuff you were probably addicted to that was not good for your body and causing you to overeat stuff that you don't need. By removing the drug, the body starts to feel well. The juicing thing cannot be underrated as it is by those who talk about removing the fibre and only leaving the sugar etc. This is in essence true, but all dietary advice assumes that people like to and do eat a lot of fruit and veg, where the reality is we mostly all live with significant deficits only a daily basis which causes us to degenerate over time. By drinking the juice, I would wager you are taking on way more nutrients than you would in any other way and for that reason you are feeling as good as you are. My recommendation would be to keep it up, but don't use it as your sole intake. Try and look at the Harcombe book, stick with it for 3 months and keep the juice going at one point during the day each day. I am pretty sure after 3 months you won't recognise yourself or be that worried about things that you no longer eat.
Think I'll make this weekend a juice only menu just to get me back on track as my target was to lose 20lbs (approx 10 kgs) and I've still got another 4.5lbs (2kgs) to go.
