Starting The Starch Solution - Meal Prep

Along with going vegan I've decided to focus on starch.  It's a vegan plant based diet that is whole foods with emphasis on getting plenty of starchy vegetables.  The diet was developed by Dr. McDougal and after lots of reading and research it looks good so I'm giving it a try.

I will continue my intermittent fasting from 5 pm till 7 am.  It has become a habit and I believe it is helping me in my weight loss journey and improving my health.  I like giving my body a period of time to completely digest what I've eaten before beginning to eat again.  It's easy because 8 of my 14 fasting hours are spent sleeping.

So yesterday I grocery shopped.  I bought loads of potatoes, grains, fruit and green vegetables.  Here's some of my meal prep for the coming week:

 I bought three of these for convience.  You just pop this 1 lb. container of potatoes into the microwave for 5 minutes and then add the seasoning pack.  I ate one Saturday and it was very good.  Great for lunches too.

 I bought a big bag of hash brown potatoes with peppers and onions.  Buying potatoes like this make it so convenient and they turned out great.

 I bought a big bag of sweet potatoes.  I bakes half of them and I'll cook the rest as needed.  You can't go wrong with sweet potatoes.  They are perfect just plain with anything.

 This was a big bag of mixed vegetables.  I added an onion soup mix and boiled them.  I'll add these veggies to grains and potatoes.

 I bought several boxes of grains.  This is a wild rice mix.  I'll add veggies and even potatoes to my servings.

 I love baked green beans.  I'll chop these and add them to potatoes or cooked grains.

 This is two bags of a blend of brussel sprouts, kale, cabbage and carrots.  I added the soup mix and boiled it.  I'll be adding this to grains or potatoes.

 This is a container of fresh mushrooms with a packet of soup mix.  I mashed some of the red potatoes and added in the mushrooms.  So good.

 The above and bottom photo are both grains; couscous and quinoa.  I'll be adding veggies to both.

Week One as a Vegan

I decided to go vegan and this last week I made a start.  I made some mistakes and I learned some things as I continue to educate myself.

When I was in my 30's I went vegetarian for a year.  At the end of the year I didn't feel any healthier and I walked away from it.  What I realize now is that I really had no idea what a healthy vegetarian diet looked like.

I started out my return making some of the same mistakes as I had before.  I bought lots of processed foods in an attempt to replace what I had been eating before.  It was all good and I really enjoyed what I ate, but it's not where I want to be in attempt to be healthier and loose weight.

A vegan whole foods diet is where I'm trying to get.  I did loose weight last week, but I feel like that's mostly due to my portion control and intermittent fasting.

Here are some of the things I ate:

 Several mornings I had this sandwich - nut bread (processed), soy cheese and "turkey" (processed) and lettuce, tomato and onion.  This was a delicious sandwich but it's almost totally processed foods; not the best choice.

 This was a much better breakfast choice - All bran cereal, almonds and dried fruit....but the nuts are high in fat and the dried fruit is very high in sugar.  Still very good, but I think I still missed the goal of eating whole foods.

 I took salads every day and this is the one I took on Friday.  The soy "pepperoni" was so good.  I was really just trying to use us the soy products I had bought and it did make a great tasting salad.

 I had this "pepperoni, cheese" open faced sandwich on Friday morning.  SO Good!  Really tasted like pizza.  Again, these are all processed foods and not the best choice for a whole foods diet.  But I did really enjoy it.

 In the afternoons I had soy yogurt with blueberries and granola.  Again, really good but processed food instead of whole foods.

So, that's pretty much what I ate last week.  I did loose weight and I did really enjoy all those soy processed foods.  But, for the coming week I've done a much better job of buying whole foods.  I'll post about that next.

I don't think there's anything wrong with consuming soy products and if I were at a healthy weight I would include them in my vegetarian diet.  I still have a lot of weight to loose, so I'm being very strict.  Once I reach my goal weight I'll probably add a few soy products and nuts/seeds back, but for only occasional use because of the calories and fat content.