My husband and I were making great strides on changing our diets to include 51% fruits and vegetables. We were cutting back on meat and avoiding sugar products. Vitamins and fresh vegetable juice were incorporated into our daily nutrition to encourage our cells to process the food properly. Our goal to be healthier was our attempt to ward off heart disease, diabetes or premature old age. We had hoped that with our better choices in food the extra inches surrounding our bodies would begin to wither away, however neither of us lost more than two pounds and no noticeable inches.
Unfortunately the fresh vegetables and vegetable juice was not healthy for my husband. He ended up in the emergency room with two 8mm kidney stones in his left kidney that were trying to move into his bladder. A 4mm stone can pass on it's own albeit with a lot of pain, but anything over that needs to be broken up and removed. Beans, beats, carrots, celery, collards, eggplant, escarole, kale, leeks, okra, parsley, peppers, potatoes, rutabaga, spinach, squash, sweet potatoes, Swiss chard, and zucchini are very high in oxalate which cause the stone to form. And that is just the beginning, soy, nuts, berries, various forms of wheat and chocolate are also on the taboo list. There is no oxalate in meat.
We have now switched back to the low carb diet eating mostly meat; my husband has lost 15 pounds and I have lost five. We are still drinking lots of water to keep everything flowing nicely.
Our commitment to change began after watching the documentaries "Supersize Me", "Food Matters" and "Food Inc", although these three videos cover similar but different topics they all encourage less meat/fat and more organic veggies. We also watched the movie "Fat Head" that takes the opposite approach from the other three. The narrator's goal is to lose weight by eating fast food and to prove that meat and fat are good for you. Of course there are scientist and nutritionist to corroborate his points, the most crucial one is that we are damaging our brain which is made up primarily of fat by eliminating fat and meat from our diet.
Which is right, do we need more meat in our diets to be healthy or virtually none?
Eat healthy, drink lots of water, stay healthy
