I don’t know why, but I’d rather eat veggie burgers in the morning, and cereal and fruit for dessert. I love the Boca “All-American Classics” patties, because they have that savoury liquid smoke flavouring. I pile the burger with onions, tomatoes, avocado, and greens (cabbage seen here). Add a litre of Diet Dr. Pepper, and you have a perfect way to start the day!

When I started my heath programme six months ago, I cut out dairy and limited my animal products to about 150g/week. That’s a pretty low amount, and even if I ate 500g/week of animal products, it’d total to less than 3% of my caloric intake. That’s my rationalisation for adding some eggs back to my diet. The real reason is that I like them in the morning, and they’re easy to make.

I’ve seen studies that show eating 3 eggs/day for a few weeks will increase LDL by more than 10%. I’ll try to keep it down to 2 eggs a week (100g/week).

This happens a lot. You go out for lunch with others, and you figure you’ll order the veggie sandwich. What you get is something else. This is what they call “wheat” bread, but it’s processed, doughy, and what I normally avoid. There’s no real vegetables in the sandwich, just some iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, and onion. There’s cheese instead of something healthy like humus. Oh well, the other options would have been worse, and at least it has calories.

In April, before I started eating whole, plant-based foods, my doctor called to tell me my AST (Aspartate Aminotransferase) and ALT (Alanine Aminotransferase) liver enzyme levels were elevated. They said it was probably related to a fatty liver, which didn’t sound good. I was a little scared about it. I started eating healthy in August. My October numbers were better, but were still high. Today I got my January test results, and they’re all normal!

Woo hoo! In less than 6 months of plant-based eating, I’ve lost 18 kg, and fixed my fatty liver. (Ok, I wasn’t actually diagnosed with fatty liver, but I probably would have developed one on my old fast-food diet.)

I’ve been eating a lot lately, because I’ve been hungry. There was probably 500 calories in this 200g plate of spaghetti. I probably ate another 1000 calories after dinner, but nothing junky.

I’m into buying fresh artisan bread these days. I like a veggie sandwich, because it has all the fibre and nutrients, and the bread is satisfying. I used avocado, humus, tomatoes, red onions, and 100g of bread. It all adds up to about 425 calories.

It’s fun eating lots of bread on a weightloss program. Everyone will tell you bread makes you fat. You hear it so often, you start to believe it. But Europeans didn’t get fat eating bread for hundreds of years. And bread is wonderful. So I ate this 150g half-baguette with dinner, and had two 50g buns with my veggie burgers today. That’s 250g of bread, totaling about 675 calories. That’s nothing.

Last week I was really tired, but still couldn’t sleep (4-6 hr/night). This is rare for me, and I figured something was off. I tried some chicken, and ate more starches, but I still felt crappy. So I channeled my inner hypochondriac, and with the help of Google, self-diagnosed myself with a B-12 deficiency! (See what happens when you only eat 150g/week of meat?!) Unable to sleep in the wee hours, I planned to get a blood B-12 test, and a B-12 injection in the morning.

You can order a B-12 test online at Request-A-Test for $49. You draw the blood at a local clinic, and the next day you get results:

This 370 pg/mL was lower than my target, which should be > 500 pg/mL, according to European and Japanese standards. This NIH cites 200-900 as normal, but says older people can show symptoms of deficiency at < 500 pg/mL.

I felt great after my B-12 injection, and even did back-to-back spin classes this morning. I may do two more classes tomorrow.

I now take a B-12 pill every day. All vegans probably know this already.

I wanted to check out Bread & Cie on 5th Ave today, to buy a loaf of their artisan bread. They had caprese on what looked like whole wheat pizza dough, but turned out to be pastry. Of course, we’re talking about olive oil on cheese on butter, and of course it was good. I would have passed on it if I knew what it was, but I didn’t kick myself over it. I didn’t eat the edges of the pastry. I almost never eat anything like this.

Unless a health-conscious chef puts a vegan-oriented item on the menu, things that “look” healthy really aren’t. Which makes complete sense, because you’re not going to sell much vegetables out of the pasty display case.

For the first half of dinner, I made some fresh salad rolls with chilled Japanese Soba noodles. I think Soba buckwheat noodles are usually served chilled. I added some Ponzu sauce to the noodles, and put them in the fridge while I went to spin. These ingredients made three salad rolls. The fresh basil, mint, and cilantro make the dish. I’ll probably make a veggie burger, then have some Weetabix and fruit for dessert.

BTW, if it isn’t clear, I prefer to eat this way. I’m not force-feeding myself vegetables. I love this stuff. That’s what makes losing weight so easy. I make fresh food, and eat until I’m full. Unlike hyper-palatable junk food, you can’t binge on this stuff.