Down 20 Pounds in 3 Months with 2 Simple Changes
I've lost 20 pounds of weight in just over 3 months... and I’m still dropping. Never before in my life have I achieved this kind of weight loss—and with so little effort, at that.
I accomplished this feat without counting calories (which I've done before), without restricting food intake (also tried), and without starting a training plan or increasing my training load (also tried that, and had the most success previously with this approach). I only made 2 simple changes:
I cut alcohol (but I still drink NA beers).
I started eating a whole foods plant-based diet.
The Back Story
I began cutting my alcohol consumption due to a simple mathematical reality. I realized that there was no possible way I could out-ride the number of calories that I was drinking in beer.
As I began that journey, I stumbled into reading Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself by Rich Roll, and it kind of rocked my world. Well, "stumbled" is the wrong word, as it was a recommendation by the one and only Joerg Steinbach. Joerg has hands-down the best book recommendations—the first book I read from him was the absolutely fantastic tome, The Comfort Crisis, so I basically just read whatever he tells me to at this point.
Finding Ultra was the third book recommendation from Joerg that I've read, and it forced me to ask myself: "What if I've been wrong about what I've believed about nutrition and food my entire life? What if the 'standard wisdom' and so-called 'norms' just aren’t true?"
So I had to give it a shot.
The Experiment
When Christine got home from a trip, I convinced her to try a plant-based diet with me as an experiment. (I say "convinced," but she was more shocked than anything that I wanted to give it a go.)
Durango, Colorado. Photo: Greg Heil
While my weight is down over the past three months, my speed on the bike is through the roof—I'm riding faster than I have in a decade. I've been able to ride 7 days in a row without a problem (haven't done that in years), and my energy levels have been fantastic. Day-to-day energy has been high, and I've been enjoying longer sustained energy later into the day. In fact, my energy is so high that I've had to quit caffeine as it was making me overstimulated and jittery (I still drink decaf coffee).
Over the same 3-month time period, my stress levels are markedly down. Stress is negatively impacted/raised by all three of these things—meat consumption, alcohol consumption, and caffeine consumption. Happiness and well-being are way up as a result.
Despite these changes in our diet, we've still been able to prepare and eat fucking delicious food! And food that has all the nutrients we need—including protein. In fact, we had been cooking one 4-serving plant-based meal per week for the past year and a half, and I think that experience gave us confidence that we could switch the rest of our meals to be plant-based and still enjoy the hell out of food. That turned out to be true.
I haven't been able to find one single downside over the past three months of this experiment... well, except for some negative peer pressure to conform to what everybody else is doing. Thankfully, I've been training myself to make my own countercultural decisions in spite of such peer pressure my entire life.
I was raised on meat, dairy, and fried food in the heart of Wisconsin dairy country—and it took me 17 years to slowly unwind and unlearn that indoctrination. The final unlearning happened all in a rush, and I'm so glad it finally has.
I'm not here to tell you what to do.
I'm not writing this to tell you what you should or should not do. I'm only sharing my experience over the past three months of life. In fact, I’m writing this to say "I was WRONG." It turns out that I’ve been wrong about a great many things in life, to the point where I now frequently ask myself, “what if I’m wrong about this?”
When I discover ways I was wrong (usually quite a painful process), or I stumble onto new information that has the potential to have a massive positive impact on one's life, it kind of feels selfish to keep it to myself—so I'm choosing to share it with you (if you’ve read this far). Maybe these diet changes could have a massive positive impact for you as well?
More Information
For more information, I'm currently working my way through How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease by Michael Greger MD (the 4th book Joerg has recommended). It's a much thicker volume, but the scientific analysis and documentation is fastidious. Thankfully, it is tempered by a good dose of humor.
If you're interested in learning more, I recommend starting with Finding Ultra before moving on to the scientific deep dive in How Not to Die. If movies are more your thing, the documentary The Game Changers is a good starting point, although it’s naturally much more limited in its analysis than a book.
I still don’t know everything there is to know about being a plant-based athlete. Even so, this experiment has shown me that a plant-based diet has massive potential to change my life, so Christine and I are taking this experiment and making it permanent.
Even though I've been experimenting with imperfect and incomplete knowledge, I think it's so important to be willing to step out on a limb and try something new without knowing it all. Too often, people will postpone action until they think they know enough to make a change. I know I've been guilty of this.
News flash: you'll never know enough. You'll never know it all. It's so much more important to experiment with new things while being willing to course-correct along the way—or even backtrack. Changing my diet is just the latest way I've embodied this philosophy in my own life, and I'm so glad I went way out of my comfort zone to give it a shot.
