I need to go to the grocery store and try to load up on veggies. We get the California blend and it’s about $4 for two lbs and doesn’t last long in our house. I struggle to get a variety of veggies.
Our monthly grocery budget is already $900 for two adults, a 4 year old, and almost 1 year old. If I stop buying the cheap chicken then I’ll have about $80 a month to use on plant based stuff.
The hard part is going to be replacing all that protein. I’m hesitant to get the bulk of my protein from protein powders.
Hey man, sorry I missed the boat on the cholesterol question, busy weekend! Thanks as always for tagging me! Seems like you’ve got things figured out.
Just my thoughts, I don’t think you necessarily need to get the bulk of your protein from supplements. I may have missed this, how many meals a day do you usually eat? If we go with the 6 meal approach, you need ~40g of protein per feeding, nothing wrong with two of those coming from protein powder, provided of course it’s high quality protein. Or, however many meals you get, you could get 150-160g protein from solid foods, and the rest from protein powder. Just for comparison, I get 200g protein a day between 6 meals, 2 of those are from Metabolic Drive; my pre workout meal of oats, PB and whey, and then pre bed of either cottage cheese, PB and whey, or a protein shake in the blender. 2 scoops of protein is an easy 40-50g, definitely nothing wrong with getting 80-100g of protein a day from high quality powder.
Non-meat sources of protein I like egg whites, easy to digest and affordable, I get the cartons of liquid egg whites. Black bean pasta/black beans also a great source of protein and fiber, one serving of black bean pasta has 25g protein. Plain greek yogurt, cottage cheese also great.
Good recommendations here to start taking a good fish oil, and definitely increase veggie intake as well. [quote=“Frank_C, post:382, topic:228202”]
He went 95% plant based, lost like 60 pounds from it, and fixed his problem.
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I would imagine that this was largely a consequence of him just cleaning up his diet and not eating as much crap, and not as much from specifically going plant based.
I would recommend reading more about the connection between carbs - especially refined ones - and serum cholesterol.
Anecdotally, I’ve eaten a moderate protein, high animal fat diet for nearly 6 years and my total chol hovers around 170. My overall carbs are never>100 grams per day if averaged over the course of a week and I’ve had extended periods of 0 - 50 net carbs per day. I’m not evangelizing, merely pointing out that there are many ways to skin the high cholesterol cat and that you’re going to need to do some experimenting to find out what works for you.
Given your current goals, if I were you I’d continue the way you eat right now or even bump up the carbs and remeasure your chol in 90 days (privatemdlabsdotcom $69). If you Tchol stays the same or increases, reduce carbs by half and replace the cals with high quality meat sources. Then retest after another 90 days.If Tchol goes down, either continue what you’re doing or you could try halving your carbs again. if chol goes up, try reducing your pro/fat intake and increasing high quality carbs. As an aside, half of Americans “vegetable” intake comes from potatoes. Better choices would be leafy greens, etc.
It took me a year of testing like this to determine that I wasn’t being well served by carbs.
That’s what I assume as well. I tried staying at 100g of carbs per day and ended up in a deficit because I couldn’t figure out what to eat to replace my usual carbs.
And thanks for the other input. I have cottage cheese in the fridge now and typically eat 2 cups of it for 50 or so grams of protein in the evenings. I love eggs as well, especially the yoke, so cutting that out would be disappointing but doable. I guess I won’t be eating as many anyway if I fear it’ll affect my cholesterol.
The baffling thing is that I’ve never even been close to high cholesterol. I get tested once a year as part of my annual physical and these results are a shock. I’m hoping it’s a fluke but I can’t say that I threw off the numbers by having a bad week leading up to the test so I’m not counting on that.
This is a new thought for me and I’ll look into it. I have my appointment with the Doc in a couple weeks and I’m sure she’ll have something to say about the cause.
I’m actually hoping it’s becuase of all the meat I eat or something else that’s part of my regular diet. If it’s not then it would mean it’s a little more out of my control and I don’t like the thought of that. If it’s something I’ve done to myself then I can make changes and fix it. That’s easy compared to an actual medical or genetic condition.
I didn’t make it to the gym for the second half of my workout. I was tired and never took a lunch break at work. My afternoon was taken up by a felony DV case. I didn’t miss much, mostly my direct deltoid work but I did close grip incline press in the morning which hits the delts plenty. I’ll survive.
Today is a planned rest day and that’s a good thing because I don’t have much energy. I think three nights in a row of 6 or less hours of sleep finally caught up with me.
I was just reading a few articles on T-Nation about the health benefits of tree nuts: reducing cholesterol levels, weight control, heart health, reducing chances of colon cancer… Although peanut butter is insanely delicious, it’s not a tree nut and doesn’t provide the same benefits. Perhaps my fellow PB loving friends (@littlesleeper) may want to consider making the swap!
I’m no doctor, but I don’t think you’d have to cut them out totally, maybe not as many whole eggs as you might usually have if you want to cut back. I usually have a cup of egg whites with breakfast, lunch is 3 whole eggs and a chicken sausage every day. Especially if you’ve never had high cholesterol before, it could just be a temporary thing your body is reacting to, or you could have had a higher than usual amount of cholesterol just at the time you were tested. Just throwing my thoughts out there, if it were me I’d make some small tweaks to the diet but wouldn’t overhaul just yet, and would get it checked again in a month or two. Maybe lessen the whole eggs but I don’t know if you need to cut them totally out, they’re healthy and delicious!
I’m not throwing anything out yet! I’m just taking it down a notch. For awhile I got into the habit of eating egg sandwiches for my brunch on my days off. I scramble six whole eggs and split them up into two piles that kind of match the shape of my bread and then melt cheap, processed pepperjack cheese slices on them. I sandwich my eggs between two pieces of toasted bread. Two sandwiches per day Mon-Wed. I don’t think that’s hurting me.
If anything in my diet has been detrimental then it has to be the increased meat consumption. I’ve been eating a 1/3 lb pepperjack cheeseburger, 12-18 ounces of chicken, and pasta with meat sauce during most of my work days. Those are split up into three meals/snacks, but I think my diet has drifted towards a split of about 80/20% meat/veggies. I’ve been getting close to 250g of protein every day and that’s with food most days. I also eat another chunk of meat at night with dinner.
My wife is vegan so I can easily just ask her to buy more tofu, tempeh, and veggies and add that while decreasing my meat consumption. I don’t have a problem with that. I’ll probably add some nuts back into the mix now that I can afford the calories. I’m not a huge fan of them when I’m restricted since they’re so calorie dense.
@jamie1888@littlesleeper if you can show me a nut based butter or spread that comes in the same form as peanut butter and tastes anything close to it then I’m all in! But until then… peanut butter stays.
This stuff is incredible, creamy and smooth like PB, and tastes amazing. Little expensive, but on par with other almond and non-peanut based nut butters.
I didn’t have any meat yesterday. I didn’t start out the day with that plan. I saved my pasta with meat sauce for later in the day and then just decided not to eat it. My wife made rice and tofu so we threw in some black beans and salsa and had a Mexican dish for dinner. As you can see I ate plenty of protein but I had four servings of protein powder. That was accidental too. I had two scoops to start the day. I came home for a lunch break and ate veggies, hummus, and a 4.5 ounce chunk of colbyjack cheese. I decided to have another protein shake because I was only at about 100g for the day. Before I finished up my work day I stopped by the supplement store to see what they had in terms of vegan protein. I bought one to try out so of course I had to have a scoop when I got home to see if it was going to be terrible or not. That powder is partially for me but mostly for my wife. She finally admitted that she might need some more protein in her diet. At the very least I can have her put it in her vegan pancake recipe.
Today’s my first day off of the week so I plan to spend plenty of time working out. Deadlifts and other pulling movements, conditioning, and abs. We’re supposed to be getting the leaky air conditioning unit replaced today so that might throw a wrinkle in my usual routine but I’ll still get everything in at some point.
I see the rest is 2-3 minutes between alternating sets. That’s an eternity for me. And it would send me to a total body 5/3/1 program. That’s not awful but I always get in my own head about making everything an equal priority and it’s tough to do work only 3 days a week.
But now would be a good time because I’m canning most of my leg training. I’m keeping deads and pulls but I’m going to try box squats instead of front squats, lunges, and split squat. Unfortunately going to full depth is hurting my hip so I’m hoping the box will help.
I don’t usually do the rest when I superset - I used to, but not any more. Although, I do it for size rather than strength, and I like the pump I get from it. I also push the rest periods down because I default to being a GD snail and that irritates me.
During most of my supersets or combo sets I usually do exercise A, then B, then rest 1 minute and repeat.
For clarity on how I use my terms:
Superset–combining exercises that hit the same muscles
Combo set–combining exercises that hit different muscles such as antagonist or upper/lower training.
I think I’m guilty of misusing a lot of the -set terms. Pretty sure my bis/tris stuff are actually giant sets because I don’t rest between the bis and tris. I guess technically they’re giant combination sets, but I’m less than concerned about how I refer to them most of the time. Then I alternate set pull aparts and bench during my warm-ups, same as face pulls and squats or DL and pull-ups.
