My Story

I have been a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints all my life.  I have always tried to live  The Word of Wisdom in varying degrees, and I've been blessed with good health as a result of it.  I've never been perfect at it, and I go through periods, around holidays, typically, where I'll binge out on sugar and chocolate, but eventually I'll come to my senses and try to do better for a time.  For the past 18 years or so, I have tried to serve my family meals that mostly followed a plant-based theme, using the occasional meat that we eat more like a condiment, than as the center of the plate.  I wasn't doing something right, though, because the past few years I had started putting on weight, until I had gained an extra 10 lbs, which probably put me about 20 lbs. over what I really needed to be. I made some half-hearted attempts to try to lose the excess pounds, but protein drinks just clogged my plumbing, and eating less just kept me hungry so I'd make up for it when I finally did eat.  I was also doing a lot of snacking while reading and studying, which I do a lot.
    At the end of 2011, some of my friends on Facebook were talking about doing a Biggest Loser contest, and for some reason I got it into my head that maybe it would give me some motivation to try to lose the weight I was hanging onto.  We started the contest the first of January.  My strategy was to just watch how many calories I ate, just trying to eat as healthy as I knew how most of the time.  That worked pretty well, and I started to lose some weight.  During this time, I started to read books on weight loss and health to see if I could get any great ideas on losing the weight faster.  In the back of my mind was the idea that I should just follow The Word of Wisdom, but I thought I was already doing that pretty well, and it hadn't made much difference. Or so I thought.
     One of the doctors whose work I started following was Dr. John McDougall.  I had read some of his books many years ago and had been impressed at that time with the research he had done, and the results he had seen with his patients, when he put them on a plant-based diet.  In recent years, he had been lecturing about centering our diet on starches and claimed to get really great results when his patients would center their meals around starches (grains, potatoes, and beans), and then add fruits and vegetables on top of that.  This kind of flies in the face of a lot of the current trends in diets, where they try to tell us that carbs are bad for us.  Starches are carbs, of course.  I decided to try it for awhile, just for fun, and see what happened.  Amazingly enough (to me), the weight really started coming off, and it seemed that the more starches I ate, the faster it came off.  I wasn't hungry, because they kept me feeling full longer, and this also made it so that I didn't crave chocolate or other things that I might normally snack on.
       I got really excited about this, and wanted to share the information with my friends at church, so I asked if I could teach a class on diet and health.  I believed that what I was doing was in keeping with The Word of Wisdom, so rather than push the starch idea, my plan was just to teach what The Word of Wisdom said.  When I started going through it, verse by verse, I was surprised to see that it actually is a starch-based diet, actually emphasizing grains as the "staff of life," or the center of the diet.  I realized that Dr. Mcdougall had nailed it right on the head, and that the reason I was seeing the results I was seeing, is because I was doing what the Lord had told us to do through revelation to one of his prophets.  My weight now, after nearly 5 months of eating this way, has pretty much stabilized after losing 20-22 lbs.  I feel great, and none of my clothes fit any more (a delicious dilemma, I call it).   See the next post for the power point presentation to understand what The Word of Wisdom teaches, and to get some ideas for implementing it.