Lifestyle
My Low Carb Vegan Journey
origins of my cookbook research project
I am a Doctor, But…
While I have a PhD, my research was in interdisciplinary technology design, not in health, medicine or nutrition. Nothing in this volume should be construed as professional advice in these areas of specialist expertise.
While I have done a lot of my own academic journal reading on topics related to the overall nutritional approach of these recipes using my general PhD skills, the recipes in this volume are derived primarily from my everyday eating habits based on my own history of personal goals around weight loss, weight maintenance, caloric restriction and practical veganism.
If you are interested in gluten free eating, you will find plenty here that does not contain gluten. If you are allergic to nuts, please don’t eat them even if my recipe includes them. Ultimately, you are responsible for what you eat, and I am just sharing my own opinions and experiences in these pages.
If you have health concerns about a low carb vegan diet, please consult with your own doctor because I am certainly not that kind of doctor, and I do not pretend to be. I have turned my kitchen into an informal food lab, and this book is an output of that personal research of mine.
Origins of this Book
Do a YouTube search on “Pixelphonics — Interview with Michael Filimowicz” (my legal name, Mike Ludo being a pen name :) and you’ll see me during my attendance at the Future Technologies academic conference talking on camera while weighing 350 pounds.
You wouldn’t know from this video clips that at the time, I was regularly lifting weights, doing hot yoga, running on my elliptical machine at home, going on long hikes in the Vancouver area mountains, eating whole (unprocessed) foods, and in general, doing quite a lot of things that one is ‘supposed to do’ to be healthy!
And yet clearly, I was not healthy. This was probably the busiest time of my professional life: I was teaching full time, working overtime as an administrator in dual roles (associate dean and program director at my university), and enrolled in a PhD program, courtesy of the tuition waiver job perk.
I thought I was being very clever in my diet, for example by going to a specialty meat store to get locally sourced organic wild game meats, eating plenty of fruits and whole grain breads, and eating eggs from free running chickens. I ate plenty of fish, which is a great dietary source of daily industrial heavy metals. And of course, my ratio of white to red meat consumption was almost saintly, or at least what all the corporate marketing said it should be. I blamed my busy schedule and genes (both my parents were obese) for my body weight.
A blood test checkup revealed that I was becoming prediabetic. Both an uncle and a grandmother were also diabetic, so I went immediately onto a low carb diet that was very similar to the South Beach Phase 1 plan that I had had some success with a decade earlier. After about a year on my new routine, I lost 70 pounds and had reversed most of what was starting to become troubling in my blood work (fatty liver, blood sugar etc.), but my cholesterol hadn’t improved much.
My father had several heart attacks, and a grandfather died of sudden cardiac arrest while mowing the lawn one day, so I have always been concerned about my cardiovascular health, for instance by doing stress tests on treadmills in hospitals every few years, just to make sure that all was more or less ok, at least according to the electrodes!
As an experiment, I cut my egg consumption in half, for instance by eating one instead of two eggs every time I included them in a meal. After a year, my cholesterol levels had much improved (no red flags!), but I still saw plenty of room for improvement. This is when I decided to go completely vegan in my diet, since clearly animal products were still causing potential issues with my health, despite now being at a much more normal body weight.
I had been vegan and vegetarian during some of my years in grad school in the 1990s (my Masters, not the PhD), but I gained a lot of weight on those diets, because of the high carb content form beans, rice, pasta, bread, and potatoes, so I gave up on plant-based diets because I gained too much weight on them. I went back to a diet that included meat and dairy, in order to lose weight, actually!
There was a time in my youth, from around 14 to 19 years old, when I was very slim — I still remember my waist size for jeans was 32” — a result of running 5 miles a day. In high school, that was relatively easy to do, since there was a rectangular park near my home, Francis Park in South St. Louis, Missouri, that was a mile and a quarter around — do four laps of that, and that’s five miles.
Eventually, though, one has to move out of the house, go to university and that’s where one discovers dorm life, all-you-can-eat buffets on the university meal plan, student friends who save money when going out by sharing pitchers of beer and large pizzas, and, well, so much for running five miles a day!
I had also moved north, first to Des Moines and then to Chicago, where the winters were colder and longer, which, from the standpoint of my fitness routine at the time, meant that the sidewalks I would normally jog on were covered in slippery ice for long stretches of the year.
Not to mention the homework, and that my knees seemed to have sustained some minor injuries from all that daily running, which had produced as a nice side effect not just next-day endorphin highs, but allowed me to eat whatever I want, whenever I want, as much as I want — which the diet in this book also aims for, simply by changing the parameters of what I allow myself to choose from.
This relationship between running everyday and being slim instilled a false sense in me that body weight is proportional to the amount of exercise one does — just run more, bike more, and the pounds will come off!
Well, maybe if running 5 miles a day, or cycling across the country and doing 50 miles a day, but other than extreme routines like that, like most people, I have found that hitting the bikes and treadmills and trails had very little effect on my body’s fat stores. There is an intuition we have, that in order to achieve something, we have to do something, and so we think: to lose weight (doing something #!), I have to go to the gym (doing something #2).
In reality, we can also do something by not doing something. I actually learned this in my early 20s reading zen philosophy, the idea of No Mind, or hitting the target (the zen of archery) without actually aiming for it. We can lose weight simply by not doing something, which in the context of this book, means to just stop consuming certain kinds of foods.
Lots of body weight can be shed through non-action, so instead of hitting the streets and gyms and trails — the illusion that we need to work very hard to lose weight — if we just stop eating so many carbs (and unhealthy fats), the weight will just come off and it will seem like we lost weight by doing nothing at all!
I have also experienced unexpected health benefits from a low carb diet, such as the total disappearance of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) which I developed as an undergrad during those long hours studying in the coffee shops. For decades, I was popping antacids — some over the counter, some prescribed — and was always told by my doctors to lay off the coffee, tomatoes and citrus.
None of those MDs told me to lay off the carbs! But voilà, just cutting out the bread, potatoes, rice and pasta made my heartburn go away, and no amount of coffee drinking or tomato eating has brought it back. It’s often the case that you can’t trust the doctors too much, because their training is so narrowly specialized. General practitioners aren’t trained well in nutrition, and nutritionists aren’t trained well in medicine.
Additionally, you have the collusion between Big Pharma — producing all the drugs to treat lifestyle diseases — the Corporate Food Giants, who lobby the politicians to protect their junk food industries — and a political system that sends politicians into the arms of Big Pharma and the Corporate Food Giants in search of campaign funds.
Thus, modern societies’ health outcomes are a disaster, and it doesn’t help that medicine and nutrition are siloed professionally, or that doctors are paid to dispense lifestyle disease treating drugs to their patients as a marketing practice. Ultimately, ‘we the people’ have to take things into our own hands as much as possible, especially when it comes to diet, because hell if governments or involved professional organizations will help us much.
So I have returned to a purely plant-based diet in my early 50s, having learned my nutritional lessons ‘the hard way’ as they say, understanding some of the pitfalls of vegan and vegetarian diets — how their high carb count can thwart one’s health and body weight goals — and the limitations of all the so-called ‘healthy’ choices when it comes to consuming animal products.
There is plenty of research that suggests the body has rather impressive capabilities of healing itself if only given a decent chance, and the longer I am on the low carb vegan diet described in this book, the more I continue to see improvements on a range of health markers.In this book I am sharing what works for me, and of course everyone’s body is different. There are no claims to anything scientific or authoritative in the recipes that follow. This project is entirely based on understanding my own experiences with food and shaping a routine that works for me.
But I am also sure that it will work for many others as well, since while nutrition can be confusing due to all the contradictory information that keeps hitting our news feeds — where what was bad for you yesterday is healthy for you today and will become bad for you again tomorrow — I don’t delve deeply into the latest and trendiest research, and instead stick to general practical principles that anyone can grasp and apply. And so, in the following pages, I have aimed for a well-rounded collection of easy to follow recipes that serve the purposes of everyday eating on a low carb vegan diet.
