The Starch Solution for losing weight.

Happyflowerlady

Happyflowerlady

Vagabond Flowerchild
Location
Northern Alabama
It has been cold all winter, and I have stayed huddled up to my little electric heater all day long, trying to keep warm, and managed to gain another 20 lbs over what I was last summer. (Already WAY to much !)

Somehow, I came across Dr. McDougall and his book called The Starch Solution.
I decided that it was worth trying for a week, although I have spent at least the last 50 years believing that eating potatoes makes you fat.
I had no other alternatives that I thought might work, and a huge list of ones that I tried and it didn’t work.

I was tired of starving myself, and the idea of eating anytime I wanted food sounded really good to me, even though I couldn’t see how that could ever work. I knew that unless you felt hungry 24/7, you would not lose weight, and even that was not guaranteed.

I lived on mostly potatoes and salads for the first week, and it was not nearly as hard as I thought it would be. At the end of the week, all of my arthritis pain was gone..... an unexpected surprise ! I can actually clench my hands again, even.
Plus, I lost a couple of pounds.
So, I decided to try another week, and bought more of the ebooks and watched more youtube videos and joined some Facebook groups for both potato diet and starch solution weight loss diet.

It has not been a whole month yet, and I have lost about 7-8 lbs, and I NEVER feel hungry !
I am a 76 year old lady who has heart failure, and had about given up that anything would ever work for me, especially with limited physical ability now.

I am actually looking forward to my morning potatoes, which still mystifies and amazes me, but it is true. I am not tired of them at all.
I can wear jeans again for the first time since last summer.
Life is good !
 

There are a lot of youtube videos about having a starch based diet, as well as what is called the Potato Diet. Both seem to work really well, and I eat mostly potatoes every day, with lots of greens and non-starchy vegetables.
Sometimes, I have oatmeal or rice, but since everything is working with potatoes, and I did not get tired of eating them (Like I thought I would do), I have been sticking with the potatoes.
Andrew “Spudfit” Taylor (from the potato diet) says we should make our food boring and our life interesting, so that is another thing that keeps me on potatoes.
I have never overeaten on cold steamed potatoes, so I am learning to eat when my body wants some food, and not because something looks or smells wonderful.

 

@Happyflowerlady,I'm glad the starch diet is working for you. Maybe the large amount of potassium in the potatoes has something to do with helping the pain.
On occasion I have gone on the rice diet. At one time, I'm not sure if it is still open, there was a place in the south called the rice house. It was very expensive but people would go there to get pampered, eat all sorts of exotic rice and lose weight.
They had the diet on line which I followed for awhile and I did loose a few pounds but quit because I got tiered just eating rice.
I wish you luck and hope you continue to lose weight.
I'm wondering if you are getting all the proper nutrition you need just from potatoes and salad?
 
hollydolly said:
But, but, HFL....how can we eat taters without butter ? :cry:...i badly need to lose weight now too..
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I totally agree with you, Holly ! I have always one of those people who ate the baked potato in order to have the butter and sour cream, and bacon bits and shredded cheese on top. When I was doing low carb, I could have all of those toppings, but not the baked potato, so I put them on things like cauliflower, but that was just not the same , either.
I didn’t believe that a starch diet could possibly work when I tried it, and was sure that I would be tired of potatoes long before my trial week was up.

I bought some (resistant starch) potato starch, and make gravy with that, some soy sauce and a little boullion, and put that on my potatoes and greens, and it is pretty darn good !
I still miss mayonnaise, but I have been looking at the youtube videos for fat-free mayo and hoping to come up with something that works as a substitute for using in salad dressings.
I made one from tofu, and it is not bad once there are seasonings and some vinegar mixed in, but it is totally not like mayo.

Nonetheless, my goal is to find an eating plan where I can lose weight and not have to limit so many healthy foods like I did with low carb (no fruits or starchy veggies EVER), and not starving like I do with the OMAD diet.
I lost weight on both of those, and then gained it all back and more, once I stopped forcing myself to eat that way. It is still too early to see how this one goes, but it is healthy, I feel good, have more energy, walking more, and do not feel hungry or denied.

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Glad this is working well for you, HFL. Please keep us updated on your progress!

I looked it up an found The Starch Solution is a version of a low-fat, vegan, plant-based diet, which I've followed fairly closely for the past 7 years.
The major difference between this eating plan and most other whole-food plant-based low-fat diets is McDougall's heavier emphasis on starchy vegetables.

The first year I lost the 20-25 lbs. that I'd gained from taking anti-depressants and getting older, and have had little maintained my weight ever since. I do eat some sweets every day :cool:, and will occasionally have something with cheese or a little fish, but more than 95% of my average calorie intake falls within WFPB guidelines.

McDougall's advice in a nutshell:
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Dr. McDougall has two basic eating plans. The starch solution is for someone who wants to be healthy, and maybe needs to lose a little weight. He also has what he calls the Maximum Weight Loss plan for people like me who need to lose more than just a few pounds. It is similar, but suggests eating half starchy foods and half greens and non-starchy veggies, some fruit, and no seeds, and nuts, until you have lost the weight, and then you can add those back into the eating plan.

I am walking more and have set a goal to try and close all the rings on my Apple Watch and walk 3 miles each day. I want to fit back into my bathing suit so I can go swimming once it warms up this spring.
The fitness center still has the pool open, but not the hot tub or steam room, so after swimming for an hour, I was freezing afterwards, and a quick shower just was not the same as a good soak in the hot tub.
Hopefully, it will get warmer soon, and we can start going back to the fitness center.
 
I have now lost around 15 lbs, and can fit into my swimming suit comfortably again, so we are going to start going back to the fitness center again, probably will start back today !
This is the easiest diet that I have ever done, and it is still hard to believe that I can eat all of this potatoes, sweet potatoes, and rice, and still be losing weight, even though I do not feel hungry.
I can have sushi with the starch diet, so I got a little sushi making device, and am going to teach myself how to make vegan sushi next.

I downloaded a diet tracker app called “Lose It”, and am using that. It keeps track of my calories, carbs, protein, and fats, plus how many vitamins and minerals are in the foods that I am eating. Even though I am not counting calories, I like having the charts that show how I am doing.
Here is an example of one of the graphs that comes with the Lose It app.

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Congratulations and Well Done @Happyflowerlady!

Just over the past two weeks I've been rereading some of the books that started me on WFPB eating and returning to a more rigorous version of WFPB.

A bit more oil snuck it's way into my diet, and I've also been eating chocolate and other sweets every day. While my scale hadn't yet noticed, my arteries surely did. Seeing your post is another great reminder of how well my body runs on a whole food plant based diet.

I think I need to find some new cookbooks... have you tried any that you like well enough to recommend?
 
I belong to bookgorilla.com, and they send me lists everyday of cookbooks that Amazon has either free or on sale that day. So when I see something interesting, then I add it to my kindle library while it is free.
I actually have not been trying to make any special recipes though, at least for right now, because I am trying to retrain my mind and body to eat food because I am hungry and not because there is food that looks or smells good.
What the advice was, is to “make your food boring and your life interesting “, and that makes sense to me. When I just have the same foods over and over, then I am way less apt to want to eat something just to be eating it.

My usual breakfast is a baked potato and steamed cabbage or other veggie, and it suits me fine because i am hungry in the morning. Lunch might be another potato, but with a salad, and sometimes, I have rice with stirfry (steamed) veggies. Now, I will be adding more of the rice with sushi.
On weekends, I relax a little, and have fruit if I want it, and if we go to the Chinese restaurant, then I have rice and veggies, and stay away from all of the greasy deep-fried foods.

Amazingly, I have found that I don’t really miss all of those foods that I was eating before , like meat, cheese, and cream in my morning coffee.
I don’t know how that happened so fast, but I like it.
 
Happyflowerlady said:
What the advice was, is to “make your food boring and your life interesting “, and that makes sense to me. When I just have the same foods over and over, then I am way less apt to want to eat something just to be eating it.
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This is very good advice, isn't it? I hadn't heard it before. My breakfasts likewise tend to be repetitious. I rotate between oatmeal with fruit, vegetable stir fry, soup with a lot of veggies, and leftovers.

I make a lot of meal-sized salads, soups, and lentil or bean based stews.

Thanks for the tip about bookgorilla.com. I just joined. :)
 
I'm very glad you found this food plan is working well for you! @Happyflowerlady
:)

I noticed that it includes legumes, but also the recommendation to not eat seeds or nuts untill you've lost enough weight.
I would personally think some lentils or quinoa, would be a healthy protein addition, but I'm just adding it as an idea.

You know what is working, and as I said, I'm glad for you! :)
 
Kaila said:
I'm very glad you found this food plan is working well for you! @Happyflowerlady
:)

I noticed that it includes legumes, but also the recommendation to not eat seeds or nuts untill you've lost enough weight.
I would personally think some lentils or quinoa, would be a healthy protein addition, but I'm just adding it as an idea.

You know what is working, and as I said, I'm glad for you! :)
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I do eat legumes, but in smaller quantities , for right now. I like to add garbanzos or dark kidney beans to my salads, and also sometimes add lentils, either cooked or sprouted. Any kind of sprouts are considered a non-starchy vegetable, so adding sprouted lentils or bean sprouts is perfectly fine.
The only seeds that I have are flax seeds and chia seeds, and those are not every day, and in small quantities, so it is not like having peanut butter or something like that.
I am still playing around with this , to fine tune it for what works best for me, so it is still kind of trial and error at this point. As long as I am feeling healthy and still losing weight, that is what is important to me.
 
It finally warmed up enough for us to go back to the fitness center and I can swim while my husband does his strength training for an hour. I noticed that I am wearing out really fast yet, because my body is way out of shape for swimming, but I am still close to a half mile and I feel good after swimming.
I am going to try to do this every other day instead of every day, for a while, until my body gets back into shape for swimming again. I took a nap in the afternoon for the last two days after swimming, which tells me that my body was pretty worn out by the exercise.
My sushi kit arrived, so I tried making sushi today. It was made from brown rice, and didn’t get as sticky as it should have been, but it tasted good, and adds something that I enjoy to my diet.
 
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Happyflowerlady said:
It finally warmed up enough for us to go back to the fitness center and I can swim while my husband does his strength training for an hour. I noticed that I am wearing out really fast yet, because my body is way out of shape for swimming, but I am still close to a half mile and I feel good after swimming.
I am going to try to do this every other day instead of every day, for a while, until my body gets back into shape for swimming again. I took a nap in the afternoon for the last two days after swimming, which tells me that my body was pretty worn out by the exercise.
My sushi kit arrived, so I tried making sushi today. It was made from brown rice, and didn’t get as sticky as it should have been, but it tasted good, and adds something that I enjoy to my diet.
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Please tell me about your sushi kit. Where did you get it? If you bought it online can you furnish a link?

We see my daughter's closest friend (Anne) and her family several times a year. About a month ago, Anne's mother started to feel generally unwell including ear pain, dizziness, nausea and vomiting.

So her husband took her to the ER where she was tested for Covid, then a middle ear infection, but no go. The ER decided to admit her for testing. A day later they narrowed it down to a minor heart issue for which they were going to do an angiogram to remove some tiny something or other on her heart that might cause a stroke.

Don't know if she ever had the angio, but four hours later they scheduled her for triple bypass surgery. Successful surgery. 14 days in the hospital, and a long recovery ahead at home.

My point, and I do have one, is that she's only a few years older than me and had no major health issues. Her experience was enough to scare me back to healthy eating with no cheats or rationalizing that a little bit won't hurt.

I'm reminding myself that to a senior, "a moment on the lips, forever on the hips" should be rephrased to "a moment on the lips, forever in the arteries."
 
There is a thread in the food section about sushi, and I think I might have put a picture of mine in that thread, @StarSong . In any case, I found it on Amazon, and they have several different kinds of kits on there, besides the one that I got.
I am so sorry to hear about your friend’s mother, too; but glad that the surgery went well.

According to Dr. McDougall, the clogged arteries can be reversed by starting on a plant-based, fat-free eating plan. I will look for the youtube video that shows this and share it if I can find it again.

I definitely recommend buying the Starch Solution book, or at least going to the McDougall website and also his youtube videos. Even when I was eating mostly plant-based, I still was using what I thought was “heart-healthy oil” (like EVO), but Dr. McDougall says we get way too much processed oils, and we should get them from eating the plants that have the oil naturally, like having the olive instead of the olive oil.


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Happyflowerlady said:
There is a thread in the food section about sushi, and I think I might have put a picture of mine in that thread, @StarSong . In any case, I found it on Amazon, and they have several different kinds of kits on there, besides the one that I got.
I am so sorry to hear about your friend’s mother, too; but glad that the surgery went well.

According to Dr. McDougall, the clogged arteries can be reversed by starting on a plant-based, fat-free eating plan. I will look for the youtube video that shows this and share it if I can find it again.

I definitely recommend buying the Starch Solution book, or at least going to the McDougall website and also his youtube videos. Even when I was eating mostly plant-based, I still was using what I thought was “heart-healthy oil” (like EVO), but Dr. McDougall says we get way too much processed oils, and we should get them from eating the plants that have the oil naturally, like having the olive instead of the olive oil.


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Yes, I'm familiar with Dr. McDougall's work and his website, and also Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, who recommends a very similar approach (WFPB, no added fats or oils). These doctors are godsends. I'll check out the food threads. Thanks~!
 
Here is one of the videos that explains how we can get clogged arteries, the different damages they cause, depending on where the clogs are.
Not just heart disease and stroke, but things like degenerative disk disease, ringing in the ears, vertigo, and impotence are all caused by a lack of blood to an area of our bodies.
There is a very graphic picture of the surgeons actually cleaning out someone’s arteries during heart surgery, and it is enough to really make a person think about how important (or unimportant) it is to have that butter and sour cream on our baked potatoes.

 
Thanks for posting this terrific video.

The cardiovascular link to degenerative diseases took me by surprise, especially since I was quite recently diagnosed with some disk degeneration. :eek: It causes me no pain or disability and was only diagnosed because it happened to appear on a lung x-ray.

I spent some time on Dr. McDougall's website after watching this and will continue lurking there. Thanks again.
 
Kaila said:
I'm sorry to hear about your daughter's friend's mom, Starsong.
What an ordeal for her to go through.
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Thank you. I'm so relieved that all went well for her.
It was a huge wake-up call for me - I do not want to have my chest cracked open, or indeed have any kind of surgery. If I can stay healthy by eschewing (so ironic that "chew" is in the center of that word) all animal products plus added fats and oils, that's my preference.
 


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