How I Lost 30 Pounds in 90 Days

hey friends I hope your week is off to a great start today I wanted to do something a little bit different with all of you so it's a new year I know a lot of people are making resolutions to lose weight to eat healthier to live their best life and so I thought it was a good time to talk about my weight loss so you may have noticed I'm that I was a little bit chunky back in June they lost 30 pounds in three months and I never really talked about it I figured it was probably a good time in the new year to address this since some of you may be curious what I did well I am not selling anything I have no affiliate links there are no tools or pills or powders to buy to do what I did that's what I'm gonna cover today in this video it's gonna be kind of a little bit more of a vlog style video it's gonna be a little bit rambling it's gonna be a little bit long I'm gonna take you through my full week meal prep so there will be some recipes in here I'll leave timestamps down below so if you want to just jump ahead to the recipes and cooking tips you can do that I really hope you enjoy this video and without further ado let's get into it so generally I do my meal prep on the weekends when I have more time so whatever day of the week you have the most time this would be a good thing to do so I do have things that need to cook and then I have things that I just need to cut up so I always start with the things I need to cook so that they can kind of work while I'm doing my other stuff so first up I've got sweet potatoes here I'm just gonna stab these with a fork to let them vent and I like to have sweet potatoes cooked and in the refrigerator during the week because I will cut these up and put them on a salad I'll eat them just as a snack if I'm feeling like super hungry between meals cooking sweet potatoes a super basic I don't think that this is new news for really anyone I'm gonna pop it into my toaster oven I've got it preheated to 400 degrees I'm gonna put it in there for like 40 minutes I'm just gonna check to make sure that they're done alright so next up I've got my mushrooms so I eat a ton of mushrooms on this eating program and I started off buying whole like baby portobello mushrooms washing them slicing them cooking them and I found that I just really hated doing that night dreaded it so now I'm buying these pre sliced portobello mushrooms which yes they are more expensive however I cook them and use them so they don't go bad in the refrigerator I mean really like it's cheaper than throwing away food so this I find just taking a little bit of help from the grocery store to slice and pre-prep a few things just makes my life a lot easier and if you make your life easier and it's something that you can stick with I mean it's worth the investment so I've got two containers of these baby portobello mushroom caps they are pre-washed however I don't really like super trust that so I'm just gonna throw them in a colander and give them a quick rinse all right so I've got my mushrooms rinsed off dumping them onto just a kitchen towel so I can dry them off a bit if I see anything that's funky looking like this thing that's obviously like a stem I'm just gonna throw that away sometimes I have to bring in a little paper towel to help get it dryer all right and then I've just got a nonstick skillet so making mushrooms this way was completely new to me whenever I made mushrooms in the past I always put some oil in the pan got it hot and Cicely put the mushrooms in did the whole thing and I thought that you had to use added fat to cook mushrooms turns out you actually don't you can saute it just like this but these will cook down and get super like meaty and delicious over the course of like 20 to 30 minutes so I'm gonna pop these on over like medium medium-high heat I always have a grain cooked in the refrigerator that way I can use it as either like a main component of a dish if I'm doing like a warm meal I could just reheat this if I'm doing salad I'll sprinkle some farro over the top I like that it's a little bit chewy it's got kind of that nutty flavor you could use quinoa you could use rice any sort of unprocessed green is totally fine farro is really easy to cook if you've never made it before there are directions on the back of the package and you don't want to follow them this is something I learned from Chris Morocco I think it was an Instagram story but basically you can just put your farro however much you want to cook I usually do about a cup put it into a sieve we're gonna rinse this and then throw it into a pot of water and you cook it kind of like pasta so I'm giving this a really thorough rinsing this just gets off any of the extra starch and then I've got my medium-sized pan here and now you're just gonna fill this up put in as much water as you want so that the farro kind of moves all around so I'm putting this on high heat I'm gonna cover it with a lid and once this comes up to the boil we're gonna drop it down to low all right cool so I've got everything cooking now so that's kind of like the most active part of this and then this is like super relaxing just chopping vegetables let's talk about the weight loss what I speak about this diet I'm talking about my personal experience I am NOT a medical professional I'm not prescribing this to you to treat or prevent any illnesses if you want to know whether this diet is right for you or safe for you you should talk to your medical professional I've never really had a major issue with my weight I've always kind of bobbed up and down but what I weigh currently was kind of like my happy like adult weight I had gotten a little bit kind of fluffy earlier in 2019 and I didn't know whether it was like work stress or like I was just eating too much with my channel and all these recipes that I test are like what the deal was but for whatever reason I had ballooned up and I was like 30 35 pounds over my normal weight and it wasn't like my favorite thing in the world to kind of have all my clothes fitting tightly and be really uncomfortable so initially I figured okay I'm just gonna track my calories I was eating salads for lunch I was having you know sensible dinners green smoothies for breakfast it really wasn't like I was out of control like binging on food all the time and for whatever reason I just could not get the weight to come off so the first six months of this year I ran two half marathons I was eating you know what I thought was a healthful diet and I just wasn't really making any progress in losing weight my sister told me about this book called eat to live which is I guess it's called a nutri terian diet it is a vegan diet though I don't really think of myself as vegan because I you know occasionally will eat animal products I guess the terminology that I prefer to for myself is like a plant-based diet and I don't think of it as a diet in the kind of traditional sense of like a diet like you're going on a diet I mean it more as a diet is like this is how I eat so it's like a way of eating it's a lifestyle it's not like a thing that you do for like a short term though you can get some pretty surprising short-term results so I got the book I read it in like two days it's like a quick read there's a lot of like sciency stuff that's you know maybe questionable like I'm not saying that this book is flawless but the principle here is basically eat your vegetables don't eat processed foods and animal products like specifically like arian cheese is like the big no-no in this book animal milk is meant for like animals right it's not for people I think that this is something that everyone kind of gets whether you agree or not like you understand the thought process so the book made sense to me and so I was like okay I'm gonna like to jump in here and just see what I can do and basically the book said go really like hard on this diet for the first six weeks just to see how like powerful it is to eat this way and then if after six weeks you're like whatever I don't want to eat this strictly like there's flexibility it's it's meant to be like a lifelong way of eating so you don't have to follow like a rigorous set of rules so essentially what I did for six weeks is in the morning I had a green smoothie that's the one that I've shared previously I'll link it here so you can check that out if you want to lunch time I would take in a salad to the office and I was taking it in because I needed a huge salad so my office had the cafeteria downstairs worth like a salad bar but to make the salad the way that I needed it was like $15 for a lunch salad versus like if I just brought it from home so I packed a lunch every single day I would eat an entire plastic clamshell container of baby kale and then on top of that I would just go to town with every vegetable that I liked I would load it up I'd have a little bit of like a nut or seed I would always have some sort of fruit on there and that would be my lunch and then I would get home and dinner again was a gigantic salad so it was green smoothie for breakfast tons of vegetables lunch gigantic salad tons of vegetables dinner gigantic salad tons of vegetables and then no snacking after dinner so it was three meals compose completely of vegetables no animal products no snacking no alcohol no coffee so I followed that for a full three months and that's how I lost the thirty pounds but that's all you're interested in I will see you later if you want to stick around and we can shop more that sounds fun so bell peppers ie peppers all the time I love how they taste normally I just use them as a salad topping and I found a cool trick for prepping them so I turn them on their side I cut off the top I'm not super like particular about how much I cut off spin it around cut off the other end and then I go down and I just cut through the center here and then you can pop out kind of that little seed pouch bit get the membranes out of there if there's any like extra membrane I just run the knife in and kind of take that off and then with that done I just do kind of quarter inch slices and they just rotate the pepper as I do the cuts and then I rotate these onto their side and normally do like two passes and I just cut them into kind of 1 centimeter by 1 centimeter pieces and this way they're like perfect for salad toppings if you want to cook these and have like a you know like a fried rice or something like that this would work well there as well it was news to me cutting a pepper this way I always used to kind of just like putz around and cut the stem out and try to be really like Precious about getting the pepper broken down and it was so time-consuming and then I don't remember how I came across this it was may be a YouTube video or Google or something regardless it's super super efficient and now it's like my favorite method to do and just so you can see the mushrooms are already releasing some of their liquid you can see that they're kind of cooking down a little bit they're not nearly there yet but this is just kind of a work in progress yeah so the I mean the diet it's super basic it's really kind of logical to me it's like eat real food you know give your body what it needs to fuel itself and it wasn't surprisingly as difficult as I thought it would be obviously like there's some kind of you know food addiction that comes into play where it's you know like I love sweets obviously if you have been on the channel for a while you know that I love desserts it's like my favorite thing so it was kind of hard to you know give that up however as you are eating better you feel better and it just kind of you know helps you keep going I did find that it was actually harder for other people to deal with my being on this way of eating and it was actually for myself to be doing it so like my co-workers were always like oh you know every time we eat lunch together it was like a isn't it so hard don't you miss XYZ as long as you're kind of prepared for that and you know you don't let it make you kind of question what your do you'll be ok with it it was surprising to me how interested people were everyone wants to know like oh how are you getting your protein aren't you like starving between meals but how can you be running and you're not eating like tons of pasta you know what I mean that's kind of like those questions where it's like you get the same five questions over and over again and so once you kind of get used to answering those questions it's not really you know that's difficult anymore you kind of get your canned responses for how to deal with people who are asking and then you can just kind of move on with your life alright so my farro is boiling I'm just gonna give this a stir to make sure that nothing's gotten stuck to the bottom and I'm gonna set a timer for thirty minutes the thing that was really interesting though is you know the first probably two weeks on the diet I had lost a bunch of weight and people couldn't really tell yet or they were like you look different but they couldn't really place like oh you've lost like a ton of weight and people I think don't want to ask that either cuz it's kind of like you don't ask a woman if she's pregnant you don't have someone like oh are you losing weight because it's like but what once people started noticing like wow Jeffery is definitely losing weight like this is Amit we can talk about everyone was like what's your secret like how are you doing it and so my answer was always like oh it's super simple like it's called eat to live it's a book you can read it or not you just eat tons of vegetables and Whole Foods you don't eat animal products you don't have sweets and that immediately was like a deal breaker for people which it's so surprising to me that people will be unhappy with their weight and then they see like oh someone's getting really good results and they asked you know how are you doing it and then it's oh I don't want to do that like people want the result of like having you know a dramatic weight loss in a short amount of time but they don't want to make the I guess the the effort or kind of do what's required to get it so I think that's true with like any eating program though you have to commit to it like if you want it it's not hard because this is something that you're doing for yourself if you're just in it for like a quick let loss you know and it's very short-sighted and you're you know if you approach it as I'm gonna do this eating program I'm gonna lose like a bunch of way for like a special event and then afterward I'm just gonna go back to doing what I did like right if you go in with like a temporary mindset I think it makes it harder for you because you're viewing everything is like oh I just have to like get through this if you really view it as I this is the way that I eat now period like this is just my new normal it makes it feel so much more sustainable even though yeah there are still times when it's challenging if you think about it as this is who I am this is what I do there's not that kind of temptation to be like oh okay but I guess I'll just like eat like a ton of ice cream today or like it all so I'm brought in a cake at the office and I'm gonna just like go to town on a cake right like because that's not who you are anymore whereas if you have that mentality of like oh I'm doing this for the next three weeks or I'm doing this for the next you know three months and then I'm gonna go back to eating whatever I want and you know go back to my old ways and you know what I mean like if you treat this like a crash diet I think you're gonna have the results of a crash diet you're not going to be successful in the long term so I think that the the way that you approach it is is the result that you're gonna get another part to being successful with this way of eating is being open to trying new things so obviously we all have foods that we're comfortable with that we know I'm fortunate that you know I do like eating a variety of vegetables that I'm open to try new things from you know I've worked in the restaurant industry as a server for like 10 years then I worked in marketing and product development for a restaurant company for three years so I am open to trying out a lot of different types of foods so that kind of set me up I think for success here if you are kind of closed-minded in the way that you approach you know cooking and putting together recipes I think that's also going to be like a hindrance for you you really need to kind of approach this with a I'm willing to start over from the ground like I have no idea like I have I've zero recipes right like because we grow up and we have like our arsenal of like maybe like a half dozen or a dozen recipes that you make all the time that you're super good at and that you love and now this this way of eating is saying that okay well we don't eat like oil we don't eat salt and more and so it makes it so some of your you know favorite recipes maybe are like outside of what you would eat if you were following this diet like 100% so then you have you have to ask yourself like okay are you going to like take a meal off and say okay you know once a week I'm gonna have you know something that's just completely like not part of this program and I know that going in and I'm at peace I'm not like binging and like having this unhealthy relationship with it it's like a conscious choice ahead of time so it's not like in the moment like oh I'm gonna eat a burrito it's like I'm thinking ahead and saying okay in two weeks I'm going to have a burrito because I'm planning to do that and that's what I'm gonna do I think that the way that you have a relationship with food also matters the book for this eating program it was not expensive was like seven dollars on Amazon or something so it's not a huge investment there are a bunch of recipes in there and it's probably good advice you know for life in general is just be open to trying new things alright and so these mushrooms are done so they are super like cooked down and they've taken on some dark brown color they're not really seeing any more moisture into the pan so I typically just let these hang out in the pan to cool down to about room temperature before putting them in my food storage container so I'll just believe this to sit one question people did ask me was you know is this way of eating so much more expensive than a traditional diet where you know maybe you're buying like meat and cheese and you know some processed foods and you know breakfast cereal like that sort of thing and I haven't really noticed my grocery bill being it's that much more expensive and what it's really kind of surprising and interesting but when you think about it maybe not so surprising right so everything I'm buying is produce most of the produce that I buy is whole and I take help you know with the mushrooms I buy you know the pre shredded carrots and that sort of thing but for the most part I'm just getting straight up produce so it can be expensive it's not to say that it's not I mean some produce is more expensive than others but meat and cheese and processed and packaged foods are so incredibly expensive so it really kind of washes out like yeah I'm eating a lot more food like I'm eating these gigantic salads and yeah some of the things are expensive but I'm saving cost on all of these other things that I don't buy anymore I wouldn't let cost be something that stops you from trying this if it's something that you want to do that you think is sustainable for yourself so like I said I followed the six-week plan from the book for a full three months so that was really like kind of like the strictest interpretation of this way of eating and so that's you know why I had the dramatic results of thirty pounds in three months after that three-month period I really was feeling like okay I'm happy with the way time at I you know was marathon training at the time so I was two months out for my marathon and I said okay I'm going to be a little bit less strict on the foods that I you know don't allow myself to eat and the things that I do allow myself to eat so starting in September I started incorporating some other foods so obviously you know I don't think of myself as a vegan because I do eat animal products like I generally don't but sometimes I do so that's what I think you know saying plant-based makes feels more accurate for me so as an example in September I started eating sushi again and I'll get you know a vegetable roll but I'll also get a rainbow roll or you know something that has a different fish on it and you know it's something that I really enjoy eating I can't imagine going the rest of my life not having sushi so that's kind of where I'm at with myself is okay like to be sustainable in this way of eating you know I'm still gonna have my green smoothie every single morning and still gonna have you know a gigantic salad for lunch every single day and most nights for dinner I'm still gonna have a gigantic salad but occasionally when I plan for it in advance I'll let myself have something that isn't allowed because you know it's it's your life you can eat whatever you want you know no one's forcing you to follow a strict set of guidelines so all of that said even though I am now being less strict about you know adhering to kind of that ideal like strict a set of rules I still have not regained any weight I'm still down a full 30 pounds from where I started even through the holidays even going to my parents house where there were cookies just like out on the table for breakfast like literally eating a breakfast cookie with something that was like on the regular you know it's like it's the holidays that's what people do and if you have like a couple treats for yourself that aren't planned you know you don't have to beat yourself up about it you don't have to you know go totally off the rails and say well I guess I'm just gonna like eat whatever I want now because like I wasn't perfect and therefore I'm just gonna be like super terrible like you know you have a splurge you you cheat a little at the holidays you know you do whatever and then that's just something that happened and then you just continue on with you know eating the way that you eat life happens you know you have to travel sometimes you have family obligations you know events I'm not going to go out to a restaurant and not eat I'm not going to go out to a restaurant and bring my own food then going out to a restaurant just part of life I mean I live in New York there are tons of great restaurants around I have friends who want to meet up for a happy hour you know whatever the case may be and I'm not going to not experience that part of life because I'm following a diet I mean if if you never do anything then what's the point of anything right like I need to be able to to live and have some freedom so it's just about picking and choosing like how strict do you want to be with yourself what are your needs how does your mind work like if having a cookie is going to send you off the rails if it's like a trigger for you to where you can't eat a cookie without binging for three days you really need to think about like what's your relationship with the cookie gonna be I guess like are you comfortable having a three day bender brought on by a cookie or do you want to say I just don't eat cookies anymore like that's I think that's something that's very personal and you know there's it's not right or wrong it's whatever it is for you you know it's a personal decision though mmm-hmm what's next okay so cool trick for cutting up jalapenos so I used to like cut them cut the tip off cut the stem off slice down the middle like take out all the ribs and everything it was like a whole like messy situation and I found this on Google as well so basically cut off the tips you can stand it up and have a little bit more stability using a paring knife start at the top and just kind of cut into the pepper to take off like a cheek basically I guess is what you would normally call it and then you can see ok what's the structure of the you know the seed and the stems and all of that inside where can I cut so then I just move my knife and try to follow on the outside of the pepper without disrupting the stem that has all of the seeds on it in the middle so it's not like an exact science sometimes you'll knock some seeds loose when you get down to that last strip I normally put it on its side and I just find that to be a lot easier but what I really like about this is now I've got all of my seeds all of the ribs are all intact I can put that in my compost and I've got just strips of jalapeno that are ready to be chopped off I've strained the farro into the sink and now you just kind of let it cool down in the colander you can throw it back into a pan if you had followed the recipe to a tea that comes on the packaging they would have told you to cook this more like rice where that water would have been fully absorbed into the farro that's not ideal because the fair then can't move around and kind of like cook evenly in the water I had like a ton of extra water you and that allowed the farro to all cook really evenly nothing to stick and so this is a really good situation so I'm gonna let this cool down and now all of our cooked items are done I'm ASA Khalid done with my vegetables the last thing I need to do is cut up an onion a few onions actually but I mean you can see that the timing works out pretty well here and you know if I hadn't been like chatting and whatever I probably would have moved through this vegetable prep a little bit faster typically everything finishes at the same time so one tip with cutting onions this kind of doesn't really new but it may be like a slight variation for what most people do so I think everyone is familiar by now with the like cutting across the onion you're going perpendicular to your cutting board right so they're straight up and down then typically what you'll see people do is they'll cut in on the onion maybe one or two times and the reason for this is though the onion is circular right so the pieces over here going to be bigger these are going to be what you want and so cutting across helps cut this and then you cut crosswise and this gives you the even kind of dice that you're going for alternatively what you can do is make a vertical cut and then basically you're going to cut you're trying to have all of your pieces connect in the center and what this is doing is making all of your slices of onion the same size because you're following the path of the onion all the way around so that eliminates the need for doing the crosswise cut which can be a little bit tricky sometimes and it definitely when you do it it messes up the onion and gets it all askew so it's harder to do like the chopping when you're done once the onion layers are all kind of broken apart from those crosswise cut hopefully that was helpful for someone if it was let me know if you've got a different way of cutting up onions I mean let me know in the comments below I'm always looking to learn something new so last I'm going to share with you my recipe for sesame ginger hummus so this is something that I make pretty much every single week it's super addictive super delicious so I do 2 cans of chickpeas and you're gonna want to save the liquid from one of the cans to that I'm gonna put in some tahini and mine separates a little bit while it sits so I always have to give it a little stir make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom but it comes together pretty quickly you've got some white miso here so this gives that kind of like earthy umami flavor white miso is the most mild of all the different colors of miso so if you're just kind of dipping your toe in the miso water white miso is a good one to go with generally I'll squeeze fresh lemons however I don't have any right now on so I always have this big bottle of lemon juice because I use this in my smoothies in the morning again it's like you don't have to be perfect you know fresh is best but you know this is a close second what I've got next okay some ginger so I've showed this before but basically you can use a spoon to just scrape off the skin of the ginger and I find this works better than using a vegetable peeler because the ginger surface is so like kind of bumpy and irregular but it's a little bit challenging to get the peeler to stick and if you do you're gonna take off a lot of the flesh that you don't need to necessarily take off all right now this is the only annoying part of the recipe is that the ginger needs to be graded into the blender I hate busting out the microplane for like one thing it's just kind of a hassle but it's totally worth it I attempted to make this before not grading the ginger and the ginger do not get broken down adequately in the blender because this is such a thick mixture with all the chickpeas and everything in there there's just not enough like kind of vortex action and this ginger piece would not hit the blade enough times before the mixture looked homogeneous so what I was finding is that it the mixture looked like it was totally smooth I thought I was cool and then they were like chunks of ginger as I was pouring I mean I do love ginger but it's not pleasant to bite into a big piece of raw fresh ginger all right so if you have never bought dates before you want to get them from in the produce section of your grocery store you can see like these are like actually juicy and tender even though they're dried if you don't buy these and you go over to the aisle where the raisins are you're gonna find another type of date I don't know what the difference is but it's like super dry and so like depressingly bad like they're absolutely gross they're like honestly they're rock-hard there's no moisture to them at all they're super tiny and they're just really really disappointing so I mean if you're going to get the dates you know get the good ones don't buy that junk from the dried fruit aisle I'm using powdered garlic calls for two cloves so I'm going to throw in two teaspoons and figure that's the close approximation and I crushed red pepper flakes this is optional I like to have it a little bit spicy so I probably put in like a half teaspoon maybe and so that is everything except for our liquid so I'm going to just mix this a little bit see where we're at and see how much liquid we need to add to get to the right consistency so this looks nice and smooth you can see it's a really thick situation going on here you can definitely send this down some if you want to and that does it for my meal prep so again this is what I did every single week for three months to lose thirty pounds if you're interested in reading more about it again the book is eat to live by dr. Fuhrman and I really hope you enjoyed this video if you did please be sure to give me a big thumbs up and click Subscribe thank you so much for watching I'll see you next week

Channel: Geoffrey Alan

Views: 350,726

Keywords: weight loss, losing weight, 90 day weight loss, before and after weight loss, weight loss transformation, how to lose weight, vegan diet, vegan diet weightless, nutritiarian diet, nutritarian diet weight loss, dr fuhrman diet, Fuhrman diet, furman diet, easy weight loss, weight loss meal prep, weight loss meal prep for the week, easy weight loss meal prep, meal prep for weight loss, healthy meal prep, meal prep in 1 hour, meal prep 1 week, easy meal prep

Id: keyJuUP6w_k

Length: 29min 5sec (1745 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 01 2020