Does Less Meat Equal More Weight Loss?
This is what my weigh-ins have looked like over the past four weeks:
February 27: -4.0
March 5: -3.0
March 12: +0.8
March 19: -0.6
Looking at the first and second weeks out of the four, the weight loss is higher than the norm, and both weeks I was asked by the Weight Watchers receptionist, and the group leader, what I had done differently. My reply in both instances was, "Nothing."
When I got to thinking about it, though, especially after the last two weigh-ins, something did occur to me: I ate significantly less meat during the weeks ahead of the first two weigh-ins.
Check this out:
- The week of February 21 through 27, my evening meals consisted, primarily, of a delicious, semi-homemade, potato and leek soup.
- The week of February 28 through March 5, my evening meals consisted of nearly equal parts of leftover soup, and chipotle chili (which, while it had beef in it, had half as much as similar recipes I'd explored before making up my own).
- The week of March 6 through March 12, leftover chili for my evening entree gave way to meatloaf "muffins" (I need to blog those, to both share the recipe, and to explain why muffins is in quotation marks) made with ground turkey.
- The week of March 13 through March 19, my evening meals started with leftover meatloaf "muffins," segued to chipotle chicken sausage over Mexican salad fixings, then to corned beef and cabbage (and turnip, parsnip, carrots, onions, and potatoes; that's in the to-be-blogged pile, too).
- This week, thus far, is still about the corned beef and cabbage+++++, but it's way more about the vegetables than the corned beef, which was my intention.
To take the analytic look at those earlier weeks, in particular, another step, I stopped to think about how I felt physically during those two weeks.
The first word that popped into my head was "lighter." After eating the soup, especially, and to a great degree the chili, I felt comfortably fill, but not at all weighed down, if that makes sense.
Taking it even further, I can definitely say my body didn't have to work so hard to digest what I was putting into it. Those vegetable-laden dishes kept my body happy. I don't know that I could be a vegetarian - I love chicken and turkey meat. But...
I wonder if it's the higher consumption of meat over the past two weeks that abruptly slowed stopped my exciting downward plunge?
What do you think? Have you experienced something similar?