WFPB is a new blog about Whole Foods, Plant-Based diets and especially my ongoing efforts to adopt this approach as my personal day-to-day diet. Successful healthy diets are ones that can be sustained long term and the WFPB diets are also the most healthy according to the latest scientific and medical research.

My name is Chuck and I’m a 50-something male, who lives in the Midwest. I’ve been an ovo-lacto vegetarian since 1989, although for the past 3 years, I eat seafood occasionally. Most of those years I was your typical vegetarian eating an American diet, albeit minus the meat. There were only a few periods in which I was eating a WFPB-style diet, with lots of food cooked from scratch. While most vegetarians and vegans report feeling and being healthier after switching to their diets, I felt even better when I was eating the WFPB diet.

Even on a vegetarian diet, I had gained lots of weight over the years. I’m 6 foot tall and had gotten up to 268 lbs in early 2017. Much of this was due to a sedentary working life, although I walk everywhere because I don’t own a car. But in 2016, I found myself with a bad case of planar fascitis, which prompted me to be even less active. In early 2017, I had been on blood pressure pills for several years and was put on pre-diabetic medicine by my doctor. Something had to change.

I had learned during a previous large weight loss around 7-8 years ago, that liquid calories were one of my biggest contributors to weight gain. I lost weight when I drank water. I had stopped soda drinking around 2008, due to kidney issues. But in the last few years, I had been drinking lots of Gatorade, followed by lemonade. My doctor suggested that I switch to bottled water. I did that and the pounds started dropping off.

At the beginning of June 2017, I started a special diet program with the University of Kansas Weight Loss Center. That program is described in my first blog post.

What This Blog Covers

• Whole Foods / Plant Based Diets – my experiences and thoughts
• Latest Science and Medical News – may include my commentary
• My Weight Loss Diet – explaining the highly effective weight loss program I’m currently on and how it works
• Book Reviews
• Restaurant Reviews – reviews of Kansas City restaurants can now be found at our sister blog, Chuck Eats KC.