Anna Be.

Image via Wikipedia This weekend, Nick and I accomplished a feat I would never before have imagined: we ate no junk food. Come on, everyone knows that weekends are meant for ice cream, cheeseburgers, and hot wings and forgetting all the good diet deeds you did the previous week. That's certainly the way we usually treat them. But as I wrote last week, I'm working on lowering my triglycerides, eliminating all animal products except fish. And this weekend has been a feast of seafood. Friday night we went out for Thai food, where I had some yummy shrimp thing. Then last night, Nick made a giant seafood paella , with shrimp, calamari, monkfish and mussels. Tonight I'm making salmon. Besides the distinct lack of any other meat, cheese or eggs, we are also avoiding processed carbs and sugar. Yeah, seriously. None of those yummy things in the last 4 days. But this is not torture when you have hummus and avocados, olives and asparagus. 26 more days to go... don't count...

Image via Wikipedia Before this morning I had never thought about how hard it is to construct a breakfast without animal products or refined carbs. A list of my regular favorites were immediately excluded: eggs, toast with butter, cereal, yogurt, cheese, croissants. I ended up with grapes and plain oatmeal (no milk, butter or sugar, of course). OK, that was adequate, but I need to do some better planning for future breakfasts. To clarify, I'm not your new Super-Vegan, out to save the world one salad at a time. This is part of a temporary experiment to see if I can go off all my prescription medications this year. I'm not going to discard those medications and go about business as usual. Instead, I'm taking one health issue at a time and replacing the medication with lifestyle changes that have been proven by research to improve the condition. First on the chopping block is my triglyceride-lowering medication, Trilipix. Yes, I'm 33 and on medicine for my triglyceri...