I've struggled with my weight for most of my life. I'd had a couple of instances of significant weight loss over the past 18 years but always ended up gaining it back. My motivations in those days were almost always superficial--just wanting to look good! But as I have gotten older and continued to be so overweight, it was more apparent that this was affecting my health.
Last year and this year I had some wakeup calls regarding my health, and I had been reading and watching videos from doctors and experts talking about just how terrible sugar and refined carbs are for our health, and that this is a much bigger issue than fat in terms of destroying our bodies. While learning about what not to eat, these experts also went over what we should be eating, and I used that as a guide. Some of the suggested foods included cauliflower and cauliflower-derived foods, like cauliflower rice and pizza made with cauliflower crust. I had poked at this a bit earlier in the year without much delight. It seemed like the old fashioned diet cliches of eating cardboard or things without much flavor based on what I had tried. I had slowly lost a little weight from the beginning of the year through the middle of summer, but it still wasn't exactly melting off and I hadn't entirely committed to a truly healthy diet.
One night toward the end of summer, I scared myself into thinking I had diabetes with all my poor food choices, so I realized I needed to take my diet much more seriously and reduce the sugar and refined carbs to next to nothing. Once I became so concerned about my health and longevity, it was a lot easier to ignore the candy bars and to understand what those quick trips to the convenience store for a burger at lunch were really going to do to me. I want to live!
I went with a very low-carb / low-sugar and more keto-style diet involving eating healthy fats, some proteins, and a lot of fiber from vegetables, leaving my sugar intake to the natural fruit sources. I also tightened up on an intermittent fasting routine I'd dabbled in before, which for me means only eating two meals between noon and 8 PM most days and fasting for the rest. This started to work in lowering my blood sugar and dropping the pounds! But I didn't want to eat the exact same two or three meals every night for the rest of my life.
I saw that there is a health food store just down the street from where I work, which had some other options. I went in and discovered the Cali'Flour Original Italian cauliflower pizza crusts, which I had never seen before. I checked the ingredients and looked over the carb count and I was amazed that I could eat an entire crust and only get 3 net carbs! I used the crust to make a healthy, basic pizza using extra virgin olive oil as the "sauce," sprinkled on a little Italian seasoning, put on a solid handful of kale, and sprinkled on a half cup of shredded mozzarella cheese. Twelve minutes later, the pizza was done to perfection. When I ate it, I couldn't believe it. It was so soft, rich, and flavorful! It felt like I was eating a cheat meal, but I wasn't! I devoured that pizza in no time.
Now I regularly go to the health food store and make sure my freezer is stocked with some of these crusts, and it is a meal I have a couple of times a week, one that I really look forward to. It is comforting to know I can eat healthy and lose weight while still actually enjoying food.
So far this year I have lost 65 pounds, with about half of that happening in just the last two months when I became very serious about my health and food choices. In my journey to reduce my intake of sugars and refined carbs and make sure I get healthy while also not depriving myself of delicious foods, Cali'Flour has been a huge help!