 Cattle are meant to graze - it is healthiest for them and for us |  |
The foundation of our program is GRASS FED BEEF
The first and easiest thing you can do
The quality of protein you eat is at the core of our Pro Pro™ healthy living program. More specifically, grass fed beef is the foundation building block of the program. When you change the sources of your protein, and eat grass fed beef you can begin to see the pounds start melting away, as I did.
How easy is that? Change your sources of protein and eat delicious, tantalizing beef on a regular basis and see your health and vitality improve. Granted, there are many other things you can do to improve your overall health that we will be talking about in the chapters to come, but for starters, your most important, and easiest change will be to eat lots of grass fed beef. Believe me, your family won't complain a bit.
The Standard American Diet (SAD)
If you're like most Americans you have probably been eating grain fed and finished beef, dairy, poultry, and pork most of your life, and that is one of the primary reasons you might struggle with your health and your weight. In the "Here's Why" section of this chapter, we'll tell you why that is.
Not only have you been consuming animal products from animals that have been force fed grain, which has contributed to your diminished health, but you have also been consuming the added growth hormones and antibiotics that are contained within those products.
One simple change can make so much difference
By eating high quality grass fed beef, free of added hormones and antibiotics on a regular basis, you can begin to improve your health in many different ways.
If you're reading this weight loss program, you are already a member of Grass Fed and Healthy, so you are entitled to receive huge discounts on grass fed beef, so the program is not only delicious and fun, but affordable as well. It's a win-win situation!
A simple note of caution here: You must be sure the beef you eat is grass finished, though, and not just grass fed. All cattle are fed grass at some point in their lives but it is in the finishing (the last 90 - 160 days before slaughter) that most cattle are fed grain, and that is where the problems begin.
Here's Why
Cattle were not built to eat massive quantities of grain, especially as their primary food source. The feeding of copious quantities of grain to cattle has only occurred in the last 50 to 60 years since government interference (through various subsidies and price supports) in the agricultural markets made it cheaper to feed grain to cattle than it was to grow it.
Cattle naturally eat grass and forage
The bovine evolved eating forage which mostly consisted of grasses, clovers, and certain forbs. Granted, in their natural state they would ingest some grass seeds (grain is nothing but grass seed) as grass plants matured, however, compared to the amount of grass and forage they ate, those seeds were a tiny percentage of the total weight or volume of what they had ingested.
In the modern day feedlot, cattle are fed only grain with no forage in their diet, and no exercise, which creates substantive changes in their blood chemistry which in turn alters their tissues and fat.
 Do you really want to eat beef that was raised like this? |
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Grain feeding makes achieving meat tenderness much easier
There's a reason grain feeding became so popular. By making the fat and muscle so watery, it is much easier to get the meat to be tender. Without any concern for genetic traits and muscular composition, most beef can be made tender with lots of grain feeding
Have you ever noticed that when you load up on a lot of starchy carbohydrates, you end up feeling bloated and gain weight? When you eat a lot of empty, starchy carbs, you can feel how soft and flabby your tissues become. (Your muscles are much more tender and your fat less solid and more watery)
The Atkins diet recognized that principle, but the whole problem with the Atkins diet was that it never differentiated the quality of the meat. So cutting the carbs you ate helped, but by eating the grain fed animal products, you were still perpetuating the problems that led to your health problems and weight problems.
Omega 3 ratios
When cattle eat only grain it creates a type of bloating which translates to the fat, making it more watery, which then changes the balance of essential fatty acids in the tissues. The ratio between the essential fatty acids; Omega 3 and Omega 6, are drastically altered, reducing the level of Omega 3 and increasing the level of Omega 6 dramatically.
Both Omega 3 and Omega 6 are critical to good health, however they need to be in balance, and nutritionists agree that the ideal ratio of Omega 6 / Omega 3 should be no more than 4 / 1. In the standard American diet, and in grain fed animal products, however, the usual ratio is often over 20 / 1 and can go much higher.
Omega 6 is responsible for causing inflammation, whereas Omega 3 acts as an anti-inflammatory. Both responses are necessary for proper physical functioning, but need to be in balance. Yet medical science has demonstrated that inflammation is a common precursor of afflictions like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. We are seeing epidemic rates of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease because Americans are getting far too much Omega 6 as compared to Omega 3
CLA
Another essential fatty acid that is extremely important to good health and weight control is Conjugated Linoleic Acid, or CLA. Numerous studies have shown that CLA is critical to health maintenance and helps with the prevention and management of diseases such as:
- Cancer
- Diabetes
- Heart Disease
- Overweight / Obesity
- Depression
- Many more
Other antioxidants
We continue to hear more about how important antioxidants are to good health with their capacity to bind up free radicals so that they can't cause their usual damage.
Studies have shown that grass fed beef is much higher in other important antioxidants such as Vitamin E, Beta Carotene, Vitamin K, and many others.
Our experience
As ranchers, beef has always been the main staple of our diet. It's what we have in plentiful supply. But up until 2002 we had always bought into what the "experts" in the industry told us; that in order for beef to be good and tender it had to be finished on grain and fed in confinement.
For that reason, every year, we would select a few calves for our own consumption, then pen them up and pour the grain to them until they were "finished", so we always ate grain fed beef. Because we never used growth hormones or gave them antibiotics (if they got sick we treated them, but then sold them) our beef was healthier than most commercial beef, but yet Mike and I continued to put on weight once we reached our forties.
We began hearing about the health benefits of eating grass fed
But in the late 90's we began hearing about the health benefits of eating grass fed animal products. The more research we did, the more intrigued we became. But because of the prevalent industrial bias towards grain feeding, we wondered how grass finished beef could be tender and enjoyable. We had always heard that eating grass fed beef was like eating old boot leather.
In 2002, we were fortunate enough to learn that we could ultrasound test our cattle to determine which ones would be most tender and marbled, so that we could finish them on grass and still maintain a high quality of meat.
That year we ultrasound tested our calves, keeping those that had the best scores, and finished them out on nothing but our own grass.
The grass finished beef was the best we had ever raised for ourselves
We were amazed to discover that the meat was extremely tender and marbled, and not only that, the meat was absolutely delicious, more flavorful than anything we had ever raised for ourselves on grain. After that we never looked back.
I couldn't believe what I saw in the mirror
 The blue patterned skirt on the right used to be too small for me and the jean skirt on the left is now almost too big |
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A few months after we started eating our grass fed beef, I had an occasion for which I had to dress up, which doesn't happen often in my world. Since I had become heavy, I only had one or two dresses that I wore for such occasions, and the last time I had worn my grey "fat dress", many months before, I had noticed, to my dismay, it was getting tight on me.
But when I put on my old grey dress that day, I was amazed to see that it was hanging loosely on my shoulders! I couldn't believe my eyes! Up until that point I hadn't noticed that I'd been losing weight because I always wore such baggy clothes. (As a heavy person I couldn't stand to wear anything tight or fitted), and I didn't own a scale, so I never knew my actual weight. But here was my old grey dress actually hanging on me.
It took me a while to figure out what might be the cause of my weight loss
As I pondered my shrunken figure, I wondered what had caused it. I have never actively "dieted", as I always felt, and still do, that starving oneself and deprivation are hard on the body, and can only lead to more frustration.
I have always incorporated a lot of movement into my day, but also believed that it was unhealthy to pound and abuse the body with mindless exercise for exercise sake. So I know I hadn't been exercising more.
As I contemplated my weight loss, it did occur to me that perhaps in the past few months I hadn't had the sugar and chocolate cravings that had plagued me since menopause. It hadn't been a conscious choice to cut out sugar and chocolate, it had just kind of happened naturally without my noticing.
 Life is just so much more fun and enjoyable when you have robust vitality |
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As I thought about it, and tried to think about any changes I had made to my diet or exercise, that would have reduced my sugar cravings, it occurred to me that the only change I had made was to switch from eating our own grain fed beef to eating our own grass fed.
As I became more and more excited about my weight loss, and wanted to lose more, I did make some other small changes in our eating that were fun and easy to implement, which we will talk about in future sections of our program.
Mike didn't start losing weight right away though, which made me wonder if it was the change in beef. But then I soon realized why he wasn't losing weight and I was, and we will tell you why in upcoming sections of the program.