I’m not a doctor. I’m not even a nutritionist, although I have taught a university-level class in nutrition. I’m a self-educated, logical (if I may flatter myself) person who is plagued by a variety of mostly hereditary ailments, who while having been a skinny (even bony) child now battles the bulge and fears incipient diabetes. While living in Japan (what now seems like eons ago) I began to gain weight. I took action and this diet is the result. The first time I followed it, I lost 30 pounds in two months. It was an easy lifestyle (more that than a “diet” in the sense of a special measure taken for weight loss) to which to stick, and I managed for quite a long while, even during an overseas holiday, with lots of temptations around. It was upon my return to Japan and some depressing circumstances that I fell off the wagon, so to speak. Depression is a terrible thing. What I didn’t realize at the time is that had I insisted to myself that I continue the lifestyle I’d chosen, dietarily speaking, my depression may well have been lightened, albeit not cured (food can only do so much!)

Here is the formula in a nutshell, and then I shall elaborate, for it is easy to turn simply things into complex ones, and misread intentions. (For example, when Adele Davis advised that the human body needed the equivalent of three — I think it was three! — tablespoons of oil a day in order to process fat-soluble vitamins, adding that most people take in more than that from their diets, and advising that those who don’t get it that way get it by drinking the dregs of their salad dressing after finishing the salad, some copycats wrote that everyone should open a bottle of oil and drink three tablespoons a day. That’s not what Ms. Davis said, and it’s ridiculous!) So please look at the nutshell, but then read on, to reveal the actual kernel (no, I am not calling myself a nut!)

• Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and it should include all five food groups. Yes, Virginia, there are five.

• Avoid fried foods, especially deep-fried foods.

• Eat all you want of meats (as lean as possible) and (especially) fish, vegetables (note: corn is not a vegetable, but a grain) and, if you are not allergic, dairy, but limit (not eliminate) grains.

• White sugar and white flour are your enemies. Do not collaborate with them. They want to make you fat and sick, and they can if you let them.

• Don’t eat right before bedtime.

• If possible, exercise. Walking counts. Wild sex counts. Pressing the keys of the remote control doesn’t count.

That is it in the aforementioned nutshell. Now to elaborate:

Eat breakast. If you eat nothing else (which would be a bad idea), eat breakfast. “But I am too tired, busy, in a hurry, not hungry, bla bla bla,” you moan. Get over it. You had to get used to whatever it is you’re currently doing; you can get used to this too. You should be ready and even eager to eat breakfast after only a few days of this, so you haven’t got long to suffer. And with microwaves and refrigerators, there is no reason why you can’t prepare some of your breakfast in advance. Nothing I will describe here is overly complex. “But I don’t like eggs/fish/oatmeal/bla bla bla,” you whine. Stop whining already! You don’t have to eat exactly what I eat; you just have to eat the right kinds of foods.

This is how it works: when you wake up, you have had your longest period of fasting, which is why the meal that follows awakening is called break-fast. Your blood sugar is in a ditch. You may not feel like making or eating breakfast but breakfast is what is going to get your blood sugar (and energy) up. Problem is, how is it going to do this? Well, you could eat some nice white sugar (doughnut, muffin, candy bar) and your blood sugar will zoom right off the charts and you’ll feel fabulous… for a short time, and then boom, down it crashes and you with it. Or you could have some protein which will raise your blood sugar gradually to a good level and keep it there until lunchtime. The best source of protein is from meat and dairy, both of which also contain fat, but you should not worry about that because if you limit grains and virtually abolish white flour and sugar from your diet, you will not be getting as much fat from other sources. At any rate, here are the five food groups you want represented in your breakfast:

• Meat (which includes fish, poultry and eggs as well as all the animal meats). Avoid smoked meats which contain nitrites, and processed meats which may include chemicals and other additives. The meat should be as lean as possible, except for the fish, which is okay fatty. If you adore the chicken skin, don’t deprive yourself, but if it means nothing to you, better to avoid it. We’re not working overhard to avoid fat in this lifestyle; your fat intake will decrease naturally with it, despite the meat and dairy. Eggs had a bad rap because they contain cholesterol, but the yolks also contain lecithin, a substance which actually decreases blood serum cholesterol. (Perhaps this is a good time to mention the top three causes of elevated blood serum cholesterol: smoking tobacco, eating white sugar, eating animal fat. Notice that eating animal fat is third, and the first one also to have any nutritional value.) This is a fantastic source of protein.

• Dairy (milk, cream, cheese). Again, dairy has a lot to offer apart from its animal fat content. If you’re not allergic you need some dairy. It’s a good source of protein and milk in particular will supply some much-needed vitamin D.

• Vegetables (especially green leafy ones, and colorful ones). The more colors, the more vitamins. Get fiber and antioxidants here. Eat ‘em raw, eat ‘em cooked, eat ‘em heated up from a frozen condition, but leave ‘em alone in cans. Canned veggies are miserable. Kids who grow up despising spinach only ever had it from a can. Popeye was a fool. (Okay, it would’ve been inconvenient for Popeye to race to the garden and pick fresh leaves every time Bluto was beating him up. But still….. By the way, tomatoes and avocadoes are fruits, and corn is a grain, and potatoes are tubers (and they’re full of starch).

• Fruit. Get your vitamin C and antioxidants here (and yes, fiber too)! Juice is good but whole fruit is better, fiberwise. Be aware that of all the food groups, fruit has the most natural sugar, which is okay if you don’t have a blood sugar problem (diabetes, hypoglycemia) and if you don’t overdo it. There should be no reason for you to avoid taking in a normal amount of fruit. Bananas have lots of potassium but they’re not the only fruit in the world. Again, the more different colors, the more different vitamins you get.

• Grain. White bread is poison. Honest it is. It’s paste and it glues your guts together. They can print “enriched” on the plastic cover but it’s still soft and squooshy and will make you fat without giving you a single vitamin or mineral worth mentioning. Feh just wipe it out of your life. If you are trying to lose weight, you should avoid even the good bread for the first few weeks. And most cold cereal is pretty useless, even dangerous: read those labels. Look at all that sugar! Better you should have some unsweetened oatmeal, or better yet raw oats, or some quinoa, or some long-grained brown rice (not Minute Rice). We’re talking GREAT fiber here.

Here are some examples of what a good breakfast would be (keep in mind these are only suggestions; customize and randomize at will as long as you cover the five food groups):

One or two eggs scrambled with milk and onions, perhaps with some fresh spinach added. Bacon isn’t the best meat to eat because it’s cured and has nitrates but it’s better than nothing, but a small steak would be better, or a bit of fish. Fish for breakfast, you cry, not quite over the concept of spinach in breakfast. Sure, the Japanese do it every day! They have a bowl of (white) rice with a raw egg on it and some seaweed, a small whole fish and some miso soup! A small salmon fillet seasoned with lemon pepper, or a little tuna from a can (it’d be nice to get it fresh!) moistened with just a touch of mayonnaise would do the trick, if you don’t happen to have a small whole fish handy. A bowl of the hot or cold, raw or cooked grain of your choice, perhaps raw oats or cooked oatmeal, some quinoa, some brown rice, any of the above cooled/moistened but a bit of milk or a bit of plain unsweetened yoghurt, and sweetened with some fresh fruit (sliced strawberries, fresh of course, a banana, some blueberries, or apple slices — and/or an apple or pear or peach on the side! The possibilities are endless. A glass of whole milk. (Did you know that whole milk, with slightly higher fat content than skim or two percent milk, has less sugar in it than those slimmer versions?) If you don’t want to have a glass of milk, have a glass of unsweetened fruit or vegetable juice, and add some cheese to the egg.

Sounds like a lot of food, and a lot of prep time, right? Nope! You surely have a microwave. You use it to make popcorn, maybe, or heat up burritos. Well, it’s good for real cooking, too, and it’s fast! Break the egg into a plastic bowl, put in the yoghurt or milk or water you use to enhance its volume (I also like to add a bit of wheat bran or raw oats), beat it up a bit, throw in the raw spinach, onions, honestly any cut-up veggies you want, the more the merrier. I tend to like a bit of zucchini and/or cabbage but one think I never leave out is the onions! They’re good the heart and they’re yummy. Don’t like onions? Don’t use ‘em! Colorful bell peppers are good, and have you ever thought of cutting up brussels sprouts? Crazy? Not at all! I cut them into quarters or thirds, depending on how big they are (the smaller they are, the sweeter, so I try to get the teeniest ones). Yellow squash is nice, red cabbage instead of green adds a stronger flavor… the possibilities are endless. You may want to add a second egg just to handle all the veg going in! If you want to use this as your dairy opportunity, add some shredded cheese (you don’t have to shred it; it comes that way in your supermarket). You can cut up some chicken or shave a bit off a beef roast and chunk it, and add that as well. Mix it all up, pop it into te microwave and nuke it until it’s not liquid anymore (there may be some juice floating at the top). Do you know how many food groups are potentially in there? If you add the wheat bran (or wheat germ, or some oats) you’ve got every food group except fruit! Gosh, eat this, munch an apple on the way out the door and you’re covered! You can make this egg dish the night before and just heat it up in the morning. Undercook it a little until morning so it won’t dry out too much.

Okay, don’t like eggs? Here’s a different breakfast scenario. Make yourself a nice, juicy steak, have that bowl of grain with some dairy and fruit, and toss a small salad on the side. Almost anything is better than iceberg lettuce, which is mostly water; how about a spinach salad, or at least some romaine? I like shredded broccoli and shredded cabbage (both available in that condition at the supermarket). If you want to splurge sugar-wise and use a little bit of creamy dreasing (I’m a bit of a fool for that) go for it, in moderation, but an oil and vinegar dressing will be better for you. Still, if you really crave a creamy dressing, try this: yoghurt flavored with paprika, lemon pepper and some green herbs of your choice (laurel, oregano, marjorum, chopped parsley). Add a little shredded cheese to the salad if you like. Tomatoes are good; avocado is full of beneficial oils and tastes wonderful. You can make all of this except the steak the night before (well you can make the steal too but it is going to lose a little in translation). Don’t pan-fry the steak; put the tiniest bit of water on a plate, add the steak and season it, and put it in the microwave for four minutes. Then give it a minute or even 30 seconds more at a time until it is cooked to the doneness you like. (I like it mooing.) Tomorrow, have a salmon fillet, or some tilapia, or flounder, instead. Put it on a dry plate, season it (easy on the salt, there! try some lemon pepper instead!) and put a teeny dab of butter on it, then drizzle a little milk over it. Nuke for six minutes. My old microwave was slow and demanded seven; you’ll learn by trial and error. Want to do it the old-fashioned way? Broil the steak, broil the fish. Broiling is good. For a real change, make a chicken salad: chop up some tomatoes, some radish, some celery, which I happen to despise but this is your breakfast, not mine, throw in your favorite small, edible seeds if you don’t have diverticulitis or diverticulosis, and moisten (just moisten, not drown!) it all with a touch of mayonnaise or, instead, poppyseed dressing. A bit of seasoned yoghurt works too. (Remember, whenever I talk about yoghurt I mean plain and unsweetened. You don’t need white sugar and you don’t need the cooked, limp, jellied fruit the manufacturers dump into the flavored kind.)

Okay, that was a lot about breakfast! Thing is, you can prepare most of it the night before, you can do the immediate stuff really easily and quickly, and it will give you such a boost until lunch, you will likely want to eat lunch later than usual, or skip lunch and have an early dinner. If you do not have a blood sugar problem, this is fine, especially the latter. Either way, you will find you have a pretty good appetite for breakfast the next day because you have finished eating early.

Your lunch and/or dinner can be pretty much anything within the (very loose) limitations prescribed above (no white sugar, white flour, fried foods, etc., etc., you remember, right?)

You may eat all you want of the meats, veggies, fruits and even grains (minus bread and bready stuff) as long as you do avoid white flour, white sugar and fried foods. So isn’t this dangerous? Won’t you pig out and lose all control? No, not really, unless you’ve got a huge problem with self-control already. If you eat ten steaks for breakfast, yeah, you’re probably going to gain some weight, and maybe even a little blood serum cholesterol, but are you really planning to eat ten steaks? Come on. I think you know what’s reasonable and what’s not. If you don’t, you need some help other than this diet, and I do not say that mockingly or as an insult; if you truly are afraid you are going to eat everything in site all day long, please get some therapy and this humble diet can wait.

One more thing: not only for the sake of being hungry enough to eat breakfast but also because your body digests a lot more slowly when you’re asleep than when you’re awake, do not eat close to bedtime.

Now a word about vitamins: some vitamins are water-soluable and some are fat-soluable. C, for example, is water-soluable. You’d have to try very hard to overdose on it; you just urinate the excess away. Fat-soluable vitamins, such as D and E, should not be taken in supplementary form exceeding whatever your doctor (or the instructions on the bottle at the very least) advises. They do build up. You need some fat in your diet in order to process them, too. A low-fat diet is fine, but a no-fat diet will find you losing hair, with flaking dry skin and no smile on your face. You do not need to drink three tablespoons of oil a day; if you do not go out of your way to avoid the amount of fat that comes along with the food I’ve described above, you will have enough to process the vitamins that come along with that food, and that reminds me, if you do not get a certain vitamin in your food at all, the supplement won’t work, as it will have nothing to supplement. There is nothing wrong with supplements, especially if you’ve had the perspicacity to discuss them with your doctor, but please do not rely on them as substitutes for food. They are not.

Yes, you in the muumuu (just like mine), raising your hand? You want to know, “What about pasta? What about dessert? Can I never have them for the rest of my life? I’d rather be fat! I’d rather be unhealthy! I’d rather die!” Relax. Nobody can live without a little treat now and again. The trick is, if you’re in the process of losing weight, satisfy your sweet tooth with some fruit instead, and if you’re maintaining your weight, or if weight isn’t an issue, a treat once or twice a week won’t kill you. (A week, not an hour!) I even sell chocolate, elsewhere on this site! The call for moderation applied as well to bread, and for pasta, too. Have them sometimes. (Not white bread! Never! And there is whole wheat pasta out there though it costs more than ordinary semolina.) Dark rye, whole grain, 12-grain, oat bran bread, those are delicious, have lots of fiber… you don’t need ten slices a day. One is fine. If you fear butter (it can be scary) get one of those trans-fat-free spreads. (Margarine was loathesome; these new spreads are pretty good.)

If you are overweight, this plan will aid you in shedding pounds at a safe but noticeable rate. If you are underweight, this should put a little flesh on your bones. If you are at an ideal (for you) weight (and don’t be fooled by TV ads; you do not need to look like a skinny model!) this will help you to maintain that weight. Remember: diet is important but it doesn’t stand alone, so once you have this down pat, exercise!

Author: Gail M Feldman

Article source: Genessa