The End of Dieting: How to Live for Life (23 page)

The Simple End of Dieting Plan

Many people have contacted me about wanting a simple plan without fancy recipes. They don’t have the time to spend all day in the kitchen. They live in a fast-food world, holding down two jobs or being busy with their families—or both. “I can’t spend half my week in the kitchen,” they tell me, “chopping vegetables and putting together complicated recipes.”

Even if this is you, you can still do this. Remember: No obstacles, no excuses. Find a way; there’s always a solution to protect your life. There are many ways to make this work. For instance, you could shop and cook one evening a week and one weekend morning and then prepare all your food for the week.

You can get started by following this simple version of my nutrient-dense eating style that doesn’t entail much in the way of cooking and preparation. You don’t have to prepare extensive and detailed recipes. Indeed, the purpose of this book is to help you end all obstacles and even the smallest source of contention, turning every person who touches its pages into a nutritarian. Use this sample core menu to devise your own meals, or follow the sample menu plans toward the end of this chapter.

Simple Core Menu

Breakfast

Intact grain, such as steel-cut oats, or old-fashioned oats with some ground flaxseeds, hemp seeds, or chia seeds added.

Or a slice of 100 percent whole grain bread with nut butter (and banana).

A serving of fresh or frozen fruit.

Consider making some quick homemade
Hemp Almond Milk
, which takes just two minutes with a high-powered blender.

Lunch

Huge
salad with a nut/seed-based dressing
(for lots of options, or Table 18 for commercial dressings).

Bowl of vegetable bean soup
(for recipes or Tables 15–17 for prepared soups).

One fresh fruit.

Dinner

Salad or raw veggies with a bean-, nut-, or vegetable-based dip.

Simple cooked vegetable-based entrée.

Include in your entrée green vegetables as well as some nutrient-dense nongreen vegetables such as tomatoes, eggplant, onions, mushrooms, cauliflower, or peppers. Great choices are steamed or water-sautéed green vegetables served on top of whole grain black or wild rice, bean pasta or squash, mushroom-bean burgers, tofu/tempeh chili, or water-sautéed kale with mushrooms, onions, and beans.

Frozen fruit dessert.

A
RE
Y
OUR
G
RAINS
I
NTACT
?

What are intact grains? They are grains that are still in their original form—that is, the outer bran layer, the middle layer (or endosperm), and the inner germ layer of the grain remain intact. Intact grains have a better nutritional profile and a lower glycemic index than grains that have been refined. Intact grains include wild and black rice, steel-cut oats, bulgur wheat, wheat berries, and hulled barley (also known as barley groats, scotch barley, or pot barley).

To make my favorite nutritarian breakfast, combine an intact grain, such as steel-cut oats, with nondairy milk (such as soy or almond milk) and soak overnight. In the morning, mix in fruit (fresh or frozen) and ground flaxseed or chia seeds.

Meat Lovers Rejoice

I can make this same Simple Core Menu favorable for all the dyed-in-the-wool meat eaters who don’t want to give up the taste of meat. You can get almost the same lifespan and health benefits as a vegan nutritarian by using a small amount of animal product to flavor your veggie burger, chili, or soup. By mixing just a small amount (about 1 ounce per serving) of meat into my mushroom-bean burgers (see
Meat-Lover’s Beef, Bean, and Mushroom Burgers
), for example, you have healthful, flavorful burgers that taste better than the typical all-beef patty, with only one-fifth the amount of meat—barely 1 ounce of animal products—for the entire day. This is almost an insignificant amount. You can call it the Soup, Salad, and Burger diet!

Otherwise, limit animal products served in a larger portion (3–5 ounces) to just once a week. This keeps the total number of ounces of animal products per week to less than 10 ounces. Then the six other days when you eat only 1–2 ounces won’t be enough to significantly increase IGF-1 levels over baseline for most people.

Still, if you’re using animal products in your diet, it might be wise to have your doctor check your IGF-1 level to make sure it’s less than
150 nanograms per milliliter. If it isn’t, you should strongly consider reducing, or eliminating, the animal products in your diet, and, of course, be careful with your intake of sweets.

Here are my suggestions if you still want to include the flavor of animal products in your diet:

1. Eat a maximum of 1.5 ounces of meat a day if you’re female and only 2.5 ounces if you’re male as a flavoring agent in a recipe or dish.

2. Eat only 2.5 ounces if you’re female and 3.5 ounces if you’re male once a day, but then make the next day completely vegan so your weekly intake remains less than 10 ounces (females) or 16 ounces (males).

3. If you have a bigger serving, such as 5–7 ounces, then have that amount only once weekly or less.

As a general rule, try to keep your calories from animal products below 5 percent of your total daily caloric intake. Since a reasonable number of daily calories is 1,600 for women and 2,400 for men, 5 percent of calories a day equals about 80 calories for women and 120 for men. Or about 560 calories a week for women and about 840 calories a week for men. This would limit your exposure to IGF-1 and keep your caloric intake of animal products in line with that of the people from the longest-lived societies around the world.

I should be clear. I am not recommending that most people consume animal products. Available evidence demonstrates that a vegan diet with the right supplements is, for most people, still the most likely path to maximizing lifespan. Of course, we’re not all robots. Some people thrive better with a small amount of animal products. For those of you who don’t want to go completely vegan nutritarian, this option is a healthy way to continue to enjoy the flavor of animal products without raising IGF-1 to levels that promote cancer.

Keep It Simple

It’s simple to eat this way without hours and hours of food preparation. For instance, make a healthy salad dressing every Wednesday and Saturday and eat that dressing for three days. (for easy-to-make basic
dressings
.) Alternatively, if you’re on the go, you can buy one of my healthy salad dressings to make your life easier. Table 18, lists my Dr. Fuhrman dressings as well as other brands that may be viable options for you. You can even mix a less healthy dressing in with one of mine or with a little tomato paste or tomato sauce to make something work for you.

Once or twice a week, make a giant pot of vegetable bean soup and use that soup for several days to limit cooking chores. Alternatively, purchase one of my healthy soups to make your life easier; see Table s 15, 16, and 17 for easy soup options. I have worked hard with my executive team in New Jersey to produce a line of super-healthful soups and salad dressings that make the no-time-to-cook obstacles no longer an issue. For busy people this can be predominantly a soup and salad diet style, so if you have the salad dressing and the soup readily available, it becomes simple to fit healthy food preparation and eating into your busy lifestyle.

Chapter 7 includes a variety of my favorite recipes. Many are quick and simple to prepare. As the nutritarian eating style becomes a way of life for you, sample these recipes, find your favorites, and include them regularly in your daily menus.

I Hate to Cook

You hate to cook? Not a problem. With just a few cartons of soup, a few salad dressings, some fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables, and some nuts and seeds and maybe some oats, you can organize your weekly menus without fuss.

Think about the food you need to eat in one day. Three or four fresh or frozen fruits. One carton or one can of soup, or the equivalent amount of homemade soup. A quarter cup of salad dressing on your huge lunch salad. And about 2 cups of steamed or frozen green vegetables for dinner. Open a bag and defrost some frozen peas, snow pea pods, Brussels sprouts, frozen artichokes, or broccoli and then pour some dressing or make one of my easy dips. It doesn’t need to be complicated.

It’s Too Expensive

People sometimes say that they can’t afford to eat this way—that fresh fruits and vegetables are too expensive. But this doesn’t have to be true. Following a nutritarian diet style doesn’t have to cost any more than a diet based on meat and highly processed foods. Take a look at the cost of a typical daily standard American diet meal compared with a nutritarian one.

Standard American Diet: Menu Cost, $16.07

Breakfast

Bagel with cream cheese

Orange juice

Coffee

Lunch

Fast-food cheeseburgers (two of them), French fries, and a soda

Snack

Two chocolate chip cookies with milk

Dinner

Mixed greens salad with tomato and purchased ranch dressing

Frozen lasagna

Vanilla ice cream

Iced tea

NUTRITION FACTS FOR THIS MENU: CALORIES 2,692; PROTEIN 78g; CARBOHYDRATES 344g; TOTAL FAT 115g; SATURATED FAT 46g; SODIUM 3,686mg; FIBER 21g; BETA-CAROTENE 826mcg; VITAMIN C 207mg; CALCIUM 1,362mg; IRON 17mg; FOLATE 591mcg; MAGNESIUM 261mg; ZINC 11.6mg; SELENIUM 93mcg

PROTEIN 11.4 percent; CARBOHYDRATE 50.5 percent; TOTAL FAT 38.1 percent

Nutritarian Diet: Menu Cost, $14.50

Breakfast

Oatmeal with blueberries and chia seeds

Hemp Almond Milk (1 cup)

Lunch

Salad of mixed greens with tomato, bell pepper, red onion, and sunflower seeds and purchased low-sodium, no-oil dressing

Homemade vegetable bean soup

Apple

Dinner

Raw veggies—such as carrots, bell pepper, radishes, fennel, snow peas, cherry tomatoes, and cucumber—dipped in purchased dressing

Mushroom-bean burgers on whole grain pita bread with lettuce, tomato, and red onion

Fruit sorbet

NUTRITION FACTS FOR THIS MENU: CALORIES 1,897; PROTEIN 65g; CARBOHYDRATES 275g; TOTAL FAT 75g; SATURATED FAT 8g; SODIUM 487mg; FIBER 57g; BETA-CAROTENE 28,965mcg; VITAMIN C 333mg; CALCIUM 865mg; IRON 22.1mg; FOLATE 973mcg; MAGNESIUM 864mg; ZINC 15.2mg; SELENIUM 85mcg

PROTEIN 12.8 percent; CARBOHYDRATE 54.1 percent; TOTAL FAT 33.0 percent

A nutritarian diet style can save your life and save you money. You are what you eat, so you might as well spend your money on quality food. Think about this. We spend ten times as much on medical care today than we did seventy years ago but only about one-quarter as much on food as a percentage of our take-home pay. We lowered the quality of our diets, so now we have to pay so much more for medical care, and we are so sickly that it is harder to afford to buy fresh food anymore.

Twelve Helpful Tips

1. The secret weight-loss food is eggplant
.

Eggplants have only 20 calories per cup. Do you have 20 pounds to lose? One hundred? Then try eating more food for once, rather than less. More eggplant, more cauliflower, more green vegetables with mushrooms and onions, more salad, more roasted peppers, and more stewed tomatoes and garlic.

Yesterday, I baked a fresh eggplant in the oven with the skin on at 360°F for forty minutes. I didn’t do anything except put the eggplant in the oven and turn the oven on. Then I heated a frying pan and added a couple of cups of finely chopped onion, tossing and mixing them with a wooden spoon until they glistened and had a slight tan. I took out the cooked eggplant, sliced it in half, turned it skin-side up (meaty center down), and, using a dish towel, squeezed the skin off, leaving the soft cooked center on the plate. I mixed in the onions, added a tablespoon of Ceylon cinnamon, and it was done. (Sometimes I add some currants and chopped raw onion.)

Not only did I have a great dish, but I had leftovers for the next day—and it was delicious cold. After eating my big salad and the eggplant,
and a box of raspberries for dessert, I was too full to eat another bite. The next morning, I was starving because my dinner, which had made me feel so full, was so low in calories that I was hungry again as soon as I woke up. Get it? Getting hungry can be fun. Foods taste better, and since you can eat whenever you want—and as much as you want—you are never dieting. You’ll gravitate to and then stay at your ideal weight forever.

2. Eat more of the foods that promote weight loss
.

These foods are unlimited, and you can eat as much of them as you want. The more you eat, the better—within reason; you should never eat until you feel uncomfortable. You actually should never even recognize that you have a stomach. Stop eating when you feel satisfied; stop eating if you start to feel full. Never overeat; never eat until you’re “stuffed.” It’s still possible, though, to eat as much food as is reasonable. Here’s a list of the foods that are most favorable to weight loss. Eat lots of them if you have a significant amount of weight to lose.