The Diet

"Holy shit. 50 pounds?! Are you low-fatting or carbing??" - Nowhere Girl

This book is the core program for weight loss that I have used. I began on this diet (as a core set of principles) in late September 2005 and still follow it (mostly). The book is Eat To Live, by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, M.D

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I am not a proselytiser for books, but, this one makes sense. The core idea of this book and Fuhrman's ideas is nutitional density per calorie of intake.

I think the book spends way too much time trying to convince people to eat healthily, but that's just my perspective.

Fuhrman says that we have sophisticated nutritional sensors in our digestive system that tell us when we have enough nutrients. He says we have stretch sensors that tell us when our stomachs are full. We have to fulfil both these needs in order to feel full. So his diet outlines how to maximise nutrients and bulk.

My diet criteria were/are: Must make sense to me; Must make some kind of real scientific sense (not health food store pseudo-science), must not be harmful or potentially fatal (see Atkins diet...), and must allow me to eat as much as I want.

I will post a few of the recipes and and pictures of things that I eat on a day to day basis. The hardest part of this diet was learning to eat - but more importantly cook differently. I come from an eastern european background and that which isn't sausage is drenched in butter or cream...

I love Asian food and Indian food - but again - I'm a little heavy on the oil. I have had to learn to be either oil free or excrutiatingly minimal in my oil usage (I eat nuts and seeds for most of my oils nowadays).

Fuhrmans' other thesis is that we eat food that is so highly processed that most of the nutirents are removed and that some over-eating is just our bodies crying out for missing nutrients.

Lots of raw and lightly steamed stuff in his recipes.

Here's something I eat about 4 times a week: You take bean sprouts, english cucumber wedges (about 1.5 inches long), and some cubed/cut not very ripe roma tomato pieces - throw it in a bowl and put a small amount of low cal dressing (yes, there are some low cal dressings that taste good - it's true) and some lemon juice (i like tart flavours). I eat as much of this as I want.