You hear about so many diets, and it is difficult to know which is best. Many of them are medically sound for the particular problem you may have, so if your physician has placed you on a special diet, by all means, follow your doctor’s advice.
But your Prescription for Life plan is about you and the rest of your life.
You want an eating plan that has staying power. Some plans cut down on sugar. Some deal with the glycemic index. And the list for specific targets to avoid goes on and on. Then there are the ones that will cause you to lose weight but are detrimental to your health. One in particular has you eating protein only—but it is full of the saturated fat and cholesterol that plug your arteries. Such types may get weight off but play havoc with your arteries. Then there are the ones that are indeed healthy but are not what you are going to be able to continue following for the rest of your life.
Some people drink a homemade smoothie that is filled with all kinds of good fruits and even some vegetables, but the problem is that such a diet is usually not something you can maintain when you travel, and it may not be something you can maintain for the rest of your life. I questioned a friend concerning this, and he said he planned on drinking a smoothie for breakfast from now on. (I didn’t argue. It will be great if he actually does.)
Others eat certain kinds of bars for breakfast. And even others buy into a preplanned diet program in which the food is delivered through the mail. I have seen such a diet plan work wonders in getting the weight off, but again the question remains, Is it a lifestyle you can sustain for the rest of your life? The lifestyle you can sustain begins at the grocery store, but now we move to the step beyond grocery shopping. This is where the rubber meets the road—the basic foods to eat, and not to eat, whether you are eating at home or in a restaurant.
A healthy diet protects your arteries. Recently published in the Annals of Neurology, a study conducted exams on seven hundred people who were sixty-five or older. Those who adhered more closely to a diet consisting mainly of fruits and vegetables, whole-grain bread, pasta, olive oil, and fish were up to 36 percent less likely to have damage to their brains as a result of small strokes.
That’s good news for those following the Prescription for Life plan.
Prescription for Life Foods
Let’s begin with the types of foods you’ll enjoy with the Prescription for Life plan. The diet platform begins with an emphasis on vegetables and fruits. You are encouraged to aim for a combination of five fruits and vegetables per day. You get most of the fruits with your breakfast, as well as fruits and nuts for snack time.
In addition to fruits and vegetables, you are also encouraged to think whole grains. Think of whole-grain cereal in the morning, whole-grain breads for sandwiches, whole-grain pasta for an evening meal, or rice with sautéed vegetables or fish chunks on top.
Choose olive oil or canola oil for cooking. Get away from oils derived from animal fat, because they are high in saturated fat or trans fat that is partially hydrogenated. Even though olive oil is a fat and does contain nine calories per gram, it contains a lot of monounsaturated fat. This is one of your good three fat that help limit LDL Cholesterol and also raise your HDL Cholesterol.
If you have a desire for meat, go with fish first and then grilled chicken. Those two will take the place of red meat from now on. You won’t go to the extreme, learning a list of fish in descending order according to the amount of omega-3 fatty acid each has. But you will change your eating lifestyle of hamburgers, steak, and barbecue pork to eating more fish. Now, that’s not extreme, is it?
So major on fruits, vegetables, and salads with peas, legumes, and beans.
Beware of the diets that say you can still eat some “bad” if you do so in moderation. The Prescription for Life plan encourages you to run from the “bad” so you won’t continue having the desire for such foods. So many diets encourage you to eat foods containing saturated fat, trans fat, and dietary cholesterol in “moderation.” They encourage you to eat cheese in moderation or to use low-fat cheese. This sets you up to continue having the desire for such foods.
Healthy Choices for Every Meal
What kinds of foods should you choose for each meal in your new, healthy lifestyle? The following suggestions are only a few examples of what you can eat. I’ll explain why a particular food is a good foundation for your eating habits, but you may try other foods as long as you stick to the principles you have been learning.
When you finish this section, you will have good ideas of what to eat for each meal. I want you to build a platform meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Each platform will consist of a list of basic foods you will use as a foundation for that particular meal. You should develop the habit of eating your three platform meals every day for a three-week period. Keep it simple. Then you can add a second or third alternate tier to your initial platform. Again, these alternate tiers will follow the same rules you made for your basic platform diet, but they will allow you to have additional selections of what to eat. But as you begin, I would like for you to choose from the foods listed here to build your basic platform diet for each meal of the day.
All three platform meals avoid saturated fat, trans fat, and dietary cholesterol—and emphasize high fiber cereals, fruit, whole grains, vegetables, salads, peas, legumes, beans, nuts, pasta, fish, and chicken.
The most important aspect of the Prescription for Life strategy for eating is that your platform diet will be the same whether you are considering losing weight or maintaining your ideal weight. You will change to smaller portions when you are losing weight, and you may eat some between meal snacks after you are at your ideal weight, but the basic rules of what foods you will eat and what foods you will avoid remain the same.
Your platform diet will consist of the basic foods that will automatically come to mind when you think of a particular meal. Your platform diet will become the basis of what you will end up desiring to eat. Your platform diet will be foods you will form an addiction to. And that will be a good addiction.
First of all, you will eat three meals a day. Even if you are going to be losing weight, the three meals a day rule is in order. Studies show that nearly 80 percent of people who lose weight and keep it off eat breakfast every day. You will be eating three meals a day after you have reached your ideal weight goal, so you need to form the lifestyle of eating three meals a day as you lose weight to get there.
A friend of mine had been gaining weight slowly, but year after year of gain resulted in him being obese. I would see him every so often, sometimes not for six or eight months. But one day we both attended the same meeting, and I was shocked to see he had gained at least another twenty pounds since I had last seen him. At the meeting, I happened to be following him as we approached a flight of stairs. I watched as he went up. It was more of a waddle than stair climbing. His legs were so big that his knees barely flexed. He nearly pulled the handrail off its wall braces. He had started wearing his shirttail pulled out in an attempt to hide his stomach, but even then his protruding abdomen pushed a nice roundness right through the front. I could not believe he had gained so much weight since the last time I saw him. He told me his doctor was referring him to an orthopedist for knee replacements. He didn’t look happy.
I made a decision. That evening, I sat him down and told him that he was going to do one of two things. “Either you are going to change your lifestyle, which will include eating habits, exercise, and losing weight, or I am going to set you up for a gastric bypass operation—which won’t work unless you change your whole mentality about your physical condition.” I didn’t want to sound harsh, but the time had come for him to face reality—something had to be done. “You are killing yourself, and if you don’t do something about it, you will not be able to walk within this coming year.” I was adamant with my friend of many years. I told him to talk it over with his wife and decide between surgery and lifestyle change, assuring him that I was not going to stand by and let a good friend go downhill like he was.
The next morning at breakfast, he and his wife said the decision had been made to change his eating lifestyle. I am going to use my friend’s lifestyle diet to teach you the basic platform diet you can develop. Here is where we started, and you can begin making specific goals for your own eating lifestyle. Less than a year later, he has lost sixty pounds, is jogging and lifting weights on a regular basis, and can walk up a flight of stairs as quickly as I can.
Breakfast: The Easiest Platform
The rule of thumb for breakfast is to aim for a combination of five fruits and vegetables a day or a total of five fruits a day. Breakfast is the easiest time to get in over half your fruits. A high fiber cereal—and equally important, fruit—will become your mainstay for breakfast. Add any three fruits to your cereal—bananas, strawberries, and blueberries go well together. For your remaining fruits for the rest of the day, keep apples and oranges on your counter and grapes in your refrigerator, plus any other favorites you may have.
Breakfast is the easiest meal to set into your new lifestyle of eating. Fiber is one of the best foods you can eat for a good intestinal tract. Not only does fiber help protect you against colon cancer, but it also improves bowel movements. A high fiber breakfast will give you a regularity that will take care of any constipation you may have. It regulates your bowels because fiber is not easily absorbed. It moves through your intestines quicker and, at the same time, absorbs water in your colon, making your stools soft. Without the straining associated with constipation, there is less buildup of pressure within the colon that commonly results in small out-pouching of the wall of the colon. These little out-pouches are about as large as the end of your little finger and are called diverticula. These can become infected and cause what is termed diverticulitis, or they can rupture and require an operation.
The British Medical Journal reported that those who eat more than 25 grams of fiber a day have a 41 percent reduced risk of being hospitalized or dying of diverticulitis complications when compared to individuals who ate less than 14 grams of fiber daily. The medical literature emphasizes that eating fiber is the best protection against diverticulosis or diverticulitis. You don’t have to remember the numbers; just remember that fiber is a big protector of your colon in many ways. (We will discuss how it protects against colon cancer later.) Make a commitment to eat more fiber.
You will get most of your fiber from your breakfast, but it is also good to remember it throughout the day. You hear a lot about whole grain being good for you. The reason is because of the amount of fiber in whole grain. Most of the fiber in grain comes from the outer covering, the kernel. Refining the grain strips away the fiber.
Cereal alternatives include steel-cut oats as your oatmeal. The difference between regular oatmeal and steel-cut is that steel-cut has the outer covering left intact. Choose whole-grain breads at the grocery store. Choose brown rice, which still has the kernel on it, instead of white rice. You can even find whole-grain pasta. There are several ways to increase your fiber throughout the day, but breakfast is still the simplest and easiest meal in which to get the most total fiber at one time.
So many patients come back to me throughout the years and thank me for advising them on such a simple high fiber breakfast plan for their bowel habits. They are so thankful that they have a single soft, simple, normal bowel movement each morning without any problem. You may get a chuckle from that—but of all the suggestions I have made to patients, this is the one that patients have told me time and again they appreciate. They are so thankful I talked to them about regulating their bowels.
I will suggest several cereals as examples for what you can choose. Not everyone will be able to eat the most high fiber content cereals, but I encourage you to eat the highest fiber content you can. Next time you choose a cereal from the grocery store, look at the Nutrition Facts section on the box and see how much fiber that particular cereal contains. I will give you some examples: Cheerios shows 3 grams, while Honey Bunches of Oats shows 2 grams, and Raisin Bran goes up to 7 grams. Now, I want to tell you my favorite—the one that contains the highest fiber content of all our common cereals. And that is whole-grain Fiber One. It comes in different types, and the fiber content ranges from 13 to 17 grams per serving. Going by fiber content, eating one bowl of Fiber One is similar to eating five bowls of Cheerios. That is a good lifestyle breakfast to begin your day—using skim milk, of course. And add on a lot of strawberries and/or bananas and/or blueberries and/or raspberries, or any other fruit you may like on cereals.
So your primary platform breakfast will be a high fiber cereal like Fiber One, with lots of fruits and skim milk.
As a side note, almond milk is zero, zero, zero nondairy. No saturated fat, no trans fat, and no dietary cholesterol. You can also use soy milk, rice milk—any of those without the butterfat. I recommend skim milk because everyone knows about it and even husbands can find it in the grocery store.
If you are tired of cereal one morning and want to cook or order a different breakfast, go for an egg-white veggie omelet with whole-grain toast and jelly of some sort. Some say eggbeaters are quicker to fix.
If you want more alternatives, you can make them up yourself with such ideas as nonfat yogurt with fruit. Or some people have made a habit of making a smoothie using frozen fruits. They keep a stash of the fruit in their freezer, and a smoothie is their daily breakfast. They can even drink it on the way to work. I will admit that I tried frozen smoothies once, but they just didn’t have the taste I thought they ought to. So I just kept eating my Fiber One cereal. However, I do have several friends who say that is what they like, and they plan to drink one every morning for years to come.
Oatmeal is another food you can add to your breakfast secondary platform. You can add raisins, cinnamon, yogurt, or strawberries or blueberries. You can eat it dry or add skim milk. There are all sorts of combinations you can develop as an alternative to high fiber cereal. And remember that steel-cut has more fiber.
And there is that old quick, in a hurry, got to get to the office toast and jelly. Whole-grain toast, and dry—that is, without adding butter. You just put some of your favorite jelly on it, eat it, and go.
Concerning what to drink with all this, most people have coffee. Breakfast is also a good time for high pulp orange juice. The juice is not as good for you as the whole fruit, but it is still good. The high pulp has the most fiber. If you are in the weight-loss stage of your diet, you may want to skip the orange juice because it gives you extra calories.
Remember, breakfast is easy—fiber and fruit. You can easily get three of your five daily fruits at breakfast time.
Lunch: Keep It Simple
Now that you know vegetables and fruits are your mainstays, if I were to ask you to choose your own primary lunch platform, I hope you would think of salad. You probably don’t believe it, but you can build a lot on a salad as your primary base platform for lunch—as long as you don’t add any cheese and always use a fat-free dressing.
Vegetables give you the most food content with the fewest calories. They give you a feeling of being satisfactorily full. You can eat an unlimited amount of vegetables. Weight Watchers has been successful over the years by having you count points for the foods you eat. Recently, they came out with a new rule that you can eat all the vegetables you want—completely point free except for a few, like peas and corn, and those are still very low in points. The reason for this is because such foods satisfy your hunger with the fewest calories. Your stomach will be stuffed, and it will be with food that gives you the most nourishment with the fewest calories possible. What more can you want than to feel full and not have paid the calorie price to do so?
There are numerous salad lunches you can eat, especially if you are eating out. Even fast-food restaurants have an assortment of salads now, including with strawberries and fat-free dressings. As you get into it, you will find more and more ways of eating a salad at lunch. I remind you to guard against letting them put cheese on the salad, and you must also remember to use a fat-free dressing. Always ask for the dressing to be placed on the side rather than on the salad. That way you control the amount you use. It is a shame to sit at a restaurant and watch someone put cups of salad dressing on their salad and then sprinkle cheese all over it. High fat dressings can add up to four hundred calories, and sprinkled cheese can add another hundred. Even more significant than the additional calories is the saturated fat being added.
If you are in the weight-loss stage of lifestyle eating, salad is definitely your base platform. I say that because you will want to eat a double or triple salad rather than begin adding foods that have greater calories per gram than the vegetables in the salad.
Once you have reached your ideal weight, you can choose foods to add to your basic lunch platform. A simple addition is grilled fish or grilled chicken. You will be adding them in small portions to your salad rather than as a full entrée, but you will be getting different tastes to your salads from time to time.
Also, in the same way, you can add a nondairy-based soup to the meal. No cream-based soup is ever allowed, but a bowl of soup can add a nice variety to your meal. You guessed it; soups like vegetable or chicken noodle are great choices to develop your platform habit.
For a variety lunch, a salad and half sandwich make a good combination. And one step further, for a difference from time to time, eat a grilled chicken or grilled fish sandwich with no mayonnaise. And instead of French fries, ask for a plain baked potato. Do not put butter or sour cream on the potato, but you can sprinkle as much black pepper on it as you like and mix it together with your fork.
When you think about it, a bowl of non-cream-based soup and a salad make a great combination that leaves you full and satisfied. Another good option, if you want to feel full when you leave, is a vegetable plate.
As you can see, you can make many additions to your primary base platform of salads, but for your mind-set, think salads for lunch.
You will develop other personal favorites, but keep these two things in mind: (1) avoid fried foods, red meat, cheese and other dairy products, and (2) fruits and vegetables fill you up the most with the fewest calories possible.
Have a good lunch.
Dinner: Developing Variety
Dinner will depend, to a certain extent, on what you had for lunch. Vegetables are still your primary platform. A vegetable plate is easy to make at home or order in a restaurant.
Salad is a good choice for your evening meal, especially if you are in your weight-loss part of the plan. A dinner salad can also give you extra vegetables while allowing you to eat less of your entrée.
Pasta with sauce is a good addition on your dinner platform. With pasta, you are avoiding the saturated fat in meats and poultry, and you can come up with a large array of possibilities. You can also add fish or chicken as supplements to the pasta. But get in the habit of using tomato-based marinara sauce rather than the creamy cheese sauces commonly used at a restaurant and at home.
Another tier to the dinner platform is grilled fish or grilled chicken. You can choose how much and how often you will eat either as your main course. Chicken and fish both have some saturated fat in them but less than red meat. Grilled fish once or twice a week can be beneficial in helping you get certain omega-3s, which help in raising your HDL. Again, even if you have fish or chicken, vegetables and salad should be a significant part of the meal.
A nondairy-based soup makes a good addition. Have a cup with your salad, or eat a bowl as your entrée.
You can also have a veggie pizza with no cheese from time to time. I have one favorite I admit to indulging in occasionally: a small amount of grilled chicken with pineapple slices on a tomato base. By ordering a pizza with no cheese, you are leaving off the saturated fat.
Write down your primary basic platform for each meal and begin developing your basic eating strategy. Again, your platform foods will remain the same whether you are in a weight-loss phase or your ideal weight lifestyle of eating.
May you do as well as my friend did. It will be a great adventure.