14

The Three-Week Kickstart
Plan: Clean Your Slate
for a New Beginning

 

By now you have a pretty good idea of what you need to do to beat your cravings, and why. This chapter gives you a quick start with a three-week program that cleans your slate, so to speak, and lets you begin fresh, free of troublesome food habits, while giving you plenty of momentum for keeping your resolve.

We developed the techniques you’ll read about in this chapter in the course of our research studies involving people who were anxious to change their eating habits in order to lose weight, lower their cholesterol levels, or beat other health problems. Some of our volunteers were highly motivated and ready to dive in, while others felt a bit more timid about changing their food habits. The Three-Week Kickstart Plan was designed to help both kinds of people.

If you are eager to start, it will channel your motivation into a practical road to success. And if you are just putting a very tentative toe in the water it will allow you to jump in for a safe and finite period. The short-term focus lets you really commit to doing it right, so your results—a healthier diet, weight loss, a decisive drop in cholesterol, or whatever dietary goal you are working toward—will come rapidly. You will see the payoff for yourself.

You will physically change as you begin this program. You will stabilize your blood sugar, increase your energy, pump up your appetite-taming leptin, and calm your hormone shifts. And your tastes will change, too. Your taste buds have a memory of about three weeks, as we have seen whenever people reduce their sugar, fat, or salt intake. It takes about three weeks for the new, lighter taste to be clearly preferred.

So the Kickstart uses a three-week time frame to allow you to shift from one set of preferences to another. It is just enough time for your taste buds to leave behind old tastes and learn new ones.

We are going to work fast. So buckle your seatbelt and let’s get started!

 

Before You Begin

 

First, let’s check a few things so that you can prove to yourself what the diet change is doing:

 

• You’ll want to check your weight on a reliable scale. It is likely to start to drop.

 

• If cholesterol, blood sugar, or blood pressure are issues for you, have your doctor check them, too. They are all likely to improve, and you’ll want to see your progress.

 

• Take stock of what you’re eating now.

 

You can get a good snapshot of your overall diet with a three-day dietary record. This is the same diet-tracking tool we use in our research studies. It is strictly optional, but it really pays to do this at least once, because it shows exactly what you are eating. You might be a bit shocked at how many calories you’re taking in, how much fat, or how little fiber. And it lets you see how your diet improves over time. If you’re having a problem it almost always shows you what’s wrong and how to improve things.

You simply take a sheet of paper and note down everything you eat or drink (except water) for three days, including two weekdays and one weekend day (most of us eat a bit differently on weekends, compared to weekdays.)

Using the form here (photocopy it as many times as you need to), jot down each food, condiment, or beverage on a separate line. For example, if you had toast with butter and jam, use three lines, one for each of the ingredients—toast, butter, and jam. Or if you had a baked potato topped with butter, sour cream, and black pepper, along with a cola, use five lines so you can separate out each part of the meal—potato, butter, sour cream, pepper, and your drink. Write down everything other than water.

Also note how you felt before the meal: happy, stressed, depressed, tired, or whatever. Then do the same after you’ve eaten, to see whether you feel the same, better, or worse. In the section marked “Why chosen?” just indicate what prompted you to pick this food at this time: hunger, taste, peer pressure (everyone else was eating it), and so on.

Jot down your foods as you go, so you don’t forget. If it is more convenient, you can keep notes in a small notebook and transfer them to this form later. No one is going to see this other than you, so be thorough.

When your record is complete look it over carefully. What patterns emerge? What are the foods that you wish you hadn’t eaten? Where were you when you ate them? How were you feeling beforehand? After? What is the record telling you?

If you like, you can get a detailed nutrient analysis of your diet. Just be sure to fill in quantities carefully, using a food scale (available in cookware stores) and log onto a nutrient analysis Web site, such as the University of Illinois Food Science and Human Nutrition Department site, http://www.nat.uiuc.edu/mainnat.html, or Dietsite.com.

By the way, while nutrient analyses on these sites are accurate, you’ll want to disregard their nutrition guidelines that allow too much fat and cholesterol. For an adult consuming 2,000 calories per day, a good fat intake goal is about 25–45 grams each day. Cholesterol intake ideally is zero. Your protein intake should be roughly 50 grams per day. Resist the temptation to push protein intake too high (see here).

After three weeks we’ll check your eating habits again and you’ll be astounded at the difference.

 

The Kickstart uses a three-week time frame to allow you to shift from one set of preferences to another. It is just enough time for your taste buds to leave behind old tastes and learn new ones.

 

Diet Record

 

Make as many copies of this page as you need. Record only one ingredient per line.

 

Date: _______________

 

Diet Record—Sample

 

Here is a sample diet record for the morning hours. A full record would include meals and snacks throughout the entire day.

 

Check your cravings. One last preliminary. Let’s check the strength of your cravings with the five-minute questionnaire beginning below. We’ll repeat it in three weeks, so you can see how things have changed.

 

Cravings Questionnaire

 

Date: _______________________

 

Rate your desire for each of these food items during a typical day in the last week from 0 (no desire) to 7 (enormously powerful desire). Our goal is not to add them up or to try to create an overall score. Rather; these numbers allow you to compare cravings overtime. When you fill out this questionnaire again, take a look at your scores for each item before and after to see how they have changed.

 

Rate from 0 (no desire) to 7 (enormously powerful desire)

Red meat	_________	Nonchocolate candy	_________
Poultry	_________	Fruit	_________
Fish or shellfish	_________	Green vegetables	_________
Cheese	_________	Other vegetables	_________
Cow’s milk	_________	Bread	_________
Ice cream	_________	Cookies or cake	_________
Eggs	_________	Sugar	_________
Chocolate	_________	Potato chips	_________

 

Cleaning Your Slate

 

Now you have a clear picture of where you stand. You know what you’re eating, what you weigh, what you crave, and perhaps additional details about your nutrient intake and health. Now it’s time to get started.

 

• Choose a three-week period. Take out your calendar and pick a starting date when it will be convenient for you to make some diet changes. Because all this is a bit new, you’ll want to avoid times when you are traveling, major holidays, and April 14 if you’re an accountant.

If you are a young woman, you’ll get an extra benefit if you start on the first day of your period and extend the Kickstart from three to four weeks. Starting this way, at the beginning of your cycle, mellows the hormone shifts of your entire cycle much more effectively than if you were to start halfway through the month.

 

• Use the New Four Food Groups. During this time period you are going to be on as perfect a diet as possible, eating only the very best of foods. This gives your taste buds a chance to learn some new tricks and to forget some old ones. Let me first give you the basic guidelines, and then we will see how they turn into actual meals.

 

We will draw our menu from the New Four Food Groups that we learned about in chapter 13. To refresh your memory, this means:

 

• Vegetables: 4 or more servings per day.

• Legumes (beans, peas, and lentils): 3 servings per day.

• Whole grains: 8 small servings (or four normal servings) per day.

• Fruits: 3 or more servings per day.

 

During this three-week period avoid meat (red meat, poultry, and fish), dairy products, eggs, added oils, and high-fat foods (potato chips, olives, nuts and nut butters, seeds, and avocadoes). Steer clear of fried foods and any oily or fatty toppings, such as margarine or typical salad dressings (nonfat dressings are fine). Keep in mind that fatty foods interfere with leptin, allowing your appetite to fly out of control and encouraging hormone swings that, in turn, lead to cravings. Avoid them scrupulously for this three-week period. The other reason for avoiding fatty foods is to help your taste buds to reduce their preference for greasy tastes. This is exactly like the shift from whole milk to skim, except that you are intentionally lightening the entire diet.

When you select breads, cereals, or other grain products, favor those that retain their normal fiber (e.g., brown rice, rather than white rice) and also favor those with a low GI, that is, below 90 on the chart here. These choices will keep your blood sugar steady and hold hunger at bay.

Those are the basic guidelines: Use the New Four Food Groups, be very careful about added oils, go high-fiber, and choose low-GI foods.

So, what does all this translate into on your plate? The foods you’ll now focus on are not really so different from what you already eat. At dinner your salad will be the same, except that it will have a nonfat dressing. Your soup will not be a greasy cream of chicken soup; instead you’ll have minestrone, lentil, split pea, or black bean soup. They are all hearty and satisfying, but are very low in fat and high in healthy fiber, with a stunningly low GI to block rebounding hunger.

Instead of meaty chili, have a bean chili or chunky vegetable chili, or perhaps an autumn stew of vegetables, beans, and hearty grains. Top your pasta with a marinara, primavera, or puttanesca sauce instead of with meat sauces.

The foods you will be eating will be naturally low in calories, so you should increase your portion sizes a bit so that you don’t get hungry later. In a recent study we found that, when people followed these guidelines and ate until they were full, they still had a marked reduction in calorie intake, nearly 400 calories less each day. The reason is that high-fiber foods are very filling and satisfying, and by skipping meat, cheese, and oily foods there is so little fat in the diet that calorie intake plummets.

You might be saying to yourself that this is more of a change than you need. You might feel, for example, that it’s just chocolate or cookies that have you enslaved, and you’re not so worried about meat, cheese, or some of the other things we’re leaving out. Let me encourage you to follow these guidelines anyway. Bad habits feed off each other. As we saw in chapter 9, a young woman eating meat, cheese, butter, or other fatty foods drives up the amount of estrogen in her bloodstream, leading to a severe estrogen drop at the end of the month, which then accentuates cravings for chocolate and sweets during the last week of her cycle. A similar phenomenon occurs with sugary foods. Sugary foods in the morning spark cravings later in the day. So our job is to really clean house, so to speak. It is best to break all your bad habits at the same time.

 

• Do not intentionally limit calories. There should be no limit on portion size or on seconds—within reason. You can eat all you want, so long as the foods you eat meet these guidelines. If you are a committed calorie counter, use the Rule of Ten that we learned about in chapter 8 to make sure you don’t cut calories too severely. Simply multiply your ideal body weight by ten, which gives you the number of calories you need each day, as a minimum. An adequate food intake, along with the strong emphasis on low-fat foods, keeps your leptin system working strong, so hunger stays within bounds.

 

Instead of meaty chili, have a bean chili or chunky vegetable chili, or perhaps an autumn stew of vegetables, beans, and hearty grains. Top your pasta with a marinara, primavera, or puttanesca sauce instead of with meat sauces.

 

• Take a multiple vitamin. Any common brand is fine. It will provide vitamin B₁₂, which is important, as we saw in the last chapter. It will also ease your mind in case you’re worried that you’re missing something during this dietary transition.

 

• Do it 100 percent. Resist the temptation to deviate from these guidelines. Allow yourself to experience what it is like to be on as close to a perfect diet as is humanly possible.

 

As Mary Ann, our volunteer you met in the Introduction, said, it is easier to simply set aside tempting foods than to try to limit them to “manageable” amounts. Teasing yourself with small bits of unhealthy foods leads to “guaranteed feelings of deprivation because of having to limit so many things.”

Yvonne agreed: “I find it easier to have none of the foods to which I’m addicted, rather than a little of one of them. For me, there’s no such thing as two or three Twizzlers or jelly beans. Also, it helps me enormously to have good substitutes ready to eat.”

 

Planning Your Menu

 

Let’s pick out some breakfasts. Write down ideas on a piece of paper for healthy breakfasts that follow the guidelines above and that appeal to you. You’ll find plenty of suggestions in the menu section. Old-fashioned oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins, a half cantaloupe, whole grain toast, a breakfast burrito, scrambled tofu—there are many healthy choices.

As we saw in chapter 6, I would encourage you to keep two things in mind at every breakfast: First, go high-fiber. Old-fashioned oatmeal, for example, is rich and satisfying, and its slow-release sugars will give you energy and keep your appetite at bay. Second, include a protein-rich food, such as a meat substitute (e.g. vegetarian sausage) or, as is especially common in Europe or Latin America, a bean dish. A spoonful of chickpeas, for example, might seem more normal for a lunchtime salad, but you’ll find that, eaten at the beginning of your breakfast, it provides energy for later in the day, with none of the fat and cholesterol that comes from eggs, bacon, or other typical breakfast fare.

An adequate breakfast is key. So write your breakfast ideas down; they will become a shopping list.

 

• Now choose the rest of your menu for the next three weeks. Knowing what you’re going to eat will prevent hunger and help you avoid situations where empty shelves lead to a trip to the convenience store or fast-food restaurant.

What will you have for lunch? How about dinner? Write down the choices that appeal to you, looking through the menus and recipes in the back of this book for suggestions. How about French onion, or lentil soup, a chuckwagon stew, mushroom stroganoff, vegetable stir-fry, or a zucchini and herb calzone? Keep your list realistic, taking into account where you will be. For example, you may have more latitude at home than you would at work. Would you like to bring in some leftovers to keep in the refrigerator at the office? Perhaps a sandwich or can of soup that is healthier than what is served at the fast-food restaurant on the corner? Don’t limit calories and don’t skip meals.

 

• Plan your snacks. Stock up on fruit, perhaps keeping a bowl of sliced cantaloupe or melon in the refrigerator. Instant soups, carrot sticks, rice cakes, dried fruit, and many other simple snacks can be lifesavers when hunger strikes. Check out the many other healthy snack ideas in the next chapter and the recipe section.

 

• Go shopping. Stock your pantry with the foods you will need. Our goal is to be sure we never run out of healthful foods. You might find it handy to cook extra food on the weekend so it’s ready during the week.

If you haven’t done so already, take a look at the health food store. Pick up some foods that may be new to you and test them out. It is worth trying the substitutes for meat, cheese, and milk that are now on the market. Try the varieties of foods from other lands, such as rice pilaf, hummus, or tabouli, now packaged for quick preparation.

Take a new look at the some of the neglected aisles at the grocery store. The produce aisles often stock meat substitutes, soy milk, and other healthy products, along with familiar as well as new and exotic fruits and vegetables. You may also find interesting products in the “health” or “dietetic” aisles. And look at the shelves with innumerable varieties of colorful dried beans.

At a library or bookstore pick up some of the cookbooks listed in the Recommended Reading list here.

 

• Plan your restaurants. Think for a moment about where you will eat if you go out for lunch or for an evening dinner. As we’ll see in the next chapter, ethnic restaurants offer plenty of choices, if you can convince the chef to contain his or her exuberance for oils.

 

• Give away the offending foods. If there is contraband in the refrigerator, it presents more of a temptation than you need. Throw it away or give it to a neighbor or a homeless shelter. If you’re not ready to do this you’re not ready to change.

If your husband, wife, or significant other is reluctant to see unhealthy foods leave the kitchen, it is time for some encouragement and a bit of assertiveness on your part. The late Benjamin Spock, M.D., used to joke about this happening in his own life. He was in his eighties when he decided to become a vegetarian. His wife Mary helped shore up his resolve in times of weakness. She did this by throwing away anything unhealthy he might buy. He recalled how he might occasionally buy some expensive cheese, only to find it missing when he went to look for it later. “Mary,” he would say, “Didn’t I have a little piece of cheese in the refrigerator?” To which Mary would say, “Yes, dear, I threw it away. I love you too much to leave food like that lying around.”

 

• Beware of times of vulnerability. As you’re getting started, take one more look at your three-day dietary record. When did problems tend to arise, and where were you at the time? If you had a chocolate binge every afternoon as you did errands around the house, the answer may be simple: don’t be hungry (adjust your mealtimes), and don’t be home (plan to be somewhere where eating is impossible).

 

• Plan your exercise. In chapter 10 we saw the value of regular exercise in resetting your natural diurnal rhythm and subduing cravings. The type of exercise you do is not so important as its frequency—including it at regular intervals in your weekly routine. Using the guidelines here, pencil exercise into your calendar, and ask someone to join you, if you can, to help you stick to it.

 

• Check your weight. It is good to step on the scale once a week or so. If you drop about a pound per week you’ll be very much like our research participants.

 

• Staying on track. Here is a simple checklist we use to help our research volunteers stay on track each day. Photocopy it and use it daily during the three-week Kickstart.

 

Daily Checklist

Here is your checklist of the foods you need each day. This guide will provide about 1,500 calories. At the bottom you will find ways to adjust your calorie intake to meet your own energy requirements. Photocopy this checklist and use it daily.

 

 

 

If you’ve checked off all your boxes and are still hungry, add extra servings from the vegetable or bean groups. If, on the other hand, this is too much food for you, cut out the sweets first, then subtract a grain serving or two. However, you shouldn’t cut your calories too much. Most people should never go below 1,200 calories/day. Use the Rule of Ten to set your own minimum.

 

After Three Weeks

 

When you reach the three-week mark, your body is physically different. Your blood sugar and hormones are now more stable, and your body’s sensitivity to leptin and to insulin has almost certainly improved. It’s time to see what you’ve accomplished.

 

• Let’s do another three-day dietary record, so you can see how much your eating habits have improved. If you analyze your record on-line, you will likely find that the amount of fat, especially saturated fat, in your diet has plummeted, as has your cholesterol intake. Protective nutrients, like vitamin C, beta-carotene, and folic acid, have probably skyrocketed, thanks to those vegetables, fruits, and beans you’ve been checking off each day. Over the long run the eating pattern you’ve just experienced improves immune strength, helps you slim down, and cuts your risk of many health problems.

 

• Let’s check your cravings. This is the acid test. Fill out a fresh copy of the questionnaire here and see if, indeed, your cravings have diminished. In our studies, the vast majority of people have dramatic reductions in their desire for meat, cheese, chocolate, sugar, cookies, and potato chips, and have a new appreciation for the fruits and vegetables their mothers would have wanted them to eat.

 

• Check your health. This is a good time to stand on your scale, if you haven’t already, to see if your weight is headed in the right direction. If you checked your cholesterol, blood pressure, or blood sugar before you started, plan to check them again soon. Three weeks is not enough time to see the full effect of a diet change, but it is enough for a noticeable start.

 

If you like, you can continue on your new, healthy menu indefinitely, and that is certainly the best course. Should you happen to sample a bit of the not-so-healthy foods you thought you loved, you will very like find they have become as uncharismatic as full-fat milk.

If you should happen to slide off the wagon, you can use the three-week program as often as you need to. It will get you back on track with the healthiest possible diet and help you leave troublesome foods behind.

In the next chapter we’ll take a closer look at how healthy diets work at restaurants and fast-food outlets, and while traveling. And we’ll finish up with enough recipes and food ideas to give you a great many healthy choices for any occasion.