My husband, Barry Sears, often says that any fool can eat one cup of pasta at a meal, but it’s much harder to eat twelve cups of broccoli. I’d like to add to that statement. No fool would ever want to chop twelve cups of broccoli for one meal.
When you’re in the Zone, you will eat lots of vegetables and fruit, plus a moderate amount of low-fat protein and a dash of monounsaturated fat. In just a few days you’ll feel more energetic, have more mental focus, and begin to notice that your clothes fit better. So why would anyone decide not to live in the Zone for a lifetime?
I’m afraid that some people think the Zone is too complicated and requires lots of chopping and chomping of vegetables, but it’s really not complicated. Meal preparation is a snap in the Zone, and, no, you won’t have to chop twelve cups of broccoli for dinner. The lifestyle called the Zone dietary program is simple to master.
Of course, my favorite type of meal preparation is getting dressed to go out to dinner. On other nights I am the person who has to prepare dinners under the watchful eyes of my husband, Dr. Barry Sears, the creator of the Zone diet. Lucky me. Fortunately, I’m no fool. I’ve learned plenty of simple tricks to make Zone meal preparation a snap, and I’ll share them with you in this book.
In fact, I’ll go far beyond tricks for preparing breakfast, lunch, and dinner at home. The real Zone challenge begins when you leave your front door and need to figure out what to eat for lunch during the workday in an office surrounded by fast-food joints and vending machines. I’ve been a newspaper reporter and editor for many years. My husband’s observation years ago after visiting my newspaper office was that most editors and reporters end up looking like Ed Asner of Lou Grant and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Although some of my brothers and sisters in journalism have avoided that fate, many more have not.
Think about it. Reporters find their stories and then come back to the newspaper’s offices, sit down, and write. Editors sit while they edit the stories. Often, when they’re facing a particularly tight deadline, they eat lunches and dinners while writing and editing. And what do reporters and editors eat? They eat stuff from the vending machine: Fritos, Twizzlers, candy bars. Then they wash it all down with a soda. Deadlines always cause feeding frenzies. One copy editor friend of mine has a favorite snack. He opens a can of Coke, uses a Twizzler as a straw, and then eats the Twizzler after he finishes the Coke.
Reporters and editors who have more time get take-out food, and lots of it: ziti and meatballs, calzones, pizzas, subs and french fries, doughnuts, chinese food with plenty of fried rice. When I last worked in a newspaper office two years ago, even I, the first lady of the Zone, after years of being happily in the Zone, began to see the pounds start to slowly pile on. Fortunately, my husband quickly took notice, and that was the end of that. I returned to the Zone, and the pounds slid off.
In Zone Meals in Seconds, you’ll learn how to avoid the fast-food lunch trap. We’ll also tell you how to survive cocktail parties, holiday parties, buffets, barbecues, dining out, and just about every culinary experience there is. Chapter 8, “The Can-Do Zone,” shows you how to open a couple of cans and use frozen food to create meals in minutes. Chapter 9, “Slow Cooking in the Zone,” tells you how to cook meals overnight, ready to take to work for lunch the next day, or cook your meals during the day so that dinner will be ready when you come home.
Even finicky kids can live happily in the Zone. We’ve raised two of our own and have learned every trick in the book. When our older daughter reached her early teens, she became a vegetarian, which presented an interesting dietary dilemma. We’ll show you how we helped her stay in the Zone while adhering to her vegetarian diet. Our younger daughter was a very picky eater. One very wearisome year she ate grilled chicken over lettuce with grapes and Granny Smith apples for dinner just about every night. I’m surprised she didn’t turn green, but at least that dinner kept her in the Zone. Happily, she outgrew her monotonous diet and now eats a wide variety of Zone foods.
No matter what your cooking style—from purist to Where’s the can opener?—I hope you’ll discover through this book how to painlessly stay in the Zone.
Many of these recipes have been created by Rachel Albert-Matesz, a freelance food and health writer, cooking coach, and natural foods cooking instructor who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Her forthcoming book, The Garden of Eating: A Produce-Dominated Diet and Cookbook, will be published in early 2004. You can definitely call her a purist.
Diane Manteca provided the recipes for chapter 8. Her recipes will help people who want to use prepared foods to cut down the amount of time needed to make meals. A chef and the owner of the Brickyard Café, a wonderfully eclectic restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Diane has been involved in the food business for sixteen years and has taught cooking for nine years. Prior to branching out with her own business, Diane was a chef at Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge and L’Alouette in Lexington, Massachusetts.
And what is my cooking style? I’m not even sure you can call it a style, but I’ve learned how to create simple and tasty Zone meals that please my family and me. I’ll also share my own story with you. In my pre-Zone days I tried every diet known to womankind—and failed every diet known to womankind. Maybe you can relate.
My dietary quest ended when I entered the Zone. The Zone works. I can attest to that. People say it’s easy for me to say that because I’m naturally thin. I reply that I am certainly not naturally thin. My trip back to a newsroom about two years ago proved to me that I could very easily get naturally fat again. One thing has to be made clear from the start: The Zone is not a dietary plan you’ll follow for a few weeks or a few months, lose weight, and then go back to eating as you used to do. You will practice the Zone lifestyle for the rest of your long, healthy, slim life. I hope this book will make the Zone way of life easier to achieve than ever before.
What are the rewards of the Zone lifestyle? For one thing, you’ll easily slip into a single-digit dress and slacks size. For another, you won’t need to pick up Family Circle, Woman’s Day or other magazines at the grocery check-out counter every week. You may have noticed that the cover of these magazines usually includes two features. The first is the proclamation of a new diet nestled inside the magazine that will be the last diet you’ll ever need—the diet to end all diets. The second is a picture of a delicious-looking cake or pie (recipe inside). In my pre-Zone days, I’d buy a magazine about every other week and try the featured diet. After about a day and a half, I’d be so famished and light-headed that I’d abandon the diet and make the cake or pie recipe instead.
The absolute worst diet I ever tried lasted exactly two meals. For breakfast, I was told to have coffee and half a grapefruit. For lunch I had “all the fruit salad you want.” At dinner, near starvation and about ready to faint due to low blood sugar from consuming all carbohydrates and no protein at all, I ate everything and anything I wanted. I was through with that diet.
Although I was slender when I got married, I should have looked a generation back at my mother, who began to gain weight when she was in her thirties and just kept on going. My mother was northern Italian, and she and her sisters suffered from a tendency toward Renaissance flesh, or as it was more commonly referred to around the family dining room table, the Bruno build. When I was married, I weighed 123 pounds. By age forty, at 5 feet, 5½ inches, I weighed 156 pounds. I was beginning to resign myself to a life spent wearing A-line skirts and blazers or muumuus and bathing suits with skirts when the weather was hotter. At size fourteen, I looked and felt dumpy.
I also began to feel light-headed between meals, especially when I was following the latest fad diet. I had every medical test on the books, but the doctors found nothing wrong. One arrogant male doctor looked down his nose at me and said that with two small children and a newspaper job, I was obviously having anxiety attacks. Great, I thought. He thinks I’m just another neurotic housewife. The more I thought about it, the more I thought his diagnosis was wrong. I didn’t feel anxious, just light-headed and shaky.
Then I made my own diagnosis. I was sure I had hypoglycemia. I hit on this idea when I thought back to my mother’s eating habits when I was growing up. She constantly said, “I feel shaky and I have to eat something now.” And she was constantly eating. When I asked my doctor to be tested for hypoglycemia, he replied, “There is no such thing as hypoglycemia. It’s all in your mind.” That was back in 1982, and I certainly hope no doctor would make that statement today.
Our family meals when I was growing up weren’t that far off the Zone mark, especially in comparison to today’s lamentable grain-laden dietary standards. We’d eat meat or fish and vegetables and a salad for dinner, but dinner was always accompanied by a starch—mashed potatoes (my father’s favorite), rice, or pasta. A basket of dinner rolls usually sat on the table. And my mother’s favorite snack was popcorn—lots of popcorn every night before she went to bed and on Sunday afternoons while she and Dad watched the Bears, Bulls, or Cubs games. As you read this book, you’ll understand why she had those shaky feelings, and why I did, too.
I was not the only one gaining weight. Barry was, too, even though he had been a very active athlete. For my husband the stakes were particularly high. The men in his family had an unfortunate penchant for dying of heart disease in their early fifties. Beginning in about 1980, when the weight started to pile on, Barry and I tried everything. We experimented with high-carbohydrate diets, high-protein diets, and even a liquid diet. Nothing worked. Arriving at the Zone didn’t happen overnight. Until about 1988, I cooked much as my mother did. We had eggs, toast, and cereal for breakfast (a meal I often skipped), a sandwich and maybe soup for lunch, and some sort of protein (probably much more than what is recommended in the Zone), a vegetable, and a starch for dinner. By ten o’clock at night, Barry and I would be rummaging around the kitchen for something to eat. Usually junk food.
Barry began to devote a great deal of his research time trying to discover a dietary plan that would both treat my hypoglycemia and avert his own family history of premature heart disease. Finally, he found a research article written back in 1985 in the New England Journal of Medicine (“Paleolithic nutrition: A consideration of its nature and current implications,” S.B. Eaton, M. Konner, 312:283–289, January 31, 1985) that described what our earliest ancestors ate. What was the diet of the caveman? Lean protein, vegetables, and fruit.
Barry’s first suggestion in that banner year, 1988, was that every meal we ate at home should include protein, and I should replace the starch portion of dinner (potatoes, pasta, rice, and/or bread) with additional vegetables, or perhaps some fruit for dessert. At first, I thought removing the starch would deprive my family and carry the perception that I was lazy, but I tried it. Amazingly, even if I removed the starch and didn’t add more vegetables or fruit, we were no longer going into a feeding frenzy at bedtime. Less was indeed more. If we were hungry later in the evening, we ate a bit of cheese (protein) and fruit (carbohydrate). The cravings for junk food diminished, and we began to lose weight and feel more energetic. Most important, my so-called anxiety attacks were gone. Long before the publication of The Zone in 1995, Barry continued to refine his dietary program, and I tried to adapt his research in what can basically be called the first Zone test kitchen. Again, lucky me.
My husband likes to talk about eicosanoids and about treating food as if it is a drug. You know what? I’m not going to go there. If you want the scientific principles behind the Zone—and believe me, the dietary plan is based on cutting-edge science—then start with A Week in the Zone. Matriculate to Mastering the Zone. Get your Zone bachelor’s degree by reading The Zone, and if you want to get your master’s, venture into The Anti-Aging Zone and The OmegaRx Zone. Zone-Perfect Meals in Minutes contains a lot of great recipes. And vegetarians and other people who want to add soy to their diets will enjoy The Soy Zone.
All you need to know about the science of the Zone right now is what I needed to know to start eating correctly. The Zone philosophy centers on keeping the hormone insulin within a Zone, not too high and not too low. You need some insulin to live because it drives nutrients to your cells, but too much insulin creates a health nightmare. Excess insulin makes you fat, accelerates heart disease, and shortens your life span.
When you stop controlling insulin, all hell breaks loose. Perhaps that’s why there’s an epidemic of obesity and type-2 diabetes in this country, both conditions caused by excess insulin production. The likely cause of this obesity epidemic is the emphasis the government places on starchy carbohydrates, which when eaten with wild abandon, make insulin levels rise sky high, with the corresponding low blood sugar. That leads to feelings of light-headedness and hunger. What happens then? You reach for a high-carbohydrate snack, which temporarily lifts you up before dropping you down with a thud back into carbohydrate hell.
Now you know why my popcorn-loving mother had to keep eating more carbohydrates to keep her energy up. Not all carbohydrates have this adverse impact. Most vegetables and fruits, such as berries, don’t cause an insulin spike.
So let’s get started. Take it from me, it’s a great feeling to finally find an eating plan that is so easy to follow. Being in the Zone brings a wonderful sense of freedom because you know you’ll never have to pick up another magazine that promises a miracle diet.