Merry Christmas, Everybody!
I am about 45 days into a dietary reset and hopefully on my way to a 20-pound weight loss in 60 days. This week I promised to make some comments about what I am eating. As a reminder, my personal lifestyle modification plan involves two different “diets.” When I am good with my weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, triglycerides and blood sugar, I eat what I refer to as a “maintenance diet.” When I am eating this diet, I might indulge in some of the MorningStar Farms products. They make vegan burgers, chicken patties, sausage and other treats that are reasonably low in fat. These are what I call “transition foods” because they can help you transition to a healthier diet. I make sandwiches, “chicken” parmesan, burritos and enchiladas. I have a very low-fat pizza that I will show you how to make in a video clip sometime before the spring. I will eat nuts and seeds and might have a bag or two of baked chips a few times a week. You get the idea; I cut some corners on the whole foods diet, but not that many. When my weight starts to get out of control or my cholesterol, blood pressure, triglycerides or blood sugar becomes elevated; I revert to the plant-based whole foods diet for what I call a dietary reset. I lose weight and my cholesterol, blood pressure, triglycerides and blood sugar all normalize very quickly.
When I first started my lifestyle modification journey, there were three things I was definitely not willing to do; count calories, starve myself and eat food that tasted like cardboard. The plant-based whole foods diet allows you to eat as much as you want to, given that the food is meat-free, oil-free, dairy-free, and unprocessed. With the plant-based whole foods diet, your weight and body functions are stabilized at optimum levels by something called homeostasis. Homeostasis is metabolic equilibrium actively maintained by several complex biological mechanisms that operate via the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is a control system that acts unconsciously for the most part and regulates bodily functions, such as the heart rate and blood pressure, digestion and operation of the intestines, respiratory rate, blood glucose control and sexual arousal and function. If you are familiar with what excess weight does to your body, you will recognize that all of those functions I just mentioned are affected if you are overweight; and not in a good way! Achieving homeostasis is the goal of lifestyle modification with the plant-based whole foods diet. Homeostasis allows you to eat to fullness and not to have to worry about counting anything at all. In very simple terms, if you give your body what it was developed to eat and move around some, you will return to the weight you are supposed to be and be healthy. The best part is that you won’t have to think about it at all! I know that is easier said than done; you need mindfulness and patience. You can read more about this at the healthy eating blog post entitled Strike Preemptively If You Have To. The long-term strategy I have used to maintain my 60-80 weight loss for over 18 years is to vacillate between the plant-based whole foods diet and the maintenance diet I mentioned.
I love, love, love the fact that I can eat as much as I want, and lose weight. Many nights I go to bed absolutely stuffed, and I never deny myself any food if my body tells me I need to eat. The key is to listen to my body and that I only eat to sustain my life. That is something called “mindful eating.” The food I eat tastes excellent, but I seldom eat just because something tastes good. Eating just for pleasure alone is not something I do. I eat nearly 100% non-meat whole foods that are full of fiber that fills my stomach up and slows the digestion process way down. My body tells me when to stop, which represents the appropriate amount of food that I need. It is a no-brainer. The trick is that you can eat no calorically-dense processed foods at all; none! If you do that even one time, it will throw your body out of homeostasis, and you will have to start all over again.
On Monday the 21st of December, I made the sign for the Café, letting everybody know what today’s lunch was. I made a vegan vegetable barley soup that day and labeled it as “No-Meat, No-Oil, No-Dairy Relatively Low in Sodium Fiber Monster!” It is something I ate a full quart of that day. I was about to add something about it being excellent diet food when I realized that it is only excellent diet food if you are eating a plant-based whole foods diet. If you are counting calories with a different diet like the DASH diet, you would have to limit the amount of this soup you eat because it has a bunch of calories in it. Because the calories correspond to the amount of barley in the soup and there is no oil or any calorically dense foods in the soup, my body can count the calories and nudge me when I have had enough. All I have to do is pay attention or be “mindful” as I am eating.
So, you have to eat the right food for your chosen diet! The barley soup was perfect for me, but if your chosen diet is not the plant-based whole foods diet, then it might not be right for you.
While I am eating the plant-based whole foods diet being nearly 100% compliant, I eat a ton of soup. To call this the central part of my diet would not be an exaggeration at all. I eat the soups I make at Hometown Café. The very same ones that you have access to. When you see that I mention on the menu that the soup is meat-free, oil-free and dairy-free, that’s what I am eating that day. Other menu items labeled as meat-free, oil-free and dairy-free are also on my menu. I also relax my need for variety and may eat the same thing for three or four meals in a row. Maybe four times a week, I will take a full large plastic carry-out container of salad home. In there is spinach, grape tomatoes, black olives, whatever beans are on the salad bar, beats if there are some and cucumber. I eat this with no dressing mezze style with the soup and bread. The bread is the bake at home bread available at Gene’s. A portion is 1/6 of a loaf, and that has 130 calories with 0.5 grams of fat (zero grams saturated.) I cut the loaf into three pieces and eat that two-portion piece at three meals with soup and salad.
Below are the soups and other items I brought home to eat from Hometown Café. Sometimes I got as many as three quarts of soup home and ate many meals.
- 11/5 Okra and Carrots & Beans
- 11/5 Potato & Sweet Pepper Soup with Spinach
- 11/16 Vegetable Soup with Orzo
- 11/16 Brussels Sprouts and Spaghetti Squash
- 11/17 Rice & Beans and Mexicali Corn
- 11/19 Yellow Split Pea Soup
- 11/24 Pumpkin Soup with Red Peppers, Chickpeas and Wheat Berries
- 11/25 No-Chicken Broth with Spinach, Red Pepper and Orzo
- 11/25 Brown Rice & Wheat Berries, Broccoli, Baby Carrots
- 11/30 Fettucine (no butter), Broccoli, Spaghetti Squash
- 12/1 Baby Carrots, Red Potatoes, Butternut Squash
- 12/2 Brown Rice & Wheat Berries
- 12/3 Okra and Green Beans
- 12/7 Chickpea Chowder
- 12/8 White Bean Vegetable Soup
- 12/9 Huge Baked Potato with Onions, Olives, Broccoli, Black Beans, Tomatoes, Wheat Berries and Salsa
- 12/14 Minestrone
- 12/14 Brussels Sprouts and Spaghetti Squash
- 12/17 Brown Rice & Wheat Berries, Carrots & Green Beans, Sandwich Slaw, one King’s Hawaiian Roll
- 12/21 Yellow & Green Squash, Braised Kale
- 12/21 Barley Vegetable Soup
- 12/22 Chickpea & Kale Soup
- 12/23 Sweet Potato & Black Bean Chili with Corn (WOW, that was good!)
There is a reason why soup is a great diet food.
Eating soup is an excellent strategy for increasing food satisfaction. Barbara J. Rolls, Ph.D. Professor of Nutritional Sciences and the Helen A. Guthrie Chair in Nutrition at The Pennsylvania State University has studied this more than anybody. In 1999, Dr. Rolls published a paper in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal (FASEB Journal) that found greater satiety and 27% fewer calories consumed after eating a soup-based starter as opposed to the same foods as a casserole with a glass of water and just the casserole without the water. This study was relatively small and somewhat limited, but the results were significant. That same study met the inclusion criteria in the prestigious American Journal of Clinical nutrition that same year. These data were confirmed, and their implications expanded in a more extensive 2007 study that found “preloading,” or consuming soup in a variety of forms before a meal, reduced overall calorie intake for both men and women ages 18-45. Not only does soup seem to give some general sense of increased satisfaction, but that satisfaction can also be quantified and measured.
One of the things that might surprise you is that I eat a massive bowl of air-popped popcorn at least four nights a week. Popcorn is not processed, and it is a whole food. I also eat the frozen dark sweet cherries available at Gene’s. I eat a half of a bag five to seven nights a week, always after popcorn.
Have a great week! There will be full details on this dietary reset, including a graph of daily weight loss and exercise in the January 8 healthy eating tip!
Here is the reference for today’s Healthy Eating Tip:
Bell EA, Rolls BJ. Effect of water content of food on satiety. FASEB Journal. 1999;13:A870
Rolls BJ, Bell EA, Thorwart ML. Water incorporated into a food but not served with a food decreases energy intake in lean women. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 1999;70:448–455.
Flood JE, Roll BJ. Soup preloads in a variety of forms reduce meal energy intake. Appetite. 2007;49:626–634.