Diet

Diet

• UPDATE: Jamie Oliver feels the same way about food: if you buy, cook and eat great fresh food, you can enjoy food and still be quite healthy.
• In other (my) words, the answer to the diet problem is: you overeat because you don’t enjoy your food enough.

You know you’re on a diet if when you shop, you apply it. (This list is also a recipe for saving lots of money if you’re willing to shop multiple grocery stores for specific items that happen to be cheap at each place.)

Never Buy

• Soda, coffee, tea, sugary drinks (even most fruit juices), etc. These are all terrible for your teeth as well. Turns out fizzy water (no sugar or artificial sweeteners) is not bad for your teeth or your weight.
• Any foods with trans fat (pre-made goodies and most bake mixes—check the box!)
• Any foods with MSG and maltodextrin (eliminating most snack foods except saltines, wheat thins, etc.). Do you even know what that is? If you eat snack foods, only eat them with meals, and apportion a small amount into its own bag, bowl or container for your meal.
• Margarine (trans fat! that was a two decades long diet fad which was a total step backwards!). If you need healthy fats, use olive oil and/or eat fish more often
• Pre-made meals, hot pockets, frozen dinners, mac and cheese, or any such thing. Make your own. It will be better tasting and with consist of real food.
• Canned meals (Spaghetti O’s, raviolis, etc.)
• Fancy canned soups. Usually these are too salty and full of preservatives, as well as being expensive—get basic canned foods and chop up a single vegetable to make a simple soup and you’ve doubled your flavor, savings, and health value all at the same time.
• "Low-fat"-ified foods ("lite"): (1) you are breaking the other rules by buying snack foods or prepared foods and (2) you are not getting your money’s worth and (3) they’re full of crazy fillers like guar gum and stuff that I can’t pronounce, which is bad for you, (4) they taste gross so paradoxically you will eat more since (5) you will not be as satisfied as the real thing.

Note that rich foods like butter, ice cream, cheese, and 2% milk are not on the "never buy" list. The important thing is to eat enough grain, lots of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and meats and let the dairy foods be the complement. Their major advantage (higher fat content) is that they are so filling, which can help you eat fewer calories overall:

• Fats contribute to the palatability of the diet (i.e. butter, sauces, salad dressings, and in baked goods) and provide satiety value (are filling), because they are a concentrated source of calories.

Restaurants

Only eat out for truly special occasions. This eliminates so-called "restaurant remorse" or "restaurant weariness" where you get sick of eating out and eating only average quality restaurant food. When you eat out, eat somewhere nice, like Seasons in Lone Pine, CA or Bistro Provence n Burbank, CA.

Always Get Lots Of

• Water (tap water seems good enough)
• Weekly or every Two Weeks:
  • Fresh produce (tomatoes, green/red/romaine lettuce) for salads
  • Celery, broccoli, eggplant (for specific recipes)
  • Lots of capsicums (chile peppers) for spicing up basically any recipe
  • Fruits for lunches or smoothies during the week:
    • Lunches: apples, grapes, bananas, oranges
    • Smoothies: peaches, strawberries, mangoes, limes, lemons

• Keep on hand as needed:
  • Spices (ground or dried). Spices last! This is one of the most important pieces of advice on the list. Spices are healthy and nearly zero calories, providing minerals, anti-oxidants, etc. Learn to cook with your own spice style.
  • Roots (onions, carrots, potatoes). Roots last and go in almost anything!
  • Zucchini. This lasts in the fridge and is good in any pasta dish.
  • Canned foods (obviously these last):
    • Beans (refried, black, kidney, cannellini (white navy beans), garbanzo)
    • Veggies (green beans, corn)
    • Chicken broth or cream of mushroom/chicken soup
    • Tomatoes: Pasta sauces, salsa, diced/spiced tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato soup
    • Tuna. Get it on sale. Keep it around.

• • Frozen vegetables (peas)
  • Grains:
    • Pasta, rice, high fiber breakfast cereals (buy on sale; these last)
    • Corn chips and/or saltines
    • Sometimes we get (but it’s expensive and/or doesn’t last):
      • Tortillas
      • Bread

• • Sherbet (for smoothies)
  • Baking/cooking supplements
    • Eggs (mostly for baking)
    • Butter (mostly for baking)
    • Olive oil and/or vegetable oil (we use hardly any for cooking)
    • Flour
    • Brown sugar/sugar

• • Dairy:
    • A little bit of ice cream (see note below)
    • 2% milk
    • A block of parmesan (which usually lasts for months) or the powdered kind
    • A few cheeses:
      • sharp cheddar
      • mozzarella
      • swiss
      • monterey jack (pepper jack, especially)

• Lots of meat for the freezer. Quality meat, if frozen, will last! And since you’re freezing it, you can always get it on sale somewhere
  • (Farmer John) bacon (drain the fat!) and only use a few slices
  • Ground beef
  • Chicken
    • Thighs/wings, drumsticks/leg quarters
    • Breasts or bone-in breasts/halves

• • Pork
    • Ribs, chops (for use these are rare)
    • Tenderloin for slow cookin’

• • Beef roasts (for slow cookin’)

We usually don’t eat lots of bread because it is so expensive and doesn’t last. (We sometimes make our own, though. Or our own tortillas.) Bread is also very preservative-laden and full of highly processed flour. We’re not opposed to good breads (like Schwarzwalder/rye or English Sheepherder bread or quality rolls/french breads) but we just end up not buying it. It even ends up being expensive at the discount bread store (at least the quality breads worth buying)! The price of bread probably reflects more the price of Diesel fuel these days.

All of this shopping for basic ingredients implies a willingness to spend a few hours cooking and doing dishes every day, with healthy leftovers for lunch the next day (a bonus).

We bake our own goodies every week or two (esp. things like cookies, cake or Chex Mix) for lunch and dinner desserts. Good desserts make a big difference in a diet! How can you avoid cheating/snacking if you hate everything you eat and you never indulge yourself? Desserts also give a sense of finality to a meal.

It’s no secret we like ice cream... we buy two half gallons (actually 1.75 qt) every two to four weeks at Ralphs (Private Selection—highly recommended in many flavors—Breyers recently dropped their quantity from 1.75 qt to 1.5 qt and kept the same high prices!). The Private Selection ice cream is similarly priced to Breyers but if you buy two PS ice creams you save quite a bit (just like buying two milk gallons at a time at most grocery stores in CA). We try to eat it in small quantities to make it last longer. Serving it in a small cup or bowl (resisting the urge to eat straight from the carton) in small portions helps, and since we get full on smoothies, salad, or healthy dinner we just don’t have room to eat too much dessert. Recently ice cream has gotten so expensive that we have resorted to buying the really big tubs of generic ice cream and making these last a few months.

On weekends when we are starving and don’t feel like making an elaborate meal right now we just eat cheese and crackers (and salsa). Or we make these really easy, yummy tostada pizzas (tostada topped with salsa and shredded cheese) in the toaster oven. Or we slice and butter a baguette or french bread and stick that in the (toaster or normal) oven. We try to make and eat something filling, not just snacks, even if it takes slightly more effort.