Our New Diet

This week Amy and I are starting a new diet. It is Healthy Lifestyle Program by Dean Ornish, MD

Dr. Ornish counsels that we will find success not by restricting calories, but by watching the ones we eat. He breaks this down into foods that should be eaten all of the time, some of the time, and none of the time. The diet is a vegetarian diet, and should not be that hard for both of us to fallow. We have never been much in the way of being meat eaters, and the Atkins diet always seemed a little extreme to us

The following can be eaten whenever you are hungry, until you are full:
• Beans and legumes (lentils, split peas, beans; kidney, pinto, garbanzo, and black)
• Fruits -- anything from apples to watermelon, from raspberries to pineapples
• Grains (such as brown basmati rice, quick cooking brown rice, bulgur wheat, couscous, polenta, rolled oats, cornmeal, millet, and quinoa)
• Vegetables
• egg whites are permitted

These should be eaten in moderation:
• Nonfat dairy products -- skim milk, nonfat yogurt, nonfat cheeses, nonfat sour cream, and egg whites
• Nonfat or very low-fat commercially available products --from Life Choice frozen dinners to Haagen-Dazs frozen yogurt bars and Entenmann's fat-free desserts (but if sugar is among the first few ingredients listed, put it back on the shelf)

These should be avoided:
• Meat of all kinds -- red and white, fish and fowl (we aren’t giving up fish, however we will at least eat as low fat as possible)
• Oils and oil-containing products, such as margarine and most salad dressings
• Avocados
• Olives
• Nuts and seeds
• Dairy products (other than the nonfat ones above)
• Sugar and simple sugar derivatives -- honey, molasses, corn syrup, and high-fructose syrup
• Alcohol
• Anything commercially prepared that has more than two grams of fat per serving

That's it. If we stick to this plan, and we meet Ornish's recommendation of less than 10% of your calories from fat, without the need to count fat grams or calories. Ornish suggests eating a lot of little meals because this diet makes you feel hungry more often. You will feel full faster, and you'll eat more food without increasing the number of calories.

Our diets as Americans have become to high in fat over the past 50 years. The typical American diet is 45% fat, 25% protein and 30% carbohydrates. The Ornish diet is 10% fat, 20% protein, and 70% carbohydrates. This diet promotes complex carbohydrates (fruit, grains, etc.) and limits simple ones (sugars, honey, and alcohol.) The most controversial part of the diet is its prohibition on nuts and fish, which some researchers claim actually protect the heart.

So my starting weight for this diet is 295 lbs. My goal is to loose at least 65 lbs, but I really would like to loose about 90 lbs. Tonight Amy are taking out my parents for dinner for our last time on our old diet and starting tomorrow the diet will start.