October Unprocessed Food Challenge

With Farley's help, I intend to blog for a complete month everything I eat.  Pictures and recipes will be posted as well where necessary.  I will strive to make my diet really excellent, and in compliance with the teachings of my heroes - Drs. John McDougall, Joel Fuhrman, and Jeff Novick.  Dr. McDougall is a legend.  Jeff Novick is/was my personal coach, and directly responsible for my health recovery.  Dr. Fuhrman is a brilliant physician whose ideas have recently helped me greatly.  I will try this month to eat a diet that would adhere to the teachings of all these great men.  Although each has slightly different ideas, there is a large area of common ground, and that is where I will try to stay.

In addition to posting each day's meals with pictures and recipes, I want to challenge myself (and you if you wish to join) to try some new things.  The main challenge is eat nothing but unprocessed and unrefined whole plant food.  This should be a revelation to anybody who has never tried it.  An additional challenge is to write down each day whatever refined or processed foods that you do eat.  This too could be a revelation.

I also will periodically address some concepts that have made a difference for me in my diet. Today's concept is what Dr. Fuhrman call "Toxic Hunger."  It is an important concept for me because, despite my excellent diet over the last 3+ years, my weight was still a bit higher than I wanted.  (194 pounds at 6'0").  My wife got to a very trim weight eating a more liberal diet then I did - but we both noted that I ate a tremendous quantity of food.  In part, I thought that this was a residual from converting to a McDougall/Esselstyn diet.  It was so important that I adhered completely that I made sure that I was never hungry so that I would not be tempted to stray.  I got used to eating a lot of whole plant food.

In his excellent book, "Eat to Live" (revised edition) Dr. Fuhrman distinguishes between Toxic Hunger and True Hunger.  Toxic hunger is felt mostly in the stomach often as an unpleasant sensation of emptiness, and can be accompanied by a feeling of shakiness or belief that blood sugar is crashing (which it is not).  However, this is not true hunger.  It is just the body shifting gears once the stomach is empty.

When the stomach empties, your body stops digesting food and does a number of other important tasks, such as detoxification.  During this time, you are operating on the food stores that you accumulated during the digestive cycle.  This is when you really burn fat and repair your body.

Many people, such as me, consider this empty feeling to be hunger, and indeed, eating dispels the unpleasant sensations.  I was in a cycle where I was constantly digesting food, because I always ate at the first sign of what I thought was hunger.

If you challenge yourself to skip a meal or two, you will notice that the unpleasant toxic hunger sensation subsides, and you can go for hours until you experience a different type of hunger, which is felt more in the throat.  It is not such an unpleasant sensation, but you are definitely interested in food.

For the last few weeks, I have been eating only when truly hungry.  My weight has dropped from 194 to 187 and I feel fine.  I no longer eat breakfast since I am not truly hungry when I awake.  Therefore, there is not breakfast listing for today.  For those who need breakfast, a great choice is oatmeal with some fruit mixed in (no soy milk or rice milk - that would be processed).

The revised edition of "Eat to Live" is such an excellent book that I would recommend everybody get a copy.  I really can't praise this book enough, and I will be discussing it more as the month goes on.  So that is this morning's entry.  For those who do not participate in the McDougall forum, I recently posted some before and after pictures of my wife Farley, which shows what this diet can do.  The before picture is over 8 years earlier than the after picture, and this is the sort of change you should expect if you are unhealthy and overweight.

Curried Chickpeas

It's nearly summer but you would never know by our recent weather.  It's been raining, hailing, thunderstorming and today we had funnel clouds, one touching down a ways north of us.  I wanted something hot, filling, satisfying and of course spicy.  Beans are always the first thing I think of.   Wanting curry flavor, it just took on a life of it's own.  Here is what I ended up with...

Ingredients:

1/2 onion diced
1 orange bell pepper diced
1 15 oz can of salt free garbanzo beans drained and rinsed
1 8oz package of green beans...I like the "haricort vert", the skinny French ones, chopped into bite size pieces
1 24 oz can of Trader Joe's whole Roma Tomatoes with juice.  Chop or cut into more manageable bite size chunks
1 heaping TBS Curry Powder
1 tsp cumin powder
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/8 - 1/4 red cayenne pepper
Red wine for sauteeing  Cab or Zin

In a large pan sautee in 1/4 - 1/2 cup of red wine the onion and bell pepper until thoroughly cooked, about 10 minutes stirring occasionally.  Add chopped green beans and garbanzos.  Cook about 10 minutes more stirring.  Now add all the spices and heat through for about 1 minute stirring. Now add the tomatoes and juice.  If getting too dry at any time add more wine to the pan and if you like to your glass:)  This is best if you let it simmer for about 2 hours for the spices to blend and lose that rawness.  Stir about every 15 minutes.

I served this over brown rice with steamed spinach.   We also had little baked Sierra Red potatoes with it.  This was a hit with Bob too.

Potato Spinach Pleaser recipe

This is one of those accidental recipes of mine.  I had a hankering for steamed spinach the other night.  I also had a few heirloom tomatoes and Bob had just baked a few small potatoes.  Well that was a no brainer.  I steamed the spinach and chopped tomatoes in my wonderful West Bend Steamer for 12 minutes.  Layered brown basmati rice, cubed baked potato and the spinach and tomatoes.  It was so good Bob told me to write this down for the blog.  I seasoned mine with Tobasco Sauce as usual.  Balsamic vinegar would be great also.  Bob just likes his as is.  The flavor of the tomato made Bob feel like he was enjoying a very healthy pizza!  Give it a try.

Dr. McDougall on at Lifestyle.org

Lifestyle Magazine is a TV show that airs on TBN.  It is usually on at weird hours, so I always set my recorder to record the show.

Dr. McDougall is often a co-host on the show when medical topics are discussed.  But most of the shows I see are fairly old.  I was excited to see a recent episode concerning the Oregon MS trials, because Dr. McDougall's association with this study is fairly recent, as is his cooperation with Dr. Bourdette, who was a guest on a recent show.  That means that some of his recent work may be on soon (including my own appearance on the show).  I know that Dr. McDougall has hosted many very interesting guests, and that the shows have already been taped.  Hopefully the more modern shows will be airing soon.

For those who don't get TBN, or can't record it, the shows are available for viewing at their website, lifestyle.org.  To view Dr. Bourdette's appearance with Dr. McDougall, see here: http://www.lifestyle.org/article.php?id=99


Dr. Bourdette is supervising the clinical trials concerning MS and diet at the Oregon medical school.  The results should be available soon, and rumors are strong that they will be very positive.

The hosts of this show are a really nice couple, and I also enjoy some of their episodes on topics like marriage.  They approach everything from a Christian point of view, but many of their episodes would be of interest, I think, to everybody.  Check it out.

A great lecture on weight loss

One of the best nutritional websites is that of the Vegetarian Society of Hawaii.  They maintain a library of guest lectures from their regular meetings.  In that library you will find lecture from many brilliant people.  The lectures can be viewed live with a high speed connection or can be downloaded for you to watch whenever on your own computer.

I periodically check the new lectures that are posted.  In doing so, I found a wonderful recent lecture on weight loss.

"Weight Loss without Hunger" by Elaine French

http://vsh.voip-info.org/French.html

The presenter is familiar with Dr. McDougall and Dr. Lisle and is familiar with the concepts of calorie density as taught by Jeff Novick.  She is particularly good explaining why, for weight loss, things like smoothies, rice cakes, tortillas and tortilla chips, bread, crackers, etc. are going to prevent weight loss.  It's a great lecture for anybody concerned about weight loss.  Take a look.

One of Jeff Novick's best posts ever

Many people are invested in the idea that recovering your health is very complex.  It isn't.  Recently, Jeff Novick posted a summary of how to go about it in his McDougall forum.

The advice given by Jeff is virtually verbatim  the same advice he gave me when I hired him as a nutritionist to reverse my own health problems.  It is really simple, and all you need to know.  If you follow these guidelines, you can't help but be trim and restore your health.  Here are Jeff's words:

Here is a quick review:
- Focus your diet on unrefined unprocessed fruits, veggies, starchy veggies, intact whole grains and legumes.

- Start meals with soup, and/or salad, and/or fruit as they will fill you up for less calories and help to reduce your consumption of other more calorie dense foods

- Avoid all liquid calories as they provide little to any satiety for the calories

- Dilute out meals based on intact whole grains, and/or starchy vegetables and/or legumes with fruits and vegetables. Make sure 1/3 to 1/2 of the bulk/volume (by eye) of all your meals are low calorie dense vegetables

- Salt - the less you salt your food, the less people tend to eat

- Variety- the less variety, the less consumption

- Raw Foods - Foods you can eat raw tend to be lower in calorie density and you may not digest as efficiently. Cooking begins the digestion process.

- Make sure you are avoiding all higher fat, calorie dense plant foods, nuts, seeds, oils, avocados, tofu, etc

- Make sure you are avoiding all refined processed grains and starches, (breads, bagels, crackers, cookies, dry cereal, etc and anything made from ground up flour) even if they are whole grain

-Avoid all refined concentrated sugars/sweeteners, even if they are natural and organic.

In regard to sodium, while tracking may be of some value, tracking is nearly impossible as most of the sodium is hidden. However, if you follow the program, the recommended foods are all naturally low in sodium. For any packaged/processed foods, make sure the amount of sodium per serving is no more than the amount of calories per serving.

If you do this, and make adjustments as necessary, you will hit all the numbers automatically and lose weight and lower your cholesterol and BP.

Only one card on the table

Wow, it's been a long time since I posted anything.  In part, I have been busy enjoying life, and in part it often feels like I might not be helping anybody.

The only people (I think) viewing this blog already know about Dr. McDougall, and I have seen few questions here.  When it comes down to it, this is really simple.

Dr. McDougall often says that, concerning his program, that there is only one card on the table.  And that card is whether a person is going to follow his advice.  Everybody who does follow his advice gets better - usually markedly and quickly.

So many people are interested in esoteric nutritional or psychological questions about diet.  But for those who give the program a real try, success in inevitable, and anybody who does try it (with real adherence) does not question that Dr. McDougall is correct because the results are so dramatic and rapid.

What about people who don't experience good results?  Simply, they are, usually knowingly, but sometimes unknowingly, failing to adhere to the recommendations.  Dr. McDougall cites the case of smoking.  When smokers quit, they all get better.  When alcoholics quit, they all get better.  And when those who eat our Western diet follow Dr. M's recommendations faithfully, they all get better.

There truly is only one card on the table.  Are you going to do it?  If you are going to do it, there is plenty of help available, including here, and all you have to do is ask.  For those who don't want to do it, or who want to do their own version of the program, I wish you success but expect failure  I could cite many cases of people who try partial adherence and remain fat and sick.  There is no known benefit to knowing about what Dr. McDougall teaches, or talking to others about it.  You have to play the card.

You might want to view my friend Laura' blog.  http://www.mrsdoodlepunkslaststand.blogspot.com/

Laura thought that she was an obese McDougaller (there is no such thing).  I challenged her to eat nothing but unprocessed whole plant food of low calorie density for a month.  You can see the results in her blog.  She played the McDougall card and won big time.

So there is only one card on the table.  It takes some effort at first to play that card, but it makes all the difference in the world.