Overweight And What To Do About It - A Primer
Overweight is defined as the presence of a body fat content beyond 15% of total body weight in men and 20% in women. If you are overweight you almost certainly have a problem with fats (chicken-meat-oils-butter-margarine) and/or sweets.
Generally, fat is found in margarine (100%), meat (50-80%), cheese (80%), butter (100%) and ice cream (+80%). There is also plenty of fat, for example, in muffins, chicken (20%), and chicken has the same cholesterol content as a T-bone steak. Even lean fish is 20% fat.
Sweets includes cakes, cookies and pastries, candy, juice, colas, syrups and ice cream-anything with sugar in it. All white-flour breads and pastas are "sweets" too, as is alcohol.
If you do not want to be overweight, you must cut calories. To do this your diet should consist mostly of vegetables - steamed 5-7 minutes or boiled 3-7 minutes, yet still well colored or cooked in soups. Flavor with any of the excellent herbal flavorings, e.g. Parsley Patch Italian Blend, Mrs. Dash or a bit of Tamari (Eden, Erewon). Don't use commercial soy sauce.
Your best friends are cooked broccoli, kale, cabbage, burdock, carrots, collards, sweet squash, daikon, onions, leeks and scallions. They should be eaten in large quantities at both lunch and dinner. Chew each bite 15 (count them) times. You are also permitted as much as you want of green beans, brussels sprouts, mushrooms, snow peas, parsnips, parsley, bok choy, beets mustard and turnip greens. Satisfy yourself with these vegetables but stay away from potatoes, eggplant, zucchini, spinach, lettuce, peppers, swiss chard and asparagus.
Although still good for you, a notch up the calorie scale from the vegetables are the whole grain foods such as whole wheat or brown rice pastas, meatless barley soup and organically grown brown rice. Next up the calorie scale from the grains come beans at only the 4% fat content. (500% less fat and 1,000% less cholesterol than skinless chicken breast). All of these are still lower in calories than chicken, turkey, fish or milk.
So, if you're serious about losing weight, start with much vegetables plus 4 oz. (1/2 cup) of whole grains per day, 6 oz. of cooked beans (red, navy, lentils and chick peas, split and black-eyed peas) five days of the week and 6 oz. of fish 2 days of the week. With this regime you can use a natural high potency one-a-day type Multivitamin but it is only to be taken Mon-Wed-Fri. Take two Chelated-Magnesium tablets five days per week, and the rest is tons of boiled or steamed vegetables and vegetable soup to fill you up and replace everything else.
Buy The Self Healing Cookbook by Kristina Turner, and read two pages per day. Make one recipe per week: Take the book to the natural food store, have someone find for you the ingredients you don't recognize, go home and make your recipe exactly according to the instructions.
Of course, a little meat, chicken, turkey, butter, margarine, skim milk, toast, sandwiches or the usual restaurant fare won't hurt. But, as you are the person who has gotten yourself into this mess, your judgement is not to be trusted. Every bite of these fatty or sugary foods interferes with weight loss, and just a few too many such bites will entirely defeat your purpose. It's up to you, but we're here to help.
H. Robert Silverstein, MD
Hartford, CT