Recipe: Breakfast Greek Frittata

This makes a flavorful meal full of superfoods, providing a mix of protein and complex carbohydrates. It's an ovo-lacto-vegetarian recipe.

This can be eaten fresh, or stored and re-heated.

• 4-8 eggs
• 1/2-1 tomato, or handful of cherry tomatoes
• 1/2-1 whole onion
• 1/2-1 medium whole potato
• 1/2-1 C fresh spinach
• 1/2-1 C mushrooms
• 1-2 oz feta cheese
• 1-2 Tbsp olive oil
• Italian seasoning
• Salt
• Ground black pepper

1. Beat eggs in a mixing bowl.
2. Chop tomatoes, mushrooms, and spinach coarsely. Fold into eggs.
3. Cube cheese. Fold into eggs.
4. Fold in salt and pepper to taste.
5. Chop onion coarsely.
6. Grate potato.
7. Heat oil in a pan large enough to hold the entire frittata.
8. Saute onion in oil until clear. Add Italian seasoning to taste.
9. Add potato and saute until golden. Add salt and pepper to taste.
10. Spread potato and onions across bottom of pan as a crust.
11. Pour in egg mix and spread evenly across crust.
12. Cover with a lid and continue heating until egg is firm, 5-10 minutes. The crust will caramelize on the bottom. The olive oil will bubble and release the crust from the pan, so the frittata slides out easily onto a serving plate.

Slice into 8 wedges. Serve with a sugar-free salsa; my favorite brand is Pace.

WW points: 3 points per ounce of cheese, 4 points per Tbsp of olive oil; 1-2 points per wedge.

Recipe: Super Green Fruit Smoothie

This is my NEW! IMPROVED! nearly-everyday breakfast, thanks to Joris Wils, one of my former coworkers. He had suggested adding greens to my Recipe: Breakfast Super Fruit Bowl. I tried it and really liked it.

The greens have very little effect on the flavor, but they kick up the nutrition, consistent with the books I've been using for reference. Dark, leafy greens are always at the top of "superfood" lists. For Losing Weight With WW Purple (now WW Personal Points), each cup of greens adds a daily point that you can spend on other foods.

The recipe is simple: Start with Recipe: Breakfast Super Fruit Bowl. Add:

• 1/2-1 C baby kale
• 1/2-1 C baby spinach
• 1-2 C water (or almond milk)

1. Blend thoroughly

WW points: 2, plus adds a free point for each cup of greens.

Recipe: Lunch Super Salad

Like my Recipe: Breakfast Super Fruit Bowl, this is my nearly-everyday salad, combining a number of the superfoods I listed in Losing Weight With WW Purple.

As with that one, it's not a precise recipe. I've listed general ranges for amounts, loosely packed, and the specific items vary by what I have on hand.

Lunch Super Salad

• 1/2-1 C Red leaf lettuce
• 1/2-1 C Napa cabbage
• 1/2-1 C Baby spinach
• 1/2-1 C Baby kale
• 1/2-1 C Baby arugula
• 1/4-1/2 C English cucumber
• 1/4-1/2 C Sweet red/orange/yellow pepper
• 1-3 Mushrooms
• 1/4-1/2 C Tomato
• 1 slice Spanish onion
• 1 scallion
• 1/4-1/2 C Kimchi
• 1/2-1 slice sourdough bread (1-2 WW points)
• 1/4-1/2 Avocado (3-5 WW points)
• 2 Tbsp hummus (2 WW points)
• 1/2 Tsp ground turmeric
• 1/4 Tsp ground black pepper (to activate the curcumin in the turmeric)
• 1/4 Tsp cayenne pepper powder (for the capsaicin)
• 2 Tbsp Bolthouse Farms Chunky blue cheese yogurt dressing (1 WW point)

1. Slice and chop all items into bitesize pieces.

7-10 WW Purple points.

Recipe: Breakfast Super Fruit Bowl

This was formerly my nearly-everyday breakfast (see Recipe: Lunch Super Salad for my nearly-everyday lunch), and forms the basis of my new nearly-everyday breakfast, by adding greens to make Recipe: Super Green Fruit Smoothie. It combines a number of the superfoods I listed in Losing Weight With WW Purple.

A couple of the items are bitter or sour tastes, but the fruit sweetens them. I don't add sweeteners.

I've made one recent change to it since starting, replacing unsweetened fat-free Greek Yogurt with unsweetened coconut-milk kefir, based on Dr. Will Bulsiewicz' book Fiber Fueled, which is very consistent with Dr. Uma Naidoo's book This Is Your Brain on Food: An Indispensible Guide to the Surprising Foods that Fight Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, OCD, ADHD, and More. The reason for the replacement is to switch from a dairy-based probiotic to a plant-based one.

This is actually a two-part recipe. The first part is a dry mix that I premix in bulk.

It's also not a precise recipe. Except for items that have WW point values, these are all Purple free foods, so the amounts are variable according to my whims and what I have on hand. I've listed recommended amount ranges.

I list specific brands where I've checked the ingredients and point values carefully. It takes constant vigilance to avoid or minimize unwanted sugars and sweeteners, so be careful making substitutions.

Dry Mix

This is a combination of spices, seeds, grains, and vegan protein powder. I use the protein powder scoop to measure everything out and store the mix in an empty protein powder jug.

All measurements in "scoops".

• 6 Ground turmeric
• 1/4 Ground black pepper (to activate the curcumin in the turmeric)
• 1 Cinnamon
• 1 Sesame seeds
• 1 Vega Essential Shake protein powder, vanilla
• 1 PB2 powdered peanut butter
• 1 Bob's Red Mill muesli
• 1 Bob's Red Mill chia seeds
• 1 Bob's Red Mill flaxseed meal
• 1 Unsweetened toasted coconut flakes

1. Chop the coconut flakes finely.
2. Mix all ingredients thoroughly.

Breakfast Super Fruit Bowl

• 1/2-1 scoop dry mix
• 7 g walnuts (2 halves, 1 WW point)
• 5 g dark chocolate (8 Ghirardelli 100% cacao unsweetened chocolate chips, 1 WW point)
• 1/2-1 C unsweetened coconut-milk kefir
• 1/2-1 C blueberries
• 3-6 strawberries
• 1/4-1/2 banana
• 1/4-1/2 apple
• 1/4-1/2 peach
• Optional for smoothie: 1/2-1 C unsweetened almond milk

1. Chop walnuts and chocolate finely.
2. Slice fruit pieces into bitesize pieces.
3. Mix all ingredients thoroughly.
4. Optional for smoothie: add almond milk and blend smooth.

WW Purple points: 2

Losing Weight With WW Purple

As I mentioned in Physical Fitness Program 2021-05, the stress eating of the pandemic caused me to put on a good 10 pounds. I was already a little bit over where I wanted to be.

In response, I've started on the WW Purple plan, with the goal of getting under 160 lbs. I've used WW in the past, along with several other weight loss methods. They all work effectively. Some are more nutritionally balanced than others.

The main difficulty with weight loss is sustaining it. Every time I lose weight, I regain it, sometimes frighteningly fast. But I've reached an age where I really need to keep it off, because it's getting harder to lose.

I've essentially lost the same 15-20 lbs. repeatedly over the decades. Now my goal is to lose it and keep it off, learning from the mistakes of the past.

What's different this time? This time I'm focusing on permanent dietary changes, not just being "on plan" and then going "off plan" when I've hit my goal.

It's that "off plan" part that's always the problem, where I no longer maintain the discipline and dietary restrictions that enabled me to lose. You might say "wild abandon" in some cases, since I have what could be considered an addictive response to sugar.

What I like about WW is that it's extremely flexible. You can literally eat anything, as long as you manage the portions and track it so that you stay within overall limits.

WW assigns "points" to each food (these days called "smart points") based on nutritional information. Some foods are zero points ("free foods"), in order to encourage you to favor these over others.

In general, the free foods are very much eat-the-rainbow choices, emphasizing high-fiber, low-Glycemic Index (GI), low-sugar, low-fat, highly nutritious foods. Just because a food is free doesn't mean you can eat unlimited amounts; you need to maintain portion control.

WW offers three color-coded programs, Green, Blue, and Purple. Each one has a progressively lower points limit, and larger free foods list, allowing you to choose based on personal preference and self-discipline.

Dietary Changes

I've already made some long-term changes that are consistent with WW, especially with the Purple free foods, by focusing on a primarily plant-based diet.

I'm also using two books for primary guidance:

• Jim Kwik's Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life (see my review), in which he lists his top 10 "brain foods".
  
• Dr. Uma Naidoo's This Is Your Brain on Food: An Indispensible Guide to the Surprising Foods that Fight Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, OCD, ADHD, and More.

Both are very consistent with WW, as are the books I've listed in Changing My Diet To Plant-Based.

Kwik's top 10 brain foods, in alphabetical order:

1. Avocado
2. Blueberries
3. Broccoli
4. Dark chocolate
5. Eggs
6. Green leafy vegetables
7. Salmon, sardines, caviar
8. Turmeric
9. Walnuts
10. Water

Naidoo's recommended foods, in alphabetical order:

1. Almonds
2. Amaranth
3. Apples
4. Apple cider vinegar
5. Artichokes
6. Asparagus
7. Avocados
8. Baked potatoes with the skin on
9. Bananas
10. Beans
11. Berries
12. Black-eyed peas
13. Bran
14. Brazil nuts
15. Brown rice
16. Buckwheat
17. Canola oil (rather than plain vegetable oil)
18. Carrots
19. Chamomile
20. Cherries
21. Chia seeds
22. Chicken
23. Chickpeas
24. Cinnamon
25. Citrus fruits
26. Cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts)
27. Cucumbers
28. Dark chocolate
29. Dark leafy green vegetables
30. Eggplant
31. Eggs
32. Garlic
33. Ginger
34. Green tea (contains polyphenols)
35. Hazelnuts
36. Herring
37. Honey
38. Kefir
39. Kimchi
40. Kombucha
41. Lavender
42. Lean beef
43. Lentils
44. Mackerel
45. Miso
46. Mushrooms
47. Nut butters
48. Olive oil
49. Onions
50. Oregano (active ingredient carvacrol)
51. Organ meats
52. Passionflower
53. Pearl barley
54. Pears
55. Peppers (active ingredient capsaicin)
56. Pickled vegetables
57. Pumpkin seeds
58. Quinoa
59. Red wine
60. Rosemary
61. Saffron
62. Salmon
63. Sardines
64. Sauerkraut
65. Soybeans
66. Steel cut oats
67. Sunflower seeds
68. Sweet potatoes
69. Tempeh
70. Tomatoes
71. Turmeric (black pepper significantly increases the absorption of the active ingredient curcumin)
72. Tuna
73. Walnuts
74. Wheat germ oil
75. Whole grains (including whole grain breads)
76. Yogurt

Note the similarities, providing cross-correlation of recommendations. All items should be in reasonable, moderate amounts, and watch out for unhealthy additions and condiments to dress them up! Just because a food is listed doesn't mean it should be eaten in large amounts.

Naidoo's list is longer because that's the whole focus of her book. She breaks down the benefits for various brain- and mood-related conditions.

She includes both probiotic items (fermented foods such kimchi, miso, kefir, and yogurt) and prebiotic items (high-fiber foods such as beans and other legumes, oats, bananas, berries, asparagus, garlic, and onions). Probiotics are live bacteria that convey health benefits through the gut microbiome. Prebiotics are essentially the food for the prebiotics.

She also recommends foods high in omega-3 fatty acids (while reducing omega-6's), various vitamins and minerals, and beneficial compounds in various spices.

She highly recommends the Mediterranean eating pattern, consistent with the Blue Zone findings. She also recommends avoiding many of the foods of the typical "Western diet," i.e. the typical American diet. These include sugar, other high-glycemic index foods, saturated and trans fats, fried foods, and large amounts of red meat.

The Results So Far

I weigh myself every day. WW recommends not doing that; they recommend just weighing once a week, since it constantly fluctuates. But I want to see those fluctuations, just out of curiosity. For consistency, I weigh first thing in the morning after getting out of bed and going to the bathroom.

This graph shows my results. Notice how jaggy it is, showing the daily fluctuations. Weighing weekly would smooth that all out.

What happened in August? My son and his girlfriend came to town for a week for a wedding. We ate bad stuff and too much of it, peaking on the 23rd, two days after they left. But then once I got back on plan, I started recovering my progress quickly. Some days show multiple pound changes!

My experience with past weight loss was that any time I went off plan, I averaged about half a pound a day weight gain. The key to dealing with that is to stop and allow my body to recover. So I can afford an occasional setback as long as I don't let it go on too long and don't let it break my regimen.

WW also emphasizes "non-scale victories," i.e. what else besides the numeric weight loss. For me, all my clothes that had stopped fitting now fit again. I was down to 2 pairs of pants that I could wear comfortably, and most of my T-shirts were too tight. Now all my pants and most of my T-shirts fit.

Here's another interesting victory: I've stopped needing Tums. Before I started WW, I generally needed a couple of Tums at least once a day to deal with heartburn. Shortly after starting WW, the heartburn stopped.

I attribute this primarily to not constantly overeating. I think being overly full too much of the time was causing my heartburn.

I looked up the points for a number of things I'd been eating previously, and it turned out I'd been eating two or three times my daily points every day. So I'd been significantly overeating on a regular basis. No wonder I'd been gaining weight!

Overall, I'm losing about 1.5 lbs per week. That's a good, sustainable rate. Once I get below 160, I'll adjust to maintain that level.

I'll be posting recipes for the things I've been eating, leaning heavily on the above food lists. In some cases, I'll list specific brand items, because I've found them to be combinations of good flavor and lowest point choice.

Some Vegetarian Restaurants

One of the challenges in eating a plant-based diet is eating out, since most American-style restaurants cater to the primarily animal-based US diet. My wife and I both enjoy eating out as one of our main activities together.

But now that I'm paying attention, I'm seeing more restaurants that cater to vegetarians. Their menus tend to be very creative and flavorful. Eating at them gives us all kinds of ideas about dishes and substitutions to try at home. That really opens up the options for eating a delicious and satisfying vegetarian diet. It's way beyond simple green salad rabbit food.

Some restaurants specialize in vegan recreations of meat dishes, challenging your ability to tell the difference. These are great for taking people who feel they could never enjoy food that doesn't taste like what they're used to.

Others throw convention completely to the wind and make no attempt to recreate animal-based dishes. They show that a whole new range of flavors and textures are just as good.

Some are very careful and explicit about what is vegan (strictly no animal-based product used in any way) and what is vegetarian (sauces, broths, oils, sides, or some other aspect may include a small amount of animal-based product). It never hurts to ask, since some dishes listed as vegetarian are in fact strictly vegan, and others may have an unexpected animal-based ingredient.

---

The Hidden Vegetarian Restaurants

I have to remind myself that vegetarian dishes are prominent in many international cuisines.

Virtually any Chinese, Thai, or Vietnamese restaurant lists tofu as one of the protein options for many dishes, so these can automatically be considered vegetarian. Tofu is a great replacement for meat, taking on the flavors of the sauces and spices.

Similarly, Indian and Ethiopian restaurants will have a number of vegetarian dishes, as will many other Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean restaurants. Some places will have separate meat and vegetarian buffets.

Broadening to ovo-lacto-vegetarian (adding eggs and dairy) opens the choices even more. For instance, many Italian restaurants offer meatless dishes that include cheese, in addition to the pasta dishes with purely vegetarian sauces like marinara or puttanesca. And of course good old pizza in its many vegetarian varieties.

---

The Restaurants

This is a list of restaurants in the greater Boston area that cater to vegetarians. Some are totally vegan, "except for the little half-and-half containers for the coffee" as they told us at one. Some are old favorites, and some are new discoveries.

This is only a tiny sampling, the ones we've tried so far. There are many more out there, so I'll be updating this on a random basis.

For each listing, the name links to the restaurant's website, and the location links to Google Maps.

Asmara Restaurant, Cambridge, MA: Eritrean and Ethiopean food eaten in traditional style, scooped up by hand with injera bread from a communal platter. We've been going here some 25 years, a family favorite. Our kids started requesting it regularly as their birthday meal once they grew past the Chuck E Cheese stage. It has both vegetarian and meat dishes. We always just order the meat sampler and vegetarian sampler to keep it simple and get a variety. I call this shoveling food, because it's so good you just shovel it in your mouth as fast as you can, until you suddenly realize it's all gone. The secret is the spices. Some are hot, but all are amazingly flavorful.

Life Alive Organic Cafe, Lowell, Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Salem, MA: A variety of creative flavorful dishes that make no pretense of recreating traditional fare. The Lowell location is one of our favorites. The Cambridge location is just around the corner from Asmara.

Veggie Galaxy, Cambridge, MA: Conversely, this offers traditional diner comfort food, but all in vegetarian versions (with options for 100% vegan), and includes a vegan bakery. The meat substitutes we've had have been delicious and utterly convincing. This is the one with the half-and-half. Also just down the street from Asmara (Central Square Cambridge is full of interesting restaurants).

Pho Pasteur, Boston and Quincy, MA: A variety of Vietnamese dishes.

My Thai Vegan Cafe, Boston, MA: Upstairs above Pho Pasteur, vegan versions of Thai dishes.

Green Elephant Vegetarian Bistro And Bar (Portland website), Portsmouth, NH, and Portland, ME: Vegetarian versions of several Asian cuisines, with spectacular flavors.

Mr. India Restaurant, Newburyport, MA: A wide range of delicious vegetarian dishes, including Nepali and Himalayan cuisine.

Mayuri Indian Cuisine, Acton, MA: Simple strip mall restaurant with amazing variety and flavors.

Dawat Authentic Hyerabadi Biryani Place, Nashua, NH: Another very simple strip mall restaurant with fantastic flavors.

Changing My Diet To Plant-Based

I'm in the process of changing my diet from significantly animal-based to significantly plant-based.

---

Motivation

The first inkling that I might need to change my diet came when I saw the Bodyworlds exhibition I mentioned in Welcome And Policies. In the section on centenarians, which is what inspired this whole venture, it mentioned that they ate primarily plant-based diets.

At the time, I was eating a modified keto diet, primarily animal-based foods with a significant plant-based component. Once I decided I wanted to become a centenarian, that information about plant-based diets concerned me.

My best chances for reaching my goal are to follow the examples of those who have already done it. My animal-based diet failed to do that. But the concept was still pretty abstract, so I didn't do anything about it.

Then I watched the Netflix documentary The Game Changers (which I'll refer to as TGC). This was consistent with information I had seen in other sources, and convinced me it was worth changing.

• I was generally familiar with Dr. Dean Ornish's plant-based dietary guidelines from the 90's. My wife and I had briefly considered following them, but found them too big a change at the time.
• The original edition of the The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook: A Delicious Alternative for Lifelong Health, by Nancy Harmon Jenkins, had promoted a largely plant-based diet in the 90's for long, healthy life. The diet is summarized in the Oldways Mediterranean Diet Pyramid.
• My daughter had switched to vegetarianism in 2018 for the purpose of reducing her resource consumption.
• The book The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance, by Tom Brady, describes how he uses a primarily plant-based diet to achieve record-breaking performance as a professional athlete.
• The books The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest and The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 Recipes to Live to 100, by Dan Buettner, describe a primarily plant-based diet as one of the secrets to longevity. 
• The book Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by Paul Hawken, ranked "Food: Plant-Rich Diet" as the #4 top solution (out of 80), "based on the total amount of greenhouse gases (it) can potentially avoid or remove from the atmosphere" by 2050. That's behind only "Materials: Refrigeration," "Food: Reduced Food Waste," and "Energy: Wind Turbines (Onshore)."
• Drawdown also includes the essay "Why Bother?" by Michael Pollan, talking about why to bother planting a garden to grow some of your own food. It ends: "The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world."
• The Bodyworlds exhibit.

TGC discusses multiple factors that influenced my decision:

• It presents multiple athletes who compete at world-class levels on plant-based diets.
• It describes the negative effects of animal-based diets.
• Dr. Ornish and others describe how plant-based diets can reverse those negative effects, and are typically the diets associated with long, healthy lives (Buettner's book The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World's Healthiest People is prominently visible on Ornish's bookshelf).
• Arnold Schwarzenegger and other athletes talk about how to go about changing from an animal-based diet to plant-based, and how it doesn't have to be all or nothing, it can be a step at a time.
• Chef Charity Morgan cooks up some delicious-looking plant-based recipes for her husband, Derek Morgan, and his Tennessee Titans teammates.
• It says meat production uses 83% of the world's farmland while providing only 18% of the calories we eat, and that animals consume 6 times more protein than they supply.
• It says meat production results in overuse of fresh water, resulting in shortages for other uses, and that one hamburger has 2400 liters of embedded water in producing it.
• It says that farm animals in the US produce 50 times more waste than the human population, and that the livestock sector is responsible for 15% of global manmade emissions, the same as all the forms of transport in all the world.
• It says that agriculture can provide the solution, by shifting to plant-based food production, which globally would free up an area of land the size of Africa.
• Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy, City University of London, sums it up succinctly when he says, "The message is overwhelming both for public health and environmental reasons. The more plants you can eat, and the less meat and dairy you can consume, the better."

So it's good for me, and it's good for the planet. I have my personal reasons for changing my diet that affect me directly, and my altruistic reasons.

If that's too tree-hugger for you, consider this: It's not purely altruistic. There's also self-interest: to achieve my goal of a sustainable life, I need a sustainable planet. I'd like to live to my 100's in a world that's not wracked by climate change, resource exhaustion, and suffering populations. Read Harry Harrison's MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM! for that vision.

---

Logistics

For now, I'm trying to split up my meals and snacks as follows as I adjust my habits and work down the animal-based foods we have in the house (the meat, eggs, and cheese we have in the refrigerator):

• 50% vegan (no animal-based foods at all)
• 25% vegetarian, with a small amount of animal-based foods on the sides
• 25% with animal-based main dish

I had been planning to work through the whey and casein protein powders I have in the pantry, but after finally watching the 2011 documentary Forks Over Knives (which features several of the same people who appear in TGC, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn and his son Rip Esselstyn, and Dr. Terry Mason), I'll give them to someone at work.

I'll replace them with pea and soy protein powders. For those who are concerned that soy contains estrogen, TGC says it is phytoestrogen, not estrogen, and that it blocks estrogen reception. As bodybuilder Nimai Delgado points out in the film, he has no lack of testosterone.

Once I've completed the shift and tried it for a while, I'll decide how to proceed. On the one hand, while my wife enjoys the vegetarian dishes, she also likes to have animal-based foods at all meals, either as main dish or sides. That determines both what we eat at home, and what restaurants we go to.

On the other hand, the reported negative effects of even a single animal-based food serving make a pretty compelling argument for me to avoid them entirely.

Realistically, I think it's reasonable to expect that I'll have animal-based foods as main or side dish at 1 or 2 meals a week. That seems like a reasonable and doable compromise, where my body can tolerate any negative effects. That's pretty consistent with the Oldways Mediterranean, Asian, Latin American, and African Heritage diet pyramids.

---

Making The Change

While in the past my wife and I found the changes to a plant-based diet to be too much at once, over the years we've actually been eating more and more of these foods. We've already come to treat many of them as major components of our meals and snacks.

My modification to the typical keto diet (where I had already cut out highly refined carbs and replaced dairy milk with almond milk) was to add more vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, and whole grains.

So I was already pretty far along. Tipping over to replacing all the animal-based foods is proving to be easier than I expected. Meanwhile, TGC is very clear about taking it at whatever pace I'm comfortable with.

Knowing how to choose and prepare a variety of flavorful foods has been a big help. Part of the key is keeping it enjoyable, because eating is truly one of our sensuous pleasures. I don't want to feel deprived for the next five decades, I want to enjoy great food.

We've recently gotten some cookbooks that look very helpful:

• The Oldways 4-Week Vegetarian & Vegan Diet Menu Plan: Power Your Day with Wholesome Plant Foods, by Oldways and Sharon Palmer, is a practical guide to information and simple recipes.
• Weeknight One-Pot Vegan Cooking: 75 Effortless Recipes with Maximum Flavor and Minimal Cleanup, by Nicole Malik, looks like a good answer to the daily time pressures that drive us to fast food.
• But I Could Never Go Vegan!: 125 Recipes That Prove You Can Live Without Cheese, It's Not All Rabbit Food, and Your Friends Will Still Come Over for Dinner, by Kristy Turner, looks like a great way to help us get past the desire for animal-based foods.
• The Middle Eastern Vegetarian Cookbook, by Salma Hage, is my current favorite, because we love many Middle Eastern dishes and flavors.

Diet History

Since my mid-20's, I've used several different diets to control my weight. The most I've had to lose is 20 pounds. Usually it's been about 15 pounds.

I've proved empirically that any of the mainstream diets work. For the short term. Long-term is a different story.

The net result is that I've lost that same 15-20 pounds repeatedly over the years. I lose it, then I gain it back. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes faster than I lost it.

In the Netflix series Explained, the episode "Why Diets Fail" discusses this. In one study it covered, the Stanford Dietfits study comparing the response of subjects to either a low-fat or a low-carb diet, Dr. Chistopher Gardner concluded that they both worked.

But it wasn't because of the specific makeup of the diet. It was because in both cases, once researchers tabulated the numbers, it turned out that people on each diet were cutting their intake by roughly 500 calories a day. The diet provided them a structure for doing that, without explicitly doing it.

So for the purpose of weight control, it appears that any reasonable diet will work, as long as you cut the actual intake relative to your activity level. That doesn't address the other positive or negative effects a particular diet may have on your body or your health.

One conclusion I came to some time ago is that dieting for weight control is much more of a psychological game than a physiological one. Physiologically, many methods seem to be effective, but are limited long-term by behavioral ability to stay with them.

The other diet-related health concern I have is diabetes. Both my grandmothers were diabetic, and other members of my family have it. That light I see ahead isn't the end of the tunnel. It's the genetic freight train barreling down the tracks straight for me. One of my diet goals is to avoid getting run over by it. So far I've been successful.

For reference, I weighed 145 lbs. when I graduated from high school. A year later, after regularly swimming 4000 yards a night 3 nights a week, I weighed 155 lbs. and was in the best shape of my life. Though I had put on 10 lbs., it was all muscle; I wasn't bulky muscular, I was lean muscular.

I use that as my benchmark and target ideal weight. The most I've ever weighed is 175 lbs. I currently weigh 165 lbs.

When I was younger, the activities I listed on my Physical Fitness History were largely sufficient to control my weight independent of diet. As I got older, that became less effective, particular after about age 40. The amount of exercise that was sufficient to lose weight exceeded the amount sufficient to cause injury. Basically, I couldn't lose weight by exercise alone without hurting myself.

---

Diet Principles

Reflecting my experience with various diets and my goal of living into my 100's, the principles are:

• Eat for whole body health.
• Eat for long-term sustainability, for both myself and the world.
• Follow the Oldways Vegetarian/Vegan Diet Pyramid.
• Minimize or avoid highly processed or refined foods, particularly added sugar and refined grains. Use intact whole grains and whole grain flours instead.
• Minimize or avoid meats and other animal-based foods.

---

Chronology Of Diets

Most of these dates are approximate.

• 1983: Atkins Diet. At the time, the version in Atkins' book was a quite restrictive low-carb, high-protein ketogenic diet. Only a few vegetables were on it. After 2 weeks, even though it was working, my wife and I stopped, because we were ready to kill for a piece of bread or a bowl of pasta. Additionally, I was concerned that it reflected a poor nutritional balance. In its current form, the Atkins Diet has evolved to allow more complex carbohydrate foods.
• 1995: We bought the first edition of The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook: A Delicious Alternative for Lifelong Health, by Nancy Harmon Jenkins, a founding director of Oldways. We tried briefly to follow it, but found it too big a change at the time (ironically, considering how pasta cravings had affected our Atkins Diet).
• 2002: Weight Watchers-At-Work. This was the standard Weight Watchers program, but done on-site at my job with a group of co-workers for 12 weeks. This was very effective. I lost 22 pounds (down to 148) and learned a lot about managing what I ate. I used this method repeatedly over the years when my weight crept back up. The biggest advantage was that it allowed any food of any type, as long as it was in controlled amounts. Eventually I stopped because I disliked the point tracking methodology, but it took nearly 3 years to gain the weight back, so had good long-term results.
• 2005: South Beach Diet, based on the results former President Bill Clinton reportedly had with it. Another low-carb, high-protein diet that was less restrictive than Atkins, but still restricted refined carbohydrates. We found it effective, but couldn't keep it up.
• 2011: Dukan Diet. Another low-carb, high-protein diet. Like Atkins and South Beach, we found it effective, but again couldn't keep it up.
• 2015: Ideal Protein. Yet another low-carb, high-protein diet, but based on program food. We bought the food from a diet coach and ate it in combination with recommended grocery food. This was very effective, and I lost about 15 lbs., but cost and carb cravings led us to stop. I regained the weight over the next year.
• 2017: Low-carb, high-protein diet. Since I had found this method effective but expensive, I applied it with the guideline of no program food. I wanted to be able to do it just with what I could get at the grocery store. Since my carb cravings had been what had always ended such diets in the past, I added more non-starchy fruits and vegetables. I lost 15 lbs. again in about 10 weeks, but then we went on vacation and threw it all to the wind on sweets and other refined carbohydrates. I regained the 15 lbs. in less than a month.
• 2018: Modified keto diet. This was largely following typical keto guidelines, since I found the high-protein diets that restricted refined carbs effective, but I further expanded my fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and included some intact whole grains. I only lost 7 lbs., but found it much more sustainable. The fruits, nuts, and limited grains prevented the carb cravings.
• 2019: I watched the Netflix documentary The Game Changers. Combined with information I had from other sources, this completely changed my approach to diet. Where before I had been focused primarily on weight control, now my focus is on long-term health, with weight being just one aspect.

---

The New Diet

Until very recently, I had expected the modified keto diet, which was primarily animal-based but with a significant plant-based component, to be my long-term diet. But I've replaced that with a primarily plant-based diet.

This is the subject of an upcoming post, which also discusses the transition.