Food for Life: How the New Four Food Groups Can Save Your Life (30 page)

Be strict for twenty-one days. Then size up how you feel. The goal is not to lose fifty pounds in three weeks or to lower your cholesterol level from 300 to 150 immediately. The goal is to start the ball rolling. The next step is to do the same for another three-week period.

Breaking the process of change into three-week blocks helps you give the program your best effort without feeling any pressure of a long-term change.

Everyone has different needs. Some have family members to help them. Others find family members offer more hurdles than help. Some people have struggled with diets for many years, while others have never given foods any thought at all. See if you find yourself described here. The New Four Food Groups are for everyone, but you may have special considerations in the process of change.

A person not well currently
. If you have existing heart disease, diabetes, a weight problem, cancer, or other serious problem, this is not a time to flirt with dietary change. This is the time to commit to an optimal menu. Grains, vegetables, fruits, and legumes are a much more powerful regimen than most old-fashioned diets, and I recommend sticking very closely to these foods. Having said that, the information in this book cannot take the place of individualized treatment by your doctor, so be sure to discuss your dietary needs and plans with your health professional. Food changes can affect medical decisions—for example, they may lower your need for insulin, blood pressure medications, or cholesterol-lowering drugs. Moreover, you may have specific needs that cannot be addressed here.

A healthy young adult
. Your biggest vulnerability is thinking that you can put off changing your diet. Now is the time when foods begin to cause cancer and heart disease. These conditions often start years before they are diagnosed. You may already have started to pay attention to your weight. This is a perfect time to build a solid healthful menu. I hope you will become familiar with all sections of this book, including those that do not seem to apply to you at the moment.

A chronic dieter
. If you have been dieting to lose weight, set aside your calorie charts. Allow yourself to have generous portion sizes. Be sure not only to eliminate animal products but keep vegetable oil to an absolute minimum. If you are overeating for emotional reasons, use this book in conjunction with Overeaters Anonymous, as described in
Chapter 4
. If you have been on a very low calorie diet, do not increase your exercise level until after you have increased your calorie intake.

A family member
. If you are married, have children, or have other loved ones living with you, you will want your family to change with you. Suggestions follow.

A businessperson or frequent traveler
. If you eat in the office or at restaurants several days a week, it is hard to be the master of your cuisine. See the tips that follow on travel and restaurants.

A person with a sweet tooth
. If you are eating occasional sugar candies without fat in them, then enjoy them and stop feeling guilty. However, if sweets lure you to fatty foods such as pies, cookies, cakes, and chocolate, give yourself a clean break from these foods. Do not tease yourself. The same applies if you are eating huge amounts of sugary foods.

Do you need transition foods? Some people use vegetarian hot dogs, soymilk, etc. to help them make the move away from fat and cholesterol. If you would like to do so, your local health food store or gourmet aisle will feature many of these. Some of these transition foods are listed in
Chapter 8
. Be on the lookout for fat content, though, because some are not much better than the foods they replace. Gradually phase them out in favor of grains, vegetables, fruits, and legumes.

Look over the menus and recipes in
Chapter 8
, along with tips on modifying existing recipes. These are all you need to get started, but eventually you will want more. One of the most rewarding parts of changing your diet is exploring the world of healthful foods. Learning about new foods is like visiting interesting shops, with lots to see and try. Take advantage of the chance to try enticing new foods.

• Check the cookbook section of your local library or bookstore. Look at the enormous variety of vegetarian and international cookbooks. Try out the recipes that appeal to you. Experiment, and assume that some new recipes will be terrific and others will be duds. That is what experimentation is all about. Every healthful new recipe that suits your taste is going to help save your life. But you do not need to have hundreds of recipes and a gourmet certificate on your wall. Most people eat from relatively few recipes and are happy with them. You need only find about a half-dozen recipes that you really like. You will modify your list of favorites as time goes on.

• When you dine out, explore international restaurants for healthful food ideas. Italian pastas, Chinese vegetables, Japanese miso soup and vegetarian sushi, Indian curries, Mexican beans, tortillas, and rice, and many other ethnic cuisines make healthy eating a joy.

• Today’s health food stores are wonderful places for America’s favorite pastime—shopping. Not so many years ago, health food stores were dingy places with dusty shelves and never-ending folk music. Well, those days are gone. Beautiful new shops have opened up to display their wares, meeting the demand for healthy and delicious foods. Organic produce, vegetarian pizza, quick and easy soups, meatless burgers, nondairy “ice creams,” tasty milk substitutes, and chemical-free frozen vegetables are only the beginning. There is a world of healthful eating in bright, colorful packages within anyone’s reach. They also carry low-sodium varieties of canned foods.

• Take another look at your local grocery. The produce selection is more varied every year. The aisle that used to stock plain spaghetti and instant mashed potatoes now has an endless array of packaged dinners, from curried rice to tabouli, that are delicious and very easy to make. In the gourmet aisle, you will find interesting and exotic condiments to spice up your foods: elegant chutneys, mustards, and so on. Some groceries carry low-fat soymilks on shelves formerly reserved for canned condensed milk, and some have nonfat salad dressings, meatless hot dogs, and other unusual foods in the “dietetic” aisle. There are also healthful new soups, such as lentil, minestrone, and ramen noodle.

One suggestion: Do not go shopping on an empty stomach. Your stomach will override your judgment, and you will end up buying all kinds of things that will gather dust on the shelf.

In my practice, I have helped patients deal with all kinds of destructive habits, from tobacco and alcohol to cocaine and heroin. The force of habit is tremendously powerful. The key is to get the force of habit working
for
you instead of against you. A person who is trying to stop smoking is set back by having an occasional cigarette. But every day without tobacco helps build a new habit: the habit of being a nonsmoker.

Similarly, you are not building a healthful habit if you are teasing yourself with fried chicken once a week and an occasional hamburger; doing so only reinforces your taste for greasy foods. So don’t tease yourself. Get some distance from offending foods, and get the force of a new habit working for you. Every day that you don’t eat animal products or added oils makes these products less likely to show up on your plate in the future. In the process, you are also resetting your taste for fat at a new lower level.

Now, I know what you are thinking. Most of us feel daunted by longterm commitments. A lifetime without pork chops or hamburgers may seem a harsh thing. The solution is to think short-term. Anyone can make a dramatic change for a few weeks. Resolve to change your menu completely, but only for three weeks. At the end of that time, decide if you would like to continue for another three weeks. Notice how your weight has changed. Have your cholesterol and blood pressure checked, if you like. You may be
surprised at the improvement. Making a complete break from the offending old foods is so rewarding that most people want to stick with the new winning formula. Halfway measures give few rewards and make it all the harder to stick with dietary changes.

You won’t need any calorie charts or food scales. The New Four Food Groups are low in fat, modest in calories, and contain no cholesterol, so you can eat generous amounts anytime you want. If you are measuring calories, fat content, or protein intake, there is something wrong with the foods you are eating.

When people change any habit, sometimes there is a period of uncertainty and cravings. Eventually a feeling of success takes its place. But initially you may find yourself window-shopping at a fast-food restaurant, thinking maybe just one burger can’t do that much harm.

It takes most people anywhere from three weeks to two months to really get used to a new way of eating. It helps to anticipate that and to know that before long you will be totally comfortable with your new way of eating. Think of any habit you ever changed. When people quit smoking, for instance, they think about cigarettes after meals and during every lull in a conversation, and this goes on for several days. Cravings become less and less frequent, and the new nonsmoker often actually comes to dislike the smell of smoke and to be annoyed with smokers who bring their odors too close.

Food habits are much, much easier to break than tobacco habits, but something similar happens. For a while you may crave greasy foods, but this does not last. Very soon you may find that your taste for fat starts to diminish, and you may actually become annoyed when a waiter butters your toast or puts an egg sauce all over your broccoli.

You may have an occasional slip. You are at a Christmas party, and in all the excitement, you somehow polished off a cheese omelet with gravy. You can almost hear your coronary arteries complaining, chanting in protest like prisoners behind bars: How could you abuse us this way? OK, relax. Forgive yourself. The real danger of a slip is using it as an excuse to abandon your new way of eating. As you get back in gear with your healthful way of eating, you will find that slips are less and less likely.

A good way to handle cravings is to eat something healthful. Don’t get judgmental about whatever craving you have had; just eat something healthful and as hunger dissipates, cravings tend to be forgotten, too.

It helps to get offending foods out of the house. This means animal products and oily foods. Throw them away or give them away, but get rid of the temptation. Restock with healthful foods so when snack time hits you have something good on hand. Fresh fruit, toast, cereal, air-popped popcorn, soymilks, bread, dried fruit, and instant soups make great snacks, and you will find endless other possibilities.

Our families eat with us. We share similar tastes, and we share all the family times when food plays a central role. As you redesign your menu, it helps to involve your family and friends, for two reasons. First, you need their support. Starting new habits is much easier with their help, and more difficult if they give you a hard time. Second, they need your help in changing their diets, too. If you don’t help them improve their diets, you may wish you had. Don’t think they can’t change. Everyone is rethinking food choices now that the links with serious illness have become so clear. Just as smokers’ families do them no favors by keeping quiet, people who watch their spouses or children eat the standard Western diet day after day may see them pay a very high price before long.

When loved ones don’t care about their health (or yours), you have a problem, but one that can be solved. People who persist in unhealthful eating habits may simply be showing a lack of knowledge of the health risks, a lack of experience with healthy and tasty foods, or just plain denial.

Let’s face it. Any change causes reactions in people around us. A woman who has had long hair all her life and decides to cut it short will encounter resistance from her family. A man who after several years shaves off his beard will elicit mixed reactions from family and friends. Dietary changes encounter the same expressions of surprise. Although you may be tempted not to “rock the boat,” a little boat rocking may be a good idea if the boat is headed for the reefs. In the long run, you will be very happy that you’ve changed the way you eat, and so will your family.

When you talk about healthful eating, family members may react with jokes about “eating rabbit food,” or with “bargaining,” such as the statement, “I had a healthy breakfast so I can have fried chicken for dinner.”
These statements, annoying as they may be, are actually very good signs. Why? Because they show—in spades—something that psychologists have studied for many years. The process of accepting new ideas occurs in stages. Denial, ridicule, and even anger are predictable events that occur early in the process of change. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote of the stages of acceptance of death, and the “deaths” of outmoded ideas follow a very similar series: denial, then anger, followed by bargaining, depression, and ultimately acceptance. In other words, we first try to push away the need to change the way we eat, sometimes using jokes or ridicule. If that fails, we naturally become annoyed. We try to “bargain” so as to make as few changes as possible, counting the number of eggs we down in a week or which part of the chicken we ate. If we have the opportunity to learn why halfway changes are not much use, we come to the depressing realization that we have not done much for ourselves. Ultimately, we accept the need to change and begin to take steps to accomplish it. And the rewards follow. So do not despair when family members are resistant. Psychiatrists know that when patients begin to express their resistance to new ideas the process of resolving the resistance can begin.

So what are the best strategies for coping with family obstacles? People in the denial phase just need more information. Give them a book from the lists. If reading is not their strong suit, try a tape. If you are in charge of the kitchen, ignore the resistance and prepare healthful meals. The palate can often be seduced even while the mind resists.