Own Your Health: How to Live Long and Avoid Chronic Illness by CHEF AJ & Merzer Glen

Author:CHEF AJ & Merzer, Glen [CHEF AJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Hail to the Kale Publishing
Published: 2020-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT:

HOW TO EAT WELL AND STICK AROUND

* * *

If you are making a transformational change in your diet, from eating the way most Americans eat—a high-fat, animal-foods-based diet—to eating the way your body was meant to be fueled, this chapter is designed to help guide you. Whether your primary objective is weight loss on one hand, or health and longevity (both of which, of course, are related to weight) on the other, the rules remain basically the same.

Let’s start by repeating the fundamentals: the natural human diet consists of whole plant foods. We classify these as fruits, vegetables, fungi (mushrooms, often lumped together with vegetables), whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, herbs and spices.

In order to feel full when we eat, we need to get the bulk of our calories from the category of foods that are sometimes described as “complex carbohydrates” and sometimes called “starches”: potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, corn, rice, and other whole grains like millet, barley, rye, buckwheat, and oats. You’d struggle to get enough calories if you tried to live off just non-starchy vegetables (think salad greens and steamed broccoli) and fruit. When you give up unhealthy but filling flesh foods, you should naturally gravitate to healthy starches in order to feel satisfied.

Potatoes, an ideal starchy vegetable, are not fattening; that’s a myth. There are about 163 calories in one medium-sized potato. There’s actually less than one calorie per gram of potato. Now, don’t be fooled when people make the mistake of calling potatoes “carbohydrates.” Potatoes are whole foods that contain, besides carbohydrates, protein and a smidgen of fat. Consider that there are four calories in a gram of carbohydrate. So how can there be less than one calorie in a gram of potato (often derided as a “carb”)? Answer: most of the weight of a potato is calorie-free fiber and water.

There are more varieties of potatoes than you can count, and they are all healthy, non-fattening forms of fuel. The only thing that can make a potato fattening is the butter or sour cream or other fatty topping that people are accustomed to spoiling it with.

Most people need to eat about four pounds of food per day to feel satisfied. If you ate four pounds of potatoes per day (without putting any topping on them), you’d ingest about 1600 calories per day. For virtually everyone, a 1600-calorie-per-day diet would be a very successful weight-loss diet.

If you ate four pounds of celery per day, you’d be taking in only a little over 300 calories per day, and the weight loss would be much greater, although your mood would likely be foul.

If you ate, instead, four pounds of nuts per day, you’d be on a 12,000-calorie-per-day diet, and you’d pack on the pounds.

So if you had to choose a food item around which to base a four-pounds-of-food-a-day monotrophic diet (in which you eat only one type of food), the potato would be as good a choice as any, since you’d get plenty of calories and you’d feel full as you lost weight.

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