Now that the holiday blur of unhealthy eating and drinking choices is past and 2024 has begun, I want to try to modify my diet. And by “diet” I don’t mean “a short-term gimmick or fad method to lose weight” but “a long term, sustainable, sensible eating plan”.
I do have weight to lose, but I want to eat healthier in general. In the past I’ve done keto, which has probably been the most successful way I’ve found to lose weight. And I didn’t find it particularly difficult to keep low-carb, except that I like to cook for myself and my family, and a lot of things I like to make simply don’t have very good low-carb alternatives. Like risotto annd paella. And believe me, I’ve tried! I’ve attempted to make low-carb riced cauliflower versions of risotto and paella: fail. Ditto with pasta dishes. I’ve tried making pasta dishes for my family with a keto-friendly sauce, serving my family actual pasta and trying various other low carb pasta substitutions for myself, but nothing is really very great for that.
I’ve heard that the Mediterranean Diet is the best overall, in terms of its healthiness and ease of maintaining it long-term, so I’m leaning toward it or the MIND diet, which is a variation on the Med diet that’s supposed to support brain health. I think the most difficult part will be avoiding or limiting butter and cheese.
So please, share your diet experiences, with the Med / MIND diet, or if you do a low-carb diet with reasonably varied and enjoyable ingredient choices, or any other healthy yet enjoyable and sustainable eating plan you have have or are planning to have in 2024.
Over here we’ve been trying to cut down on red meat, that is after cutting down on meat in general, so at this point the meals I cook predominantly involve beans or lentils, chicken, turkey or fish. By this point I am already used to eating some meatless meals every week. I’m trying to swing a little more toward the Mediterranean diet.
One tool I use is the paid app Plan to Eat which allows me to snip recipes from anywhere online without that godawful text spiel that precedes every recipe, and then there’s a cooking mode where it won’t lock your phone in the middle of the recipe. And you can schedule meals and print grocery lists, which I do all the time. I think if you are preparing your meals and you’re trying to eat a certain way, a tool like this is important. You can also tag your recipes so, for example, if you were looking for exclusively Mediterranean diet recipes you could find them easily. Once you get a robust library of recipes, as I have now, it gets a lot easier to figure out what to eat that week.
One book that I thought had a cool approach to nutrition was How to Eat More Plants. This is not a book that advises you to stop eating meat, just encourages you to eat 30 different kinds of plants a week (each plant is a plant point.) Variations count, so if you have yellow onions and later red onions, that’s two plants. It includes nuts and fruits and seeds. My husband and I followed this plan using a whiteboard where we competed to see who could eat the most plants in 7 days. It was fun. It is also the best my body ever felt. We should get back to that.
My best understanding of the research is that meat can potentially be bad news for you, but plants operate as a sort of protective factor. So regardless of the specific diet, plants are always a winner.
Oh, I’m not there yet. Cooking with less butter is one change I also want to start implementing, but I’m not sure how.
This sounds like a great thing. I have literally tired my thumbs out scrolling and scrolling on a recipe page just to find the actual recipe. I mean, good for the author writing a 10,000 word treatise on the history and sociological impact of that particular recipe, and sometimes I do read and enjoy it, but other times I just want to find the darn recipe.
I had heard about spaghetti squash as a low-carb pasta sub but never got around to trying it. The low-carb pasta substitutes I’ve tried have been ‘zoodles’, zucchini cut into noodle shapes (too insubstantial); Shiritaki, a zero-cab noodle made from a type of yam-- good as a ramen substitute but not really a pasta sub; and Palmini, which are hearts of palm cut into noodle shapes (I love hearts of palm, which kind of taste like artichoke hearts, and this worked great as a pasta sub with white sauces, but not so much red sauces).
Low carb worked really well for me (to the tune of 85 lbs). I don’t really love pasta and don’t love bread, so it wasn’t too hard. I also cut out all excess sugar and really started strictly going by portion sizes.
Be aware you WILL be hungry. This is a lifestyle change, not a diet. It took a couple of years to train my stomach. But it does get trained. I get full much faster now.
I also got a spiralizer and now spiralize SO MANY veggies. I use them instead of pasta and it’s delish. Zucchini noodles, squash noodles. I also eat lots of fish and fill up on veggies. My average lunch on a Saturday is a packet of tuna or salmon with a huge pile of arugula, sauteed with olive oil and herbs and spices, and then I eat with hot sauce.
I also never denied myself anything. If I really wanted something I would have it - a portion sized serving, as long as it fit into my calories for the day. I am averaging about 1400 calories - in the beginning I was super strict, but now I vary between 12 and 1500. So if I want a delicious ice cream and it’s 500 calories, I will skip something else to be able to eat it. I also will absolutely have a big meal but then that will be my only meal of the day.
I didn’t give up red meat because the calories are really low but I did go into lots and lots of tofu.
One happy thing I noticed when I lost 30+ lbs. doing a low-carb diet in 2019 is that I wasn’t ever really hungry. It was like a superpower. I’d feel like, eh, I could eat, but I didn’t get that ‘starving to death’ sensation I got when eating simple carbs that spike and then drastically drop your blood sugar. At least, that’s what I assumed gave me the ‘hungries’ when I was on carbs.
I’m hoping if I go to a Med diet, with whole grains and complex carbs, it will slow the absorption of the carbs and I also won’t get the drastic blood sugar spikes and drops, similar to how I didn’t on a low-carb diet. At least, not as bad as when consuming simple carbs.
I wish I could say that! I did get really hungry at times. I did my best to switch my perspective and be proud and happy when I was hungry, it showed that I was on track! I also drank endless cups of herbal tea and upped my coffee consumption.
I do find now that I can’t really eat overly sweet things anymore, I get headaches, so I stick to moderately sweet desserts. The Asian grocery store has sweets and desserts that are vastly better for you than our sweet cakes and pies, like red bean desserts.