An awful lot of diets seem to have the same problem: no standard menus for the week based on one shopping list which makes it easy to cook (while working twelve-hour days.) I think that y’all know the kind of thing I mean:
Monday:
Lunch: Some recipe based on beef and bok choy.
Dinner: Ditto with turkey and boston lettuce.
Tuesday:
Flounder and red cabbage.
Chicken and mandarin oranges.
Wednesday:
Orange roughy and durian.
Sand dollars and algae.
Thursday:
Fried albatross and seaweed.
King crab and sea cucumbers.
Well, you get the idea…
Can anyone recommend a good diet book (or something online) based on actual, practical shopping lists and menus that repeat the same ingredients?? I am not interested in using 8,000 different kinds of meats, fruits, and vegetables per week! All suggestions welcomed…
I really, really don’t mind eating the same thing every day for weeks and months–and I do that when I am eating unhealthy as well as healthy. Apparently most people aren’t like me, so take this with a grain of salt.
I don’t eat “meals” at all. I eat things, and I measure how much I eat so that I know basically how many calories and what my nutrients are. Whenever I am hungry, I eat something, but I don’t ever put various things on a plate together and call it a meal.
There are hundreds of healthy things out there. You might try to just find ones you like and don’t try to put them together in combinations that “go”. I think that makes portion control harder.
For me my standard foods are:
Baked chicken breast
pork tenderloin
very, very lean ground beef, browned, drained and rinsed
apples
oranges
carrots
100 calorie popcorn bags
1% milk
sugar-free, fat-free pudding + wheat bran (this is gross to think about, but sweet + filling)
high fiber cereal
When I get stuck out and need food I eat:
Chipotle bowl with easy rice, bean, meat, and salsa OR McDs plain grilled chicken sandwich
Now, I rotate through some of these things to avoid TOO much of a rut. But I find planning meals to be overwhelming. Having lots of food that I like and I can graze is much less stressful.
Here is what I did to lose weight - just eat less calories and eat more raw food and less processed food. It’s very simple to do this, you don’t have to worry about which foods are on the list or not in most cases.
The easiest way I found was to replace most junk food with fruits and vegetables. I went from 200 to 160 in about 9 months. I also walked 30-60 minutes most days.
Here, you can test out my theoretical ‘diet’ that I haven’t yet tried myself:
Take the current food pyramid and…follow it.
I don’t see how anyone can ever be hungry following that. That’s a lot of fruits and vegetables!
And don’t put anything into your body that doesn’t put you toward that goal of eating that pyramid every single day.
I saw a TV interview a few years ago with a Seattle Seahawks cheerleader (Seagals) who had lost over 100 lbs. She did it by cutting out everything except meat, fruits, and vegetables (non-starchy ones - no potatoes). No breads or pastas or grains. Just meat, fruits and vegetables. I would assume eggs would also be included. That always struck me as the simplest diet - easy to follow, infinite variety.
I’ve always thought those kinds of “diets” seemed annoying and a lot of work. Why should I have to make some particular thing for a particular day and meal? And as others have said, it’s a hell of a lot easier to grab some yogurt and a banana (or whatever) every morning than have to consult some list to find out what six-ingredient breakfast I have to make and eat today. And there’s another thing: who wants to make a recipe for three meals a day? If I were working 12-hour days I sure as hell wouldn’t want to mess with that. And how are you going to maintain a diet like that? Sooner or later will come the day when you can’t eat what’s on your recipe regimen, because you’re at a restaurant, or at someone’s house, or on vacation. What then?
I’ve lost 55 pounds (and counting) on Weight Watchers, but I’ll second the food pyramid recommendation. Cut out the junk, learn portion control, and up the fruits, veggies, lean protein, and whole grains. And increase your physical activity.
My solution to this is simply calorie counting - I eat whatever I want, as long as it fits in my calorie budget for the day. My menus are fairly repetitious; after doing this for seven months now, I have a good idea what works well and keep eating the same things day after day (breakfast is a bowl of multigrain cereal, lunch is a cheese or meat bun and yogurt, snacks are fruit, cheese, and crackers, etc.). For the record, my husband and I are both doing this, and there is even room in this method for eating out a couple times on the weekends. We even eat high-calorie foods and desserts sometimes (those are heavy exercise days ).
ETA: Forgot to say that we use an online calorie counter and Jim’s iTouch LoseIt app.
If you really like to have suggested recipes, printable grocery lists and count calories, check out eDiets.com. I worked with that site for a while and found it quite simple. You plan your own menu based on their suggested meals and once you’ve planned for the week you can print out a grocery list based on the meals you’ve chosen.
The ingredients in their recipes/meals are pretty basic and repetitive, so it’s not hard to plan it so you’re not left over with a whole bunch of chard because you needed it for one day. You just have to do a tiny bit of pre-planning yourself to make sure you didn’t choose a meal that was off the wall and requires you to buy something you’ll only use once in the week.
You could try the premise of Channel Four’s (UK CH4) ‘Big Fat Diet Show’. You’re allowed a daily calorie intake of about 800 calories under your ‘normal’ intake.
The rest of the premise consists of knowing what calorie content food has. This list consists of how much food you can have for 100 calories worth of it.
You then assemble meals with these 100 calorie blocks, simples!
I’m a 5"8’ male at 220 pounds. I’ve ate 1400-1600 calories a day since tues, not only have I been reasonably full but I’ve also enjoyed what I’m eating.
It’s also important to record what you eat though.
Also check out Mayo Clinic’s new diet book - lots of vegetables and fruits, simple advice, in a two-part approach (add 5 habits, break 5 habits). It’s getting great reviews.
If you want someone to give you a meal plan with recipes you could try sparkpeople dot com. Frankly, I didn’t stick with it because I never planned out my meals enough to follow their plan and I got tired of manually entering my food but I might go back to that when I get a faster Internet connection. But anyway it’s free so you could always give it a try and see if it’s what you want.
That’s what I use (actually, Babyfit.com, which is Sparkpeople for pregnant women).
I like it - I don’t do meal plans, I usually eat lots of leftovers and the meal plans expect you to eat a totally different lunch & dinner every single day, so I just hide the meals.
I just enter my food in the mornings - sometimes I leave dinner out, then add it in when I decide what I’m having. After awhile, you get good at planning out a day without much fuss, as long as you know about how many calories are in the foods you’ve picked.
I’ve lost over 50 pounds in the past two years by following one principle: stop eating carbs. (There are other principles I’ve added–drink lots of water, accept being “hungry” (as opposed to hungry without the q. marks), exercise, no eating while cooking, etc. --but they don’t amount to the hill of beans I haven’t eaten lately; I would have lost much of the weight if I had only cut carbs out of my diet, which was very tough at first, since I loved potatoes, rice, bread, pasta, cake, etc. But I disliked more being overweight, and out of breath often, and needing to buy bigger and bigger clothes every few months.
If you want simple, and you can do something challenging but no problem to understand and to follow, try this. Read THE SOUTH BEACH DIET, which is a modified form of no carbs (and I do make the occasional exception, if someone has baked a cake herself, and I want to be polite, I’ll eat a small portion, etc.), to get some idea of recipes and the reasoning, but it’s largely a mental thing. You grow up thinking that carbs are the most natural thing in everyone’s diet, and it feels strange to omit them completely (or nearly so). But you really don’t need them in the grotesque proportions they appear in most people’s diet, and as soon as you accept that information as helpful, the sooner you’ll start losing weight. It takes considerable willpower to overcome a lifetime of habits, but it’s well within your reach. Good luck.
I’ll try some of these suggestions-- thanks. It’s weird, though, how hard it seems to be to find a diet book like the one I’m looking for. (Maybe somebody needs to write one…)
Example:
“Here’s your shopping list for the week. Here are the staples you need to have in your kitchen, but these are the specific shopping lists for these weeks.”
“Now, based on that shopping list, here are the repeating menus you’ll use.”
rather than having to figure out shopping lists and exactly how cooking and meals are going to work from complicated menus with lots of different ingredients required. I can’t believe that more diet books aren’t written in the first way.
I must regretfully disagree with cutting out carbs - if you want sustained weight loss, you have to lose weight in a sustainable way, and not only is it difficult to not eat carbs, but the healthy human should be eating about 55% carbs, 15% protein, and 30% fat - it’s what we’re built for.
What you need is either Menu Mailer, or Thyme for Cooking. (Google them.) Both of them will give you a weekly shopping list, with a menu, sent to you in-box every week. Menu Mailer has also got published books, if you prefer that.
Menu Mailer has several varieties (low-carb is one) and other options (such as vegetarian and frugal) as e-books that you can buy for download. She assumes that all you have in the house is salt and pepper, and that you can boil water with help. I did find that after a while the menus started tasting the same, so I went looking for something more interesting.
Thyme for Cooking is more adventurous food, plus she lives in Europe and they periodically move (from Ireland to Spain to France) and she gives lots of cool details about daily life there. Her meals are more involved. She includes a fairly elaborate Sunday dinner with multiple courses. Her website has detailed instructions on how to do everything from cleaning leeks to deboning chickens. I really enjoyed all her food, but as a single mother with one small child, I never ate everything. (Ingredients are coded on the shopping list, so I could easily drop everything for Tuesday, for example, if I know I wasn’t going to make that meal.)
I’ve used and liked both of them. I’m not right now because I got a CSA, and I need to be able to eat what shows up, rather than shop from their lists. Both have sample menus available, and both are responsive to questions and such by e-mail.
The diet my mom uses, which she’s managed to stay on for over ten years, is very simple. Every day, she eats at least ten servings of fruits and vegetables, and whatever else she wants. It’s flexible enough to accommodate almost any situation, but doesn’t leave much room for junk food. While she does like variety in her veggies, I see no reason you couldn’t do it with the same or similar things every day.
I have been diabetic since 1980, and i rarely eat junk food, but I also have a love of vegetables … so one of my absolute favorite snacks is carrot sticks and celery sticks with hummus … I think it is more a matter of finding healthy snacks that you actually like, and stick with them =)
That being said, I don’t see any issue with tossing in an occasional 100 calorie snack pack once a week or so if you like cookies or pretzles. [Im not much for cookies but I do like pretzles now and again]
).