I could cheat and just repeat an earlier post, but I find it is good for the soul to restate this every now and then. My diet is designed to meet several conditions:
Condition 1: No transfat, no hydrogenated fat, and no high fructose corn syrup. This is pretty much 100% absolute for everything that comes into my kitchen and pantry. Eating out, this may get violated without my knowledge. But, we try to eat out at places that would not use these much and rarely order food that would contain them. The ketchup in the fridge has corn syrup in it, but we only use that on turkey meatloaf. I will bend the rule for a few grams/month.
Condition 2: Eat 1200 calories per day, plus or minus 200. Only go outside this limit for some really good reason and keep the average at 1200 on a weekly basis.
Condition 3: Get a good Omega 6/Omega 3 ratio - under 10 most certainly, with 3 being desirable.
Condition 4: Get the RDAs for vitamins and minerals - or very close to it. I fail this rule on a couple of things which I supplement (zinc, calcium). I would never supplement Vitamin A. I get 400% of the RDA of carotenes. Anyone can do this easily without impacting calories.
Condition 5: Get enough high quality protein. For me, I have set this goal at 80g/day.
Condition 6: Don't go over 150g of carbohydrates a day. I find this makes me hungry and I feel "bad".
Condition 7: Avoid foods on my food allergy list (from IgG testing): cows milk, yeast, egg whites, sunflower seeds, beef, hot peppers, corn, pistachios, cashews. I am actually a miserable failure at the peppers and corn. But, I do pretty good at the rest of them.
If I achieve all of the above, I find that I feel very good, all the time, and have minimal hunger issues.
I eat out, though less lately. I focus on Asian and Mediterranean cuisines - especially Thai and Lebanese, when I was in Virginia. Here, those are not available, but Greek and Vietnamese are. We have been very disappointed in the Thai restaurants so far. All too bland. Here we've found one "favorite" restaurant so far, an Italian one,
Hill Country Pasta. We will be going there for Mother's Day. It's a great CR restaurant. They have great salads and will make any pasta dish by replacing the pasta with steamed veggies. Lots of olive oil, too. Everything is very fresh! I will order grilled, baked or steamed fish or shellfish dishes or a salad with grilled chicken in most other restaurants. I eat Mexican too, but here you can order a green sauce and chicken, which cuts out most of the bad calories and adds vitamins.
I eat animal protein at every meal - and a variety of it. The only dairy product I eat is goat cheese, typically hard cheese like goat gouda or cheddar. I eat an ounce or less of this a day. I love cheese too much to give it up, so I switched to a non-cow version and a strong flavored cheese. The sharper and stronger the cheese, the less you have to use to get cheesiness. I also use feta and romano in recipes. My typical protein sources are chicken breast, ground turkey, tilapia, catfish, wild salmon, shrimp, buffalo, and lean pork. I also love crab, lobster, mussels and oysters, but I just eat them less since my husband doesn't like them. I eat enough poultry, fish and meat to get the 80g of protein - typically 6-8 oz a day. I am allergic to egg whites and they do indeed break out my face in hives, so I don't eat eggs. Cow's milk makes my stomach hurt now, so it is also off my list.
I eat 2-3 servings of fruit a day. I do not eat bananas and rarely eat pears or apples. They are just too high calorie and low nutrient. I eat berries almost every day - whatever is in season or cheapest. I eat mangos a lot lately. They are very good here and inexpensive. I cannot eat oranges - they give me mouth sores. I can eat grapefruit and tangerines in small quantities. I eat cherries, grapes, melons, kiwis and pineapples. I tend to treat fruit as a snack or dessert and eat it mid-afternoon and after dinner.
I eat 3-8 servings of vegetables a day. There is no vegetable I don't eat. I adore spinach. I make vegetable soups fairly often. We steam veggies a lot - especially broccoli. We use 3 or 4 bell peppers a week in our cooking and chop peppers and onions into almost every dish. I especially love the red ones. I eat modest amounts of carrots and sweet potatoes. I prefer yellow squash to zuchinni and we eat that often. We make really delicious microwaved winter squash pretty often in the fall and winter. I love chard and kale. There is just an infinite number of vegetable dishes to be made. We usually steam, grill or sautee our veggies and serve them fairly plain with seasonings and no oil or olive oil. I am a big fan of dill. All veggies go with dill. Also coriander.
I try to keep grain servings per day down to one or two. Our grain items are almost always whole grain. The ban on yeast for me tend to make me focus on crackers and tortillas or wraps.
Just say no to dessert. I rarely eat a real dessert. And then, I try to get a very small piece and get other people to eat the rest. I have my fruit and my hot chocolate instead. I will eat a little piece of dark chocolate every now and then. My hot chocolate is good-quality organic baking cocoa mixed with hot water and sucralose. I will eat desserts on special occasions. Since I must record the damage in my food diary, I find it not too difficult to keep the portions low.
I don't use sugar - I use sucralose (Splenda) instead. I am trying to cut this out and not use sweetener. I think it keeps your sweet tooth active if you use it. Your brain does adjust to lower sweetness. I've been there in the past.
I use Morton Lite salt - half potassium salt - to cook with. This is the only way I see to getting a good potassium to salt ratio. We salt very lightly regardless. Prepared foods are usually twice as salty or more than what we cook.
Our only cooking oil is olive oil. Olive oil is the food of the gods. We use it in everything - even baking. We have some unsalted butter in the fridge - which my husband uses occasionally. A pound will last 6 months or more. April's practice of adding flax oil to dishes after they are cooked is really a great idea. I have not made this a habit. Flax oil spoils pretty quickly, so you have to make sure you use it! To get the good Omega 6/Omega 3 ratio, we avoid buying anything with significant corn oil in it. I cannot eat anything made with sunflower oil or I risk a huge hive breakout. This is very helpful in many ways since almost all gakky food contains "one of the following oils: ..., sunflower oil, ...". We look for chips and crackers made with expeller pressed canola or olive oil. These are rare, but still findable.
We eat lots of nuts - basically as a snack or a garnish. We leave some raw almonds in a dish on the counter. I tend to eat 10-20g of these a day. I like to eat them while I cook dinner. We also use walnuts fairly often.
We drink very little. We split a light beer three ways, maybe once or twice a week. I drink a half glass of wine once or twice a week. I am just not that into alcohol. It increases your appetite and reduces restraint. I do not think it is good for CR.
I drink tons of decaf organic coffee. I drink a fair amount of green and black tea. I drink a lot of filtered water. In the past, I have drunk a lot of mineral water - especially Gerolsteiner. This is too expensive here. In the last 8 months, I have become addicted to diet cherry Pepsi. This is annoying. I drink it to stay alert after lunch. I quit buying it this week and started drinking caffeinated tea instead with lunch. Soft drinks are not good for you. Caffeine appears to have some value. I drink low salt V-8 too. I drink a lot of fluid. My husband calls me "the guzzler". I drink twice as much as most people. I always have, so this is not a CR thing.
It's really important to shop well at the grocery store. You should be proud of the foods in your cart. They should smile up at you and say - "We are beautiful wholesome fresh foods that will nourish your body. We have lots of flavors and colors and will taste delicious." My family has a tradition of anthropomorphizing foods, so forgive me for doing that. Food always cries out to be eaten to me. So, I have to make sure that the food I have is the right food.
Last but not least, I diary my eating every day. I weigh things a lot and I am very experienced at estimating portions. A best practice is to record what you've eaten before dinner and then predict your dinner. This will help you to stay on target. I would rather eat a lot of variety and diary. If you are willing to design a diet and stick with it, then you can just eat according to your plan and not have to diary. For some people, this is easier. Regardless, I do not believe that ad hoc eating can be CR. You will forget what you've eaten. By diarying every day, I have to keep a running list in my head of what I've eaten and I have an idea of where I am on calories. If you are not thinking that way, you will be eating ad lib and CR is out the window. Plus, unless you use a tool, like CRON-o-Meter, you will not be improving the quality of your diet with regards to nutrition. Everyone who has tracked their diet for a week is always appalled at how deficient they were. Only the most healthy eaters will not have some deficiencies.
