Weekly Diet

When I meet with my medical weight-loss patients, I hear the same thing over and over: “There is so much conflicting data in the press in regards to diet, I don’t know what to do so I just don’t do anything.” I am going to take this opportunity to give you some simple tips and also show you what a sample week of eating can look like. For the week described below, I shopped at Meijers the Sunday prior and then went to Whole Foods the following Sunday. I am feeding a family of 5 including children ages 8, 6, and 2. We do not have any family allergies or dietary restrictions.

1. You do not need processed food. If the package has more than five ingredients and you don’t know how to pronounce them, you do not need to eat them. This can be tricky because some of the packaged foods at the grocery have labels that say they are healthy or certified by the American Heart Association. In general, those are just marketing tactics. Eat the real version of the food.

2. You do not need to be a gourmet cook to eat real food. Find five or six things you really like and make them over and over again. It’s OK to stick to basics. My children eat hard-boiled eggs, slices of turkey, and carrots almost daily for lunch. If I try to make something Pinterest worthy, no one in my house will even try it. They all know what a terrible cook I am!

3. Leftovers are your best friend. Why rethink what is for lunch the next day? In the food examples below I baked the salmon and hard-boiled eggs on Sunday night and then ate them in the next three days’ salads.

4. Intermittent fasting is a great lifestyle change and will help you lose weight. I generally recommend an eight-hour feeding window followed by sixteen-hour fasting window. There is some interesting data being discovered how fasting helps us reset our hormone levels so we use the fat that we have already stored. Besides the great hormone resets, it also restricts the amount of time you have to mindlessly snack before bed.

5. During your eating window you should aim to eat two meals and, if needed, a snack. You should not graze for an eight-hour period of time. I see a lot of food logs where the person never actually ate anything substantial. You do need to eat. There is not conclusive data on how much to eat. In my personal experience with my weight-loss patients, I find eating around 1,200 calories per day works. I do not expect anyone to count the calories, however; this is just a ballpark amount to make sure you are eating enough food.

6. Carbs . . . Carbohydrates are tough. There is some data showing the keto diet is no better than a low-fat diet. It depends on the person and how willing they are to stick to the diet. It is my recommendation to keep total carbohydrate content to less than 100g per day. That will allow you to eat a half of cup of rice or beans or a piece of bread throughout the day without going overboard on carbohydrates. I also expect that you are still following point number one, so no processed foods. This makes overdoing carbohydrates more difficult.

Sample Food Week (this is my actual diet from last week). I did intermittent fasting and ate between 12 p.m. and 8 p.m. daily. I counted calories and carbohydrates for the purpose of this blog but do not do so on a daily basis.