Thursday, October 1, 2009

Dr. Fuhrman's Life Plan

I was briefly listening to Dr. Fuhrman's Eat to Live audio tape (studying for my Nutritional Excellence Trainer certificate), and was reminded of the Life Plan, the plan you can follow when you are healthy and at your ideal weight, which is the situation I am fortunate to be in. So in the Life Plan, Dr. Fuhrman says you only need to eat 90% of your calories as healthy food. The other 10% can be whatever you want. He says the typical woman should eat 1500 calories a day, and the typical male 2000. So that means I can eat 150 calories of unhealthy food per day, or 1000 calories per week. Now that's a fair amount. My unhealthy obsession is still the cupcake. There is this restaurant in my town that sells what look to be really good cupcakes. They are small. I can find out how many calories they have but I bet it's less than 500 a piece. So I could eat a cupcake (or two) a week! Or go to a restaurant and eat 1000 calories once a week. Maybe I should try this out. Then I wouldn't get into that weird psychology where you say, oh I want to splurge today and go back to eating healthy tomorrow, and then you eat a whole bunch of unhealthy stuff because it will be forbidden tomorrow, instead of just eating one little cupcake.

Oh, Dr. Fuhrman suggests a good way to track your 10% off-plan calories. Write it in your calendar. Then you know how many days you have left until you earn your next splurge. He also says that after a while you probably won't even want this stuff. But as long as you know it's not forbidden, you won't be as likely to binge when you go offplan (thinking, okay, I'll start over tomorrow but in that case I'd better eat all the good stuff I missed).

2 comments:

NancyO said...

I didn't know about Dr. F's Life Plan and the 10% splurge thing. That's something to look forward to because my cravings and desire for my old favorites (which are often still in the house for other family members), are still very much alive.

It feels like three steps forward and two steps back...sometimes vice versa, but I'm not giving up!

kneecap said...

I'm glad you aren't giving up! that's the most important thing.