My eating has evolved over the past year and I think I’ve
settled on something that is both easy and healthy. I follow
Jeff Novick’s principles of a
healthy diet, which he briefly describes as “plant-centered, minimally
processed, calorie dilute, low SOS (salt, oil, sugar)” in
this interview. The calorie density approach is summarized
in
this newsletter article.
Calorie density is the number of calories per weight of a
given food. For most people, if you
keep your average calorie density below about 600 calories per pound, you can eat satisfying volumes of food and lose weight without going hungry. It
turns out that a lot of the most satiating foods have a calorie density around 300-600
calories/lb, and the most healthy foods have a calorie density below 800. So that tells me all I need to know: Eat mostly foods with calorie density below
700 calories/lb, and consider the higher calorie density foods as condiments, or avoid them altogether. Here is a table of calorie density of foods:
Foods Calorie/lb
Vegetables 60 - 195
Fruit 140 - 420
Potatoes, Pasta, Rice, Barley, Yams, Corn, Hot Cereals 320 - 630
Beans, Peas, Lentils (cooked) 310 - 780
Breads, Bagels, Fat-free Muffins, Dried Fruit 920 - 1360
Sugars (ie, sugar, honey, molasses, agave, corn syrup 1200 -1800
Dry Cereals, Baked Chips, Fat-free Crackers, Pretzels 1480 - 1760
Nuts/Seeds 2400 -
3200
Oils 4000
You don’t have to count calories or measure foods to use
this chart. My approach is to eat
mostly from the top 4 lines (vegetables, fruit, starches & grains, beans), consider everything else condiments, and eat when
I’m hungry and stop when I’m full. I try avoid salt, oil, sugar, caffeine, chocolate (yeah, sucks!), and alcohol altogether because of their disease-promoting and addictive qualities. The rest I limit or avoid as well.
If you
don’t see a particular food on the above table, you can determine its calorie density by looking up its nutritional information (google it or check it out in a calorie counting website, e.g.,
cronometer). For
example, take popcorn: Type into google
“nutritional info air popped popcorn” and you find that 24 grams has 93
calories. Divide 93 by 24 to get calories
per gram and then multiply by 454 to get calories per lb. This gives you 1760 calories/lb for
air-popped poprcorn! It’s okay to eat
it, but don’t use your stomach sensations as a guide for when to stop—that’s a
key point of this is that your satiation mechanisms don’t work well with the
high calorie-dense food because they pack a lot of calories in small volumes. If you use
your stomach as a guide, you’ll eat a lot of more the calorie-dense foods
before you decide you are full. Another
example is rice cakes, which are right up there with the popcorn. Meat ranges from 600-1200, and ice cream from
1000-1500. Isn't it interesting that even fat-free bread, crackers, rice cakes and dry cereals have more calorie density than meat? This might explain why many diets promote meat and fish over breads and crackers. However, I would bypass the meat altogether and go straight for the potatoes and vegetables and fruit.
An easy way to follow this plan is to fill “1/2 your plate
(by visual volume) with intact whole grains, starchy vegetables and/or legumes
and the other half with vegetables and/or fruit.”
Another important point JN makes in his article is to
not drink your calories (even fruit juices and smoothies): “Liquids have little if any satiety so they
do not fill you up as much as solid foods of equal calories.”
You might be wondering: Aren’t there certain foods we should eat every day because they are so
important? JN says there are no
superfoods in
this article. If you don’t
like a particular food, that’s okay.
However Dr. Esselstyn suggests we eat leafy green vegetables at every
meal, or at least, regularly. I eat a
lot of the green and yellow veggies (e.g., kale, collards, spinach, broccoli,
Brussels sprouts, cauliflower) and salads and raw vegetables.
I also eat potatoes, sweet potatoes, intact whole grains (rice, oats,
quinoa, buckwheat), and beans. And I eat
some fruit, and very occasional nuts, dried fruit, and avocado. That’s all there is to
it. If you want added insurance that you
are getting enough essential fats, add a tablespoon of some ground flaxseed or
chia seeds. But Drs. McDougall and Campbell say it’s
not necessary if you eat leafy greens and don’t consume oil (I talked about it
more in
this post).
Since the low-calorie dense foods regulate appetite, and are
also the healthiest, it’s win-win to eat
this way.
I asked JN some followup questions about how this works, and
you can see his replies
here.
If you follow this approach, it ends up being very similar
to that outlined by Dr. McDougall for his Maximum Weight Loss plan (summarized
here and
here) and by
Dr.Esselstyn for reversing heart disease.
