Eat to Live, 6 Week Plan, Week 1, Day 1

Eat to Live, 6 Week Plan, Week 1, Day 1

For the past several years, Megan and I have been researching ways to eat more healthily.  There were so many books, websites, articles, etc., that offer a wide variety of advice, often conflicting, that we really had trouble sorting our way through it all and making sense of it.  My doctor I had been seeing for the past 10 years or so retired in December.  In late January I asked my new doctor, Susan Klimist-Zingo if she had any advice on how to eat more healthily.  Without hesitating, she recommended the book, Eat to Live, by Doctor Joel Fuhrman.  She told me several doctors she knew had used this book and had great results with eating more healthily and losing weight.

Excited, I rushed home to check into this book.  I was surprised to find that I already owned it.  It was one of a few I had already purchased because, in my early research, it looked like it made a lot of sense.  It also was one of the most highly reviewed books on Amazon for eating healthily.  

My friend Brenda knows a lot about proper nutrition having taught classes through her church on healthy eating, so I gave her a call to see what she thought of this book.  She immediately told me that she thought it was based on sound ideas and was worth checking out.

So Megan and I both started reading it.  We had hoped to get through the book in a few weeks and get started on this new approach to eating within about a month, but as usually happens, life got in the way.  Nevertheless, in early May we finally finished the book after carefully reading it each time we had a free moment.  We decided to start the more strict 6 week plan today.

This was our dinner tonight.  It consisted of a salad with a variety of vegetables, black beans, and a balsamic vinegarette dressing.  We cheated a bit because the balsamic vinegarette had a small amount of oil in it.  On the 6 week plan, oil is off limits (later you can have some on the regular plan).

The idea behind this way of eating is to eat foods that are high in nutritional value on a per calorie basis and to avoid foods that have little to no nutritional value.  One of the things I like about eating like this is that you can eat as much as you want.  On this plan, you mainly eat leafy greens with some beans, plenty of fruit (at least four servings a day -more if you want) and a tiny amount of nuts and seeds.  For someone like me, who loves meat, bread, and homemade sweets, this is going to be very tough, to say the least.

For dessert, we had some fresh blackberries.  They seemed surprisingly sweet.  Since I am still used to eating sugar occasionally, I thought they would taste a bit sour.

I'm not sure how often Megan and I will have time to post, but if you're interested in following our journey with this type of eating, you can subscribe at the top to the right.  You can also post comments below.  One of the things Dr. Fuhrman suggested in his book was to encourage our friends and family to help support us on this arduous journey as we transition to a new way of eating that will be much healthier for us.

Stay tuned...