'Tis the season for dieting.
It seems everyone is on some sort of a diet – eat grapefruits until you drop diet, the cookie diet, the stress diet, and my favorite, the Hershey Kisses diet.
Instead of introducing you to another fun-filled fascinating fantasy, let’s get real. How about something different this time and something that will work more than a week or a month?
Mark and Phyllis Franklin of Edmond learned about The Full Plate Diet while de-stressing at Lifestyle Center of America, where you are encouraged to eat real food you can buy at real grocery stores. Lifestyle Center of America is a place you can go to relax, learn about healthy living and to recharge your batteries.
It’s a 1,700 wooded-acre campus located in the beautiful Arbuckle Mountains near Sulphur, Okla. The grounds are some of the most spectacular scenery around with wild boar, deer and other animals scurrying about. Just deeply breathing in the fresh air could cut your stress level in half.
The nutritional advice bestowed to the Franklins at this center came from The Full Plate Diet, written by Stuart A. Seale, M.D., Theresa Sherard, M.D. and Diane Fleming, Ph.D., LDN. The book really should be called “Eating Real Food 101,” because the book encourages you to consume food Mother Nature created and not created by a manufacturing plant.
As my friend Rachel told me, if it comes from a plant, eat it. If it is made in a plant, don’t. Not preferred, are foods filled with unpronounceable ingredients such as: calcium disodium EDTA, phosphoric acid, acesulfame K, or pyridoxine HCL (I don’t know what this stuff is, either).
Instead, the full plate diet encourages you to power up your plate by adding food to your plate rather than take it away. The whole key to this is increasing the amount of fiber you eat from 10 grams (what the average American consumes) to 40 grams a day.
“It’s very doable,” Phyllis Franklin said. She loves this new way of eating and has even lost weight although she did not enter Lifestyle Center of America with the expectation she was going to change her behavior much.
“They teach you how to make better choices,” she said about the staff. “It’s incorporating more fiber into your diet.”
High fiber foods include fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains. Fiber-filled foods are naturally low in calories and have the added benefit of giving you that full feeling so your body has no idea its consuming fewer calories than normal. Fewer calories ingested than your body burns simply turns into weight loss. One thing about fiber, though, is the quality.
Not all fiber is created equal. Today, fiber is the buzz ingredient for food manufacturers much like “no trans fats” is the buzz term for food marketers.
They know fiber is considered a healthy way to go, so they inject fiber into anything including candy bars, yogurt and Fruit Loops. These foods are not considered good quality fiber foods because the fiber has been engineered into them.
Now, food manufacturers can boast “high fiber” and more people will buy their product. These are the same agencies that will claim “no trans fats” in orange juice when oranges don’t naturally have trans fats.
Instead of simply eating just regular foods from trees and other plants, people are looking for the magic potion. They think exotic foods from the deep forests of the Amazon have the secret healthful enzymes needed for optimal health and low body fat. They want phytochemicals, antioxidants, detoxification, and weekly cleansing regiments.
What’s really missing, Franklin discovered, is that people are not eating enough real fiber. Instead they are gorging themselves with pseudo fiber and other forms of faux foods.
Franklin even surprised herself with the ease of this program and the fact she doesn’t even crave the old zero-gramed fiber foods she once consumed. Instead she enjoys the natural taste of fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes -- and yes, legumes are fill with fiber as well as protein.
If you are looking for more information on how to get more real fiber into your diet (and even some cool recipes and an online fiber calculator), take a look at www.FullPlateDiet.org. This, I assure you, is the “magic” elixir you’ve been craving.
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