Authors: Travis Stork
The Doctor's Diet: Dr. Travis Stork's STAT Program to Help You Lose Weight & Restore Your Health (18 page)
Then, go into the kitchen and eat a meal. (The best time to do this is when you’re alone, so you can really zero in on your physical responses.) Eat slowly, keeping close track of how you feel. Notice your stomach feeling fuller and the emptiness in your belly subsiding. Note any changes you experience in your body and mind as you move from hunger to satiety.
During the days that follow, continue to monitor these feelings. Over time, you’ll get much better at recognizing them, and at distinguishing hunger from thirst and fatigue, as well as from emotional hungers such as boredom, sadness, and loneliness.
Here’s another reason why developing the skill of mindful eating will help you lose weight. As you start to follow The Doctor’s Diet and begin to implement all of my Food Prescriptions, you’ll be eating food in a much more natural form than you may be used to. As you cut out added sugar, unhealthy fats, fried foods, preserved meats, and other kinds of processed foods, you’ll replace them with whole, unprocessed foods, such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes, whole grains, and lean meats and fish.
At first this change may be jarring to your taste buds—food may taste dull and boring without all those additives, sugars, and fake flavorings. But be patient—I promise you that before you know it, your taste buds will come around to your new way of eating, and your palate will be reset. Real foods may taste a bit bland at first compared with fake foods, but by cutting down on processed foods and using mindfulness to fully taste and appreciate whole foods, you’ll soon come to prefer their natural flavors.
Resetting your palate is a crucial part of The Doctor’s Diet. Once you do this, you’ll be much better able to appreciate subtle flavors, and you will no longer need a big wallop of sugar or a heavy shake of salt to make foods taste good.
| FOLLOWING THE DOCTOR’S DIET RESETS YOUR PALATE SO YOU CAN TRULY ENJOY THE TASTES OF WHOLE, NATURAL FOODS. |
Mindfulness means more than being aware of what you’re eating—it’s being fully conscious of what is in the food you eat and being honest with yourself about its potential impact on your health.
The opposite of mindful eating is blind eating—for example, the kind of eating you do in restaurants when you pretend that the 12-ounce steak you ordered is really just 3 ounces, or when you tell yourself that the
battered fried fish is really just as good a choice as a filet grilled without coating.
We sometimes deceive ourselves about food, telling ourselves lies about the choices we make. Our bodies know the truth, though.
Mindful eating means being honest with yourself about serving sizes, ingredients, and choices. It means owning your decisions and making them based on facts, not fallacies. When you’re ordering fish at a restaurant, find out how it’s cooked. Quiz your server about whether it’s breaded and fried. Ask if it can be cooked “naked”—grilled or baked without any extra fats or breading.
Once you know the facts and make a selection about what you’re going to eat, own that decision 100 percent! If you go with baked fish, enjoy it and give yourself credit for choosing wisely (but celebrate with a pat on the back, not a piece of cherry cheesecake!). And if you opt for the breaded fish, own that decision as well—don’t blame it on someone else, or tell yourself little stories that it was your only choice, or play dumb with yourself and believe that all that fried breading doesn’t really make a difference to your health. It does, and when you decide to have it, you need to own that choice as something you did with your nutritional eyes wide open.
It’s all up to you—you have the choice at every meal, every snack, to eat in a way that contributes to weight loss and robust health.
TRY IT: PRACTICE EATING MINDFULLY
After a lifetime of mindless eating, eating mindfully takes some practice. Here’s a really easy way to get started. Take a small square (about half an ounce) of really amazing, intense dark chocolate (at least 70 percent cocoa). Sit in a quiet, distraction-free place and eat it in a mindful, focused, attentive way.
As you unwrap it, notice everything about the experience—the crinkly sound of the foil wrapper, the earthy aroma of cocoa, the color and smoothness of the chocolate in your fingers, the feeling of your taste buds releasing saliva.
Place half the chocolate square on your tongue, and notice how it feels. Allow it to melt in your mouth without chewing it.
Taste the chocolate’s creamy richness as it softens. Identify the flavors you notice—sweetness, bitterness, vanilla, spiciness; even a note of mocha or citrus may play out on your tongue.
Slowly start to chew the square and see how the taste changes. Notice how your body is reacting to it. Is your mouth watering? Are you feeling a sense of pleasure? What are all of your senses reporting to you about the chocolate? Swallow that piece, sit for a moment reflecting on the experience, and then have the other piece. As you do, pay attention to every one of your senses and note how the second piece may taste different than the first. Over time you won’t find yourself missing all the added sugar of milk chocolate and you’ll learn to appreciate the richness of darker chocolate (and the added health benefit).
This exercise works well with any food—sweet-tart apples, creamy yogurt, tangy kale, or crunchy almonds. Your goal is to practice being fully aware of how the food tastes and how your body and senses react to it. As you become more aware, you’ll start to notice that foods satisfy you in a whole new way. A tiny piece of chocolate eaten mindfully can be way more enjoyable than an entire candy bar inattentively gobbled up.
Mindfulness is like a muscle—the more you work it, the stronger it gets. Practice it at every meal and snack, and its benefits will start to flow. As you become more mindful, you may discover that the foods you like taste even better. You may also find that whole, natural foods you once thought of as bland are actually bursting with flavor.
IT’S NOT A RACE!
How many times have you spent hours cooking a meal and then just a few minutes eating it? Or, if you’re not a cook, how many times have you snarfed down a meal that someone else spent a long time creating? Instead of eating slowly, savoring your (or your favorite cook’s) hard work, and relishing the flavors in your
food, you chomp it all down at breakneck speed.
Your food will taste better and be more satisfying if you slow down while you eat it—that’s another part of mindfulness. When you eat at a leisurely pace, you give yourself time to taste and enjoy your food.
Slowing down doesn’t just increase the pleasure of eating. It actually impacts the amount of food you eat.
Your digestive system and your brain communicate via hormones such as leptin and ghrelin. Hormones tell you when you’re hungry and signal you when you’re full. But hormones sometimes take a while to act.
If you’re eating rapidly and mindlessly, by the time your brain gets the message that you’re not hungry any more, you may already have consumed way more food than you actually need.
If you’re eating slowly and mindfully, your hormones have time to do their job properly. When you’ve had enough to eat, they can get the message out to you, and you can stop eating before taking in a whole lot of extra calories.
Eating mindfully extends beyond the awareness of what you eat and whether it benefits your health. In order to succeed at weight loss, you have to pay attention to how much you eat.
Even if you eat all of the super-healthy foods I recommend and stay away from all junk food, you won’t shed pounds and burn excess fat unless you cut back on calories. It’s a simple equation: When you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight. When you eat fewer calories than you burn, you lose weight.
It’s not exactly a “calories in, calories out” situation. Some foods contribute more to weight loss than others. For example, research suggests that when you eat 100 calories worth of nuts, some 10 or 15 of those calories go through your body undigested.
But in general, the only way you’re going to lose weight is by taking in fewer calories than you’ve become accustomed to. To do this, you have
to be totally mindful of how much you’re eating. You have to commit fully to becoming an expert in portion sizes.
You can’t count on eyeballing portion sizes. For one thing, we are absolutely terrible at approximating how much food we eat. Even if a piece of steak looks like it weighs three ounces, it’s likely to be four, five, or six ounces—or more. A half cup of ice cream is likely to be closer to half a pint. And in the opposite direction, what looks like two cups of salad greens may be more like a cup or a cup and a half.
Go ahead and blame all this portion distortion on the fact that food has gotten so much bigger in the past two decades. When I was a kid, foods like bagels, muffins, pizza slices, sodas, cookies, and even ice cream cones were way smaller than they are now—and I’m not that old, so it’s not like I’m dredging up memories from the Great Depression. A bagel that you buy in a bakery or grocery store today may actually contain as many as four servings of bread. Take a look at a bag of mini bagels in the grocery store and you’ll see that, rather than being tiny little things that many of us could easily eat two or three of, these “mini” bagels actually weigh in at about an ounce—which is equal to one serving of bread.
Muffins are worse. I’ve seen muffins that are so big a bodybuilder would have trouble lifting them. These are muffins that weigh in with more calories and fat than two candy bars.
Like it or not, in order to lose weight you have to get real about portion sizes. You have to be mindful of how much you
should
be eating, and how much you
are
eating. To do this you’ve got to use some kind of measuring system.
I don’t care what you use to gauge your portion sizes. You can weigh it on a scale or measure it with a cup or spoon. You can learn how much your kitchen dishes hold—that way, you know when you have cereal in the blue flowered bowl that you should pour in just enough to reach the third leaf under the rim. You can go by the sizes of your hands or fingers—for example, an ounce of cheese is about the size of your thumb, a medium apple or orange is about the size of your fist, and a serving of nuts is about a handful. You can even count your foods—for example, with the peanuts I buy, a one-ounce serving is just about 40 nuts.
And of course, keep an eye on food labels—they tell you exactly what you’re getting.
Whatever you do, just make sure you’re being honest with yourself. If you fill your hand with 60 nuts and call it 40, you’re getting 50 percent more calories. The only one you cheat is yourself.
Allowing yourself to get ravenously hungry between meals is a recipe for dietary disaster. That’s why the STAT Plan includes one snack daily, which you can eat whenever you need it: mid-morning, mid-afternoon, or after dinner.
Eating small, healthy, well-constructed snacks between meals can boost your energy, make it easier for you to stick with your eating plan, and contribute to your daily requirements for fiber, protein, vitamins, and other important nutrients.
Careful snacking can also help keep blood sugar levels stable, which heads off the kind of binging that can occur when you’re very hungry.
The key to smart snacking is making mindful choices. Having a snack doesn’t mean eating cookies, ice cream, cake, or a bag of chips. It means enjoying sensible-size portions of healthy foods.
The most effective snacks usually combine complex carbohydrates with lean protein. This combo gives you an immediate energy fix and puts some fuel in your tank for later on, too. Together, protein and complex carbohydrates fill you up and help chase hunger pangs away.
As you move on through the rest of my Food Prescriptions, remember to keep your mind as open as possible. Be aware not only of what and how you’re eating, but of foods you may have turned away from in the past that might be worth reconsidering.
Opening yourself to a full awareness of food’s impact on your life and health will make it easier for you to make choices that will pay off now and in the future. If you really, truly set your mind to it, permanent weight loss is within your reach.
PUT PROTEIN TO WORK FOR YOU
By now you’ve probably noticed that protein is an important part of The Doctor’s Diet. All of the meals and snacks in the STAT Plan, the RESTORE Plan, and the MAINTAIN Plan contain protein. There’s a really good reason for this: protein is an incredibly effective weight-loss tool—provided you know how to use it.
When it comes to losing weight, protein has power, and The Doctor’s Diet is designed to harness that power.
What do I mean when I talk about putting protein to work for you? I’m referring to the fact that protein is most beneficial to your weight-loss efforts if you include it in your diet in a balanced, strategic way. You can’t just binge on meat, eggs, and other high-protein foods whenever you feel like it—that won’t lead to better health.