Part 2-–the 1950s Diet
Welcome Back to Part 2-–the 1950s Diet ! If you are here I am assuming you already read Part One of the 1950s diet. And by now you are wondering if you have been subjected to a bait and switch. No worries. You haven’t. I am actually going to share my version of the Modern Day 1950s Housewife Diet with you today. It’s the one and only way of eating that brought me from this:
to this:
and from this
to this
You ready? Part 2–The 1950’s Diet
It’ll be the last time you ever use the word diet because you’ll never need it again. You’ll also likely improve many of your current health conditions to the point where you no longer have them–things like allergies, asthma, diabetes, and skin rashes. I know this because it’s worked for tens of thousands of people.
I did not invent this diet. I found it while desperately searching for an answer to my constant yo-yo dieting. I needed something to help me get my weight and my life under control and it made sense. I tried it and it worked so well that I was stunned. And after years of hell, I had zero asthma symptoms. And I had no more allergies. And I had the best health of my life during a time when everyone around me was getting colds and flu.
I also saved a ton of money on groceries and diet pills and potions and gym memberships. And that’s why I call it the Modern Day 1950s diet. Because it works amazingly well with no cigarettes and amphetamines required, and it gave me a perfect hour-glass figure. I went from a size 16/18 down to a size 7 in 3 months and all I did was eat the whole time. I even ate ice cream four or five nights a week. And brownies. And cake. And pizza.
So why did this one work? And why did it catch my eye? Let’s start with this.
Why in all of my years with hundreds of different diets did nobody ever mention stretch receptors? or chemoreceptors lining my digestive tract?
What are they and why do they matter, you ask?
Well they matter because they tell your brain when to tell you that you aren’t hungry anymore. Here’s how they work (photo is by Dr. Joel Fuhrman. I’ll introduce you to his books in a moment.)
When you eat, there are stretch receptors in your stomach that tell your brain when you have eaten enough bulk. Then there are chemoreceptors in your intestines that tell your brain that you’ve gotten enough nutrition from what you ate.
But here’s the thing. If either of those components are missing, your brain will continue to tell you to eat.
So let me put that into plain english. If you eat a cheeseburger and fries and a Coke, for example, your stomach may stretch to capacity and you will feel full and the stretch receptors will send a message to your brain telling it to stop calling for food. You will feel fine for a bit, but as soon as all that food hits your intestines and your chemoreceptors don’t find enough nutritional value in it, they send a message back to your brain to cause you to want to eat again so that it can hopefully get you to bring in more nutrition.
This keeps happening until your body gets enough vitamins, minerals, enzymes and phytochemicals, etc. to run well and keep you healthy. Sometimes that never happens. Sometimes no matter how much you eat, you just keep feeling hungry an hour later.
Sound familiar?
Oh but it gets worse. When you diet and restrict calories but continue to eat those same kinds of foods, you can imagine what happens. Eating smaller quantities of nutritionally deficient foods just causes you to not even get the benefit of the stretch receptor break. You are eating such small quantities that your body never tells your brain that you are satisfied.
If you tough it out, your stomach will eventually shrink and you may not feel hungry all the time, but those chemoreceptors are still not getting enough nutrition to turn off the hunger for long. Usually within thirty minutes or so your belly will start growling again.
You can’t live like that forever. And that’s why diets never work.
On the other hand if you have a big thick fruit smoothie for breakfast, or you eat a great big salad with all kinds of colorful and yummy veggies and maybe some nuts and seeds in it for lunch (just as one example. It could be veggie lasagna, or something else too), your stretch receptors and your chemo receptors both tell your brain that it has enough for now. It digests slowly, pulling all that good nutrition out. All the while you feel satisfied and happy.
That little tidbit of info was the first thing that made me realize I was on to something new. Something that might actually work. If this makes sense to you, you will also want to hear Dr. Fuhrman explain about insulin and how it reacts in your body and is making you fat. Those food choices are truly killing you.
He talks about all that, diseases, and slow metabolisms in his book. He talks about so much more than I could ever summarize here, that I have to simply recommend that you buy his book and read it cover to cover. To make it easy, I’m including affiliate links to the books in and below this post. Make sure you have the book and not the cookbook. I am also including links to his cookbook and some of his other books, so be sure you have the right one. They are all excellent. They have saved my life.
But don’t worry. I’m not going to leave you hanging. I’m going to give you a basic outline of what my daily diet ended up morphing into. And I’ll give you a plan that you can use to prepare yourself and start transitioning into an Eat To Live way of living until you can get the book and read it.
Dr. Fuhrman has a few different plans that you can follow. He has a vegan plan. A meat-eating plan. I hear he even has a less aggressive plan, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to lose weight and get healthy slower. Why would they?
My husband follows a modified vegan plan where he includes some meat every week. I seem to do best on the vegan plan. I know that sounds dramatic, but it really wasn’t. There are so many recipes for vegan foods and vegan food products like sour cream and cream cheese out there that it’s easy now, once you set your mind to it. Plus I have discovered that my asthma goes completely away when I eat a vegan diet. I must have some type of reaction to animal products.
I DO understand that changing to a largely non-animal product diet can be a lot at first so here’s what I recommend as a transition until you can read the book and incorporate the entire plan. Start by focusing on ADDING to your current eating plan rather than taking away. Add a bunch of fruit to breakfast. Eat it first. Wait 10 minutes then eat the rest of your meal. You will find yourself not eating what you used to. Then every day for lunch, start with a giant salad. (No meat or cheese in it please!) If you are still hungry after, then eat your normal lunch. You most likely won’t. Then add as many vegetables to your dinner as you can and eat them first.
Start with that for a week or two. By then you should have gotten and read Eat to Live. Follow the guidelines in the book. Before you know it you’ll be living on enormous quantities of crazy good for you food. And you’ll lose about 20 lbs in 6 weeks. Or more. My husband lost 28.
And as promised I’m going to tell you what I eat. I live on Large LARGE amounts of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, tofu, and smaller amounts of grains. These can be combined into thousands of recipes. I eat pizza, brownies, cakes, frozen banana ice cream (it’s fabulous) and even banana splits. I eat sandwiches, fries, breakfast bars, wraps, Buffalo cauliflower (just like buffalo chicken wings), lasagna, chili, sloppy joes, cereal, and everything I used to eat–just modified. I save a small fortune not buying meat. You’d be amazed what cauliflower can replace. (Chopped small into chili, it replaces the beef and you’d never know the difference! Here’s my recipe for chili .)
I also get a tremendous amount of recipes from www.vegweb.com.
But I couldn’t know which are good and which are deadly until I read Dr. Fuhrman’s book. Things like added vegetable oil are a no-no, but there are ways of switching ingredients out if need be. You’ll learn all that in the book.
