People are always asking me what I eat, well, let me share with you one of the meals I ate this week. This is a typical meal for me. I will also share a few weight loss tips with you and show you how to sequence a meal, according to Calorie Density. This is perfect for helping you lose weight and is useful with long term maintenance of a healthy weight.
To sequence your meal according to calorie density you would eat the lowest calorie density foods first, which in this meal, would be the bowl (upper left) of raw non starchy vegetables and fruit with just a drizzle of apple cider vinegar – ACV. The bowl contains about 4 cups of power greens chopped, which reduced it to about 2 cups chopped. If you eat the non starchy vegetables and fruit first, they will create bulk in the stomach from the water and fiber and help to activate the stretch receptors that tell the brain we are getting full. This in turn helps us to naturally reduce our overall caloric intake.
Then I move on to the nourish bowl on the right, which is half cooked non starchy vegetables and half starch. Dr. McDougall calls this the 50/50 plate. For optimal health and weight loss, we should include non starchy vegetables at every meal. We also need some healthy whole starches at every meal in order to feel satisfied and to have energy.
A good thing to remember, is that we are hard wired to seek out the most calorie dense foods in our environment, for the least amount of effort. That is a survival instinct, and should we ever have a famine, it would serve us well. This instinct is why, if we start eating the starch first, we will consume a lot of it and are less likely then, to go back to the steamed vegetables or the raw salad. Instead we will keep eating the starches until we finally engage those stretch receptors in our stomach. We will end up consuming far more calories then we would if we eat the non starchy vegetables first. You could eat a bowl of broth based vegetable soup to start with – it would accomplish the same thing.
Lastly, I ate my ear of corn. This meal was filling, satisfying and delicious. It is a typical meal for me. Plenty of non starchy vegetables both raw and cooked and plenty of starch.
I hope you will enjoy this short video where I explain everything about my lunch!
Let’s talk a little bit more about Calorie density. It is simply the amount of calories in a given measurement of food. For the chart above, 1 pound of food is used as the measurement. I eat most of my meals from foods that fall into the categories to the left of the red line on this calorie density chart created by my friend Chef AJ. Now that I am at my healthy weight, I do include a few seeds like chia seeds and ground flax seeds, a little avocado, tofu or a little nuts now and then. Everyone has to figure out what works best for them. We are all an experiment of one and the same exact amount of food will not be right for every person. However, all of the plant based doctors will tell you that if you want to lose weight and keep it off you must consume more non starchy vegetables in your daily diet. Non starchy vegetables are the lowest calorie density foods we have and they are also the most nutrient dense foods, and we need them for optimal health!
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If you feel stuck at your attempt to lose weight or maintain your weight loss please watch my Sequencing Using Calorie Density video. I learned this information from Chef AJ and she learned it from Dr. Barbara Rolls from Penn State who wrote the book all about calorie density called “Volumetrics” based on her research about weight loss. Dr. Doug Lisle, Dr. Alan Goldhamer and Dr. John McDougall were also influential to Chef AJ’s success in losing weight and keeping it off. These three plant exclusive doctors have helped thousands of people to get healthy, lose weight and more importantly maintain their weight loss and optimal health. I also recommend reading The Pleasure Trap by Dr. Doug Lisle and Dr. Alan Goldhamer and also The McDougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss by Dr. John McDougall. Get Chef AJ’s book The Secrets To Ultimate Weight Loss. It is the plan I used to lose my weight and I have kept it off since 2015!
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Stay Healthy One Meal At A Time
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A Nutmeg Notebook Online Course. Beautiful Chopped Salad Course Link
Tami Kramer’s Beautiful Chopped Salad Course includes a complete full color 40+ page recipe PDF eBook and 12 instructional videos. In the course Tami will teach you how to batch prep salads, what to shop for, and tips to ensure that your stored salads will last for a week. She will share different methods for chopping salads, and all the details about how she tops these beauties. Included are 25 different ways to top a chopped salad, 5 oil free salad dressings, gluten free croutons and crunchy toppings, hummus, salsa’s and more! Please enjoy the course videos at your own pace. There are approximately 2 1/2 hours of instruction spread over the 12 individual topic videos. When completed you will be well on your way to enjoying these beautiful chopped salads as often as you wish, perhaps even daily as Tami does.
We are also Holland Bowl Mill Affiliates. The 15 inch Holland Bowl Mill Cherry fruit bowl has a permanent home on our kitchen island. It’s beautiful and useful. The heart shaped bowl makes me happy – I love everything heart shaped! We use our 15 inch Beechwood & cherry bowl (his and her’s) to chop our salads everyday. Eating a salad for one meal every day helped me lose weight and become a size 4. I still eat a salad for one meal a day but now it’s a Big Beautiful Chopped salad and it helps me stay a size 4! See the Chopped Salad Blog Post to find out how you can incorporate a chopped salad into your daily food plan and how you can get a free mezzaluna knife with your Holland Bowl salad bowl order when you use our Holland Bowl affiliate link as well as free engraving and free shipping.
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