The Six Week Strategy
So what have we learned so far?
Firstly, eating foods with too few nutrients is seriously bad for your health. Second, a large amount of animal products in your diet correlates to with a vast number of diseases. Finally, unrefined plant foods offer the best protection against disease and are the quickest path to long term sustainable weight loss.
The question is, how can we translate this knowledge into a health program that will:
– (1) help us achieve a healthy weight
– (2) maximize our well-being
– (3) lets us enjoy our meals at the same time.
That is basically what the rest of the information featured on this site will focus on. We will first describe the exact steps that you need to take for the next six weeks of your life. Then we will show you how we can incorporate these principles into the rest of your life in a practical and sensible way, with more flexibility than the six-week plan including both vegetarian and none vegetarian options.
The Six Week Strategy.
Get ready for the most exciting six weeks of your adult life!
If you follow the Better Body Plan precisely for the next six weeks, your body will undergo a remarkable transformation, and you will be witness to its miraculous self-healing ability. Provided you allow no compromise for the first six weeks, you will unleash a biochemical and physiological makeover that will change your life forever. You will be thrilled with how easily your weight drops and by the subtle changes you experience in your physical and emotional well-being. Maybe even more meaningful than the weight loss, you will feel better than you have in years.
Results encourage change and results motivate. The stricter you are, the quicker the results will come. Your body will undergo an energizing and healing transformation. It will overcome food addictions and get the physiological housecleaning it has been yearning for. It will be hard initially, but the immediate results will help keep you focussed. As you follow the program outlined below you will see that your ideal weight is in reach, see how far down you can get your lipids (cholesterol and triglycerides) and how many symptoms, such as headache, gastritis, and indigestion, will gradually disappear. Once you see the incredible results, you will never want to deviate from this ideal diet.
The Six Week Strategy gives your body time to adjust to this new way of eating. At the beginning the weight comes off quickly, but as you approach your ideal weight your weight loss will slow down. Your taste buds will change … they will actually become more sensitive to the subtle flavours of natural foods, esp fruit. Results beget results, and after you have lost about 20 pounds, you will feel like exercising more and be thrilled again by even more spectacular results.
The Keys to Success
Raw Vegetables (including Salad)
These foods are to be eaten in unlimited quantities … since they have a negative caloric effect, the more you eat the more you lose! Raw foods also have a faster transit time through the digestive tract and result in a lower glucose response, thereby encouraging more weight loss than their cooked counterparts. The object is to eat as many raw vegetables as possible, with a goal of one pound (16 ounces) daily.
This goal should be relatively easy to achieve … a small head of romaine lettuce is 6 to 8 ounces, a medium tomato or bell pepper weighs about 4 to 6 ounces. Try to include raw vegetables such as snow peas, red bell peppers, carrots, raw peas, tomatoes, cucumbers and sprouts. The entire pound is less than 100 calories of food and when you spread this out between meals you should find it very easy to consume this amount each day.
Cooked Vegetables
Eat as many steamed or cooked green vegetables as you can. Cooked non-green nutrient dense vegetables such as eggplant, mushrooms, peppers, onions, tomatoes, carrots and cauliflower are unlimited as well.
Again, the goal is to eat one pound per day … but if you can’t eat that much, don’t force yourself. One of the secrets of your success is to eat large portions of the right foods: so when you eat these greens, try to eat a much larger portion than you have in the past. For example, a serving of 1 1/2 cups of cooked kale weighs 7 ounces, 2 cups of cooked broccoli or Brussels sprouts weighs 11 ounces and 2 cups of cauliflower weigh 9 ounces. Go for variety in your cooked vegetables by using string beans, broccoli, artichokes, asparagus, zucchini, kale, collards, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, bok choy, okra, Swiss chard, turnip, greens, escarole, beet greens, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, mushrooms, onions and tomatoes.
Beans & Legumes
Beans & legumes are among the world’s most perfect foods. They stabilize blood sugar, blunt the desire for sweets and prevent mid-afternoon cravings. Even a small portion can help you feel full … but in the Six Week Strategy you should eat at least one full cup daily. Beans contain both insoluble and soluble fibre and are very high in resistant starch. While the benefits of fibre are well known, resistant starch is proving to be another highly desirable component in a carefully managed and nutrient rich diet.
The health benefits of beans and legumes are well known, and their intake has been proven time and again in studies around the world to greatly improve longevity. A recent important longitudinal study highlighted the fact that higher legume intake was a major factor and the most protective dietary factor affecting survival among the elderly … regardless of their ethnicity. Consider beans your preferred high-carbohydrate food. They can be flavoured and spiced in interesting ways and you can eat an unlimited quantity of them. Try and eat some beans with every lunch. Among your choices, you can include chick peas, black eyed peas, black beans, cow peas, split peas, lima beans, pinto beans, lentils, red kidney beans, soybeans, cannellini beans, pigeon peas and white beans.
Fresh Fruit
The goal is to eat four fresh fruits per day during the 6 Week Strategy, but no fruit juice. Shred or cut up apples and oranges and add them to your salads to give them more flavour. Clementines are a nice addition to a green salad. Pineapple is good with vegetables, esp when cooked with tomatoes. Frozen fruit is permissible, but avoid canned fruit because it is not as nutritious. Dried fruits should only be used in very small amounts for sweetening. Exotic fruits are interesting to try and will add variety and interest to your diet.
Recommended are: blood oranges, persimmons and cherimoyas. Eat a good variety of bananas, blackberries, blueberries, clementines, grapes, kiwi fruit, kumquats, mangoes, melons, nectarines, oranges, papayas, peaches, pears, plums, raspberries, star fruit, strawberries and tangerines.
Starchy Vegetables and Whole Grains
These two food categories are grouped together because either can be the culprit for sabotaging a sincere attempt to lose weight using a nutrient dense, low-carb diet (which is what the Better Body Diet is). While wholesome high carbohydrate foods are a valuable addition to a disease prevention diet, they are much more calorie dense than none starchy vegetables. Therefore, cooked high starch vegetables and whole grains should be limited to one serving daily during the six-week strategy. It is suggested that diabetics, those who struggle to lose weight and those who want to lose weight fast restrict these foods altogether. If you eat large amounts of raw vegetables, beans, legumes and fruits, you won’t have room for much more anyway!
Examples of high calorie, starchy vegetables are corn, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, butternut squash, acorn squash, winter squash, chestnuts, parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, water chestnuts, yams and pumpkins. Examples of high calorie whole grains include barley, buckwheat, millet, oats, quinoa, brown rice and wild rice. So during the six-week strategy, you may choose to have a cup of oatmeal or another whole grain at breakfast. On other days, save your serving of starch for dinner.
Nuts and Seeds
Be careful!
Nuts and seeds contain 150 to 200 calories per ounce! There should be no harm in eating a small amount of nuts and seeds each day, say one ounce or less. Indeed, there are health benefits in doing so … as nuts and seeds contain valuable nutrients and healthy unprocessed fats. Nuts and seeds are ideal for salad dressings, particularly when blended with fruits and spices or vegetable juices, eg tomato, celery and carrot. Always eat nuts and seeds raw because the roasting process alters their beneficial fats.
Commercially packaged nuts and seeds are often cooked in hydrogenated oils, adding trans fats ( also called trans-unsaturated fatty acids or trans fatty acids, a type of unsaturated fat that occur in small amounts in nature but became widely produced industrially from vegetable fats starting in the 1950s for use in margarine, snack food, and packaged baked goods and for frying fast food) and sodium to your diet … so these are absolutely off limits! Among the raw nuts and seed recommended for the six week strategy are almonds, cashews, walnuts, black walnuts, pecans, filberts, hickory nuts, macadamias, pignolis, pistachios, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, hemp seeds, chia seeds and flaxseeds.
The Six Week Strategy – Summary
UNLIMITED FOODS
Eat as much as you want :
– all raw vegetables (goal 1 pound daily)
– cooked green and none green nutrient rich vegetables (goal 1 pound daily)
(examples of none green nutrient rich vegetables are mushrooms, tomatoes, carrots, cauliflower, eggplant, peppers and onions).
– beans and legumes
– fresh fruits (goal at least 4 daily)
LIMITED
– cooked starchy vegetables and whole grains (including bread, potatoes, cereal, butternut and acorn squash, rice and sweet potatoes. Not more than one serving per day ie one cup).
– raw nuts and seeds (1 oz max per day)
– avocado (2 oz max per day)
– dried fruit (2 tablespoons max per day)
– ground flaxseeds ( 1 tablespoon max per day)
BANNED!
– all dairy products
– animal products
– between meal snacks
– fruit juice
– oils ( inc salad cream, mayonnaise and ketchup)
