Our Life Following The Weight Loss Diet
(This is my mother’s article)
Some people, having read my “Weight Loss Without Hunger” article, want to know how that translates into everyday living. Actually, everyone has to organize his or her life, depending on schedule, preferences etc.
But I can describe how I and my husband do it. Just remember, this is not really a diet – it’s just a way of eating.
Breakfasts in our household are always the same – rolled (flattened) oats, rolled wheat and rolled rye, to which we add an ounce of 7 or 9-grain, and a bit of maize. This gets thrown into a pot of boiling water.
When it’s ready, I add 25 blueberries – fresh if possible, 6 ounces of non-fat milk, and two large over-ripe mashed up bananas, sprinkled generously with cinnamon.
My husband prefers his bananas a bit harder, and sliced rather than mashed. He also adds a quarter of a grapefruit, which he eats separately.
By the time this concoction is ready, it’s no longer warm; but before I heat it up in the microwave, I remove 6 ounces, to be eaten at lunchtime instead of the sandwich I used to eat.
Most days we wash it down with a cup of hot coffee.
Lunch consists of the rest of the porridge, preceded by a baggie of baby carrots
(2 ounces) and followed by a baggie of orange segments (6 oz), and then a second cup of coffee. When I have lunch at home, as I do on weekends, except for the days I go hiking, I have half a grapefruit instead of the orange.
On hiking days, I don’t add the milk to the porridge, and eat the whole thing at breakfast. I have a lunch every three hours or so, because hiking makes me hungry. Along with the carrots and the oranges, I have a dark rye sandwich at each lunch, with turkey breast filling, and yogurt instead of butter or mayonnaise.
My husband likes to fill a pint container with a variety of cut up fruit for his lunch – peaches, nectarines, mangoes, strawberries, apples etc – whatever’s in season. He also has the rest of his porridge, and possibly his coffee. (Except when we’re on vacation, we don’t generally have lunch together.)
Once a week we have either a chicken leg or a turkey thigh each. This is always accompanied by yams or sweet potatoes (completely cooked in the microwave) and half a pound of green beans each (completely cooked in the steamer, as is the meat, which is placed in there on a bed of sliced garlic.) This is our favorite meal, and usually served on a Sunday or a Monday.
The other meal we like a lot is either salmon (bought frozen from Trader Joe’s) and thawed in the fridge, and prepared just like the chicken and turkey. It’s accompanied by regular potatoes, cooked like, the yams, in the microwave, and regular carrots, steamed along with the fish, on its bed of sliced garlic.
We usually have this every second week, and stew the opposite week; but now and then, if we can fit them both in, we do so.
The stew is made every second month or so, in a huge pot, and then frozen in containers large enough to enable us to have a large bowl each at a meal. It consists of 12 oz of chunks of turkey or chicken breast, carrots, broccoli, and green beans, 3 oz of barley, 1 1/4 cups of whole-grain pasta, and a large can of salt-free tomatoes.
In between these meals come one or two vegetarian meals – a huge bowl of salad – cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce, which we also eat with the favorite meals, and vegetables. I like my salad with cider or wine vinegar, and Bob likes a little grated cheese on his.
We each have our own way of eating vegetables. My husband always steams up an artichoke (on a small bed of sliced garlic), which he eats along with a little of whatever vegetable I steamed up for myself, a bit of a “tomato mess” which I don’t care for, and a bit of whichever beans & rice mess we happen to be eating at the moment. We rotate the three of them, and eat them until they’re gone or have become too old to be enjoyable. I eat a whole bowl of this, and don’t bother with the artichoke.
I like to eat the green beans and the carrots without vinegar. Those two vegetables get eaten with the yams or the potatoes.
If I’m hungry in the middle of the morning or afternoon, which usually happens at work, I have a baggie of cut up fruit – ripe d’anjou pears, peaches, nectarines and/or apples in the morning, and 6 oz of plain non-fat yogurt in the afternoon. I’m usually hungry when I get home, and have to have a piece of Wasa (what we used to call “rye-bisk”) or a piece of dark rye toast with nothing on it.
Once a week – usually on Friday – we go to a restaurant and blow the diet. Like the meat, fish and stew meals, the restaurant has a vegetarian day on each side of it.
The result of all this is that we don’t gain any weight in the course of the week, but we don’t lose any either.