Reaching Your Ideal Weight (And Staying There!) with Detox Dieting
In This Chapter
▶ Rethinking what it means to go on a diet
▶ Identifying destructive eating behaviors
▶ Focusing on the right eating habits
▶ Putting some thought and planning into your eating
As you’ve no doubt seen, read, and heard on the news, obesity is more of a problem now than it ever has been before. The unhealthy, toxin- filled foods that people consume on a massive scale have caused many to become overweight, and the trend doesn’t seem to be letting up any- time soon.
If you’re interested in losing weight or staying at a healthy weight, the best way to do so is to choose and eat healthy, toxin-free foods. Doing so isn’t always easy, but it’s certainly something that you can accomplish, and I’m happy to provide you with the basics in this chapter.
I start out by asking you to rethink what it means to go on a diet, and then I set out a number of ways that you can change the way you think about food and the way you eat. A successful detox diet really starts with a particular mindset. If you can begin to think about food and eating in a certain way, you’ve already won half the battle.
Changing the Way You Think about Dieting
What does it mean to go on a diet? For most people, dieting means commit- ting to eating in some unusual and bizarre way for as short a period of time as possible to achieve significant weight loss. People who go on diets want to shed pounds until they reach some magical weight. (For most, that means getting down to what they weighed several years ago, when they could eat whatever they wanted without gaining any weight.)
This concept of dieting is pretty strange when you really think about it, and dieting very rarely works. Most diets fail spectacularly even though we spend outrageous sums of money on them. The amount spent on diets in the United States each year — upward of $50 billion — is higher than the entire gross domestic product of Costa Rica! Combine that staggering figure with the fact that we’re still one of the fattest countries in the history of the world, and you can clearly see that we’re going about dieting in the wrong way.
Identifying the problem with diet pills
Diet pills are a popular choice for people who struggle with their weight. Most people think that if they use diet pills for a period of time, they can simply get used to eating less and watch in amazement as the weight drops (and stays) off. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Diet pills reduce your appetite so you can eat all you want and lose weight — you just want less. But when you stop the diet pills, you continue the same behavior. You still eat all you want, but because you’re not taking the pills anymore, your body wants a lot more. The end result: You gain weight.
Research has shown that almost all people who use diet pills to lose weight end up weighing more than they did before they started the pills. In the end they would’ve been better off not buying the pills at all.
Realizing why limiting your consumption doesn’t work
Many other diets focus on reducing the amount or types of food you can eat to the point that you’re miserable all the time. Maybe you’re allowed to have only a mug of hot water for breakfast and lunch (followed by “a sensible dinner”!), or maybe you can eat all the beef and cheese you want but not much else.
On many such diets, people will lose 5 pounds in the first week and think that means they’ll reach their goal of losing 20 pounds in just a month. The problem? That first 5 pounds is mostly water weight. After the second week of dieting, the pounds stop coming off and the feeling of failure starts set- ting in. Then the dieter gives up, saying that hormones must be causing the weight gain and she can’t do anything about it. So she goes on an eating binge to reward herself for making such a valiant effort and ends up gaining 10 pounds.
Does this pattern sound familiar?
Seeking the big picture
As a country, the United States has a weight problem. But the true problem is not the weight itself; it’s the way we think about eating.
If you want to lose weight, you have to look at the process not as an isolated diet but rather as a change in the way you eat for the rest of your life. If you look at dieting in any other way, you’re dooming yourself to fail. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you approach dieting in the right frame of mind, you can make the kind of long-term changes that will help you to lose weight, detoxify your body, and enjoy better all-around health. The rest of this chapter shows you how.
Doing Away with Dysfunctional Eating Behaviors
The first step you can take toward establishing a healthy, sustainable diet for you and your family is to cut out key dysfunctional eating behaviors that
you’ve developed over the years. Please don’t feel bad if you’ve fallen into one of the traps I describe in this section; our culture makes it very easy to start down the wrong path and very challenging to keep your guard up all the time.
Here are the biggest behavioral pitfalls:
✓ Eating whatever is quickest and easiest to procure: When you’re really hungry, what could be easier than driving through a fast food restaurant? You pay just a few bucks for a big bag full of greasy, toxin-filled food and maybe another buck or two to get a 64-ounce cup of an equally unhealthy soft drink. No planning or preparation is required. You get hungry, and you hammer back some grub — that’s the end of it.
✓ Failing to plan your at-home meals: Even when you’re at home, the fastest and easiest meals are often the first choice. That’s especially true when everyone in the house is eating at different times. Why take the time to chop up some vegetables or run some produce through a juicer when you can microwave a frozen dinner, pop open a couple cans of processed side dishes, and sit down to eat?
✓ Racing through meals: After you’ve spent mere minutes microwaving your dinner, you may sit down in front of the TV to eat. Then, after you’ve gulped down your food (very likely in mere minutes as well), you’re right back to the TV, videogames, or the Internet. I know some families who have a little game to see who can finish their food the fastest! That’s a very bad habit to encourage (as I explain later in this chapter).
Sometimes family members save arguments or stressful conversations for dinner time. Not a good idea! You should be relaxed when you eat so your body is ready to turn its attention toward effective digestion.
If you’re intent on detoxifying your body and losing weight, you have to make a long-term commitment to putting a stop to harmful eating behaviors you’ve developed over the years. It’s not easy, and if you have a family you may face resistance on the home front. But you simply won’t succeed if you try to approach the process with anything other than the long view.
Going Back to the Basics
To better understand how you should be approaching food, think about what life was like generations ago, when many people were farmers and focused almost exclusively on growing food for their families. Everyone in the family worked extremely hard (especially compared to today’s standards), and people were outside for much of the year. They cared for crops grown organically without chemical fertilizers or harsh pesticides. The food they grew, and the food they caught or killed in the form of wild game, was relatively hard to procure and was overwhelmingly toxin-free. Families ate together, taking time to slowly enjoy the food that they had worked so hard to pro- duce. Then they relaxed for the rest of the evening before getting up early to do it all over again.
Obviously, people back then faced their share of problems and hardships. But as far as food quality and toxicity, they had it pretty good. People didn’t suffer from the effects of widespread toxins in their air, water, and food. Health problems like Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, autism, and ADHD weren’t an issue, and the population wasn’t enslaved by heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and hypertension.
I know that you’re not going to go back to living the way people lived back then. I can’t ask you to quit your job and start working out in the fields with hand tools and a mule-driven plow to grow your own food, which you could enjoy eating over the course of a couple of hours with your family in front of the fireplace. However, when it comes to food and eating, you can certainly incorporate certain aspects of that lifestyle into your routine. The effects on your health (and weight) can be tremendous.
Chewing the right way
Chewing is extremely important to your health. You can do your body a lot of good just by chewing the right way. Chewing is the first step in the digestive process, and if it’s not done correctly, your digestion can really suffer.
One of the most important aspects of the chewing process is the act of physically breaking down your food into smaller pieces. If the food pieces are too big when they get to your stomach, the next part of the digestive process doesn’t work properly. The result is that you won’t absorb the nutrients in your food nearly as well.
To make sure you get the most out of the nutrients in your food, take the time to chew your food into smaller and smaller pieces until it’s essentially a liquid before swallowing.
The interaction that your saliva has with your food is also very important. Your goal should be to make sure that saliva touches every last surface of your food. If you can accomplish that, you can be confident that you’re starting your digestion off right because your saliva contains digestive enzymes. You can also feel good about reducing your risks for irritating or damaging your esophagus. If you don’t take the time to mix plenty of saliva in with your food when you chew, you can harm the surface tissue of your esophagus when you swallow.
When you’re eating, take your time and chew slowly. Taking plenty of time to chew is a great way to ensure that you’re breaking your food down into small enough bits and also saturating it with adequate amounts of saliva.
Slowing down your eating
So many aspects of our modern culture lead to eating much too fast. Fast- paced lives include fast-paced meals, and that trend is flat-out unhealthy. The slower you can eat your food, the better. Why? Here are two key reasons:
✓ The physical reason: Your stomach has a limited amount of acid and enzymes available to break down your food. If you eat extremely quickly and throw a lot of food at your stomach at once, your stomach has a hard time soaking all the food with the right amount of acid. That means your stomach isn’t able to do its job, and lousy nutrient absorption is often the result.
✓ The mental reason: The mental aspect of eating is often overlooked.
Your stomach and intestines respond to your emotional state. If you’re anxious, nervous, hurried, or physically active when you eat, there’s a discernable decrease in blood flow to your stomach and intestines.
Digesting your food properly is a blood-intensive process, so eating at a frenzied pace when you’re not relaxed can put your digestion at risk.
Also, you eat a lot more if you are multitasking while you eat rather than paying attention to your food.
Resisting the urge to wash it down
The standard American diet includes a drink with every meal. How many meals have you had recently that weren’t accompanied by a glass, can, or bottle of something to drink? Some people have a hard time believing this, but having a drink with your meal can actually cause a problem when it comes to healthy nutrition.
When you’re eating and you take a drink, the food and saliva combination in your mouth is immediately diluted, and the digestive enzymes in your saliva are compromised. Then, when you swallow the mix of food, drink, and saliva, the slippery texture of your saliva is cut by the drink, and swallowing becomes more likely to irritate your esophagus.
Drinking with meals can also create problems for your stomach. Your stomach is about the same size as both of your hands cupped together. When you drink a big beverage while eating, you can really fill up your stomach and drastically dilute your stomach acid, which throws a wrench in digestion.
If your stomach can’t thoroughly soak the food you put in it with powerful acid, it can’t properly prepare the food to enter the intestines, where much of digestion — particularly nutrient absorption — takes place. And the effect trickles down: Drinks can also dilute enzymes from other sources, like the pancreas.
Drinking lots of water is a good thing for dieting and for detoxification, but don’t drink anything with your meals. Wait at least one hour after eating before having a big glass of water, and your digestion will improve as a result.
Less is more, more often
Most people have experienced the ravages of indigestion from eating a really big meal. It’s an uncomfortable, unnatural feeling, and it contributes to weight gain and general damage to your health.
A large meal — especially one that you eat quickly — challenges your stomach’s ability to produce the acid and pepsin (an important digestive enzyme) necessary to break down your food. A lack of acid is a problem, and the problem is further compounded by the fact that it triggers your pancreas to produce less of its important digestive enzymes. That leaves you with some pretty poorly digested food that starts heading into the intestines where it can wreak all sorts of havoc and cause you plenty of discomfort.
Like many of the problems I describe earlier in this chapter, big meals also decrease your chances of properly absorbing the nutrients in your food. Finally, eating a huge amount of food at one time can cause your blood sugar to rise and fall dramatically, which makes your energy levels go haywire and can even contribute to diabetes over time.
How can you avoid these complications? It’s pretty easy, really. The best way to get the most out of your digestive system is to eat small meals on a more frequent basis. This eating pattern allows all the digestive processes to do their work without being overwhelmed, and it helps to ensure that your blood sugar stays at steady, pleasant levels (no big peaks and troughs in your energy levels). Smaller and more frequent meals also allow for more absorption of nutrients.
The best eating pattern for a detoxification diet is to eat smaller meals more often throughout the day. One good plan is to eat three small meals a day — breakfast, lunch, and dinner work fine — and also eat a small snack between each meal.
Taking a break
How often have you heard the term “eat and run”? You’ve probably heard it a lot, and if you’re like a lot of Americans, you’ve probably done it far more than you should. To get the most out of your food, you need to take a break after eating a meal. It doesn’t have to be a long break, so please don’t think I’m suggesting that you need to lie down on the couch for 60 minutes after a mid- afternoon snack. But it does help the digestive process if you can avoid any vigorous activity for a short period of time — 30 minutes is a good rule — right after you eat.
Why is this break important? A natural process occurs right after you eat that involves an increased level of blood flow to your stomach and intestines and a decreased blood flow to your muscles. Healthy digestion depends on an ample supply of available blood for your digestive organs and other tissues.
If you engage in physical activity soon after eating, you allow your muscles to place a demand for your blood at the expense of your stomach and intestines. The shift of blood flow that occurs directly after you eat allows all the digestive processes to function at a high level, and it also allows for better absorption of nutrients. Don’t jeopardize those benefits by shifting into high gear right after you have a meal.
Taking time for a BM
Let’s face it: What goes in has to come out. Nobody likes to talk about having a bowel movement, but I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on the importance of normal, healthy BMs as a part of any successful detox diet.
The gastrointestinal tract produces quite a lot of trash, and the trash has to be emptied on a regular basis. If your stool sits too long in your colon, too much water is removed from it and it becomes dry and hard to pass. That’s very uncomfortable and even harmful when the situation is extreme.
It can also contribute to toxicity because when higher-than-normal amounts of water are absorbed from your stool into your intestines, the chances increase that toxins will be absorbed at the same time.
From the time we are born, a natural reflex called the gastro-colic reflex is present. This reflex stimulates you to have a bowel movement shortly after a meal. For many people, it can be a subtle reflex that is relatively easy to override. That’s unfortunate. Many people resist the natural urge to have a BM after a meal, waiting instead until they can take care of it at a more convenient time and in a more convenient location.
If at all possible, don’t fight your body’s natural reflex to have a bowel movement after a meal. A healthy BM schedule is vital for good health and detoxification, and you need to make sure you’re making your body’s needs #1 when it comes to #2.
Practicing Essential (And Realistic) Eating Habits
I can go on and on about the specific steps you should take to detoxify your body and improve your health, but none of it amounts to much if you can’t make those practices part of your everyday life, and fast.
When it comes to detox dieting, you need to do as much as you can to put your diet in proper perspective and make eating properly a major priority in your life. The food you choose to eat has a big impact on your health, as does the food you choose not to eat. Some of the steps are easy, and some can be quite difficult if you’ve been stuck in an unhealthy food rut for a long period of time. But you have to commit to making the changes or you’ll never see any success with your detox diet. Proper non-toxic eating habits will provide you with good health, whereas most prescriptions treat only the symptoms of disease.
The practices I describe next are not suggestions; they’re rules. Thinking of them as rules is the only way you’ll make the kinds of long-term adjustments to your eating habits that will allow you to rid your body of toxins and reach your ideal weight through detox dieting.
Dodging food served through a window
Fast food is designed to be prepared rapidly (hence the name) and to appeal to the taste buds of the majority of the population. It’s cheap to prepare and sell. Providing good nutrition and avoiding toxins have never been part of the formula when it comes to fast food.
If I started writing now and promised that I wouldn’t stop until I had covered all the various unhealthy qualities of fast food, I’d still be writing when the last Styrofoam cup from the last fast food restaurant finally biodegraded. Fast food is truly awful for you. Here are just a few tidbits for you to consider.
✓ A recent study found that 100 percent of chicken from fast food restaurants contains at least some amount of arsenic, which is an extremely harmful toxin.
✓ The vast majority of beef used in fast food is raised on massive commercial feed lots where the cows are pumped full of hormones, antibiotics, and steroids.
✓ Cooking — if you can call it that — in fast food restaurants is done almost exclusively with trans fats, which are the most unhealthy, toxin-laden fats you can consume.
The worst part of the fast food picture is that fast food restaurant chains spend billions of dollars each year on marketing tricks, which are designed to make you feel better about eating their food. One chain offers a large packet of salad dressing that has only 70 calories per serving. The problem is that in very small print at the bottom of the package it says the package contains 5 servings. That’s 350 calories in one packet alone, which is as many calories as the standard cheeseburger.
It’s not impossible to make food choices at fast food restaurants that aren’t completely horrible for your body — salads come to mind. But you always need to remember that the ingredients you find even in those somewhat healthy alternatives were chosen because they were the cheapest (not because they were the healthiest, and certainly not because they contained the fewest toxins).
Don’t eat fast food. The convenience and the price simply aren’t worth the damaging effects that fast food has on your health.
Avoiding white foods
If you’re looking for a simple rule that can go quite a long way toward making your detox diet a success, this is the one for you. It seems like such a simple thing, but by avoiding white foods you automatically miss out on the things that are loaded with calories, short on nutrients, and often jam-packed with toxins. Avoiding white foods is a fantastic rule to live by for diabetics and anyone who wants to be healthy and maintain a decent weight. Avoid any- thing white and anything that started out white.
A few exceptions to the “Don’t eat white foods” rule exist, the most notable being cauliflower. Feel free to make that vegetable a part of your diet, and of course try to use a 100 percent organic option if you can!
Getting out the gluten
Gluten is a substance found in barley, rye, wheat, and oats. It’s used as a major protein source in many cultures and is common in the United States. Gluten is present in all wheat products and is used as an additive to make food thicker or stick foods together. You find it in breads, wheat pastas, pastries, cookies, cakes, and literally anything made from flour (which is typically white). If you’re reading your food labels like you should be, you’ll see that gluten pops up in an incredible array of food products.
Dodging gluten in wheat and grains is hard enough, but food manufacturers make avoiding gluten even trickier because they add it to a dizzying variety of foods. You can find it in soups, casseroles, pastes, cereals, and even beef jerky. Forms of gluten can be included in ingredients lists with many names, including starch, binders, and natural flavorings.
The steps necessary to cut gluten out of your diet are too complex for me to cover here. If you’d like to eliminate gluten from your diet, try reading Living Gluten-Free For Dummies by Danna Korn (Wiley).
Increasing numbers of people have a gluten allergy, and many others suffer from an ailment called celiac disease. That’s an autoimmune disorder where the presence of gluten in the diet causes multiple, extremely unpleasant effects. Some estimates indicate that as many as one out of every eight people has some form of celiac disease. The small intestines of people who suffer from celiac disease are damaged when the diet includes gluten, and over time the damage can cause the intestine to leak substances that aren’t intended to get into the bloodstream, like harmful bacteria and toxins. It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s one that many people live with.
Common symptoms of celiac disease include diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. It can also contribute to growth retardation and psychosocial problems in children. If you think you may be suffering from celiac disease, consult your doctor. Keep in mind, though, that if your doctor is firmly rooted in conventional medicine, she may be prone to look for every other
possible cause for your symptoms before considering celiac disease or a similar form of gluten sensitivity. Common misdiagnoses include irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease, regional enteritis, gastroenteritis, nervous stomach, and stomach flu.
Your doctor can order blood tests to determine whether you have celiac dis- ease, but the best way to confirm the problem is to go on a gluten-free diet because it’s possible that gluten is giving you fits but not at the level that would be confirmed with a blood test. A gluten-free diet isn’t an easy thing to do, but if your body is sensitive to gluten, the rewards are enormous.
Here’s one other note on gluten for you to consider: After it’s in the body, gluten can be transformed into a compound called glutomorphine. That com- pound is commonly identified in autistic children, and some experts think that it causes additional complications within the autism spectrum. If some- one you know is affected by autism, you may want to consider trying to limit his gluten intake to see if doing so has a positive effect on his symptoms.
Removing milk and milk products
Milk is processed in some very strange and unnatural ways these days, and the result can be a product that has questionable health benefits and could, in fact, contribute to some ailments. Quite a lot of the milk available today also contains hormones and antibiotics because those substances are frequently given to dairy cows.
About 20 percent of the U.S. population is lactose intolerant, meaning that milk and products made from milk cause quite a few problems. For these people, caseins could be the culprit.
Caseins are proteins found in milk. Casein is structurally very similar to gluten, and it may cause some of the same effects. We don’t yet fully under- stand how caseins could wreak havoc on the intestines and other parts of the body, and we also don’t know how many people may be casein intolerant. But some experts believe that for some people, casein causes long-term disruption to the digestive system and can also have negative effects on mental and immune function.
Some interesting case studies suggest a connection between casein and the symptoms of autism in children. Avoidance diets — in which children don’t eat or drink anything containing casein — have resulted in remarkable improvements in the behavior of some children with autism. As with gluten, if you are close to a child with autism, you may consider putting him on a diet that cuts out casein to see if there’s a positive effect.
If you’re suffering from a digestive system problem and your doctor isn’t having much luck diagnosing or treating it successfully, consider cutting milk and milk products out of your diet for three months. An avoidance diet of that length will tell you whether milk is creating problems for your intestines. And don’t worry about missing out on calcium: You can get all the calcium you need from vegetables, and you can get your vitamin D with supplements.
Keep in mind that most conventional physicians don’t consider casein to be a real problem, so you may have to decide for yourself whether consuming milk or milk products is damaging to your health.
If you choose to eliminate milk from your diet, be on the lookout for milk products hidden in other foods. Milk or milk proteins are added to a wide variety of foods, particularly processed foods. Check labels for sodium caseinate, calcium caseinate, and milk protein; all three are milk-based materials.
Giving sweeteners the slip
Sweeteners are one of the biggest problem areas when it comes to detoxification and detox dieting. Sweeteners are present in a mind-boggling array of foods, and they can add up quickly to cause a bigger waistline and higher levels of toxins in your body.
As you begin your detox diet and general detoxification efforts, do your best to cut out foods and beverages that contain sweeteners. Sweeteners contribute to obesity (either directly or indirectly) and are often loaded with toxins. The one exception is stevia, a plant-based sweetener that doesn’t contribute to weight gain, diabetes, or any other ailments that are common among people who consume excessive amounts of sweeteners.
The many faces of sugar
Sugar comes in many, many forms on ingredient lists, and you need to be sure you’re checking for all of them when you’re scanning ingredients to select healthy, toxin-free foods. Here are a few common forms of sugar you need to watch out for:
✓ Dextrin
✓ Fructose
✓ Galactose
✓ Glucose
✓ Lactose
✓ Maltose
✓ Sucrose
In addition to dodging the different kinds of sugar, you also need to make sure you cut out the artificial sweeteners. Here are the most common examples:
✓ Acesulfame
✓ Aspartame
✓ Neotame
✓ Saccharin
✓ Sucralose
High fructose corn syrup
High fructose corn syrup deserves its own section because it’s used in all kinds of processed foods and food products. It’s everywhere, and it’s horrible for you! Not only is the substance itself really bad for your health, but it also often contains mercury. Do whatever you can to cut high fructose corn syrup out of your diet immediately!
Planning ahead
Unhealthy, toxic food has crept into the diets of most people because it’s incredibly easy and often cheap to obtain. You can get nutritionally lousy, high-toxin food in a huge number of places these days.
If you want to eat healthy, lose weight, and cut out toxins, you have to commit to thinking about and planning your meals. Planning ahead is the key to success for detoxing and for weight loss. Here are a few useful tips that will help you adjust to the idea of putting some thought into the food you eat:
✓ Remember that you’re changing the way you eat for the rest of your life.
Even if it feels like a pain to read labels, shop for healthy ingredients, and make a concerted effort to dodge toxins, doing so will get easier over time as it becomes the norm.
✓ Go through your pantry and refrigerator and get rid of the unhealthy, toxic foods that I describe in Chapter 6. If a food is in your house, you’ll probably eat it, so either trash it or donate it.
✓ If you’re going to be away from home at a meal time, either pack a healthy meal or snack or figure out a healthy place to eat beforehand.
Decisions made on the fly with limited choices rarely turn out well.
✓ Build a few more minutes into your meal schedule. Taking the time to eat your food slowly and giving your digestive system a few minutes to work its magic before you’re off to the races again can pay dividends for any detoxification diet. Also consider taking digestive enzymes at meal- times; they can never hurt. And remember that having a bowel movement after a meal is a normal reflex, so don’t fight it.
✓ Make sure you have a good source of clean water available at all times, but don’t drink it during meal time!
Recipes for Detox Dieting Success
One important thing to bear in mind when starting out on a detox diet is that the food you eat doesn’t have to be bland or boring. You can cook up some really fantastic dishes and stay safely within the tenets of detox dieting. Don’t believe me? Check out the recipes in the next few pages.
Curried Chicken with Amaranth Pilaf
Curry powder is an excellent spice combination to add to your diet. It is flavorful and warm. One of the main ingredients of this delicious chicken recipe is turmeric, a root with powerful anti-inflammatory properties. It helps improve liver and cardiovascular function. And whole grains like amaranth contain lots of soluble fiber, which helps you feel full more quickly so you eat less.
1 In large saucepan, place 1 tablespoon olive oil. Add onion and garlic; cook over medium heat and stir 5–6 minutes until tender. Add 2 teaspoons curry powder; cook 1 minute. Stir in amaranth and cook 1 minute. Add dates, water, and orange juice. Bring to a simmer. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 20 minutes.
2 Meanwhile, combine chicken with 1 tablespoon curry powder, cinnamon, and pepper; toss to coat. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil over medium high heat in another saucepan; add chicken mixture. Brown chicken, stirring several times, until chicken is almost done, about 6 minutes.
3 Add 1/2 cup orange juice and 2 tablespoons honey to the chicken mixture; bring to a simmer. Simmer 3–5 minutes until chicken is cooked. Cover and remove from heat.
4 When amaranth is tender, stir in lemon juice and cherries, cover, and let stand 5 min- utes. Then place on serving platter. Pour chicken mixture over, sprinkle with sesame seeds, and serve.
Chopped Veggie Salad
Raw vegetables are important to a detox diet, especially when focusing on weight loss. They’re rich in fiber, vitamins, and minerals, and they contain enzymes that help your liver focus on converting stored fat into energy. That helps the pounds come off!
One of the nicest things about salads is that it’s so easy to change them, adding foods you love or deleting foods you don’t like. Just about anything goes — as long as it’s 100 percent organic. Other vegetables that would be good in this salad include shredded raw parsnips, sliced fresh mushrooms, and chopped tomatoes, fennel, or celery.
1 In large bowl, combine yogurt, flaxseed oil, mustard, lemon juice, parsley, and pepper; mix well. Add cabbage, cauliflower, asparagus, beets, and carrots and stir to coat. Refrigerate until ready to serve.
2 Just before serving, add avocados and toss gently. Sprinkle with almonds and serve. You can also serve this salad on a bed of mixed organic greens or cooked brown rice mixed with chopped nuts and a mustard vinaigrette.
Root Vegetable Lentil Soup
Root vegetables are hearty and filling, and they contain lots of antioxidants and fiber. Cooking these vegetables makes their nutrients more available, and it concentrates their flavor. Lentils are an excellent diet food: nutty, creamy, and a wonderful source of protein. This soup is warming and satisfying on a cold day.
1 In a large pot, place olive oil; add onions, garlic, and ginger root. Cook over medium high heat, stirring occasionally, until vegetables are tender, about 6–7 minutes. Add sweet potatoes and parsnip; cook and stir until vegetables start to soften.
2 Add carrots, turmeric, rosemary, water, apple juice, and lentils; bring to a simmer. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer 40–50 minutes until vegetables and lentils are tender.
3 Remove rosemary stems. Stir in lemon juice, pepper, and parsley. Correct seasonings if necessary, and serve dolloped with yogurt and topped with pumpkin seeds.
Quinoa Fruit Breakfast Cereal
Quinoa (pronounced keen-wah) is a super-crop, containing all the amino acids necessary for the human body to stay healthy. It’s an ancient grain, eaten by pre-Columbian peoples.
Make sure that you rinse quinoa well before using because it’s coated with a substance called saponin, which is a bitter chemical that prevents birds from eating the seeds.
The berries add a fresh finish to this hearty breakfast, providing you with antioxidants, vitamin C, flavonoids, and phytochemicals. And raspberries have anthocyanins, a com- pound that stabilizes blood sugar to keep hunger pangs away.
1 Spread the rinsed quinoa on a paper towel and let dry 10–15 minutes. (Note: It will still be somewhat wet after 15 minutes, which is fine.)
2 Place quinoa in a skillet over medium heat and toast it, stirring frequently, until it begins to pop. Remove from heat; place quinoa in heavy saucepan.
3 Add filtered water, orange juice, apple juice, stevia, and cinnamon and bring to a simmer. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer 20–25 minutes until quinoa is tender.
4 Stir in almonds, remove from heat, cover, and let stand 5 minutes. Meanwhile, combine berries with lemon juice, honey, and thyme in small bowl. Serve the quinoa and top with the berry mixture.
Crunchy Curried Salmon Wraps
One of the secrets of eating well with fewer calories is to add interest and flavor to your food. Curry powder adds no calories but is full of flavor and nutrients. Nuts are an important part of any diet; they provide good fats and lots of protein. And using whole grain organic tortillas as wraps satisfies your need for carbohydrates in a healthy way.
1 Place salmon fillets in large skillet; pour juice over; sprinkle with ginger root. Bring to a simmer over medium heat. Reduce heat to low, cover, and poach salmon for 7–8 minutes until done. Remove salmon from pan; reserve 2 tablespoons poaching liquid.
2 Flake salmon and place in medium bowl. Add celery, apricots, prunes, and cashews.
3 In small bowl, combine yogurt, curry powder, poaching liquid, and pepper; mix. Add to salmon mixture and stir gently.
4 Divide arugula and sprouts among the tortillas; add salmon mixture. Roll up and cut each roll in half. Serve immediately.
Nutty Hummus Dip
Hummus is a puree of chickpeas (also called garbanzo beans), garlic, sesame, and lemon. It’s high in folate, manganese, fiber, and protein and very low in fat, making it the perfect diet snack. Hummus is also delicious as a sandwich spread or topping for grilled salmon or chicken. Serve it with lots of fresh vegetables for dipping, and if you can find whole grain organic pita bread, cut it into triangles and toast it for another great dipper. For this recipe keep in mind that you can substitute a 15-ounce can of organic chick- peas for the cooked chickpeas, but the result will be higher in sodium.
1 Pick over the chickpeas and rinse well. Cover with filtered water and soak overnight.
2 In the morning, drain and rinse the chickpeas. Place in heavy saucepan, cover with 6 cups filtered water, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover pan, and simmer 70–120 minutes until they are tender. (Check after 1 hour to see if they are soft.) Drain well, reserving 1/3 cup cooking liquid.
3 Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Cut garlic head in half crosswise and place, cut side up, on small baking sheet. Drizzle each half with a teaspoon of sesame oil. Bake for 35–45 minutes until garlic is very soft. Let cool 15 minutes, then remove cloves from skin; set aside.
4 In food processor, combine roasted garlic, cooked and drained chickpeas, and remaining ingredients. Process until desired consistency, adding reserved cooking liquid as desired. Hummus can be very smooth or it can be chunky. You may need to add more water, lemon juice, or flaxseed oil until the hummus is creamy. Serve with vegetable dippers.
Apple-Pear Smoothie
Apples and pears are available year-round, so they’re perfect for this easy breakfast smoothie. Each packs a lot of soluble and insoluble fiber. Pectin in apples can lead to a reduction in the body’s need for insulin. Apples are also rich in quercetin, a flavonoid that fights inflammation and oxidation in the body.
1 Combine all ingredients in a heavy-duty blender or food processor. Process or blend until mixture is smooth. Immediately pour into chilled glasses and serve.
Butternut Squash and Rice Stew
Any root vegetable or squash that’s brightly colored, like pumpkin, sweet potatoes, car- rots, or butternut squash, is packed with carotenoids and beta-carotenes, as well as fiber. These nutrients help protect your body from disease. The slow cooker is a healthy cooking method. When cooked at low temperatures, foods do not develop advanced glycation end products, or AGEs. These compounds are formed when sugars, protein, and fat are combined at high heat. They irritate cells in your body and may increase your risk for heart disease and diabetes.
1 In 5-quart slow cooker, place onions, garlic, squash, and carrots. Place apple on top. Add water and pear juice.
2 In small bowl, combine orange juice with mustard and basil; whisk until smooth and stir into slow cooker.
3 Add rosemary, and then cover and cook on low for 8–9 hours until vegetables are tender.
4 Add rice, lemon juice, and peppers; remove rosemary stems. Cover and cook on high 55–65 minutes until rice is tender.
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