Every year, there’s a new diet book bestseller, sometimes even two or three. Over twenty years ago, there was even a book published called, I kid you not, The Ice Cream Diet, written by a registered dietician and nutrition editor of Prevention magazine. On the book’s Amazon page, the diet strategy is promoted with these words: “So go ahead and have your milkshakes, hot fudge sundaes, and banana splits. With The Ice Cream Diet, you can drop the guilt and the weight!”
What could possibly go wrong with a diet based around ice cream and hot fudge sundaes?
The Ice Cream Diet was actually a follow-up to another weight-loss classic by the same dietician: The Peanut Butter Diet.
People are always delighted to learn that their bad habits might actually be beneficial; it’s never hard to fool people who are motivated to be fooled.
If someone really wants to lose weight, a good approach might be to adopt the exact opposite strategy from The Ice Cream Diet. Instead of centering your diet around foods that are hyperpalatable, full of fat, and rich, try emphasizing simplicity in your meals, by centering them around starches. For breakfast every day, for example, have hot cereals like oatmeal or buckwheat, topped with fruits. For lunch every day, a sweet potato and salad. For dinner, white potatoes or purple potatoes with beans and vegetables. Every day. Make a virtue of consistency.
Would it be boring to eat the same foods every day? Who cares? Do you want to lose weight, or be entertained? If you want to lose weight, you’re better off sticking to a plan that is guaranteed to work and that will keep you feeling satisfied. There’s no nutritional downside to eating healthy foods (oatmeal, buckwheat, fruits, vegetables, potatoes, sweet potatoes) over and over again. And there’s plenty of room for variety: the fruits that you top your cereal with, for example, or the greens and vegetables in your salad, or the vegetables that accompany your potatoes and beans. For that matter, there are countless varieties of potatoes and beans.
Make these meals without adding sugar, oil, and salt. And, of course, no animal products. You will down-regulate your taste buds so that you appreciate the taste of real food and become intolerant of the kinds of rich foods that are hawked in diet books sold by con artists.
You’ll gain a sense of mastery and self-control from eating simple meals like this, and the excess pounds will roll off. You can eat until satisfied, so there’s no deprivation involved.
Once you lose the weight you need to lose, you can begin to experiment with more varied vegan meals. But you’ll find that you’ll always be coming back to the basics. Because you want to.
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