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The Perfect Diet


Daniel Rogov

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I have grown incredibly weary of reading about dieting and the overall concern that people show with regard to what they eat. So weary in fact that I have decided in all seriousness to present whatI consider the perfect diet, one that will guarantee that people will either maintain their weight or lose weight as they choose and will do nothing but good to their bodies and their emotions. Heck...this diet is so perfect no-one will ever have to suffer the least bit of guilt over what they eat. Be aware of course that I base this not on the least bit of medical expertise.

Rule 1. Eat three, four of five meals a day depending on your personal needs and desires. Beyond that, no between-meal snacks!

Rule 2. At each meal serve whatever foods most appeal to you at the moment. Unless under a doctor's orders (and it should be a doctor you trust) forget the words "cholesterol", "fat" and "vitamins".

Rule 3. At a restaurant accept the normal portion served, no matter how large or if dining at home ask someone else to serve you what they consider a normal portion.

Rule 4. Eat precisely 1/3 of what those portions are. Leave the rest untouched.

Rule 5. With at least one of those meals consume one or two glasses of good wine.

Rule 6. At least two of those meals should take a minimum of 50 minutes to consume. Even if you finish eating before that, stay at the table and sip your wine or a cup of tea, coffee, or water as you like.

Rule 7. Only things to be avoided are all commercial soft drinks (including diet drinks) and chewing gum. Anything else goes so long as we are wise enough not to dine on foods to which we are in any way allergic.

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Rules of truly common sense and, in particular, I find Rule 2 most appealing in its simplicity:At each meal serve whatever foods most appeal to you at the moment but I doubt that I could only eat one third of such a meal, even with the addition of the wine. Why the fifty minute goal for eating a meal?

Melissa Goodman aka "Gifted Gourmet"

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Is this what you do? How do people serving you at home respond to you eating 1/3 the "normal" portion size?

Heck, if you tried that at my Mom's, you keel over from lack of calories!

I'm a canning clean freak because there's no sorry large enough to cover the, "Oops! I gave you botulism" regrets.

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Each to its own:

1. I set the 50 minute minimum for two meals because dining should be a way of enjoying rselves, of relaxing. Making dining part of the cultured parts of our lives (as opposed to mere eating) adds to our psychological well-being as well as our physical well-being. And yes, part of dining is simply sitting at the table and if not actually dining, talking or contemplating.

2. Indeed I dine that way (with a few exceptions I admit for truly superb meals but those are few indeed). If at someone's home I simply explain that I'm "trying to lose a few kilos"

3. No gum because chewing gum increases our "feeling" of hunger. I'd rather rely on true hunger or desire for food and not an artificial message that gets to my brain.

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What are you suppose to do with the 2/3 left on your plate? Don't tell me that you are going to throw it away. :shock: I think it is more reasonable to just take a sample of each food item and if you are still hungry after that, then take another sample until you don't feel hungry. Of course, when I am dining out, I would pack all the leftovers home if they would taste good the next day.

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If the world was like this, you'd never need a...

I like the idea to forget the "bad" words such as "cholesterol", unless this makes my doctor to remind me of this in emergency manner.

In fact, there can't be a perfect diet. The more one's diet is restrictive, the more chances he/she will drop it on some stage. Any diet has some restrictions, and on any restriction there are people especially sensitive to it.

For this particular diet there are people that sensitive to amount of food to eat - 1/3 portion will be heavy limitaiton for them, which will lead to frustration and eventually to leaving the diet. And, caused weight fluctuation may even be more harmful then forgetting the word "cholesterol".

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As to the 2/3 left over on the plate - just let it sit there. That's the whole point of the exercise - and to refer to the question of "restrictions" you'll note that this about the only one placed on anyone in this entire diet.

By the way, I'm all for taking home the left overs when dining out. Keep in mind though that when you put those on your plate the next day you can only eat 1/3 of what is there so be sure if you're hungry, to add something more to the plate to make your 1/3 a "full and not partial 1/3"

Perfect? Of course not. Nothing on this planet is perfect....Despite what we learned as children, even snow drops are not perfectly symmetrical. What is called for here though is absolutely minimal self-restraint. If you really feel like a 300 gram hamburger topped with cheese and bacon, no problem.....simply order or prepare a burger that weighs that weighs 900 grams to start (or, if you prefer three 300 gram burgers but then to eat only one of them). Believe me, the combination of the humor and the satisfaction involved in this is unbeatable. And I can assure you that after a while, you will order a single 300 gram burger and happily eat only 100 grams of it.......and feel damned good for it.

Am I striving to be amusing in all of this. Truth is - not at all!!!!

Edited by Daniel Rogov (log)
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For some time now I've been trying to figure out what to do to shed a few--okay, really more than a few--pounds. Daniel I think your suggestions make a lot of sense and are definitely in line with my thinking of late. The thought of going on my 1,000th diet, incredibly restrictive in you name it: carbs, fats, sugars, calories, flavor makes me cringe.

In addition to your suggestions I'd like to add:

- Cook from scratch as often as possible for obvious reasons.

- Widen your repetoire of foods. Purchase the widest variety of fresh foods/high quality food products you can afford. I've been venturing into trying different types of cheeses, breads, vegetables, condiments.

- Eat highly flavorful food. I think that a lot of Americans are overweight simply because a lot of the foods we eat are somewhat bland, relying solely on salt, sugar and fat (not that I don't like those things) alone for flavor, so we try to satiate ourselves with quantity. I find that when I dine on certain cuisines such as Indian, Middle Eastern, Thai, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, I eat less because my tastebuds are satisfied.

- Stay away from "diet" products. Remember those awful fat free cookies? People would eat half a bagful because, after all they were fat free, right? Except: they were full of white flour, sugar, and God knows what else and weren't calorie free. Eat one or two real cookies, or even better one or two small pieces of good chocolate and be satisfied. Or how about those snack foods prepared with fat substitutes. Can we say anal leakage? Blech.

- Tell yourself you can eat whatever you want, when you want. In the past when I've dieted, I usually start out with an I can't eat this or that mentality which always sets me up for failure. Giving myself permission to eat whatever I want allows me to be in control of what I eat and not the other way around.

Just my two cents.

Inside me there is a thin woman screaming to get out, but I can usually keep the Bitch quiet: with CHOCOLATE!!!

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Sounds like a rotten idea for the environment to me. Imagine if the whole population of the world were preparing three times as much as they needed, and throwing two thirds away.

Why not prepare/order/place on one's plate the one third and no more?

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Anzu, Hello.....

Much of the population of our planet has no such luxury. It is estimated that 50% of the people who inhabit our little world are born hungry, live their entire lives hungry and die hungry. Not of starvation, mind you, simply of hunger. More than this that their options for selecting foods that are either good or good for them are extroardinarily limited. People in such circumstances never think of diets. They think of having enough on their plates and on the plates of their children to keep them above the starvation level.

I am not talking about any world catastrophe here. We are talking about that relatively limited number of people who can afford to eat well and who, for one reason or another, have chosen to keep their weight at its current status or to lose a few kilos.

By the way, it is estimated that in the United States fully 55% of all food produced eventually goes to waste. I'm not adding so drastically to that number. Heck, I suppose by following my diet people would also be adding to the gross national product. I can live with that.

Fully seriously, let's imagine we wander into and decide on the scallops in cream-enriched sauce as a first course, a T bone steak with buttered potato puree as a main course, and the chocolate mousse for dessert. Can we truly imagine asking for the steak to cut in 1/3 before being cooked, serving us only 2 of the scallops and asking for "just a tablespoon of the mousse, please".

Edited by Daniel Rogov (log)
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Daniel, I think I see it differently from you.

Firstly, with the restaurant issue: I personally wouldn't order all three dishes, but only one.

Maybe this is not doable for some, I don't know. I simply don't order more than I am able to eat. Both my husband and I have medical conditions which are partially controlled by relatively strict diet, and the idea of some type of restraint is always present in our eating. I am the sort of person who will eat only one square of chocolate, only one peanut, etc. and not lust after the remainder in the pack.

Incidentally, when I lived in the US, I did occasionally buy a half or quarter order of some food which was served in portions so large I would have been unable (and unwilling) to eat it all. When I made it clear that I was willing to pay the full price for a partial serving, I was given that which I requested. Sometimes I got some rather odd looks, but it is possible.

This is not, of course, meant to be a comment on what you personally may eat or order. I'm talking about this as the concept of a perfect diet which would be followed by numerous people.

Secondly, I am well aware that many people in this world are hungry. I have lived in places where parts of the population have chronic malnutrition (this can be observed easily, as it is often indicated by hair discoloration). And it is partly because of that very hunger that I find the idea of deliberately food wastage among the better-off extremely distasteful.

I don't believe in consuming food in the sense of 'Finish the food on your plate, think of the starving children in Africa.' (or whichever other region may be undergoing hardship at that particular time). That is a ridiculous argument.

However, taken as a global whole, resources are spent in ploughing land, and then planting, growing, harvesting, refining, storing, moving, refrigerating, and preparing the foods that we eat. To then waste two thirds of that is, in my opinion, terribly wasteful. If that which was never going to be eaten were not bought or prepared in the first place, then surely those resources might be directed more usefully, and might - being terribly optimistic here - even help those who do suffer from hunger.

Of course, that would be merely a drop in the bucket compared the huge amount of wastage in this world.

But, in my opinion, why add to that wastage?

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Rule 3.  At a restaurant accept the normal portion served, no matter how large or if dining at home ask someone else to serve you what they consider a normal portion.

Rule 4.  Eat precisely 1/3 of what those portions are. Leave the rest untouched.

does this rule apply only in restaurants or when you dine at someone elses home, or also when you eat in you own home (ie prepare the food yourself?)

I can understand the rule for dining out in a restaurant. But at home..

For me, weight loss/weight control is all about being conscious of what I eat, the food that I let enter my body, and the respect I have for the food that nourishes me. Leaving 2/3 of lovingly prepared food on my plate, watching it grow cold, fat congealing, and then throwing it out, is not showing it respect...

That does not mean that you always have to eat everything that is put before you.

But to eat only a third of everything, as a rule, seems to me (I agree with Anzu) a terrible waste.

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Thinking of the people who are kind enough to tolerate me in their home for dinner, eating 1/3 would result in a dearth of invitations...

But I like the overall idea.

The sea was angry that day my friends... like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.

George Costanza

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I'm not preaching anything here. Just my suggestions. The main suggestion (relating to the eating of 1/3 of what's on the plate) is nothing more than a way of assuring that we can eat WHATEVER we want, WHENEVER we want, automatically (!!) controlling the AMOUNT we eat and thus controlling our weight maintenance or loss.

Considering that I have no desire to be thought of in the category of an Atkins or a Pritkin or something akin to a Weight Watcher's Society, with this I now rest my case and leave it to all to decide on their own whether my suggestions are or are not appropriate for them.

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I'm not preaching anything here. Just my suggestions.  The main suggestion (relating to the eating of 1/3 of what's on the plate) is nothing more than a way of assuring that we can eat WHATEVER we want, WHENEVER we want, automatically (!!) controlling the AMOUNT we eat and thus controlling our weight maintenance or loss. 

I did not think you were preaching, I just did not quite understand your statement in your first post (and still don't).

Does the perfect diet, in your words, mean that at home, you prepare, say, a plate of pasta, sit down with it, drink a glass of wine, and then only eat 1/3?

Portion control is a big issue for me and I find your suggestions interesting, but before I can have an opinion about them, I have to understand what you mean.

edited cause I forgot a word

Edited by Chufi (log)
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Does the perfect diet, in your words, mean that at home, you prepare, say, a plate of pasta, sit down with it, drink a glass of wine, and then only eat 1/3?

Portion control is a big issue for me and I find your suggestions interesting, but before I can have an opinion about them, I have to understand what you mean.

Chufi, Hi...

That's precisely my meaning - wherever you are dining, whatever is prepared or whatever is served, eat 1/3.

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I think the 1/3 rule would work well, and could be done temporarily until a person adjusts to eating less at each meal.

When I eat out, I try to never arrive at a restaurant really hungry and I usually eat about 1/2 what is served to me. At home, I use a small plate that can only hold a reasonable portion and I don't go back for seconds. I eat six small meals/snacks per day, so if I am still a little hungry after I eat a meal, I wait 2-3 hours until it is time for my next meal or snack. For me, knowing it won't be long until I eat again is enough to keep me from overdoing it at mealtime.

I used to eat much larger portions at every meal than I do now (and I used to weigh a lot more too). By eating more often, I never feel really full but I never feel really hungry either. This took some getting used to but it did work for me.

Tammy Olson aka "TPO"

The Practical Pantry

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Naturally Rogov you know that I am interested in learning what the philosophic answer is to the idea of waste either of intent or of actuality within the structure of the world as we know it with so much want and so little thoughtful intent, would be, in this idea of diet and the eating of one-third. If there is one. I can understand if this concept needs to sit outside the box of the idea. But if there is an answer in your mind to this, I'd love to hear it. :biggrin:

As far as the rest of the diet goes, I say for the most part it is a good one. A third of a whole, used ad continuum (if that is a word) finally will be used up if so desired.

I would personally have a problem with the two 50 minute meals per day and agree that this is wrong. Time should be found for this. And glue for the children's behinds to stick them to the seats perhaps. :cool:

The other thing I do not do is the wine but that is because I want to take a nap sometimes after wine. But I guess if the children can be glued to their seats, then they could stay there for a while and I would not be so tired. Or else I could take a nap. Either way. And their fussing would not bother me if the alcohol content was high enough, it is to be imagined.

Nice diet.

Now do you have a recipe for some good glue?

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I'm all for the nap! In fact, a civilized part of life.

As to the 50 minute rule, first of all remember that I suggested that this period be devoted to two meals, not to all. As to the children, I'm not imposing that rule on them. No reason why if children dine with you at one of those 50 minute meals they cannot be excused when they are ready to go. The diet is for us, not for them.

As to philosophy and waste, I'm afraid you're going to find that this is one of those points on which I am not concerned with others but only with the person who is doing the dining. Truth is that the conspicuous consumption practiced by too many people these days is far more wasteful than the program that I am suggesting. Most of that waste would take place in restaurants. At home the balance of most dishes can easily go into leftovers or other meals.

What I am not proposing is a moral solution to world hunger. Just a simple way for individuals to control what they ingest. Obviously for those not in need of such control, this or other programs are not in order.

As to the red wine - sorry but that remains an integral part of the diet and that because I perceive wine as part of the cultured life and as the most natural accompaniment to fine food (note again, moderation and not at every meal). And, being a reasonable man, because wine is delicious and with quite enough evidence from non-biased sources, in moderation although far from a medicine, is certainly good for us.

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Stephen, Hi....

I'll go along with chaqun a son gout but not on my diet. After all, rules are rules......start with the snacks and then say, "what the heck....why not half instead of one-third", and "well, I'd better not have the foie gras with Madeira sauce" or......well........the road to hell and all that...... :cool:

Edited by Daniel Rogov (log)
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  • 2 months later...
Have you heard about the Reverse Diet Solution?

Dear Ms. Cunningham,

No. To tell you the truth I hadn't heard about it until you posted it. The only one I know who often enjoyed dining in the fashion to which you refer was Ludwig the Mad of Bavaria who, of course, drove his servants quite wild with his requests. I suspect though that Ludwig's diet did not consist of SPAM, and that surely does sound like what your post is to me.

If I have offended the rules of egullet and am duly spanked, I accept that but truth is, this was too tempting to resist. Something like the profiteroles with which I just finished off my dinner.

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