by Dana James
If you’re not hungry for a snack, either your meals are too large or you’ve trained your body not to get hungry, which is not necessarily a good thing. If you’re not used to eating a snack, I urge you to try it. Snacks give you the opportunity to take in more nutrients, provided you are following Food Fundamental “When Snacking, Calories Matter.”
Breakfast Is the Least Important Meal of the Day
Contrary to popular opinion, breakfast is not the most important meal of the day. (That is a myth created to get you to eat packaged cereal!) Your appetite-suppressing hormones, GLP-1 and CCK, are highest during the early part of the day, which is why you often don’t feel hungry when you first wake up even though you haven’t eaten for twelve hours. It also explains why you can eat a light breakfast and still feel satiated. Light, however, doesn’t mean you should only eat fruit. Fruit is metabolized within sixty minutes and will leave you feeling hungrier than before you ate. (Fruit is fine as a snack later in the day when you just need something to hold you over from lunch to dinner, but not as the base for starting your day.)
If you want to speed up the body’s ability to burn fat, eat a protein-based breakfast, like organic eggs, a plant-based protein smoothie, or chia seed pudding. Protein activates the hormone glucagon, which helps to burn body fat. Eating protein for breakfast has also been shown to decrease the number of calories you consume throughout the rest of the day. In a 1999 study at Harvard University, participants were fed breakfasts of instant oatmeal, steel-cut oatmeal, or a vegetable omelet with a side of fruit and were then allowed to consume all the food they wanted for the rest of the day. Even though each breakfast had the same number of calories, when the participants ate the instant oatmeal, they devoured a whopping 500 to 600 more calories throughout the day than on the days that they ate the omelet. When the same subjects ate the steel-cut oats, they consumed an additional 300 calories compared to the day they ate eggs and fruit.2 This increased hunger is one of the main reasons why I don’t suggest eating oats (instant or steel cut) for breakfast, no matter how “healthy” you’ve heard they are. What’s more, a fasting body is particularly sensitive to sugar and carbs, so if you eat only oats, cereal, toast, or pancakes for breakfast, you’ll tip your body in favor of fat storage, not fat burning.
I recommend eating light to heavy, with your lightest meal at breakfast and largest meal at dinner. Most people are hungrier and more relaxed in the evening than they are in the morning, and the body secretes more digestive enzymes when it is in a relaxed state. These enzymes help break down food into its individual components so that the nutrients can be better absorbed and utilized by the body. Just don’t eat a massive meal right before bed! See Food Fundamental “Fast for Twelve Hours a Day.”
Eat Your Veggies!
You already know you should eat your vegetables, but I want to get specific here:
Eat at least half a plate—about 2 to 4 cups—of vegetables at both lunch and dinner.
Include three different vegetables at each of these meals. Only by eating three different vegetables will you get the diversity of phytonutrients needed to optimize your vitality, mind, and health.
Eating this way isn’t complicated, but it does require you to pay attention to your food, especially when ordering out. Too often, for instance, a menu will list something as a “salad” that only contains one vegetable. A kale salad with walnuts, dried cranberries, and feta cheese is not a salad; it’s a cheese plate served on a bed of kale! A kale salad with red onion and yellow peppers, or even a steak accompanied by a side of mixed vegetables, would be a better choice.
Eating three vegetables does not mean you can only eat salad. You could have a vegetable soup made with organic carrots, leeks, and celery or a veggie plate made with ruby-red heirloom tomatoes, French radish, and grilled asparagus.
Portion Size Matters
I don’t want you to count calories at meals, as doing so distorts how you view food. I want you to focus on the composition of the meal, not numbers. But that doesn’t mean you can just eat unlimited quantities of healthy foods and lose weight. To lose weight, you must also consider the amount of food you eat. Your hands serve as a proxy for gauging caloric intake without counting calories. Simply hold your hands out side by side, palms up. This represents the area your meal should cover. The left hand is the portion size for vegetables and it can be overflowing. The right hand is for all of the other ingredients that comprise your meal—carbs, protein, and fat—and the precise balance of those elements will depend on your archetype. I once had twins in my office, and one of them was twenty pounds heavier than the other. Not surprisingly, her hands were larger than her sister’s, confirming that she needed more food to support her slightly larger frame.
When Snacking, Calories Matter
While I just said you don’t have to count calories at meals, I do want you to consider them when choosing your snacks. It’s very easy to go overboard on snacks, and that can be the difference between weight loss and weight gain. For each of your two daily snacks, the number of calories should be no greater than the equivalent of your goal weight in pounds. If you want to get to 120 pounds, eat two 120-calorie snacks. If your goal is 150 pounds, eat two 150-calorie snacks. When snacking, opt for fruits, fats, or vegetables, not protein or carbs. Unless you’re training intensely or are looking to build muscle mass, you don’t need more protein than what you are getting from your meals, so no snacks of turkey jerky, hard-boiled eggs, or chicken slices. Likewise, limit carbs to mealtimes, as carbs are the levers for weight loss and weight gain—in general, the more you eat, the harder it is to lose. Instead, try half an avocado with lime, maca-dusted hazelnuts (fourteen is about 120 calories), 2 tablespoons of turmeric-spiced pumpkin seeds, 12 ounces of green vegetable juice or bone broth, a matcha latte made with creamy cashew milk, four fresh figs, a pear with tahini, or a small chia seed pudding with fresh apricots.
Say No to Gluten and Dairy (Temporarily)
I know I mentioned earlier that I wouldn’t restrict the foods you can eat, but I have found that temporarily removing gluten and dairy from your diet can help rebalance the body and make it easier to lose weight. Once you’ve improved your body’s resilience, you will be able to tolerate a greater diversity of foods, including high-quality forms of gluten and dairy. To do this, however, the body may require a small break to correct itself since these foods can trigger inflammation and interfere with cellular processes that govern your physical body and emotional state.
If you’re unhappy with how you look and feel, experiment with a four-week gluten and dairy hiatus, particularly if you haven’t tried this before. Just take out the obvious—no pasta, bread, cakes, cookies, milk, yogurt, cheese, or ice cream—and see what happens. If your brain fogginess, cravings, fatigue, and bloating dissipate during this time, I highly recommend you stay gluten- and dairy-free for at least another eight months. This is typically enough time to down-regulate the body’s overactive immune response to these foods. After that, you can gradually reintroduce gluten and dairy as long as they are organic so that you are not consuming pesticides and growth hormones. All of the archetype meal plans are gluten- and dairy-free to help get you started.
Don’t Eat to Cheat
Although your archetype meal plans are meant to be followed for life, I do not want you to feel like you need to “cheat” in order to enjoy foods that fall outside of these recommendations. That’s why I strongly encourage you to enjoy one pleasure meal each week. This is not a “cheat” meal; it’s part of your archetype’s plan and is meant to be savored and enjoyed without guilt.
There are no rules about what to eat for your pleasure meals but Chapter 12, “Permission for Pleasure,” provides suggestions on how to structure them. I’ve had a number of clients who worry that opening the door to treats, however infrequently, will derail their diets, but I promise this is not the case. The archetype plan is designed to help you adopt bet
ter eating habits that you can sustain for the long term. At the same time, these meals will stop your body from calibrating to what you’re eating by adding variety into your diet, top up your glycogen (stored energy) levels, and help you avoid that much-feared weight-loss plateau.
The goal of these plans is to help you form a peaceful relationship with food, which means not being afraid of it. I don’t ever want you to feel guilty because you ate something you weren’t “supposed” to eat. If the idea of a treat meal has you panicking because you worry it will set off a binge, trust yourself more. Turn to the exercises in Part III on healing the mind to help you if you need support.
Get in the Kitchen
Thankfully, we’ve come a long way from the time when women were expected to make all of their family’s meals, but that doesn’t mean we should give up cooking altogether. You already know that homemade meals are better for you than frozen, processed meals or takeout, but there are other benefits to cooking as well. When you smell food cooking, your digestive juices start to secrete. This primes your body for enhanced digestion, including better nutrient absorption. If you get a bloated belly after eating, this is one way to decrease the likelihood of that happening. Slow down, savor the aromas, and relish the knowledge that when you eat a meal you’ve prepared from real ingredients, you’re taking in more minerals, vitamins, phytonutrients, and amino acids to support your biochemistry.
If gourmet cooking is not part of your skill set, don’t worry; none of the meals I suggest require more than a few minutes of prep and a handful of ingredients. Foods picked from the earth and grown without pesticides and chemicals require very little dressing up; a splash of olive oil, lemon juice, and sea salt is all that is often needed.
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The Food Fundamentals are principles to live by, not commandments etched in stone. If you’re not able to eat three vegetables at lunch one day, that’s okay. If you eat dinner later than usual one night and only end up fasting for eight hours before breakfast, don’t worry about it. Your diet will not be derailed, and stressing about it can easily lead to questioning your own self-worth, which is much more difficult to overcome. If the entire plan feels overwhelming, skip to Part III to try to identify and work through the beliefs and thought patterns that are holding you back. For instance, if you are fearful that you will never lose weight and are scared that you have damaged your metabolism from years of unsuccessful dieting, you may find yourself self-sabotaging to prove that you are “right.” Unless you reinterpret this false belief to fully accept that you are worthy of getting to your goal weight, it will be challenging to change your habits and behaviors in the long term. But once you’ve changed this belief, these principles will come so naturally to you that you will rarely eat any other way. You’ll have grace and ease around food that you thought eluded you.
CHAPTER 7
Eat Your Vegetables
Plants offer much more than just vitamins, minerals, and fiber. They also contain phytonutrients, plant chemicals that switch on genes that can decrease cellular inflammation and increase the body’s ability to clear toxins. Your body needs a variety of fruit and vegetables to function at its most optimal state. If you eat the same salad for lunch day in and day out or avoid certain vegetables and fruits because you’ve heard they are “inflammatory” or contain too much sugar, you haven’t been given the full truth.
First, let’s start by clarifying a few food misconceptions:
All fruit and vegetables are anti-inflammatory, unless you have developed a sensitivity or allergy to one or more of them.
All non-starchy vegetables are low in sugar. (I’ve excluded starchy vegetables like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and yams from this chapter and classified them as carbohydrates in Chapter 10.)
Fruit is not a colored lump of sugar. While fruit does have more sugar than vegetables, sugar is not the only factor to consider when determining if something is good for you or not. That’s like using the number on the scale to determine your self-worth.
Part of the reason we’ve become myopically focused on the sugar content of fruit and vegetables is due to the glycemic index (GI), which was developed in 1981 as a way to measure how quickly eating certain carbohydrates causes blood-sugar levels to spike. According to this metric, the lower the body’s glycemic response to a food, the healthier it is. The GI index quickly became a popular tool for determining which foods are “better” than others. But the GI discounts the contributions of plant-based phytonutrients, which weren’t discovered until the mid-1990s. (Even today only eight thousand phytonutrients have been identified, although scientists estimate there are more than twenty thousand of them in existence.) By the time we started learning about these nutrients, we’d grown accustomed to avoiding foods at the top of the glycemic scale, including carrots, beets, watermelon, and tropical fruits—all of which contain valuable nutrients.
It’s worth noting that even the fruits and vegetables that chart higher on the GI contain far less sugar than you may assume once you factor in portion sizes. For instance, 1 cup of pineapple contains only one more gram of sugar than 1 cup of berries. This is equivalent to ¼ teaspoon of sugar. If you’ve been loading up on berries and avoiding pineapple because pineapple is higher on the GI, you’ve not only missed out on the pleasure of savoring a juicy slice of pineapple on a sunny summer afternoon but also its unique phytonutrients and enzymes like bromelin, which slow the aging process.
One of the reasons a plant-centric diet supports weight loss is that the phytonutrients trigger the release of gut incretins—gut hormones that improve insulin signaling to decrease fat storage. These incretins also promote the secretion of leptin, a satiety hormone produced by your fat cells. At the same time, the fiber from these plants supports the proliferation of good bacteria such as Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria, which convert the fiber into short-chain fatty acids, further stimulating the release of gut satiety incretins. That means, if you want to not be hungry and not store excess body fat, eat your greens—and reds, oranges, yellows, and purples!
A plant’s color provides clues to its phytonutrient content and function. I’ll explain this in more detail as I go through this chapter, but, in general, the more intense the color, the greater the density of phytonutrients. Color also has certain energetic properties. If you remember your high school physics, you’ll recall that each color in the visible light spectrum, from violet to red, is associated with a different wave length and frequency. This frequency has a subtle impact on both the physical body (the body visible to others) and the energetic body (the body invisible to us, which corresponds to our chakras). When you eat fruits and vegetables, their phytonutrients affects your biochemistry and their color frequency affects your energetic body.
In Part I, I provided suggestions on how each of the archetypes could use certain colored plants to support their physical and emotional needs. While you should favor the color that supports your archetype, it’s not the only color to eat! And if you feel like one of your chakras (even if it’s not the one associated with your archetype) is out of balance, you can eat plants in that color spectrum to help realign yourself. In short: eat as many different types of fruits and vegetables as possible. The more attuned you are to your physical and energetic body, the more you’ll notice the subtle changes this dietary guideline brings.
In the Food Fundamentals, I recommended that you eat three different non-starchy vegetables at both lunch and dinner and that these vegetables should make up half of your plate—about 2 to 4 cups. As fruit does contain more sugar than vegetables, limit your consumption to two 1-cup servings per day, as either a snack or part of a meal.
Red Plants
THE PLANTS Heirloom tomatoes, red bell peppers, watermelon, guava, raspberries, cherries, red apples, strawberries, and pomegranates.
THE PHYSICAL The two best-researched phytonutrients in red plants are lycopene and ellagic
acid, both of which help protect the skin from sun damage and bones from oxidative stress. In one study, women who consumed 1 tablespoon of tomato paste each day for twelve weeks before being exposed to UV light had lower levels of sun damage compared to those women who didn’t eat the tomato paste.1 In another study, when lycopene was removed from postmenopausal women’s diets for four weeks, researchers noticed such a significant change in bone density markers that they concluded that eating a diet without lycopene-rich foods puts women at increased risk of osteoporosis.2
THE ENERGETIC Red plants support the root chakra, which represents stability and protection. When the root chakra is out of balance, you can feel isolated and uncertain of your place in the world—like there isn’t enough food or money to go around. Nurturers are the most vulnerable to this.
EAT THEM FOR . . . Protection against sunburn; reducing wrinkles and hyperpigmentation; stronger bones; and a deeper connection to your physical environment, peers, and friends.
MENU SUGGESTIONS Strawberry smoothie; tomato and watermelon gazpacho; grilled fish with roasted red peppers; pomegranate in a kale salad; guava as a snack.
PRACTICAL TIP Eat tomato salads before and during a beach vacation and drink watermelon juice while you are poolside to increase the skin’s protection against UV light and other free radicals that can cause aging.
Orange Plants
THE PLANTS Carrots, orange bell peppers, apricots, mangoes, nectarines, oranges, clementines, papayas, peaches, gooseberries, cantaloupe, and persimmons.