by Scott Davis
Before QWLCA, I considered eating healthy time-consuming and costly. After all, marketers brainwash us into buying into the convenience and economy of “fast” food. Those are more of the devil’s lies.
As you can tell by the descriptions of what I ate, I needed a second mortgage to maintain my old habits. Eating healthy is much cheaper if for no other reason than half the cows in New England are safe now.
Second, making a trip to a restaurant will never be faster than staying at home to grill and prepare fresh vegetables.
I’ll challenge you to a contest. I’ll cook one of the meals from my QWLCA book, even weighing my meat portions, measuring out everything, and firing up the grill, while you leave my living room to fetch a Big Mac. By the time you walk back in the door and kick off your shoes, I’ll be watching TV and won’t even be belching anymore. You would go to a lot more trouble, eat a much less healthy meal, and waste a few bucks of gasoline.
I always assumed cooking at home took longer because of the work required. If we’re honest with ourselves, the reason most of us got big in the first place is because we prefer the easy road. For me, it wasn’t that it took too long to prepare the food. It’s just that I didn’t want to prepare the food. I wanted someone else to do it for me.
God has set in place several universal, immutable rules. If I throw a ball off of a cliff, it’s going down, not up. If I try to breathe underwater, I’ll drown. If I tell my wife how to drive, at some point I’ll get slapped. These truths are crystal clear to me. I had to learn the hard way that no shortcuts exist when it comes to health.
I swallowed everything in sight, including the hook, line, and sinker of the myth that cooking healthy food is too hard, too tedious, too time-consuming. I crave immediacy, one reason I love to make people laugh. It’s instant feedback. However, I learned it’s not hard to chop up and steam a few vegetables, weigh and grill a slice of meat, and throw together a salad. My eating plan allowed one cup of squash during a meal. That’s one squash. How long does it take to chop one squash?
Grilling is a breeze and doesn’t require much cleanup, and Donna and I turned it into great bonding time. We were able to talk, watch TV together, or even entertain while we prepared and cooked our food.
This is how easy we made it: We love big salads, so we bought packaged, pre-washed mixed greens or spinach, threw in several nuggets of chicken from a refrigerated supply grilled en masse a few days earlier, dumped it all into a bowl, poured some dressing on top, and went to town. Without going to town.
How long does that take? Two minutes? In the old days, I hadn’t even squeezed under the driver’s wheel to go to Wendy’s within two minutes.
When we eat healthy, time is our friend in more ways than one. It takes almost as long to microwave a frozen fast-food meal as it does to prepare healthy food. The good news is that while our nation has grown fatter because we supersized everything for years, the tide is turning. More companies, stores, and people are placing an emphasis on healthy alternatives. Supermarkets now carry entire sections of organic and whole foods. I couldn’t say that only a decade ago.
Our Daily Bread
A typical day on the QWLCA plan requires three meals and two snacks. Notice I said the meals are required. The clinic insists on a routine to maintain the metabolism needed for weight loss. I couldn’t skip meals, but I didn’t mind. It meant I got to eat five times a day, which I needed because the plan’s portions are much smaller than those to which I grew accustomed.
Out of respect to the proprietary aspects of the QWLCA approach, I will share one of my typical days to give you an idea of what is required and allowed. However, the only way you will lose weight like I did is if you follow QWLCA’s two-pronged approach. The eating plan is important, but so are the visits to the clinic. Going solo won’t work. Even if I copied the QWLCA plan verbatim in this book, you still would need to make the visits or phone calls and do everything the QWLCA way to forge lasting life change.
For breakfast at 8 a.m., I eat a piece of 40-calorie wheat toast with a fried or scrambled egg. I put the egg on the toast for a half-sandwich. I’m allowed one tablespoon of lite butter daily, and I use half of it on the toast before adding the egg.
I finish breakfast with one of my four servings of fruit. My favorites are grapes, apples, apricots, blueberries, cantaloupe, cherries, grapefruit, lemons, and oranges. For breakfast, I usually eat an apple.
That’s not bad for breakfast. For a lot of people, it’s a big meal.
At 10 o’clock, I enjoy my first snack. This is where I’m creative. At first, QWLCA allowed me eight ounces of skim milk each day. After the weight loss, I can have ten ounces. For my mid-morning snack, I use the milk with another of my allowed fruits, strawberries, and a protein powder I purchase from QWLCA. I throw that stuff in the blender with some ice and whirr it around for several seconds. It makes a huge smoothie that holds me until lunch. Talk about yummy. I have to fight the urge to make more than one a day.
Poultry and fish are staples of the diet. Because the plan allows little salt, Mrs. Dash is my friend. Mrs. Dash is a line of salt-free seasonings that transforms a bland, flavorless piece of meat into a delight. I love spicy foods, the hotter the better. When I grill chicken, I alternate among different kinds of Mrs. Dash for variety. I love the Chipotle and Southwestern flavors.
It helps to eat foods with hot seasonings like cayenne peppers, raising metabolism to speed weight loss.
At lunch, I enjoy either an eight-ounce grilled chicken breast or seven-ounce turkey breast. I grill the chicken breast with a lot of Mrs. Dash and pepper. Mrs. Dash makes a marinade, and Donna coats the chicken with Mrs. Dash and sears it on medium-high. She adds no-salt chicken bullion cubes, turns down the burner to a low heat and mixes the bullion with water so the chicken sits halfway in the seasoned water. It simmers for an hour to ninety minutes. All the spices from the bullion cubes and Mrs. Dash combine to create a masterpiece of health. It is tender and can be chopped for salads or eaten in one serving as the daily eight-ounce chicken allowance.
The latter combined with two vegetables makes a fine meal. I can pick from asparagus, bean sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, cucumbers, egg plant, lettuce, mushrooms, mustard greens, okra, spinach, squash, tomatoes, and zucchini, among others. I also can eat kale, but I don’t eat things that remind me of the weeds I spray in my lawn.
A neat bonus to the QWLCA plan is the cooking demonstrations during office visits. They often have a table featuring items they bought at a local supermarket. I learned about bullion cubes, dressings, and different kinds of butters—all of these wonderful goodies—just by watching the demos.
I keep my mid-afternoon snack quick and simple. My custom is to eat one protein bar. It has 15 grams of protein and somewhere between 170 to 190 calories, depending upon the brand. I buy boxes of protein bars from Wal-Mart or Kroger Supermarket because their brands are cheaper than the ones available at the QWLCA office yet have similar ingredients.
I eat dinner anywhere from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., sometimes even later if I’m on the road. Standard fare is chicken or fish. Twice a week, I can eat a 5-1/2-ounce serving of one of the eleven choices of beef, but I can never eat beef two days in a row. It’s that chemical thing again. I’m allowed two more vegetables for dinner, bringing the daily total to four servings.
The plan features great fish choices. I like to sprinkle Mrs. Dash on grouper or tilapia and place it on a ceramic plate at 350 degrees for twenty-five minutes until it reaches a beautiful golden brown. I steam veggies in the microwave, save my allowance of bread to make toast, and assemble a meal that should satisfy anyone.
The QWLCA people are ticky about mixing servings. For instance, I’m supposed to eat two vegetables at lunch and two at dinner. I cannot eat one vegetable at lunch and save three for dinner or skip vegetables at lunch so I can have an all-veggie dinner.
My two servings of vegetables often comprise a salad of lettuce and cucumbers. Sometimes I throw in the chicken Donna cooked
in the bullion broth, and I prefer to use the QWLCA salad dressings because they are pre-measured for one salad. I don’t have to think about it. I rip open the pouch, pour it on the salad, and dig in without worrying if I used the right amount.
Finally, I eat two servings of various starches each day. The selections include 40-calorie diet bread, melba toast, a bread stick, rice cakes, and Akmak crackers. That name scared me until I Googled it and discovered it’s a healthy flatbread from a reputable bakery that’s been around for more than a century.
Three times a week, I can have either one-half of a small baked potato or a helping of brown rice.
One of my weak spots is beverages—on this or any plan.
The QWLCA plan calls for mostly water, so it’s wise to drink ice water with meals. I also can enjoy a daily total of two cups of either tea or coffee each day.
Honestly, I lost three to five pounds a week with no problem, just as QWLCA promised, but I didn’t always follow the tea and coffee limitations. Sometimes I didn’t drink just four or five cups of coffee a day. I drank four or five pots. Donna served as a nurse on the graveyard shift for years and grew accustomed to coffee. We have the large Bunn coffee maker that makes a pot in three minutes because we’re coffeeholics.
It speaks volumes of the QWLCA plan that I ignored the rules and sucked down java like the caffeinated maniac I am and still shed the pounds. Maybe I tee-teed the pounds away. Maybe I jittered them off, I don’t know. I guess coffee for me is like cigarettes for a recovering drug addict. I’ve got to have something in my hand, in my mouth, something to feed a compulsion—hopefully, maybe, one step at a time—until all the compulsions are gone.
I’m sure the plan still worked despite all the coffee because I diluted it. I had to drink eight to ten eight-ounce servings of water every day. Eighty ounces of water proved my biggest challenge. That’s a lot of water. That’s a lot of trips to the bathroom. I didn’t know I could lose weight through my kidneys, but I did.
The water performed wonders for the weight loss and flushed out toxins while I burned off the fat.
A friendly suggestion: Don’t drink all that water before a long flight. I learned that lesson the hard way. At least I had my customary aisle seat.
Here’s a limitation I found interesting: QWLCA will allow you to drink diet colas but they must be clear sodas—like diet Sprite and diet 7-Up—because a certain chemical in colored colas makes you hungry. The daily plan permits two twelve-ounce cans of clear diet colas in addition to all other beverages.
I can drink all the herb tea I want, and I buy the brand offered by QWLCA. I call it poop tea. It’s a natural laxative. If I feel a little backed up, I drink that stuff and the next morning the day begins great and flows naturally from there.
I’m confident you can find something you like on the QWLCA list of foods. If you’re creative, the plan booklet contains recipes and you can mix foods and supplements and develop wonderful meals.
Consider these hints as “cheats,” like the cheats in a video game. If I get really hungry before bedtime, I treat myself to a ten-calorie diet jello cup. Sometimes I add an extra vegetable of two cups of raw cauliflower right out of the bag as a snack. It gives me something to gnaw on and tames the beast.
Because the plan avails multiple choices from all food groups, I don’t have to eat the same thing every day—here a cabbage, there a cabbage, everywhere a cabbage cabbage—and it helps break the monotony inherent in many diets.
I said I didn’t have to eat the same thing every day. But here’s the kicker: A lot of times I do.
I like routine. I found what I liked on the plan and for a lot of meals I stuck with it during the huge weight loss. Call it superstition. Or maybe my old one-track, addictive mind took over on some days. But when I saw the pounds evaporate like never before I thought to myself, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
No, spaghetti isn’t allowed. So don’t ask, even if the question comes with a but.
Small Bites
America’s eating habits often are a double whammy. Not only do we eat unhealthy foods but we eat them in unhealthy portions. Sometimes I think the latter is most damaging. It’s one thing to eat a slice of pizza every now and then. It’s another to realize what you’ve done as you pick the last remnants of melted cheese from the bottom of an empty delivery box. Sometimes I didn’t bother to remove the trace of cardboard paper stuck to the cheese.
The QWLCA plan limits portion sizes, an essential restriction for overeaters like me. When it comes to weight loss, the words quick and second helpings don’t go together.
My plan’s booklet lists specific portion sizes for every food. I can eat eight-ounce servings of chicken or seven-ounce turkey breasts. Most beef is apportioned at 5-1/2 ounces, most fish at either seven or eight ounces. I’m careful to purchase the correct amounts or weigh them pre-cooked. The majority of vegetables are one-cup servings, and I can have small to medium amounts of fruits.
If those amounts seem small it’s because they are. I discovered I couldn’t lose weight on the enough-to-feed-a-horse menu.
The QWLCA portions are closer to proper nutritional amounts than the servings I heaped upon my plate most of my life. The QWLCA plan retrained me to eat the way I’m supposed to eat.
While the QWLCA clinic publishes a general plan for everybody, it also adds customized steps for each client. Donna needed to lose less weight than I did, so she had fewer restrictions. At the bottom of the cover of my booklet, a staffer handwrote the following specialized instructions for me:
64 to 80 ounces of water per day
One-quarter to one-half teaspoon of Morton’s Lite Salt
One tablespoon of Land O’ Lakes Lite Butter
Two nutritional supplements
Eight ounces skim milk
While QWLCA makes available a line of helpful products, including not only vitamins and supplements but also salad dressings and protein powders and bars, they don’t hawk them to you as soon as you walk in the door. Their supplements and vitamins are beneficial, but you don’t have to purchase them. I didn’t always use their brand.
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh used a supplement while on a Quick Weight Loss Diet in Florida. He lost 90 pounds and gave an unsolicited endorsement of the plan during his show. The various Quick Weight Loss Centers around the country didn’t expect it, and their phones lines jammed over the next several hours. At least one Quick Weight Loss Center website saw so much traffic that two servers shut down.
I remember walking into the QWLCA clinic that day. The ladies scurried to pack vitamins and supplements and protein bars into shipping boxes. They told me it was because of Limbaugh’s announcement. I didn’t hear his endorsement, but I wonder if he talked about the easiest and hardest parts of the plan.
The easiest part is the exercise. The QWLCA people insisted I do none.
Sold now?
I don’t know all the scientific nuts and bolts of QWLCA plan, but they explained that all of these foods and portions work together to maximize metabolism. When I talked with Ron Presley, president of QWLCA, he discouraged exercise while on the plan, especially when you’re larger. It apparently interferes with the process and can inhibit weight loss.
I know it sounds hard to believe. If you disagree, don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just relaying the info and standing before the world 132 pounds lighter without working out.
First of all, I couldn’t exercise. I couldn’t bend over, much less run or climb on a Stairmaster. I could hardly put on shoes. I first had to lose a certain amount of weight just to be able to function.
I remember hearing of one lady at the clinic. She became upset when she had lost only half of her goal of forty pounds. They checked into her routine and discovered her rigorous exercise regimen. They told her to stop working out so she could reach her goal.
However, once you lose the weight, it’s wise to begin exercising to maintain your weight and become physically fit.
&
nbsp; After I lost the mass, my wife reminded me that loose skin looks no better than fat rolls when you’re naked.
“So now let’s get it toned up,” she said.
But during the diet, the no-exercise rule is the easy part. Now for the hard part. One little handwritten line prompted a huge challenge: One-quarter to one-half teaspoon of Morton’s Lite Salt.
Per day.
Ouch.
I slowly got used to it because I had to. It’s the only way to lose substantial weight as quickly as I did. But I didn’t like getting used to it. I had no idea I also suffered from salt addiction until this diet. It’s amazing how much sodium we consume daily, and I learned how dependent on salt I had become. One-half of a teaspoon of salt is a tiny fraction of my previous daily intake, and the fact that it’s Lite Salt added another degree of difficulty.
Such a limitation requires bearing down with unusual discipline. I weathered the storm and no longer enjoy foods seasoned with salt in amounts most people would consider normal.
You will notice my instructions stipulated one-quarter to one-half teaspoon of Lite Salt. That meant I had to have at least one-quarter teaspoon every day. They want you to have some salt (the chemicals!) but not too much because sodium causes water retention.
A requirement of any healthy eating plan is to stay away from processed foods. Most include salt as a preservative. In my fat days, I bought packaged sliced turkey and tore into it because I considered it healthy. I didn’t realize I might as well have gnawed a salt lick like a cow. The sodium is excessive in most deli meats, canned sauces, canned soups, and even cereals. When Donna and I launched into the QWLCA program, we gave away every canned or packaged food in our home. That’s another reason I love this approach—you don’t eat out of a box. You get in a shopping routine and eat fresh foods.
Someone once gave me this tip: When you go to the supermarket, shop on the perimeter of the store. Most of the foods in the middle aisles are packaged. Everything near the walls is fresh produce, fresh meat, fresh fish, or fresh dairy. I guess it’s cheaper to run electrical wiring there for the coolers.