Eat To Live

I, like many other Americans, am overweight. Based on the Body Mass Index scale, for a guy who's 6'1", I should weigh about 175 - 180 lbs. I'm at 225 lbs. I was ten pounds heavier but I've been trying some new things. Like not eating pizza every night (although I still think it is the perfect food). And I picked up a book.

The book, Eat to Live: The Revolutionary Formula for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss by Joel Fuhrman, M.D. has been enjoyable to me for serveral reasons. The first is related to me being a vegetarian. Many of the wieght-loss plans and "ways of eating" assume that one eats meat and plenty of it. Dr. Fuhrman's plan is essentially a vegetarian food plan. Eat as many raw vegetables as you want and stay away from animal products.

This actually leads me to another cool point - you don't have to starve yourself. Believe me, you can get full on celery, broccoli and carrots. What about protein, you ask? Believe it or not, according to Fuhrman, most raw, unprocessed vegetables trump meat for protein-per-calories percentage. For example, one cup of frozen broccoli has more proteins-per-calorie than one Burger King cheeseburger:

1 Cup frozen broccoli - 5.8 g protein - 52 cal - 45% protein

1 BK cheeseburger - 18.0 g protein - 350 cal - 21% protein

Dr. Fuhrman endorses a more efficient way of providing nutrition to the body. It's a 6 week plan; I kinda think the book is really a lot of pages for such an easy method. Certainly, if you have pre-existing medical conditions, this may not be for you. But I'm finding it very easy to pretty much stick to the plan. The book has a lot of explanations in the first five chapters about nutrition and what is and isn't the realities of protein, calories and carbs. The back end of the book contains recipes and an extensive f.a.q.

Let me know if you've read this book or another like this one that focuses on vegetables and beans.