The Doctor's Diet: Dr. Travis Stork's STAT Program to Help You Lose Weight & Restore Your Health (30 page)
Authors: Travis Stork
Sardines
Mackerel
Shellfish
Walnuts
Flaxseed
Canola oil
Soybean oil
Olive oil
THE AMAZING AVOCADO
Once thought of as little more than the main ingredient in guacamole, the avocado is actually so full of nutrients that it’s sometimes referred to as the world’s healthiest food. Not many days go by where I don’t include avocados in my diet. There’s a lot to love about avocados, which are the fruit of an evergreen grown in California, Latin America, and other warm climates.
Avocados are a great source of monounsaturated fat, which is a truly “good” fat, especially if you eat it in place of less-healthy fats.
They also contain about 20 essential nutrients, including fiber, vitamin K, folate, potassium, vitamin E, magnesium, vitamin C, vitamin B6, and significant amounts of antioxidants such as lutein, which helps lower risk of macular degeneration, an eye disease that can cause blindness.
Not only do they bring their own nutritional advantages to your table, but they magnify the good stuff in other foods as well. Avocados work as “nutrient boosters” that actually increase your body’s ability to absorb the health-building compounds in foods paired with them, such as the antioxidants in spinach, carrots, tomatoes, and other vegetables. That’s why it makes so much sense to add them to salads, dips, and other veggie-dense foods. Plus they taste great.
I love smartly made guacamole—I use it as a dip for vegetables and a spread for burritos and sandwiches. It’s easy to whip up your own: simply peel and mash two or three avocados into a bowl and mix in some chopped red onion, minced garlic, chopped tomato, some cilantro, and the juice of a lime. If you like a spicy kick, mix in some cumin, chili powder, diced jalapeño peppers, or a splash of hot sauce.
But don’t stop at guacamole—there are countless other ways to include avocado in your diet. Blend it into smoothies, toss it into salads, add it to tuna instead of mayonnaise, serve it sliced alongside baked poultry, dice it up and mix it into omelets or vegetable dishes, combine it with berries in a salad, puree it with olive oil and garlic for a tasty spread to use in place of butter—the possibilities really are endless.
Change can be hard, especially when you’ve bought into a certain belief for a long time. But change is also part of life, and the better we can be at adapting to new lessons in life, the better.
That’s how it is with fat. For a long time, the idea that all fat is bad was hammered into our heads. And it’s true: some kinds of fat still belong in the “eat only rarely” column. But now we know that some kinds of dietary fat are actually good for us, and we need to be incorporating them in our daily eating plans.
Here’s one of the things I love most about healthy fats: you can use them to make other foods taste better. That really comes in handy with veggies, which are the focus of our next Food Prescription.
FILL YOUR PLATE WITH VEGETABLES
Vegetables play a major role in The Doctor’s Diet. They’re included at lunch, dinner, and in snacks. You can even eat them at breakfast, blending them into smoothies or tucking them into scrambled eggs. On the STAT Plan, we focus on lower-calorie vegetables—remember, when you first get started, we want to kick-start weight loss STAT. During the RESTORE Plan, you have even more vegetable choices.
The most important reason to include veggies in your diet is your health. Vegetables are full of all kinds of nutrients that do all kinds of wonderful things for your body, from protecting your eyes, blood vessels, and heart to boosting your immune system, keeping cells healthy, and even helping your body fight off cancer.
But there’s more—and this is a major deal for us because we’re focusing not just on good health but on losing weight: vegetables are turning out to play a crucial part in weight loss. Studies show that people who eat more vegetables are way more likely to lose weight and maintain a healthy weight than those who eat fewer vegetables.
One of the main reasons for the veggie–weight loss connection is that vegetables are filling because they’re packed with fiber. When you eat high-fiber foods, they take up more room and spend more time in your digestive system than low-fiber foods. All that bulk in your intestines activates hormones that tell your brain to put down your fork and stop eating—or to wait longer before you pick it up.
What’s more, there’s a lot of water in vegetables—snap a piece of celery in half and you’ll likely get sprayed in the face with more than a few drops. The water in vegetables also helps with weight loss because, like fiber, it contributes bulk to your digestive system, filling your belly and adding to that full feeling you get when you’ve had enough to eat.
It all comes down to this: foods such as non-starchy vegetables and lower-calorie fruits (like the ones recommended during the STAT Plan) simply do a better job than most other foods at filling you up.
Here’s what’s going on. Vegetables are considered to have low energy density—that is, you can eat a lot of them for a small number of calories. (In comparison, high energy–density foods such as brownies or cheese have a large number of calories relative to their weight or volume.) With low energy–density foods, you can simply eat more food than you can when you eat high energy–density foods.
Here’s an example. Say you’re going to have a snack that weighs in at 200 calories. For that number of calories, you can have a couple one-ounce squares of cheddar cheese, which is a high energy–density food. As anyone who’s ever been to a cocktail party knows, two pieces of cheese go down quick. But if you choose 200 calories worth of salad, you can eat way more food. For the same number of calories, you can pile a bowl full of all kinds of greens and veggies—and you can even drizzle it with a bit of dressing made of olive oil and balsamic vinegar
and
add some cheese crumbles as well.
A few chunks of cheese or a big salad with some cheese crumbles—which do you think will fill you up more? No question, the salad, which is packed with fiber and water and is laced with hunger-busting (and heart-healthy) monounsaturated fat as well.
When you look at all the evidence, it makes a huge amount of sense: including vegetables at most (or all) of your meals is one of the best ways we know of to satisfy your appetite and help you lose weight. And, as a bonus, you get giant servings of nutrients, too!