Healthy Planet Diet

Here Is My Sample Menu Plan for Proven Weight Loss

I sense that people just want to know what they can eat that will let them lose weight. It is easier for me to tell you what you shouldn't eat.

Ideally--and it may take you a while to re-train your tastes to eat this way on a regular basis--the healthy planet diet is a strict vegetarian diet: No meat, no poultry, no fish, no eggs, and definitely no milk products. If you can't give up all these foods at once, simply reducing the quantity of these items in your diet would be a good start. Eliminating red meat and milk products would be another major first step to show you how much better you can feel on this diet.

The other things you should avoid, according to Dr. McDougall and others, are refined sugar, flour, and oils--and this includes oily seeds, nuts, and vegetables.

Sugars of all kinds cause a spike in your body's insulin production. Too much sugar is a bad thing, although some people seem to be able to get away with it better than others. Over a period of years, your body can lose its ability to handle the excessive quantities of refined sugar that is in soft rinks, most baked goods, even canned soups and frozen dinners, and especially desserts. This leads to weight gain and, worse than that, diabetes. Then, you've got major problems. Better to avoid refined sugars and even the unrefined syrups made from agave, cane, rice, and honey that you may find in many items in natural food stores. It's all sugar and, except for the rare treat, you don't want it in your body.

I, personally, am more flexible with my oil consumption, with the exception of the totally-unnatural Trans-fats. That stuff is probably worse for you than butter. And I love nuts and nut butters, so--at this point in my dietary evolution--I enjoy them and feel no damage from them. Avocadoes, too, though I eat these rarely because they don't grow in my climate zone.

One of the best ways to avoid oils in your diet is to stop frying foods. It's better for weightloss purposes to steam vegetables or to make a slow-cooked soup out of them.

Spices, such as garlic, onions, and hot peppers make for more interesting flavors. Hot peppers have thermogenic properties, meaning they stimulate the burning of fat to release heat. Curry is a very healthful spice, as is oregano. Experiment in the kitchen to create dishes you enjoy.

Eating fresh salads of greens and cut up vegetables is a good practice to get the live enzymes you need to properly digest your food. Remember to use a simple dressing that contains no oil, sugar, or MSG. This may seem too plain at first, but you will come to appreciate the natural flavors over time.

Remember: On the Healthy Planet Diet, you can eat as much as you want using the approved ingredients! Eat slowly, chew thoroughly, and stop when you are full.

Sugars, especially simple or refined sugars are what cancer has been found to feed on. That's another good reason to eliminate it from your diet.

Simply put, if you quit eating animals and their milk and manmade foods that contain refined sugar and white flour, you should find it very easy to lose weight--even without much exercise. That is the heart of the Healthy Planet Diet, which will benefit your health, leave more food for others, and save you money.

More than looking better and thinner, you will feel better when you don't eat rich, hard-to-digest animal foods. Symptoms and vague discomforts will disappear as you stop making a regular practice of eating meat, poultry, dairy foods, and the refined sugars and flours.

Beyond avoiding these foods, I leave it up to you to use your imagination to create delicious dishes. There are many good recipes in Dr. McDougall's Cookbook, and others along the same guidelines in Dr. Esselstyn's "How To Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease".*************************************************************** Our planet's natural ecology is being severely strained by the Western habit of building our diet around animal products, rather than vegetables, grains, legumes, fruit, and nuts. By correcting your own health and weight by a change to the Healthy Planet Diet, you will contribute to making our earth a healthier, more beautiful, and sustainable life support system for us all.

Raising meat and milk cows and chickens is--from an ecological perspective--a terrible waste of healthy vegetable protein. It is also a terrible way to treat our animal friends. As I have discussed elsewhere, humans aren't set up physically to eat meat on a regular basis. Fish we can digest more easily, but there are other health concerns from eating too much fish.

I don't know who you are or where you live, you who are reading this. If you live in Singapore, the Philipines, or Pakistan, you may not see the harm in eating animals, or drinking sugary soft drinks or sweetened coffee. These things may seem to be harmless pleasures from your perspective. If you could see the end result of what excessive consumption of those small pleasures all the time has done to the people of my country, the United States, you might feel differently about it.

Two-thirds of the people in the United States are overweight or grossly obese. To support this level of over-consumption, our government-subsidized, chemicalized farming methods produce so much toxic run-off that our largest river system, the Mississippi, has poisoned a sixteen thousand square kilometer area(about 9600 sq. miles) where it flows into the Gulf of Mexico!

The Gulf of Mexico used to be a very productive, living body of water. Now it doesn't support much fish or other sea life at all. This is caused in large part by our force-fed, petroleum-dependent agriculture, where 56% of our vegetable protein(grains, mostly corn, and soybeans) are fed to fatten animals.

A major movement to the Healthy Planet Diet would help to remedy this sort of environmental damage.

This nation of fat people, sickly people, that is content to kill off the nearby oceans and spend about $1.5 trillion to keep its population alive medically--This is the end result of the Un-healthy Planet Diet. This is where we all are headed if we embrace American fast food restaurants, soft drinks, and packaged foods.

The Healthy Planet Diet should be understood as a worldwide step toward rejecting the proliferation of American-style fast food, soft drinks, and junk foods.

Oh, and by the way, the trend of the USA and other nations to total dependence on farming methods based on petroleum by-products also drives these countries to try to control the oil-rich regions of the planet so we can maintain our unhealthy habits. Our bad habits of diet drive our war efforts in the Middle East, Central and Southern Asia, and Africa. Because we must eat--and some of us think we must eat more richly than others--our insanity leads us to kill others for their oil and natural gas, though we will never admit that.

The Healthy Planet Diet, if adopted by most of the world population(and many are already forced by poverty to eat this way) also will help to make war and conflicts over land and resources unnecessary.

The effects of factory-farm agriculture are not only restricted to the USA. In France, there was a report recently of the toxic manure and fertilizer run-off from a large pig farm that killed a horse that fell into a hole filled with decaying algae. This occurred on the beaches of Normandy. It is not an isolated incident. Rivers that receive the nitrogen-enriched runoff from commercial farming have been running a slimy green for decades. Now scientists find the frogs and fish in them are mutating and scarred with cancers.

Our present system of modern agriculture is destroying the fertility of the soil, wasting water to produce meat, and ruining the health of those who eat foods raised on depleted soils and drenched with chemicals. I invite you to join me in enjoying the benefits that come with the Healthy Planet Diet. Support your local organic farmer, whenever possible--or grow your own! Growing 85% of your food needs is equivalent to a tax-free increase of your income of $8,185 for a family of three, according to Brett Markham, author of "Mini-Farming for Self Sufficiency."

We can do our part in preventing this trend toward an unhealthy, unlivable planet by choosing to live more closely by the Healthy Planet Diet. This is the way of eating that solves so many problems, for us and for our animal friends and for the earth we depend on.

Here are more reasons to adopt a Healthy Planet Diet