Eat To Live Plan

By Ahsan

“Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food.” Hippocrates

There is so much confusion about nutrition and healthy eating. Everyone seems to have some advice, and many ways of eating or not eating (Fasting) don’t work. So much misinformation and outright falsehoods to sift through before a person can find the few morsels of honest truth worth considering.

I admit there are many ways to eat healthy and take care of your body and metabolic function.  The following approach has worked for me, and I want to share it with you so you can take whatever is beneficial for you on your health journey.

Ahsan’s ETL (Eat to Live) Plan:

Eat: 3 meals a day for your first one or two weeks, no snacks in between, no processed foods.

Breakfast: always low-carb

Lunch: always low-carb

Dinner: always low-carb, with a small serving of rice, bread, potato, or pasta, one cup for men and half to ¾ cup for women.

What is low carb?

Meat, eggs, and veggies. Very simple. So, if you are at a buffet, on a cruise, or at your friend’s house, just eat low-carb.

Sample Breakfast looks like: Omelet with veggies sautéed in butter, and even add some cheese. Drink a cup of black coffee or tea with some cream or milk, or just black. And obviously, no sugar.

Sample Lunch looks like: a crunchy salad with roasted chicken, beef, or tuna, with no store-bought salad dressing containing low-quality oil and sugar. Make your own olive oil- and vinegar-based salad dressing with herbs and spices to add flavour.

Sample Dinner: Any meat, any veggies, and half a cup of rice, a small piece of bread, a small potato, or half a cup of pasta. To fill up, add more veggies or an extra piece of meat.

Eat all meals to satiety, not to a stuffed feeling, and don’t under-eat to watch calories; you don’t want to rely on willpower. You want to feed and fuel yourself.

What about fruit? Only one a day. Strawberries, blueberries, and other berries are low-sugar fruits and ideal; mango and banana are high-sugar and not ideal for a low-carb goal.

What about nuts? Only a small handful a day.

Eat fermented foods at dinner: Yogurt is good, as are kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles, Gouda cheese, blue cheese, and kefir. Look up fermented foods. You only need a small amount of fermented food with your meal; you are eating to add microbes to your gut, not to fill yourself up.

Treat Day?

Sure, but only like this: treat yourself to one day when you MIGHT have an indulgence: pizza, French fries, or quadruple-chocolate volcano cake. On that day, eat as above, and before having the treat, eat a proper meal as above, so you can enjoy a small slice of pizza, share the fries with someone, or have a few bites of cake. Save treat day for occasions like a family outing or party. At some point, you might also exercise your determination muscle by skipping this treat every so often.

Fasting: Everyone fasts. They may not realize it, but they do. Your meal at breakfast and the last bite before you sleep are a fast. So, a midnight snack and breakfast at 6:30 am is a six-and-a-half-hour fast.

That is fast but not long enough to be helpful.

Intermittent Fasting: After your dinner, you lock the fridge and pantry. Not even one grape or one nut, and certainly no grape nut cereal (ha-ha)

If you stop eating at 8 pm and have your first meal at 12 noon, you just completed a 16-hour fast. If you wake up at 6 am, drink water and black coffee, black tea, green tea, or herbal tea without sugar or sugar substitutes like Splenda, etc. Then just eat a low-carb meal.

Rules:

1. For the first week or many weeks, eat 3 meals a day, but do not snack in between. No food. Drink water or black coffee/tea.

2. Enjoy your weekly treat to give you mental comfort.

3. Track your fasting hours; the first week can easily be 8-12 hours.

4. In your second week, etc, keep eating 3 meals and try to stretch your hours of fasting to 10-14 hours.

5. In your subsequent weeks, keep fasting and try to get to 14-16 hours. By this time, you will likely only eat twice a day: one delish low-carb brunch/lunch and one dinner with a bit of starchy carb (bread/pasta/rice/potato)

6. If you are ever wondering what to eat, keep it simple: meat and veggies (veggies have carbs, so if you don’t eat bread, you won’t deprive yourself of carbs).

7. When to quit this approach? When a person feels like the benefits are not worth it. Extra energy, stable mood, good sleep, and a focused mind might not be that important to a large swath of the population.

8. You are not establishing a lifestyle. You are simply changing to a new “way of eating.”

9. Establish a strong vision in your mind of what your life will look like by making this your new way of eating.

10. Reinforce your strong vision with a very big WHY you are doing this and ask this additional question of yourself: What will it cost me if I don’t take care of my health now?

There you have it. My personal nutritional practices and thoughts on this complex and often confusing issue everyone faces. I hope some of my rules and ideas above inspire you to make positive changes to how you eat and what you consume on a daily basis.

Have An Awesome Day Every Day!

*Disclaimer: You are advised to speak with your doctor to ensure that eating whole, nutritionally dense, satisfying foods and fasting from dinner to breakfast are safe and effective for your personal health. Do not follow this plan without performing your basic due diligence with a qualified Health Professional, such as a doctor or Nutritionist. Get the appropriate blood and other diagnostic tests done to make sure you know about any deficiencies or concerns. Past success with other diets may have eluded you, and future results using this protocol may not be guaranteed or appropriate for everyone. You will need to follow your personal intuition with determined resolve.

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