The Plan on Vacation

The ultimate test of a true healthy-eating lifestyle is the ability to take it on the road.  The Plan author Lyn-Genet Recitas acknowledges that “Most everyone can lose weight if they stay home and cook every meal in their kitchen, strictly adhering to their friendly foods.”  But what fun is that?

Ms. Recitas recommends the following guidelines for traveling on The Plan:

• Stay hydrated
•  Eat as many friendly foods as possible
• Stick to half portions of foods you haven’t tested or that you know are reactive
• Moderate excess sodium by including foods high in potassium.  Can you say “salt-free potato chips and guacamole?”
• Drink your red wine – it helps flush out sodium and aids digestion
• Relax and enjoy

We recently returned from a six-day road trip to Arizona for Spring Training.  We had the luxury of staying with relatives, which meant a) a refrigerator for our non-dairy milk and a cupboard for our healthy cereals, and b) a say in the food that we prepared while we were there.  In fact, when we discussed The Plan with my uncle, he thought some of the recipes might help him deal with pre-diabetes.  They were already reducing the sodium in their diets.  We substituted salads for the mashed potatoes and gravy when we had dinners in.

That left restaurants and ball parks.  Here’s what we learned.

1   Breakfasts are easy.  Every restaurant we patronized offered at least one healthy egg choice, and every restaurant was more than willing to substitute fruit (friendly) for the potatoes (decidedly unfriendly).  That said, I did get raised eyebrows when I told one server to leave the bacon out of my omelet.

2.       Salads were always a good choice for lunches.  Unfortunately, I have yet to find a ball park that has a salad concession.
3.       Ball parks, by design, serve pretty unfriendly foods.  Hot dogs – Dodger dogs or otherwise – are completely off limits, and peanuts and Crackerjack have way too much salt.  We found a beef and bean burrito, which we split, at our first ball park.  We ate in restaurants before the games after that.  See #2.
4.       Margaritas are a friendlier choice at a ball park than beer.  This did not stop us from having an occasional beer.   Alcohol at a ball park must be “chased” with lots of water.
5.       Sometimes you just have to say “What the heck,” and enjoy a fine meal.  We went to a wonderful Italian restaurant our last evening, and enjoyed the pasta, wine, and limoncello without guilt.

Yes, when we stepped on the scale upon our return, we had both gained weight.  The good news – it took only eight days of healthy eating and we were back on track.

I sent my uncle a copy of The Plan when we returned.

DisciPLAN

We've now been following The Plan for 15 days, and have learned that following The Plan requires a lot more discipline than merely watching what you put into your mouth.  The menus are all based on starting with raw foods – which require cleaning at minimum.  Some require seeding, coring, and chopping.  Some even require research as to how to seed, core and chop in the first place.  Take a new favorite vegetable – butternut squash.  It’s great!  No wonder Italian restaurants everywhere put it in their ravioli.  And it’s really easy to prepare – just cube it and steam it for five minutes.

Just cube it.  There is nothing cubicle about the shape of a butternut squash.  It’s got a long neck and a little round belly – and a very thick skin.  Per Wikipedia, you cut it in half lengthwise, peel the skin, scrap out the seeds, and then cut it into bite-sized pieces.  Did I mention that the squash has a very thick skin?  Have you watched old movies of men splitting logs?  Or like me, just watched an old man splitting logs?  My largest knife became the ax.  I had to strike the counter – knife inside – with the squash twice for it to split.  Skin removal required my sharpest paring knife; seed removal was best done with a spoon, and then it was back to the “ax” for cutting it into cubes.  So after you've taken 20 – 30 minutes to prepare the squash, then you can steam it for five minutes. 

I wonder how many would-be Plan followers are scared away by all the prep time.  We are retired.  We have the time to prepare the “everything from scratch” meals and to eat every meal and snack together – for the most part.  I wonder how couples – or even individuals – follow this rigorous testing protocol while also juggling work schedules, family commitments, commutes, and the temptations of co-workers bringing donuts. 

  

Even our schedule has some time constraints, and of course, life happens when you’re busy making plans – or busy following The Plan.  We volunteer two evenings a week – starting at 4:30 PM.  Before we started The Plan, it was a simple thing to stop at one of the many restaurants on the way and grab a quick bite.  Now we have to plan not only our meals but our meal times to make sure we eat everything we’re supposed to for the day.  We’re planning our errands around mealtimes as well.

So we grouse about the work and the time and the discipline – but we cannot argue with the results.  My husband has lost 11 pounds so far.  My weight loss stopped after I lost five pounds – a good thing since the kids threatened to kidnap me and hold me hostage at Red Robin until I ate a cheeseburger if I kept losing weight.   We are both feeling great.  We will make it the full 20 days and beyond.

The Plan – Cleanse and Detox

We finished the three day cleanse yesterday.  Yippee!  I got to have coffee this morning!  Yippee!

All in all it was a good experience.  Neither of us felt hungry during the cleanse, although I experienced a different sort of “pang” – my stomach telling me it’s not used to the foods I've been eating.  Where’s the bread?  Where are the cookies? 

We were warned by the author to expect some fatigue and possibly other symptoms as our bodies flushed out the toxins we've been building up for a while.  Ms. Recitas recommends taking it easy during the cleanse and finding ways to pamper yourself.  And while she didn't explicitly say, “stay close to home,” we found it convenient to do so.  All that water we've been drinking had been doing its job – flushing out the toxins.  Pun intended.

About the menus:  I like the curly-leaf kale better than the lacinato kale, but that’s close to saying I like being stuck with prickly pear needles better than barrel cactus needles.  OK, not quite that bad, but I seriously doubt that kale will make it to the “keeper” list of foods we’ll eat when the twenty day testing protocol is done.  I may not have cooked it enough.  We’ll try again.

And as for Spicy Coco Sauce – I just didn't like it.  There.  I said it.  I’ll take my kitty litter plain, thank you very much.  I’m on a pretty short list, though.  Per the author, most plan followers really like it.

We really liked last night’s dinner menu.  Who would have thought that baked chicken with only herbs and orange rind would taste so good?  Of course, it may have been that we were craving meat – but the recipe was really very good.  And the roasted vegetables were wonderful. 

So far my husband has lost six pounds and I have lost four.  Truth be told, I think we both gained exactly those amounts last weekend on vacation.  We ate many of the foods on the “probably bad” list – and drank beer and champagne.  I expect my weight loss to significantly taper off as we continue the testing protocol.

Can’t wait to have wine and chocolate tonight!

The Plan – A New Twist on Grocery Shopping

My husband and I have always loved cooking, and The Plan recipes looked like they could be fun.  The day before we started the three-day cleanse, we went shopping.  Serious shopping.  Our list included items we had never consumed in our lives, many of which we did not expect to find in our regular grocery store.

Our regular staples – bread, milk, eggs, beer, bananas – not on the list.  We test bread on day 8, eggs on day 10.  Not sure when we’ll finally test bananas and beer. 

Dairy is out until it’s tested (day 14) so we bought Vanilla-flavored coconut milk for our flax-seed granola breakfasts.  We didn’t find flax-seed granola in either my regular grocery store or in the Whole Foods Market, so we made our own using whole flax seeds (found on the baking aisle but not in the health foods section) and the recipe in The Plan.

We also needed a can of coconut milk for the Spicy Coco Sauce, a recipe that apparently is quite popular with The Plan followers.  The author is quoted to say “I’ve had clients say it’s so good that they would eat kitty litter if it had Spicy Coco Sauce on it.”  I looked in the baking aisle next to the other varieties of canned milk.  Not there.  I found with the oriental foods.

Years ago, an Asian restaurant in the area had a billboard stating “Shiitake happens,” so I knew this variety of mushroom existed.  I bought them for the first time.  Apparently they are less reactive than the regular variety.  Who knew? 

I knew that kale was leafy and green, but had never actually looked at it, much less purchased it.  Bought two bunches of lacinato kale (also known as Tuscan kale) at my regular grocery store.  Should have bought the kale at Whole Foods – they apparently sell a lot more kale because they had more than one variety and it seemed to be fresher.  Lesson learned.   I did buy rye crackers (rye is less reactive than wheat), raw sunflower seeds, raw almonds, and raw pumpkin seeds at Whole Foods.  The seeds (including the flax seeds) are the major protein source for the first two days.

Who would have thought that I would buy three heads of broccoli for a week’s worth of meals and then go back to buy two more?  Same with zucchini – I bought four and needed three more.

My refrigerator looks like the produce section in a small grocery store.  

The Plan

My husband was intrigued by a discussion of The Plan by author Lyn-Genet Recitas on the Dr. Oz Show.  Apparently he was not the only one – when we went to our local Barnes & Noble to buy the book it was sold out.  We ordered it online and waited the two weeks for it to ship.

We both read the book.  The Plan presents an interesting philosophy on food and weight gain.  Per Ms. Recitas, who quotes multiple case studies to back up this theory, weight gain is the result of inflammation caused by foods that are reactive to your body.  She states, “Weight gain is nothing more than a reflection of your body’s chemical reaction to foods.”   It’s personal – foods that I react to may be perfectly fine for you to eat, and vice-versa. 

She goes on to tell us, “Aging itself is an inflammatory process.”  Ouch – I could have gone all my life without hearing this, but it does make sense.  I've known lots of people who could eat anything they wanted – until they turned 40.  Myself included. 

After reading the book, my husband decided he wanted to try The Plan’s 20-day testing protocol.  That’s right – it’s a testing protocol, not a diet.  The first three days are designed to cleanse and detox the body using foods that are friendly for 90% of the author’s test population.  The cleansing phase sets a neutral baseline for your body to begin testing foods that could be more reactive.  The menus are set, with recipes included in the book.

I looked over the menus, and decided to go on The Plan.  While I don’t need to lose weight, wouldn't it be great to know if there are certain foods that cause inflammation for me?  Then I could avoid those foods, or at least, know that inflammation was coming and be prepared to deal with it.  And of course, I wanted to support my husband’s goal of dropping the extra 20 pounds that have eluded him for years.

We started The Plan yesterday – day 1 of the three-day cleanse.