Food Writer on a Diet

The beginning of this year I went on a diet. I know! A food writer on a diet, it sounds crazy. But I had gained a lot of weight and it had to be done. My diet is really simple and I’ve lost almost 20 pounds. A number of people have asked me how I did it, so I shared the story on my friend Dianne's blog. 

When I'm dining at home, I generally follow The Day Off Diet from Dr. Oz. I do take a day off. Sometimes two days! It just depends on the week and my schedule. If I can order something on my diet at a restaurant I do, if not, I don’t sweat it. 

Here’s the diet in a nutshell—Every day I try to eat two servings of complex carbohydrates, two servings of foods high in monounsaturated fatty acids (olives, avocados, nuts or seeds) and six ounces of lean protein a day. I eat all the non-starchy vegetables I want and just a little bit of olive oil. 

It’s a fairly low carbohydrate diet, so I eat much smaller portions of pasta but I mix in a ton of vegetables, I eat pureed cauliflower instead of mashed potatoes, brown rice instead of white rice and quinoa and bulgur instead of couscous. I drink the smoothie in the plan everyday usually for breakfast and I add a lot of cinnamon to it. 

Here are some specific things I eat when I'm home that fit with the diet:

Cold shirataki noodle salads—especially good with peanut or sesame sauce

Slices of sweet potato —baked with Cajun seasoning, spread with almond butter or Dijon mustard

Quinoa salad with lots of fresh vegetables

Meatballs made from ground lean turkey or chicken

Roasted eggplant slices topped with a chimichurri style herb mixture

Tomato and tofu “Caprese” salad

Steamed artichokes with hummus

Lots of fish, shellfish and chicken! 

Being on a diet has forced me to be more creative with my recipes. Some of them I've posted to the blog and others I haven't. I will continue to cook all kinds of things, and with any luck, I will continue to lose weight. Do you have any favorite recipes that fit on your diet? Tell me about them in the comments.