VegMoFo Post - Weight Gain and Loss

We usually eat pretty boringly, having the same meals on certain days week after week. This is how our week usually goes:

Sunday - burgers
Monday - baked beans and biscuits
Tuesday - anything goes
Wednesday - lasagna
Thursday - chicken patty sandwiches
Friday - soup and bread
Saturday - pizza

For the burger and chicken patty meals, my guys eat meat versions and I eat vegan versions, and never the twain shall meet. OK, once in a blue moon hubby will have a veggie burger if the kid is hungry and wants an extra burger that day.

"Anything goes" days are usually the only time I make things from the dozens of vegan cookbooks I own, but because Veganomicon is a brand new book that I've been waiting months for, I've been cooking from there instead of our usual Monday and Friday meals, or like last week, the Friday soup was a V'con recipe.

All of this good eatin' has shown on my scale, so I'm going to have to scale back (Get it, "scale" back! Yeah, you can smack me now, cuz if you don't my kid will.) on all these new recipes, or at least how much of them I eat. I need to cut back on the amount of salt I consume, too.

So my VeganMoFo post for today is going to be about the Rice Diet.

The original Duke University Rice Diet, as written by Dr. Werner Kempner back in the 1940's was very spartan, led to loads of weight loss and reversal of kidney damage (The original purpose of the food plan) but was really hard for people to keep up with in real life, not just because it was a starvation diet but the main focus of the plan was the low sodium, and in normal people the food plan led to electrolyte imbalances unless they were closely monitored by a doctor and had frewquent lab work done. When Dr. Kempner retired he left (sold?) the food plan to his protegé, Dr. Robert Rosati, and his wife, nutritionist Kitty Rosati. The Rosati's eventually broke the Rice Diet away from Duke University, started what is now known as the Rice House in Durham, North Carolina, and revised the Rice Diet so it's much safer to do on your own without constant medical intervention to assure you're not going into electrolyte imbalance or becoming anorexic or have nutritional deficiencies from the very low amount of calories and food choices in the original plan. The first time this was made available to others was in Kitty Rosati's book, Heal Your Heart. In 2006 the Rosati's came out with the book, The Rice Diet Solution, which explains their "dieta", what they're calling not just the food plan but entire way of life associated with the Rice Diet. This past year Kitty came out with the official Rice Diet Cookbook, which was disappointing because many of the recipes had been developed by members of the forum and posted there previously.

A former forum member named Nathalie has a great web site called The Rice Way that explains the Rice Diet in detail, but the best place to go for support is the official Rice Diet forums. Plenty of information about the program and loads of recipes. There are also 2 Yahoogroups devoted to the Rice Dieta, The_Ricers, where the owner abandoned the list and it's now full of spam, and The Rice Diet Solution, a new and very mall (for now) list.



Click to visit The Rice Diet Solution group

My favorite Rice Diet recipe is Rhonda's Rice and Beans.