Super Gentle Qigong

I've mentioned Dr. Robert Bates and his Fun With Qigong videos in the past. Now he has 2 of his videos from his latest DVD, Super Gentle Qigong, up on YouTube. This page from his blog explains what it is and what the movements on the DVD are.

When I bought this DVD he was selling it directly from his professional website, but I don't see it for sale there or on Amazon where I got another of his DVDs. Maybe that's why he posted these videos on-line?

This first one explains what qigong is, what the basic movements in this video set entail, what they're supposed to do for you, and how you're supposed to feel while doing them.


The second video assumes you now know how to do the movements and is a 14 minute run-through of the practice.



These are all VERY simple movements that can be done by anyone, at any level of fitness. They're perfect for people with limited movement because of age, illness or even body size. If you or anyone you know can benefit from even the smallest increase in movement, give this video a try. 

As you progress and get more flexible and stronger, look into either more of Dr. Bate's videos, or those from Lee Holden, the ones I do the most now. The videos from this selection are those I use most frequently, and on this site you can find some of his on-line/streaming videos, including the 30 day 7 Minutes a Day program.

John Pierre Shows Simple At-Home Exercises

National Walking Day

The National Heart Association has declared April 6 as National Walking Day!

Pop on your walking shoes or sneakers, and if the weather is good, head outside for a while. If it's not where you live, pop a Leslie Sansone video on! You cal always find some of her walks on YouTube if you don't own any.

It doesn't matter how fast or how far - just go!

Marvelous Marla

Long-time McDougaller Marla, owner of the Marla's Marvelous Meals recipe web site, has been experimenting lately. On the McDougall forums, Marla has been photographing and entering into the CRON-O-Meter 30 days of her meals (Only 2 meals per day - she skips breakfast) in a thread called Marla's CRON-O-Meter Chronicles. At the same time she's been wearing a Fit-Bit pedometer night and day to measure her energy expenditure.

Want to know what I found out?

She has to eat between 1000 and 1200 calories a day to lose any weight, and it's only been about 2 pounds per week. 

Of the 2 meals a day that she does eat, one of those meals is usually a big salad (2 quarts) with a nut based dressing, and a tiny sweet potato.

Her dinner plates appear to average 75% green/yellow non-starchy vegetables and only 25% starchy foods. 

Oh, plus a bowl of fruit on the side, at least 2 servings each to equal about 100 calories, at both meals.

She estimates the daily caloric density of her food is about 300-350 calories per pound, and she eats around 3-4 pounds of food each day.

The only potatoes she eats regularly are Japanese yellow sweet potatoes. I think I saw russets only twice. The volume seems to be no more than a cup each time. When she does have rice instead, it looks like a half cup scoop, 2 ounces in weight (The CRON-O-Meter printout says they weigh apx. 70 grams).

She also must walk/run 5 miles every morning plus another 20 minute walk every evening. She calculated at the beginning how much exercise/calories she needed to lose 8 pounds in 4 weeks. She estimated she needs to do 2,200 calories worth of exercise per day to see any weight loss.

Here is her conclusion at the end of her 30 day experiment.

It's an eye opener thread, that's for sure! I found out that even eating at least 75% non-starchy veggies with fruit and only 25% starch at most, that's still a very small amount of food, volume-wise, unless one eats mostly salads. What she's been eating doesn't really resemble the McDougall *Starch Based* food program at all.

Great Stress Reliever

And now for something completely different.

One of the important things for living a good life is to find something you like to do and do it frequently. With all the stresses in our lives recently and all the spare time we had during my husband CABG recuperation, we spent a lot of time in front of the tv watching stuff that makes us laugh. Scientists learned years ago how great the power of laughter was for recuperation from illness, so who are we to argue with the great scientific minds. Laughter is also good for reducing blood pressure, boosting your immune system, lower cholesterol, and releasing those all important endorphins into your bloodstream. It can also lead to world peace and intergalactic exploration, but don't hold me to those last 2.

This is how we would spend a lot of that time:

We already had a big collection of MST3K movies, and now we have a lot of RiffTrax to keep us company when on the treadmill and exercise bike. Our son takes some of the MP3s with him on his iPod when doing his walking outside, too, since he has the movies they go with memorized by now.

So go ahead and take a look. Check out the preview videos on the movies. I guarantee you'll fall in love with Mike, Bill and Kevin as much as our family has.

McDougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss

Back in 1994, Dr. McDougall finally realized that not everyone was losing weight effortlessly on his food program and published the book The McDougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss, affectionately known as MWLP by his followers.

He added a 5-day MWLP program in Santa Rosa, which was well attended.

Michelle Dick added a page to her FatFree web site explaining the difference between the two McDougall programs.

A long-time McDougaller made up a list of MWLP recipes found in all the other McDougall books.

Another forum member started doing a blog with photo essays of her making many of the MWLP recipes. She also took the time to make a list with links to all the MWLP recipes found in the McDougall newsletters up to that point.

In January 2005, he wrote a newsletter article on how to refine the MWLP program for better compliance and results. He mentioned all the big weight loss people at his program would achieve. Well, yeah, people always lose big the first week of a new weight loss diet. 

Many people still weren't losing weight as easily as promised. I even wrote to him with that complaint, and got the same reply back that doctors had been telling me for decades when I complained I would follow a diet exactly as written but still fail to lose or gain - I must be cheating and not following the plan right. After years of encouraging people to fill their plates to the max, even offering a bet in the MWLP book to people saying that they can't eat more than him, he decided that eating so much isn't a good thing.

In the November 2005 newsletter article on Volume Eaters he admitted that for some people, they do need to reduce the total amount of food, even of his beloved of starches, to levels sometimes as low as those given to clients in attendance of the Rice House, many times reducing the calories to under 1000kcal/day. Yeah, that's what I said when I wrote to him, that I don't lose any weight unless I eat under 1000 calories. I was told to stop counting calories. 

Possibly disproving my usual preaching that people following our diet always lose weight and become healthier are a few extraordinary people I call “volume eaters.”  They eat very large amounts of McDougall approved foods, and their weight remains stubbornly fixed at a point too high for excellent health—although they all lost initially after giving up the high-fat, high-calorie Western diet.  I can vividly recall several men and a few woman who exemplify this behavior—and I know there are many more out there (in fact, I am guilty of a tinge of this behavior at times myself—“it takes one to know one”).

and also:

The most successful program for the treatment of people with serious eating disorders is the Kempner Rice Diet.5  This is a diet of rice, fruit, and sugar, plus vitamin and iron supplements, devised by Walter Kempner, MD, of Duke University in the 1940s to treat hypertension. The regular diet consists of about  2,000 calories daily and contains 5 gm or less of fat, about 20 gm of protein, and not more than 150 mg of sodium.  However, the initial diet prescribed for weight loss is even more restricted in calories (400 to 800 per day).

 I had heard from a number of other women who were experiencing the same thing - weight gain while following the MWLP as-written. When I mentioned this fact on the original McDougall forums on VegSource I was banned. Finally, I was vindicated!

In 2006, he let the world know how he and Mary go on an actual calorie-restricted diet he named the "Mary's Mini" for 10 days at a time and outlined this in the June and July issues of the newsletter. (Also told of Mary's history of what appears to be disordered eating, some days eating only a can of tomatoes or some jars of baby food, then went on to defend it by saying the babyfood squash has all the vital nutrients. Enabling much?) 

In 2008 he released another set of lectures on DVD called Dr. McDougall's Money Saving Medical Advice, and the first of those three lectures was The Science Behind the Maximum Weight Loss Program.

In 2011 Dr. McDougall added this short talk to his McDougall's Moments video series:



In April 2011, in a forum post about the buffet table at the seminars, her wrote this:

I have made that same conclusion and have often threatened to reverse the order on the buffet table so that people eat their salad last like I hear they do in Europe.
I teach the Maximum Weight Loss Program (an approach which emphasizes green and yellow vegetables) less enthusiastically than before because people do not do well in short and long term without the starch.
Short term they don't like the food as well, are hungry between meals, and have intestinal distress (gas and pain and upper acid indigestion).
Long term, without satisfaction delivered by starches, compliance falls off.
I believe in a starch-based diet -- green and yellow vegetables and salads are side dished.

In recent years, he's been mentioning in lectures he's given that he no longer pushes the MWLP program because people were turning it from a starch-based program into a green and yellow vegetable based one. You can see that plainly on his forums daily, when certain Star McDougallers encourage people to make their plates 3/4 veggies and only a quarter starch, the complete opposite of Dr. McDougall's teachings. He barely mentions this way of eating in the last book, The Starch Solution, devoting only a page to the principles of it (216) for those with stubborn weight loss and doesn't even refer to it as the MWLP. He no longer offers the MWLP 5-day seminars in Santa Rosa.

Still, for so many of us, weight loss is not possible without it, and many of the female Stars who are on that elite list because of their large amounts of weight loss only achieved it because of the MWLP. As soon as they start to eat foods not on the plan they start to gain. Just as with any weight loss diet, to maintain the loss you have to continue eating the foods that got you there, and in the same amounts. There's no way to eat more and not gain weight. 

There were only 3 times in my life I lost any significant amount of weight. The first time was as a child on 1000 calories a day, exercising almost 2 hours each day. It took 2 years to lose 30 pounds, then 1 month at 1200 calories to regain it all plus another 20. 

The second times was in 2000 when I followed strict MWLP 5 days a week, the regular McDougall program on weekends. Because of recent injuries and degenerative disc disease, I barely exercised. I lost almost 50 pounds in 6 months before the weight started to come back on, even when I started to reduce calories to below 1000kcal/day. I lost 16 pounds the first week, around 5 a week for the next few, then down to 2, one, none, and then started to regain. Before a year was out, most of the weight was back on. My doc blamed lack of exercise and low thyroid. It took over 10 years to find the root cause of all my pains that had prevented me from exercising more effectively, and my thyroid numbers still aren't all that great, but "good enough" according to my docs. 

My most recent weight loss has come after my husband's CABG surgery, when he was barely eating and needed a lot of assistance. During those long days at the hospital without access to decent food so lunch was skipped and it was too late for a decent meal when I got home at night; those busy days at home when I only had time to eat a small amount of food, all contributed to a rapid loss of about 15 pounds. The strict adherence to Dr. McDougall/Dr. Esselstyn food rules have helped release a few more pounds. 

Recent lab work that showed a worsening of some values, such as total cholesterol and triglycerides, is now causing me to move from many of the Esselstyn and McD heart-healthy recipes back into MWLP territory. I suspected I would have to do this back in September when my trigs and LDL shot up a bit from July's numbers, but they continued to be flaky in my March lab tests even though I made some changes. Hummus sandwiches, Rip's Big Bowl breakfasts and all those pasta meals have got to go, as well as large amounts of potatoes and brown rice. I'll be eating more soups and stews, more SNAP meals, more very beany Mary McDougall MWLP recipes. I'll take Chef AJ's advice and have green veggies with every meal, including breakfast. I already add greens to my oatmeal and grits, but now even the grits have got to go.

Dr. McDougall may not be that much into the MWLP program any more, but for many of us, it's the only way to go for weight loss and better lab numbers.

This Year I Will . . .

Thanks, Jeanette, for the video.

Back to Doctor Bashing

Those who followed my VeganMoFo posts for the first half of the month might remember the day I mentioned my doctor's appointment to get some lab results. I wrote a long post about being overwhelmed when I finally got all the results.

Well, I did have some blood drawn to repeat some of those labs and got the results last Thursday.

The good news is that the ESR and CRP were well within normal limits, so no excessive inflammation that would indicate lupus, many other auto-immune diseases, or rampaging cardiovascular disease.

My total cholesterol was down to 176 - much better but still not in the heart-attack proof range. VLDL was up a little, but took me just one point over the normal reference range.

My triglycerides level is what shocked me - 237! They went UP even after eating from the 2 heart-healthy books for the 2 weeks prior to the blood draw and strict McDougall/Esselstyn since July 8th when my husband first told me of his chest pains! WTF?!?!?!

Then I looked back over my journal entries to see exactly what I was eating, and saw that for more than half of the entries in the first half of the month I had flour products, and what wasn't mentioned in those entries were the (whole wheat, unsalted) pretzels I was eating most nights. One day I had a load of fruit as a night time snack, and most mornings I had raisins or dried dates in my oatmeal. Most days I was also having a few ounces of POM juice, as recommended by Dr. Fuhrman in his autoimmune protocols, and once or twice some fruit-based salad dressing.

Between the flour and fruits I can see why the trigs were up.

My doc doesn't believe too much fruit has anything to do with triglycerides, that it's only saturated fats that raise it, "anything you can buy in a bakery, including whole wheat bread" is bad, everything else is fine, (here it comes) in moderation." (sigh)

My doctor went into immediate pill-pusher mode and had the student doc start looking up meds to lower triglycerides and wrote a prescription for Lovaza, a purified fish oil pill to raise Omega-3's, even though I told him I'm not going to take it, especially when the web site say it's for trigs over 500, and mine are less than half that. I can take more crushed flax seed and chia seeds to raise Omega 3's, like Dr. Esselstyn says to do.

He told me I'm eating too many carbs on my food plan, to switch to the "heart healthy" Mediterranean diet, to replace all those carbs with protein foods.

I looked him right in the eye and said: "You want me to stop eating my whole food plant based, no sugar-oil-salt food plan and start taking fish oil, eat fish, chicken and beef, and start pouring olive oil over everything so my triglycerides go down? What do you think my total cholesterol is going to do if I do that?" He and the student just shrugged. 

I also reminded him that many people with MCTD eventually wind up with kidney failure and on dialysis, and he wants me to load up on kidney-killing animal protein? He shrugged again.

He told me if I don't want to take the Lovaza, at least take fish oil pills from another source, but make sure they're fresh. I shrugged. Now I know he's just not listening.

I told him I'm going to cut the rest of the dried fruit out my diet and stick to only 1 serving a day of either blueberries or apples, and he shrugged.

I told him I'll cut out the processed carbs - the whole wheat flour and cornmeal - and he shrugged again, telling me I should also cut out the beans and potatoes, so I shrugged again.

He didn't even ask if I saw the rheumatologist yet to start treatment for my MCTD, the one thing my husband was most concerned about. I had to come right out and ask how my ESR and CRP results were. He shrugged and said they're fine, then went back to telling me how horrible my diet is.

So here I am, debating whether or not to shut him up and take Lovaza (probably not), other fish oil pills (ditto), grab a bottle of the EPA-DHA or OmegaPure that Dr. Fuhrman sells, or just go with other comments by Fuhrman and Esselstyn, that as long as one is following the whole foods plant based/plant perfect food plan, don't worry about the trigs, because they're not going to be normal until all the excess weight is off, especially if you already have a lot of belly fat, which I most certainly do. 

Dr. McD has a few tips, besides cutting down on fruit and eliminating flour products (meaning, go on MWLP instead of the regular/heart healthy program) that includes increasing exercise and eating an extra quarter cup of oat bran, and a few cloves of garlic every day.

So, no to Lovaza or fish oil, yes to more oat bran, garlic (Yum! Really!) and ground flax (I have to remember to drink more water now), no to flour products (Goodbye, pizza and pasta - sniff) and try increase my aerobic exercise a bit without causing any more pain to my already achy joints and muscles (Now attibutable to MCTD and not my fat and degenerative arthritis).

I'm now 60 years old - time to nip this in the bud so I can live to see 70 and beyond.

The Dangers of Moderation - My Husband's Stress Test Results

For those who bothered to read my post regarding my husband's chest pains the other day, here's a follow-up.

He failed his stress test.

He got extremely short of breath within seconds, his blood pressure spiked and the nurses said he showed EKG changes which indicated cardiac damage and he needs a cardiac cath done ASAP, so it's scheduled for tomorrow. He has the same cardiologist as I had back in 2009 and he and one of the same nurses who assisted in my cardiac cath back then explained that there most likely is some blockage, that the cath will will show how badly and where. If it's in a not-too-bad place and less than 75% blocked the doc said he can first try lifestyle changes, meaning 100% adherence to the food plan of Drs. Esselstyn and McDougall and a strict, strenuous exercise program; but if the blockage is in another area or too solid, he may need an angioplasty, with or without a stent, or even bypass surgery as worst case scenario. The doc & nurse both said that the whole foods, plant-based, no SOS food plan for dinner, his biggest meal of the day, certainly helped and may have prevented this from happening sooner, but those cheese and pepperoni pizzas and cheese sandwiches and potato chips did their own share of the damage.

In either case, my husband is now committed to 100% (Dr., not Rip) Esselstyn/McDougall, and as soon as he's allowed to, a steady exercise program.

We plan next week on packing a box of all the cheat foods that are still in the house and finding a food pantry to donate them to. I'm sure those folks in need would love to have jars of natural peanut and cashew butter, boxes of macaroni and cheese, maybe even bags of potato chips (Unless our son refuses to give them up himself and hides them in his room). We may have a jar or 2 of marinara sauce that have a tiny bit of oil in them, so those will have to go, as will the semolina pastas we have left (only 2 boxes right now because I already stocked up on Tinkayada brown rice pasta when the store had a sale a few weeks ago). Of course, his "emergency" cans of SPAM will have to go. I've been tossing them out as they got outdated (and when they started to swell on the pantry shelf. No kidding!) so there are only 2 of those left, too. Those cans have been here since long before Hurricane Sandy so that tells you how long they've been around.

Of course, if they feed him after the cath tomorrow they'll give him a typical hospital tray of SAD food. After mine they gave me greasy breaded veal parmesan coated with at least a half inch thick layer of mozzarella cheese, as well as very salty broth and ice cream for dessert. I have a cooker of rice going right now and plan on bringing a container of it with veggies to eat for my own breakfast at the hospital tomorrow while he's having the test done. I brought brown rice krispies today but never had a chance to eat them. I'll bring another container for my husband to eat instead of the crap food they give him after the test. Our hospital dietary department has no idea what even "vegetarian" means, much less "whole foods plant based no sugar, oil or salt!"

I hear him stirring about in the kitchen so I guess his nap is over and it's time for lunch. I'll reheat that Awesome Almost All Orange soup for us. It was delicious, BTW. 

Keep your fingers crossed, candles lit and rosary beads humming tomorrow around 7:30am, okay? Thanks.

Today is World Tai Chi and Qigong Day

I'd like to offer my thanks to Dr. Robert Bates, Lee and Karen Holden, Garri and Daisy Garripoli, Thich Nhat Hanh, and, believe it or not, David Carradine, who sparked my interest in the gentle martial arts many, many decades ago.

Jeff Novick Says: BREATHE

I was rummaging through the old Jeff Novick newsletters earlier today and came across this one on meditation called Building Genuine Health: One Breath At A Time. He describes his discovery of meditation through a pamphlet on Transcendental Meditation (A biggie when I was in my late teens back in the 1970's and made famous by the Beatles when they met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi).

Like Jeff, I've meditated for years, but I love the way Jeff's cousin Sheila does her meditations!

Keeping the Brain Limber

I finally got a chance to watch Dr. Neal Barnard's new PBS special, Protect Your Memory. A preview:


If you missed any of the showings on your local PBS stations, Amazon is now selling the DVD of the broadcast. This lecture is an off-shoot of his new book, Power Foods for the Brain which I purchased the day of release but it's still sitting in the ever-growing pile of health books to read.

In the video, he stated that there are three very important things we should be doing to ensure the health of our brain, and thus protecting our memories:

1) Skip bad fats
2) Knock out free radicals
3) Exercise your brain

To exercise your brain, he includes both physical, aerobic exercise, especially regular walking for 30 to 40 minutes three times a week, as well as exercises for your brain itself, such as learning new things, doing word and number puzzles like anagrams and Sudoku, even learning a language and being bilingual.

Well, I always hated anagrams and always get those questions wrong in Jeopardy, and Sudoku - ANY puzzle that involves numbers - just makes my head hurt. Learning languages? Well, in high school, the nun that taught us Spanish used the Castillian pronunciation of all the words so nothing we learned were we able to transfer to real-life usage. And the nun who taught us freshman Latin? She terrorized us all. She followed me into adulthood when, as an RN and working in a nursing home I was the primary caregiver of her mother, and she terrorized everyone in the Catholic Church-run nursing home just as she did high school girls. But I did love the language, and even won a few awards in competitions back in the 1960's. Knowing Latin really helped me in nursing school and when working with the doctors and even pharmacists. Eventually most of my Latin knowledge slipped away when I stopped working as a nurse and became a stay-at-home mom.

Fast forward a few years and I'm now home-schooling a sixth grader. We used a canned curriculum, and he was usually finished with all the required schoolwork by 10 am and I needed more work for him to do, something that would hold his interest. The curriculum focused on the Classics, so why not teach him a Classic language, and what's more Classic than Latin! Because home-schooling was starting to get popular, there were many resources out there, and I was able to get flashcards, workbooks, textbooks appropriate to his age group, even a few children's books written in Latin, like Winnie Ille Pu. We had fun doing the work together and he continued with Latin courses throughout high school, even taking a college level course when only 14. Knowing Latin helped his vocabulary greatly, so much so that it helped earn him a full-tuition scholarship to the state's engineering university and entrance into its Honor's College. He's proud of his vocabulary skills and is mocked incessantly by his friends for it, even now when they're all in their late 29's and early 30's. It's all in fun - all but one of them was also in the Honor's College in the same university, each in their own engineering major. The one in the bio-mechanical engineering program is now in med school and yes, he still laughs at my son's "very correct word usage," as he calls it, and has been known to IM him when writing papers to get his opinion on the wording of things.  


Back to Dr. Barnard and the brain. I think it's time to dust out the cobwebs in mine with something a little more challenging than matching games on Disney videos or nutrition books, so I dragged out the old English From the Roots Up cards my son made all those years ago and I signed up at the Latin Word A Day web site:

Learn more Latin »

Get this widget

I'll be adding this widget to the sidebar later.

I even dusted off my well-worn copy of the Winnie the Pooh book shown above.

Hopefully this will help prevent my brain from becoming Swiss cheese. There's no history of Alzheimer's in my own family, even though a lot on my mother's side lived into their late 80's, 90's and my great-grandmother and her sister both went over 100. But it exists on my husband's side. His mother started her Alzheimer's symptoms in her late 60's, and her sister, the aunt who just died from it last month, was lucky enough to not start until she was in her early 90's, but it ravaged her. By the time she died, she not only know who anyone was, where she was, when it was, but who she was. She forgot everything, including how to eat. She had forgotten a few years ago how to go to the bathroom and I was so grateful for adult diapers until she eventually needed a colostomy to go #2 (for another reason, not the Alzheimer's) and a catheter for #1 (this was because of the Alzheimer's. It was necessary for hygiene and infection control reasons.) I do NOT want either my husband or myself to wind up like that! Or our son, but he has many year to go to worry about that, but he wold be the one who would have to take care of us if we started to suffer from dementia. If following a healthy low-fat plant based diet, doing a few Leslie Sansone or Richard Simmons workouts and learning a few new vocabulary words a day will help prevent it, so be it!

Now for Some Gentle Exercise

With my degenerative disc disease and cervical neuritis, as well as plantar fasciitis and a multitude of other musculo-skeletal problems, I really can't do full impact aerobics. Both my primary care doc and podiatrist said exercise like qigong and tai chi are perfect for me, and I have a number of DVD's from Lee Holden and his mother Karen and Robert Bates, DC that I enjoy doing.

This one is one of my favorites from Lee: Qi Gong for Weight Loss:
 

from his mother Karen: Exercise to Heal: Get Stronger:


and this is the first video from Dr. Bates: Fun With Qigong: The Five Flows


Sometimes even those are too much for my back and I have to do yoga, instead. This video from Sally Pugh, Expanding into Fullness, Yoga for Large Women, does quite nicely in stretching the body without doing any more damage:



And when things are going well and I have no back or foot pains, I can then return to my favorite exercise instructors,  Leslie Sansone



and my first exercise love, Richard Simmons.



And Richard has announced he's releasing 10 new videos any day now - I can't wait! I may not be able to do all the steps with this 59 year old body, but I do try. The results are usually  more hysterical than Richard's get-ups!

Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Dry Bones

A problem many of us older females have is osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, arthritis, degenerative disc disease, and other bone related disabilities. Maybe if we had been vegan since childhood, or never had any injuries that involved the bones or joints, we wouldn't have this problem, but at least our diets and exercise habits NOW can help ease the pain and discomfort and possibly stop any further damage.

Dr. Fuhrman has a web page and even a video out concerning osteoporosis called Osteoporosis Protection for Life:



and osteoporosis is one of Dr. McDougall's Hot Topics, too.

• Some important things to remember:
• Avoid dairy.
• Avoid high protein foods.
• Get proper amounts of high impact exercise.
• Make sure your Vitamin D level is within the normal range and supplement with extra time in the sun or vitamins as necessary.

And here is Dr. McDougall's advice:

"Bone loss is reversible by fixing the cause. Everyone, and especially people with osteoporosis and a lesser condition, osteopenia, should eat a low-acid starch-based diet (with some restriction on grains and legumes, which are slightly acidic) and exercise.  Focus on a diet plentiful in sweet potatoes, potatoes, winter squashes, with the addition of fruits and green and yellow vegetables."