Salad Eating Advice - Nothing New Under the Sun

For those who are now in the habit of eating a pound or more of non-starchy vegetables for breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, and dinner on the advice of a certain somebody, including those "BAS - Big Ass Salads" that "if they aren't big enough that someone comments on their size, they're not big enough," and "salad should be as big as your head" - everything old is new again. 

Jeff Novick, dietitian for The McDougall Program in Santa Rosa (and has many videos of his own out, both lectures and cooking videos), has written about that - and much more - for many years now, but nobody goes around quoting *him* (Aside from some of us on the McDougall message boards, that is).

Here's a blog post he wrote back in 2007 called "Shock and Awe" Salads. Good reading, as are all the other blog posts and articles on Jeff's web site. Lots of good information there, as well as his forum on the free McDougall message boards.

Imagine what life would be like for all those people if they took this advice when it was first given back in 2007 (Myself include)?

Ann and Jane - It Takes Two to Mango, Lime, Bean Salad

Whoops. This one came out before the french fries video but I didn't post it because I had planned on making the salad myself and would share the photo when done. I even bought the mangoes and lime, two items I usually don't keep around the house. But we wound up having lots of leftovers from dinners that I was eating for lunches and I forgot all about this. I used the cilantro in another meal, but I hesitate to open that refrigerator drawer and take a look at the mangoes and limes. Wish me luck.

The recipe comes from not only both books, as Jane stated, but it's also on Dr. Esselstyn's web site:

Mango-Lime Bean Salad

MAKES 2 SERVINGS

Everyone loves this, so double or even triple the recipe! It vanishes in a flash, and also works well as a salsa. It really is our all-time favorite summer salad. The red onion adds a dash of color and the zest (the peel) intensifies the lime flavor.

1 mango, peeled and diced

1 small red onion, diced to taste (start with 1/2)

1 15-ounce can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

zest of 1 lime

1 juicy lime, squeezed

cilantro, a lot, 1/2 cup or more

Combine all ingredients. Serve on a bed of baby lettuce.

Success, but Also Failure

Well, I used my Ulu knife in my 32 cup Tupperware Thatsa Bowl and I chopped, chopped, and chopped, first right handed, then left, then back to right again. My arms were getting sore, but it was still not chopped small enough, so kept at it for about 10 minutes. Still a few pieces of apple weren't as small as I wanted, but good enough.

I added some reheated short grain brown rice and some leftover Sangre de Toro beans from Rancho Gordo to make it a full meal.

I made a LOT of salad. I had about 3 cups, my husband ate around 2 without the rice and beans because he was having his with sandwiches, and I put three cups away for tomorrow's lunch.

It was okay, but I see no advantage to using the bowl and Ulu over using the food processor to make these micro salads like I've been doing for a few years after reading about them on the Dr. Fuhrman forums when they were being called confetti salads. In fact, the food processor makes the salads quicker and in smaller pieces without aggravating the joints in my hands and muscles in my arms (damn this MCTD!).

Okay, I see one advantage - the bowl and knife clean up faster than the food processor.

Those of you who were debating whether or not to spend the money on a large Tupperware bowl because you're afraid of nicking it with the knife? Well, it DID leave a bunch of small nicks in the bottom of the bowl. Yes, the Ulu knife DOES damage Tupperware bowls! So what if a certain person says jokingly in a video that she's been doing this for 8 years and hasn't died yet, you're still damaging a $30 plastic bowl and those microscopic bits of plastic have to be going somewhere, most likely in your food!

Now that it's damaged I'm SOL when it comes to returning the bowl for a refund. I will never make a chopped salad in it again because plastic isn't a part of the McDougall - or any - food program. I guess I now own an extra large plastic bowl that's too big to fit in my refrigerator, so it gets relegated to either a large mixing bowl or non-food storage status. 

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother.

Barbecue Bean Salad

This is the last of the 4 salads I made. Unlike the other 3 which filled my largest Pyrex container, this one didn't even fill the 6-cup size. Since we had use of our kitchen and sink again there was no need to go back to the store and pray they had decent potatoes and serve this over them for dinners, so we just used it like the leftovers of the others, for lunches, and one night for an after dinner snack.

Barbecue Bean Salad
Servings: 4
Prep time: 10 minutes

2, 15-ounce cans small red beans, rinsed and drained
2 cups frozen corn kernels, thawed
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1/3 cup oil-free honey Dijon mustard style salad dressing
1/4 cup barbecue sauce

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and toss well to mix. Serve at once or refrigerate until serving time.

Again, I used the Esselstyn 3-2-1 Dressing, this time mixing it with Thick Bone Sucking Sauce.

I LOVE this stuff! A few months ago we made our first ever trip to Whole Foods, and along with a bunch of sweet potatoes and one of nearly every Engine 2 product the store had, I bought 2 jars of this because everyone who ever wrote about it on-line loved it. Now I know why. My husband plans on taking a day off work in a few weeks so we can make another trip to the store again, and this time I plan on getting no Engine 2 products, even more of those assorted sweet potatoes, and at least 6 jars of this stuff. I have only a fraction of a jar left and have been rationing it for weeks. They just better have it on the shelf when we go or I'll be really disappointed.

And so ends the emergency slew of salads. We were surprised at how much we liked them, although as I wrote yesterday, we were both starting to get really tired of beans and corn, corn and beans. This coming week I plan on making up the recipes I had planned for last week so I can use up the ingredients I bought for them before they go bad. After that? Well, maybe I'll choose a few more of those Mary McDougall salads to try. The Quick and Easy book had a few more I would like to try, and every McDougall book with recipes has a bunch, too. I already have my eyes on some potato salads, a garbanzo bean one, even one made with Italian bread. Hopefully they'll all be as tasty as these turned out to be.

Honey Bean Salad

So far this one is my favorite, probably because it has actual green veggies in it.

I had leftover green beans and wax beans from a previous meal so cut those down to size and used them instead of using canned.

Again, canned beans, drained and rinsed.

And the store had no red onions so I used a small yellow one, sliced very fine.

For the dressing I used the Esselstyn 3-2-1 Dressing with balsamic vinegar, Dijon mustard and maple syrup.

It was a very nice, tasty salad, but I'm starting to get tired of all those beans and corn! This, like the other 3, filled my 11-cup Pyrex glass container. We had this for one dinner and for lunched for both of us for another few days. My husband ate his as a side dish to his sandwiches, I had mine over baked sweet potatoes. He poured extra dressing over his, but it was just fine for me.

We're not really salad people, but this is one we both declared a "really good" and I'll be making this one again in the future, especially when the heat goes back up into the 90's. It's only July 4th so there's a lot of summer weather still ahead of us.

Mexican Corn Salad

This is the first one we ate, Mexican Corn Salad.

For the red bell pepper I just used a 4 ounce jar of pimientos. The whole thing came together in less than 5 minutes - the longest step was taking the time to open, drain and rinse the cans of beans. I already had the cilantro chopped from the other recipe. I didn't bother putting the salsa and vinegar in a blender.

As for the kitchen, the pipe has been fixed and the old dishwasher is in the hallway outside the bedroom. I have water back and can access all my cabinets. But I still have a gaping hole in the wall where the dishwasher used to be and live wires from said dishwasher hanging around the open area. The owner also yanked the wires off the garbage disposal. That's another thing that never worked right the whole 15 years we've lived here, and every time we use it water would back up in our downstairs neighbor's kitchen sink, so we don't turn it on. He promises to remove it soon, but we've heard that line for the past 5 years. He also said he's going to replace our leaky kitchen faucet, another job we've been after him for for about 5 years, maybe more. That started leaking about a month after he put it in and he promised then to come up and fix it.  So we're now in limbo, waiting to see what will happen next.

But at least I have water and that half of my kitchen back.

Of the last 2 salads already made, one is being eaten with sweet potatoes for lunch, the other we'll have Sunday, so reports on them soon.

Salad Days

Life interferes with the best laid plans. Besides last Friday's flare-up of my degenerative disc disease causing agonizing pain in my lower back and left hip, and arthritis pain in my left toes making every step painful for the previous 2 weeks, we now have no water in the kitchen. The drain pipe has a 6 inch hole in it, so any water that went down our kitchen sink flooded the apartment beneath us, the apartment beneath that one, and all the way down to the basement. The owner spent 4 hours here the other night, nearly in tears. He usually does all the repairs himself, but this one was a doozy and he felt he needed the help of one of his friends who knows plumbing, but he's unavailable for at least a week. He left our kitchen a mess, including a non-functioning dishwasher (Never worked in the 15 years we're in this apartment) blocking my stove and most of my kitchen cabinets and a pile of soggy, moldy plaster and fiberglass insulation in the space where the dishwasher used to be. Not to mention the gigantic hole in my wall exposing that leaky pipe and soggy wood and insulation. Of course, our water is turned off in the kitchen.

Great. I'm not only having to spend the holiday weekend with no way to cook but it may take as long as 2-3 weeks. I could wash some dishes in a bucket in the bathroom, but of course, would rather not. And most of my pots, dishes, microwave, even some food items, were now unreachable behind the piles of crud and the dishwasher. Thank goodness he came up during dinner so we had a few plates, bowls, and one small pot either in the sink or the dish drainer, so we could use those, along with the one accessible burner on the stove. My son was able to shift the dishwasher enough and with his long arms managed to grab the oatmeal for breakfasts, the toaster so he and hubby could make their toasted bread for lunches, the teapot, so I could make up some McDougall cups for myself for my lunches, and, using one of those grabbers, our medications.

Time to make something new for dinners instead of the planned meals. Mary McDougall has a lot of hearty salad recipes in the McDougall Quick and Easy Cookbook, so the next morning I had my son bring me to the grocery store (My back still hurts too much to drive myself) and grabbed a few items I would need to make a week's worth of salads for dinner. I figured I better make them all right then before plans changed and I had people tearing my kitchen apart for who knows how long. I'm glad we always keep a stash of paper plates, bowls, and plastic utensils handy - and they were on the other side of the kitchen!

Because I was still able to reach one burner of the stove and the one pot we had was the right size, this was the first one I made.

I doubled the recipe because we like to get a few meals out of each recipe.

Here it is, still in the mixing bowl, and when put away, it nearly filled the 11-cup Pyrex:

Since we haven't eaten this yet, all I can say about it is that I really don't like the smell of fresh cilantro. Unfortunately, it's used in more of these recipes and in greater quantities.

More in the next post. For some reason Blogger won't let me insert anymore graphics.

Chef AJ on Foody TV Web Site

Remember back when the weather was warm and sunshine actually existed Chef AJ made the announcement that she was making a few episodes of a web tv show that were going to "air" in Spring 2015? Well, they're already on-line.

The series is called "Healthy Living With Chef AJ", and the episodes are as follows:

Episode 1) Guest: Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn; Recipes: Sweet Potato Chili, Beet Soup and Banana Strawberry Soft Serve



Episode 2) Dr. T. Colin Campbell; Recipes: Yellow Split Pea Soup, Quinoa Salad, Peanut Butter Fudge Truffles



Episode 3) Both Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Campbell; Recipes: Breakfast Oats, Red Lentil Chili, Hail to the Kale Salad



Episode 4) Rebecca Martinez-Rocha (Chef AJ's sous-chef); Recipes: Hearty Lentil Tostadas, Mockacamole, Black Bean Brownies



Episode 5) John Joseph (front man for Cro-Mags and Ironman participant); Recipes: Clafouti, Cole's Cauliflower Soup, Caramel Apples



Episode 6) Classic Diner Food; Recipes: Mushroom Chili, Chipotle Burgers, Almond Milk and Chocolate Milkshake Smoothie

Chipotle Corn Salsa

This is another one I've already made multiple times but hadn't written about yet. First it was a Chef and the Dietitian episode:



and then I remember seeing this recipe a few years back on the Forks Over Knives web site and asked myself why should I make salsa when there are plenty of tasty ones in the grocery store. Well, as my stash of jars got low this winter I decided I better try my hand at making some salsa, and since I had already been making a lot of AJ recipes, said what the heck and pulled up this one.

Chipotle Corn Salsa

Ingredients:

•    1 – one pound bag of frozen corn, defrosted
•    2 – 15 ounce cans of Pinto beans, drained and rinsed
•    One pound of Roma Tomatoes (approximately 4), seeded and diced
•    One bunch of Cilantro, chopped
•    4 scallions (or more, to taste) finely chopped
•    1 tbsp Chipotle Paste (or ¼ teaspoon chipotle powder) or more to taste
•    Juice and zest from 4 limes

Instructions:

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl.  Flavors will improve on sitting.  Stir well before serving.

Let's see, I already had corn, pintos, diced tomatoes, chipotle powder, a jar of lemon juice, even scallions. The only thing I didn't have was cilantro, and I always use parsley when a recipe calls for cilantro, and had plenty of jarred dried parsley. A few tablespoons did the trick. The Chef and the Dietitian video also used one can of sliced black olives, so I added them, too.

The whole thing went together in just minutes. But I do have a confession to make: I mis-read the recipe I thought it said 4 bunches of scallions, so that's what I chopped up and used. My husband liked it so much as it is, every time I make it now I use that much. No harm, no foul. :)

I made it up in the morning to use in a recipe that evening, but when my husband saw it in the refrigerator when he took his lunch break, he grabbed a few spoonfuls to accompany his sandwich. Even though it had sat maybe an hour, he declared it Fantastic! and Perfect! That was good, because this made up so much that the container you see in the photo is 12 cups, and this was snapped after he took almost 2 cups with lunch. The recipe makes about 8 cups making it my way.

I'e made this twice more since the photo batch, but instead of leaving it all in that gigantic Pyrex I split it up. In the refrigerator I put a quart canning jar full, and in the freezer I put 2 to 3 pint sized jars, and when the fridge jar is empty I just pull out the next.

One time I made His and Hers jars, putting even more chipotle powder in his. Hubby liked it, but said to just leave it alone and not do that anymore, that he prefers it a bit blander, the way I like it, because that way he can mix it with a lot more foods and the spiciness won't overpower it. Just now for lunch he ate his usual seitan sandwich on one whole wheat roll, and between 2 slices of ww bread he made himself a salsa sandwich. I was eating leftover rice for my lunch and just added a few tablespoons to it for a tasty meal for myself, too. Many times at dinner he'll been pulling a jar out and adding a few spoons to whatever we're eating, too. At least doing this he's getting plenty of fiber and phytonutrients and not getting all the sodium he was getting when pouring on a few ounces of sriracha sauce, like he use to do.

Next post I'll be making the meal I originally made this salsa for. Stay tuned!

Super Slaw

Although I own every book Dr. Fuhrman has out there, I don't follow his nutritarian food plan, mostly because I have an immense hatred of raw vegetables, especially leafy greens and cruciferous ones. Even cooked, many cruciferous veggies hurt my gums so the only way they get eaten is well-done. I rarely use his recipes because they either contain nuts or dried fruit, 2 items we have to avoid because of my husband's CVD and my high triglycerides.

But while I was reading the Fuhrman forums this morning my husband told me had a yearning for cole slaw for his Labor Day weekend meals, and since I refuse to buy those very-fatty mayo based ones at the deli, I either had to make my own or disappoint the guy. He was looking over my shoulder as I started looking at various cole slaw recipes on Dr. Fuhrman's Member Center recipe section, and this one caught his eye:

Super Slaw
Serves: 3
Preparation Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:
SLAW
2 cups shredded apples
1 cup shredded raw cabbage
1 cup shredded raw beets
1 cup shredded raw carrots
1/2 cup raisins
DRESSING
1/2 cup soft tofu
1/4 cup soy, almond or hemp milk
1 tablespoon Dr. Fuhrman's Riesling Raisin Vinegar
1 tablespoon Dr. Fuhrman's Spicy Pecan Vinegar
3 dates, pitted
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup chopped pecans, lightly toasted *
Instructions:
Combine slaw ingredients. 

Blend dressing ingredients and toss with slaw. Top with toasted pecans.

*Lightly toast pecans in a 200 degree oven for 3 minutes.

Per Serving:
CALORIES 289; PROTEIN 9g; CARBOHYDRATES 50g; TOTAL FAT 9.4g; SATURATED FAT 1g; SODIUM 85mg; FIBER 7.5g; BETA-CAROTENE 3153ug; VITAMIN C 19mg; CALCIUM 210mg; IRON 4mg; FOLATE 83ug; MAGNESIUM 62mg; ZINC 1.2mg; SELENIUM 5.8ug

I sighed and acquiesced to his demands, even though I preferred to look at McDougall recipes, too, before choosing, but he was in a rush to get out so I added a few items needed for this one to my shopping list for our weekly grocery store trip and off we went.

My changes to the recipe:

I used a bag of cole slaw mix, which, when fluffed up, measures around 4-5 cups. I added some shredded carrots to the mix, as some of those commenting on the recipe recommended doing. Because of the excess volume I doubled the dressing ingredients.

I don't own any of Dr. Fuhrman's flavored vinegars, but did manage to grab a fig flavored one at the store. I used that and balsamic, again, as others recommended.

I hate when the type of date isn't specified in a recipe. There's a big difference in size between deglet noor and medjool. I split the difference and used 4 medjool ones, only because they're the oldest in my refrigerator.

Because my husband is a cardiac patient and Dr. Esselstyn advises against them for those people, I skipped the nuts.

Now to put it all together. 

The dry ingredients was easy - pop the slaw into my giant mixing bowl, add the currants, carrots, peel and shred the apples (Hmm, getting a little messy now) and toss them all so everything is well mixed, that the wet apples aren't clumping together (This is getting to be a bit annoying now. They just won't separate!). My husband volunteered to take care of tossing it all so I can work on the dressing.

I recently heard Chef AJ say in a video to pay attention to the texture of the items you need to blend, and blend up hard things with some liquid before adding the softer ingredients, so I took the pits out of my dates and tossed them and the milk in my Ninja together and turned it on. 

What is that ungodly noise?? 

I admit I rarely use dates, and when I do, I just toss the deglet nooor ones in with the other ingredients. This is the first time I'm doing the dates, larger ones at that, first. It sounded like a bunch of marbles were tossed in the blender container! It took a good 2 minutes before they were broken down to itty bitty pieces and small enough for me to add the other ingredients.

It came out really thick, but it all mixed together with the dry ingredients pretty easily, or so said my husband, who was stuck with the task as I cleaned everything up.

I took a taste of a sliver of carrot or two and it was okay, but certainly not anything like deli-bought cole slaw. I'm not a vinegar fan, either, and I'm not too happy with the way this came out. Since we hadn't had any deli salads in many years now, I'm hoping my husband enjoys this healthier way to eat them. He, on the other hand, loves vinegars of all sorts. I realize that today it may not taste all that great and that tomorrow it should taste better. I guess I'll find out in about 23 1/2 hours.

Hope everyone is having a happy Labor Day, and remember that tomorrow starts VeganMoFo, so be sure to check in often in September.

How To Store Lettuce

Looks like I better find some big containers if I want to try this. My lettuce is sometimes browning by the same afternoon I bought it, so every little hint helps. Those "green bags" really don't do any good.

Mayonnaise??

With the summer season now upon us, and being this is the first year my husband is going to be home - and healthy - for it, I'm guessing he won't want to eat seitan sandwiches or have soup every day, so decided to look into some McDougall sandwich spreads and salads.

The main part of most of those recipes is the mayonnaise, so I took a look at all of the mayo recipes throughout the years to be associated with the McDougall program, from the earliest mention in a newsletter with a recipe by McDougall cooking instructor Alex Bury in a July 2005 newsletter, to the latest incarnation in the Kid Friendly Snack, Dips and Spreads article with recipes by Heather McDougall in February 2013, which is the same one posted by Mary McDougall back in a 2005 newsletter, which is the same one in the McDougall Made Easy DVD. In fact, Weight Watcher's mayonnaise was even mentioned in one cookbook as a good alternative because, at least at the time, it was egg and oil-free. IDK if this product even exists anymore. I know another alternative, fat-free Nayonnaise, no longer is.

The McDougall recipe is the one I made up. I figured it's been around McDougall circles the longest so it stood the test of time. It must be good, right?

Tofu Mayonnaise

1  12.3 ounce package firm lite silken tofu
1 ½ tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon sugar
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon dry mustard
1/8 teaspoon white pepper

Combine all ingredients in a food processor and process until smooth.  Cover and refrigerate.

This will keep in the refrigerator for at least 1 week.

The instructions I used said to drain the tofu in a fine sieve first, so I put the package of MoriNu tofu into one of those reusable coffee filters. I never used it for coffee but for straining non-dairy milk. It's really fine. After about 2 hours I got over an ounce of liquid out of it and decided that was enough.

Now to blend everything up in my food processor. It didn't take long to break down and become smooth, I put it all into a pint Mason jar, but before putting it into the refrigerator handed the jar and a spoon to my husband and told him to taste it and tell me what he thinks it is. His guess was unsalted creamy cottage cheese. I said it was supposed to be mayonnaise and he said he would never had guessed that in a million years. I asked his opinion because, as I've said a few times lately, with this cold my taste buds are a bit off, and he's had mayo more recently than I have. It's over a decade since I last had some but only a year or so for him, just a few months before his CABG surgery. I hoped it would acquire some taste overnight in the refrigerator.

It didn't. Hubby suggested adding sugar and paprika so it would taste more like Miracle Whip, a product he always liked more than plain mayo. When asked if he would be the guinea pig and tell me when it got close, he rescinded the suggestion. In fact, he said he no longer wanted me to try make any kind of sandwich salad or spread, that he's lived this long without any tuna or egg salad, real or fake, that he'll be just as happy for the rest of his life continuing to do without them.

I mixed some with ketchup and used it as a spread on a whole wheat roll when I made an onion, lettuce and tomato sandwich. Like that it wasn't bad at all. Maybe tomorrow I'll mix up some more of this concoction and add a little vinegar and water and shake it all up and use it on a bowl of rice and veggies at lunch time.

But I know I won't be wasting any more tofu or garbanzos trying to make a sandwich spread out of it. My husband's mind is made up and tightly closed to the idea. I guess it's back to seitan sandwiches, soup, and the occasional container of leftovers until I can find something else to make. There are loads of non-sandwich spread related salads out there for the trying. Temps already hit 90 degrees here in NJ so it's going to be a long, hot summer, and I really would rather not light the oven every 2 weeks for 90 minutes at a time to make more seitan for him!

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.

Coach Ami and Boxed Salads

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Another new "cooking" video. Great if you like lime juice instead of salad dressing.