Eat to Live question

[Alexandra]

It seems that the author says that you can not snack on this plan (page 179). If you have a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast do you then need to really fill up on fruit and other stuff to make it to lunch?
No snacks...wow - it seems like it would be so tough to follow this plan!

Also may I ask if you lost weight on this plan, have you kept it off? Did you do so by following the Maintenance Plan?

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

[abbeyej]

Well, I would *highly* recommend that you have a piece of fruit with that oatmeal for breakfast.

As for snacks, I know Fuhrman indicates that you shouldn't, but I see no reason to stick to that dogmatically. If you're following the diet in all other ways, but find you're facing hunger between meals, by all means eat! Just stick to fresh, raw fruits or veggies. It can be *very* challenging to consume a pound of cooked and a pound of raw vegetables each day, if you're restricted to eating only at meal times. So keep some raw snacking vegetables available for those times when you just need to eat. Or a piece of fresh fruit if you really need something sweet.

My experience was that early on I needed to snack, but after a short time, the snacking just sort of naturally fell away.

I haven't done a good job of following the maintenance plan for the last couple of months. (Fell off the wagon with a couple of family trips, and never got 100% back to what I'd been doing.) I haven't gained the weight back, but I don't feel as good and I haven't continued to lose (though I could still happily lose a few more). I'm starting back again now. I really did feel so much *better* eating this way. (But man, it takes a lot of time chopping all those veggies! lol...)

[Sunny]

Well, a bowl of oatmeal really does taste much better when you add a fresh peach and banana or blueberries to it :) He recommends fruit with breakfast. Probably more than what you normally eat... but think of it as you need less grain then, and fill up on more fruit.

Dr. Furhman has updated his book. If you go to his web site, he now advertises Eat for Health. In this book, he took his experience of so many previous converts to his eating plan and found that it is much easier if you implement a smaller chunk of his plan than going directly to full "vegan". In fact, he does not call himself this in his new book.... he says he invented this new word to describe his plan. A nutritarian. Pg. 43 says
This is not a book about becoming a strict vegetarian. Instead, this eating style is easily described with a word I coined: Nutritarian: A person who has a preference for foods and/ or an eating style high in micronutrients.

Snacks: The goal is to not eat snacks, however, the real goal is to figure out when you are REALLY hungry, not just wanting to eat. If you are hungry, you may by all means, eat. He does suggest that our stomachs need time between meals to complete the digestion process, so constant snacks are no good. Eat till you are satisfied, not full.