Dr. McDougall's Online Discussion Board

Guidelines are guidelines. Implementations vary.

Plus, one area of confusion (for me) is the distinction of non-starchy and starchy vegetables and whether starchy vegetables count as your "starch."

I have been including oats at breakfast and either potatoes or rice in each lunch and dinner. I'm trying to get more trim. This thread has me eating a large salad and a bag of frozen veggies (heated) and sometime some steamed spinach for lunch. The early results are that I'm a few pounds down. This is encouraging.

It's not something new (eat more veggies and less starch for weight loss).

Thanks Spiral!

-dog

With good results I take my model from those pictures of the buffet table at the McD live in programs. It looks to me like they start with salads, raw and cooked vegies and then at the end of the line there is the main course starch dish. Certainly does not look like a scarcity of raw or cooked vegetables, soups and salads. It does sound from his talks that dr. McD only casually mentions non starchy vegies almost as an after thought but the buffet table certainly belies that impression. And of course the rule there is that you can eat all you want. So no. No paucity of non starchy vegies.

didi

that's what occurred to me as well, dteresa - those pics of the buffet tables!

Thanks for the great discussion.

I just did a quick calculation in the Cron-O-Meter (www.cronometer.com), to see how the numbers work out.

For simplicity, here is a diet of just cooked brown rice and raw iceberg lettuce:

Brown Rice, cooked in unsalted water
1462.45 g
Approx. 3.22 lbs (454 g/lb)
7.5 cup
1623.32 calories

Lettuce, Iceberg [raw]
2849.96 g
Approx. 6.28 lbs (454 g/lb)
50 cups, chopped
398.99 calories

** Remember, 2 cups raw leafy greens are typically considered one serving of vegetables. So we have 25 servings of vegetables in this example day. If we steamed the lettuce, the resulting volume would be much lower, as I am sure many of us have experienced.

Total Calories: 2022

All RDAs met at 80%, with the exception of a few that we have discussed previously on Jeff Novick's boards, such as calcium and sodium.

(If anyone is just stumbling on this discussion without any background knowledge, I would spend some time learning more about the overall dietary pattern and recommendations, especially the "sticky" posts on Jeff Novick's (MS, RD) message board: viewforum.php?f=22 . Novick posts as "JeffN.")

Novick has previously discussed that a target of at least 75% RDA per day seems to be prudent. (viewtopic.php?p=409340#p409340) (75% RDA of Vit A would be 47.5 cups of iceberg for the day.)

The "limiting nutrient" here appears to be Vitamin A, which comes in at 79%. Since all the Vitamin A is coming from the iceberg, we could add in more servings to bump the Vit A up if we wanted to aim for 100% RDA. (For those of us aiming for excellence, we would need a total of 63 cups of raw iceberg lettuce to hit 100% RDA for Vit A, which my Cron-o-meter lists as 3000 IU.)

I hope that helps further the discussion, at least from a nutrient perspective. As we can see, it is still a starch-based diet, with the vast majority of the calories coming from the brown rice.

Thanks again for the amazing discussion. Please have a wonderful day.

MikeyG wrote:I just did a quick calculation in the Cron-O-Meter (http://www.cronometer.com), to see how the numbers work out.

For simplicity, here is a diet of just cooked brown rice and raw iceberg lettuce:

Brown Rice, cooked in unsalted water Approx. 3.22 lbs (454 g/lb) 7.5 cup 1623.32 calories
Lettuce, Iceberg [raw] 2849.96 g Approx. 6.28 lbs (454 g/lb) 50 cups, chopped 398.99 calories
Total Calories: 2022
All RDAs met at 80%

I appreciate this analysis very much. Thanks, Jeff!

Back to salad...people in Ecuador mostly eat fried eggs and potatoes for breakfast with some fruit. My breakfast is generally a bowl of mixed chopped fruit w/ uncooked oats sprinkled on it and something like the salad pictured below. This is this mornings~broccoli, red cabbage, sweet red peppers, baby purple mustard greens, 2 kinds baby kale, leek, sprouted green peas, and nasturtium flowers. YUM!

Thank you for the picture! I wish more pictures were posted of high volume veg meals

Geoffrey,

La fotografía, se me hace la boca agua.

didi

dteresa wrote:Geoffrey,

La fotografía, se me hace la boca agua.

didi

¡JA! Eso era mi plan amigo, ese era mi plan. Disfrute.

Just for sake of clarity, since that salad was mostly really thick red cabbage, broccoli, sweet red peppers and lot of very sprouted green peas it did probably weigh at least a couple pounds! I eat/ate 1/2 for breakfast as is, then 1/2 very lightly boiled as a stew for lunch.

As a newbie, I appreciate this thread.

Not sure why people are upset about the lbs issue. The McDougall diet is not about numbers or measuring yet people post every single day about the cron-o-meter, calories, fat percentages. I've never been curious enough to use the cron-o-meter but I guess some people just like numbers. No matter to me.

No, consciously eating certain quantities may not be "natural eating" but some of us are overweight which isn't too "natural" either. So we may need tools to help, like measuring pounds.

Also, almost daily people post saying "It's not working; i'm not losing weight," and usually the answer is eat more vegetable, eat more vegetables. That goes for me too. So I'm very glad that this thread is about just that.

I just want to say that this thread has inspired me to eat more fresh raw colorful salads everyday so thank you for that!

Eating salad & vegetables first is basically preloading and is recommended by Jeff, mentioned in the MWL book, and, according to Jeff, is a technique used at the live-in program.

Nobody should feel guilty about eating lots of food. Indulging one's appetite is a great part of this WOE and helps with adherence. On portion-control diets, binging would be a natural reaction to white-knuckling through several days of hunger. (And the target of binging is obviously going to be calorie and fat-rich food because that's how we're wired.)

When starting on McDougall from a particularly bad diet, which has happened to me at least twice in the last 6 years, I tend to eat a lot of food for a week or two. This seems to be recovery from the Pleasure Trap and subsides without any intervention on my part except sticking to MWL. Between that induction period and times when I've exercised a lot, which also increases my appetite, there have been days when I've eaten around 8 lbs of food.

Maybe I've never been thin enough (never below a BMI of around 23 in my adult life, through no fault of this WOE but my own), but I've never reached any plateau that forced me to portion control rather than eating ad libitum. Proportion control has always been enough, as long as I was eating on-plan MWL foods. So, maybe I'm biased but I don't see any reason to worry about volume. There is some calorie density, and hence starch to veggie ratio, below which it is physically impossible to overeat.

I am an admitted compulsive overeater. Preloading with vegetables and water-based soup are two of the most important tools I have to maintain my weight-loss (12 years and counting ). I find the following resources most helpful:

Pushing your set-point to the limit:
http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2005nl/ ... ushing.htm

How to help the volume eater:
http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2005nl/ ... 100vol.htm

How to lose weight without losing your mind:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xAdqLB6bTuQ

A common sense approach to sound nutrition:
http://www.jeffnovick.com/RD/Articles/E ... ition.html

Kate