Clean-Plate Club

Bor-ing

Many of us can sympathize. Simultaneously surrounded by food and conflicting messages about it, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and to look for simplistic solutions. Cut out sugar or caffeine, friends will recommend. Drink green tea. Don’t snack. Avoid white foods. Give up your favorites. Chances are you’ve tried one of these approaches, or know someone else who has. But as you might guess, “There really are no magical methods out there,” Husu says, “other than to balance mixed meals throughout the day at reasonable times.”

That’s a “boring” message, she acknowledges, because it hasn’t changed. We all need to be eating more protein and more fiber from complex carbohydrates, and should be putting vegetables and fruits into our meals three times a day, plus having one or two snacks of these same types of food. Each meal should be mixed, Husu says, containing some lean protein, healthy fats, and carbohydrates.

The body uses nearly all of the carbohydrates we eat (which include grains, cereals, breads, pastas, fruits, and vegetables) as energy. Fat—preferably mono- or polyunsaturated, like the kind found in fish, nuts, and olive oil—provides a feeling of satiety. And protein from dairy, meat, poultry, fish, nuts, or a combination of rice and beans “kind of buffers the entry of the carbohydrates and sustains them in your system.” That prevents the crash that can happen an hour after you eat, say, a bagel and nothing else.

“Whenever you know you’re going to go more than five hours between meals, add a snack that’s mixed, too,” Husu says, like a piece of string cheese and a whole-wheat bagel. That small afternoon snack is critical in preventing you from overeating at dinner.

What takes this advice from mundane to amazing is that it works. For example, one of Husu’s clients was a man in his 30s who exercised about five times a week. But he also spent long hours at work, skipped meals, and ate too many high-calorie, high-fat foods. “All of a sudden it was catching up to him,” she says. He was gaining weight, and his blood pressure and cholesterol were creeping up, too.

Husu cut back his 3,000-plus-calorie diet to about 2,000 calories a day, divided between three meals and an afternoon snack. Initially, this didn’t work; he felt starved. So Husu focused on packing more fiber into the 2,000-calorie diet with salad, fruit, vegetables, soups, and whole grains.

“A couple of weeks later, he came back and said, ‘I can’t do this, it’s too much food,’” Husu says. “It seems odd to them at times to be told to eat more, or what they think is more, but they actually end up eating a little less” in total calories than they used to. “People are amazed that they can eat so well and lose weight,” she adds.

The trick is that high-fiber, high-fluid foods fill us up faster and are lower in calories than, say, a cheeseburger, making it easier to create the deficit of 500 to 1,000 calories a day that will spur weight loss of one to two pounds per week. But don’t think that means you have to give up the cheeseburger, or any food you love. “You just have to change the way you eat those things,” Husu says. “Have chips with your meal, not as a snack. Eat dessert to finish the meal, not three hours later as a snack. You’ll eat less of it.”