Starflower’s Journey to Health

[Starflower]

MWL thread post for 12/30

Hope you had a lovely trip, Mark!

Hi team!


1) Start each meal with a soup and/or salad and/or fruit. NO

2) Follow the 50/50 plate method for your meals, filling half your plate (by visual volume) with non-starchy vegetables and 50% (by visual volume) with minimally processed starches. Choose fruit for desert. YES?

3) Greatly reduce or eliminate added sugars and added salts.  This includes gourmet sugars and salts too.  If either is troublesome for you, you can eliminate them. YES

4) Eliminate all animal foods (dairy, meat, eggs, fish, seafood). YES

5) Eliminate all higher fat plant foods (i.e., nuts, seeds, avocados, tofu, soy). NO

6) Eliminate any added oil. NO

7) Eliminate all higher calorie-dense foods including flour products (i.e. bread, bagels, muffins, crackers, dry cereals, cookies, cakes), puffed cereals, air-popped popcorn and dried fruit. YES

8 ) Don’t drink your calories (especially from juices & sugar-sweetened beverages). YES

9) Follow these principles, eating whenever you are hungry until you are comfortably full. Don't starve yourself and don't stuff yourself. YES

10) Avoid being sedentary and aim for at least 30 minutes or more of moderate exercise daily (i.e., brisk walking). YES

Victories, comments, concerns, questions:

It was a good week, considering. Some of the busyness got to me and I made some poor choices with high fat foods and bread, and one food that had some oil. I’m going into the new year hopeful that the lessons learned will lead to better adherence in the new year. The posts in the thread below from some long-term successful McDougallers are inspiring! Wishing us all success in joining them. Onward!

https://www.drmcdougallforums.com/viewt ... =1&t=62592

Happy 2024! Wishing everyone a wonderful and successful week and year!

[Starflower]

I’m making a resolution to post on this forum daily in order to achieve better adherence. The support and community here make a big difference. Today I’m visiting family. I managed to eat only fruit and black coffee at breakfast. Nothing else was compliant. Lunch is order-in Chinese food. Hopefully there will be brown rice and steamed vegetables. Taking it one meal at a time!

Edit: Brown rice and steamed vegetables were delicious! I had one non-MWL food today, some guacamole. It was a conscious decision due to a family member that worries, and it allowed me to refuse several other things that were not McDougall compliant without being noticed.

[Starflower]

Today is going well so far, with lots of vegetables and whole starches. Brown rice, baked potatoes, beans, carrots, cucumbers and steamed greens. I’m actually eating as planned! Most of the New Year’s treats are compliant, so I have good choices.

Happy 2024!

[Starflower]

Today went very well. I experimented with a few new recipes and found a couple I really like. They’re simple and quick. Double win!

[VegSeekingFit]

Happy New Year, Starflower!!!

Your NYE food sounded delicious!!

Sounds like your week / year is starting off great!!! Yay!!

Cheers,
Stephanie

[Starflower]

Happy New Year, Starflower!!!

Your NYE food sounded delicious!!

Sounds like your week / year is starting off great!!! Yay!!

Cheers,
Stephanie

Happy New Year, Stephanie!

Thanks for your kind words! You’re starting 2024 strong! Hope it’s your best yet!

[Starflower]

It was a pretty good day. I had some sunflower seed butter, so that’s one miss, but the rest of the day was on plan. Potatoes, spinach, beans, oats, carrots, noodles, brown rice, and applesauce.

[Starflower]

I stayed on plan today despite a lot of stress and tempting foods for family, except for a little sunflower butter again. Quinoa, rice, green beans, apple, corn, carrots, beets, spinach and potatoes. I need to reduce salt further. The condiments I’m using add up to too much over the course of a day. Time to search the recipes for low/no salt sauces.

[Starflower]

Today was busy, but good. Food was on plan. Quinoa, rice, green beans, corn, carrots, beans, apple and pear. There is vegetable stew in the slow cooker for tomorrow. This is starting to feel less like a struggle and more like my normal. Progress!

[Starflower]

This thread seems to have gotten bumped because of a spam post (removed now). Lucky for me, lol! It’s a very inspiring thread!

https://www.drmcdougallforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=57787

[Starflower]

MWL thread post for 1/6


Hi team!


1) Start each meal with a soup and/or salad and/or fruit. YES

2) Follow the 50/50 plate method for your meals, filling half your plate (by visual volume) with non-starchy vegetables and 50% (by visual volume) with minimally processed starches. Choose fruit for desert. YES

3) Greatly reduce or eliminate added sugars and added salts.  This includes gourmet sugars and salts too.  If either is troublesome for you, you can eliminate them. YES

4) Eliminate all animal foods (dairy, meat, eggs, fish, seafood). YES

5) Eliminate all higher fat plant foods (i.e., nuts, seeds, avocados, tofu, soy). NO

6) Eliminate any added oil. YES

7) Eliminate all higher calorie-dense foods including flour products (i.e. bread, bagels, muffins, crackers, dry cereals, cookies, cakes), puffed cereals, air-popped popcorn and dried fruit. YES

8 ) Don’t drink your calories (especially from juices & sugar-sweetened beverages). YES

9) Follow these principles, eating whenever you are hungry until you are comfortably full. Don't starve yourself and don't stuff yourself. YES

10) Avoid being sedentary and aim for at least 30 minutes or more of moderate exercise daily (i.e., brisk walking). YES

Victories, comments, concerns, questions:

It was a good week. Except for some sunflower seed butter and some guacamole, everything was on plan. The guacamole was a decision in order to not worry a quite elderly family member. I would like to get my salt intake lower. I’m working on making some condiments that are salt-free, since commercial condiments are the source of most of it. Onward!


Wishing everyone a wonderful and healthy week!

[Starflower]

Mark’s response to me included a link to a 2020 post by wildgoose. There are so many good ideas here! Experimenting will be fun.


Re: July 2020 McDougall MWL Weigh-In Group
Postby wildgoose » Fri Jul 10, 2020 1:15 pm

Sauces/gravies/toppings are a very individual thing, but I can tell you what we do and see if anything resonates with you.

Salsa (homemade — a pull chopper like this is really helpful for making easy salsa)
Soup, stew, or especially chili. I make a lentil chili with kidney beans and pinto beans, loads of tomato, onion and garlic, in the Instant Pot. The Gander and I really like it, and we pour it over everything, especially as it gets thicker when it’s in the fridge for a day or two.

Chunky marinara — again, homemade. Took me a while to make this easy. The trick for me was lots of fresh basil. Now the jarred stuff tastes horrible to us.

Anything starting with my cauliflower base.
Steam some cauliflower, fresh or frozen (how much doesn’t matter; I just fill my 2-quart microwave steamer) until it’s very soft.
While it’s steaming, water sauté chopped onion and garlic, then add mushrooms and cook till they’re as done as you like them. If you don’t like mushrooms, leave them out (I have to do half a batch with mushrooms and half without, because the Gander is allergic).
Take the steamed cauliflower and put it in a blender (do this in small batches — hot food in a blender can build up steam pressure and blow the lid, which is unsafe and very messy), blend until smooth. You can add the onion/garlic/mushroom mix to the blender, or stir it in to the blended cauliflower if you like a chunkier sauce.
Add some of the leftover warm steaming water until you get the desired consistency.
Season with whatever you like — we use Benson's Table Tasty.
This can be a base for anything. Add vegetables, spices, herbs — the sky is the limit. The Gander and I like to add chopped broccoli.

Finely chopped veggie mix (for us, that’s usually something heavy on broccoli, celery, carrot, onions; asparagus if it’s in season), water-sautéed with a lot of garlic, with a drizzle (and I do mean a drizzle — don’t drown the stuff) of balsamic vinegar.

Anything based on Jeff's SNAP meals.

Mary McDougall's smashed pinto beans. We totally love this easy way of doing pinto beans. We make burrito bowls with a layer of brown rice, a layer of beans, chopped romaine, chopped tomato, and chopped onion. "Stuffed" baked potatoes are good this way too.

It got easier for me when I stopped chasing recipes and started working with techniques. I learned the technique for the cauliflower base, and that gave me any combination I wanted. I learned a couple of basic soup techniques, which I can change up if we get bored. I’ve been playing with marinara for years.

What is not MWL and/or didn’t work for us anyway:

Anything with cashews or other nuts. Way too high in fat, way too rich, just made me want to overeat.

Ditto anything with tahini or nut butter.

Fake "cheese" sauce or anything with nutritional yeast. Often calorie dense and not that tasty in my opinion. I know I’ll get disagreement here, but to me, nothing tastes like cheese, and anything that gets me thinking about cheese is not a good idea.

You’ll probably get good suggestions from others, or by searching this board, but I hope that at least gives you some ideas.

Goose

*edited spacing

[VegSeekingFit]

Hi Starflower,

Thanks for posting that old thread that got resurrected. What a great read!!!

Also, glad that Mark shared Wildgoose's post with you. Reminded me too that I want to try her cauliflower base sauce. I bought a pull-chopper maybe a year and a half ago (based on WG suggestion) and it makes delicious salsa very easily. Love it!!! Please share if you find a favorite new technique.

Hope you have an excellent week!

Best,
Stephanie

[Starflower]

Hi Starflower,

Thanks for posting that old thread that got resurrected. What a great read!!!

Also, glad that Mark shared Wildgoose's post with you. Reminded me too that I want to try her cauliflower base sauce. I bought a pull-chopper maybe a year and a half ago (based on WG suggestion) and it makes delicious salsa very easily. Love it!!! Please share if you find a favorite new technique.

Hope you have an excellent week!

Best,
Stephanie

Hi Stephanie!

Lots of encouragement there! Mining the older posts is on my to-do list now.

I hope the cauliflower sauce comes out well. It sounds delicious!

Wishing you an amazing week!

[Starflower]

Yesterday and today went pretty well. I was still struggling with the sunflower seed butter. I added some to my food tonight and for some reason it made me feel really sick. I’m going to call that a good thing. I have no desire to repeat the experience! Is it part of eating this way to lose tolerance for high fat foods? That’s an interesting question. It would help, lol!