10 Great Food Ideas For Permanent Weight Loss
Together with the right psychology, these ideas can make your success permanent and a real pleasure.
I lost 140 pounds after 25 years of weight loss failure when I discovered the solution as a behavior therapist. I’ve kept it off for 35 year and I have been teaching others since. Success is not in a diet. It’s in the psychology and mind control that creates the success I teach as The Anderson Method. However, there are some foods and ideas about food that especially stand out that made success much easier. They, as part of a holistic approach using the sciences, can make your success permanent and a real pleasure.
1) Planned meals and Active Fasting.
The first edition of my method in 1985 emphasized creating lifetime habits of planned meals, no spontaneous eating, and “active” and intermittant fasting. Planning engages the subconscious to make success easier, like hypnosis, and all the techniques I teach utilize mind control principles that super-powers your will.
Successful people do not eat spontaneously, on a whim or “at will” throughout the day. They have planned meals of their own creation and preference. Between those meals, they don’t eat. In my approach, I frame that as “active fasting”, like a religious practice. This is a CBT (cognitive behavior therapy) “reframing” technique that changes how we experience abstaining between those meals. Instead of them being periods of deprivation and emptiness, they become periods filled with meaning and achievement, devoting ourselves to whole health, body, mind and spirit. At the same time, we are burning calories and burning fat. Instead of having “nothing” in those periods, we engage in something important, something big. We are accomplishing something valuable, burning calories , burning the fat we’ve stored, and we are making ourselves healthier every moment we do.
It doesn’t matter whether you have 2, 3, or 4 meals per day, when they are or what they are, as long as it achieves your caloric objectives and: 1) are a pleasure, and 2) are something you can live with long term. All my clients have different eating patterns and different food choices. It’s all up to you. As far as the quality of the nutrition, clients may start out with a diet that causes dietitians to blanche. However, in this process clients naturally improve the quality of their eating as they become more invested in their health. They often end up eating much more healthfully than a lot of dietitians do!
2) The 5-day/2-day pattern
Another idea I introduced in 1985 is the 5-day/2-day pattern of eating. This is done for several reasons. One, your way of eating to reach and maintain your goal weight must include all of the foods you ever plan on eating in the future, like birthday cake, steaks and turkey dinner with all the fixings.
For women, doctors usually prescribe a diet of 1000 calories per day to lose, and often no more than 1400 per day to maintain. How are you going to fit those favorite foods in and lose weight? It’s impossible! Trying to stick to those diets usually results in a big failure after a short period, realizing you can’t live like that and then giving up. It’s the “what the hell” phenomenon that has you going back to overeating and gaining.
With my method, we go for an average of those caloric goals, going below them on weekdays, and then having more on the weekends, so the average creates a nice satisfying loss and the weekends includes the higher calorie things you know you’ll want to include for the rest of your life.
3) Soup or protein shakes for lunch.
Most clients have 2 or 3 meals a day, and save most of their calories for a satisfying supper at the end of the workday. Lunch can easily be kept to around 200 calories by avoiding fast food places, where the meals can add up to well over a thousand. Soups, like Progresso vegetable soups, are fast and easy with a microwave, and very filling. Protein shakes are also easy, insure a high protein intake, and will suppress appetite for the afternoon. Most offices and workplaces have microwaves and refrigerators. Having these lunches ready to go can make the lunch hour relaxing without the need to rush out, eat fast, and rush back.
4) Food as money.
Another CBT technique I teach is the economic analogy. Calories are like dollars. The physics of weight control is simple, scientific, and as dependable as the law of gravity. (See my article Science-Based Weight Loss.) You can find out what your metabolic rate is, and then think of that as your paycheck or budget. The different foods you like to eat have a price you pay for them in calories, like dollars.
When you think of managing your eating like managing money, it changes everything. Some things are bargains, like diet sodas at 0 calories. Some things are a waste of hard earned cash, like the gourmet coffee drinks of 700 calories. You start getting stingy with your calories, unwilling to pay for things that are mediocre or a bad deal. Foods you like that are a good deal start to taste better and are more satisfying. Expensive foods lose their luster and appeal.
When you are under budget, you’ll feel like you made a killing. If you are a bit over budget one day, you won’t feel like a total failure. Instead of feeling like you “blew it” on a diet, you’ll see you didn’t really ruin everything, but only lost a little ground.
In the eating economy, we work to create deficits instead of surpluses, and the satisfaction of building the cumulative deficit is way better than building a bank account! And eating without paying attention to the count can be ruinous. It’s like shopping at the mall with a credit card and getting everything that you like without looking at the price tags. It can ruin your life!
5) Eggs and Egg Beaters
Eggs are almost magical in their ability to carry you through the day without the hunger most people get when they have fruits and grains for breakfast. Protein acts as an appetite suppressant, but eggs are much better than other protein-rich food like meats. I don’t think anyone knows why. Egg substitutes do the job as well, and at half the calories. I use them for veggie omelettes. For scrambled eggs, I’ll blend two egg substitute portions with one real egg so the texture retains the tactile quality of real scrambled eggs. Without the real egg, it’s just not the same, kind of crumbly rather than a cohesive portion. The result is a 3 egg scramble for about 150 calories!
6) Fresca
I know I’ll get a lot of flak for recommending diet soda, but it’s been a life saver for me. It’s easy to make a sandwich at 250–300 calories, but water never satisfied me with a sandwich, hot dog or burger. And I like to drink as much as I want at lunch, instead of being limited. If I had fruit juice or a regular soda, the calories would go through the roof. Weight control would be impossible with them, as well as that awful feeling of being restricted. Any zero-calorie drink will help, though the caramel coloring in colas is linked to cancer. As far as the criticism of the artificial sweeteners, there’s no sound scientific evidence that any of the artificial sweeteners approved for use in the United States cause cancer or other serious health problems. And it’s not like I am overdosing on it. I rarely have more than 12 ounces a day. And even if it’s someday found there is something unhealthy about it, I’m certain I’m much better off than I was being obese. I’ve been drinking diet soda for more than half of my 70 years, and I don’t think I would have made it past 40 the way I was. Today, I’m healthier than I was at 30!
7) I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Spray
I couldn’t stand vegetables without some butter and salt on them. I tried, but they were just so bland, and butter added 35 calories a pat. When I broke down and stated using butter or even low calorie spread again, I’m sure I used more than that. The fake butter spray gives my steamed broccoli and asparagus or frozen veggies a nice saucy glaze, very tasty, and practically no calories! Again, like the diet soda, it is something I can use liberally without feeling restricted or going over budget.
By making vegetables more palatable with the buttery spray, veggies have become a life-saver. With my method, we eat everything we like, and with the new calorie consciousness, we tend to automatically increase the vegetable portions while whittling down the meat portions. It gives us lots to chew to feel very satisfied, without a lot of calories. We don’t give up meats, but we reduce the portions while increasing the volume of vegetables.
8) Fat-free low calorie versions of favorite foods and mixing low calorie products 50/50 with the real thing.
I like half-and-half with my coffee, maple syrup on my pancakes and decent salad dressing on my salads. But the fat-free half-and-half and sugar-free maple syrup didn’t cut it for me. Neither was I happy about doing without great coffee in the morning or pancakes on Sunday.
I’ve switched to Splenda for my coffee (0 instead of 12/tsp), Hellman’s Light Mayo for my sandwiches (35 instead of 100/TBS) and found some low calorie dressings that are great, cutting those calories by half or more.
Some low-calorie versions of my favorite things didn’t cut it, flavorless or worse, and not palatable at all. However, I found that by cutting fat-free half-and-half with the real thing, and sugar-free maple syrup with real Vermont maple syrup, I could save lots of calories and still have those foods that tasted great. I’ve done the same with salad dressings. It’s like using coupons! Anything you can do to reduce caloric intake and enhance the pleasure is a great thing, even little things. To me, it’s reminds me of what Ben Franklin said, “A penny saved is a penny earned”. Little changes can make a big difference when they accumulate.
9) Eating out only on weekends.
Restaurant eating can be a budget buster. Some restaurants have some thrifty offerings but when I sit down in a restaurant and look at the menu, those tempting pictures can easily overwhelm all my good intentions. My self-control is totally dependent on using my behavioral methods and rules.
People not paying attention can easily do 3000 calories for a restaurant meal. Even paying attention, it can be difficult to keep it under 1000. I found that restaurant eating on weekdays was out. Restaurants are for weekends.
Eating out for lunch was also a trouble-maker. My way of keeping a day under 1000 was to keep breakfast at about 200 and lunch about 250. There was no way that was going to happen eating out for breakfast or lunch at nice places. So, I limit restaurant lunches to McD’s burger, Taco Bell’s soft beef taco or a hot dog with mustard, relish and onion from a vendor. No real restaurant eating on weekdays.
10) Maintaining a “safe house”.
I don’t want to think about how many cartons of ice cream I’ve thrown down the garbage disposal.
With my method there are no “bad calories”, except ones that are not worth the price for the pleasure. Ice cream, at 150 a serving can be OK, budget-wise, even on a weekday. A small dish of chips or handful of cashews could be fit into a weekend day. That wouldn’t be bad if I could do that. The problem is, I can’t. If that stuff is in the house, there is no such thing as having a small amount for me. If I bought a carton of ice cream, bag of chips or can of cashews, I’d measure out the right amount, have that, and then just keep getting up and getting more until it was gone. I could go through a half-gallon of ice cream in no time, and I would have gotten more if there were more in the house.
With all those things, I tried multiple times to eat just the portion, and then fail. Each time, I’d tell myself, “I think I can do it now”, try, and then I’d break down and eat the whole thing. The last times I tried, I was able to stop myself after a few dishes, but I felt disgusted with myself and chucked it down the disposal. When I stopped smoking years ago, I learned I’d go back to the trash for the contraband if it was still intact. That’s what addiction can do.
I finally accepted that this was the way I was. I just could not have that stuff in the house. My weakness did not make me a bad person. But it did make me fat.
We all have flaws, and compared with some of the other things my fellow human beings do, overeating is not that terrible. So, it doesn’t mean we are unworthy of all the good things in life. In fact, we have other qualities that more than make up for that flaw. It doesn't make us bad people. But it did make us fat.
So, I don’t have anything in the house that I have a problem with. No chips, salted nuts, cookies, cakes ever, in the house. If I entertain and serve those things, I send them home with the guests. I’ve made my home a “safe house.”
I still have those things on occasion, but it’s on a weekend or a holiday, at a restaurant or a party, and then I leave for home. It’s enjoyable and no problem that way. And I get a kick out of people seeing me have those things if they don’t know I’m a weight loss therapist, especially the ones on a diet, torturing themselves. They say “I can’t stand you skinny people who can eat everything like that and not gain weight! I gain weight just by looking at them!”
I’ll say to them, “Actually, I lost 140 pounds eating like this and I’ve kept it off for years. Have you ever heard of The Anderson Method?”
William Anderson is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, the author of “The Anderson Method of Permanent Weight Loss” (paperback and Kindle at Amazon, audiobook at Audible). He was obese until his early thirties when he found the solution. He lost 140 pounds, has kept it off for 35 years, and has taught thousands to successfully manage their weight.
