Rick Frea's Common Sense Diet

When I was a kid it was 4-4-3-2, and then they switched to the food pyramid, and now (as you can read here at UPI.com) the government is going to use a plate that reminds consumers to eat half a plate of fruits and vegetables.  I'm tired of these gimmicks, and I think they are too complex and pointless.

According to the article, "As the food icon's Web site -- ChooseMyPlate.gov -- explains, people should enjoy their food but eat less of it and avoid oversized portions. In addition, Americans are urged to make half of their plate fruits and vegetables, make the one-quarter of the plate grains -- and half of those should be whole grains -- and switch to fat-free or low-fat 1 percent milk."

Who the heck wants to keep track of what they eat.  I don't.  I can't even keep track of my check book. 

Likewise, the article notes, "Finally, MyPlate advises Americans to compare sodium in processed foods such as soup, bread and frozen meals and choose food with lower sodium numbers, and to drink water instead of sugary drinks."

So basically they want us to spend time reading labels instead of enjoying food and having fun living.  Plus they want us to drink boring and tasteless water instead of sugary drinks.  I actually recommend this in my diet below,  yet I allow you at least the option of fitting sugary drinks into your diet.

Several years ago I came up with my own food plan and it's called the Rick Frea Common Sense Diet.  It's simpler than any gimmick created by the government and it mostly involves common sense.  Here's my diet:

1.  Eat one portion of protein and one portion of carbohydrate every 2-3 hours five or six times each day.  Scratch the idea of three large meals a day and eating as much as you can to make it to the next meal.  Smaller meals more often keep your metabolism going around the clock.

2.  Serving portions are generally the size of your fist or the palm of your hand, not the serving size on the box which generally tend to be too small to fill the normal size stomach.  However, if your portions are slightly more or less the sun will still rise tomorrow.

3.  You can eat all the vegetables you want but no less than two servings a day, and two of your carbs each day should be a fruit.

4.  For fun food and drink you have two choices.  You can either have one treat each day, or you can save your treats and have what I like to call a free day.  On this day you can eat and drink anything you want such as alcohol, fried food, cake, cookies, candy bars, or whatever you want.

5.  Drink 8-10 glasses of water each day.  But this isn't mandatory to keep your metabolism going, it's simply a good way of making your stomach feel full.  If you'd rather drink coffee go ahead, and drink as much coffee feel you need.

6.  Adjust your diet according to your life.  If you have a bad day at work, or a party at work, or your friend brings in a case of donuts to work and everyone else is having fun, go ahead and take a dip.  Just remember your goal is to stay in shape or get in shape.

That's it.  No calorie counting.  No fat counting.  You can eat pretty much anything on this diet and you're guaranteed to lose weight, or at least maintain what you have. 

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The key to a healthy lifestyle

When doling out food, it is my belief that you should not go by the serving size that's on the package of the product. This serving size was made up by the manufacturer to make their product look good.

I'm not sure what all the rules are, but if you have less than half a gram of fat in a serving, then you can call your product fat free. Thus, if half a cup of corn flakes has 0.499 grams of fat in it, then corn flakes is considered fat free.

Well, corn flakes doesn't have 0.499 grams of fat in a serving, I was just using that as an example. A better example is butter spray. You know butter is bad for you. If you smear a tablespoon of butter on a piece of toast you're getting 5 grams of fat.

Yet if you take the spray version of that butter, one squirt is considered a serving. If you're normal like me, one squirt is never enough. Because the product says fat free, you think you're not putting fat on your bread. Yet you are, because that 0.499 times however many squirts you are using adds up.

Now I don't think one gram of fat is going to hurt anyone, but if you put 10 squirts of butter on your toast thinking there is no fat in it, that comes to 5 grams of fat. Now make that 20 squirts, and you're really delving into the fat with 10 grams.

If you're on a diet thinking you're eating a fat free product, you could be in a world of hurt come Saturday weight in time. You might have been good all week, and you barely lost a pound.

So serving sizes on products are meant to make the company look good. Let's go back to our bowl of cereal example. One serving is half a cup. If you're a little grandma perhaps half a cup of cereal fills you up. Yet if you're a grown man like me, half a cup of cereal is like eating a cracker.

Therefore, a serving size should be based on something other than what's on the side of the box.

That said, what is the best way to determine serving size? First, you have to do your homework. You have to decide what is healthy for you, and what you can eat on whatever diet you're on. Then you have to do a Google search to find out how much fat is in that product.

Or, if you're like me, I simply eat the foods in the Body For Life diet. Yet sometimes there's food not mentioned on this diet, and then I have to use another method of determining if it's a product I can eat.

So that brings us to the: how-to-determine-the-best-serving-size-for-you method. First, you Google your product to learn how much fat is in it. Don't go by serving size, I'm talking: is there fat in it? Or whatever content you're looking for: calories, carbohydrates, etc.

If it's cereal, for example, you pour a bowl so you have enough cereal to cover your fist. And if it's a steak, a portion size (one serving size) would be whatever fills covers your flat palm. If you have a large hand, then you're aloud to eat a little more. If you have a small palm, then you will be eating a little less.

Ideally, if you're eating the appropriate foods, a serving of two or more products should fill you up just nice. The BFL diet allows me to eat a protein and a carb with each meal, plus as many vegetables as I want. You can adjust the diet in other ways depending on how serious you are, yet I usually take the easiest route because I only have one goal: lose weight and/or don't gain.

You can adjust the diet however you want. I mean, if you're really serious, you can only purchase lean meats. You can only eat low glycogen carbs, which would be those that are basically not white, such as no white bread and no baked potato. I believe most fruits are low glycogen, yet you still have to do your homework.

Me, however, I take the easy route. I eat pretty much whatever I want, I simply make sure I get the correct serving size, not the one doled out in a restaurant, and not the miniscule amount noted on the package. As a rule, if I eat a sandwich at a restaurant, I usually cut it in half. Steaks are cut in half too. Burgers, well, it depends on how big it is.

So pretty much on my diet I am allowed to eat steak and hambergers every two hours throughout the day if I want. Of course you have to use common sense here too. How serious are you? Plus, is the meat you're eating lean or not? Usually, I limit myself to one such luxury per day. But you can do what you want.

Farmers back in time would eat when they had the chance. That's where we get our standard three meals a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner. If you really want to be a serioius dieter, you will want to forget about the three meal plan. You should start your own.

The problem with the three meal plan, to make it simple, is by the time it's meal time, you are starving. And what happens when you're starving? You pig out. You eat too much. Plus, by the time you're body is saying it's hungry, it's going into emergency mode and slowing it's metabolism and storing fat -- the exact opposite you want.

You want your body metabolizm to be continuously going. You want your body burning fat all day. You want your body to be a lean mean fat burning machine. To do that you will want to eat a small meal (for example, one protein and one carb with a veggie and glass of water) every 2-3 hours. This will keep your metabolism going.

Usually what I do is I plan on eating two really nice sized meals a day, and I consider these lunch and dinner. Here I will have my steak, potato, hamberger, pork, and vegetable with a bun, bread, or whatever. I want to really be full when I'm done.

Then two hours later I'll have what I call a snack. Stuff I consider snack food is: cereal, cottage cheese, oat meal, yogurt, small sandwich, etc. You might consider these meals, but these things don't satiate my hunger enough to last long.

Thus, after my "meals" I wait three hours before I eat a snack. After my snacks I wait two hours before I eat a meal. That way, I keep myself satisfied. I never go hungry. This is my own tweak of the BFL diet. Whatever diet you do, you can do your own tweaking to satisfy your own body.

I think that's one of the reasons so many poeple fail at diets, becasue they think they can read a diet and do what the diet says. Well, that would basically entail every person in the world eating the same diet, and having the same results. In the real world, that won't work. Every body is different. Every body needs a different serving size.

One more thing here. Another key to not getting hungry is fiber. If you eat a steak or a burger, chances are you will be filled up. Yet if you eat a bowl of cereal, you will probably be hungry in an hour and risk the urge of binging. So, when eating something like cereal, you need to only eat cereal that are high in fiber.

So Special K is out. Sure they say it's a good diet cereal, but you can't eat it becaue it has no fiber in it. You'll just be hungry an hour later. You'll be wanting to eat. You'll be craving that cake your spouse made the night before, or that candy Butterfinger you have in the cupboard.

A couple other rules I have is that if someone offers me something I'm allowed to eat it, or drink it. I don't want to be anti-social. If I'm at my neighbor's house and he offers me a Bud, then I drink up and enjoy. If I take the kids to my aunt's pool and she has cake and hot dogs, then I endulge.

Of course you don't want to do this kind of stuff every day, yet you can. You're body's metabolism needs to be fooled once in a while anyway.

Another rule is when you start your diet, or lifestyle, or whatever you want to call it, don't expect to feel good the first week if you eat small portion sizes. Eat big the first too weeks. Cheat the first two weeks if you need to. Do whatever you need to do to make it through.

Then in wees three or four, when you're stomach has shrunk, you can get more satisfaction from the smaller meal sizes. Then you can tinker with size. When you start you're diet your stomach is going to be full of all the junk you normally eat, and it will probably be large.

Another rule is I take one day off a week and eat anything I want. I try to make this day the one I might be tempted to otherwise eat bad, such as if I plan on going to a party, or aunt Mary's pool, or the neighbors for drinks, I try to make that my day off. Yet things don't always go as planned.

I certainly don't want to be the boring person who says, "No, I'm dieting." You'll never hear me say that. Ever. Nobody knows I diet. In fact, when I go to work, I carry with me a big bag full of food to last the 12 hour shift. I actually take more food with me to work when I'm "dieting" than when I'm not.

The fact is, if you're eating healthy, you can actually eat more and more often. The key is you want to eat several small meals through the day to keep your metabolism going. That's it.

You don't even have to exercise. Exercise helps, as it can get your metabolism going even faster, and muscle burns fat a gazilion times faster than fat, which barely burns anything. So aerobic activity, getting your heart rate over 100 for 20 minutes three times a week is important, but not necessary.

Some form of weight training helps too. Yet, if you hate to exercise, studies have been done, and common sense says this too, if you put into your body less than what goes out, you will lose weight. If you put in 2,000 calories a day and you burn up 3,000, you will lose. It may be gradual, yet if you stick to it you'll lose, or at least not gain.

I guess it all depends on what you want. It all depends on what your goals are It all depends on what kind of food you like. But to sit on the couch all day eating potato chips is not going to get you feeling better about yourself. To get results, you'll need to take some form of action.

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Your choice: Eat healthy or don't eat healthy!!!

I read recently about how in New York some radicals have convinced legislatures to force restaurants into placing the ingredients of their foods somewhere visible on the walls of their restraurants. The goal here is to make people aware of what's in foods so they only eat the healthy stuff.

I don't have a problem with this being done locally, because it is local governments who should be experimenting in this way. However, while the goal by creating all these labels is to get people to make good choices, there has never been a study done that show they work.

Everywhere we look now there are labels, and there is a growing number of evidence that most people just ignore them. When I come across an agreement on the Internet I simply click yes and go on with my life. I don't want to waste my time reading all that Lawyer jargon.

When I want to eat healthy, I make the decision to purchase healthy foods. Yet at least once a week, and sometimes more often, my wife and I choose to eat out. When we do, we most certainly don't want to buy food that doesn't taste good. We want to buy food that has salt and high concentrations of triglycerides. We want to eat hearty.

So they can have labels on the walls of restaurants, or on the wrappers and napkins of McDonald's and Burger King, and I don't think it has ever stopped one person from eating a Big Mac if a Big Bac is on their minds. I don't think it stops them from eating french fries either.

I think we all know fast food is junk food and junk food is not good for us. Yet I think we can go back to the wisdom of our fathers that says, "Anything in moderation is a good thing."

Still, I think the ultimate goal of radicals is not simply to have signs on walls and napkins, they want to "force" restaurants and other food makers to make their foods healthier. A while back New York tried to pass a law making it illegal to put salt in food. They said they were doing this "for our own good."

Lest last I read it, the role of the U.S. Constitution is not to protect us from ourselves, it is to protect us from each other. So they start with napkins, and then it is printed on walls, and then they make laws that tell us what we can and cannot eat.

This all falls in line with their ultimate objective of a government run healthcare system. However, there's an old saying that lines up here well too: You are a slave to the person you are in debt to. If the government is flipping your bills, the government has a right to tell you what to do.

If the government is paying for your healthcare, then the government has a right to lell you what you can and cannot eat. The government has a right to keep you healthy.

And this is why we must be careful what we allow our government to do. The more laws enacted by Congress, the less freedoms you and I have.

Eating right should be a personal choice, not one forced upon us by a government. If you're like me, you're struggling all the time to stay healthy. Yet, if you're like me, life is stressful and you are not perfect.

So, eat well. Or, if you're in the mind for it, make the individual decision to eat poorly like this lady did.


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Your choice: Eat healthy or don't eat healthy!!!

I read recently about how in New York some radicals have convinced legislatures to force restaurants into placing the ingredients of their foods somewhere visible on the walls of their restraurants. The goal here is to make people aware of what's in foods so they only eat the healthy stuff.

I don't have a problem with this being done locally, because it is local governments who should be experimenting in this way. However, while the goal by creating all these labels is to get people to make good choices, there has never been a study done that show they work.

Everywhere we look now there are labels, and there is a growing number of evidence that most people just ignore them. When I come across an agreement on the Internet I simply click yes and go on with my life. I don't want to waste my time reading all that Lawyer jargon.

When I want to eat healthy, I make the decision to purchase healthy foods. Yet at least once a week, and sometimes more often, my wife and I choose to eat out. When we do, we most certainly don't want to buy food that doesn't taste good. We want to buy food that has salt and high concentrations of triglycerides. We want to eat hearty.

So they can have labels on the walls of restaurants, or on the wrappers and napkins of McDonald's and Burger King, and I don't think it has ever stopped one person from eating a Big Mac if a Big Bac is on their minds. I don't think it stops them from eating french fries either.

I think we all know fast food is junk food and junk food is not good for us. Yet I think we can go back to the wisdom of our fathers that says, "Anything in moderation is a good thing."

Still, I think the ultimate goal of radicals is not simply to have signs on walls and napkins, they want to "force" restaurants and other food makers to make their foods healthier. A while back New York tried to pass a law making it illegal to put salt in food. They said they were doing this "for our own good."

Lest last I read it, the role of the U.S. Constitution is not to protect us from ourselves, it is to protect us from each other. So they start with napkins, and then it is printed on walls, and then they make laws that tell us what we can and cannot eat.

This all falls in line with their ultimate objective of a government run healthcare system. However, there's an old saying that lines up here well too: You are a slave to the person you are in debt to. If the government is flipping your bills, the government has a right to tell you what to do.

If the government is paying for your healthcare, then the government has a right to lell you what you can and cannot eat. The government has a right to keep you healthy.

And this is why we must be careful what we allow our government to do. The more laws enacted by Congress, the less freedoms you and I have.

Eating right should be a personal choice, not one forced upon us by a government. If you're like me, you're struggling all the time to stay healthy. Yet, if you're like me, life is stressful and you are not perfect.

So, eat well. Or, if you're in the mind for it, make the individual decision to eat poorly like this lady did.


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