This is page 2 of a 2-page Article. Please begin at Page 1 here, to fully understand the Dr. Joel Fuhrman 6-week Diet.
3. Non-Starchy Vegetables
Fill up on as many non-starchy vegetables as you want. These can be cooked or raw.
Enjoy a variety of artichokes, asparagus, broccoli, broccoli raab, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, celery, eggplant, green peas, leeks, mushrooms, okra, onions, sweet peppers (especially red and orange pepper), tomatoes, string beans, zucchini.
These non-starchy veggies are your Filler Food for six weeks, along with beans.
Eat bean SPROUTS too, like chickpea and mung bean. They are low in starch and fill you up.
In the winter I sprout mung, lentil and chickpea in jars. In the summer, I eat fewer bean sprouts. I prefer fruit when it’s so hot.
Frozen vegetables are fine to eat. They’re picked ripe and quickly blanched before freezing.
Freshly picked produce from the farmer’s market has more nutrients than frozen.
Home-grown LIVING food that you grow yourself in your Sprouter or garden, are the most nutrient-rich of all. They’re in perfect balance.
Avoid beans and vegetables in cans and jars.
4. Cooked Beans or Legumes
Eat one cup of cooked beans or legumes daily. Dr. Fuhrman writes in Eat to Live (#ad):
“Consider beans your preferred high carbohydrate food.”
The starch in beans is 50% slowly-digested starch and 50% resistant starch — a good form of fiber that you don’t digest.
This means you don’t absorb about half the carbohydrate calories in beans. They fill your tummy but never go to your fat cells! How cool is that?
Dr. Fuhrman describes beans as:
“among the world’s most perfect foods. They stabilize blood sugar, blunt your desire for sweets, and prevent mid-afternoon cravings. Even a small portion can help you feel full.”
Eat beans for your lunch, instead of bread. You’ll find a wide variety in the health food store, such as aduki beans, black turtle beans, black-eyed (cow) peas, cannellini beans, chickpeas (garbanzo), fava (broad) beans, haricot beans, kidney beans, lentils, lima (butter) beans, navy (great northern white) beans, pigeon peas, pinto (sugar) beans, soya beans, split peas, white beans.
If a bean germinates and it’s not too starchy (like mung, lentil, chickpea) then I sprout it for 2-3 days and eat it raw. But then I eat only half a cup.
If it does not sprout, or it’s too starchy to eat as a raw sprout (like kidney, navy, pinto) then I soak 2 cups overnight and simmer in the morning for five minutes. Then I sit my pot inside a Wonderbag Non-Electric Portable Slow Cooker (#ad). My beans cook all day without electricity, while I’m at work.
I love my Wonderbag! I used to dread cooking my beans. They always boil over unless you keep an eagle eye on the pot. This way gives me four cups of cooked beans, so I cook only twice a week.
Your chief calorie source is the cooked beans. Davis & Melina point out in Becoming Raw: The Essential Guide to Raw Vegan Diets (#ad) that a cup of dried mung beans (cooked) has 640 calories, of which 70% come from the carbohydrates in beans, and only 3% from fat. Beans are low in fat!
There’s also 44 grams of protein in this cup.
Compare a cup of bean sprouts. It has only 3 grams of protein, and 31 calories per cup. Mung bean sprouts are 90% water, like fruit.
If you eat only bean sprouts, and no cooked beans, then you may not get enough calories and protein.
That’s why I treat bean sprouts as a low-calorie vegetable, like green peas, and NOT as a legume.
You can spice up your cooked beans in so many ways. My favorite is curry. They’ll stay good in the refrigerator for up to 3 days, or freeze them if you cook once a week.
Dr. Fuhrman writes:
“Eating beans and greens are the foods most closely linked in the scientific literature with protection against cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke and dementia.”
Dan Buettner in The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest (#ad) writes:
“Lead with Beans. Beans (legumes) are a cornerstone of each of the Blue Zone diets.”
So to live long and strong, eat your greens and beans! Actually, Dr. Fuhrman says the best foods are: G-BOMBS: Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms (cooked), Berries, and Seeds.
5. Fruits
Eat four fruits or more daily. I love Dr. Fuhrman because he eats fruit for breakfast! It’s my favorite breakfast too.
After eating your pound of raw vegetables and pound of leafy greens, and your cup or two of cooked beans, then eat as much fresh fruit as you want, up to 40% of calories.
Limit your fruits to four a day if you’re diabetic, want to lose weight quickly, or have difficulty losing weight. Fruits are high in calories, as are nuts, grains, and starchy vegetables.
Frozen fruit is okay, usually it’s raw — not blanched like frozen vegetables. But again, no canned fruit.
Sun-dried fruit you can use a little, only to sweeten a dish, maximum 2 Tablespoons a day.
Avoid dried fruit preserved with sulfites. Read labels! Sun-dried apricots are dark in color, whereas those with sulfites are orange.
Dr. Fuhrman writes in Eat to Live (#ad):
“Eat at least four fresh fruits per day, but no fruit juice. Shred or cut up apples and oranges and add them to your salad for flavor; they will help you feel full.”
Enjoy a variety of apples, apricots, bananas, blackberries, blueberries, clementines, cherimoyas, cherries, figs, gooseberries, grapes, guavas, kiwis, kumquats, mangoes, melons, nectarines, oranges, papayas, peaches, pears, persimmons, pineapples, plums, raspberries, satsuma, sharon fruit, starfruit, strawberries, tangerines.
Try the more unusual fruits. They often are less hybridized so they give you more nutrients. That’s your goal — more nutrients per calorie!
LIMITED: Eat Only a Little
- Omega-3 Seeds — eat one Tablespoon a day for your essential fats. Alternate between flax, hemp, and chia seed. Buy whole seeds and grind in coffee grinder. Eat within 15 minutes of grinding. Soak in a little water for a few minutes to make a pudding. Do NOT use any oil.
- Raw Nuts & Omega-6 Seeds — eat maximum 1 ounce or 28 grams daily. Feel free to leave out on any day. Omega-6 seeds are sunflower, pumpkin, sesame. Do NOT eat roasted or salted nuts.
- Avocado — eat maximum 2 ounces or 57 grams daily. Feel free to leave out on any day.
- Cooked Starchy Vegetables, and Whole Grains like brown rice or millet — eat maximum 1 cup daily if you lose weight easily, or you don’t want to lose weight. Otherwise leave out on most days.
Starchy vegetables include acorn squash, butternut squash, cooked carrots, chestnuts, corn, parsnips, pumpkins, rutabagas, sweet potatoes, turnips, water chestnuts, white potatoes, winter squash, yams.
Grains must be whole grains, such as fresh organic (GMO-free) corn, millet, oat groats, brown rice, teff.
Enjoy the four pseudo-grains — amaranth, buckwheat (kasha), wild rice, and quinoa. They’re pseudo because they look and act like a grain, but botanically they’re not a grain. They have fewer calories and more protein.
See my recipe for raw buckwheat-quinoa porridge. It saved me from buying muffins and donuts on my way to work in Manhattan 🙂
Avoid the “bad gluten” grains. That’s wheat (all kinds, including spelt, kamut, durum & einkorn; and wheat products like bulgur & semolina) and barley, rye, and triticale (a rye/wheat hybrid).
Dr. Tom O’Bryan reports that this bad gluten leads to leaky gut and a host of health problems, such as autoimmune or heart disease, ADHD, and foggy brain.
OFF-LIMITS: Do Not Touch for 6 Weeks
- No Dairy.
- No Eggs.
- No Animal, Bird, Fish, or Seafood (except sea vegetables like kelp and dulse).
- No Processed Foods — no oils, no candy, no food in a can or jar, box or wrapper. Eat only fresh (and frozen) food from Nature and cook it yourself, or blend it raw, or juice it.
- No Snacks Between Meals — give yourself 3-4 hours to digest a meal.
- No Fruit Juices, not even home-made raw juice — drink water or herb teas. A little apple added to green juice to make it tasty is okay.
- No Starchy Vegetables or Whole Grains — if you’re diabetic, want to lose weight quickly, or have difficulty losing weight. Otherwise a cup a day is fine.
- No Processed Grains! No bread, breakfast cereal, pasta, white rice, cookies, cakes, rolls.
- It’s best to OMIT ALL GRAINS for six weeks. When you feel a strong need for starch, eat the starchy vegetables. The colorful veggies give you far more nutrition.
- NO COMPROMISES for six weeks!
Dr. Fuhrman writes in Eat to Live (#ad):
“If you follow my program precisely for the next six weeks, your body will undergo a remarkable transformation and you will be witness to its miraculous self-healing.
…Do this very strictly for just six weeks and see how much weight you lose. Most get so excited with the results during the six-week ‘trial’ that they are motivated to keep going. The stricter you are, the more quickly your taste will change.”
You Grow From Inside Out
How can you choose whole and living foods if an outside force compels you to eat junk? If, like I was, you’re insane? And want to be dead?
For you, I have good news. When you blend and juice greens, you grow from inside out, like a plant.
There’s no way I could ever have quit SFS Drug cold turkey for six weeks! I was too big an addict.
Simply by eating Energy Soup daily, no matter how much junk I ate, I slowly healed.
Over time, you never again have a stuffed-down desire. You know what happens when you want a cookie, but you force yourself to eat an apple? You get Deprivation Hunger.
One big stress and you topple over into a sticky barrel of calories and fat, sucking you in. You guzzle a dozen cream donuts to replace the one lost cookie.
Loneliness will do it to you too. My #1 Tip is: Find a Support Group. Ideally a local one. I got sober in a woman’s AA group in Brooklyn. If you’re an isolator, then go online. Two good groups are:
- Dr. Fuhrman’s Member Support Center, and
- Jon Gabriel’s FREE 30-Day Support Group Trial — Jon was stressed out in a Wall Street job and lost 226 lbs (103 kg).
When the desire itself leaves you, that’s when you’re free. You pass a cookie store and you want nothing. It’s like passing a photocopy shop.
There are four ways to lose the desire, and thereby lose weight:
- Eat junk BUT ALSO — blend Energy Soup or Green Smoothie five days a week for one year, and juice greens as often as you can; or
- If you’re a dieter, follow the Joel Fuhrman way for six weeks, and create healthy habits; or
- If you hate dieting, join Jon Gabriel for one month, download all the Freebies and test his NO-DIET way; or
- Hire a personal cook and a fitness trainer, get up at 5 every morning to jog, and control everything you eat.
I did it the first way. Oprah Winfrey hired the staff. Oprah writes in Make The Connection (#ad):
“It’s amazing how your tastes will change when you make it a habit to begin eating healthily.”
The more RAW you eat, the more your body will thank you 🙂
Do This Today
Go shopping for fresh fruits and vegetables, organic if possible.
Add fresh food from Nature to everything you eat. Even if you’re eating a cheese sandwich, add fresh lettuce or alfalfa sprouts!
Remember, you don’t need to eat grains for breakfast. Green Smoothie is a perfect breakfast.
If you add 1 or 2 Tbsp of ground seeds to your Smoothie, you’ll feel energized and full for hours.
On raw living food, every cell works to peak perfection. You fulfill your highest dreams.