Diet Full of Raw Fruits and Vegetables

Can Help You Achieve Ideal Weight

Dieting is hard. But with a little practical advice, you could be well on your way to achieving your ideal weight.

By Dr. Arthur B. Robinson

There are many wonderful medical discoveries languishing in the scientific literature—providing no benefits to human health. In large part this is caused by government destruction of the marketplace. The $800 million dollar average price tag for government approval of a new drug is unconscionable.

It functions hand in glove with a “justice” system that prevents innovation by threatening financial destruction for any individual or enterprise that risks failure by using innovative procedures and the government award of monopoly status to a medical bureaucracy that assures delicensing of those who are out of step with currently “accepted” procedures.

These are major factors in determining the fact that medicine inches forward at a snail’s pace as compared with the rate of underlying technological advances.

Wonderful technological improvements in human dietary health became possible over a generation ago, but they languish undeveloped in the backwaters of science, while people live and die without the potential benefits.

It is inexcusable that the question of ideal personal weight and the means for changing weight remain subjects of fad, rumor, and popular articles—little advanced in the past century.

Most people do realize that they would be better off with less weight and the increased well-being that comes with diet restriction. Compliance—the human will to actually change one’s dietary intake—is, however, a difficulty.

Moreover, there are social pressures. My mother, who was not conventionally “overweight” but knew that she was too plump for the best of health, remarked to me many years ago that she did not want to lose weight because then “the wrinkles would show.”

A society that values minimum chronological age over ability and accomplishment places misguided peer pressure on its members.

In any case, what techniques are helpful?

One of the best is the adoption of a diet composed entirely of raw fruits and vegetables.

After the desired weight is achieved, grains, beans, and other staples are added to balance caloric intake with metabolic rate.

The primary advantage of this approach is that there is no limit to food consumption. Fruits and vegetables contain so much water and indigestible material that it is physically impossible to eat enough calories to satisfy an ordinary metabolism. Diet restriction is thereby assured.

Another advantage of this approach is that the balance of nutrients in these foods is excellent. The nutrient composition of spinach, for example, is as rich as that of beefsteak, but, in order to have a normal caloric intake, one would need to eat 30 pounds of spinach per day.

Record keeping is a great help, too.

In our home school curriculum, we have found that asking the student to keep a running graph of his daily math scores—a cumulative graph that remains on his desk—is very effective in the prevention of careless errors. The student knows that, if he becomes careless, he will have to look at the graphical results of that carelessness every day for many months.

Blessed with a high metabolic rate and lots of physical work to do, this problem generally passed me by. As the children took over the farm work and time passed, however, my habits became more sedentary and my weight drifted up from the 167 pound optimum. Occasionally, I would notice this, eat very little for a few days, and put my weight down to about 170.

Recently, however, I noticed that the problem was really getting out of control and decided a more serious approach was warranted.

In this, I was helped by my government, which has caused food composition charts to be placed on most items in the supermarket, and by a new toy—manufactured by Tanita.

Their TBF-622 scale sells for about $70 and gives a three significant figure read-outs of weight and percentage of body fat.

An Omron HBF-301 hand-held fat analyzer is also offered. This tends to give readings that are a little different because a different part of the body is tested.

One wants to burn fat and not muscle. Since fat weighs far less than muscle, these measurements provide verification that both weight and fat weight are diminishing at the same rate. If muscle were diminishing, total weight would decline much faster than weight of fat.

The results were obtained without unusual exercise—which might have complicated the experiment by adding muscle and distorting the weight values.

Weighings in the early morning diminished the effects of variation in body water content.

Using two meals per day made up of canned tomatoes, canned mixed vegetables, whole grain rice, and lean turkey meat, I reduced my dietary intake to 2 grams of fat, 140 grams of carbohydrate, 40 grams of protein, and 700 calories per day—including two mint lifesavers as a bedtime snack.

Weight loss was a little faster than planned because I underestimated my metabolic rate, but at last I am two-thirds of the way back to normal in 18 days.

Now, I have doubled the daily ration by adding canned beans and spinach, so the slope of this graph will diminish.

In another 20 days or so, I should be a reasonably correct weight for a 6’1” 59-year-old scientist who weighed about 167 at the age of 20. My sense of well-being and energy have already greatly increased.

Moreover, the slope of the lines for the two dietary periods will allow me to calculate the caloric intake that will keep my weight stable with no excess fat. If I want to eat more than that, I will have to do physical work. I like to eat, and there is hope for a feast or two, since it is now time to cut our firewood for next winter.

This example contains several lessons.

First, to regain control of weight, it is not necessary to eat the most nutritious foods. Canned vegetables are not the best food, but they held my interest because the cans give me exact food compositions.

Second, the graph has been highly motivating. With many days invested, I am strongly inhibited from spoiling my graph with a dietary transgression.

It is very important to understand that fat is required for good health. It has many uses in the body, including as a fuel source for the heart.

It would be dangerous to drive one’s fat content down to a very low level as though fat were an enemy. Setting as a standard one’s weight when 20 years old helps prevent this.

After achieving and maintaining a weight in this range for a few weeks or months, it is probably desirable for people over 30 to reduce their weight a little further. This puts the person into a true diet restriction mode in which the substantial benefits to longevity that have been observed in animals may apply. ™