Weight Loss Tips – Lose Weight With The Mediterranean Diet

Holidaying in Southern Spain this year we enjoyed the Mediterranean food. A typical meal was salmon fillet with home-made pesto sauce (basil, pine nuts and olive oil) and stir-fried Mediterranean vegetables.

Our Mediterranean veg medley consisted of aubergines (eggplants) and courgettes (zucchini) and sweet pepper.

I wonder why in the UK we use the French word “courgette” while in the US the same vegetable is the Italian “zucchini”. It’s as if neither English-speaking nation quite got around to naming the vegetable!

Anyway, our meal of salmon, pesto and veg was bursting with the nutrients that you will find in a healthy diet. Omega 3 fats in the salmon, monosaturated fats in the olive oil, and polyunsaturates in the pine nuts. Plus all the fat-soluble vitamins that go with this (that’s A, D, E and K).

At this meal we have no starchy carbs (potato, rice or bread) because excess starch is fat-producing. And we get all the carbs we need from the veg medley.

And the veg are bursting with plant chemicals that will make your arteries sing!

Now note that this meal is not low fat. But it’s so tasty and nutritious that your body does not need tons of this food. And this diet is good at lowering cholesterol in spite of (or perhaps because of) its fat content.

The Standard American Diet (or SAD!) contains 42% fat, mostly saturated fat. American doctors are keen to get patients on to a low fat diet (around 20% fat) to lower cholesterol. But the Mediterranean diet lowers cholesterol almost as well as the low fat diet – and tastes a lot better and is bursting with nutrients.

And the Mediterranean diet contains… wait for it…38% fat. This news makes the American cardiologists’ arteries burst because they have difficulty acknowledging that such a high fat diet works!

It is, of course, the right kind of fat. And this diet is low in sugar and rich in whole grains, so there is more than just the fat contributing to lowered cholesterol.

The “low fat = health” lobby is so strong (and think how many diet plans are built around it) that it is only through clenched teeth that some doctors will acknowledge that the Mediterranean diet is healthy.

But this diet satisfies our taste buds and the satiety centres of the brain. We enjoy the food and feel full.

So you may not be on the Mediterranean but you can eat nature’s bounty while adding to your health and reducing your waistline.

The Mediterranean diet is of special benefit because of all the colourful vegetables it contains. Sweet peppers, for example, come in various colours and all are good to eat. I like the red ones because they add some visual punch to a meal and are especially useful if you don’t care for tomatoes (another red fruit that is closely related to peppers).

So what is so wonderful about this redness? Well, you get a whacking amount of vitamin C, lots of benefical flavonoids to keep your arteries healthy and a good dollop of carotenes. The carotenes are the red pigments that give the pepper its colour.

Carotenes are powerful antioxidants and tend to be fat soluble so they’ll act as antioxidants for the fat-containing bits of you. Now I know you’re thinking fat wobbly hips at this point but cast such thoughts aside!

Structurally fat is used for useful things like making your cell membranes. Tissues made up of a lot of layers of cells have a lot of cell membranes and so, for example, your skin has a lot of fat in it. I’m not talking about the layer of fat under the skin, I mean the actual structure of the skin cells. Fat soluble antioxidants help protect these cells. And this includes your inside skin – so the carotenes will protect your skin, your gut wall and lungs (these latter two your inside skin!).

Carotenes in the skin protect you from ultra-violet light and I have seen some research that suggests people on a Mediterranean diet have more natural sun protection (but don’t ditch the sun cream).

You’ll also have a lot of fat-related substances in your reproductive bits (ovaries, testes, breast tissue) and in your nervous system which is 60% fat. So you need a reasonable amount of fat-soluble antioxidants in your diet to keep all these parts of you in good working order.

So get your Mediterranean fish and vegetables, with reasonable quantities of olive oil, nuts, seeds and whole grains to be healthier and slimmer.

(c) 2008 Liz Copeland

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