On A Diet? Use a Chef, Not A Dietician, to Prepare Your Meals

There is no way around it. An effective nutritional game plan blends science with taste. Diet food stinks because the foods are bland, repetitive and unimaginative. Either that or they are trans-fatty acid, frozen TV dinner, nightmare meals sold as a “healthy alternatives.” Frozen “diet foods” contain more chemicals preservatives than the medical lab at your local hospital. Some people use willpower to overcome taste habits.

Most people don’t have (or desire) this iron-willed determination and drive for perfection. The iron ruler types tend to dismiss those who can’t hang with 24-7-365 helpings of George Foreman-grilled chicken breast, rice and broccoli. (Ad infinitum ad nauseum) Iron Ruler types say “You just don’t want it bad enough!” The sane way to develop an effective performance eating regimen is to get your nutritional science and facts together, then seek out food preparation tips from the world’s great chefs. We want to learn how to inject flavor and variety and imaginative flair into our everyday food preparation.

Performance eating is a Purposeful Primitive phrase and could be called, “beyond dieting.” Dieting is all about calories: performance eating is about nutrients. Calories are certainly a part of the PE equation, but nutrient manipulation is synchronized with cycled weight training and cycled cardio. Get the three elements of the PP fitness triad lined up and moving in the same direction and reap optimal physical results in a minimum timeframe.

We need do our own food preparation. To depend on mom or the wife or the girlfriend to make our meals is a major imposition and you lose the element of control. You become dependant on another for results. Besides – we’re not talking rocket science. Assuming you have a propane grill a Weber grill, a stove and a skillet, how easy is it to grill a perfect steak, sauté a perfect rainbow trout filet, steam shrimp in beer, hickory smoke a brace of “beer can” chickens on the Weber grill? These are easy to prepare and they are all diet foods people! So easy to prepare its ridiculous: we all need become miniaturized Iron Chefs.

Culinary proficiency is easy! As any celebrity chef worth their kosher salt will tell you, what makes a dish taste great are fresh ingredients. Prepare them minimally. When an ingredient is freshly harvested (animal, fish, fowl, fruit or vegetable) the unique flavor of that ingredient is at its freshest and most vibrant. A top chef knows not to smother, muffle or dilute that unique vibrancy of flavor: just prepare it in such a well that the natural tastes are presented with minimum interference. Stand back and let that incredible flavor shine through!

You know how to make a perfect steak? Buy the best meat. Find a butcher shop and get the good stuff. Some experts will coat the meat with a light coating of olive oil; most don’t coat the meat with anything. Let the beef sit out on the kitchen counter for three hours before grilling to allow the intracellular fat to soften. Salt and pepper both sides. Throw the steak on a blazing hot grill and let it sit and sear shut on one side. After a minute or two, flip the steak and sear the other side – not quite as long…this seals in all the good stuff. Place the seared steak on a cool part of the grill away from flames a let it roast until the meat reaches an internal temperature of 140-degrees for medium rare. How hard is that?

Want to roast a perfect chicken? Slather it in olive oil or safflower oil, season it, and stick it in the oven for 45-minutes at 350. Fish fillets? Easy. Vegetables? Easy. The key is obtaining fresh ingredients and having the tools and an arsenal minimalist recipes ready to roll out and use…easy to prepare and all ready to eat inside 15-minutes. Purchase quality cuts of lean beef, seek the freshest fish and shellfish, fowl can be prepared dozens of ways, each tastier than its predecessor and all falling within the acceptable performance eating limitations.

Fresh vegetables can be prepared in a myriad of delicious ways. Sautee thin cut vegetables in olive oil or safflower oil, bake sweet potatoes and yams, basmati rice is exotic and acceptable and delicious…on and on it goes. You can eat so many varieties of acceptable diet food that it boggles the mind.

There is plenty of room for variety and imagination when it comes to imaginative preparation of what we can and should eat. One night grill filet beef medallions…then the next salmon, pan fried with baby onions and red peppers from the garden…scallops in extra virgin olive oil…beer can roast chicken…hickory smoked turkey…ditto vegetables…roasted, grilled, baked, sautéed, steamed or flash fried…I would rather have a chef as my dietary guru than a clinical scientist, a dietician, RN or medical doctor – scientist all too often reduce diet strategy to numbers (calories) and neglect any and all reference to the psychological aspects of food control.

The most important single factor in successfully dealing with the nutritional leg of the Purposefully Primitive philosophy is psychological: you have to maneuver your psyche into a new perspective: taste can be built into “diet foods” and therefore there is no reason to eat forbidden foods. Some foods are easily converted into body fat: sweets, saturated fat, alcohol and man-made stuff…pasta, pies, cookies, chips, etc. Some foods are virtually impossible for the body to transform into body fat: protein devoid of saturated fat, fibrous carbohydrates. We bias our food selections towards foods hard to transform into fat and shy away from foods that easily find their way to fat storage depots.

We eat often. We eat those foods that will be used for energy, used to build muscle or excreted. By eating smaller amount more often you are never hungry and 80% of binges occur when the person is hungry. Since we know exactly what ingredients are in-bounds and out-of-bounds, we know what food types to steer clear of. We don’t need a scientist or dietician to tell us what to eat, how much to eat or when to eat it. We know that already. What we really need is someone like Mario or Bobby Flay or Anthony Bourdian to show us a dozen ways to prepare a chicken breast, or how best to prepare a piece of fish and make these dishes so delicious we are totally oblivious to the fact that they are diet foods. I have eaten diet foods so delicious that you’re thinking about second helpings within the first two bites.

It tastes so good you instinctively glance towards the bowl or pan to see if there are any more left. If there is, you wolf down the piece on your plate. If there is no more, you slow down to a snail’s pace and savor every bite…Top culinary experts can show us how to best assemble the approved ingredients. I’d rather eat 500-calories of an outstanding dish than 500-calories of bland prison gruel. If my divine portion is slightly smaller than its bland-0 opponent, I’ll take quality over quantity every single time.

Coming soon! “The Obesity Solution” is designed to help overweight men and women physically transform themselves into healthier, thinner, more fit individuals. Designed by Marty Gallagher, a world champion coach and former washingtonpost.com fitness columnist, he will take you by the hand to help you achieve permanent fat loss.

For more information, visit http://www.purposefullyprimitive.com/announce.html and get a FREE special report on how to stick to a diet the easy way!

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