10 Day Diet Toolbox

When we begin dieting, failing to have a proper plan in place is simply planning to fail, and like any other thing in order to do it well, you need the correct tools.

Here are 3 tools you can use, not only with the 10 Day Easy Diet, but also with any other weight loss plan.

How to Fight Food Cravings and Win

There are many reasons for food cravings, both emotional and physical.

A craving for certain foods, for example chocolate, often in reality is a craving for something else- it

could be physical or it could be emotional.

In order to beat food cravings we need to understand what it is we really need, and satisfy the need

rather than eat the food we crave.

Fight Cravings with Nutrient Dense Foods

Some nutrition experts now claim that food cravings are a sign of a mineral deficiency.

Because our bodies (and minds!) have become so confused due to today’s low-nutrient, high fat

junk food diet that most of us have grown up with, the signals our bodies send to our brains are

completely haywire when the body needs vitamins and minerals.

For this reason, we often still feel a need to carry on eating, long after we feel full because the food

we ate did not meet the nutrient requirements our body needs to be healthy.

Our bodies will crave calcium, zinc, magnesium, chromium and trace minerals. If you haven’t consumed enough of these minerals, you body will send a message to your brain to carry on eating- it will

continue to do so until you have eaten enough of the minerals you need.

That is why although you may be craving chocolate, it is actually a signal your body is short of

magnesium. If you were to eat magnesium rich healthy foods your craving for chocolate would actually disappear.

I was quite amazed to read in one publication that if we are craving a certain food that is bad for us that we should replace it with a corresponding healthy food.

Therefore, if you are craving a Coca-Cola you should take calcium supplements, or eat a large plate of broccoli or turnip greens.

This of course is totally impractical. I know for a fact that if I want to drink a soda I am not going to seek out a plate of broccoli instead.

It is just not going to happen.

However, there is a simple way to make sure we are not deficient on any of the major nutrients or

minerals, and therefore are less likely to crave corresponding junk foods.

Every morning on the 10 Day Easy Diet we will make a nutrient dense breakfast which will supply us

with vitamins and minerals our bodies need, and minimizing the possibilities of craving junk foods during

the day.

This is a very important part of the diet, and your success will be measured by how strictly you

follow this rule, so please do not skip this step.

Recipe

In the Mediterranean regions gazpacho is a popular drink, particularly during the summer months.

I do not recommend buying shop bought versions, because of the additives and the process of

preserving the gazpacho destroys many of the nutrients and vitamins, rendering the drink

more or less useless for our needs.

Gazpacho is very easy to make, all you will need is a blender or a food processor. It is of course

possible to make gazpacho without a blender, but it will make a lot of work, and the point of the 10 Day Diet is it is supposed to be easy, so please try to get hold of a blender or a food processor if you do not

have one.

The following is a typical recipe for gazpacho:

• 6 tomatoes
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 onion
• 2 red and green peppers
• 1 cucumber (optional)
• 6 tablespoons of oil
• 2 tablespoons of vinegar
• 4 tablespoons of water
• (Serves 2/3)

The ingredients are simply placed in the blender, and blended until smooth.

For our weight loss and healthy eating purposes we are going to modify it slightly.

Daily intake for one person:

• 2 large ripe tomatoes
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1/2 onion
• 1 red or green pepper
• 1 small cucumber (optional)
• 1 tablespoons of cold pressed virgin olive oil (optional, I do not recommend using any other oils,
• other than cold-pressed oils, if they are hard to come by, or too expensive in your area, just leave it out).
• 1 tablespoons of vinegar or lemon juice
• 2 Large handfuls of spinach/ kale/ escarole or any other leafy greens.
• (Avoid iceberg lettuce), it has very few minerals or vitamins)
• Water to dilute to preferred consistency.

These quantities are approximate- you may use more or less of each ingredient, but go easy on the oil!

You can make enough gazpacho to last for 2 days but it is preferable to make a fresh batch everyday, as after a while cut fruits and vegetables lose nutrients.

Frozen spinach can be substituted for fresh leafy greens if you are not able to get fresh greens everyday.

This drink will provide you with a large portion of your daily nutrient needs, therefore keeping your cravings for junk foods down to a minimum.

I also add a teaspoon of wheatgrass powder to my morning drink. This can be bought online or some local health shops will also stock it.

Amazingly, although I am now 54 years old, at the time of this update, I barely have a grey hair on my head. This was not always the case- I began noticing grey hairs appearing when I reached my late 30s, and like many other people would cover them with commercial dyes.

When I began using wheatgrass powder (If you have possibilities of drinking/making wheatgrass juice,

do it, it is superior to the powder!) I noticed that the grey hairs no longer seemed to be growing

through, and rather tentatively I began to stop using the dyes. The grey growth did indeed stop, and not only that- even round the temples and brow line where the hair had began to turn completely grey,

the hair gradually went back to my natural dark brown color. I can only attribute this to the wheatgrass juice, and probably in part to the large amounts of leafy greens I was drinking in my morning drink- so please don’t skip the drink- the benefits are enormous.

Finally, when a craving for a certain food hits, ask yourself if eating it will make you happier. Let you final decision rest on whatever makes you happier.

Don’t try to avoid being near food- you cannot avoid it indefinitely- it is far better to be round food and practice controlling your eating than trying to avoid it. Just make sure you know what to do when confronted with tempting situations. You only have to succeed in saying ‘No’ a few times and new neural patterns begin to emerge.

A good way of thinking about it is to compare it to walking in the woods…if you walk the same path every day the path is well worn and very easy to follow.

After a while you decide you no longer want to walk that way- it is not serving your needs any longer and you want to change. At first when you try to walk another way it is almost impossible- there are weeds, brambles and bushes- you have to beat your way through them to make a new path. However after a few days, you can see the new path- it is still difficult to follow, but you can see where you are going.

After a week the new path is quite clear- you are able to walk down it easily, although the old one is also still there.

With time this changes, your new path becomes wider and wider, yet the old one is harder to see- it is

now growing over, and brambles are covering the path. Eventually the old one disappears altogether-

and you new path is now a super clear way that you can run down without even considering going the old way.

Your present eating habits are the old path- your new way of eating I the new path- Yes it will be tough for a few days, but it becomes easier as the days go by!

When you feel you are struggling just remember the path analogy.

Understanding Cause and Effect

I know you will be mostly interested of the nitty-gritty of the diet and what you can or cannot eat, but

there are two very important points that must be addressed if the diet is to be successful for you.

I will make this as short as possible, so we can continue with the meal plan instructions, but please

do not skip these first three chapters, as it is important to have the correct mindset before you begin.

For just about every condition we experience as human beings there is a cause and there is an effect.

If my husband decided to leave me tomorrow I would most likely be very upset,

My distress would verge on despair. His leaving would be the cause and my distress would be the effect.

Likewise if a child falls and bloodies his knee, the fall is the cause and the bloody knee the effect.

In the case of being overweight or obesity, unhealthy eating is the cause and excess fat/pounds the

effect.

To fix the effect (being fat) we first have to adjust the cause, so when our eating becomes healthy and

the weight will automatically right itself.

In a similar vein, if I am a person my husband is happy to be with, he will not leave me, I will not be

distraught. If the cause doesn’t happen, the effect just won’t appear.

If the child walks or runs with a bit of care he is unlikely to fall and his knees will not be hurt.

After interviewing literally hundreds of people who have tried the 10 Day Easy Diet over the years,

I found there was a very clear distinction between the people who lost weight easily and kept it off,

and those who struggled to lose it, and still struggle today.

There is nothing worse than following a diet, feeling delighted when you start losing weight only to put

most of it back on a month later- or even worse to put the weight back on plus some more.

It is vital to follow one golden rule, for this or any other diet to work permanently for you:

Do not Eat with the Goal of Losing Weight- Eat With a Goal “To Be Healthy”.

And that is it.

If you follow this one simple idea, dieting will be easy for you, the weight will fall of faster than you can imagine, and you won’t put it back on.

Now, I know some of you will be annoyed at that- you will be saying “I can worry about that AFTER I

have lost this weight- I didn’t pay good money to learn how to be healthy- I want to be thin!”

That is akin to me acting mean spirited and selfishly towards my husband and hoping he will stay.

Or a boy running like crazy without looking where he is going hoping he won’t trip- it is very likely he will.

Traditionally, and many of you reading will have experienced this during previous weight loss attempts,

we will eat to lose weight (low-fat, low-calorie, low-carb or whatever) and after a few days or a week of struggling we will begin to see some improvement.

We don’t feel optimal, because we are depriving ourselves of foods we would like to be eating, and we

are also depriving ourselves of foods we need to be healthy.

We lose some pounds, our clothes feel a bit looser, and we decide it is OK to have a small treat

‘as a reward’. Within no time we have put the lost pounds back on, and feel miserable failures once

again- our weight loss goals seeming even further out of reach than they did even before we

started the diet.

When we eat to be healthy, this doesn’t happen- I can not explain exactly why this should be- but eating

to lose weight just isn’t strong enough motivation for us- we want it more than anything, but somehow in practice it just doesn’t cut it. If it did, we would all just opt for a low calorie diet and be done with it.

So, I might have a choice of a small bagel for my breakfast or a couple of medium sized bananas.

The bananas are actually more calories than the bagel- the bagel is only around 175 calories, whereas

the 2 medium bananas are around 220 calories, but because I am eating for my good health rather than

my weight, and I know the bananas provide me with a multitude of vitamins and minerals, and the bagel basically will give me zilch in the way of nutrients I opt for the 2 bananas.

So, just drop any prejudices you may have- if you struggle with this concept, don’t worry, by the time

you have reached the end of the book it will make more sense to you and you should be able to accept it without question. Even if you simply cannot get the idea out of your head that you are eating to try to

lose weight rather than to be healthy, you will still lose weight over the 10 days of the diet, but your chances of keeping it off permanently, once the diet is finished are at best, quite slim.

You may be saying “In that situation I would most likely eat the bananas, then decide to have the

bagel too if it were sitting in my kitchen/or offered to me at work”.

How Not to Feel Deprived

Diets generally don’t work. The reason for this is not because we don’t know what to eat, the vast majority of adults know perfectly well which foods are fattening and which are not.

If you are not sure a little research in the library or on the internet will soon give you the knowledge you need, you do not need to spend money on an ebook to learn which foods are healthy.

In this chapter we are not dealing with which foods are healthy, but how to overcome cravings and feelings of deprivation- because unfortunately we are addicted to the non-healthy foods, such as cakes, convenience packet meals, puddings and sugar laden drinks- just as the smoker is addicted to his tobacco and an alcoholic to alcohol. We cannot just abandon eating non healthy foods overnight- if we could we would all be at a perfect weight.

I have never heard anyone complain they are addicted to health-giving foods such as carrots or apples.

Why?

Because carrots and apples are natural foods, that do not contain any addictive substances- but the fore-mentioned foods are unnatural, processed foods and contain addictive substances. The food industry is of course very well aware of this, that simple fact puts billions of pounds into company coffers every year- but we will save that for another book!

For now we will concentrate on what to do when the cravings and feelings of deprivation hit.

Have you ever decided to start a diet on a Monday (I always started mine on Mondays!) and prepared the foods and shopped to find that a day or two before your start date, you would begin overeating more than ever?

You would be cramming as many different foods in during the time you had “left” and only eating the addictive foods completely ignoring fruit, vegetables and salad and anything else that might have been good for you?

If so you are certainly not alone. How many times has a smoker decided on a quit date only to chain smoke like a madman during the days before? And then lights up two hours into the quit day?

Or how many drinkers have gone on serious benders the night before they were going to quit? Just to need a ‘hair of the dog’ in the morning?

Yes, thousands…so when we are trying to stop a certain undesirable behavior (addiction) why do we completely over indulge before our quit date? Surely it would make much more sense to taper off for a few days before we stop indulging?

Off course it would, but an addicted brain does not see it like that!

An addicted brain when faced with no longer using the substance of choice firstly feels terribly deprived.

To overcome the feeling of deprivation, we have to take it step by step- what we need to change first is our mindset.

We are not going to have to forgo the food we desire for ever and ever. (Later we may decide to, but that is later). We are simply deciding to forgo it at this moment, because we want to do something amazing for our health.

So, we decide for this moment we will pass on that chocolate muffin that is looking o inviting in the shopping mall. Will we pass on it later when we walk past again on the way out?

We don’t know right now- later is not our problem, we have just decided to pass on it right at this minute in time. We are doing something more important- looking after ourselves and our body, and we have a whole ton of fantastic shops to look round and better things to spend our money on.

Later we pass the bakery on the way out…

You think:   ”Hmmm, those lovely muffins are still in the window. I must have burned of a whole lot of calories doing all this shopping- it would be nice to sit down with a cup of coffee, and maybe just one muffin….after all so far I haven’t eaten anything fattening all day- and besides I am getting hungry- I need to eat something!”

Answering thought:  “Yes they do look delicious but in reality they are not going to do anything nice for my body- and my health is my priority- I can do without my arteries blocked up by all that fat and sugar thank you very much. Anyway, it would be a bother trying to get in there with all these bags, and get my purse out yet again. For now I am going to pass, and wait till I get home- my food is half prepared in the fridge- I only need to heat it up, and I can sit down in peace and already be eating just 10 minutes after I get in. Now where are my car keys?”

We haven’t denied ourselves anything. We have just decided that just for now we are not going to eat it. Maybe the next time we are here we will- but we certainly are not going to worry about that NOW.

Another Scenario:-

You have been invited to a party at a neighbor’s house- that table is groaning under the weight of all sorts of delicious foods- most of it smothered with mayonnaise and other fattening substances- everyone is tucking in like it is their Last Supper- there is no way you can pass up on these delicious foods.

You think:  “This food is absolutely delicious- there is so much I want to try, in fact I want to try it all! I just cannot stick to healthy eating today….it is impossible!”

Answering thought:  “Well, lets just see how this goes, I don’t have to deprive myself, but I will start of with a big bowl of that lovely fresh salad- at least that way I will get some nutrients”.

After a huge bowl of fresh salad, you begin chatting to an old friend, and notice how other people are looking decidedly uncomfortable. There is Susan sitting over there, whom has had to undo the button on her jeans, and is kind of lolling to one side. She is red and sweaty, and has obviously eaten way too much. Even so, she is still trying to struggle through a piece of Chocolate cake!

You are so interested in what you friend is telling you, you kind of forget about the food for a bit.

After your friend has moved on, you go back to the table- funny the food doesn’t look quite so good now- someone has even squashed a cigarette out on one of the plates, and a spilt beer has completely ruined the potato salad. You decide to get another bowl of salad, it is surprising how delicious fresh salad is when you are hungry, and a baked potato with some grilled sardines.

Needless to say after that delicious plate you are comfortably full, and manage to pass on the cake just by having another glance at Susan, who is looking pretty miserable.

You take a glass of white wine and soda and move away from the table to join some friends at the other end of the room.

By not telling ourselves we ‘Can’t’ have a certain food, and simply by deciding we ‘We can, we are just not going to do it RIGHT NOW’ is a fantastic way to stop those feelings of deprivation.

It won’t work ALL of the time, but it will work 90% of the time- it is very much like the Alcoholics Anonymous adage- One Day at a Time. We don’t think about tomorrow, we just decide for today we are not going to indulge. We will deal with tomorrow when it comes. In fact drinkers are often encouraged to take it just 1 hour at a time, or even 1 minute at a time when they feel under pressure and want to drink. Those minutes soon become hours, which soon becomes another day- as they days pass it becomes easier and easier, until new habits are formed and the old ones drop away- often unnoticed.