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How to Move into the Excellent Category

Here’s the scoop from me, Star Jones Reynolds: in order to be all you can be physically, your body should be healthy and vigorous, and you really should live in that excellent category. You don’t live there? I’ll help you find your way home, but remember, I’m not going to advocate a particular weight-loss or exercise program because I’m not a nutritionist, nor am I a physician. Lawyers know about a lot about courtrooms and objecting, and zip about health regimens for others.

There are several popular methods to choose from that can be effective in jump-starting your healthy lifestyle change. Among them are:

• Peer group diets (e.g., Weight Watchers)
  
• Prepared food diets (e.g., Jenny Craig)
  
• Programmed eating diets (e.g., Atkins, the Zone)
  
• Appetite suppressants (medication)
  
• Surgical intervention (e.g., stomach stapling, banding)
  

Regardless of how any individual chooses to jump-start a weight-loss program, though, there are three things on which every doctor, nutritionist, health professional, and diet guru agree, and those three principles are what ultimately are working for me, long term. As far as I’m concerned, they comprise the only fail-safe diet in the world, the only one that works for most of us, and for the long run.

Are you ready? Write this down. Magic words.

Portion control

Nutritional balance

Exercise

Simple as that. Eat less. Eat right. Move more. In this country, we’ll do almost anything to lose weight. I know someone who bought a bristle brush that would help her scrub away cellulite, and someone else who wore her magic weight-loss earrings everywhere: granted, these women aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, but when you’re desperate—hey, you’ll try anything. But I, for one, am pretty fed up with diet crazes. You can take any diet on the planet—the low-carb diet, the high-carb diet, the South Beach Diet, the Scarsdale diet, the Weight Watchers diet, the Zone diet, the Three-Hour diet, the Dr. Perricone diet, the Atkins diet (Atkins Nutritionals filed for bankruptcy in August 2005), the French woman’s diet, the ice cream diet, the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet (that’s right—
cabbage soup diet
): you name it, it exists. Think about this statistic: 95 percent of all dieters will regain their lost weight in one to five years. No surprises here: If any one of these really worked, why in the world would we be looking for yet another diet book? Wouldn’t we all be on the same diet if it worked?

Rebecca Blake, MS, RD, CDN, is the senior dietician/nutritionist in the Department of Clinical Nutrition in New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital. She also runs the weight-loss program “Winning by Losing” at the fitness center in the famous 92nd Street Y in New York City, and she maintains a private nutrition counseling service. I’d say she knows a little about weight-loss plans that work.

“Portion control,” says Rebecca, “is the major key to weight loss and its long-term maintenance. If you want to lose weight, you must not allow yourself unlimited portions of
anything
—except perhaps water. A diet like Atkins that promises
you can eat as much as you want of X, Y, or Z is never optimal or beneficial for long-term weight loss.
Weight loss is about achieving a calorie deficit, and, as Star says, that’s achieved primarily through portion control.
Period. The way you arrange for portion control is to consume fewer calories than you will burn by exercise. That ice cream diet, steak diet, bacon diet, cashew diet, or even cauliflower diet—whatever the promised ‘miracle’ food is this month—will never work long term because if you take too many calories in of any of these low-, high-, or no-carb foods, low-, high-, or no-fat foods, you will gain weight—that I promise.

“Still, I try not to even use the word
diet
when counseling my patients because it connotes hunger, deprivation, and other nasty things,” says Rebecca. “Can you ever eat ice cream when you’re on a weight-loss plan? Yes. What about that cupcake? Of course. You can eat everything in a healthy, balanced diet—the question is always, how much will you eat? That’s portion control.”

I’ll say it again.

Portion control

Nutritional balance

Exercise

I had medical help
starting
my weight-loss effort but only discipline and these three elements will lead to my permanent healthy living. It works and it continues working. My guess is that it’ll work for you. Of course, I can and will give you some of my own secret tips and my personal approaches to a firm, healthy body. I do believe that at this point, I’m eating and exercising in the most sensible and effective manner possible. It took me a long time, though, to get to the place where I was sure that what I put in my mouth and how I moved my body was the beginning of a process in which I could learn to love myself, and then love and be loved by a wonderful man.

If you feel you want to try one of those myriad diets I mentioned earlier, be my guest. It probably won’t hurt you unless you go nuts. But in my experience, it will only work as a start to healthy living and will soon be abandoned. It’s
always
not so much what you eat, but how much you eat that’s the culprit. Also, human nature dictates that you can’t stay on diets forever—they’re pretty boring, and the moment you slip, you’re on your way to gaining back whatever you lost. What I know works is the simplest plan in the world because it’s more than a
diet—it’s a lifestyle change. You learn to eat intelligently and to exercise for the rest of your life. You don’t need scales to measure your food, and you don’t need books to figure out calories. All you need is common sense.

Best of all, you won’t feel deprived. And when you meet the man of your dreams (when you’re ready for him, naturally), he’ll probably join you in a portion-control plan, not to mention a workout regimen.

Portion Control

I’m a firm believer in bigger is better for many things. Taxicabs, diamonds, and closets are all better when they’re bigger. Food portions are not better when they’re bigger. Overestimating what a reasonable serving consists of is probably the leading cause of obesity in America. Who makes up these portions? Insane chefs?

Here’s what’s
not
portion control:

• A medium movie bag of popcorn: it contains sixteen cups of popcorn!
  
• An average twenty-four-ounce steak at your local steak house: it contains six servings!
  
• A pretzel from a street vendor: it’s calorically equivalent to six bread slices, six one-ounce bags of pretzels, or eighteen cups of popcorn!
  

“I’m going to eat only one cookie,” you decide. That sounds reasonable. The recommended serving size for a cookie is half an ounce. So, you go to the corner deli and buy only one cellophane-wrapped cookie—you wouldn’t dream of being bad and buying a whole box of cookies. But the chocolate-chipper you’ve just purchased weighs about four ounces (about 700 percent bigger than the recommended cookie) and contains about 500 calories. Ever try leaving three-quarters of a cookie on your plate? Wouldn’t happen. So, if the average adult female needs about 1,600 calories a day, do you really need to take up one-third of your whole daily calorie allowance with one cookie? You’ve been had. If a plate piled high with pasta and meat sauce will set you back 1,600 calories (and it will), is that all you’re going to eat all day? Call that a portion?

Repeat after me: a serving is not a portion. A serving is the amount of food
that nutritionists have decided is the standard amount of food that should be eaten by a healthy person, based on the calories it contains. A portion can vary in the number of servings on your plate. I’ve been in restaurants where I’ve received a plate (a portion) filled with four servings—and I can’t believe I ate the whole thing. Felt no remorse. All I ate was one portion, right? No. I ate a humongous portion made up of four servings.

Bacon bacon bacon bacon bacon

You don’t have to walk around with a tape measure to figure out what a controlled portion of food looks like. Mostly, you have to use your common sense. Portion control doesn’t mean you have to eat what you hate—exactly the opposite. It just means you have to get in the habit of limiting what you love.

For example, my very favorite food in the whole world is bacon. You know how in some diets they ask if it would kill you if you couldn’t have the one thing you really love? Yeah, it would kill me if I couldn’t have bacon. I
love
bacon. I like turkey bacon, I like pork bacon. I like thick bacon, I like thin bacon. I’m like that little dog on television: “Bacon bacon bacon bacon bacon.” I put bacon on baked potatoes, and I put it on an egg sandwich. Today, I had half a chicken club sandwich, and I put two strips of bacon on it.

Tricking Myself

Now, here’s my biggest secret: I trick myself. Normally, two years ago, I would have four or five strips of bacon on that chicken club. Today—just two. It’s a huge difference, but—guess what—I’ve come to the point where I don’t even notice that I’m not chowing down on four or five strips. I do not deny myself my favorite thing in the whole world, but I limit it. I treat this change in lifestyle as a great victory because I don’t want anyone, ever, to take away my bacon. I trick myself into thinking there are four slices on that sandwich, and because I’ve gotten so used to the two, it tastes and feels like four. By the way, on that chicken sandwich, I put a bit of low-fat mayonnaise on one side of the bread and nothing on the other (tricking myself into thinking there’s mayonnaise on both sides). A vat of mayonnaise on the bread, incidentally, doesn’t qualify as tricking yourself. Tomatoes, a slice of onion, some lettuce, and that bacon, and then the last step:
cut it in half
and only eat half. There’s a great, portion-controlled chicken club.

If I could design my perfect dinner, this would be it: a portion-controlled steak, a satisfying half-plate of broccoli rabe, and a couple of tablespoons of mashed potatoes.

My perfect breakfast? Two strips of bacon and one scrambled egg with a little cheese (I don’t have a cholesterol problem, so I allow myself this). No bread—although if I’m really hungry, I’ll eat half a slice. Never, ever a bagel. Here’s a little-known fact the bagel companies try to keep quiet: do you know that one bagel contains the calorie equivalent of five slices of bread?

Tonight, I’m going to have a portion-controlled piece of roast chicken: I’ll put a whole chicken in the oven with some spices on it, bake it at 350 degrees, and in an hour, it’s done. Then, I’ll carve off my deck-of-cards portion (and put the rest away), add a spoonful of mashed potatoes, a lot of asparagus, and maybe a salad. What do I drink? More water than any human being ever drank. There are small bottles of water next to my bed in a small bedroom refrigerator. There are bottles of water in my living room and on my terrace. If you walk into my home, I’ll offer you water first thing. It’s not only a great weight-losing device, it’s the best thing ever devised for gorgeous skin. Sometimes I’ll drink diet root beer, sometimes grapefruit juice, but it’s mostly water for this gal. Dessert? I’m the wrong person to ask on that. I don’t really crave sweets. But if you crave, for example, giant chocolate-covered strawberries, have one giant chocolate-covered strawberry. One. That’s portion control. I do admire oatmeal raisin cookies, so I’ll have one or two after a meal a couple of times a month.

How Do You Know if You’re Full?

Simple. I had to train myself to say, eat until you are full, Star, not until you are tired. If at the end of a meal you say something like, “That was sooo satisfying,” you’re full—not tired. But if you really feel more like saying, “Whew, Lord, I need to go lie down,” you ate too much. This all translates into eat till you’re no longer hungry, not till you’re as bloated as the Michelin Man.

Ask Yourself, “Is It Worth All That?”

Say you need a dish of ice cream—you truly need it. You get up, go to the kitchen, put
one
scoop of ice cream in a dish, wash the spoon you used, put the ice cream
back in the freezer, and walk away from the kitchen. Then you sit down to watch a television show or talk to friends. If you are so craving another scoop of ice cream, it means you have to get up from the television show you’re watching or the friends with whom you’re talking, go back to the kitchen, take the ice cream out of the refrigerator, get another spoon and a dish to put the ice cream in, and make yourself the extra portion.