How I Took Control of My Diet

Eating Whatever I Wanted

For over a decade after I moved out on my own I more or less ate whatever I felt like. I tried to eat 'healthy' (whatever that meant) but in general I didn't have any plan or purpose for what I would eat. By the time I was close to finishing my undergraduate degree I had gained about 30 pounds and needed to take drastic action.

My roommate and I started a workout and diet plan in my last semester of university and over the next four months I got into the best shape of my life. After reaching my fitness goals I managed to stay in shape for about a year until my old habits leaked back into my life and I gradually gained back the weight...the problem was that I could convince myself to achieve a short term goal but I didn't have a long term plan.

Making a Plan

Two years ago when I had hit my self-imposed weight ceiling (200 lbs) I decided it was time to do something again but that this time I wouldn't settle for a short-term solution. So I began googling...but I wasn't really sure what I wanted. Most diets I could find online were catering to simply losing weight, gaining muscle or optimizing athletic performance. I don't really care about any of that. For sure, I felt like I needed to lose weight but not for its own sake. Ultimately, what I realized was that I wanted to be 'healthy' and if I had to attach a measure to it I wanted my diet to help me live as long as possible...

So finding a diet designed for longevity doesn't appear to be a common request. You can find articles and blogs on this subject of course but many just provide general information (eat lots of fruits, vegetables and legumes...gee why didn't I think of that myself!?!) and the ones that did provide diets didn't match my eating preferences (I'm kind of a picky eater...). I also decided that if I did go with someone else's diet plan, even though the meals weren't my favourites, I could probably stick to it for a while but I'd ultimately slip back into my old routine.

The Mediterranean Diet

Through the googling I did something that consistently showed up was the Mediterranean diet. A lot of the suggestions you get for what's healthy and what's not is dubious at best but the research backing up the Mediterranean diet and its impact on longevity seems to better than most. It's definitely not beyond reproach but I decided that if I was aiming for longevity I could do a lot worse than the Mediterranean diet. That said, a lot of the foods commonly associated with Mediterranean diets weren't up my alley...so I adopted the food pyramid but not the typical meals.

So how do you do that? Well, I took the pyramid on the right and used it to estimate how many servings per month (and by month I mean 28 days) it implies. As you can see the pyramid gives you a sense of the frequency but it's not exactly a formula. I converted it into a formula...



As you can see the table I created on the left is a little more user friendly for those of us obsessed with precision and it's much easier to plug into Microsoft Excel. I also figured out what exactly a 'serving' was for each of the food categories - which you can see in the comments section of the table. I'll never understand why a 'serving' always seems to be significantly less than any North American would eat with an actual meal but I digress. For those of you willing to argue this point with me you had better enjoy eating the 2.5 oz steak I cook for you next time you're over at my house...

Turning the Pyramid into a Plan

Once I had my pyramid converted into numbers I then had to decide how many calories/day I was targeting. The pyramid gave me a proportion to target but not an absolute number. I decided to target 2,000 calories/day given my height and level of activity (this may or may not be appropriate for you). With all that done I could then start categorizing the food.

Categorizing food? Yeah, it turns out that to do this I needed to take all my favourite meals, break them into their unique parts and then decide which category they fit in. Just consider that you might eat 3 pieces of pepperoni pizza for dinner. That pizza probably contains a serving or two of "Red Meat", a serving or two of "Vegetables" (tomato sauce), a few servings of "Cheese" and a few servings of "Bread". That's an extreme example but unfortunately I had to do this for every meal I wanted to include in the plan. The table below shows a snapshot of this exercise.

So now that I had an idea of how much of each food category I wanted to eat and how much of each category my favourite meals were it was time to put it all together. This involved some trial and error as I didn't want to do it mechanically. I had selected a 28-day cycle for my meal plan specifically because I didn't want my meal plan to become predictable. If I then started calculating how much I needed to include in the plan and spread it out evenly there would be a pattern and outside of a few special meals (bacon and eggs on Sunday for example) I really didn't want a pattern. Regardless, I started typing in meals at random and created a calculator on another spreadsheet to make sure the randomness eventually converged on my desired calories and proportions. I never did get it exactly perfect but below shows my final analysis of the plan.

The Result

Here's the final product: my 28-day, 2,000 calorie/day meal plan based on the Mediterranean diet but filled with only my favourite North American meals...