The Maui Diet: Blog

The single easiest, healthiest and most effective weight loss tip I know of is in the next sentence—all you have to do is follow it, and it will work for you.

Stop eating your evening meal.

It’s that simple.
It works and it not only is a great weight loss tactic, but improves your health in other ways. Let’s stick to weight loss and talk about the other health benefits of no evening meal in another article.

First, unless you are a lumberjack or in another profession that burns a ton of calories, there is absolutely no reason in our society to eat the evening meal. Period.

There is no argument about this. The three-square-meals a day habit came from a time when most of us worked on farms or in factories.

Pretty much the opposite is true today—we are incredibly sedentary, which means we sit a lot. While driving, while at work, at home, almost everywhere.

Result? Two-thirds of us are overweight or obese.

We just don’t need that extra 500 calories per day that the evening meal provides. We do nothing with it. We don’t burn it off. We store most of those calories as fat. In most cases gradually, over time.

Cut out those extra 500 calories every evening and you quit importing onto your waistline an extra 3,500 unneeded calories a week. Which equals one pound.

This means you only need to burn 250 calories a day exercising to lose a very healthful 1.5 pounds a week. Two hundred fifty calories is easily burnt by taking a brisk walk of 45 minutes.

Definitely make this daily exercise part of your weight loss routine, to keep your metabolism up and running. Because cutting down calories without exercising is called dieting. And dieting doesn’t work.

I am a maniac when it comes to keeping lean. I also do things healthfully, including fat loss. I believe in natural foods. My beliefs and practices many might call hard-core.

Are they secrets? I hate that word secret, as it is used as a marketing scam in many areas, including fat loss.

But I keep secrets and I will reveal some here. These things I do to keep lean and fit I usually do not talk about. I advise people to go the more traditional routes.

For example, I advise making breakfast your main meal of the day; that is not a secret. Making breakfast a healthy, substantial meal is a great fat loss tactic. But my secret is that I do not eat what I recommend people eat, because my personal standard is that only premium fuels go into my body.

I advise people to eat a whole grain cereal, hot or cold, served with soy, almond or rice milk. And fresh fruit. Whole grain toast topped with a natural peanut butter or almond butter. Stuff like that.

That is a healthy breakfast, but outside of the fresh fruit, I do not eat those things. For breakfast I soak in water overnight old-fashioned oats, raw sunflower seeds, walnuts, and almonds, plus raisins and date pieces. That is my centerpiece; I call it super cereal. I often have apple or banana slices too.

This dish is not for everyone, but it is about as healthy as anyone can eat. All whole, natural ingredients, all raw, with protein, complex carbohydrates, healthy fats and fiber. It is nutritious and very filling.

I never eat boxed cereals, even if they are whole grain. These are in fact processed foods, these flakes or whatever. And they have added sugar, only it is called evaporated cane juice. I just do not eat them.
I almost never go for almond, rice or soymilks. Except for some plain soymilks, they all have added sugar.

Another thing, these products are expensive for my tastes. I like to get the best bang for my food buck, and I eat the way I do at about half the cost of prepared foods.

As for the whole grain toast and nut butters, these go to the core of my own overeating and overweight challenge. I have to severely limit these. I do not buy them often. It is too easy for me to eat bread slices, and overindulge in high fat foods like peanut butter. I love that stuff, I spread it thickly on those bread slices, toasted or un-toasted.

Same goes for pure fruit juices. I rarely drink them. They are healthy but they are also huge sugar/calorie hits. I enjoy them very occasionally.

You get the idea. If you are like me, a food lover who loves sweet drinks like fruit juices and fattening foods like peanut butter, you do not buy them very often. That is how I keep lean.

There, I let some of my secrets out. I was not really keeping them secret. I advise people on how to lose fat healthfully and permanently but most are not ready to eat the way I eat. Or restrict themselves like I do. So I strongly urge them to eliminate the horribly fattening stuff like dairy products, mayonnaise, meat, chicken, and replace them with plant-based, whole, natural foods. I stand by that advice.

But I do not expect most people to follow my personal hard-core, maniacal standards. But if you’re interested, they definitely work.

My old buddy Ron. I ran into him recently at a breakfast place, after not having seen him for years. He’s forty or fifty now, and Ron is fat. Hate to see it, hate to say it, but there it was. Big gut hanging out, can’t miss it.

I noted this sad state and sent him love, in place of judging him for letting himself go to pot. Pot-belly. So typical of us these days, unfortunately.

There is no reason for it and there is no excuse for it, as being even 10 pounds overweight is known to be detrimental to health. Fat is just pretty much the accepted norm today. You hit whatever age, and you gain weight. You don’t have to and you shouldn’t, but we all know that’s just the way it is.

As Ron and I catch up on each other, I cannot help noticing what Ron is eating. It is part of his breakfast and he picks it up to eat it. It is one of those god-awful processed slabs of what was once called hash browns. Today they come in a flash-frozen slab, as uniform in size and shape as a Twinkie; they even look like a Twinkie. The term potato turd came to my mind.

Because that is pretty much what they are, a worse than nothing food. It will pass through Ron without much nutritive value at all, as much as his miraculous physical body will do its best to wring every last drop of nutritive value out of it. There just aren’t many nutrients in it.

What his body will wring out of it is the fattening oil it is made with and the oil that it is deep-fried in. Processing and deep-frying have transformed what was once a healthy potato with a fair share of vitamins, nutrients and fiber into this nightmare food Ron was ingesting.

I couldn’t bring myself to check the rest of what Ron was eating. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t need to, because I know what this famous food place serves for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I was drinking water, which is all I had there, including at the meeting I had before I met Ron.

The bottom line of this story is that Ron and I are traveling different paths. Ron, this is my belief, just doesn’t care. Hasn’t educated himself. Like most people, he hasn’t learned that what we eat and drink are the most important things we do every day. And they are.

For Ron, like most people, if that potato turd and the rest of his meal were as bad as I say it is, they could not be sold to the public. Ron is wrong. It is that bad and just like cigarettes, it can indeed be sold, and the herd-like public mindlessly buys and consumes them.

It is up to the public, us, to educate ourselves. It is up to us to put only the finest possible fuels into our bodies. Whole, fresh, natural foods, and that’s all.

It’s not hard. If I can do it, anyone can, including Ron. In the meantime, Ron is fat and I am not. And it’s mostly because of what he eats, pure junk food, and what I eat, whole, natural foods, premium fuels only.

The easiet way to lose fat is to control what you put into your mouth, the food and beverages you ingest. This includes how much you eat and drink, and how you actually eat and drink, and where, when and why.

This is where true, healthy fat loss takes place.

Not to forget exercise, but I urge you to lose the idea that you have to work and sweat and exercise the fat off, put in the miles on the track or on the treadmill, hit the weights and really work out to shape up and burn the fat off the body.

The fat loss program I recommend includes moderately high intensity aerobic exercise a minimum of five days a week, and strength or resistance training three times a week too.

Any fat loss program must include exercise for it to work. Exercise not only burns calories, it also raises the metabolic rate. The body needs calories to operate, even if we do nothing all day. It needs calories to breathe, pump blood, digest food, etc. The metabolic rate for most people is about 75 percent of their total calorie expenditure, around 1,500 calories. You would need to jog 15 miles to burn that many calories.

If you diet, or cut calories, your metabolic rate slows down. Exercise has the effect of keeping the metabolic rate going even on fewer calories. The decrease in calories burned is balanced out when you exercise, and your body burns calories abundantly.

So exercise is important for fat loss, and it cannot be neglected. But remember that you need to jog 15 miles for burn 1,500 calories.

That statistic underlines how important what we eat really is. Even without exercise, our bodies are going to burn about 1500 calories every day. Only we determine what quality those calories are, by what we eat. It only makes sense to someone interested in overall health and fat loss to make everything we eat a top notch, premium fuel. Nutrient dense. Low fat. Foods that give you the best, healthiest bang from your overall caloric intake.

How I recommend you get that premium, high quality bang is by eating a balanced, plant-based diet of whole, fresh natural foods. Foods as grown, nothing added, nothing taken away. These are the premium fuels, low in fat, high in nutritional value and fiber. Excellent for fat loss.

Another huge fat loss factor is to make breakfast your main meal of the day. This might take some big changes for you but they are absolutely worth making.

And to really accelerate fat loss, eliminate the evening meal until you lose all the fat you want to lose. And do not snack between meals. Finally, make water your main beverage. These are the struggle-free ways to really lose fat.