The Pritikin Principle
The Pritikin Principle: What It Is
Everyone who's ever thought about going on a diet has at least heard of The
Pritikin Approach: a low-fat diet, not vegetarian, but largely based on
vegetables, grains and fruits. Fat in the diet accounts for a mere 10%. Since
1976, more than 70,000 people have spent time at the Pritikin Longevity Centers
learning how to eat healthy, prepare low-fat meals and snacks, and incorporate
exercise and stress-reduction techniques
into their lives. Several books by Nathan Pritikin carried the message of the
Pritikin approach to the masses. It was an approach designed largely to promote
well-being by lowering cholesterol and helping
diabetics normalize their blood sugar without taking insulin. That people lost
weight was an added plus.
Now his son, Robert, has taken over and tweaked the concept. The same
plant-based foods of the original are the staples of his diet, and the fat
content of the regimen is still about as low as you can go. But Robert's latest
book, The Pritikin Principle (following The New Pritikin Program and
The Pritikin Weight Loss Breakthrough) focuses on something he calls The
Calorie Density Solution.
He claims the concern is not calories but rather how dense they are in any
given food. Fill up on foods that have relatively few calories per pound and
you will lose the "excess body fat that threatens your health and
longevity."
Choosing foods that are not "calorie dense," such as apples and
oatmeal, promises to "give you the freedom to eat until you are full and
never limit your portions or be hungry in order to lose weight." The higher
the caloric density of any given food, the more likely it is to cause weight gain, because you will
consume more calories to feel full than if you choose foods with a lower
caloric density. A pound of broccoli, for instance, has only 130 calories
(that's raw and unbuttered, of course) but a pound of chocolate chip cookies
has 2,140 calories. You get the drift -- broccoli, good; chocolate chip
cookies, bad.
The Pritikin Principle: What You Can Eat
Some foods have more calories packed in them, bite for bite and pound for
pound, claims Pritikin. If we eat foods with fewer calories per pound, we can
fill up on these foods and still have the kind of calorie deficit that we need
to lose weight. Pritikin doesn't shy away from the basic principle that weight
loss is achieved by eating fewer calories than you burn each day, which is
refreshing, given the spate of current diet books that attempt to ignore that
simple but unalterable axiom. The Pritikin Principle has more than 20 pages of
charts listing the caloric density of all kinds of foods, from snacks to
sausages, listing them in calories per pound to graphically demonstrate the
striking calorie differences between low-density foods and high-density
foods.
Not surprisingly, the more processed the food, the more likely they are
packed full of calories. Corn, for instance, starts out at a somewhat
reasonable 490 calories per pound. By the time it ends up in a tortilla chip at
your favorite Mexican restaurant, it's skyrocketed to 2,450 calories per pound.
However, eat it with guacamole, and the combination (avocado dip with the
chips) drops the number to 1,450 calories per pound.
The plan is to eat food with a large volume of fiber and water to fill up
your stomach -- vegetables, fruits, beans, and natural, unprocessed grains.
These foods, he claims, "create tremendous feelings of fullness, or
satiety, in your stomach." In addition to eating three meals a day, the
program incorporates two "calorically light" snacks as well. While
Pritikin doesn't have you counting calories, you do have to possess a basic
understanding of how to calculate the "average caloric density of your
meal," and then keep that average below a certain number.
Exercise is strongly recommended, and walking is his favorite. How much is
just right to maintain weight loss? Based on observations of obese people who lost weight
and kept it off, Pritikin suggests "All of us should use ... 30 miles a
week as a goal." For the rest of us, however, he suggests one 30-minute
walk a day. Going at a good clip, you might average 12 to 15 miles a week.
Diet & Weight Management RSS