Hi Renee, and thanks for your response!
I appreciate the input, but I think my wife is really looking for NO impact exercises, so I guess we'll go with one of the strength building DVD's, would you agree with others that Pure Strength is the one to start with, or would you go for Slow & Heavy?
Now to the "other" issue. Cool, and I don't mind a bit that you've "hijacked" my thread!
I think I'll try to con my wife (Claudia) into answering you on a lot of this, as she the cook in the family and has some fantastic ways to make veges taste great! But first let me say, my wife & I were both on the McDougall diet for health reasons and lost no weight on it (except by counting calories, which we don't have to do with Dr. Fuhrman's diet.) There's a major difference between their diets, namely, Dr. McDougall has a lot of grains in his diet which have much lower levels of phytonutrients (than what's found in all those greens in Dr. Fuhrman's "diet"), so even though his diet may reduce your chances of getting heart disease, or help control your diabetes, unlike Dr. Fuhrman's, it will probably not ELIMINATE your chances of getting heart disease, nor CURE you of your diabetes, which I think will happen with the Eat To Live diet!
Now to your issue. You need to have a way to eat more greens without feeling "blanded to death," nor getting fat from all the oil in the dressing. On the latter issue I can help. Claudia and I have found a WonderFul salad dressing that is a Delicious Raspberry flavor!
It's called Consorzio Raspberry & Balsamic Fat-Free Dressing, it costs about $3-4 per 12 oz bottle, and it's so good we buy a box of 6 bottles at a time to make sure we don't run out of it. (I hope posting this here doesn't cause a national run on it that makes it unavailable to us!) My wife usually uses 2 tablespoonfulls which only contain 30 calories, and this is for a salad that is half a large head of lettuce (for each of us), then we sprinkle walnuts on it (for those good for you Omega 3, anti-inflammatory essential oils), not to mention adding another delicious topping for us. [Of course, for those of you who haven't read Eat To Live yet, this is just the salad, then there's more later for the rest of the meal). You'll probably like the fact that Consorzio is based in Napa, California.
For more ideas, you might want to join the online group at drfuhrman.com, even though it's not free, it's worth it, as they get to ask individual questions of Dr. Fuhrman, and they also share recipies, and he has an information packed newsletter bi-monthly (every 2 months) that's 8 pages long with all the lastest info, or an in-depth topic discussion. (Again, I don't get any "kickback" or whatever for advocating for his healthy ideas etc.)
My wife has developed an excellent sauce whose main ingredient is cashews, for pouring over & mixing in with steamed kale, so I'm going to turn this over to her, and ask her to give you her recipe, including amounts of kale to use etc. Good luck in your quest for perfect health! DrD
Hi, this is David's wife. The recipe isn't really original, rather I just modified the recipe for "Kale w/Cashew Cream Sauce from the ETL website, to produce the "onion haters" version, because David and I don't like onions. Anyway.... steam an entire bunch of kale, and while it is steaming, blend up 2 ounces of raw cashews, 1/2 cup plain soymilk, 1 1/2 teaspoons of vogue vege base, and 1/8 tsp of asafoetida (hing) to make the sauce. That last ingredient is an exotic indian spice, that we onion haters tend to use. Vogue Vege Base is my favorite soup broth powder, and the original recipe actually did call for it. Pour the sauce over the Kale, mixing well. This recipe serves two (in our house, anyway).
Two other vegetable oriented recipes I use a lot are from the ETL book. I take the recipe for Tofu Spinach Pot, and substitute an entire bunch of Swiss Chard, which is really excellent in that recipe (in addition to being an onion hater, I also hate spinach). I also substitute 1/8 tsp of asafoetida for the 1/8 tsp of onion powder. The second recipe is the zesty tomato garlic dressing, which I make a whole quart of at a time. This dressing goes well on salads with beans, corn, and tomatoes on top. You can throw frozen corn on your salad and don't even have to pre-cook it. If you carry your salad to work with you, it defrosts just fine and is nice and sweet. David likes edamame beans (soy beans) on salad, and I like chickpeas.
We eat salads at lunch and at dinner, so we each eat about a head of lettuce every day. We also have a cooked green vegetable at dinner time, which means we split an entire bunch of some cooked green vegetable between the two of us. I also eat about 2 cups of starchy vegetables every day, and only occasionally have any kind of grain.
As far as all that salad goes, the easiest way to do it on work days is to buy the bags of salad greens. We split a bag of salad greens for each of our salads. For weekend salads, I'll do the washing and chopping myself, but during the week its way easier to just buy the bags of salad greens even though they cost more.
DrD back again, a few extra pieces of info: 1. the asafoetida (hing) may be hard to find, you'll probably have to go to at least a health food store, and maybe an Indian foods store (cheaper there than at a health food store) to find it; 2. the edamame we get are frozen and then only have to be cooked for 5 minutes, they are about the size and shape of kidney beans but are a bright green, so don't substitute the little tiny brown soy beans you might find otherwise, I don't think they'll taste nearly as good, (from what I've heard); 3. We got large plastic reusable containers to carry our salads to work everyday for lunch, we got them at Walmart, they're made by Rubbermaid, and say "Stainshield" on them; 4. It's kind of funny, we used to eat sandwiches everyday, now we almost never do, and we therefore eat a lot less grains than we used to; 5. Another couple of things we've noticed are: a) when we quit dairy products, Claudia lost her sinus allergies which caused headaches, b) her cholesterol dropped 60 points!, c) I had decreased headache frequency, and d) my blood pressure dropped 40 points (from low level hypertension at 145/95 to better than "perfect" BP at 105/70 ! ! !; 6. Another way to get veges into your day, and have something delicious is what we do at breakfast most days: It's called a Carrot Citrus Cocktail (sorry, no liquor). The recipe is: (Per Person) 3 ounces of organic baby carrots,
1/8 of a lemon (peel and all), 1/2 of a can (can size 16 or 17 ounces) of sliced or shredded pineapple and 1 cup of ice cubes. Put it all in a VitaMix (VitaMix.com) as this will kill most blenders, and run it on the highest speed for 1 minute. Then drink a delicious beverage for breakfast, add popped corn, or nuts and/or raisins (or oatmeal and raisins) to complete the meal.
This is more than I had time for tonight, but appreciate your input, and wish you the best. Also, don't forget to go to drfuhrman.com and check that out.
Love,
). Another option for low impact, but getting to do all of Cathe's amazingly fun step routines is to find or cut a rug the size of a step and use it flat on the floor in place of the step. I know that some women do this while pregnant or for lower impact on the knees.