Digesting Information

While at BlogHer, I had an opportunity to meet  with some people from Readers Digest. We all know Readers Digest as the little magazine usually  in a waiting room, or in my case, I read in my Grandma’s house.  I loved reading it and have learned after all these years that its’ one of those publication that can totally be trusted.  Readers Digest is still going strong, and in fact there is something pretty awesome going on there that I had been hearing some buzz about for a while.   I had an opportunity to speak with Liz Vaccariello, Editor in Chief of Reader’s Digest, and the author of The Digest Diet-   a new weight loss and eating plan. I had a lot of questions and she had  a lot of answers for me! I wanted to know all about the diet.

You guys know that one thing I’m NOT interested in is fad diets.  You know the cabbage diet, the cookie diet, anything that requires me to eat some prepackaged crap or anything that doesn’t fit in my clean” eating lifestyle isn’t something I am interested in trying at all. I was pretty upfront with Liz about that.  She assured me that  I would love the book, and the diet. She sent me a copy of the book to check out.   She was telling the truth-  there was nothing but GOOD FOOD here, people!

There was a LOT of information that I like from the section titled “how to eat and exercise at a glance -

• Eat Breakfast
• Eat real food. Choose whole foods over processed. When you need to packaged…. chose those with with an ingredient list of no more than 5 items.
• Go organic wherever you can.
• Thrive with Five: Look for fiber, protein, vitamin C, calcium, and dairy in your food choices.
• Exercise first thing in the morning
• Exercise hard in short burst
• Mix up your moves to keep your body guessing
• Make exercise fun!

All of these are things I already embrace and love. (and need to get back to!)

and a few I’m not too sure of:

• Choose fat releasers at every meal and snacks
• Eat three serving so fat-free or reduced fat each day

I want to really check out what they deem to be “fat releasers” and I do not always choose fat free  because often fat is replaced with sugar or some other thing that is worse than the fat.

Another thing that made me a little bit leery was that  the first few days are smoothies and soups.   I’ll normally have a  smoothie for breakfast anyway, actually much the same type of smoothie they recommend, so  that wasn’t a problem, but  I am wondering about the smoothie and soup only requirement for 4 days.   I can see how it’s a detox/sugar cleansing attempt. I’ve done worse Like the Shakeology cleanse, and at least this is full of  healthy stuff to keep me going.

That being said, ALL the ingredients that  are in the meals  are things I would eat and  ingredients I have or have used before.  So I’ve decided that I will start and follow the Digest Diet  starting Monday.  (Why Monday?  Because  Friday is my birthday- and we’re having the Birthday Weekend!)

I am interested in seeing how I will do on this 21 day plan.  To be honest, what sold me is the clean eating, whole foods and lack of anything gimmicky (other than the first 4 days smoothie fest, but I’ll reserve judgment on that until I do it!)

Have you read The Digest Diet?   What are you planning on doing to jump start your weight loss? I’ll be “blogging it off” writing about the whoel experience, s obe sure to  check in and see how I’m doing!

Disclosure: I was provided a copy of The Digest Diet free of charge.   No expectation was given with the receipt of this book. All opinions are my own.