182 Joel Fuhrman, M.D.concerned about overeating raw vegetables, salads, or cooked
greens. There are a variety of foods that you can use to make
vegetable salads, including the following: lettuce (including ro-
maine, bib, Boston, red leaf, green ice, arugula, radicchio, endive,
frisee, iceberg), celery, spinach, cucumbers, tomatoes, mush-
rooms, broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, onions, radishes, kohlrabi,
snow peas, carrots, beets, cabbage, and all kinds of sprouts. Eve-
more vegetables can be eaten cooked. They include broccoli, kal
string beans, artichokes, Brussels sprouts, spinach, Swiss chard,
cabbage, asparagus, collards, okra, and zucchini. These vegetables
can be flavored in various ways. Greens are always great with
mushrooms, onions, garlic, and stewed tomatoes. If you don't
have time to cook, just defrost a box of frozen green vegetables.
Throw a box of frozen artichoke hearts, asparagus, or peas on
your salad. This is less than 150 calories of food. Cooked greens
are very low in calories but give you the nutritional power of ten
pounds of other foods. Frozen greens such as broccoli and peas
are nutritious and convenient — they are flash-cooked and frozen
soon after being picked and are just as nutritious as fresh.
- Beware of the starchy vegetable.
For the Six-Week Plan, limit cooked, high-starch grains and veg-
etables to one cup a day. Consider any vegetable that is not green
to be a high-starch vegetable, (The main exceptions to this rul
are eggplant, peppers, onions, and mushrooms.) One cup of
high-starch vegetable would be one corn on the cob, one small-
to medium-sized baked potato, or one cup of brown rice or sweet
potato. Fill up on the raw vegetables and cooked green vegeta-
bles first. However, make most of your starch consumption from
starchy vegetables — such as butternut or acorn squash, corn,
turnips, parsnips, rutabagas, cooked carrots, sweet and white po-
tatoes — rather than starchy grains. Refined starchy grains (suchas bread, pasta, and white rice) should be even more restricte
than the vegetable-based starches, which are more nutrient-dense. All whole grains should be considered high-starch foods
If you do use bread, a thin whole-wheat pita is a good choice fo
sandwiches because it is less bread and can hold healthful filling
such as vegetables, eggplant, and bean spreads. When you egrains, use whole grains, such as brown and wild rice, and u
them in place of a cooked, starchy vegetable at dinner. Restricti
the portion size of rice, potato, and other cooked starchy vegetabl