14.
The Food Can Fix It 21-Day Plan
To a child, three weeks before a birthday seems like a lifetime away. To an adult,
three weeks to get a major project finished whizzes by. It’s all about your
perspective. When you’re looking at the entire spectrum of your life, twenty-one
days is a blip—just a small moment among many.
So here’s what I ask of you. Give me one of your blips.
Stay with me for three weeks. That will give you the time to:
Retrain your palate
Begin to experiment in the kitchen
Automate new healthy habits that will swallow up old, unhealthy ones
Shed a little weight—if you’re looking to lose extra kilos
Teach your body how good it feels to eat foods that healI want to be clear. I’m not hawking a “lose ten kilos in ten days” crash diet.
And I’m not at all implying that you can switch up your eating for a few weeks
and erase heart disease or reverse diabetes.
This is a sensible, well-paced plan. It won’t make you feel deprived or hangry,
or fill your brain with visions of cheeseburgers. Follow it faithfully and you
could lose one to two kilos in the first week—mostly water weight, but it feels
great!—and half a kilo a week afterwards, most likely shedding three to four
kilos by the end of week three, since the menu is full of satiating meals that help
your body feel full on less. Not bad for a blip of your time. (If weight loss isn’t
one of your goals, no problem. An online calorie intake calculator, such as the
My Weight Manager at www.supertracker.usda.gov, can help you figure out how
much you should be eating to maintain your current weight. Once you know, you