[BoBoGuy]

For those new to the concept, or others who might be interested in what a calorie restricted (CR/CRON) lifestyle entails, please see the below:

CR Lifestyle - General Guidelines

Begin with your current diet. The basic idea is to substitute foods that have more nutrition per calorie for foods that have less nutrition per calorie, while gradually reducing the number of calories. The goal is to get equal or better nutrition from fewer calories. This is not hard…as a practical matter, one should attempt something like the following:

Curtail the "whites" (most bread, potatoes, pasta, and rice), since they don’t deliver very much nutrition per calorie, and they often have very high glycemic indexes--result in excessive insulin production, ultimately in insulin resistance and adult-onset diabetes. If you must eat grains, eat whole grains--for their better fiber, mineral, anti-oxidant, anti-cancer and cholesterol reduction benefits.

Curtail the desserts and the snacks (pies, cakes, candy, potato chips, pretzels, etc.) for they deliver almost no nutrition per calorie. Increase fruits (especially berries, like blueberries, blackberries, or strawberries) to fully or partly substitute for the desserts. Substitute tea (discourages stroke, heart attack, cancer, and neurological damage) for empty-calorie sodas.

Vegetables -- both green leafy vegetables and non-leaf vegetables -- contain the highest content of a wide variety of nutrients for their calorie content. By volume (and often by calories), vegetables are the major component of many calorie restricted but not nutrient deficient diets. Increase vegetables of almost any type, the more variety the better, by as much as you need to enable you to feel full at the end of a meal.

Reduce red meat portions, trim visible fat, substitute liquid oils, especially olive or canola, for butter and hard margarine, use skim instead of full fat milk, etc. to improve heart/cancer health in addition to saving nine calories per gram.

Increase fish consumption, especially high omega-3 oil varieties (cold-water fish like tuna, salmon, etc). Note that there is some controversy on this, with some advocating greater flax or walnut oil rather than fish. Eat more tree nuts, especially walnuts and almonds to replace fatty meats.

Yet another way to think about diet under CR is to consider Paleolithic diets. The idea here is that mankind’s optimal diet (the one we have evolved to handle) does not include the "recent foods" that we only began consuming in large quantities in the last 5,000-10,000 years when agriculture began to replace the earlier hunter-gatherer system of food collection.

Bo