New Year's Resolution - the Game Addict Diet.

Now that the holidays (and eating fests) are over for a good block of time, its time for me to get serious about my diet. I had my first heart attack two years ago and the cardiologist gave me just one command: drop the tonnage.

Fortunately, my younger (and much healthier) brother had already been following a scientifically based diet by Dr. Joel Fuhrman called the "Eat to Live" diet. Catchy name. Its the title of his book.

The essence of the diet is the formula H = N/C, where H is Health, N is Nutrients, and C = Calories. All food consists of two things, nutrients and calories. Nutrients are the building blocks your body uses to rebuild itself as it decays due to wear and tear. Calories are the energy your body requires to perform that rebuilding.

For years, most diets have focused on the calorie component of foods. Calorie counting has been the order of the day for a long time, and it has not worked out well for most people because they always seem to run out of allocated food before they run out of hunger. And then there was also the problem of taste cravings.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman introduced a paradigm-shift by focusing on the nutrient side of the equation. Dr. Fuhrman asked what would happen if we sorted our available foods by nutrient density and ate only those foods which were high in nutrients in comparison to their volume. When he did such a sort, he came up with his own food pyramid. You can have unlimited amounts of vegetables, fruits, and legumes/beans. A daily limit of whole grains, nuts, and seeds. Other items are more restricted. With the vegetables, you particularly focus on the leafy green vegetables which are called high-cruciferous vegetables. And you utterly avoid over-processed, nutrient-drained foods that come out of a factory. Fast food is verboten.

Now, what did Dr. Fuhrman discover when he came up with his food pyramid? He discovered that if you habitually eat nutrient dense foods your hunger and craving for food goes away and you end up eating less food over all without noticing it. Our problems with hunger and cravings have been, all along, due to the fact that we eat foods that are low in nutrients. This has been compounded by our modern food delivery systems that actually strip foods of their natural nutrients while adding calories and chemicals we really can do without. We tend to eat foods that are high in calories and low in nutrients. So we eat more and more and yet get hungrier and hungrier. This is probably why our food delivery systems do what they do: consumption is automatically increased, which increases sales. There is economic incentive for our foods to do us in.

I have been unoffically on Dr. Fuhrman's diet for a year or so. "Unofficially" in the sense that I switched my food content but did not follow his diet exactly where it was not convenient. Then about a couple of months or so, I visited him in his practice in Flemmington, New Jersey and officially got on his diet.

What did I discover? I discovered that starting on the diet initially required me to "walk by faith and not by sight." Louie Anderson once quipped that a fat person will not eat a salad unless it has on it a crouton the size of a small child. Croutons, I should not have to point out, are a low-nutrient, high calorie item.

The first thing you have to get over is the re-education of your taste buds. Our food delivery systems gives us food that is overloaded with either sugar or salt. Both of these substances contribute to cravings, and they do a lot to dull the natural flavor of vegetables and fruits. They make fruits and vegetables seem boring and tasteless in comparison to the kinds of foods we are used to eating. But after you have been on Fuhrman's diet for awhile, a subtle change takes place in your taste buds and you begin to find out that you like vegetables more than you thought you did, and you find fruits to be very tasty after all. In fact, when I first started, I found I could tolerate only certain kinds of vegetables, but then much later I discovered that I liked vegetables I had never liked before. This was a revelation.

Another revelation was when I again had a meat dish after being on Fuhrman's diet for a good long while. The meat tasted like a salt lick! There I had it! My own personal proof that our "normal" diet is abnormally high in salt.

The next thing I had to get used to was giving up the convenience of our poisonous food delivery system. No more TV dinners. No more canned goods (they are notoriously high in salt content), no more boxes and packages of over-processed, nutrient-starved goodies. I am still in process of learning to cook, bake, chop and steam. (Fortunately, I can still microwave.) Make no mistake, if you are going to escape the ravages of our all-too-convenient-but-deadly food delivery system, you are going to have to manfully face your kitchen every day.

But after awhile you find out its actually kind of fun!

But what has all this to do with being a computer game addict? And what is the Game Addict Diet? Well, Blaise Pascal once said "All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room." All my dietary evil now comes from not being able to avoid visiting the mall on the weekends. The smell of Nathan's Famous cheese fries. The fragrance of Aunt Anne's Pretzel Dogs. The free sample of a cheese steak offered up by the cunning cheese steak vendor. These are The Last Temptations of Gamesplorer, which will truly be my last if I continue to fall before them.

The only thing I've found that truly takes me away from the temptation to visit the malls on the weekends is getting involved in a good, engrossing computer game. So now that the holidays are over, I have a clear space to stay on Dr. Fuhrman's diet as strictly as I can with the help of Supreme Commander, Dawn of War II, and Call of Duty World at War.

As of the last holiday binge, I tilt the scale at 186 poounds. (About a year before I was 210). My ideal weight, based on sex and height, is 154 pounds. So, away I go! Downwards and on wards! I'll keep you posted.