Tholian's Full Review: Harvey Diamond and Marilyn Diamond - Fit for Life
This is not a program for people who hate vegetables, nor for people who hate dietary rules.
Harvey Diamond's dietary principles, drawn from the Natural Hygiene school of alternative medicine, will have you eating all the fresh fruit you like every morning--but only in the morning, and never less than one hour before ingesting other food nor less than three hours afterwards. Because fruit is so easy to digest, the theory goes, eating fruit from waking until noon every day eases the "elimination" cycle of the metabolism, fostering weight loss and improving the general health of the organism.
If you are not used to this much pectin fiber you will certainly experience a massive change in your elimination, that is for sure.
Foods must be properly combined (never a protein with a starch, never fruit with anything else, always plenty of fresh vegetables) and precisely timed according to an "energy ladder" that shows when to eat what. Fruit in the morning, proceeding through fresh vegetables at lunch--perhaps wrapped in a tortilla, which was a novel idea in 1985--finally graduating to "concentrated foods" and cooked veggies, plus more salad, at dinner.
Meats, dairy products and eggs are very strongly discouraged as "dead food," although they are not forbidden provided that they are properly combined with vegetables. However, there is an entire chapter devoted to the evils of too much protein--ditto for dairy.
Diamond prescribes a sensible exercise regimen, requiring 20 minutes per day of brisk walking, although the most favored exercise is bouncing on a small trampoline. (That's a lot of fun and I kept doing it even after I was off the diet. The only downside is that those $30 mini-tramps you can buy at K-Mart, break every 5 weeks if used daily. Invest in the kind of mini-tramp that gymnastics people use...available from mail-order houses or, probably, on-line by now.)
The Natural Hygiene principles make "intuitive" sense, that is, they seem to be common-sense ideas. Cow's milk is for baby cows; eggs do smell hideous if cracked on a 98.6 degree driveway and left there for a couple of hours; toxins are stored in fat cells, among other places in the body. However, the diet prescribed, whatever the claims are about its operation, is simply a very-low-calorie, albeit healthful, diet. If you are eating according to his vegan recommendation, then you are really on a low-calorie vegetarian diet. If you are including meats then you are on a modified version of the Stillman diet. No mystery here as to what the real weight-loss principle is, although I do believe that Mr. Diamond is not attempting to hoodwink anyone. He is passionate in his advocacy of his form of healthful eating.
Note: I experienced fairly severe blood-sugar fluctuations on this diet (detailed elsewhere on the epinions site), despite never having been diagnosed as hypoglycemic. Fruit all morning, every morning, is not the food of choice for everyone, despite Diamond's claims to the contrary.
The second half of this book is one of the most innovative, classy and downright delicious vegetarian cookbooks it has ever been my pleasure to own. Years after quitting the diet and even after abandoning my vegetarianism for Dr. Atkins' plan (believe it or not), I still use many of Marilyn Diamond's excellent recipes. My copy of Fit For Life is spattered, tattered and torn--always the sign of a great cookbook.
Among the highlights are a vegetarian version of split-pea soup that my father swore had been made with ham; a delicious mock-Caesar salad dressing; a vegetarian shepherd's pie that was good enough to serve for Christmas dinner; a terrific zucchini-mushroom stir-fry; and "ice cream" shakes made with almond milk, dates and frozen bananas.
Marilyn Diamond has also written a stand-alone Fit For Life Vegetarian Cookbook, which I recommend as well. But I do not think the diet is any kind of magic.
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