Some Basic Personal Living & Eating Guidelines

One of the things that I try to do with every meal is to have a lean protein (or a hearty vegetable, like white or portobello mushrooms) with an arugula salad, and then mix up the secondary ingredients. Sometimes I'll chop up half a white onion and throw that in the salad or in with the sauteed chicken, or maybe I'll finely dice a clove of shallots and cook them with the salad. The important thing to do is to maximize your vitamin and protein intake while limiting the saturated (bad) fats in your dishes. Plus, if something tastes really good, I'll want to savor it and make the meal last a long time, thereby allowing my body to adequately process the food so you actually feel yourself getting full. Also, the breaking down of protein in your body (called metabolysis) requires more energy than for metabolizing complex sugars, like carbohydrates. So the body is actually "working out" and burning calories just by digesting the delicious chicken pasta roma dish you had for dinner as you watch re-runs of Seinfeld. Pretty groovy if you ask me. The idea is to convert the body into a machine that is working out the other 23 hours of the day in which you are not in the gym or running in the park. A balanced diet containing lean proteins and a rich assortment of vitamins is the way in which I try to build that body.