Dr. Oz: The Fourteen-Day YOU Diet

Jan. 4, 2010— -- Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Michael Roizen are back in their ongoing effort to make Americans healthier. Today on "Good Morning America," the expert pair discussed how you can start eating healthier in the new year.

Read the excerpt below, and then head to the "GMA" Library to find more good reads.

Click here for the "Magical Breakfast Blaster" shake recipe Dr. Oz mentioned on "GMA."

During these two weeks, we'll give you the meal guidelines, the tools, the strategies, the tricks, theplan, and the help you need to change your diet and live it. By the end of the fourteen days, you'llhave developed eating patterns and behavioral habits that will help get you on your way to changingyour body from the inside out. Here we outline the seven- day plan and strategies for making smartdecisions about food and eating. In week two, you'll repeat the first week, making appropriate foodsubstitutions where you wish.

Day One: Saturday

1. Walk: Thirty minutes. Walking—whether you do it by yourself, with a friend, with your dog (onlyactual walking time counts, not time spent waiting for the dog to sniff), or around the dining roomtable—gives you your first dose of physical success. Walk every day for thirty minutes, and you'llestablish the behavioral and motivational foundation for the YOU Diet.

2. Stretch: Do three to five minutes of stretching after your walk. See Chapter 12. While stretching keeps your muscles limber and flexible to help prevent injury, it also has a meditative element to it, helping you refocus and cope with cravings. "No pain, no gain" does not apply here.

3. Dump Your Fridge: To make room for all the new, good food you're about to buy, it's time to rid your kitchen of the nutritional felons. The appeals are up; it's execution time. Read the label of everything in your kitchen cupboards, your refrigerator, your secret boxes, and everywhere else you stash food. If something has any of the following in one of the first five ingredients, throw it out. This is the YOU: On a Diet Rule of 5. Don't have any of these five ingredients in the first five ingredients on the label:

1 and 2. Simple sugars and syrups. This includes brown sugar, dextrose, corn sweetener, fructose (as in high- fructose corn syrup), glucose, corn syrup, honey, invert sugar, maltose, lactose, malt syrup, molasses, raw sugar, and sucrose. Keep a little table sugar handy, and honey, and maple sugar, because you'll use some for recipes. (See the box on other sweeteners on page 107.)

3. Saturated fat. This includes most four- legged animal fat, milk fat, butter or lard, and tropical oils, such as palm and coconut.

4. Trans fat. This includes partially hydrogenated fats, vegetable oil blends that are hydrogenated, and many margarines and cooking blends. (If you must, use cholesterol-fighting sterol spreads such as Promise and Benecol.)

5. Enriched flours and all flours other than 100 percent whole grain or 100 percent whole wheat. This includes enriched white flour, semolina, durum wheat, and any of the acronyms for flourthat is not whole wheat—they should not be in your kitchen.

4. Go Food Shopping: Your current kitchen is most likely like a prison—it's filled with a lot of bad dudes. We want to turn your kitchen into a nutritional honor society, so that it's filled with good-for-your- waist foods that make it easy (and automatic!) to eat right. The first week, you'll have a larger- than- normal shopping list because you'll stock up on essentials as well as ingredients you'llneed for this week's recipes. For a specific shopping list that works with our suggested seven- dayschedule, see page 277.

5. Make Your Weekly Staples: Your choice of vegetables or soup. See above.

Eat!

Follow guidelines for breakfast, lunch, and snacks. For dinner, have . . .

Asian Salmon with Brown Rice Pilaf