Johns - Lose weight by eating

For the amazing women who inspire me:

Mom You taught me that life was what I made of it and that my dreams could become reality if I had the gumption and drive to make them happen.

Sophia I hope many of these recipes are the ones youll ask for during trips home from college. Thank you for helping me shop for, cook, and taste these recipes and for inspiring me to be the kind of mom you can be proud of every day.

CONTENTS

T he weight-loss industry is a multimillion-dollar business. Every company boasts a weight-loss product that costs a small fortune and fails to leave you with lasting results. What it all really comes down to is marketing. I use the beer analogy often when I try to get through to people who cant cut through the marketing BS; I ask them, Do you really think when you open a cold can of beer a frozen train will show up at your house? You dont, thats silly... but chances are youve bought into less outrageous diet claims. And thats all they areclaims.

Dont feel bad. I bought into marketing hype for years, but when I finally saw it for what it was and stopped blindly believing what big food companies told me, I lost weight and kept it off for the first time in my life. Before this revelation, I was always the biggest girl in the room, the girl who was always told, But you have such a pretty face. After trying every major diet out there (and some scary minor ones, too) without any lasting results, I was left heavier than ever, more broke than ever, and depressed. I felt awful and I was nearing the three-hundred-pound mark. Something had to changebut what do you do when youre penny-pinching? The answer was so simple I couldnt believe I had missed it for so many years: just go back to nature and let nature do all the work.

I was eating under 1,000 calories a day of frozen diet meals and diet sodas, and all along I was gaining weight. My signature dish was anything that came out of a box and could be made fastconvenience was more important to me than nutrition. No veggies, no wholesome food, all because I thought nutritious food was boring, expensive, and difficult to make. I had been brought up on Shake N Bake, boxed side dishes, drive-thru takeout, and quick microwaved mealsand I realized I was bringing my daughter up on them, too.

I started by giving up my first love, the zero-calorie diet soda, and when I lost ten pounds that first week without any other modifications to my diet, I knew I was onto something. The next week I stopped consuming all artificial sweeteners and five pounds flew off, and the following week I dropped another eight pounds by removing preservatives from my diet. I kept it up, and after a short eleven months I had lost 150 pounds. I had gone from a size 24 to a size 4, I felt and looked amazing, and best of all my grocery (and medical) bills had dropped substantially. I hadnt just proved that eating all natural could help you lose weightId proved it was inexpensive as well.

Unfortunately my cravings never stopped, and by month two all I wanted was a burger and fries, some mac and cheese, and my favorite, cookies! I had to find ways to eat what I wanted without reversing all the hard work Id done. By slightly changing my favorite meals and allowing myself a very lax kitchen learning curve, I found ways to eat the naughty, delicious food I was craving, all while losing pounds and later maintaining my new healthy weight. I cut calories by adding in vegetables and swapping high-calorie ingredients like butter and sugar for all-natural applesauce and mashed fruits. I took mac and cheese from 800 calories per serving to 300 by cutting down on the butter, choosing sharp cheese for extra flavor, and substituting metabolism-boosting almond milk for heavy cream.

I was so excited I wanted to shout my weight-loss breakthrough from the rooftops, so I started my blog, Lose Weight by Eating, and posted recipes to share the knowledge with any readers who stumbled across it. In the past I spent a fortune in failed attempts to lose weight. Now that I had found the answer I wanted to share what Id learned free of charge to the masses, and it paid off for all involved. Women and men who had struggled for years with weight and illness changed their diets, and by doing so they changed their lives for the better. Women whose signature dish was cereal in milk were finally learning to cook, starting with easy yet impressive meals like my . They told me their boyfriends were so impressed that they finally saw them as wife material. One gal in particular learned to cook from my recipes, got married, bought a small ranch, and now raises her own chickens and writes a popular food column for a local newspaper. Three years ago she couldnt cook, and today shes a food journalist!

Thats what I love most about cookingyou dont need to go to school to learn how to cook! Julia Child could barely boil an egg when she was in her late thirties, and look what happened to her. Just a little kitchen confidence and you can change your life, your body, and your health.

The recipes on my blog and the Lose Weight by Eating plan have helped thousands of people. A woman in her seventies who thought weight loss was impossible lost almost 170 pounds. A sixteen-year-old started cooking my recipes for her family, resulting in a family-wide hundred-pound weight loss, a new healthy lifestyle, and some seriously impressive kitchen confidence for a high schooler. A man with a knee injury who could no longer hit the gym found solace and weight loss in his kitchen. All these amazing people have inspired me ten times more than I ever inspired them. Their weight-loss success stories have helped me prove that if you can wield a spatula, you can lose weightit all comes down to what you eat.

So why trust me that healthy food can be delicious? James Beard Awardwinning chef Marcus Samuelsson picked me out of thirty-six people to be on his team of four on Season 2 of ABCs The Taste. And youd trust him to know good food, right? Of the other judges, Nigella Lawson told me that the world needs my food, Anthony Bourdain said I cook pasta as well as any chef, and even hotheaded Ludo Lefebvre claimed that my were some of the best potatoes hed ever had. If this stay-at-home mom living in a rural town in California can learn to cook well, lose weight, and make it into a national cooking competition all in three years, you certainly can, too.

This book is all about making the naughty nice. The foods you crave may make you gain weight, but you can give them a delicious makeover with some simple (and inexpensive) Smart Swaps so you can eat them every day. Want to lose weight eating pizza, cookies, meat loaf, and nachos? Well then, Lose Weight by Eating is for you. Life is too short to eat boring, bland diet food... so lets get cooking. What do you have to lose but the weight?!

I want you to forget all the weight-loss rules youve learned over the years and read this chapter with a fresh, open mind. We demonize food and calories, but we cant live without them. We look for zero-calorie snacks in the hope that theyll fill us up (they never do) but dont realize were missing an opportunity to feed our bodies fat-burning fuel. Food is not the problemfood-like products are. They are the reason millions of people cant lose weight or maintain the figure they want.