Revolution on the dinner plate

I once impressed an acquaintance by mentioning that I did most of the cooking in our family.

He was a foodie. By "cooking," he envisioned something like you'd see people artistically crafting on a Food Network show. Something like the students of Stevenson High School's Food Revolution Club taught us to do during a recent healthy cooking seminar.

But by "cooking," I actually meant microwaving frozen foods, grilling steaks in our electric stove, occasionally cooking a roast in a slow cooker. It isn't so much cooking as "warming up."

The most ambitious thing I ever concocted was a Thanksgiving turkey dinner, complete with German-style stuffing. And that whole feast probably used fewer ingredients than the fancy salmon those high school kids taught us that afternoon.

Even though my wife Patty and I will never live forever on the kind of Push Start Your Metabolism diet -"nutrition regimen" - that the contestants are enduring, I set out with them to try it on at least a limited basis.

I liked the idea that this plan doesn't require specific recipes on each day, most of which I wouldn't have liked. Nor does it require counting calories, or even "carbs." It just specifies how many servings of each of three food groups - proteins, fats and "carbs" - that one must eat during each of five meals a day.

To lose 10 or 20 pounds, my trainer, Josh Steckler, had recommended that I follow the regimen's 1,800-calorie plan. I carefully studied the list of allowed foods and how many servings to eat at a meal and how much of each constituted a "serving."

Breakfast called for one protein, two fats and one "carb" - and remember that by "carb" this plan really means "fruits and vegetables," plus one starch per DAY.

For the protein, I picked milk, like I normally would have put on breakfast cereal. For the carbs, I drank cranberry juice, to help avoid a return of kidney stones, though fruit juices in general technically are forbidden.

But what two fats? After much thought, I decided to munch some peanuts and cashews plus some cheddar cheese. Later I would start swallowing three capsules of fish oil each morning as Push Start recommends.

On top of that, I drank one can of Diet Mountain Dew to prevent a caffeine-withdrawal headache, since I would no longer be sipping pop all day.

Just three hours later it was time for Meal 2. Midmorning - what a weird time to eat a full meal! I was supposed to have one protein, one carb and one fat. I picked some sliced turkey, half a grapefruit and an ounce of mixed nuts. An easy source of fat in a category where I didn't like many of the foods, nuts would become a well known companion on this diet.

Another three hours and it was time for Meal 3, or what humans call lunch. I ate barbecued meat similar to what I would have eaten before the new diet, but without a bun and washed it down with water instead of milk. With it came an apple, grapes and (unapproved by Steckler because it's so processed and artificial) Velveeta cheese.

Dinner was steak for the protein - four ounces instead of my typical six; half a baked potato with Shedd's spread, constituting one carb and one fat; a mixed-greens salad with balsamic vinaigrette dressing for another carb and another fat; and milk for another protein, though this technically violated the limit of no more than one dairy item per day.

For Meal 5 - a late-night snack - I was supposed to eat one serving from each food group. But an ounce of peanuts filled me up. Since peanuts really contain protein as well as fat, I figured that would do.

The Push Start diet is not based at all on calorie counting. But just for curiosity, I decided to figure out what kinds of nutrition I had ingested on this first New Diet day.

I had figured out that during a typical day on the Old Dave Diet, I took in almost 3,000 calories. Steckler's new plan for me had aimed at 1,800 calories. I added up what I had just eaten. And even though I had cheated here and there, with things like two glasses of milk and cranberry juice, the total came to - drum roll - 1,855 calories. Apparently Push Start's developers knew what they were doing in that department.

Next I measured the new intake of other nutrients. The fats were actually UP a little - 78 on the Old Dave Diet, 96 on the new. Saturated fat was almost exactly the same. Traditional diet-recommenders would not have approved.

The amount of protein also was almost exactly the same. And fiber almost the same.

So what HAD changed besides the one-third plunge in calories? The amount of sugar had plummeted from 241 grams to 103 grams. And the total of what a chemist would call "carbohydrates" - which turn into sugars once they are digested - had plunged from 376 grams to 161.

So as of Day 1 it looked like the Push Start plan had evicted lots of bad stuff from my plate - except for the traditionally villainous fat - without taking away the good stuff. And somehow I never had become hungry.

But how happy would I be eating like this for 12 more weeks?

• Dave Gathman is a Daily Herald correspondent. He is undergoing the same physical workouts and nutritional counseling as the Fittest Loser contestants as he writes about their journey.