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The fastest, easiest way to a healthy 2021!
Dr Michael Mosley’s Fast 800 diet just got faster, thanks to his wife Dr Clare Bailey, whose new book is full of delicious, nutritious meals based on the essentials we all have in our store cupboards
With long queues at our local supermarket, shortages of fresh ingredients and my husband Michael and three of our 20-something children to feed, I was finding it as tricky as many others to prepare healthy meals at home in the early months of the first lockdown last spring.
Once again we’re facing the challenge of how to put a healthy meal on the table under increasingly harsh Covid restrictions, but the good news is that it possible to find plenty of delicious ways to eat nutritiously and lose weight using the contents of your store cupboard and freezer – as we’ve discovered in the Mosley household.
Back in March, I began experimenting with ways to create quick, nutritious meals using ingredients such as a can of chickpeas, some tinned tomatoes or some frozen spinach. This rapidly turned into a Mosley family challenge with everyone taking it in turns to create a healthy lunch, based on foods we already had at home. The kids helped out too, with the cooking as well as with providing very honest feedback!
These were trying times for everyone, but it was satisfying to discover that when a trip to the shops was not an option, we could still conjure up simple versions of the low-carb Mediterranean-style Fast 800 meals that normally form the basis of the way we eat at home. The Fast 800 diet, which I helped my husband devise, involves eating a low-calorie, low-carb diet for an initial period to trigger rapid weight loss before switching to intermittent fasting and a sustainable Mediterranean-style way of eating.
I began posting our family lunches on Instagram (@drclarebailey), sharing recipes featuring ingredients that were likely to be found at the back of everyone’s cupboards. I was amazed by the positive response. Messages poured in from busy working mothers like me, people living alone and younger people too, all wanting inspiration for easy, affordable ways to lose weight the Fast 800 way. And eating a healthy diet has never been so crucial as it is now – as Covid-19 has so dramatically illustrated.
If you’re overweight – as twothirds of British adults are – research shows you’re more vulnerable to becoming seriously ill if you contract coronavirus. You’re also at an increased risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer, type 2 diabetes and dementia – something that, as a GP, I have sadly seen too regularly.
Yet losing a lot of weight quickly
on a diet like the Fast 800 can bring big health improvements. For instance, it can dramatically improve blood glucose levels and even lead some patients to reverse their type 2 diabetes, as we demonstrated recently with the exciting results of the ‘Diamond’ trial which I worked on with Professor Susan Jebb, a world authority on weight loss, based at the University of Oxford.
Our research, published last April, found that patients who followed a low-carb diet of 800-1,000 calories a day lost on average 20lb (9.5kg) in two months. They lost almost five times more weight than those who followed standard advice based on a low-fat diet. And, unlike the standard group, they also saw improvements in their blood sugar and blood pressure levels too.
And what we eat is also of paramount importance for maintaining an effective immune system to fight off infections – which is of particular importance during the pandemic. To shore up our immunity, we need to support our gut microbiome – those trillions of bugs that live in our large intestines.
If you eat a highly processed sugary diet then you will encourage the growth of proinflammatory ‘bad’ bugs in your microbiome. But if you eat a varied diet with plenty of protein, vegetables and fibre you will be sending reinforcements to bolster the good guys in your gut.
Realising that our lockdown home-cooking sessions were striking a powerful chord with many others, I set to work with acclaimed food writer Justine Pattison to test and refine the recipes – and the result is my new book, Fast 800 Easy, the latest in a series based on the Fast 800 programme and packed full of easy, practical ways to follow the diet often using affordable store cupboard ingredients.
Our simple but tantalising recipes are also at the heart of a brilliant new Eat To Beat Disease series, that Michael and I have put together exclusively for Daily Mail readers, starting today with a tempting array of our favourite dishes here in Weekend magazine. In tomorrow’s Mail on Sunday and all next week in special Daily Mail pullouts, we’ll
WE MADE HEALTHY MEALS WITH WHAT WE HAD DURING LOCKDOWN
bring you more advice about how the food you eat can help your body to beat disease in 2021 – as well as generous extra servings of delectable Fast 800 Easy recipes.
Food can be a powerful medicine, as Michael and I have learned from personal experience and years devoted to researching and writing about the impact of diet on our health. It all began when Michael was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2012 following a routine blood test. Rather than resign himself to a life on medication Michael vowed to find a way to improve his condition by changing his lifestyle; he lost 20lb in eight weeks and reversed his diabetes by following a regimen of intermittent fasting.
As his wife I supported his quest but as a GP at that time I also accepted the long-established medical view that diabetes was a lifelong condition – one to manage with drugs, but not cure. So I was both delighted and astonished by Michael’s success. And it led to him developing the 5:2 diet, which involved dramatically reducing his calorie intake for two days a week and eating a normal healthy diet for the remaining five. This went on to form the basis for the Fast 800 programme, which advocates an initial period of eating 800 calories a day to kick-start weight loss, followed by intermittent fasting along 5:2 guidelines following a low-carb, Mediterranean-style diet. Once people reach their weight-loss goal they remain on a moderately lowcarb Med-style diet – which is the healthiest way of life and the one we follow at home as a family.
Meanwhile the effectiveness of an initial rapid weight-loss programme like the Fast 800 has been repeatedly demonstrated in authoritative recent studies. Research by Professor Roy Taylor at Newcastle University showed that participants who followed a diet of 800 calories a day for eight weeks lost on average 22lb (10kg), leading many to come off their diabetes medication.
But as Professor Taylor’s research involved trial volunteers consuming their calories in the form of mealreplacement shakes, I was eager to discover whether this weight loss could also be replicated by eating real food, based on a low-carb Mediterranean-style diet (which is high in protein, fibre, good fats and vegetables, and rich in nutrients)
So I began suggesting this approach to some of my overweight patients – and was excited by how quickly they lost weight and saw improvements to their blood sugar levels, blood pressure and blood cholesterol levels. I was surprised when patients reported back after only a week or two that they no longer felt hungry all the time, despite eating only around 800 calories a day.
It’s so clear to me that the answers to many of the health conditions that trouble so many of us can be found at home, in our own kitchens. As a keen cook myself, I am always interested in finding tempting new ways to enjoy the ingredients that we’ve discovered are so good for us.
We had great fun researching and creating the recipes for the Fast 800 Easy as a family – on one occasion we even held our own family-and-friends version of Ready Steady Cook, competing via Zoom with other households to
CONTINUED ON PAGE 46
ANSWERS TO MANY OF OUR TROUBLES CAN BE FOUND IN OUR OWN KITCHENS
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 45 see who could make the best dish out of a tin of tomatoes and some sausages, courgettes and spinach from the freezer.
The winning result was a very tasty and filling Low-carb Sausage ‘Lasagne’, topped with a crème fraîche sauce with a little nutmeg and some grated Parmesan, which takes only 15 minutes to prepare and has fewer than 400 calories a portion.
And while it’s wonderful to cook with fruit and vegetables that are in season, I do believe we can also get too hung up about the idea of ‘fresh’. Tinned, bottled and frozen foods are often not only cheaper but just as tasty and highly nutritious, as they are usually packaged as soon as they’re picked, capturing their nutrients in optimum condition – unlike fresh fruit and veg that might have been degrading for many days if you factor in transportation time, several days on a supermarket shelf and then sitting in your fridge at home.
Happily, many of the principal ingredients in the Mediterraneanstyle diet – oily fish, nuts, olive oil, beans, lentils and wholegrains – can be freezer or store cupboard staples. Fish is delicious fresh, but can be bought far more cheaply frozen or tinned. The same goes for summer berries, peas and other vegetables.
I hope you’ll find plenty of inspiration for ways to enjoy these glorious healthy ingredients in the pages that follow, many containing ingredients found in the cupboard or freezer.
Our tempting recipes today are quick to prepare – you’ll find plenty of fuss-free one-pot dishes, simplified classics and tips for how to add extra carbs and larger portions for family members who aren’t trying to lose weight. You could set yourself up for the day with a One-pan
Breakfast (right); a glorious lowcarb combination of bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes and spinach that’s under 300 calories a portion.
If you have a family to feed, try the Fastest Spaghetti Bolognese (page 50, which uses spiralised courgettes as well as wholewheat pasta, and is under 500 calories a serving), and simply double the portions for those who aren’t trying to lose weight. It takes only 15 minutes to prepare, plus cooking time. And that’s not forgetting delicious sweet treats either, such as a slice of light but luxurious Chocolate And Black Bean Torte (page 52). It’s gluten-free and you’d never guess it’s made with black beans which add fibre and protein – it’s under 200 calories a serving.
And there’s also another bonus at the end of it all: our pared-back recipes use fewer pots and pans and kitchen equipment – so that means less washing up, too!
OUR RECIPES USE FEWER POTS AND PANS – SO THAT’S LESS WASHING UP!