Quotes from John A. McDougall

People love to hear good news about their bad habits.

You don't realize that some part of your brain is spinning out little scenarios of how much worse your future will be if you change. This keeps you from growing into a better and happier existence.

Encourage your present friends to be active so that you can continue to enjoy recreation with them.

These positive psychological benefits may prevent relapses to the old eating habits, especially since a positive self-image encourages more positive and life-supportive behaviors.

Also, as you start to feel better thanks to your diet and exercise program, the positive cycle encourages its own continuation. This

These good results encourage greater compliance, which leads to even better results. In this way, the positive cycle is perpetuated.

It also contributes to the feeling of fullness you get from your next meal, which may be four or five hours later.

As the great mythologist Joseph Campbell said, follow your bliss and the universe miraculously supports your choices for a happier and healthier way of life. Therefore

All of us resist growth to some extent. It's built in; I'm convinced of it. To paraphrase Tom Hanks's character in the movie A League of Their Own, if growth were easy, everybody would be doing it. But that's what makes it great.

Day by day, you'll be making your best effort at creating better health. And day by day, you'll find yourself looking better, weighing less, and feeling more energy and confidence. It doesn't happen without effort. But that's what makes it great. You earn the right to be healthier, happier, more vital, beautiful, and alive. Enjoy it. You deserve to look and feel great.

If many of your meals are eaten away from home, make the situations meet your needs. Go to restaurants that offer at least one delicious, nutritious item. Ask the waiter to remove the butter and olive oil from the table. Accept invitations to dinner from friends who eat and live healthfully. Bring healthful foods with you whenever possible.

Avoid temptation. Very few people could quit smoking without ridding their house of cigarettes. Alcoholics avoid bars to stop drinking. Protect yourself by protecting your environment. Decrease the time when you are exposed to rich foods to avoid testing your "willpower." One of the best ways to do this is to throw all the rich foods out of the house. Just as important is to replace harmful foods with those used in the McDougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss.

Keep those people close who support your efforts and do not try to sabotage you. Ask

Keep those people close who support your efforts and do not try to sabotage you. Ask family and friends to stop giving you boxes of candy and cakes as gifts. Instead suggest flowers, a card, or a fruit basket. Tell your mother that if she really loves you she'll feed you properly, forgoing her traditional beef stroganoff.

When you're full, you are not as strongly tempted to eat foods outside the program. A stomach full of well-prepared high-carbohydrate, low-fat foods effectively curbs your tendency to cheat yourself out of great looks and great health. Meanwhile, you'll appear to be a tower of strength and discipline to those around you—and you'll feel like one.

If you must alleviate your frustration by eating, eat the right foods.

Meanwhile, find new friends who are also involved in healthful approaches to life by frequenting health-food stores and restaurants or by attending lectures.

If your partner rejects your efforts to regain your health, he or she should consider what it would feel like to be sleeping next to an empty place at night, instead of you. Encourage

Factory farms feed their sick and dying cows, called "downer cows," to chickens and pigs.

Roll up the tortilla and place it seam-side down in the baking dish. Repeat with the remaining tortillas, snuggling them close together in the pan. P

We are all creatures of habit, and our palates are pleasantly excited by the rich animal foods with their high content of proteid [protein], and we may well question whether our dietetic habits are not based more upon the dictates of our palates than upon scientific reasoning or true physiological needs.

Our dependence on smell is revealed every time we have a cold; once the nose becomes stuffed up, we lose the capacity to taste anything, simply because we cannot smell it.

So now, even if I wanted to, I could not become a moderate person. Still, I love life and do not want my high-spirited personality to kill me, as it almost did in my youth. This is one reason that motivated me to discover

Among the Indian foods we commonly order are samosa (stuffed bread pocket), urid dal (bean curry), moong dal (lentil curry), pilao (a rice dish), chana masala (garbanzo beans), alu gobi (cauliflower), upma (wheat and vegetables), khichuri (lentils and rice), tel baigan (eggplant curry), and bhindi bhaji (okra and onions).