Is the Spartan Diet hard to stay on?
Making food from scratch and buying the best ingredients takes time and effort. But it's also a joy and far more rewarding for your overall health and happiness.
The Spartan Diet involves preparing food and cooking from scratch. That means you'll buy only unprocessed foods rather than food products or ingredients already prepared.
You’ll buy chemical and GMO-free fresh and seasonal foods. You'll soak beans and whole grains, chop fresh vegetables, and bake, braise, simmer, sauté and cook foods in the oven or on the stove, rather than in the microwave. You’ll make your own salad dressings from scratch and make soups without store-bought vegetable stock or canned ingredients. And for the sake of your gut flora, the foundation of health and the immune system, you’ll also choose to bake your own (or buy from a good sourdough baker) naturally leavened bread (real sourdough). You’ll also make your own sauerkraut, fermented hot sauce and maybe even make your own red wine vinegar or raw apple cider vinegar and cure your own olives -- eventually.
If you're used to convenience foods, fast food restaurants and pre-packaged, ready-to-eat foods, the Spartan Diet will call for more time and effort than you may be used to.
There's also a learning curve. Many of the health benefits in the Spartan Diet result from improved cooking methods and techniques, which may also be new to you. But all these new ways of preparing food will be made available to you in this newsletter and future book, explained in a step-by-step format that makes it easy for anyone to master.
Cooking from scratch is made quicker and easier with a wonderful variety of appliances and kitchen tools, from food processors, blenders, mixers and many others, and we’ll give you our recommendations on which to buy and also tell you how to use them for optimal health.
Cooking is also made easier with cell phones and computers. Electronic timers, alarms, calendars and other tools can remind you to engage in various stages of home cooking, so you don’t forget. And once you learn how to cook Spartan Diet foods, all of which are very basic foods that do not require advanced culinary skills, you’ll be surprised at how easy making real food from scratch actually is. You will become a very skillful, knowledgeable and intuitive, and hopefully, a joyful cook!
Other aspects of the Spartan Diet are also easy. For example, it doesn't force you to learn the minutiae of dietary biochemistry. Unlike many other diets, you won't need to count calories, track "points," or monitor every aspect of nutrition (I’ll discuss this in more detail later on).
The easiest thing about The Spartan Diet is that it’s a fun source of joy and discovery. Buying, preparing and eating processed and industrially made junk food is boring, predictable and soul-killing. But on The Spartan Diet, shopping and cooking food is a major part of the joy of eating.
Stated another way, the world of convenience food deadens us to the enjoyment and gratification of food foraging, preparation, cooking and feasting around the table. The Spartan Diet will re-activate that part of your brain that loves finding, preparing, cooking and above all, eating wonderful real food as you cultivate the art of joyful gathering around your table.
Recipe: Spartan Muesli
In a cover story for Vogue magazine published in the summer of 2016, American decathlete and two-time Olympic champion, Ashton Eaton, professed his love for Spartan Muesli, a menu item at Backyard Bowls.
In fact I developed the item for Backyard Bowls years ago while consulting for the company. (The chain has six locations, all in Southern California, and it specializes in very fresh, very healthy delicious casual foods.)
The mention came about when Eaton was playfully arguing with supermodel Gigi Hadid during a Vogue cover shoot about which Backyard Bowls item was their favorite (with Eaton favoring the Spartan Muesli and Hadid arguing in favor of Berry bowl with peanut butter).
Eaton holds the world record in both the decathlon and indoor heptathlon, and was often referred to as "the world's greatest athlete."
So there you have it. The world's greatest athlete loves an item from the World's Healthiest Diet. Makes sense!
Click on the button to get the recipe!
