The most Asian thing about me is my eating habits. There is no question about it. Dinner is, and has always been, rice, vegetables, meat and fish. So when the idea of trying the Mediterranean diet came up, I was definitely up for a chance to break out of my routine.

The Mediterranean is a broad region of countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea, including Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Turkey, North Africa and the Middle East. The diet relies heavily on olive oil, seasonal fruits and vegetables and whole-grain bread.

Much to my excitement, a Nov. 1 Reuters health article reported that eating a Mediterranean-style diet for only three months can lower my chance of heart disease by 15 percent.

I was full of enthusiasm — really, I was. The diet seemed chock-full of new foods that I could try — eggplant parmesan, garlic shrimp, avocado and basil salad and pasta galore — everything sounded delicious. I was book-marking as many recipes online as I could find when suddenly I realized: I am going to have to cook all of this food. My culinary expertise was limited to Top Ramen and toast.

First, I checked the ingredients I needed. The Mediterranean diet food pyramid has red meat at the very top of the pyramid, recommended only once a month. I was also supposed to eat less sweets, eggs, poultry and fish. This was all possible, I thought. But what would I be eating? Olive oil has its own category in the pyramid, so I was sure to get that. Fruits, nuts and vegetables are also emphasized, and the biggest section is grains. I definitely wasn’t going on the Atkins diet.

The first day of my week and a half-long diet was unorganized and unplanned. There wasn’t anything I considered “Mediterranean” in my refrigerator, so I mostly ate fruit and bread. That definitely made me irritable. I was hungry, but I didn’t want to break my diet because then I’d have to start all over again. Thankfully my diet was saved because of my friend Johanna and her father, an amazing cook. Johanna dropped by my reg on day two with a Tupperware full of garlic pasta and another with avocado basil salad. I went home and made more pasta, and was pretty content, but pasta wasn’t enough variety. I talked to my mom. “Did you know that the grocery store a block away is a Mediterranean grocery store?” she asked. Perfect. I went the next day.

When I first entered the store I grabbed a loaf of potato, rosemary and olive oil bread, perfectly in sync with my trusty pyramid. I added fig preserves, red onions, cucumbers for dessert, a box of frozen apple tarts with “Go Mediterranean!” emblazoned on the box and a small container of baklava, made of flaky filo dough with pistachio filling drizzled with a simple syrup often made with honey.

Now I had a wider array of food. Breakfast was a pear and whole-wheat crackers. For lunch, I created my own avocado tomato salad, and dinner was pasta, the bread and the fig preserves. Everything was delicious. Another good dinner that week was wheat pasta with eggplant and mozzarella cheese.

By far, my favorite meal was garlic shrimp pasta. Over the course of preparing for that meal, I learned how to finely chop garlic and de-vein shrimp. And I decided my new favorite dessert is baklava.

I figured that for the real Mediterranean experience, I’d have to experience more than my own cooking. So I paid a visit to Bursa Kebab, a Turkish restaurant on West Portal and Vicente. My friends and I ordered an eggplant kebab sandwich and a chicken shish kebab. The fried eggplant, cucumbers, onions, yogurt dressing and tomatoes, all wrapped up in flat bread was good, but a far cry from the chicken delicious shish kebab. Marinated in special sauce and on a skewer with rice and salad, the meat was cooked perfectly and tenderly. Other Mediterranean restaurant options abound: a Greek restaurant, Mezes on Chestnut street, and Greek and North African restaurant La Mediterranee on Fillmore, to name two.

This diet gave me a chance to break out of my culinary shell. All the new non-Asian foods I tried were tasty. I plan on loosely sticking to the diet even after this article comes out. I don’t really miss eating red meat; poultry is good enough for me, and I like the emphasis on fruits and vegetables. Cooking my own food was also a great experience, I now have a few useful recipes under my belt. It’s as if the Genie really spoke out to me in his song in Aladdin:

“Try some of column A
Try all of column B…
Say what you wish
It’s yours! True dish
How ‘bout a little more baklava?”
- Friend Like Me

Sweet tooth almost pulled out
By Logan Weir

It is 11:20 am on co-curricular day. The sun is shining, clubs are selling food, and the air smells like churros and chilidogs. At the German booth, I’m selling cookies for next to nothing, slowly counting down; I have four days, four hours, and 10 minutes left.

For one week, I eliminated all processed foods, retreating to the world of vegetables, whole-wheat bread, meat, butter and fruits.

The worst thing about this diet was the timing. I started on Halloween and four days later was co-curricular day, one of the school’s largest free-for-all sugar days, complete with Butterfingers and brownies every few feet in the courtyard. I just sat there and watched, slowing munching on my carrot.

Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon, the diet was referred to me by a friend-of-a-friend, Carrie Aginsky. Aginsky, a cook and former Lowell parent, advocates the Nourishing Traditions eating plan as a way to improve health. “Processed foods are hidden in almost everything we eat,” Aginsky said, “and this leads to very bad digestion, arthritis and diseases.” According to Aginsky and Fallon, the typical American fear of fat is misplaced. “Natural fats are far better for you than processed ones and are still very much needed,” Aginsky said.

The rules of the diet are basic: Eliminate processed foods, including any form of pure sugar and white flour, eat more natural fats such as butter, oil and free-range meat, as well as plenty of vegetables, fruits and dairy is allowed, although more unprocessed is better. Pure water is the optimal beverage. Fallon also advocates a variety of naturally fermented foods, such as kimchee and miso soup. Seven days of wrenching away from my consumer lifestyle of eating anything in sight was difficult. This diet challenges American eating habits, forcing one to break away from the mass-produced, factory-processed food so prevalent in supermarkets.

sticks dipped in pure lemon juice for dessert disturbed me. Over the next few days, my diet started getting harder and harder. Not only was my sister’s Halloween candy tempting, but I was running out of things to eat.

For breakfast I had unsweetened oatmeal, and for lunch a whole-wheat bagel would suffice, but soon there was nothing for my after-school snack, my pre-dinner nibbling, my dinner or my midnight feeding frenzies.

Thankfully, my mother, bless her food-providing heart, went shopping. Hooray! I was never happier to see pistachios and oranges in all my life! I ate like a king that night, with pure free-range steak for dinner. The next day I got to eat French toast in the morning and pork chops for dinner. But on Sunday, with food running low again and three days left, I succumbed to the power of a fun-sized Butterfinger. Oh, what a delicious felony, what a scrumptious wrongdoing. Still, I felt bad. On Tuesday at 3:30 my diet would end, so I headed over to Albertsons with $15. I returned with a bag of candy corn, a bag of fun-sized Twix, a bag of Butterfingers, a box of donuts, a bag of Doritos and a two-liter bottle of Coke. When school and the diet ended, the chips went first, and then, after stuffing my face with Twix, I moved on to the donuts and Butterfingers, finishing off with soda and candy corn. Although the feast was quite satisfactory, it left me blissfully sick to my stomach.

Sacrificing staple foods for only raw takes dedication
By Heather Hammel

One rule: No food cooked over 116 degrees, the temperature at which the enzymes in food die. The raw food diet sounds simple, but when broken down, the rule bans a lengthy list of everyday foods — no pasta, bread, cereal, toasted nuts, potatoes, milk and soymilk, chocolate, coffee, peanut butter — until you’re forced to survive on nothing but fruits, vegetables, raw nuts and sprouts.

A vegetarian, I eat healthy foods most of the time. However, I love sweets and have never bought into the low-carb diet craze’s sudden fear of eating bagels. So when I realized that following the raw food diet for a week would mean cutting out every kind of bread and sweets so crucial to my diet, I freaked out.

My first day on the diet ended with a breakdown after dinner when I ate, of course, bread. After surviving the day on pears, raspberries and Fruit Leathers, the only uncooked food in the school vending machines, I came home from crew practice starved and longing for something substantial to eat.

After that difficult first day, I resolved to gradually taper bread out of my diet. Every day, I tried to eat less of it and survive longer without it. Yet I never came to the point where I could go an entire day without some kind of bread. That should have been expected, according to nutritionist Weill Marc.

“The problem most people have is that they just cut stuff out and of course they feel tired,” he said.

Yet I did succeed in drastically cutting cooked foods out of my diet even though I couldn’t cut them out entirely. Rainbow Grocery became my savior. They had non-dairy and soy free products such as raw sorbets, almond milk and raw cookies, which tasted like glue in my mouth. Smoothies were now an ideal staple of my new diet: fruity, sweet and filling. Yet their liquid state left me longing for something solid — something like bread.

When I broke my diet, I ate healthier foods to feel less guilty. I ate brown bread instead of my usual white and avoided sweets altogether. If this diet helped me in any way, it exposed me to healthier foods that I once rejected because the less healthy versions looked more appealing.

My breakdowns were usually a result of having all the food I couldn’t eat within arms reach. The family dinner table was full of foods I couldn’t eat. I was close to tears as I opened the fridge and saw practically nothing that fit the diet.

People who stick with the raw food diet eventually find alternatives to staple cooked foods. “Initially I did miss bread,” said Misha Rappaport, who has been eating 90-100% raw food for 15 years. “But there were always really good crackers that people made.“

Rappaport frequents Café Gratitude, a raw food restaurant serving salads, pizzas and desserts along with other raw dishes that opened two years ago on Harrison Street. The pizzas rely on a crust made with buckwheat, sunflower seeds and ground flax seeds. The pizza crust is not cooked, but made using a dehydrator, which sucks the moisture out of the food.

“Raw food has gotten a lot more sophisticated since I started the diet,” she said.

Rappaport said she notices a difference in her energy state when she eats raw food versus cooked meals. “I always feel kind of deadened out when I eat cooked foods,” she said.

While the raw food diet may be a healthy alternative for some dedicated individuals, the diet would be difficult for most people, especially teenagers, who have trouble preparing foods that satisfy the diet.

For me, the diet did more harm than good. By the end of the week, I felt exhausted, exactly the opposite of what I was supposed to feel. Looking back on the week, I realize that I should have made a more gradual transition into the diet. Cutting out every bit of cooked food right from the beginning simply doesn’t work. I don’t think I’ll be doing the diet again. I love bread more than ever now and I don’t plan on giving it up again.