In our long quest to lose weight and be healthier, Cherokee and I have tried some different diet approaches.
Previous Dieting
I have had my own challenges with losing weight as an adult. I was a vegetarian for quite a few years, but ultimately stopped after reading Michael Pollan’s Omnivore Dilemna. I recognized that how I was eating was not healthy for me and my body reflected it. Eating out often meant loading up deep fried carbs (I’m looking at you, french fries) because so few places had real vegetarian options.
When Cherokee and I started dating, we ate out a lot. Even working as a very busy hospital orderly, I put on a lot of weight. Keto was in vogue at the time so we tried it. It was easy: eat burgers, steak, chicken, cheese, bacon, whatever greasy thing you wanted as long as you didn’t eat carbs. Somehow snacking on bacon made more sense than eating an apple.
I religiously counted net carbs. I grilled, fried, and baked. I made pizza crust from almond flour and mozzarella. I made almond flour and coconut flour cookies. We smothered burgers with cheese and sauteed peppers.
Keto worked. I dropped to the lowest weight in my adult life. We also recognized that it was not sustainable long term. After a few short months, we started transitioning back to eating carbs. That’s when we saw the downside. As the carbs came back, so did the pounds.
This was a classic case of yo-yo dieting. We tried keto another time, watched the pounds melt off, switched off keto, watched the pounds come back on.
Counting Calories
Perhaps the most tedious thing we tried was counting calories. Keto was easy. Put up that mental block that says carbs are bad and suddenly there’s no more chips, cookies, cake, beer, fries. We didn’t have to think about it. We just had to pick a keto meal and make it. When we felt lazy, it was easy to grill a burger or chicken.
Calorie counting was far from easy. The principle is simple: count the calories coming in and make sure its less than what’s going out. Exercise some and you can up the calories allowed for the day. Actually counting calories is time consuming though. When they come from a premade, packaged item, its simple to scan a bar code and put in servings. Cooking from scratch involves figuring out individual calories.
I tried Fitbit, Samsung Health, and Cronometer apps for tracking exercise and calories. Cronometer even allows for importing or creating recipes. That simplifies it somewhat but still requires the initial time. It worked when I put in the effort to track and stayed under the calorie limits. I found that effort was a barrier to actually following it though.
Not Dieting
The problem with dieting is dieting. Diets tend to be short term changes. They are temporary inconveniences before returning to the good food. Keto worked for a while because we cut out the carbs but holidays come. Birthday parties happen. Eventually eating carbs just happens.
Going Mediterranean
After all the dieting experiments—keto, calorie counting, vegetarian phases—we finally hit a point where we were just done. Not done with trying to be healthy, but done with the yo-yo fad diets. One week we looked at each other and basically said, “Alright. Mediterranean Diet. Let’s just do it.” And that was that. No easing in. No transition period. We flipped the switch.
The funny part is that the switch wasn’t even the hard part. The hard part was figuring out how to make it work for a family of seven with wildly different food preferences. We’ve got kids who will eat anything, kids who will eat nothing, and kids who will eat anything as long as it’s beige. So instead of guessing, I fed all of that into Gemini (things like ages, preferences, picky quirks, the whole circus) and had it spit out a meal plan that actually made sense for our house.
And honestly, that made the whole thing feel doable. Instead of trying to reinvent our entire life, we just had a plan. Real meals. Real ingredients. Stuff that didn’t feel like “diet food.” We were roasting vegetables, grilling chicken with lemon and herbs, throwing together simple bowls with rice, beans, and veggies.
The kids didn’t love everything. Even tonight, we had a Mexican Chicken Power Bowls with sauteed chicken, rice (Cherokee and I ate quinoa), peppers and onions, and black beans. H said load it up. C looked defeated. A reluctantly accepted a bowl that had beans and veggies in it. They at least like it enough that they’re trying new foods and eating healthier.
It wasn’t some magical transformation. It was just… normal. Normal food that tasted good and didn’t leave us feeling like we needed to lie down afterward. And because we weren’t counting anything or banning anything, it didn’t feel like a punishment. It felt like, “Oh. This is how we’re supposed to eat.”
What is the Mediterranean Diet?
Before we jumped into this whole thing, I had a vague idea of what the Mediterranean Diet was — something about olive oil, fish, and people who live to be 100. But once we actually committed to it, I wanted a clearer picture of what we were signing up for.
The simplest way to describe it is this: it’s not really a “diet” at all. Not a crash course, drop weight in a week kind of diet anyway. It’s a way of eating that comes from the traditional food habits of countries around the Mediterranean Sea. There isn’t one official version either. At least sixteen countries border the Mediterranean and they all eat a little differently but the basic pattern is the same.
It focuses on real foods that are minimally processed. Basically, its lots of vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains, nuts, and olive oil as the main fat source. Fish and seafood are encouraged, while meat and dairy are more occasional. However, it’s less about strict rules and more about the overall pattern of what you eat day to day.
Our priority wasn’t just to lose weight. It was to be healthier overall. This style of eating ranks as one of the healthiest with links to better heart health and less chronic disease. I nerd out on that stuff, but if the diet doesn’t feel sustainable, it won’t happen. That means the food has to actually taste good, be easy to prepare, and go over with everyone. Cooking two meals — a parent meal and a kid meal — is not practical. Big, elaborate meals won’t work in soccer season. Eating this way doesn’t have to be complex or time consuming.
Go To Meals
Many of our meals still look familiar. We take recipes and figure out how to add more vegetables. Where we can we’ll substitute or partially replace meat with beans and lentils.
One of our first meals was Sloppy Joe sandwiches. Not exactly a conventional Mediterranean food but we filled it with vegetables and replaced half of the ground beef with lentils. Surprisingly the kids devoured it.
The sauce was made with tomato sauce, carrots, peppers, onions, and maple syrup. Then I mixed it with lentils and grass fed ground beef. We served it on whole wheat buns with a salad and zucchini quinoa fritters.
I also eat a lot of hummus with sliced tomatoes and cucumber. Usually its on pita but I don’t discriminate against bread.
The easiest way to add vegetables to any meal is a salad. I know salads sound boring but they are a quick and simple way to add bulk. Roughly half of each meal should be vegetables so a salad will fill it easily.
One meal was turkey meatballs in a pita with tzatziki sauce. Spinach and tomatoes complemented the meatballs and the salad added in even more veggies.
Looking Forward
Since we have been doing this for nearly two months, its safe to say this is how we eat now. Its not a crash diet or 30 day challenge.
We won’t pretend that every meal is perfect either. Sometimes we still order Domino’s (but we get thin crust and load up the veggies) or we make mac n cheese for our picky eaters. The important part is that we look at each meal as an opportunity to eat something more nutritious.
Our ongoing goal is to continue eating this way. I make weekly meal plans (with a little lot of help from Gemini) that are focused on the Mediterranean Diet. Using a meal plan keeps us consistent and less likely to revert to junk food. It actually gives us meals that we look forward to trying and we have developed some new favorites from it.
Author’s Note
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for hanging out with me through the twists and turns of our food history. Writing this has been a good reminder that none of this has been linear. We’ve tried things, abandoned things, circled back to things, and finally landed on something that feels like it fits who we are right now.
I’m not a nutritionist. I’m not a chef. I’m just a dad trying to feed a big family without losing my mind and someone who’s spent way too many years thinking about food in ways that weren’t helpful. The Mediterranean Diet isn’t magic, but it’s the first approach that hasn’t made me feel like I’m fighting myself.
If you’re reading this because you’re trying to figure out your own way of eating, I hope our story gives you a little encouragement. Not because we’ve figured it all out, but because we finally found something that feels sustainable and that’s really the whole point.
Here’s to eating well, feeling better, and finding routines that actually work in the chaos of real life.