How this Fast Diet Lifestyle works: Eat these meals tomorrow, for a calorie total of less than 600. On another day this week, eat the meals from a different post, another day of eating 600 calories or less. Eat sensibly the other days of the week. That’s it: a simple way to lose weight and be healthier. Welcome to Saumya P. who is now Following.

Nicholas Copernicus is one of my favorite scientists. He was adopted as an orphan by his uncle, the Bishop of Varmia. Due to him, Nicholas received an excellent pan-European education, attending most of the universities of the continent and earning degrees in mathematics, medicine, and law. He returned to Poland to be his uncle’s administrative assistant. Evenings found young Nicholas on the ramparts of the cathedral close, studying the motion of the stars and planets as he had been taught as part of his training in mathematics. His notes from early March of 1497 gave him pause. Established scientists and church leaders all agreed that the sun orbited the Earth. Ptolemy said so and the Bible implied it. But Copernicus’ data clearly showed that the Earth was just another planet and that they all circled the sun — the sun was in the ‘center of the universe,’ not Earth. He was reluctant to publish this theological bombshell, but did so at long last in 1543, under the cautious title De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium [Concerning the Orbits of Heavenly Bodies]. It was a best seller. Printed on the new Gutenberg press, it went into two printings, flooding Europe with Copernicus’ new ideas. My students used to ask if he got in trouble* for his radicalism. But no, Copernicus died soon after the work was published and his ideas lived on to influence future scientists such as Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. [*His book was banned by the Church in 1616]

For breakfast, an astronomy lesson: the egg yolk represents the sun with the figs and cheese crumbles circling around it like planets. For dinner, a meal inspired by Polish favorites: sausage, sauerkraut, pickled beets. Copernicus would have been proud to eat these.

Fig & Chevre Plate:  153 calories 8.4 g fat 2.2 g fiber 7.8 g protein 13.4 g carbs [12 g Complex] 163 mg Calcium  NB: The food values shown are for the cheese, egg, fig, and spinach, not for the optional beverages. PB GF Simple, elegant, and more filling than it looks.

½ hard-boiled egg 1 dried fig, 0.65 oz = 16 g 1 oz chevre cheese ¼ oz baby spinach Optional: blackish coffee [53 calories] or blackish tea or mocha cafe au lait [65 calories] Optional: 5 oz fruit smoothie or berry-yogurt smoothie  [88 calories]

Rehydrate the dried fig by covering with water and microwaving or heating for 1 minute. Let the fig sit in the water for another few minutes, then cut in half. Arrange the spinach leaves in an oval. Dab the leaves with crumbles of the goat cheese. Plate the egg half and the fig halves.  HINT: I composed the plate the night before, covered it with a plastic bag, and kept it cool until breakfast.  Instant breakfast!

Baltic Bake:  293 calories 5.5 g fat 7 g fiber 6.6 g fiber 12.8 g protein 33 g carbs 86.4 mg Calcium  PB  GF  Believe it or not, this diet dinner is adapted from the book Two Fat Ladies Obsessions. The meal has wonderful Eastern European flavors and is so simple to prepare that once I assembled it in 16 minutes!! 

1.5 low-fat hot dogs [I like Hebrew National reduced-fat] ½ cup canned or fresh sauerkraut ¼ c pickled beets, drained ¼ c sliced onions ½ tsp horseradish 2 Tbsp canned white beans, drained and rinsed

Put the hot dogs [frozen or thawed] and onions in a saucepan with a little water or some juice from the sauerkraut. Heat until the dogs are cooked and most of the liquid is evaporated. Remove the dogs and add remaining ingredients to the pan to heat. Cut the hot dogs into 5-6 pieces and put them back in the pan until all ingredients are heated through.