In How Not to Die, I compiled the healthiest of the so-called green light foods into my

Daily Dozen checklist and encouraged people to try to fit them into their daily routine.

I made it into a free app, Dr. Gregor's Daily Dozen, available for iPhone and Android,

so anyone and everyone can try to check off all the boxes every day and track their progress over time.

As the feedback poured in from millions of people giving the app a try, two themes of complaints arose.

The first was that it was just too much food. There was no way they

could eat all that food in one day. In response, I explained that, look, the daily dozen

was aspirational, something to shoot for, just a tool to inspire people to include some of

the healthiest of healthy foods into their daily diets. The vast volume of food I prescribed was on purpose.

I mean, I was hoping by encouraging people to eat so much healthy stuff, it would naturally

crowd out some of the less healthy stuff. After checking off 24 servings in the daily dozen,

there's only so much room left for a pepperoni pizza.

Ironically, the second major complaint we got is that it doesn't have enough calories.

I had to explain that the daily dozen just represented the minimum.

I encourage people to eat not the maximum, and certainly, you know, training athletes requiring

thousands more calories would have

to eat much more.

This all got me thinking, though.

Too much food, but too few calories?

Sounds like the perfect weight loss diet.

The daily dozen is by definition all green light foods, all whole plant foods.

So that right there bakes in all 17 ingredients of the ideal weight loss diet I introduced

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