Leonardo da Vinci, the Golden Ratio and What's for Dinner, Part 2

The Diet Code: Eat Bread, Drink Wine, Lose Weight
by Stephen Lanzalotta

(Page 2 of 2)

The Diet Code allows you to lose weight at nutritionists' recommended rate for healthy, stable and permanent weight loss: 1-2 pounds a week; 4-8 pounds a month. You'll be eating so well that the weight loss will seem almost effortless. Over time, eating this way will restructure your metabolism and alkalize your system, creating vibrant good health as well as maintaining your natural, healthy weight.

I've experienced the changes that eating this way has brought about in my own body and have witnessed it working for others as they discovered it at my shop, Sophia's. When I made the transition to eating essentially this way (years before I fine-tuned it exactly to the Golden Ratio), the extra pounds I'd been carrying around fell away. Once I refined my personal practices precisely to match the Golden Ratio, I grew leaner still and more muscular. The numbers on the scale didn't really change, since muscle weighs more than fat, but I looked somehow less fleshy, and my clothes fit differently. Equally important, meals proportioned according to the Golden Ratio gave me the energy I needed — the baker's life is a physically demanding one.

As soon as I realized the power of combining foods this way in my own life, I designed a menu along the same lines to serve in my bakery café. My customers responded as enthusiastically as they always had to my bread and began asking how they could eat like this at home, too. And many reported losing weight.

One woman, for example, told me she had started on the South Beach Diet before switching over to The Diet Code approach. She then ate bread every day and still reached her original target weight on time, dropping 25 pounds in four months. She's now the perfect fit for one of the (size small) T-shirts I sell in my shop, the ones that brag "Body by Bread"!

Another woman in her 40s ate The Diet Code way during and after her recent pregnancy. Just recently she was in the store for a pizza with her family (including her three-month-old) — and back at her usual size 4, with no trace left of the 50 pounds she'd put on while pregnant.

A woman in her 60s came into the shop excited about her early success with the plan. "You might not be able to tell, since I'm still stout," she said to me, "but I've lost 7 pounds already!"

Even my own daughter, tall and slim but, in the unfortunate way of teenage girls everywhere, conscious of her weight, lost 7 pounds in three weeks when she started eating The Diet Code way. Since she wasn't overweight to begin with, her weight then stabilized. On both counts (the loss and the stabilization), proportion was the key. My daughter had been eating a typical American diet at her mom's — coffee cake for breakfast, mac and cheese for dinner — heavy on the starch, without the fresh vegetables and the balanced fat and protein to complement the carbs.

Even people who don't need or want to lose weight can reap the benefits of following The Diet Code. My son, who has that beanpole build many teenage boys specialize in, noticed a difference when he moved back in with me. Over dinner one night, he said, "Dad, have you noticed I haven't been sick in about a year and a half? I haven't even had a cold. That's never happened before!" One of my employees recently told me I saved his life — he no longer craved junk food once he started eating from my shop. Getting better nutrition as well as better taste, he said his body was just not happy when he ate anywhere else.

Now this book reveals a plan anyone can use to reap the same benefits my family, my customers and I have. As many times and as many ways as the Golden Ratio has been used through the ages, never before has it been applied to taking in foods and nutrients in proportion with the inherent design of the human body — and the universe. When your food is correctly selected, combined, portioned and proportioned to be directly in sync with your natural metabolic needs, the inevitable result is optimal health and ideal weight.

The Diet Code unlocks all that for you. This is age-old math, but revealed here for the first time is how it works with food, nutrition and weight loss. The Golden Ratio has kept artists and scholars busy exploring its complexities for millennia, yet in the end The Diet Code is as simple as one, two, three, as you'll discover in chapter 2. The basic weight loss formula is accessible to anyone and everyone. The Diet Code program consists of three stages, which I'll walk you through in chapter 7: a gentle initiation for beginners, including the specific formula for creating Diet Code meals; more details in a somewhat more intense period in the middle of the learning curve; and a final phase in which you relax into a lifetime of eating this way, having internalized the principles.

As I developed meals according to the Golden Ratio, I saw that not only was I using the numbers Leonardo did, I was using his foods, too. Not in the strictest sense, of course — tomatoes are a staple of mine, for example, but they weren't even introduced in Italy from the New World until near the end of Leonardo's lifetime, and I do eat meat, while he was a vegetarian for most of his adult life. Leonardo lived during a prosperous time in Italian history, in a financial and cultural capital of the world. Food was generally plentiful — certainly for tradesmen and the upper classes — and varied, thanks to a moderate climate, extensive agriculture and bustling worldwide trade. Food was also fresh, whole, organic, local, free-range, antibiotic-free, pesticide-free, unprocessed and nutrient-dense. General dietary patterns at the time reflect what I've now worked out as Golden Ratio proportions: carbohydrate based and balanced by moderate protein intake and the inclusion of healthy fats — Leonardo's lunch of bread, cheese and vegetable soup. For these reasons, I initially thought of the system I was working out as "the da Vinci diet," referencing not only the man and his math, but also the time (fifteenth century) and place in which he lived. His home village (Vinci) in the Tuscan hills was once ancient Etruria, a cultural and culinary center of Italy even before Roman civilization developed.

That seemingly simple meal fueled not just Leonardo's genius but also the genius of his whole era. He lived during the Renaissance, which saw unprecedented changes to Italy, Europe and the world. It was an awakening unlike any before or since; literally (in French, via Latin) a rebirth. The fifteenth century was a maelstrom of rebirth of human aspirations, values and visions, a time of unrepentant inquiry in science, perspective, sociology and theology. It saw perhaps the biggest paradigm shift of all time, and everything was in play. It was a rebirth following a millennium of church domination during which scientific learning was suppressed and a dark age marked by traveling laborers, serfdom and ignorance was spread. It was also a rebirth after the Black Death wiped out one-third of the population of Europe.

RENAISSANCE MAN Father of the submarine, bicycle, automobile, flying machine and computer, along with his fine art legacy, Leonardo da Vinci was the ultimate Renaissance man. The author Maria Costantino wrote that he was "possibly the most versatile genius in the history of mankind, consistently demonstrating ideas far ahead of his time. . . . Today both his scientific vision and his skill as an artist seem breathtaking." Leonardo as a Renaissance man has particular personal meaning for me not in what he invented (wondrous though those are), but rather in what he ceaselessly strove to apply anew — having inherited knowledge from a long chain of people who'd gone before him. In the age of intrigue, suspicion and unrest in which he lived, everyone was on the move, often for their very lives. Counts and dukes wrangled for alliances; artists migrated from region to region seeking paying patrons. Little wonder Leonardo encoded and secreted his occult knowledge in enigmatic works that baffle us today. Having struggled myself for decades against indoctrination and cultural biases to keep methods and teachings of the ancients alive amidst a fast-paced consumer-oriented present, I have come to respect Leonardo's persistence as much as or more than his creative genius.

With the invention of the printing press, mass media were born, beginning with the printing of the Bible. Trade routes to the East brought Chinese gunpowder and Islamic mathematics to Europe; firepower and more sophisticated calculations led to regular trans-Atlantic navigation and the subsequent plundering of the Americas. Society's entire worldview changed, quite literally, making possible the acceptance of Copernican theory (that the earth revolves around the sun, not vice versa) and the proposition that the globe is spherical. Scientists and scholars working from ancient Greek and Egyptian texts upset the canon of the clergy. Renaissance culture brought about breakthroughs in thought and advances in art, architecture, anatomy, cosmology, global navigation, engineering, humanism and social reform.

Taken together, this was one of the most significant clusters of events in human history, and it simultaneously expanded and fractured provincial Europe. Yet through this revolution, cuisine and culinary arts stayed much the same. What happened in the fields and at the tables of ordinary people may have been the only area of life not subjected to a major upheaval. Those ordinary people were working from truths with roots too strong to allow dislocation. The people of the Renaissance performed intense physical and mental exertions on a balanced base of carb-rich foods, including grains, beans, vegetables and fruits, combined judiciously with healthy fats and proteins. Leonardo and his fellow Tuscan mangiafagioli (bean eaters) would have been eating bread, pasta, wine and all kinds of fruits and vegetables, including leafy greens, onions, nuts and figs — from the whole, unadulterated and organic dieta (fare) available to him in the fifteenth century. Leonardo's diet was as much in rhythm with the design and function of the human body and the natural world around him as were his creative efforts.

You might say I'm a bit of a Renaissance man myself: abstract painter, master woodworker, amateur classical and jazz pianist and violinist, student of the martial arts — as well as baker and chef. And a single father with three teenagers. So I'm serious about the personal expression made possible through preparing wonderful food, and equally serious about making that a real-life proposition. Some nights, you just need to get a meal on the table. But even in the midst of a busy life, that meal can be a thing of beauty: gracefully proportioned aesthetically and nutritionally, and perfectly in sync with the needs of the healthy human body.

To that end, part I of this book examines the math behind the Golden Ratio and how I came to realize that a magical-seeming series of numbers held the secret to healthy eating and weight loss. It considers how out of balance our diets have become, as we've lost touch with the foods that have nurtured us and sustained us for almost the entirety of human history, and shows how crucial it is for us to reclaim what we've left behind.

Part II of the book presents the practical part of the program, giving you a closer look at the science behind and simple methods for living by The Diet Code. It includes a look at the problems with cutting any food group out of your diet — a mystifyingly popular approach guaranteed to result in a drastically imbalanced diet destined to cause weight gain and malnutrition simultaneously — and why the only food you need to avoid for weight loss success is fake food. One chapter describes the short list of Fundamental Foods at the heart of The Diet Code program and introduces how to apply the Golden Ratio to be sure you get them in the proportions necessary for weight loss. Another gives you the five basic steps you need to take to implement The Diet Code: choosing foods by asking yourself, What would Leonardo eat?; combining your chosen foods properly; proportioning those combinations well; speeding up your metabolism and slowing down your life. The last chapter in the section lays out the actual Diet Code program, which leads you through a three-part plan modeled on the path of classical tradespeople — from Apprentice to Journeyman to Master — with varied intensity according to your abilities and desires. There's a gentle initiation for beginners, including the specific formula for creating Diet Code meals, more specifics and details in a more intense phase in the middle of the learning curve, and a final phase in which you can relax into a lifetime of eating according to the program, having internalized the principles and reached your ideal weight.

Finally, in part III, I share advice on creating and maintaining a Diet Code kitchen, a range of flexible meal plans, and delicious, proportionally balanced recipes that are as quick to make as they are delectable. Diet Code food is inspired by the tastes and smells of my grandmother's Italian kitchen, honed by the ancient numbers of the Golden Ratio and presented here to allow you to get dinner ready in half an hour or less while stabilizing your weight and health without experiencing even a day of deprivation.

This book is a blend of ancient lore, Renaissance history, higher mathematics, hard science, personal stories, smart nutritional information and mouthwatering recipes anyone can manage. It unites the structural, mathematical principles of the cosmos that govern the growth of natural life and the aesthetic of natural beauty with wholesome, Mediterranean foods in a breakthrough formula for health, vitality and weight control. It's a provocative yet practical system of nutrition based on an intriguing mathematical phenomenon that's been utilized for millennia but never before applied to nourishing the human body. That makes this book absolutely unique in offering a more sustainable approach to food and eating pegged not to eliminating any one food group but to eating for enjoyment and pleasure, promoting health and reaching an ideal weight. My passion for excellent food, together with my understanding of how to combine the right foods for health, satisfaction and weight loss, gives you a plan you can quickly and easily put to work in your own life in your own kitchen, rediscovering along the way your natural waistline as well as the pure joy of eating for pleasure.

Our rightful heritage of wholesome eating as embodied by Leonardo's daily fare has been lost amidst our modern culture of fast food, fad diets and food phobias. The last three decades in particular, dominated by low-fat and then low-carb regimes that ensured nothing more than hordes of Americans eating in disastrously unnatural and imbalanced ways, have left us in sorry shape physically (more than 65% of Americans are overweight or obese) and even spiritually. Experts have calculated that obesity now cuts more years off our life spans than does cancer or heart disease. Americans have dieted furiously, yet grown ever fatter, no matter which way the prevailing dietary winds blow. It is time to dump the diets that have not just failed us but also aggravated (and even created) the obesity problem in favor of a lifestyle plan that will really work, once and for all. It is a lifestyle plan that puts an end to fad diets, a lifestyle plan from the ages, for the ages. The Diet Code reflects an ancient way of eating we've fallen away from. It's rightfully ours, however, and we need to reclaim it.

Neither this diet nor any other diet program should be followed without first consulting a health care professional. If you have any special conditions requiring attention, you should consult with your health care professional regularly regarding possible modification of the program contained in this book.

Copyright © Stephen Lanzalotta

About the Author

Stephen Lanzalotta is a master woodworker, painter, baker, and chef. He studied microbiology and biochemistry at the University of Vermont. After working for fifteen years as a woodworker, he opened Sophia's, a popular eatery in Portland, Maine, where customers savor the ancient principles of The Diet Code in his famous breads and foods.