Finally, the key to this man's healthy heart Portion control, precooked meals, variety, the answer
Jun. 2, 2006 Toronto Star
ROB SALEM, TV CRITIC Three balanced, calorie-controlled meals a day, chosen by you from several delicious options, delivered right to your door, six days a week, completely prepared and packaged, requiring only a few minutes in the microwave ... and at a cost of only around $20 a day.

My own mother wouldn't do this for me. At first glance, Healthy Heart Meal Delivery sounds almost too good to be true. Particularly for a lazy, overweight schlub like me, who just can't seem to wrap his head around calorie-counting, and whose schedule pretty much precludes cooking for himself, and who, given the option of a healthy meal in a restaurant or cafeteria, will invariably opt for a hot dog on the street or a burger at my desk.

I've been down this road before. Several years ago, I lost 45 pounds on what was then the Zone Delivery diet. The problem there was, I couldn't keep it off — the arcane limitations the Zone imposes on food combination were even harder for me to process than calorie math. I could not continue on my own. I soon resumed my old ways, stopped exercising and eating well, and slid back into sloth. (Something of an occupational hazard — I am a TV critic.)

Fortunately, my old food-delivery friends — ex-cop entrepeneur Jon Burnside and his partner/chef, Keith Mitchell — had reached pretty much the same conclusion. Selling off the Zone business, the two had refocused their efforts on a more user-friendly, lifestyle-oriented, medically approved program.

Every item on the Healthy Heart menu is submitted to the Heart and Stroke Foundation's Health Check Program, and as each individual meal is tested and deemed to meet its stringent parameters, it is so marked on their vast, rotating menu — six choices of meal per day for each three-day delivery period, cycled every six weeks, and available in 1,150-, 1,350- or 1,550-calorie-a-day servings.

The $20-a-day price applies to the lowest-calorie program (the most popular), over a 30-day period, not including delivery charges ($5.49 for every three-day delivery within the city of Toronto , $7.50 for the GTA). The higher-calorie and shorter-term daily charges are all just a few dollars more. The intitial consultation fee is $9.99.

But aside from the convenience and the cost — which I know is at least half of what I would normally spend on the food that is slowly killing me — the great thing about Healthy Heart is it works. The constantly evolving menu eliminates boredom, while ingraining the discipline of portion control.

"That's why I always recommend that people, at least occasionally, take the food out of the container and put it on the plate that you eat with at home," says Mitchell.

"With Healthy Heart, I think, it's really lifestyle eating. It's not something that you go on for a couple of weeks. "

Variety, he acknowledges, is the key. "We want to give enough choices ... But we try to keep enough of the old classics on there too, so that if you're feeling like you want chili, you can have chili."

Mitchell, a 27-year kitchen veteran, knows of what he speaks. To borrow an old ad-line: "He's not only the Healthy Heart head chef — he's also a client."

He has lost 50 pounds on the program.

"That was part of the reason I came up with this," he says. "I looked at a few fad diets, and cooked a couple, and really, I was just getting heavier and heavier. So I decided that I wanted to do something that I would eat and stay on myself.

I talk about weight gain as an occupational hazard — but how much more tempting must it be to over-eat when you spend every waking, working minute in a kitchen full of food?

"When you're 20 years old, and running your ass off all the time, your metabolism can handle that. But once you turn 35, 40, you're just not going to be able to live like that any more, not unless you up your activity level," Mitchell says.

Aha! Now even the food guy is telling me what my girlfriend has been hammering at me for years — no diet in the world is going to work for me until I get off my butt and do something physical.

"The best thing that I ever bought was a MP3 player," Mitchell assures me. "That got me walking.

"And you know, eating the right food helps, because then you've got more energy, and then the whole self-reinforcement thing kicks in once the weight starts coming off."

Check out Healthy Heart Meals for yourself at their website, http://www.healthyheartmealsusa.com, or call 1-888-446-3257.