Diet books, Books on dieting, Hollywood weight loss guides, Secret fatburners, Diabetic diet, Cardiovascular heart health diet, Low carbohydrate diet, High protein diet, the Mediterranean diet – you name the publication; it’s available in the bookstands. Authors churn these books by the dozen; and people desperate to lose weight buy and read them.

But I have yet to find one diet recommendation that works for me. My weight has gone up and down much like an elevator at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas – “regularly” would be a more specific term to describe it. My weight has ranged from a high of 210 pounds to a low of 180 pounds. My doctor tells me that my ideal weight, at 5 foot – 8 inches and with my build, should be at 160 pounds. Let me tell you, trying to lose 20 or so pounds is very challenging if not impossible.

I have tried the so-called starvation diet. It doesn’t work. In the end I always wound up binging. I think I may have found a diet that works for me. I found it quite by accident really. This diet, described in simple terms, can be defined as eating foods as my forebears, or ancestors have eaten – in other words, it is the food we used to eat back home!

Steamed rice – at the time, rice was husked using mortar and pestle. Unlike today’s bleached rice grain sold by the mega-warehouse conglomerates, the rice grain we used to eat back home retained part of the germ and most of the nutritious parts of the husk. It would have been just harvested that year. Although still high in starch content, that rice grain offered more nutrition than today’s bleached white rice.

Dineng-deng, or up north Inabraw – Poached vegetables, flavored with salted fish sauce, tomato and onion with an accompanying fish or shrimp for additional flavor.

Or Pinacbet - Vegetables (bittle melons, eggplants, string beans, squash, lima beans) slowly cooked in salted fish sauce until they shrivel (this is what the term pinacbet, which is a foreshortened pinackebbet – shrinked or shrunk, means).

Or Sinigang – Freshly caught fish, squid, or shrimp poached in water with tamarinds, or camias, or green mangoes for the tart flavoring, and some salt.

Side Dishes – Freshly caught fish, or squid roasted over coals with a pinch of sea salt for flavor or live shrimp in lime juice.

Dip - Vinegar with minced fresh garlic and hot devil peppers.

Salad - Blanched flower of catuday, or blanched tender shoots of� bitter melon, or blanched tender shoots of green beans with chopped green onions, tomatoes, minced ginger roots and flavored with salted fish sauce.

Desserts or Dulce - Sweet Rice cakes prepared in coconut milk using raw brown sugar, or fresh fruits like bananas, jackfruit, pomelo, star apple, mango, papaya, pineapple, or fruits in season.

If you examine the above mentioned spread, there is a glaring absence of vegetable oils and/or animal fats in the food, or butter – not even in the desserts. No synthetic sugars or sweeteners are used in the main course or side dishes. No processing chemicals, preservatives, and added stabilizers are used. There is an abundance of green leafy vegetables and fresh fruits, a great source of phyto-chemicals. If there is one weakness in this kind of ancestral diet, it is the tendency to overuse sodium found in the salted fish sauce. So, extreme caution is exercised in its use and inclusion in the vayands.

Meats are also part of the ancestral diet but they are only seldom used. Families usually go to the Sunday open market to purchase pork, beef, or poultry. They instead rely on their own family-raised livestock for meat in their diets. It would be safe to say that meat is eaten rather sparingly.

It is just as well because most of the ancestral meat recipes I have seen include some very fatty sections of the animal carcass. An example of this is a dish called chitcharon (pork crispies). A highly prized dish, it’s popular and enjoys many uses. It is eaten in many ways up to and including as appetizers (finger foods) during mah-jong games, or card games. Chitcharon or sometimes spelled sitcharon in some quarters is taken from the belly of pork, or fat-backs and jowls, simmered in star-clove spices until the skin becomes tender, allowed to cool in baker’s racks (bagnet), then crisped in a vat of boiling rendered lard until golden brown. The cold fatty tissues of the pork bellies (bagnet) explode in a million tiny eruptions forming air pockets in the fatty tissues but leaving the interspersed lean meat in between. Chitcharon is simply delicious but quite deadly.

Growing up in the province – in the farm, I ate food prepared by my mother, aunts and grandmother. It was a lean diet of vegetables and fruits mostly, rice of course, salted fish and the tart fruits like green mango, tamarinds, camias.

Coming to America, I soon forgot my old diet of rice and vegetables and in its place began to devour tons of junk food. I didn’t even notice I had forsaken the diet my ancestors ate and started consuming foods that were bad for me. Ice cream, cheeseburgers, soda and potato chips became my staples. And another thing, I picked up bad habits: smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol.

Fortunately, all that’s in the past. I am a reformed former smoker… and as a famous talk show host would proclaim, “I am typing this story on my keyboard with my formerly nicotine stained fingers…” I am also enjoying eating a healthy diet once again, a diet of fresh vegetables (dineng-deng, inabraw, sinigang, pinacbet), and fresh fruits, seafood (paksiw, tinono, adobo), a sliver of meat every now and then (mostly chicken roasted over coals without butter or any of that sweetening stuff or barbecue sauces), a little pinch of salt, and a half cup of steamed rice. What did I give up? Phony foods like kare-kare, frito, raw-meat kilawen, and other dishes heavy with coconut milk.

I weighed myself just a few hours ago… 172 pounds and decrementing.