Danish-born Suzy Wengel’s diet has been hailed as the ‘simplest diet in the world’, for a reason. It takes the stress away from measuring portion sizes and carefully calibrating macronutrients, by employing the ‘handful method’, to plan out your three main meals.
She calls each of these meals, a meal box. A single meal box ideally consists of 4 handfuls of food — 1 of protein, 1 of starch/fruit, 2 of vegetables — with 1-3 tablespoons of fat and a bit of dairy. “Your portion size is controlled by your hand,” says Wengel over a Skype call. This automatically means that someone who has a smaller hand (and needs less calories) eats less than a larger person.
It takes a little time to figure out, she admits: “You have to keep full for 5-6 hours,” but once you do, it becomes a great tool to control portions wherever you are and whatever you eat. If you’re eating a burger, for instance, you can swap the French fries for a salad, reduce the bread to create a perfect meal box. Vegetarians or vegans can eat beans, soy and pulses instead of that handful of meat. If you’d like a glass of wine occasionally, simply drop the handful of starch from your meal box and eat just the protein and vegetable component. And if only ice cream will do, “you can simply fill your meal box with that, and go back to the handful system the next time you eat,” says Wengel.
A Scandi Sense success story
Suzy Wengel walks the talks: she herself lost around 40 kilos in 10 months, following a calorie-controlled, structured eating plan. “After 17 years of yo-yo dieting, I was sick and tired of my situation,” says Wengel, who weighed nearly 100 kilos when she started, soon after the birth of her second child. “I knew I had to do something good for myself. I had children and had to raise them right.”
She had tried every fad diet in the world and knew, “I couldn’t go back to one of those because they don’t work in the long run.” Instead, she decided to do it the old-fashioned way, researching intensely to find a lifestyle that would work for her.
“Research says that only 5% of people who lose weight keep it off. What they do is very boring; they change their habits and keep that going.” The only way to do that sustainably was, “to adapt everything to the life they are living,” adds Wengel, who did exactly that to lose her weight.
The diet she adapted to lose weight back then evolved into the Scandi Sense Diet. “I realised there was a pattern in my meals. So I took my hand and placed it over my plate and realised that it contained one handful of starch, two of vegetables, one of protein and 1-3 tablespoons of fat. Also, sometimes I have dairy and sometimes I don’t,” she says.
Box it up
A visit to Ikea added another dimension to this way of eating, “They have these boxes and I saw those and told myself, ‘this is my meal box’,” says Wengel, who went on to do a course in nutrition to deepen her understanding of the subject. “I wanted to help other people, which is why I educated myself,” she says, adding that there are now around 65 nutritionists in Denmark using the Scandi Sense Diet with their clients.She went on to write a book — the latest edition of which was released in October last year — and uses social media extensively to drive home her message. “It is a relatively new idea and my big job is trying to communicate it around the world,” she says, pointing out that the meal-box concept is a great mental tool for people with overeating issues.
“A mechanical structured way of eating, over time, allows your body to intuitively know when it is hungry and when it is full. That is what happened to me.”
The nicest thing about the diet is its versatility. You can follow the principles whether you are on IF (intermittent fasting), vegetarian, LCHF (low carb, high fat); you can eat out with your friends on it; you can follow it on a holiday or during the festive season; eat food from all around the world on it.
“It is a multi-system plan,” agrees Wengel. “You just need to get your handfuls right. Weight loss is only induced by a deficit of calories and this tool will help you with that.”
