IN Good Health: Frank Davis

In 1995, celebrity cook and sportsman Frank Davis decided to take wife Mary Clare dancing after the Madisonville Wooden Boat Festival. The evening included dancing—FUN! Smoking—TSK! TSK! And intermittent pressure on his jugular vein—DANGER!

“I didn’t feel the elephant on my chest thing everyone talks about, so I didn’t think I was having a heart attack,” Frank explains.

At 5 a.m. the next day, Frank drove himself to Methodist Hospital (from Slidell). After monitoring and an angiogram, doctors performed a triple bypass on the happy-go-lucky Davis. “I didn’t want to die,” he recalls. This brush with death caused him to rethink life. “Live every day to its fullest. Dream as if you will live forever, but live as if you will die tomorrow,” he recommends.

Those sentiments are worthy, indeed, but Frank needed to make dietary changes, also. He modified old New Orleans recipes into heart-healthy cooking for his TV show—and the audience hated him for it! “This area talks a nice game but don’t play that way,” he adds in his trademark “Naturally N’Awlins” speech. “People wrote me, saying, ‘It’s YOUR heart problem, not ours. We want recipes done the way they’re supposed to be done.’”

Despite having a triple bypass, Frank couldn’t stick to a diet. His weight yo-yoed. Why? “As you get further away from a heart attack, you start slipping. You think, ‘Hey, my mama’s coming over. I can eat fried chicken, and it won’t hurt me just this once.’” Don’t even say the “d” word to Frank. “Diets don’t work. I’m tellin’ ya, if someone tells you to never eat a donut, all you think about is that donut. Pretty soon, you’ll mug a donut shop clerk just to get one.”

What works instead is something he calls “Frank’s Philosophy of Halves.” Serve yourself what you normally would eat—five meatballs, two mounds of spaghetti. Knock yourself out! BUT, after you serve yourself, put half of what’s on your plate back in the pot. “It don’t work to say you’ll only put half of an average serving on your plate. We lie to ourselves. We all do it,” he cautions.

A doctor friend once advised Frank that he could eat everything, but in moderation. Once an insulin-dependent diabetic, Frank’s diabetes is now controlled by diet—a diet that includes sweets, but in moderation. Frank swears that his Philosophy of Halves really works, and he has the numbers to back it up. In four months, he’s lost 50 pounds.

Couple that with reduced sodium, adds Frank. As much as possible, try to eat food that has fewer than 140 mg/sodium per serving. “Do that, and your first week you’ll urinate like Seabiscuit,” he laughs.

With his weight under control, his diabetes in check and his cardiologist’s home number on speed dial, Frank Davis is one happy fella. “I’m absolutely living the ideal life. Mary Clare and I have tried to take the word ‘tomorrow’ out of our vocabulary. Now, we take very little for granted. I tell people you can find something good in every situation. If stuff happens, c’est la vie. It beats lying in Forest Lawn listening to the traffic going by.”

And that, friends, is “Naturally N’Awlins” advice spoken right from the heart.

– Karen Gibbs