Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat (26 page)

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Authors: Mike Dow,Antonia Blyth

BOOK: Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat
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Finding the Time, Money, and Energy to Rehab Your Diet
 
“
These frozen pies are just a few bucks and the family loves them.”
“I don’t have time to cook!”
“My kids only eat the stuff they see on TV.”
“I can’t afford to eat organic.”
 
If shopping, cooking, and supplying yourself with high-quality food seems daunting—and if getting your family to change their tastes feels even more so—believe me, I understand. My mom was the same way: stressed out, busy, and forced to manage on a very tight budget. Between coping with my brother’s medical issues and running her own business, cooking, shopping, and worrying about nutrition were the last things on her mind. We got by on pasta, chips, and soda. If only we had known then what I have learned since: There are lots of quick, easy, and affordable ways to make healthy, delicious meals that even a picky kid will eat. Finger-sized munchies like baby carrots or cherry tomatoes dipped in hummus or salsa can easily replace chips and candy. Keep washed grapes in the fridge and freezer at all times. Learn how to cook a few healthy one-pot meals like low-fat turkey chili that can be frozen. Swap white pasta with whole-wheat. Double vegetable-based pasta sauce and halve the noodles. Add broccoli to macaroni and cheese. When your bananas are turning a little black, peel and wrap in plastic wrap and throw them in the freezer.
Let me tell you up front: I’m busy, too, and though I love to eat, I don’t especially like to cook. Nothing I make ever takes longer than twenty minutes. Sometimes I grill three lunches’ worth of wild salmon and quinoa at one time or make a week’s worth of veggie chili so that I only have to reheat it and prepare my vegetables. (For a look at my favorite recipes, see page 297; for answers to questions about Diet Rehab, see page 236 in Chapter 14.) I am living, breathing proof that you can eat well and easily—and if I can do it, anybody can!
Family Food
 
I understand your concerns about cost, but I promised you that while packaged foods
look
cheaper, you’ll actually get more food for your money if you buy fresh foods and cook them. Your family will also start to snack less as their cravings for cookies and chips diminish. And you might be surprised at how readily your kids will take to sweet crunchy carrots or tangy hummus or apples, raisins, and almonds as healthy snacks.
If you’re worried about paying for organic, pick and choose. The most important foods to buy organic are the ones most exposed to pesticides and other pollutants when grown conventionally: strawberries, leafy green vegetables, apples, and carrots. The least important are the fruits with thick protective skins, such as bananas, citrus fruits, and avocados. I strongly recommend buying either organic milk or milk without the extra hormones.
It’s also true that living on a healthy diet, at a healthy weight, means you are—well, healthier! Your immune system is stronger, your stamina is greater, and you’ll face fewer doctor bills and days home from work.
But don’t take my word for it. As you slowly but surely make the transition to healthy eating, you’ll have a chance to see for yourself how much better you feel on a diet rich in booster foods and a life abundant in booster activities. Take your gradual detox one step at a time, and discover a whole new world of delicious foods, feeling full, and enjoying your healthy new body.
 
11
 
Salt Junkies: Hooked on the Gateway Drug
 
Whether we need serotonin, dopamine, or both, we all tend to love salty food. Why shouldn’t we? It’s stirred into just about every processed food there is—even the sweet ones! It’s the cheap, easy additive that fast-food companies pour into their products to make it taste more intense, more flavorful, and more compelling. Once your taste buds get revved up on salt, it’s hard for them to be satisfied with gentler, subtler flavors, and so we turn to overly sweet and fatty foods.
Our bodies require some natural salt, but the amount we actually need is tiny in comparison to the average person’s intake. Other spices could be adding a kick to your food and improving your health at the same time, such as black pepper, cinnamon, rosemary, turmeric (found in curry powder and mustard), and capsaicin-packed spicy chiles.
In his 2009 book
The End of Overeating,
David Kessler, M.D., interviewed a former employee of Frito-Lay. The interviewee revealed that snack companies develop products that purposely trigger our addictive behaviors for sugar and fat, deliberately employing a technique called “layering,” which puts fat and salt and sugar together to intensify the flavors of each. That’s why I call salt the gateway drug. It sets us up for addictive relationships to serotonin and dopamine-flooding foods by cuing our taste buds to want only overwhelming and artificial flavors. Once our taste buds are ramped up to want extreme flavors, we crave super-sweet and super-fatty foods that then create addictions.
The Perils of Salt
 
Salt raises our blood pressure and causes dehydration. Besides potentially creating cardiovascular problems, dehydration causes us to eat more when what we really crave is water. Instead, we tend to snack on salty treats and processed foods, and then quench our thirst with sodas. Since sodas and other caffeinated drinks are diuretic, they cause our bodies to lose still more liquid, so the dehydration continues.
Salt is known to cause early death through heart attack and stroke. In fact, salt is estimated to be killing about 100,000 people each year. That’s the equivalent of a wide-body 767 airliner of people crashing and dying every day.
Breaking the Habit: Jasmine’s Story
 
My patient Jasmine ran into problems with salt when she tried to give herself a new food regime. A single woman in her mid-thirties, Jasmine worked long hours as a public-interest lawyer. She’d grab a latte and Danish as she rushed to work in the morning. A few hours later, she’d crash and need another coffee and maybe a bagel with cream cheese from the office snack bar. She’d skip lunch, but she always got hungry around three p.m., when she would ravenously snack on something salty, such as chips or pretzels. She’d have a slice of pizza around seven p.m. When she finally got home at ten or eleven, she’d throw some pasta into a pot of boiling water and serve it up to herself with some creamy Alfredo sauce or oily white clam sauce from the grocery store.
As Jasmine and I worked together, she began to realize that her eating habits fed her sugar/starch and fat addictions in problematic ways. But she still didn’t have time to cook, and so she switched to what she thought were healthy frozen meals. What she didn’t realize, though, was that this was yet another processed food with a salt content just as alarming as some of her previous go-to foods.
Eventually, Jasmine found that she could just as easily throw together a healthy salad or low-salt, low-fat soups and stews that she could make for the week and put in the freezer, thawing them out when she wanted them. Avoiding her addictions was a lot about planning for Jasmine, since she was so time-constrained. She was shocked at how much more easily her hunger was satisfied and how cutting back on salt changed her eating habits.
She began waking up earlier, feeling less sluggish than before. She was up in time to make a healthy breakfast of fruit and yogurt or oatmeal, which kept her feeling full until her lunch of grilled chicken salad or whatever lighter option she felt like having.
Without salt, Jasmine was able to steer herself away from sweet, starchy, and fatty foods far more easily. It took a while for her sense of taste to adjust, but once it did she was amazed.
“I can’t believe how good everything tastes!” she told me. “I had almonds with no added salt yesterday. They would have tasted like cardboard to me before, but now they’re delicious! They’ve got so much flavor and they kept me full until dinner.”
Jasmine lost seven pounds in three weeks. Cutting the salt had been the clincher for her.
“The first few days of low salt were tough,” she admitted. “But then I felt like I was hardly even trying. I really started enjoying food, instead of just feeling starved or stuffed.”
Stealth Salt
 
It’s almost impossible to keep your salt intake down if you eat any processed or fast food. Like sugar, it’s hidden everywhere. Some restaurant entrees have 2,000 milligrams or more in a single dish—far more than the maximum suggested daily allowance of 1,500 milligrams for people over fifty-one, African-Americans, or those with high blood pressure, diabetics, or chronic kidney disease. For people not in these groups, that one entrée alone is dangerously close to the daily recommended allowance of 2,300 milligrams. Burgers typically contain more than 1,000 milligrams. Canned and restaurant soups can also be huge salt-packers.
Salt is hidden in most packaged food items, including cookies and cakes, as most food companies use salt to preserve their products. Accordingly, pasta sauces, broths, lunch meats, salad dressings, cheeses, crackers, and frozen foods are frequently swimming in salt.
 
The Problem with Packaged Meals: Andrew’s Story
 
Andrew came to me at age fifty after being diagnosed with high blood pressure. He was really shaken when his doctor had prescribed hypertension medication because his father had died of a heart attack at the relatively young age of fifty-five, while his grandfather had suffered a debilitating stroke. Andrew was suddenly terrified that this was his future, too.
From the outside, Andrew appeared quite healthy. He did some moderate exercise three times a week and was perhaps only ten pounds overweight. He insisted he ate at home and avoided fast food.
“I don’t even eat that much anyway,” he sighed. “I do love tortilla chips, and I always have pretzels when I watch a game at the bar, but I almost never eat fast food and I barely ever have a drink! How has this happened to me?” He was visibly upset.
I suggested that Andrew write down everything he ate in detail for a week. At his next appointment I was able to see the problem immediately: It wasn’t just his once-a-week pretzel habit or the occasional treat of tortilla chips. Andrew was living on packaged TV dinners—and they were simply saturated in salt.
As a bachelor, Andrew didn’t see the point of cooking for himself, so he stocked up on reasonably sized frozen dinners of roast beef and potatoes, chicken with vegetables, and premixed noodle dishes. He had trained his taste buds to expect strong, salty flavors, so he found himself sprinkling extra salt on his sandwiches at lunch and craving bacon at breakfast time. Andrew was so careful to avoid overeating that he had evaded a fat addiction—but at 4,000 milligrams per day, his salt intake was off the charts.
Now Andrew carefully reads the labels on everything at the grocery store. He doesn’t buy anything with more than 500 milligrams of sodium per serving. He’s learned to cook some basic meals from scratch and recalibrated his taste buds, so that fresh foods and alternate flavors now seem more satisfying than his old, processed diet.
“Now I can taste the salt in things too much,” Andrew laughs. “If I find myself at a restaurant with friends, the soup especially always tastes disgusting to me now. So salty! I don’t even think about those pretzels and chips anymore. Sometimes I’ll have unsalted popcorn, but that’s about the only snack I like now.”
Andrew wasn’t just enjoying new, fresh flavors, he was experiencing a dopamine high from trying new things. He was also feeling increased self-esteem from learning to cook for himself—he even joined a cooking class, where he made a few new friends. Meanwhile, his blood pressure has fallen to a normal level, and he feels a sense of optimism that is giving him the confidence to keep making changes.
Hypertension Horrors
 
• Every American over fifty has a 90 percent chance of developing hypertension, which increases the risk of heart disease and stroke.
• If you’re overweight, eating processed food, and doing little physical activity, you are the most likely type to develop this condition.
• Hypertension is preventable through salt reduction, exercise, and maintaining a healthy body weight.
 
Keys to Cutting Salt
 
•
Read all labels
. Limit your intake of anything with over 500 milligrams of salt per serving.
•
Wean yourself off the taste
. Start by slowly reducing your salt intake, then keep reducing, little by little. Give your taste buds a chance to recalibrate themselves. (For more on recalibrating your tastes, see Chapter 10.)
•
Cook for yourself.
When you do, replace salt with strong, stimulating flavors such as turmeric, rosemary, balsamic or apple cider vinegar, ginger, lemon, lime, cracked black pepper, hot chile peppers, onions, and garlic.
•
Experiment.
Play with adding new herbs and spices to your diet. Try cooking foods from different countries, or create some new versions of old comfort foods.
•
Avoid overwhelming a dish with too many seasonings.
Learn to appreciate the subtle flavors that make food worth tasting.

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