Food Cures (2 page)

Many remarkable people were involved in the creation of this book. I’m especially grateful to the world-class physicians who continuously trust and support my work, and to my extraordinary clients—their successes have made this book possible by teaching me the things readers need and want to know.

Tremendous thanks to Carol Svec—appreciation is an understatement. You were my pillar of strength during this entire process and actually made hard work enjoyable. This book is a direct result of your extraordinary talent and professionalism. You’re a brilliant writer, and it’s a sheer honor to work with you and call you my friend.

Sincere thanks to
Dystel and Goderich Literary Management
. Jane Dystel, your wisdom, ongoing support, and direction mean the world. And many thanks to Miriam Goderich for your overall guidance and expertise.

Special thanks have to go out to two extraordinary experts and colleagues: Erica Ilton, the director of nutrition research for this project. This book substantially benefited from your genius research and exceptional input. And Jennifer Iserloh, a phenomenal chef with a passion for health. Your scrumptious recipe contributions and incredible commitment were a true blessing. Seriously, you are both angels.

Thanks to the entire crew at Rodale, Inc. Your enthusiasm, support, and dedication are greatly appreciated. Special thanks to Heather Jackson and Tami Booth Corwin for recruiting me, and to Gail and Jim Citrin for helping to ignite the fire. Many thanks also to Liz Perl, Nancy Hancock, Lois Hazel, Cindy Ratzlaff, Mary Lengle, Chris Rhoads, and Joanna Williams. Tremendous thanks to my two fabulous editors: Lisa Considine, for your valuable suggestions in writing, editing, and structuring the book…and Amy Super, who pulled everything together at the end.

I feel particularly grateful to Steven Rubenstein for your friendship, support, and ongoing kindness. And special thanks to Alice McGillion, Rachel Nagler, and Lori Ferme of Rubenstein Public Relations for helping to spread the word of good health!

Deep appreciation to Shaquille O’Neal—for making me a part of your dream team and mission to get kids healthy.

Lori Schulweis, I am so appreciative of your friendship and for all that you’ve done.

Many thanks to Jim Bell (for your kindness and ongoing support), Amy Rosenblum (for your confidence, friendship and expert tutelage—I’m forever indebted), Marc Victor (for your warm generosity), Rainy Farrell (for believing in me, and going way out on a limb), Elena Nachmanoff (for taking my calls!), and Jackie Levin (for giving my book a shot). Heartfelt thanks to all of you for regularly inviting me on your show and enabling me to improve the health of America. You make the studio feel like my home away from home. Also, thank goodness for Laura Bonanni and Barbara Kelly, Bianca Henry, Kristin Costa, Edward Helbig, and Deb Winson. And many thanks to Paul, Cindy and the hardworking prop department at
Today
.

Thanks to Kim Gerbasi and Emily Raiber—you gave me a shot and I’m forever grateful.

Much appreciation to my friends at Yahoo!…Deanna Brown, Rachel Friedlander, Harold Goings, and Maggie Nemser.

Sincere thanks to Jessica Seinfeld. Your passion for health makes it an honor to collaborate and call you a friend. Thanks, too, to the fabulous Pam Fink, for my “Charmed Life.” Clearly, your Good Charma jewelry works!

I owe thank yous to so many people, all of whom play an important part in my life: Peter Martins, Ken Tabachnick, and the rest of the gang at
New York City Ballet…
and Mirabai Holland at the 92
^nd
Street Y…the crew at
SELF
magazine, especially Lucy Danziger, Carla Levy, and Donna Fennessy…my attorney, Richard Heller, for invaluable input and legal advice…Jon and Bonnie Ackerman, for expertise on teeth and cooking…and last (but never least) Judy Lieberman, for the outstanding gazpacho recipe.

Special thanks to Janice Johnston, Lois Perelson-Gross, Dany Levy, and Geralyn Coopersmith for your genuine support and friendship. And many thanks to Cindy Cinicolo, Louisa Guigli and Martha Rios.

For your ongoing advice, opinions, and positive energy, I send heartfelt thanks to the dedicated registered dietitians/nutritionists at
Joy Bauer Nutrition
who help keep New Yorkers healthy: Lisa Mandelbaum, Jennifer Medina, Laura Pumillo, Maria Baldo, Erica Ilton, Elyssa Hurlbut, Nicole DiLorenzo, Suzanne Magnotta, Rebecca Appleman, Amy Horwitz, and Ilana Derman. And many thanks to my interns for all your hard work and commitment; Barbara Ackerman-Kravitz, Ilyse Bernikow Schapiro, Janice Wen, and Rachel Dower.

Hugs to everyone in my wonderful families: the Beal family; (Debra, Steve, Ben, Noah, Becca, Harvey, and Jenny), the Schloss family (Ellen, Artie, Pam, Dan, Charlie, Glenn, Elena, and Otis), the Bauer family (Carol, Vic, Jason, Mia, Harley, and Jimmy), the Malachowsky family (Mary and Nat), and the Cohen/Shapiro family (Nancy, Jon and Camrin). And special thanks to Lisi Epstein, Kael Goodman, and Shannon Green.

I must give special mention to “the room” on the third floor in Stockbridge where I spent most of my summer, and to the Berkshire Co-Op in Great Barrington for providing me with a table and cup of coffee whenever my house was too filled with chaos to write.

Thanks, too, to Bill Svec, for keeping my coauthor sane and happy while she was working on deadline.

Infinite, deep, and ever-lasting thanks to my mom and dad. You are my lifelines and my touchstones. Your support means the world and I’m forever grateful for your encouragement, advice, cashews, and wine.

I can’t say enough about my husband Ian, and my three children, Jesse, Cole, and Ayden Jane—I owe you big time! You all astonish me with your patience, understanding, support, flexibility, and forgiveness. You picked up the pieces when I was preoccupied, and you picked me up with your good humor and loving spirits. Just when I thought I saw the full magnitude of your generosity, you surprised me again and again. You are everything valuable in the world…my heart…my bliss…my home…my loves.

M
y motto is this: Life is hard…food should be easy.

But for many people, knowing what to eat, when to eat, and how much to eat is a puzzle they have lost all hope of ever solving.

Anyone who has ever tried to make a commitment to healthy eating knows the obstacles: The dizzying number of choices in grocery stores and restaurants…the crazy, always-on-the-go schedules of nearly every member of the family…the relentless hype and marketing surrounding fatty and sugary snack foods…and the powerful appetites fueled by habits, traditions, and humongous portion sizes. As if that wasn’t enough pressure, add in the swirl of conflicting information about specific diets—high-carb versus low-carb, high-fat versus low-fat, calorie-counting versus no-counting, cabbage versus grapefruit versus eggs versus whatever.

Who wouldn’t feel overwhelmed and frustrated? And when we’re frustrated, we tend to fall back into old, unhealthy eating patterns. Have you ever gone on a diet to lose weight, but ended up gaining weight instead? Or did you lose weight only to put it back on again within a year or two? Has your doctor ever put you on a special diet to treat a health problem, but you soon abandoned it because it was just too complicated for real life? If so, you’re not alone. These scenarios happen more often than you might think. No one consciously plans to eat her way into a larger dress size, or to make himself a candidate for triple bypass surgery. But dietary uncertainty can turn the best intentions sour, even when the stakes are high. When it comes to good nutrition, it is so easy to go from being totally motivated to feeling utterly defeated.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Whatever else is going on in your life, food should be the least of your worries. Eating is a piece of cake.

Really.

HOW FOOD MAKES US NUTS

I understand why you might be skeptical. We have a strange love/hate relationship with food. We want to eat cupcakes, but be as slim as Jennifer Aniston. We fantasize about our ideal meal, but settle for a burger and fries from a drive-through window. We buy “skinny jeans” for the body we want to have, but then eat comfort foods because those jeans don’t fit anything but our dreams. Love/hate—two sides of the same sneaky cookie.

Food does more than nourish us, so it makes sense that it can elicit complex feelings. Of course, its most important role is to nourish us—to give us the vitamins, minerals, energy, and nutrients necessary to keep us alive and healthy—but food is also about love and family traditions. It’s how we celebrate and comfort and nurture—which is why food is at the center of weddings and funerals, and it’s the first thing we think to bring when we hear a friend is sick. Food is about taking away the pain that comes from hunger, but it also has become about easing our boredom, stress, or depression. We tend to eat too much of almost everything whenever we get the chance. We eat in the car, at work, in front of the TV, or standing over the kitchen sink. We snack before meals, after meals, and sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes without even waking up. Next to sex, eating is the activity most responsible for making us feel any number of emotions, including happiness, longing, pride, pleasure, shame, weakness, and power.

Food is like that great, big proverbial elephant in the room—which also follows you around all day. We try to ignore it, but every time we turn around, there it is. Yet despite the huge (mammoth!) role food plays in our lives, we don’t really know how to talk about it, at least not in a way that helps us make the best choices when it comes time to eat.

I believe the reason some diets become wildly popular for a time is that they allow us to understand food and eating in a new way, and they give us a different language to use when trying to sort out our confusion. Think about it: During the past few years, we’ve all learned the language of “Carbs”—what carbs are, what low-carb eating looks like, the difference between net carbs and total carbs, bad carbs and good carbs, et cetera, et cetera. Before that, we studied the language of “Fats.” And before fats, we all knew how to parse calories.

So it’s not that people lack information about food and eating. In fact, most of us have more information than we know what to do with. Literally. Many of my clients have such sophisticated vocabularies that they sound like third-year nutrition students. The problem is that they don’t know how to combine all the disparate pieces of the diet puzzle into a plan that they can use to achieve their individual, highly personal goals. They are eager—desperate, even—to gain control over food. But they can’t do it with words alone!

That’s where I come in.

THE POWER OF A STEP-WISE PROGRAM

In my 16 years as a nutritionist, I’ve helped thousands of people overcome their worst problems with eating. In the process, they have grown stronger and healthier. In many cases, they have added 10, 15, or even 20 years to their lives by controlling or even reversing disease processes.

How can food turn your life around? Let me tell you about 56-year-old Stephen, a high-powered lawyer who was all but ordered by his doctors to make an appointment with me. To say he was initially resistant to seeing a nutritionist would be an understatement. It was a hard sell, but in the end the encouragement (and begging and pleading) of his wife and children persuaded him to come to see me.

He was a nutritional wreck. At 5′ 9&8243; tall, Stephen was significantly overweight at 250 pounds. His body mass index (BMI) was 37, officially classifying him as obese. His lab values were high across the board: High cholesterol and triglycerides put him at high risk of heart disease, and high fasting glucose levels meant Stephen was officially diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

To try to get control over these risk factors, Stephen’s doctors put him on three powerhouse medications—a blood pressure drug, a statin to lower his cholesterol, and Glucophage to lower his blood sugar. And then I got a hold of him.

I gave him a food plan to help him lose weight, lower blood sugar, and lower his cholesterol…and when he had an episode of gout, I gave him tips on how to treat that, too. Once he overcame his initial reluctance, Stephen approached his new eating program with the same intensity he used to succeed in every other aspect of his life. He made a spreadsheet to track his weight loss and his lab numbers, he used his eating plan like a script: he memorized and followed it religiously. He consulted me whenever circumstances made it more than likely he would need to deviate from it—to make sure he wouldn’t do too much harm. He ate cake at his birthday party, he socialized with friends, and he enjoyed holiday celebrations—but all within the guidelines of his food program.

At the end of a year, Stephen had lost more than 60 pounds, bringing him down to under 190. His critical blood measurements—triglycerides, cholesterol, and fasting glucose—all dropped to within normal ranges. He continued to take the statin, but he was able to stop taking the Glucophage and the blood pressure medication. As of this writing, Stephen has maintained his weight loss and health benefits for three years. His doctor told him that because of the nutritional changes, Stephen has probably
added at least ten healthy years to his life
.

As amazing as this story sounds, Stephen’s results are not unusual, and well within anyone’s reach. No matter what your personal health goals are, I have a terrific food plan for you. I’ll even help you figure out exactly what your goals should be.

My goal is to make reading this book as much as possible like a one-on-one consultation with me in my New York office. I’ll tell you everything you need to know to lose weight, look gorgeous, improve your mood and memory, boost your bone density, and stay healthy. I’ll even give you a script to follow—a focused four-step program that spells out everything you need to know to think
and eat
just like a nutritionist. In short, I’ll provide everything you need for success.

STEP INSIDE MY OFFICE

Let’s start at the beginning, with the absolute basics. One of the main questions I’m asked over and over is what defines
good nutrition
. In general, it means eating the right foods in the right combinations throughout the day to optimize your energy and overall health.

Of course, the people who come to see me lead different lives and strive to achieve a wide range of goals. So for some, good nutrition means focusing on increasing energy. I’ve worked with professional and student athletes, dancers, actors, and business executives who need to maintain a consistent level of performance. For other people who have a strong family history of disease, good nutrition means minimizing their risk of heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, migraine headaches, arthritis, osteoporosis, or cancer. For others, it means finding a way to lose the weight they might have been struggling with for years.

A while ago, a man I’ll call Bruce called me up and told me that one of his friends had lost a ton of weight after he became my client, and now he looked phenomenal. His buddy said that I worked miracles. Bruce was calling because he had a weight problem, but he was a busy person. He knew all the tricks, had been on all the diets, had gained and lost 100 pounds more times than he could count, and didn’t want to bother with an appointment if I couldn’t guarantee success. “Tell me,” he said, “are you the person who is absolutely going to help me prevail, once and for all?”

He didn’t mince words! But he just asked outright what everyone really wants to know—can my programs work, immediately, quickly, and forever? The short answer to that question is
Yes, dramatic and long-lasting results are absolutely possible…but the chance of success depends entirely on you
. I don’t want to give anyone false promises, not in my office and not in this book. I’m only as good as my clients’ follow-through, so if you’re after the kind of transformation that your friends (like Bruce’s) will call miraculous, I’m here to help. I can show you how to evaluate your needs, give you a dynamite eating plan, and guide you through some of the most common nutritional pitfalls. We are a team—I’m your food coach, but ultimately you’re the one who’ll be doing the heavy lifting.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT COMMITMENT

In the end, no matter what spurs you to seek help, three things are necessary for you to meet your goals:

1. The right coach. Well, you’ve got me, so cross this one off your list. I have a great track record for success with my clients.
   
2. Rock-solid nutrition and health information. Cross this one off the list, too, because that’s what this book is all about.
   
3. Your personal commitment to stay in it for the long haul. This one is up to you!
   

Personal commitment is a big deal. None of this will work for very long if you’re only following a food program because you’re going on vacation, or because someone else is on your back about losing weight. You have to be doing this for you. You have to want results and be willing to work for them no matter what obstacles get in your way. After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I heard lots of stories about how people ran for comfort foods and the liquor cabinet and gave themselves permission to overeat and drink…for weeks. My belief is that it’s incredibly important—especially in times of crisis—to eat right and stay on top of your health.

Think about it: Whenever you say “I’m overwhelmed, I’ve got too many things on my plate”—or “I’m depressed…or too busy…or too anxious”—what do you do? If you’re like most people, you give up on good nutrition and eat foods that make you sick, contribute to your illness, or put on weight you spent months trying to shed. In the end, you’re left feeling depressed, sluggish, and easily angered. How is that helpful?

That’s why I really think that any time could be the right time to make food changes. Your commitment is what’s important, the commitment to eating well the majority of the time—not perfect foods, but healthy foods. It is a commitment you’ll need to honor when you’re home, when you’re out, when you’re shopping, and when you’re socializing. It’s a commitment to totally change your lifestyle.

PREPARE YOURSELF

Changing how you eat is never easy. The first step is to get in the right place mentally. If we’re going to try to create a little nutritional magic, there are a few things you need to do to prepare for this adventure:

• Limit your use of the word
  diet
  .
  The word
  diet
  seems to have horrible connotations. It is impossible to use the word
  diet
  in a sentence without sounding sad or judgmental. Try it: “I really should go on a diet.” “My doctor put me on a diet.” “Boy, if anyone needs to diet, he does.” The only time
  diet
  doesn’t sound like a prison sentence is when we talk happily about going off one. Try not to use the D-word; it will just demoralize you.
  
• Repeat after me: “I can do this!”
  The prospect of trying another weight-loss program can feel like staring into a black hole—no joy, no light, no end in sight. It’s easy to feel defeated before you even begin, so some degree of nervousness is understandable. But a more appropriate response is enthusiasm and confidence. Trust me. I’m a professional. I’ve done this hundreds and hundreds of times before. No matter what your personal issues are, I’ve seen worse (and you’ll read some of those stories in the chapters to come). I will give you all the secrets for success I’ve learned over the years.
  
• Dare to make the leap.
  Pop quiz: Which is more fun, wading into the shallow end of the pool or doing a cannonball off the diving board? When we were kids, all we wanted to do was jump into the deep end. We tend to lose that sense of courage and daring along the way. As adults, we need to find a way to get back that feeling of
  one…two…three…let’s go!
  And we’re talking about nutritional changes, so you can’t hurt yourself by making a full, unrestrained leap. This is about your health—the only risk is if you don’t do anything. So go ahead, take a deep breath, and jump in.
  
• Think big.
  As far as I’m concerned, small changes add up to small results. Grand changes equal grand, life-altering results. We’re on this earth for such a short time that I don’t believe we have the luxury to move slowly. And face it, it can be just as hard to make a small change as it is to go for the whole enchilada (so to speak). So, you might as well go for it. Make the big changes! The payoffs will be larger, and your gratification will come sooner.
  
• When the going gets tough, remember that it’s
  just food
  .
  That probably sounds crazy coming from a nutritionist, but it’s a critically important point to remember. Write it on a piece of paper and tape it up on your refrigerator: “It’s just food.” If you’re in a restaurant trying to stick to your food plan, but salivating over the meal that the person next to you is eating, remember to ask yourself: Is it worth it? The food is only going to be there for 15 to 20 minutes at most, and then it is gone, a memory except for the effects it has on your health and your weight. Is it worth it? That’s a question only you can answer. If, after careful and deliberate consideration, you answer yes, it is worth it, then go for it. We’ll consider it your “meal off,” like a little vacation day for your taste buds. But those meals off should be rare and special, just like real vacations.
  
• Prepare to feel fabulous.
  I won’t try to fool you into thinking that there will ever come a time when you won’t crave sweet, fatty foods, or that you will never want to go whole-hog at a buffet. We’re all magnetically drawn to those foods that temporarily make us euphoric, and then drop us way down. Those yummy temptations are on every street corner, at every dinner party, and in all your friends’ homes. They will always be there, every day for the rest of your life. But that said, the payoff in the form of improved quality of life is well worth the fight. You’re going to want to continue to live through these struggles because you’re going to feel so good when you meet your goals. When you give in to temptation and eat poorly, you end up feeling sluggish, lethargic, and unhealthy. What’s the point?