The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body's Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast (63 page)

After you experience a health transformation yourself, you will likely want to share your newly discovered insights and passion, which is great. But tread lightly—no one wants to be lectured to! Instead, you can share by example. Getting healthy yourself will cause people to wonder how you did it. In the course of your everyday life, as you
change your small daily habits (for instance, ordering herbal tea instead of a latte when meeting friends for coffee, or bringing nuts or fresh veggies and homemade dip for a workday snack instead of raiding the vending machine), people will naturally be curious. When they ask about your new lifestyle, take the opportunity to pass along the food-addiction and detox secrets you now know. If you do this with respect (and not judgment), others will likely want to know more and be receptive to learning the real facts. Even if you open the eyes of
one
person, you’ve paid it forward and made a difference.

Better yet, encourage your friends to join you. Invite them to go shopping with you, to cook and enjoy a meal together. Start a group at work or in your community for people who want to take back their health and go on hikes, play games or sports together, and have dinners. Start a supper club. Start a church group. Start a friendly competition at work and see who can get the healthiest by dejunking their work spaces, or form teams and see who can lose the most weight, walk the most steps, or eat the most vegetables in a week. Remember the words of Margaret Mead:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

The single most powerful weapon you have to take down the food industry is your wallet. Your dollars are what the food industry is after; how you spend them dictates
everything!
Think about it: Where does the $1 trillion we spend on factory-made hyperprocessed junk and fast food come from? It comes from us—from our wallets and paychecks. While asking for policy, industrial, and social reform is important, the truth is
we—
not the government or corporations—already hold the keys to fixing this.

Imagine if we just stopped buying the food industry’s unhealthy products, even for a day. If we refused to buy these processed and addictive foods, the industry would lose its major source of profits, and we
would collectively make a difference in what appears on our grocery shelves.

We could change how our food is grown and produced, stop the destruction of our soils and depletion of our natural aquifers, and transform agriculture from an oil-based industry (one that uses more fossil fuels than all our cars put together) into a more sustainable, local, health-creating, and community-building food system. We could renew our oceans and estuaries destroyed by the runoff from factory farms. We could end climate change by closing factory animal farms, which create clouds of methane gas (a bigger contributor to global warming than carbon dioxide).

What you choose to purchase and put on your fork is the ultimate game changer. It is the most important thing you can do for yourself, your family, your community, our nation, and the planet. Period!

Where
you eat may be just as important as
what
you eat. Not only does this make an impact in terms of where our dollars are spent—it puts the control over what goes in your food squarely in your hands. A hundred years ago, only 2 percent of our meals were eaten outside the home. Today, that number has escalated to 50 percent. I believe in the power of collective intelligence, and as more and more families wake up to the power of taking back their kitchens, we’ll turn the tide.

Imagine an experiment. Or better yet, let’s call it a celebration: We’ll call upon the people of the world to join together and celebrate eating whole, real, fresh food at home for one week. I call it an eat-in, like the nonviolent sit-in protests of the 1960s, but the eat-in won’t get you arrested! For one week (or even one day!), we all eat breakfast and dinner at home with our families or friends. Imagine the power of all those forks to change the world.

The extraordinary thing is that we really do have the ability to influence large corporations and social change by our collective choices. We
can reclaim the family dinner. Doing so will reinforce how easy it is to find and prepare real food quickly and simply, and teach our children by example how to connect, build security, and develop social skills—meal after meal, day after day, year after year.

I recently went to South Carolina to help an obese family as part of a film on childhood obesity called
Fed Up
. The family was massively overweight. The father was in dialysis but couldn’t get a kidney transplant because of his weight, and the son at sixteen was 260 pounds and 60 percent body fat.

They lived on food stamps and disability. Instead of a prescription, I brought them the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) guide
Good Food on a Tight Budget
and groceries for turkey chili, roasted sweet potatoes, and a salad and went to their trailer and taught them to cook a meal.

I left them with the EWG’s guide to eating well for less and my
Blood Sugar Solution Cookbook
and suggested they cook and eat at home using the guide. After five months, the mother lost 57 pounds and the father and son each lost 40 pounds. Now the father can get a new kidney. It is a myth that eating well and cooking real food from real ingredients is too hard, takes too much time, and is too expensive. Nonsense. If a family of five on food stamps can do it, anyone can.

We can take back our kitchens one family at a time, one home at a time. We can take back our health.

Here are some tips that will help you take back the family dinner in your home, starting today:

1.
Prioritize cooking.
It is the essential act that makes us human and is vital for our own health and our family’s and community’s health, but it also connects us to nature and the larger community. We have to cook our way out of this mess of obesity and disease. Spending time preparing our own food is a simple but transformational act.

2.
Keep your pantry and fridge clean.
Keep out any food with high-fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated fats, or with sugar listed as the first or second ingredient on the label. Fill your cabinets and fridge with real, fresh, whole foods. For a full refresher on the kitchen makeover, see
here
in “The Prep Phase.”

3.
Read Laurie David’s book
The Family Dinner.
She suggests simple but effective guidelines, such as scheduling a set dinnertime, banning phones and other devices from the dinner table, turning off the television, serving everyone the same meal, cleaning up together, and more.

4.
Eat together.
No matter how modest the meal, savor the ritual of the table. Sit down together and treat one another and your food with care and respect. Mealtime is a time to communicate and nourish ourselves on every level. Say a blessing of gratitude before your meal. Use a traditional blessing or make one up that is unique to your family and friends!

People helping people works. Community-based models, like the one we created for the Daniel Plan, have shown up in other forms across the globe. Peers for Progress created pilot programs based on peer support to treat diabetes in Cameroon, Uganda, Thailand, and South Africa. The peer support group models were more effective than conventional-care interventions for improving the health of diabetics, and health care costs decreased tenfold. In Thailand, a community garden is irrigated by an old bike hooked up to a generator run by patients with diabetes. They get exercise and grow their own healthy food at the same time!

An old African proverb says that if you want to travel swiftly, travel alone, but if you want to travel far, travel together. There are many, many ways you can help bring together people on the path to health beyond even the small, personal groups you’ve established as part of the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox community.

Here are just a few ideas to get you started:

1.
Put out a call for healthy recipes to your friends and family
and collect them in a community cookbook. One mom did this within her child’s grade school; she collected over fifty healthy recipes and created a PDF that the entire parent body and teachers now share.

2.
Plant a community garden.
This is a great way to bring people together and grow the most delicious, nutritious, and environmentally friendly food imaginable.

3.
Talk to your human resources department at work
about training wellness champions in the workplace. These people (meaning you!) can lead support groups for others to get healthy by following the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet or doing the online course together (see www.10daydetox.com/resources).

4.
Establish a CSA (community-supported agriculture group) or farmers’ market
in your town. Check out www.localharvest.org or go to www.10daydetox.com/resources for information on how.

5.
Start a hiking or walking group,
or organize a weekly bike ride. Combining friends and fitness is a great way to make exercise easy and fun.

6.
Start a men’s group or a women’s group
—or really, just start any group to get people together to focus on healthy living and fulfillment. It could be breakfast once a week at a diner willing to accommodate your healthy preferences, or coffee (hopefully decaf!) one afternoon, or anything that gives continuity, support, and meaning through connection.

7.
Volunteer.
The simple act of giving to others satisfies a human need to be of service, and also provides deep happiness. Getting out of our own world and into someone else’s connects us to our common humanity. Science shows that altruism activates the same reward pathways in the brain as sugar, but without all the bad side effects.

8.
Get involved with your local schools.
If you have kids, work with the schools to improve the food (see the movie
Lunch Wars
or visit www.angrymoms.org). If you don’t have kids, help them plant a garden, teach meditation, or run a healthy bake sale. Find a way to share your unique gifts and skills.

Obesity, diabetes, and food addiction are social diseases, and we need a social cure. My personal hope is that together we can create a national conversation and a movement about real, practical solutions for the prevention, treatment, and reversal of our big fat problem. But you can start with you, your family, and your community. The health of our world and our future depends on it.

Let’s get cooking!

But first, just a quick recap of your options for the 10-Day Detox. There are two recipe plans to choose from: the
Core Plan
and the
Adventure Plan
. Meals on the Core Plan are very simple yet healthy, and can be made by everyone—even cooking novices. Remember, if you can read, you can cook!

For those of you who have more time and want to experiment with some new flavors, the Adventure Plan takes the fun one step further.

You should feel free to mix and match between the two plans, as long as you pick all of your meals for any given day from that day’s Core and Adventure plans; don’t pick lunches and dinners from different days. The daily menus are carefully balanced to make sure you get the right dose of nutrients.

Lastly, you always have the option to prepare a basic protein and nonstarchy vegetable for lunch or dinner. I’ve given you everything you need to know to make these super-simple meals in the “Cooking the Basics” section
here
.

On
here
, you will find the 10-Day Detox Staples Shopping List, which includes the kitchen essentials that will enable you to make a variety of healthy meals, both during these ten days and after. I also encourage you to read through the 10-Day Meal Plan in advance and choose your meals, so you can shop ahead for the specific ingredients you will need for those recipes.

The answer to that is short and simple: NO! Remember, this program isn’t about deprivation. The meals are all designed to ensure that your blood sugar is balanced and your stomach, and taste buds, are more than satisfied.

Having said that, I realize that each of you will have different caloric requirements. A six-foot-tall person who starts the program at 300 pounds will need more food than someone five feet four inches and 150 pounds. The secret to making this meal plan work for you? Personalize it!

Use each recipe as a guide, but feel free to modify it with the whole foods listed in the guidelines below to meet your individual needs. Some of you will do just fine with the recipes as is, and some of you will need more food to achieve your daily goals of work, exercise, or normal metabolic function. I suggest starting the 10-Day Detox by following the recipes as written, and then after the first day or two, make any necessary adjustments. You’ll know you need to eat more if you:

If you feel you need to eat more, follow these guidelines: