The End of Dieting: How to Live for Life (3 page)

This is a diet style that you will learn to enjoy forever. The goal is for the information to change you in a natural fashion, so this style becomes your preferred way of eating. To accomplish this, I’ll present scientific, logical information that explains the connection between food and your health. By incorporating this information into your life and using the included meal plans and delicious recipes, you’ll shed pounds consistently and almost miraculously—the natural side effect of eating so healthfully. You will also discover an amazing new array of different flavors and foods that will soon become your preferred way to eat.

Can any other program produce these results and support the claims with real science? Can another program present thousands of weight-loss and disease-reversal successes from people who have already adopted it, lost their excess weight, and kept it off over many years? Can any other program stand the test of time and scrutiny of the scientific community for effectiveness and consistency with established and emerging science? Of course not, and that grants you a supportive community of many thousands of people anxious to share their success, offer tips, and camaraderie and support you along your path to wellness. You can see how others can be so helpful by reading some of these people’s stories, in their own words, throughout this book.

I promise you, through this diet style, you can retain your youthful vigor and health. You can prevent heart attacks, strokes, dementia, and even cancer. You will literally disease-proof your body—all while
losing weight. You’ll come to understand the key principles of the science of health, nutrition, and weight loss. And, as a result, you’ll gain a simple and effective strategy to achieve—and maintain—a favorable weight without dieting for the rest of your life, freeing you forever from a merry-go-round of endless, tedious discussions about dieting strategies.

The cases incorporated into this book are submissions from people in their own words, chosen, out of hundreds submitted, because they exemplify the experience of many and share a learning point that can benefit you on your quest to a happy and fulfilled life. They have agreed to use their actual names because they are enthusiastic and committed to having a positive effect on the lives of others. What they have learned has freed them from dieting—for the rest of their lives. They, and I, hope you will be inspired to do the same.

Welcome to the end of dieting.

I
N
T
HEIR
O
WN
W
ORDS

Kathleen spent her life on the dieting merry-go-round as the result of food addiction and cravings. Her dysfunctional relationship with food controlled her life, until she took back her power
.

BEFORE:
228 pound

AFTER:
163 pounds (so far)

Food was the perfect friend. This friend never, ever let me down. If I was sad, food was there for me. If I wanted to celebrate, my “friend” lifted me up and celebrated with me. If I was bored, food filled my time. If life was too painful to contemplate, my friend distracted me, easing my pain. Truly, food felt like the best friend I’d ever had.

The standard American diet brought me solace, comfort, celebration. It was always present when I was lonely. However, it also brought me pain and despair because this relationship caused me to gain an enormous amount of weight. It exacerbated a genetic condition, causing me to end up with such severe osteoarthritis that I had to have a total knee replacement. I was only forty-seven years old. The standard American diet, and my addiction to food, chipped away at my self-esteem and self-care.

Clearly, the sensible thing to do was to end this unhealthy relationship. But, as with all dysfunctional relationships, ending it also meant giving up the good parts that I desperately wanted. How does one reconcile that? I suspect that the answer to this question is deeply personal and different for each of us. For me, it took watching my dad slowly die, a victim of the standard American diet. I remember visiting my dad in the ICU after he’d pulled through yet another crisis and suggesting to him that he could improve his health by improving his diet. He shook his head and said, “Kathleen, I can’t give up my food.” I’ll never forget his words as he sat in his hospital bed under the harsh fluorescent lights with the sound of monitors beeping in the background. He had just nearly died, and yet he couldn’t give up his unhealthy foods. Wow. That’s addiction for you. Not only did I miss him terribly when he passed, but I also saw my own future. My addiction to the standard American diet was no less powerful than my dad’s, and I was terrified.

I worked with Dr. Fuhrman’s food addiction counselor, who helped me recognize my dysfunctional relationship with food. I realized that my addiction to food was no different from an addiction to drugs or alcohol. Aren’t we so very fortunate that our addiction is socially sanctioned and it takes place in clean church halls, restaurants, and our very own kitchens? Aren’t we lucky that we don’t have to hide in dirty alleys to get our fixes? And isn’t it incredibly tragic that we have the same exact sort of dopamine-craving, soul-crushing, health-destroying compulsion that the drug addict has?

I also learned that if you’re running with a crowd that causes you trouble, you end up making poor decisions. This crowd doesn’t respect you. It hurts you. You have to cut those friends loose no matter what positive aspects the relationship brings to you. For me, unhealthy food was my dysfunctional “gang.”

As so often happens when you remove dysfunctional relationships from your life, you open up space to form new, healthy connections. I now have gorgeous, fresh, crisp vegetables as friends. I have decadently sweet, juicy fruit. I have happy belly-filling beans, hearty whole grains, and luscious nuts and seeds. My new friends nourish me and never hurt me the way the standard American diet always did. Now that I have a much healthier relationship with food, I’m 60 pounds lighter and I’m still losing weight.

Breaking free of food addiction is difficult, but once you have the knowledge provided by Dr. Fuhrman’s research and writings, you can never un-know it. Once you’ve had the experience of living in a truly nourished body, you can never again tolerate the toxic feelings that come from toxic food. Once you start to become active, you can never tolerate stagnation again. Once you learn to listen to your own body, you’ll always hear its wisdom.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Toxic Hunger

W
e have a nation of overweight and sickly people, with health care costs out of control. We have people suffering from easily preventable diseases all around us. Why isn’t everyone recognizing that a radical change in our nation’s diet is needed to fix this? Why are we so confused about nutrition? The evidence of this crisis is all around us, but this state of affairs is not a coincidence. The traditional food pyramid, once the cornerstone of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the standard American diet (SAD) are both responsible for our poor health and our poor information.

Influenced by social, business, and political concerns—rather than pure nutritional science—the food pyramid recommended massive amounts of foods that were high in calories and generally low in nutrients, such as white bread, oils, and chicken. The current government plate is an improvement over the past pronouncements, but still leaves much to be desired, and the diet style of Americans has not changed for the better. The majority of calories in the American diet still come from refined, processed foods and fast foods. Fifty-five percent of calories now come from processed foods and 30 percent from animal products, both of which are dangerously lacking in antioxidants and phytochemicals, two essential life-protecting and life-saving classes of nutrients. There’s no way around it. A diet centered on milk, cheese, pasta, bread, fried foods, and sugar-filled snacks and drinks leads to obesity, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and autoimmune illnesses.

We’re eating ourselves to death.

Simply put, the SAD is toxic. There is no better word to describe it. It causes disease and leads to compulsive eating. It’s terrible for us, and terribly addictive. Our standard diet of foods high in fat, sugar, and salt are physically addictive, which makes it impossible for most people to reduce portion sizes, cut back on calories, count points, or follow other typical dieting strategies.

Unhealthy Food Is Powerfully Addicting

Most researchers believe that 5 to 10 percent of the U.S. population is addicted to food. Not me. I believe that 60 to 80 percent of the population suffers from food addiction—and this is true whether someone is eating processed food, a low-nutrient diet, or even a high-protein diet based on animal products. People who are overweight struggle with sweets, fried foods, chips, and fatty meats in exactly the same way smokers and drug addicts struggle with cigarettes and cocaine.

If you’re overweight, chances are you’re a food addict. You eat because you physically feel the need for food, not because your body has any biological need for additional calories.

Addiction is a physical and psychological dependence on a substance or behavior. Initially, the substance or behavior satisfies a person, but it quickly turns to compulsion when he or she needs more, just to avoid the discomfort or pain that follows. Food addiction is complex and involves the stimulation of the digestive apparatus, which results in the release of bile, enzymes, and hormones and removes waste from the liver, kidney, and bloodstream. It also intimately involves dopamine in the brain. A primary neurotransmitter, dopamine regulates, among other things, motivation and feelings of pleasure. Regardless of the addiction, the brain reacts in the same way. Concentrated calories like sugar and oil, for instance, produce within food addicts a surge in dopamine levels similar to the levels found in people who abuse illegal drugs.

Investigators from Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts recently found that a meal high in refined carbohydrates produced brain effects consistent with those of drug addiction.
¹
Every single subject showed intense activation in the nucleus accumbens, the area of the brain related to addiction.

The brain is literally wired to ensure that we repeat behaviors that make us feel good by associating them with the sweet release of dopamine
and specific brain patterning. The brain records a pleasurable action as a beneficial pattern that needs to be remembered and repeated automatically. The smoker lights up a cigarette, for instance, and the food addict opens a bag of potato chips without hesitation or any consideration of the long-term risks.

And just as the smoker becomes tolerant to nicotine, the overeater becomes tolerant to sugar and salt and fat, reducing the amount of pleasure derived from eating high-caloric foods. A recent study published in
Nature Neuroscience
showed that drug addiction and compulsive eating desensitize brain reward circuits.
²
This means that to feel the pleasure of drugs or the pleasure of eating, we need more and more. In the brain, eating behavior is driven by pleasure and reward signals, and the brain now needs lots of stimulation (concentrated food that is highly sweetened and flavored) or lots of eating to maintain those signal levels. Anything less results in physical and emotional discomfort.

I have never really thought of it as food addiction, but reading what you have said, I see that my father died from food addiction. He was a physician and was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes when he was thirty-seven. After years of using medications (eleven of them) to treat his symptoms while buying candy and pastries in bulk, he died at the ripe age of sixty-four. I now see that this was addictive behavior because he knew that changing his diet would make his symptoms go away. He knew what the consequences of his behavior would be and yet he kept gorging on unhealthy food for twenty-five years. Twenty-five years of hospital stays and all sorts of nasty diabetic side effects. He was not a dummy, yet he engaged in this irrational behavior.

Angela Biggar

Most overweight people understand that being overweight is bad for their health. Their friends and family and even their doctors may have advised them to lose weight, but they can’t. They have tried diet
after diet but simply can’t stick to them. Why does this happen? Why can’t they just stop eating?

The answer is TOXIC HUNGER.

When we eat primarily foods high in calories, without incorporating sufficient amounts of protective nutrients into our diets, our cells become congested with waste products such as free radicals and advanced glycation end products (AGEs), collectively known as
oxidative stress
. Oxidative stress can lead to inflammation, cell damage, and premature cell death. More often than not, it is accompanied by a buildup of toxic metabolites that can create physical symptoms of withdrawal between meals. I call these withdrawal symptoms
toxic hunger
.