The End of Dieting: How to Live for Life (5 page)

Marriage On the Rocks, High Blood Pressure, and Prediabetes

A perfect example is Jill Harrington, a patient of mine. Jill was overweight, unhappy, and disappointed in her marriage. She complained about her aloof husband and felt trapped in the relationship. She considered divorce, but couldn’t afford one. Her husband, Tim, ate poorly and drank alcohol almost every night. Jill was trying to follow my program but found it difficult, especially with the stress of her marriage. Tim hardly ever paid attention to her.

Jill and Tim were essentially living together as roommates; there was no romance in their marriage. I wanted to help Jill lose weight and find happiness, but I knew the trouble in her marriage was one of the biggest obstacles to her success. Therefore, I worked on a strategy with her to help improve her marriage so she could focus her energy on eating better. This was an essential first step in improving her health and happiness. Instead of placing demands on Tim, for instance, she started to thank him for the small things he always did for her. At the same time, she came up with a few small things she could do for him. We talked at length about Tim and his many good points, as well as all the reasons she still loved him. I spent some time with her bringing out Tim’s good points and reasons she loved him over the years. I told her that she should be proud of her ability to care for, support, and show her love for him unconditionally.

Jill immediately started feeling better about herself, living with more confidence, and Tim, to his credit, responded in kind. He was kinder and more thoughtful too. Eventually, they were both more affectionate toward one another, emotionally and physically. Their marriage was moving in a better direction. As a result, Jill gave up her disappointment in Tim and finally agreed that their marital problems weren’t merely his fault. She acknowledged her role in them as well. In time, they rekindled a healthy marital relationship.

As that part of her life improved, Jill’s diet and health simultaneously improved. Instead of eating emotionally, she ate nutritarian meals and started to feel in control of her life and her food choices. She finally was able to look better and feel better and successfully stop taking her medications. She was on her way to better health.

Like Jill, your emotional health depends on your feeling good about yourself—not because you tell yourself you love yourself or because someone else does, but rather because of your positive actions. To assure success, you need a legitimate reason to love yourself for your ability to appreciate the value, importance, goodness, and beauty around you. Not by trying to impress, but rather by trying to feel. Not by trying to make yourself look good, but rather by trying to appreciate how much beauty is in others. How much you are loved isn’t the most important thing. A better measurement of emotional strength is your capacity to emote and feel love for others.

The Three Habits of Health

The way you take care of yourself is just as crucial a determinant of your future happiness as your savings account. Many people invest in their financial future, but they never consider their health future. A large nest egg is of no use to you if you’re not there to spend it!

As you plan for your health future, you must consider the three important components that pay the biggest dividends: nutrition, exercise, and positive mind-set.

• Nutrition: Make every calorie count as you strive for lifelong health. Strive only to eat foods that are rich in nutrients and low in calories—and remember my health equation, H (Health) = N (Nutrition) / C (Calories).
  
• Exercise: Exercise regularly. Make it a part of your daily routine. A gym membership is nice, but there are plenty of other opportunities to work out your body over the course of an average day. Take the stairs, for instance, instead of the elevator. Walk or ride a bike instead of drive. Take frequent exercise breaks and do something active for just three to five minutes, then go back to work.
  
• Positive mind-set: A healthy mind-set is a prerequisite for a healthy lifestyle. The best way to develop one is to be optimistic and surround yourself with people who engage in and support your health. Show people you care about them with your actions, not just with words. A positive mind-set results from your goodwill to others. It is like putting deposits in your lifespan account.
  

These are the three essential habits of health. The more you practice them, the more routine they become. You won’t want to act any other way.

Many people—healthy and unhealthy people alike—are often obsessed with food. Eating the right foods will make you incredibly healthy, but avoid obsessions even with healthful foods because they are often indicators of compulsions and other emotional and psychological issues. Striking a balance between eating and not eating is the quickest way to eliminate this obsession and live a fully balanced life where people, food, and exercise are all in the right place. The key to finding food’s place in this delicate balance is by practicing the habits of health until they all become a natural part of your life. Balancing your diet style for optimal health is part of, and most natural and effective when it is connected to, balancing your life between exercise, rest, sleep, recreation, work, family, friends, and intellectual pursuits.

Addictions make attempts at dietary modifications more difficult, but it only takes a few seconds of decision-making to win the battle and say an emphatic “no” to your destructive compulsions and a resounding “yes” to the three habits of health. Throughout my career, I have observed thousands of people in whom these positive changes have resulted in tremendous benefits. Sure, there are always some temporary moments of discomfort as the body eliminates toxins and restores
its cells to a more youthful, decongested state. This is perfectly normal, however. Learning to cope is a small price to pay for better health. Never underestimate the human body’s powerful capacity for self-healing when superior nutrition takes the place of dietary and emotional distress.

Mild cravings will always come and go. From time to time, you may still want to eat unhealthy food or eat when you’re not truly hungry. But remember: You always have a choice. Modern foods—the products of a manipulative, profit-driven food industry—are designed to seduce your taste buds. They entice us to eat even when we’re not truly hungry, and the intense, artificial flavors cause us to enjoy natural flavors less. Our taste buds get all out of whack, and we become captives of these heightened flavors. Fortunately, by eating a high-nutrient diet, your cravings lessen and your sensory abilities return—like never before.

Realizing your impediments and gaining knowledge about great health are important steps toward lifelong health. But you also have to put into practice and repeat the three habits of health—nutrition, exercise, and positive mind-set—over and over again until they become part of you. Repetition breeds positive action. The more you eat healthful meals, and the more days you link together nutrition, exercise, and a positive mind-set, the more your brain will respond to them—and the more you’ll come to prefer eating healthfully.

Cultivating a desire for optimal health will help in this process. Eat right, and your taste buds will line up with this desire, and your behaviors will work in concert with your new beliefs. Before you know it, you won’t even want artificially flavored or heavily seasoned foods. You’ll crave healthy, naturally flavored foods.

It’s never easy to develop new habits, and there’s no such thing as a shortcut to developing them. However, if you’re motivated to persevere and keep trying, the change soon becomes considerably easier. Feeling better and losing weight are great motivators. Don’t give up. The only way to fail is to stop trying.

I
N
T
HEIR
O
WN
W
ORDS

Ronna didn’t need to lose a significant amount of weight, but her food cravings and addictions were ruling her life—until she embraced a nutritarian lifestyle
.

BEFORE:
146 pounds

AFTER:
116 pounds

My head was once filled with a myriad of nutrition theories. Self-help books and fad diets dictated my rules for weight loss. I was only concerned with finding the right diet program for a “miraculous” weight loss. To me, increasing vitamins and minerals meant consuming supplements and fortified foods, such as orange juice and cereals. Having salad or a side of some vegetable was my version of observing the food pyramid. I avoided junk food and tried to eat less—but it did not work.

At age eleven, I was diagnosed with an underactive thyroid, which meant I could only lose weight through extreme calorie restriction and/or excessive physical activity. I was a classic yo-yo dieter. I could never stay away from sugar for very long. I became addicted to sweets and felt I needed to diet like crazy to compensate.

After attending one of Dr. Fuhrman’s Health Immersion programs, however, I started reading his books, which dramatically shifted my perspective on many health-related matters. Before the immersion, I fed my desires daily—coffee with cream, a little wine and cheese, several bites of a gluten-free ice-cream sandwich and a few “healthy snacks,” which I thought I needed every few hours.

My erroneous beliefs didn’t end there. I had self-diagnosed myself as hypoglycemic, but I wasn’t. I was just going through withdrawals from my toxic diet. I also believed that my metabolism would slow down with age and that my hypothyroid disease was working against me, both of which proved to be myths.

Becoming a nutritarian changed my life. I don’t just look different; I think and live differently. I have shed 30 pounds from my 5-foot-2-inch frame. My energy battery is always fully charged, and I’m no longer a slave to addictive eating habits. I’m happier and think more clearly. I feel a sense of balance, ease in movement, and enhanced self-confidence. And, most importantly, my cravings and the constant “noise” in my head related to food, body weight, and self-image are completely gone.

CHAPTER TWO

Diet Myths Exposed

I
n a 1954 study published in the
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
, researchers asked Princeton and Dartmouth college students to watch a football game between the two schools and pay attention to penalties. Not surprisingly, the Princeton students reported twice as many violations by the Dartmouth team as the students from Dartmouth did. Likewise, a more recent study asked people to identify whether highly credentialed and respected scientists were credible experts on global warming, nuclear waste, and gun control. Subjects favored the scientists whose conclusions matched their own values; the facts or their expertise were irrelevant.

This behavior, called
selective perception
, happens when rational and intelligent people distort facts by seeing them through the lens of their personal perceptions and preferences. They wind up with views that are incorrect and out of whack with reality. Selective perception affects our beliefs so much that it can stand in the way of scientific communication, which helps explain the continued popularity of wildly outrageous, dangerous, and scientifically unsound diets.
¹

Like any other person, health writers and medical authorities approach their subjects with inherent biases, agendas, and egos, all of which color their findings and influence how they package information. Everywhere I look, board-certified doctors and celebrity nutritionists are promoting falsehoods, while shelling out improper advice about food and nutrition. When these so-called experts continue to hold on to their biases about nutrition despite the mounting scientific evidence against them, everybody loses.

What we hear today about nutrition and dieting is, at best, confusing. Almost every article or television show on the topic hypes some magic food, supplement, metabolism booster, fasting protocol, or fat-carbohydrate-protein ratio that can instantly solve all of our weight problems. Research articles continue to test diets that are low in fat, high in fat, low in carbohydrates, or high in carbohydrates, and the media continue to report on them as though they were exciting new breakthroughs.
But trying to micromanage carbohydrate, fat, or protein has never been shown to substantially increase health and longevity. This sort of restrictive dieting only encourages drastic fluctuations in caloric intake, which, as we already learned, result in only temporary changes in body weight.

Meanwhile, study after study shows that diets that fail to address nutritional quality fail to make any real dent in weight loss or other health parameters.
²
A magic ratio of fat, carbohydrate, and protein that will lead you to your ideal weight and superior health doesn’t exist. Weight loss and superior health are the products of substantive changes in the nutritional quality of the food you eat. Whatever ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate you eat doesn’t matter (within reason, of course). It is predominantly the nutritional quality and healthfulness of those carbs, fats, and proteins that determine your health.

Who Do You Believe?

In the field of nutritional science, getting the science right is critically important because even small errors of perception or interpretation can result in bad health—and even the loss of human life. To counter this, nutritionists must come to a consensus about the ideal way to eat. If we simply accepted some basic irrefutable truths about nutrition and health, rather than looking for the newest fad diet, our country wouldn’t be mired in a terrifying health and obesity pandemic.