Crazy Sexy Diet: Eat Your Veggies, Ignite Your Spark, and Live Like You Mean It! (16 page)

If you have any doubt about sugar and cancer, consider how a PET scan works. Patients are injected with a tiny amount of radioactive glucose (sugar). The test measures the parts of the body that absorb the most glucose. Greedy cancer cells light up like fireworks.

But it doesn’t stop there, and as you just learned, you can’t talk about glucose without mentioning insulin. As David Servan-Schreiber, MD, writes in his book,
Anticancer: A New Way of Life
, “The secretion of insulin is accompanied by another molecule, called IGF (Insulin-like Growth Factor), whose role is to stimulate cell growth. Furthermore, insulin and IGF have another effect in common: They promote the factors of inflammation that also stimulate cell growth and act as fertilizer for tumors.” Bottom line: Excess insulin in the body tells cancer cells to grow, baby, grow.

Need I say more? That’s all I need to know as a cancer patient. And though some well-respected experts disagree, I’m not taking any chances! Whether we’re talking normal cells or cancer cells, the cycle is the same: The more sugar you eat, the more acidic (anaerobic) you become, the more you tax your immune system, the more stress and inflammation you create, the more insulin and IGF circulate in your body—and thus the more opportunity for cancer cells to grow and divide.

How can you learn
to make better choices when eating carbs and sugar? Enter the dazzling glycemic index (GI), a measure of how quickly and how high a particular carbohydrate raises your blood sugar level. GI is a numerical ranking system that compares a given food to a pure sugar, such as white sugar. Because white sugar is all carbohydrate, it’s designated 100 on a scale of 0 to 100. The GI is a measure of carbs only; fats and proteins have no effect on the score.

Foods with a high GI value are almost always refined, simple carbs. Conversely, foods with low GI values tend to be unrefined, complex carbs. The difference between high- and low-GI foods lies mostly in how much fiber they contain. Fiber slows the digestion of sugars and keeps you even and peaceful. That’s why a plant-based, low-GI diet is one of the central tenets of the Crazy Sexy lifestyle.

Familiarize yourself with the glycemic index—it’s a terrific tool. As a rule of thumb, any food that has a GI rank below 60 is a good choice, especially if you need to watch your blood sugar. In fact, people who stick to a low-GI diet are less likely to develop diabetes and other medical life lemons. And guess what? Not only can low GI diets prevent nasty diseases, they can also help to reverse them. Amen, glitter explosion!

I’ve listed the GI Index of many common foods. Keep in mind that the index measures grams of carbs, not grams of food. In other words, it doesn’t tell you how much you have to eat to get that gram. For example, a big bowl of beans might contain the same quantity of carbs as a small bowl of fruit. If you want to learn more,
The GI Handbook
by Barbara Ravage and
The New Glucose Revolution
by Jennie Brand-Miller and Kaye Foster-Powell are both great books for self-study.

note:
Most vegetables are 0 on the GI index, including broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, cucumber, green beans, chard, kale, lettuce and other salad greens, and spinach.

SOURCE:
Jennie Brand-Miller and Kaye Foster-Powell,
The New Glucose Revolution

Only a few decades ago,
plain old sugar was about the only game in town to satisfy a sweet tooth. But as Old Cane started to get a bad rap, the chemical companies began cranking out one artificial sweetener after another. Dr. Ginger Southall of the Hippocrates Health Institute emphatically states that the use of chemical sweeteners of any kind—aspartame, NutraSweet, Equal, Sweet’N Low, saccharin, Canderel, and even Splenda—is not advised, tootsie. “Artificial sweeteners are potent nerve toxins and never should have been approved as safe for human consumption. They have the potential to freak out and damage your nervous system—your brain and nerves—leading to a variety of symptoms from migraine headaches to unexplained seizures, dizziness, depression, and vision problems. They are even linked to cancer, obesity, and diabetes. I bet you didn’t realize how many of these human-made tasty toxins you gobble up on a daily basis. They hide out in thousands of your favorite foods, including diet meals, flavored waters, popular drink mixes such as Crystal Light, many commercial salad dressings, and—ready for this?—even overthe-counter medicines like Alka-Seltzer, toothpastes, gum, vitamins, and those Listerine breath strips! Even the stuff that ‘tastes like sugar because it’s made from sugar’ is highly processed and has been laced with chlorine.” Yum!

So what are the sweeteners of choice on the crazy sexy diet? Raw organic agave, yacón, and, even better, stevia are great choices. Pick them up at the local health food store or even at the good old standard supermarket.

When I first started
on my Crazy Sexy Diet, my cravings didn’t care one bit that I was trying to get healthy—my body was used to crap and wanted more. Before sundown I was an alkaline angel, but when night fell I’d hear that eerie spaghetti-western music in my head. You know, the tune that plays when the white-powder outlaw rides into town. I’d slam the door, roll the armoire in front of the windows, and grab my handy sawedoff shotgun.

Useless! The fudge brownies (à la mode) would find their way to my lips. Once down the hatch they created a wild (yet numbing) effect that made me want to move to a brothel! The only way for me to break the pattern was to acknowledge and then grin and bear the craving cyclone until it passed.