Crazy Sexy Diet: Eat Your Veggies, Ignite Your Spark, and Live Like You Mean It! (20 page)
Read Crazy Sexy Diet: Eat Your Veggies, Ignite Your Spark, and Live Like You Mean It! Online
Authors: Kris Carr,Rory Freedman (Preface),Dean Ornish M.D. (Foreword)
Tags: #Nutrition, #Motivational & Inspirational, #Health & Fitness, #Diets, #Medical, #General, #Women - Health and hygiene, #Health, #Diet Therapy, #Self-Help, #Vegetarianism, #Women
If your meals consistently revolve around corpse multiple times daily, you might become one sooner than you planned. I imagine that this statement is quite unsettling for some—it sure was for me. I grew up across the street from a small, family-owned dairy farm. Shooting milk from the udder straight into my mouth was fun. Udders also made terrific weapons. Point, aim, squeeze, and if you got lucky you’d nail a passing farmhand. (I adored causing trouble. It wasn’t till I tried my first bit of Red Man chewing tobacco that those sneaky bastards got me back. “You can swallow it, tastes like candy.” After about thirty seconds I barfed on his boot and cried. Touché.)
At home our daily meals revolved around animal products, and the options were either decadent or gross. My fiery Colombian grandma was a very imaginative chef who loved buckets of butter, Julia Child, and anything she could flambé (that is, douse with booze and set on fire, including, on occasion, the curtains). On decadent days dinner would consist of coq au vin or curried chicken. On gross days we might get tongue, chipped beef on toast (which has an uncanny resemblance to vomit), and Spam cake sandwiches. What’s a Spam cake sandwich, you ask? Alternating layers of the mysterious meat and slices of white bread covered with cream cheese. Since presentation was everything, Grandma topped the Spam cake with colorful cream cheese flowers made with food dye and shot through a pastry-decorating bag. Sometimes the cakes would even have my name on them.
Grandma loved to experiment. The day my mom went into labor with me, she had just finished a big bowl of kidney stew with red wine glaze and scalloped potatoes. I imagine that the little me said, “Enough is enough, I’m outta here, lady!” My tastes, on the other hand, were simple. I could live happily on the following five foods in rotation: hamburgers, cereal, Ritz crackers with Cheez Whiz, PB&J, and fries.
When I was ten years old, I learned that there was a God, because she had finally answered my prayers by opening a Burger King on Route 22. I immediately begged Grandma to take me, but since fast food was foreign she vetoed the request in her thick Colombian accent. No (in any language) is not a word I stomach well—never have, never will. Though I didn’t have wheels, I still had my feet. So I pillaged her coat pockets and took off on a 10-mile walkabout. Boy, were those fries worth the hell I caught. In one fell swoop, I tasted freedom, independence, theft, and trans-fat-drenched carbohydrates. I was hooked. For the next two decades, fast food would be my rebellious comfort.
So I’m not just blowin’ smoke up your ass, I understand how hard it can be to change patterns. I found this amazing lifestyle because I was on the ropes. While I loved animals and nature, I didn’t make the connection. A burger
has a face and is unhealthy? When we shake it up and wake it up, we realize that ignorance isn’t yummy or sexy or responsible.
Do you have to change everything all at once? No! As I said at the start, I don’t expect you to go full-tilt boogie. Even if you don’t eliminate flesh completely, cut way back—snip snip, trim trim. The American Dietetic Association recommends that meat, poultry, and fish portions should be no more than the size of a deck of playing cards—about 3 to 4 ounces. Even for Texans!
To help you avoid (or at least reduce) animal products, let me clarify what we’re talking about here. Meat = a being with ideas, a mother, family, and community. Dairy = liquid meat from the breast of an animal with ideas, a mother, family, and community. I know it seems pretty obvious, but I come across a lot of folks who need a little “what’s a sentient being” refresher because they’re under the false impression that chicken and fish don’t count.
The vast majority of our animal consumption comes from the famous five: cow, chicken, turkey, pig, fish. But there’s a whole Noah’s ark of notable noshables: lamb, goat, duck, bunnies, frogs, buffalo, deer, elk, ostrich, shellfish, snakes, eel, monkey, and for all you Deliverance guys still out there, squirrel. Basically, if it moves, we find ways to kill it and eat it. Then there’s milk. Cow, goat, and sheep are our main sources for cottage cheese, cream cheese, cheese, sour cream, butter, ice cream, yogurt. And what about eggs? Somewhere along the line we mistakenly grouped them with dairy (probably because they’re next to butter and cheese in the grocery store), but actually they are considered meat since they contain similar nutrients—and because they’re little chicken fetuses. So as you upgrade your diet, keep these critters and critter products in mind.
Here’s an easy way to reframe your plate. Think of meat and milk products as the supporting cast, grains as costars, and veggies as the center-stage divas. Animal products should be a side dish or treated as a condiment (if consumed at all), while plant-based foods make up the main course. This very simple and inexpensive change will rock your world, up your life span, and vanquish the scariest C of all—cellulite!
While we’re on the topic of thigh cheese, let’s dive into a vat of fat for a hot minute. Your body’s fat cells are all present by age ten for the most part, but the little buggers are very elastic and can grow in size at any point. A healthy vegetarian or vegan diet consumed in moderate portions helps prevent fat cells from ballooning in size. The recipe for success: Eat lots of high-fiber foods, as many as possible in the raw form, and limit animal products and processed junk. Cellulite is a different beast than overall body fat. As Jennifer Reilly, RD (
www.BitchinDietitian.com
) says, “You can be ‘skinny fat’ and still have cellulite! Cellulite is formed because of fluid retention and the accumulation of waste products and toxins in the body. The Standard American Diet is very pro-cellulite! Breaking down these foods results in a ton of toxic waste products floating around our systems, and they are visible from the outside in the form of nasty cellulite.”
So are you panicked and wondering: “But what about protein? And where will I get my calcium?” Relax and release the fear. The truth is that we can get all the protein and calcium we need from a varied plant-based diet. The healthiest people on the planet are those who eat the fewest animal products. It takes a sexy revolutionary like yourself to buck the system and go your own way. And I promise you, it’s worth it. Eat clean and green and toast to life. Cheers!
PREVENTING THE BIG THREE
with
Neal D. Barnard, MD
Many people imagine
that heart disease, cancer, or diabetes is the natural result of growing older. As the calendar pages turn, we are more and more susceptible to illness, or so many of us think. But let me share some good news. These problems are not caused by the passage of time. No matter how old you are, you can take strong steps to prevent and even reverse these and other serious illnesses. And if these diseases have already struck, there is a lot you can do to turn things around.
Heart disease is extremely common. And it often starts very early in life. Many children have the beginnings of heart disease before they pick up their high school diplomas. But if we take a look at what causes it, we’ll see how to prevent it—and even how to reverse it. The problem starts with particles of cholesterol flowing along in your bloodstream. These particles irritate the artery wall and cause blisterlike bumps—or plaques—to form.
A plaque is fragile and can break open. And when that happens, nearby blood cells react by clumping together in a clot. If the clot plugs the artery, it cuts off the blood supply to the heart itself. A section of the heart muscle dies, which is what we call a “heart attack.” Until fairly recently, this process was considered irreversible. A growing plaque was a one-way street leading to the operating room. But Dr. Dean Ornish, a Harvard-trained physician, changed that dismal scenario. He aimed not just to prevent heart disease but to actually reverse it. At his research center in San Francisco, he asked heart patients to make some powerful lifestyle changes, based on four simple steps:
1.
A vegetarian diet. Foods from plants skip the animal fat and cholesterol that lurk in animal products.
2.
Regular exercise. That meant a half-hour walk every day, or an hour three times per week.
3.
Stress management. This could mean yoga, meditation, or simple breathing or stretching exercises.
4.
Avoidance of tobacco.
That was the whole program. There were no drugs, no surgery, no intensive medical treatments of any kind. Easy!
And the results were astounding: Chest pain melted away, and the participants’ cholesterol levels plummeted. After a year the research team found something even more dramatic. The participants’ arteries had actually opened up, so
much so that the difference was clearly visible on angiograms in 82 percent of the people in the study. And the average person had lost more than 20 pounds, which, of course, made them absolutely love the program they had begun.
What are the foods that work this magic? Vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, and all the meals that are made from them. So breakfast might be a bowl of old-fashioned oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins. Lunch might be veggie and bean chili with corn bread, and dinner might be pasta marinara with carrots, fresh peas, and onion. Some heart researchers also encourage the use of nuts (say, almonds), soy products, and oats, because each of these is reputed to have special heart-protecting effects.
The foods to avoid are meats, dairy products, eggs, and oily foods. That means throwing out the chicken and fish, too. Yes, fish has some “good” (omega-3) fat. But at least 70 percent of the fat in fish is not “good” fat; it is a mixture of plain old saturated (“bad”) fat, along with various other fats that do your heart no good at all. Fish and chicken have too much cholesterol and fat to seriously lower your cholesterol level, they don’t help with weight control, and they are not part of the programs that are most powerful for protecting the heart.
In the early 1960s researchers made a remarkable observation. People living in certain countries had what seemed to be a measure of protection against cancer. Breast cancer, for example, was common in North America and Europe, but surprisingly rare in Japan. And when cancer did strike Japanese women, they were much more likely to survive than their American or European counterparts.
However, starting in the 1960s, things began to change. Fast foods and meat and cheese business lunches invaded Asia, replacing rice. And cancer rates quickly rose. By the late 1970s Japanese women who had Westernized their diets and ate meat every day had eight times the risk of breast cancer, compared with poorer women who continued traditional rice-based diets. Here’s the lesson we can draw: To prevent cancer, it pays to move toward vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and beans.
Part of the value of plant-based diets is that they help us stay slimmer. That is important, because body fat makes estrogens, the female sex hormones that can stimulate cancer growth. Women with less body fat are less likely to develop the common forms of breast cancer, and, if cancer strikes, slimmer women are also more likely to survive. But healthy foods do more than keep us slim. Two large studies put diet changes to the test. Their goal was not to see if cancer could be prevented, but to see what foods could do to help women who had already had breast cancer. The Women’s Intervention Nutrition Study (WINS), including nearly 2,500 post-menopausal women who had previously been treated for cancer, showed that cutting down on fatty foods did indeed reduce the odds that their cancer would come back. The Women’s Healthy Eating and Living (WHEL) study, which included more than 3,000 women, showed that a combination of a diet very rich in vegetables and fruits, along with regular exercise, could cut the risk of a recurrence in half.