The Doctor's Diet: Dr. Travis Stork's STAT Program to Help You Lose Weight & Restore Your Health (16 page)

“Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.”
-Hippocrates

W
hen patients are brought into the emergency room suffering from a heart attack, stroke, or other life-threatening emergency, doctors and nurses jump into action, administering treatment and giving medications in hopes of pulling them from the jaws of death.

Once they’re stabilized—once we “stop the bleeding,” so to speak—our emergency room patients go back to their own doctors and specialists, who work with them to make changes that will keep them out of the ER in the future.

After leaving the ER, patients typically receive a stack of prescriptions. Post–heart attack, for example, they might walk out with prescriptions for blood thinners, beta-blockers, or statins.

Now that you’ve started The Doctor’s Diet, and you’re at least a few meals into the STAT Plan—now that you’re taking crucial steps to stabilize your own weight emergency—I’m going to follow my typical ER procedure and hand you a stack of prescriptions.

Unlike what you’d get after an ER visit, though, these aren’t prescriptions for medicines. They’re prescriptions for food.

My Doctor’s Diet Food Prescriptions will help you not only lose weight, but aid you in restoring your vitality and lowering your risk of disease. They’ll explain in detail the science behind the design of The Doctor’s Diet, why certain foods can boost your health, and why other foods can devastate it. They’ll give you a step-by-step blueprint for healthy eating—and it’s one that you can follow for the rest of your life.

Sure, you could just follow the meal plans in this book and lose weight without understanding the “why” behind the recommendations I make. But I don’t think that’s the best way to go. Unless you really get the thinking behind my dietary advice, you won’t really own it yourself.

I’m a big believer in everyone owning their own health-care decisions. And I’m a big believer in the power of “why.”

Here’s the way I look at it. If someone suggests that I do something, and they tell me
why
I ought to do it, I’m much more likely to understand it and to want to do it that way than I am if I don’t get an explanation. (We’re also more likely to remember to do something a certain way if we understand why we’re doing it.) When I was in medical school, and one of my professors demonstrated a particular way to suture a laceration, I picked it up a whole lot quicker when I understood the
why
of it, rather than just the
how
. For example, the kind of suture that is best for a deep wound may leave too much of a scar if it’s used on a superficial skin wound.

That’s why I want you to understand not just
which
foods are best for your health, but
why
they are so good.

I don’t want you choosing one food over another because you’re thinking, “That’s what Dr. Travis thinks I should eat.” It’s not about me—it’s about you, your body, and your health. When you understand how food impacts your blood, your organs, and every cell in your body, making the healthiest choices becomes easier. When you own your decisions, you’re better able to live them.

Before we go any further, let’s talk a little about the scientific research behind my recommendations.

Sometimes it seems like nutrition scientists are purposely trying to confuse us. Foods are like celebrities: overnight, they go from being stars to pariahs. One day we hear that a certain food will cure whatever ails us; the next day we are told that the very same food will kill us. Well, which
is it? What’s going on here? If the scientists and doctors aren’t even sure whether to eat some of these foods, how are people without nutritional and medical training supposed to decide what to eat?

Listen, I’ll be completely honest with you. I’m a doctor with an avid interest in nutrition—I make a point of staying on top of all the latest research—and even I struggle with this conundrum in my own life nearly every day. Not long ago, I read a study saying people should stay away from corn, for example. The very next day I read a different study that said corn is great! So which is it? Honestly, it leaves me standing in front of the refrigerator some days not knowing what the heck to eat!

That’s why, even with the Food Prescriptions in The Doctor’s Diet, you shouldn’t go overboard with any one food. With the corn example, my position is that until the studies on corn become clearer, I’ll go ahead and have an occasional ear of corn (because I enjoy corn on the cob, especially in the summer), but until there’s more clarity on the question of how good it is for me, I only eat corn now and then.

My advice is to always be moderate, and be sure to mix things up. Even when the research is heavily in favor of a certain food, it doesn’t make sense to get obsessed with it. Legumes are great, but that doesn’t mean you should eat only lentils for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of your life. It’s not ideal to eat too much of any single food, even if researchers are calling it a “superfood.”

Go for variety—have lentils in your soup today, black beans in your burrito tomorrow, kidney beans in your salad the next day. Enjoy corn on the cob at your next barbecue, but don’t put it on the menu every single meal. Optimal health comes from eating a variety of healthful foods, not expecting one food to be a nutritional knight in shining armor that will fix all the health problems in your life.

In the following section of the book, I’ll give you my 10 Food Prescriptions for optimal health. They are the backbone of The Doctor’s Diet. Read them as you work your way through the 14-day STAT Plan. Then, by the time you’re ready to begin the RESTORE Plan, you’ll have all the knowledge you need to own your new eating choices for the rest of your life.

We’ve all done it: eaten something so fast that we don’t even taste it. We’ve inhaled bags of chips, sucked down giant milkshakes, mowed through a plate of cookies, and swallowed a candy bar so fast that we don’t even remember unwrapping it.

We do it when we’re eating on the run, grabbing something quick—usually a greasy burger or a sweet dessert—and stuffing it into our mouths so quickly that it barely registers in our mind that we’re eating.

We do it at home, plowing through our favorite snack foods while we’re watching television after a long day.

We even do it at mealtimes, when we’re sitting down to the same old thing, mindlessly shoveling food into our mouths as we sort through the mail, read the newspaper, or check in with friends on Facebook.

You probably did it at your most recent meal. Quick: What did you have for dinner last night? If you can’t remember, it’s probably because you wolfed it down mindlessly.

If you’re anything like me, you can mindlessly inhale a big bowl of ice cream and be hard pressed to remember, even half an hour later, what kind of ice cream it was. This kind of eating is called mindless eating because while our mouths do the chewing, our minds are paying zero attention to what we eat. When we eat mindlessly, we don’t taste our food or appreciate the flavors of what we’re consuming. What’s worse, we don’t pay attention to how much we’re eating, or what ingredients are in the food we’re gobbling up. We ignore the signals our body sends when we start to feel full. We just keep eating and eating, making poor choices, focusing on everything else except our body’s reactions to the food we’re taking in.

I think mindless eating is one of the top contributors to America’s obesity epidemic. I know there’s a lot more to it—we eat too much, we eat the wrong kinds of food. But have you ever thought about why we do that? Nobody’s setting out to gain excess weight. Nobody intentionally eats foods that will put them on the fast track to the emergency room.

We don’t sit down at the dinner table and say to ourselves, “I am going to eat so much at this meal that my pants won’t button an hour from now.” We don’t grab a bottle of cola and think, “What my body really needs right now is 16 teaspoons of sugar and a load of artificial caramel color!” And we certainly don’t wish, when we’re biting into a piece of coffee cake, “I sure hope this raises my heart disease risk!”

This is the problem: we are so accustomed to not thinking about the food we eat that we’ve eaten ourselves sick. Eating mindlessly gets us nowhere but to the ER and an early grave.

It’s time to change all that and start eating
mindfully
. It’s time to start paying attention—really paying attention—to what you put in your mouth, how it tastes, how it makes your body feel, what it’s made of, and what potential it has to save or sabotage your health.

It’s time to start listening to your body while you eat, so when it starts telling you that it’s getting full, you’ll hear its message loud and clear and put down your fork.

It’s time to bring mindfulness—an ancient principle of awareness, awakening, and enlightenment espoused by philosophers and wise people throughout history—to your kitchen table.

My 10 Food Prescriptions are all really important, but being mindful of what you eat is the most important one of all. Mindful eating is my number one Food Prescription, because if you can open your mind and become fully aware of food and its impact on your health and your life,
everything else you do as you follow The Doctor’s Diet will be easier. In and of itself, that one change alone could make all the difference for you in your quest to lose weight for good.