The End of Dieting: How to Live for Life (13 page)

In addition to reducing hormones that facilitate fat storage, phytochemicals also help restore your body’s normal fat-burning metabolism. And phytochemicals can reduce the amount of fatty tissue on your body by inducing
apoptosis
, or the killing off of existing fat cells.

Polyphenols, a complex mixture of many plant pigments, do the same thing. When you consume natural foods that contain phytochemicals and polyphenols, you can decrease the number of bacteria in your gut that promote fat storage and increase the number that encourage a slim body.
¹³
A high consumption of polyphenols leads to an increase in bacteria that interfere with the breakdown of carbohydrates into simple sugars. Foods high in polyphenols lower blood glucose levels and enhance insulin sensitivity. They keep you slim. Beans, greens, tomatoes, seeds, and
berries contain loads and loads of phytochemicals
and
polyphenols that restore a healthy fat metabolism and oppose body fat storage.

Furthermore, a high consumption of colorful plant foods creates an abundance of bifidobacteria and lactobacilli, as well as many other microorganisms that benefit our health and our weight. A diet of refined foods or heavy in meat supports the growth of bacteria that release inflammatory compounds, increase insulin resistance, and promote fat storage and atherosclerosis.
¹⁴
This means that it isn’t primarily
how much
you eat that makes you overweight, but
what
you eat. This, in a nutshell, is the most important reason that so many people are overweight and can’t lose weight. It’s not enough to eat less; you have to eat differently.

In addition to their low caloric content, high-nutrient plant foods have anti-obesity and anti-diabetic effects (see Table 5, opposite).
¹⁵
Almost everybody thinks that dieting is still about counting calories, exercising more, and having the willpower to eat less food. And then they’re told that if they don’t have the willpower to do these things, they need to have surgery to remove three-quarters of their stomach. This conventional way of thinking is the problem, not the solution.

The same beneficial hormonal parameters that facilitate the reduction of body fat also protect against cancer, especially prostate and breast cancer. In other words, eating to prevent cancer also prevents fat storage in the body and vice versa.

More and more we’re discovering multiple mechanisms that lead to weight gain. And in the process, we learn the secret to permanent
weight loss. Eating the right foods is the secret to removing the common obstacles to weight reduction. When you eat right, you restore the proper biochemical mix of body hormones, gut bacteria, and fuel cellular repair to make the body function right. The balance of favorable microorganisms in your digestive tract is an often overlooked factor that helps keep your weight down.

The list in Table 5 is only partial. How many of the items in the table do you eat in your regular diet? I try to eat as many of them as I can every day. I add them to my breakfast oats or fruit, I add them to my lunch salad or soup, and I eat them as part of my dinner. In other words, I might add chopped raw scallions to my hot soup and raw onions, watercress, and tomatoes to my mushroom bean burger.

Eat hefty portions of the foods that fight fat, and you won’t be dieting. You’ll be eating for health and longevity with plenty of great-tasting, satisfying foods—which just happen to interfere with fat storage and facilitate weight reduction. You don’t have to weigh portions
and count calories because a bigger portion of these foods is better than a smaller one. Instead of eating less food, then, eat three substantially sized meals a day—of the right kinds of food.

Green Makes You Lean

Once you get back to eating real food, you don’t have to diet to become slim. You can eat as much as you want. You don’t have to skimp, you can eat in abundance, and your taste will grow to prefer the healthy food that makes your body feel so good. It takes time for your body and mind to adjust to this, but it
does
happen.

You have to change the way you eat permanently, however, and you have to remember that it takes time for enzymes to return to a normal state. Be patient and remember that there’s no such thing as a quick fix.

At the beginning, you have to start somewhere, and the place to start is with salads. The first foods you eat at a meal influence how much you eat and what you eat. Make salad the main dish; make it big, and make it first. This is the simplest and most effective way to prevent overeating and to make sure you never have a weight problem. The only thing you have to remember is to not stuff yourself until you’re uncomfortable. You shouldn’t be aware of your stomach. How does your liver feel today? Are you a little uncomfortable in your pancreas or adrenals? The point here is that we don’t feel that these organs even exist. You shouldn’t be aware of your internal organs, including your stomach. So you shouldn’t eat until your stomach feels uncomfortable.

Recently I had some old friends over for dinner. We didn’t prepare anything in advance; when they arrived, we all made the food together. Some chopped the watercress, scallions, and onion. Some chopped the lettuce and other greens. Others sliced tomatoes and strawberries,
one peeled a few oranges, and I made salad dressing by blending oranges, lemon, blood orange vinegar, toasted sesame seeds, and some raw cashew pieces. We had a great salad that included strawberries, onions, scallions, watercress, radicchio, baby lettuces, and frisée lettuce. It was super delicious and super healthy. Then we had some homemade mixed-bean chili with shiitake mushrooms, and some creamy, sweet ice cream for dessert made from blending frozen mango with a young coconut.

When you eat for optimal health, you can eat as much as you want, feel satisfied, and intellectually and emotionally feel great about what you eat. You restore your metabolism to normal, inhibit fat storage in your body, become lean, and cancer-proof your body simultaneously.

Let’s End the Insanity

About half of all Americans are on a diet. The other half have just given up dieting and are currently on a binge. Collectively, we’re overweight, sickly, and struggling. We’ve made it socially acceptable to be a nation of food addicts, forfeiting our health via a toxic diet. In fact, people in the United States are ostracized if they don’t take part in self-destructive habits. Instead of supporting, reinforcing, and applauding those who take good care of their health with superior nutrition and regular exercise, people call them “health nuts” and criticize them for being extreme. It’s normal to continually stoke the body with addictive substances—alcohol, addictive and unhealthy foods, and prescription drugs.

Now is the time to acknowledge, understand, and end this insanity.

We’ve made it socially unacceptable in the United States to smoke cigarettes. Now we have to make it socially unacceptable to drink soft drinks and to eat candy and fried foods. These are simply self-destructive and irresponsible behaviors, just like smoking, snorting cocaine, and
getting drunk. We as a nation have to stop dieting and looking for a magic fix. We need to accept the fact that all of us are individually responsible for putting in our mouths high-quality, nourishing food. Eat little salt and very little animal products, if you eat them at all. Eat mostly vegetables, beans, fruits, onions, and mushrooms. Don’t eat sweets or anything white. Get off your butt and be active, exercising every day. Stop dieting, go live, be productive, and let’s heal the world.

To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy, “It’s not what your diet can do for you, it’s what your diet can do for your country.” (Or something like that.) Our country is in the pits, and it’s not getting out until we become a healthier, more productive population with fewer medical costs. We can never afford to pay for so many sick individuals, given the tremendous medical costs involved and especially within the context of our litigious society.

We are paying for this fast-food genocide with our shared tax dollars. When people eat themselves into coronary bypass surgery or wind up in nursing homes, we pay for it with our tax dollars and national debt. Our sickly population destroys our economy and weakens our businesses; our industries can’t compete in the world market because of such high medical expenditures.

More than 85 percent of U.S. workers are overweight or obese, and the resulting and chronic diseases have lowered productivity, increased the number of sick days, and increased healthcare costs, among other expenses. These expenses are rising geometrically, outstripping other costs, and making our products noncompetitive in the world marketplace. Fast food, soda and energy drinks, snack foods, and specialty beverages are now commonplace. We practice “sickcare,” not “healthcare,” and we can’t afford sickcare now, which is 20 percent of our gross domestic product and rising. How are we going to afford this as costs rise even higher? According to the American Heart Association, the costs of treating heart disease and stroke are expected to triple in the next twenty years to $818 billion per year.

We simply have an unacceptable level of health problems and health tragedies, reducing the quality of our lives. Plus, we need a healthier population to improve our economy, and we need a population eating healthier foods to benefit our environment, too. Obviously, eating right will do all: It will protect us and also help our country and our planet. Eating right is the right thing to do.

I
N
T
HEIR
O
WN
W
ORDS

You are not alone in your struggle with your weight and food addictions. A successful nutritarian and contributor to my blog since 2009, Emily has inspired thousands of people to change their lives
.

Since my early twenties I had adopted a dieting mentality that resulted in a 100-pound weight gain. I was always dieting, and no matter how ridiculous a plan would be, I’d try to follow it for a few days until my body couldn’t stand the nutritional deprivation any longer. I’d then eat everything in sight. Or I’d get so exasperated trying to follow restrictive rituals, like counting calories and points or weighing or measuring food, that I’d quit whatever diet I was currently on. I ended up literally starving myself to obesity.

I wasn’t interested in the science behind toxic hunger, food addiction, optimal health, and longevity; I just wanted a quick way to lose weight. I earmarked and started following the Six-Week Plan in
Eat to Live
, but didn’t read the rest of the book. By the second day, when symptoms of detox started to surface, I caved in and immediately went back to my old way of eating. This continued on and off for the next five years.

When my health had deteriorated to the point that I was scared of having a heart attack or stroke, I was ready to radically change my way of thinking—and eating. I was ready to get rid of the dieting mentality and replace it with eating for excellent health for the rest of my life.

I knew Dr. Fuhrman had the answer, and I went back to his teachings with a new refocused commitment. I no longer focused on what I
couldn’t
eat until I lost weight; instead, I focused on consuming colorful and vibrant foods that I
could
eat to give my body the best opportunity to live in optimal health. I made the firm commitment to get my health back by carefully following Dr. Fuhrman’s nutritarian approach.