Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss (25 page)

My Eat to Live dietary approach has already been tested and shown to be the most effective diet style for lowering cholesterol, as reported in the medical journal
Metabolism
.
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A recent study also showed that participants who followed my plan for two years lost more weight and kept it off better than those following diets previously studied.
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Longevity and disease protection should be the ultimate goals of dietary advice; you can lose weight snorting cocaine and smoking cigarettes. When you settle for second-class nutritional advice, you doom yourself not only to a shorter life but also to a poor quality of life in your later years. Humans can survive long enough to reproduce with varying diet styles, but we can use nutritional science to greatly extend the potential of human health and enable a quality life expectancy. We can do better than our parents and better than our ancestors. We have an unprecedented opportunity in human history to live longer and better than ever before. The high-protein, high-animal-product promoters, who appeal to those people with that dietary preference, mutilate the nutritional science to promote their agenda, destroy life-enhancing opportunities for millions, and perpetuate needless premature deaths.

Eat to Live means the weight-loss benefits are only the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of scientific studies are demonstrating the potential of foods to extend your life span and offer
dramatic protection against cancer. What makes Eat to Live unique among diet styles is that it encourages the consumption of nutrient-rich produce, particularly those foods with dramatic health benefits. The result is that these disease-protective biochemical nutrients reduce food cravings, remove food addictions, and curtail overeating behavior. Without this knowledge, and without the attention to nutrient quality, diets are doomed to fail.

You can’t get to an ideal level of dietary protection, which includes enough of these fruit and vegetable super-foods, unless you significantly reduce your consumption of animal products, processed foods, oils, flours, and sweeteners. This leaves caloric space and stomach space for a sufficient amount of highly protective foods. This is what Eat to Live is all about. When you eat sufficient volumes of beneficial foods in delicious and satisfying ways, you will not have room for the other foods that are not health-promoting, and you will eventually lose your desire for them.

The chicken, pasta, and olive oil diet is the perfect formula for mediocre health and a poor life expectancy. Chicken, oil, and pasta are all low-nutrient foods. Not grain-based, meat-based, or corn-based, a nutritarian diet is based on high-nutrient plant foods of varying colors. I coined the word
nutritarian
to represent a person whose dietary focus is on eating healthful, nutrient-rich foods. A nutritarian recognizes that nutrient-rich produce has disease-preventive, therapeutic, and life-extending properties.

Can you imagine what would happen to our nation’s growing health-care costs; our epidemic of obesity, cancer, and diabetes; and our suffering economy, overburdened with out-of-control medical costs, if all Americans did these things?

Eat to Live isn’t for everyone. Some people may decide to ignore the life-enhancing information presented here. A multitude of health promoters offer diets, nutritional supplements, surgical procedures, and even drugs with the promise of weight loss without changing the way you eat. This promise alone is enough to keep people from doing the work to change; it gives the subconscious a way out. The subconscious mind is not logical. Many of these diets have been debunked, but that doesn’t damage their allure.

Occasionally, I meet someone who tells me, “I read
Eat to Live.
I know that it makes sense. But I can’t eat like that.” Or, “I read your book, but I could never be a vegetarian.” Most often it turns out that the person didn’t read the book in its entirety, just skimmed it. These individuals fear that healthful dietary changes will remove all the pleasure from their lives.

Habits are hard to break, no question about it. Some people cannot be convinced by all the best science in the world that it is better to eat healthy foods. Nothing short of disease, fear, or pain (and often all three) will motivate them to change. Toxic eating can be just as addictive as smoking or taking drugs. The same steps are necessary to overcome the addiction. The first step is to recognize that you have a problem and that it is an addiction. Knowledge can help defeat addictions. It also helps to have a support system of others to reinforce the reality that any temporary suffering incurred as a result of change will bring about a much more pleasurable and happier life.

Addictive behavior can seem like an effective way to escape sadness, loneliness, and fear because it brings momentary pleasure. It is difficult to break old, addictive eating habits and form
new, healthy ones. One of the difficulties is the immense power of addiction, which makes the human mind anxious to rationalize and justify bad habits. As a result, people often fail before they even attempt to change. They either use denial about the vital necessity of change—the need to improve their health and happiness—or they simply give up without even trying, thinking that change is too difficult. Keep in mind, part of you (your intellect) wants to change and be healthy. It wants the suffering caused by your bad habits to end. But part of you (part of your subconscious) does not want to change. It wants to avoid conflict and the discomfort that comes with withdrawal from your addictive bad habits. That part of you wants to pretend that things are just fine the way they are, thank you, and it can come up with some mighty convincing reasons why you should not follow the Eat to Live plan. Here are some common ones:

• It’s too radical a change.
  
• There’s not enough protein.
  
• I will get too thin and my skin will wrinkle.
  
• My family won’t eat this way.
  
• It is too difficult to eat this way on the road.
  
• There is nothing to eat in a restaurant.
  
• I’ve tried dieting before, and I know I’ll just gain all the weight back.
  
• I really don’t like vegetables.
  

Addictions affect our ability to think rationally; they prejudice our judgment in favor of maintaining the addiction. That is why it is so difficult even to decide to change, much less actually change. Those addicted to rich, heart attack–causing foods are more than happy to believe the lie that a low cholesterol level is not desirable and readily parrot high-protein enthusiasts who spread the myth that low cholesterol is dangerous. Many people addicted to animal foods would embrace the belief that the earth is flat if they could use it to justify their consumption of fatty meats, butter, and cheese.

The modern food and drug industry has converted a significant portion of the world’s people to a new religion—a massive cult of pleasure seekers who consume coffee, cigarettes, soft drinks, candy, chocolate, alcohol, processed foods, fast foods, and concentrated dairy fat (cheese) in a self-indulgent orgy of destructive behavior. When the inevitable results of such bad habits appear—pain, suffering, sickness, and disease—the addicted cult members drag themselves to physicians and demand drugs to alleviate their pain, mask their symptoms, and cure their diseases. These revelers become so drunk on their addictive behavior and the accompanying addictive thinking that they can no longer tell the difference between health and health care.

The benefits of a diet based on nutritional excellence accrue over time, and achieving them takes some effort. But Eat to Live does not have to be an all-or-nothing decision on day one. Incremental improvements bring benefits, too, and change can take place over time. Healthy foods taste fantastic, but you may have to rehabilitate your taste buds and take some time to learn new cooking techniques and recipes to appreciate them.

Instead of searching for weight-loss gimmicks and tricks, adopt a resolution to be healthy. Focusing on your health, not on your weight, will eventually result in long-term weight loss. Eating a healthy diet, one that is rich in an assortment of natural plant fibers, will help you crave less and feel satisfied without overeating. Other diet plans fail because they cater to modern American tastes, which include too many processed foods and animal products to be healthy. Stop measuring portions and trying to follow complicated formulas. Instead, eat as many vegetables, beans, and fresh fruits as possible, and less of everything else. Don’t succumb to those other plans, which are an insult to your body as well as your intelligence.

W
e are living among an addicted population of compulsive eaters, creating allergic and sickly individuals. Eat and live like most Americans and you will eventually suffer from an assortment of ailments—like most Americans.

Good health is not merely the absence of disease. Good health assumes protection from disease in the future and can be predicted only by a healthy lifestyle and diet. You cannot buy your health; you must earn it through healthy living. Visiting physicians, acupuncturists, chiropractors, homeopaths, naturopaths, osteopaths, and other health providers cannot make you healthy. You can receive
symptomatic
relief for your condition, but treatments do not make you healthy.