Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss (3 page)
Read Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss Online
Authors: Joel Fuhrman
The next two chapters apply the concepts learned in the first four chapters by evaluating other diet plans and tackling many of the current controversies in human nutrition. Chapter five deepens your knowledge of the critical issues in order to understand the accurate information that is essential for maintaining your weight loss over the long term—your most important goal. Chapter six discusses food addiction and the differences between true hunger and toxic hunger.
Chapter seven illustrates the power of the Eat to Live plan to reverse illness and provides instruction on how to apply this plan to remedy your health problems and find your ideal weight. Applying the Eat to Live formula to reverse and prevent heart disease, autoimmune illnesses, and so much more opens your
critical eye to a new way of looking at your well-being. Health care becomes self-care, with food your new weapon to prevent and defeat illnesses. This is a key chapter, not just for those with chronic medical problems but for all who want to live a longer, healthier life.
Chapters eight, nine, and ten put the advice into action and teach you how to make the healthy eating plan of this book taste great. Chapter eight explains the rules for swift and sustained weight loss and gives you the tools you need to adjust your diet to achieve the results you desire. It offers guidelines and a set program that allows you to plan your daily menus. Chapter nine contains cooking tips, menu plans, and recipes, including the more aggressive six-week plan designed for those who want to lose weight quickly, as well as vegetarian and nonvegetarian options. Frequently asked questions and answers are put forth in chapter ten, and I provide more practical information to aid you in your quest to regain your health.
It is my mission and my hope to give everyone the tools to achieve lifelong slimness and radiant health. Read on and learn how to put my health formula to work for you.
Digging Our Graves with Forks and KnivesT
HE
E
FFECTS OF THE
A
MERICAN
D
IET
, P
ART
I
Case Study:
Robert lost over sixty pounds and saved his life!I was generally thin until about thirty-two years of age. I gained about thirty pounds seemingly overnight. At thirty-four, I began having labored breathing and was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, which caused significant scarring over a large area of my lungs. I began the standard treatment of a biopsy and steroids.
At age thirty-seven, I was fifty pounds overweight. My life changed one afternoon at an all-you-can-eat buffet. The button on my last comfortable pair of pants snapped and the zipper broke. It was funny, embarrassing, and deadly serious all at the same time. That day, I decided I had to change and went to the bookstore to find some answers. I stumbled upon Dr. Fuhrman’s book, and it made sense to me.
Six months later, I was sixty pounds lighter, but my wife brought to my attention a lump in my neck. The lump had been there for years, but without all my fat obscuring it, it was now readily visible. I had assumed that my gasping was a result of the sarcoidosis, but I had a massive thyroid cyst, which blocked my windpipe and cut off my air supply. The doctors decided that it needed to come out. A couple of days prior to surgery, I was given an MRI, which showed that I had no traces of the sarcoidosis. It had completely cleared up, just as Dr. Fuhrman had predicted.
During the surgery the cyst burst as soon as the surgeon attempted to cut it out with his scalpel, causing me to go into anaphylactic shock. Had the doctor not first drained the fluid with a needle, I might have died. Even more sobering is the fact that had I not adopted Dr. Fuhrman’s advice, the cyst would have remained obscured and would have burst on its own. I would not have had the benefit of being on the operating table.
I am now forty-six years old, I run about twenty miles a week, and I have unbelievable stamina. My systolic blood pressure went from 140 to 108, and my current LDL cholesterol level is 40 (that is not a typo). I feel great. I look ten years younger than I did two years ago and take no medications. I have competed in several triathlons and am preparing for my first marathon.
Not long after my surgery, I sought out Dr. Fuhrman to thank him. You too can achieve your ideal weight, reverse disease, and, yes, even delay the aging process.
A
mericans have been among the first people worldwide to have the luxury of bombarding themselves with nutrient-deficient, high-calorie food, often called
empty-calorie or junk food
. By “empty-calorie,” I mean food that is deficient in nutrients and fiber. More Americans than ever before are eating these high-calorie foods while remaining inactive—a dangerous combination.
The number one health problem in the United States is obesity, and if the current trend continues, by the year 2048 all adults in the United States will be overweight or obese.
1
The National Institutes of Health estimate that obesity is associated with a twofold increase in mortality, costing society more than $100 billion per year.
2
This is especially discouraging for dieters because after spending so much money attempting to lose weight, 95 percent of them gain all the weight back and then add on even more pounds within three years.
3
This incredibly high failure rate holds true for the vast majority of weight-loss schemes, programs, and diets.
Obesity and its sequelae pose a serious challenge to physicians. Both primary-care physicians and obesity-treatment specialists fail to make an impact on the long-term health of most of their patients. Studies show that initial weight loss is followed by weight regain.
4
Those who genetically store fat more efficiently may have had a survival advantage thousands of years ago when food was scarce, or in a famine, but in today’s modern food pantry they are the ones with the survival disadvantage. People whose parents are obese have a tenfold increased risk of being obese. On the other hand, obese families tend to have obese pets, which is obviously not genetic. So it is the combination of food choices, inactivity, and genetics that determines obesity.
5
More important, one can’t change one’s genes, so blaming them doesn’t solve the problem. Rather than taking an honest look at what causes obesity, Americans are still looking for a miraculous cure—a magic diet or some other effortless gimmick.
Obesity is not just a cosmetic issue—extra weight leads to an
earlier death, as many studies confirm.
6
Overweight individuals are more likely to die from all causes, including heart disease and cancer. Two-thirds of those with weight problems also have hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, or another obesity-related condition.
7
It is a major cause of early mortality in the United States.
8
Since dieting almost never works and the health risks of obesity are so life-threatening, more and more people are desperately turning to drugs and surgical procedures to lose weight.
Health Complications of Obesity• Increased overall premature mortality
• Adult-onset diabetes
• Hypertension
• Degenerative arthritis
• Coronary artery disease
• Cancer
• Lipid disorders
• Obstructive sleep apnea
• Gallstones
• Fatty infiltration of liver
• Restrictive lung disease
• Gastrointestinal diseases
The results so many of my patients have achieved utilizing the Eat to Live guidelines over the past twenty years rival what can be achieved with surgical weight-reduction techniques, without the associated morbidity and mortality.
9
Surgery for Weight Reduction and Its Risks
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), wound problems and complications from blood clots are common after-effects of gastric bypass and gastroplasty surgery. The NIH has also reported that those undergoing surgical treatment for obesity have had substantial nutritional and metabolic complications, gastritis, esophagitis, outlet stenosis, and abdominal hernias. More than 10 percent required another operation to fix problems resulting from the first surgery.
10
GASTRIC BYPASS SURGERY COMPLICATIONS: 14-YEAR FOLLOW-UP
11
| Vitamin B 12 deficiency | 239 | 39.9 percent |
| Readmit for various reasons | 229 | 38.2 percent |
| Incisional hernia | 143 | 23.9 percent |
| Depression | 142 | 23.7 percent |
| Staple line failure | 90 | 15.0 percent |
| Gastritis | 79 | 13.2 percent |
| Cholecystitis | 68 | 11.4 percent |
| Anastomotic problems | 59 | 9.8 percent |
| Dehydration, malnutrition | 35 | 5.8 percent |
| Dilated pouch | 19 | 3.2 percent |
Dangerous Dieting
In addition to undergoing extremely risky surgeries, Americans have been bombarded with a battery of gimmicky diets that promise to combat obesity. Almost all diets are ineffective. They don’t work, because no matter how much weight you lose when you are on a diet, you put it right back on when you go off. Measuring portions and trying to eat fewer calories, typically called “dieting,” almost never result in permanent weight loss and actually worsen the problem over time. Such “dieting” temporarily slows down your metabolic rate, so often more weight comes back than you lost. You wind up heavier than you were before you started dieting. This leads many to claim, “I’ve tried everything, and nothing works. It must be genetic. Who wouldn’t give up?”
You may already know that the conventional “solution” to being overweight—low-calorie dieting—doesn’t work. But you may not know why. It is for this simple yet much overlooked reason: for the vast majority of people, being overweight is not caused by how much they eat but by what they eat. The idea that people get heavy because they consume a high volume of food is
a myth. Eating large amounts of the right food is your key to success and is what makes this plan workable for the rest of your life. What makes many people over weight is not that they eat so much more but that they get a higher percentage of their calories from fat and refined carbohydrates, or mostly low-nutrient foods. This low-nutrient diet establishes a favorable cellular environment for disease to flourish.
Regardless of your metabolism or genetics, you can achieve a normal weight once you start a high-nutrient diet style. Since the majority of all Americans are overweight, the problem is not primarily genetic. Though genes are an important ingredient, physical activity and food choices play a far more significant role. In studies on identical twins with the tendency to be overweight, scientists found that physical activity is the strongest environmental determinant of total body and central abdominal fat mass.
12
Even those with a strong family history of obesity effectively lose weight with increased physical activity and appropriate dietary modifications.
Most of the time, the reason people are overweight is too little physical activity, in conjunction with a high-calorie, low-nutrient diet. Eating a diet with plenty of low-fiber, calorie-dense foods, such as oil and refined carbohydrates, is the main culprit.
As long as you are eating fatty foods and refined carbohydrates, it is impossible to lose weight healthfully. In fact, this vicious combination of a sedentary lifestyle and eating typical “American” food (high-fat, low-fiber) is the primary reason we have such an incredibly overweight population.
