The End of Dieting: How to Live for Life (12 page)

Kate lost 64 pounds and now feels “back in the land of the living.” She’s no longer chronically fatigued from her autoimmune disease
.

BEFORE:
170 pounds

AFTER:
106 pounds

I had always considered myself a healthy eater. I stuck to organic veggies and meats, never drank colas or ate candy bars. I scrutinized the ingredients in my food. But the older I got, the worse I began to feel. I was up to 170 pounds, my total cholesterol was at 239, and my fatigue felt bottomless. I was diagnosed with pernicious anemia, a debilitating autoimmune disease. I was told that there really wasn’t much that could be done other than take vitamin B
₁₂
, which I started immediately. Unfortunately, however, it didn’t really help my fatigue.

At this point I became completely stopped in life—I couldn’t work, I had zero energy, and I felt miserable all the time. No doctor at any time ever mentioned food as maybe contributing to all this. While trying to find out more about autoimmune diseases, I came across Dr. Fuhrman’s
Eat to Live
. Both my husband and I started reading it immediately, and it made total sense to us. We both recognized that food was the one constant in our lives that had never really changed, despite all the different diet combinations and ratios we had tried in the past.

We both committed 100 percent to this way of eating. We’ve been following it for 2
½
years. As a result, I went from 170 pounds to 106 pounds. My cholesterol went from 239 to 129, and my dress size went from a size 14 to a size 2! Most important, however, is my newfound energy and tremendous quality of life I now enjoy.

When people meet me for the first time, they can’t believe that just a few short years earlier I was house-bound and had virtually no life at all. Now I’m actively back in the land of the living, and it’s an honor to be able to share with people my story about how simple it is to get back your health and vitality by just following what Dr. Fuhrman says.

“Fast Food” Versus “Slow Food”

I call the staples of the SAD—sugar, flour, milk, and oil—
fast foods
. The term “fast food” conventionally refers to what you find at a fast-food restaurant, with its high-salt, highly processed, mass-produced meals; but I want you to categorize foods that flood the body with empty calories as fast food too. When you eat a piece of bread or chocolate cake, for instance, your body breaks down the white flour into simple glucose in the stomach, which is then absorbed into the bloodstream within minutes. Oils are processed; fast foods too. Unlike real food, they are absorbed into the bloodstream immediately. And when fats are absorbed so rapidly, the body can’t burn them for energy, so they’re quickly cleared from the bloodstream and stored in the body as fat. Nuts and seeds are also high-fat foods, but unlike oil and refined sweets, they take a long time to digest, and their fats are released slowly into the bloodstream. The body can then utilize them, properly, for energy.

The secret to hormonally activating your weight loss is by staying with natural whole foods and away from processed foods entirely, especially sweets and oil. For example, your body absorbs quickly the calories in white bread and apple juice, but it takes comparatively more time to absorb calories from a whole wheat berry or an apple (see Table 3).

The hormones regulating fat storage and fat removal include insulin, leptin, and IGF-1. The more fat you have on your body, the more leptin it releases. Leptin is released by fatty tissue. When you start storing fat, the release of leptin tells the brain that you have plenty of energy storage and you don’t need to eat. Leptin also activates receptors in the hypothalamus that suppress your appetite. So why doesn’t it work? Why do people become immune to the appetite suppressive effects of leptin?

There are various reasons why, but the main one is that the body becomes resistant to leptin once its levels have been elevated too long. In other words, if you overeat and put on a few extra pounds several times in your life, your body continues to release leptin until you return to the appropriate weight. But once you spend enough of your life in a severely overweight condition, leptin just stops working, largely because the body is so overwhelmed dealing with the symptoms of toxic hunger. As a result, leptin can no longer suppress appetite.

However, the problem gets worse. Not only has your body become resistant to high levels of leptin, your leptin level also drops as you diet to lose weight, which, in turn, decreases thyroid activity and the expenditure of energy in your body’s skeletal muscle. So people who have lost weight through dieting end up with a lower basal metabolic rate, which means that they burn fewer calories at rest than people at the same exact weight who didn’t get to that weight by dieting. For people to start losing weight again, leptin has to be activated. More important, however, tissue sensitivity has to be reignited so the body can start to respond again to leptin and to encourage the thyroid to function normally again.

The same is true for insulin. The pancreas normally secretes very small amounts of insulin to regulate blood sugar. A healthy body needs only a small amount of insulin to move the glucose from the bloodstream into the cells of the body. The combination of a high-glycemic diet and fat on the body raises the levels of insulin higher and higher.
Stored body fat acts like a barrier to insulin function, so the pancreas responds by producing more and more of it. A high amount of insulin is harmful because excess insulin supports and drives fat storage, and it promotes angiogenesis. Angiogenesis is the growth of new blood vessels. This new blood vessel growth is necessary to feed and support the increasing mass of fatty tissue on the body. Evidence has also linked chronic hyperinsulinemia (high insulin levels) to a greater risk of cancer.
¹²
As your body becomes more resistant to insulin, the pancreas is forced to produce abnormally elevated levels. This overworks the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas, which eventually can lead to type 2 diabetes.

I’ve Messed Up My Body, So What Do I Do Now?

So let’s assume you’ve spent a lifetime dieting, and in the process, you’ve messed up your metabolism. It’s now almost impossible for you to lose weight. Don’t worry. You don’t have to throw in the towel. You can still lose weight, but to do so you must slow down your body’s fat-storage enzymes and keep their levels down, and you must inhibit angiogenesis. You can still avoid surges in your insulin levels and insulin-like growth hormones. All you have to do is eat lots of low-glycemic plant foods such as greens, cauliflower, tomatoes, eggplant, mushroom, beans, seeds, and nuts. Such low-glycemic plant foods digest slowly and feed the body with protective nutrients.

Consuming foods that take a long time to digest is the key to resensitizing the body to leptin and insulin. Lucky for us, foods that take a long time to digest contain phytochemicals with angiogenesis-inhibiting effects. When you eat foods that can slowly feed your metabolism without stimulating insulin receptors, you can hormonally activate your weight loss. In other words, by giving your body better foods, it will start to naturally burn through the excess fat in your diet.

I
N
T
HEIR
O
WN
W
ORDS

It took hitting rock bottom for Susan to realize that the solution to her health problems was within her grasp
.

BEFORE:
350 pounds

AFTER:
140 pounds

As another birthday approached, I found myself at a whopping 350 pounds. I was diabetic, hypertensive, and very depressed. Ironically, I only had to look as far as my own bookshelf to find a prescription to better health,
Eat to Live
by Dr. Fuhrman. It was signed: “Wishing you all good health and much happiness always, Joel Fuhrman.”

I remember my first meeting with Dr. Fuhrman. He let me know in no uncertain terms that my current lifestyle was going to lead to disease and an early grave. But I continued my destructive course, and continued to live to eat.

Through the years, I tried many different weight-loss programs and found only temporary successes. In 2005, at 350 pounds, I had a lapband procedure, probably one of the worst decisions I have ever made. The restrictive band made it almost impossible to eat a healthy, well-balanced diet. In fact, it made it most comfortable to eat foods that were literally sugar-coated. Eventually, I had the band opened to its fullest extent and continued trying new fads.

I finally took
Eat to Live
off the shelf, knowing that in my hands was my greatest hope for a healthy future. Since then, I have lost 210 pounds. I now enjoy physical activities. On my fiftieth birthday, I climbed a mountain in Woodstock, New York—and then enjoyed a meal of kale, roasted beets, and beans! I ride my bicycle with my son, too. Our last trek was fourteen miles, much of it uphill. My husband and I traveled to Paris to visit our daughter, a vacation I never would have dreamed of because of the expense and humiliation of buying two airplane seats for one obese person.

I love telling my story. This diet style is easy to follow. I rarely weigh or measure any food. I don’t feel like I’m on a diet—because if I’m hungry, I eat.

The nutritarian diet style is
not
a burden—being morbidly obese and sidelined from your own life
is
!

Certain foods downregulate fat-storage hormones because they’re packed with angiogenesis inhibitors and hormone-inhibiting phytochemicals (Table 4). Angiogenesis inhibition prevents the growth of new blood vessels, which is needed to expand your fat deposits. By inhibiting the growth of blood vessels, you prevent your body from getting fat. At the same time, this also helps you lose fat over time. The body literally can rebuild itself, and its architecture is shaped by the foods you choose to eat.

When you consume plant foods that are high in nutrients and phytochemicals, your body will start to repair itself via multiple mechanisms. For example, parsley, arugula, scallions, and watercress are simple low-calorie foods that contain hundreds of body-fixing nutrients that oppose body fat accumulation. They douse us with nutrients, with very few calories in the process. They haven’t had the phytochemicals bred out of them through commercial propagation and food engineering, like white potatoes and corn have. Because of their high content of phytochemicals, these and other natural foods encourage fat loss and make possible a favorable weight for the rest of your life. Eating the right foods helps people resolve their lifelong struggle with their weight, while simultaneously protecting against cancer.