The End of Dieting: How to Live for Life (4 page)

If you feel any of the following symptoms, you’re experiencing toxic hunger.

Weakness

Fatigue

Shakiness

Headache

Stomach fluttering or cramping

Discomfort after stopping an addictive substance is called
withdrawal
, and it is significant because it represents detoxification or a biochemical healing after a substance is withdrawn. It’s nearly impossible to cleanse the body of a harmful substance without experiencing discomfort. Detoxification is enhanced when digestion ceases. So when digestion is finished, people often feel queasy, tired, or headachy and most often believe that these minor discomforts are actual feelings of hunger. Eating something restarts digestion and shuts down the detoxification process, which helps make the bad feelings go away. Let me explain.

There are two phases of the digestive cycle, the anabolic and catabolic. During the anabolic, or building, phase, you eat, chew, digest, and absorb nutrients, which slows or halts the active process of detoxification that occurs most efficiently when the body’s not actively digesting food. When digestion stops, the body enters its catabolic phase, and detoxification immediately starts to rev up. As a result, people experience detox symptoms, which they interpret as hunger. They just
have
to eat again, they think, even though their body is already overfilled
with calories. They can either eat frequently so their body doesn’t enter the catabolic phase for any sustained time, or they can eat calorically dense meals and animal products to keep the digestion (anabolic) process active until it’s time to eat again.

The distinction between real hunger and toxic hunger is crucial. Unlike true hunger, which appears when the body has burned through most of the stored calories from the previous meal and is now ready to be refueled, toxic hunger occurs when the body starts to get rid of these dangerous toxins. We immediately feel discomfort, which makes us think we need to eat or drink a high-caloric load for relief. This drives overeating behavior and strongly increases your desire to consume more calories than the body requires.

I am not asking you to diet. I’m asking you to change your fundamental beliefs about food.

The more you search for quick relief, however, the more you inhibit the detoxification, or healing, process. Uncomfortable sensations are very often the signals that repair is under way and the removal of toxins is occurring. We mistake these symptoms for actual hunger and, as a result, mistakenly eat too often and too much to lessen them, which causes us to pack on the pounds, make ourselves sick, and, in the process, perpetuate the vicious cycle of addiction.

Quitting a bad habit initially makes you feel worse, not better. When people start a healthy diet, for instance, the first three to five days are usually the most uncomfortable. This is precisely why all diets fail. No matter the diet, they all try to get people to eat less, and eating less is too uncomfortable physically and emotionally. The only way to comfortably eat less is to help the body desire less food, which requires us to get rid of the toxic hunger. Micronutrient adequacy is needed to prevent the buildup of toxins in cells, a primary cause of toxic hunger. In order to gravitate comfortably toward a more favorable weight, our diet has to be healthier and more micronutrient complete.

I
N
T
HEIR
O
WN
W
ORDS

Heather doesn’t worry about the scale anymore. She eats what she wants and is far healthier and headache-free
.

BEFORE:
201 pounds

AFTER:
125 pounds

I’m a thirty-eight-year-old wife and mother of three. For as long as I can remember, I’ve suffered from horrible, debilitating migraines. I couldn’t sleep. I was exhausted all the time. I didn’t have the energy to get up and play with my son and would nod off while driving (yikes!). I suffered from terrible seasonal allergies and had an unexplained facial rash that didn’t go away for months. I also had mood swings, although my family tells me that I was just plain grumpy. I started taking an antidepressant for anxiety.

I tried to start my own plan to regain my health. I ordered a juicer and juiced for about four weeks. Although I felt great, I knew this wasn’t a way I could live long term. I considered this time as just a detox for my body in preparation for what was yet to come.

Inspired to learn more, I did some research and found Dr. Fuhrman. I discovered his books, bought one, and read it in one day. This book is now marked up like my Bible.

I used to be a food label reader (you can see where that got me), but I’ve since learned that I was looking for the wrong things—carbs and protein, for example, which are emphasized in the standard American diet. I don’t buy anything processed or packaged, so labels hardly matter to me anymore. However, when I buy canned goods, such as beans or tomato sauce, I buy organic and am always vigilant about the amount of salt and sugar they contain. I will NEVER eat the other way again, EVER.

Since becoming a nutritarian I’ve lost weight, but more importantly, I feel FANTASTIC! I haven’t had a cold in over a year. I no longer suffer from migraines or headaches. I have energy. I sleep well. I stopped taking antidepressants, and I no longer suffer from anxiety. I feel GREAT all the time!

What you choose to eat is an opportunity to control how your brain functions. It is an opportunity to control your emotional and physical well-being and to control your later-life health. The key is to get all parts of your brain to agree to eat healthfully, because part of you may not want to go along. Once you understand how an unhealthful diet style can take over the brain, you can earn back your health and discover an ideal weight.

Beat the Brain at Its Own Game

So how and where do you start? You may have a New Year’s resolution or want to look great in that bathing suit for the Fourth of July. But it doesn’t work that way. It’s not about will power. There are no shortcuts. Addictions don’t respond to easy answers. You can’t “just say no.”

The first step to resolving food addiction is to eat lots of micronutrient-rich produce, which will crowd out the junk food and, over time, lessen toxic hunger signals and eventually eliminate your craving for junk. Fill your stomach with foods that have a high-nutrient, low-calorie density—foods such as raw vegetables, fruits, beans, onions, and mushrooms, which help you beat your addiction and lose weight. These fill up your stomach so much that you won’t feel like eating the concentrated calories found in addictive foods.

Ice cream is addictive, for instance. A peach is not. A peach won’t make you want to eat a dozen of them in a druglike binge. With its heavy concentration of sugar and fat, ice cream will light up a primitive part of your brain that persuades you to give up control, just as cocaine persuades coke addicts to let their lives spin out of control.

The most effective way to lose weight safely is to give up the goal of losing weight in favor of preventing disease and living pain free later in life. You’ll now eat more of the disease-fighting foods and fewer or none of the disease-causing foods. And by eating a high-grade nutritarian
diet, you’ll cycle through the detox phase so quickly that you’ll be feeling fine in just a few days. Toxic hunger will fade away, and you won’t be driven to eat all the time.

To Beat Food Addiction, You Also Have to Beat Emotional Eating

Toxic hunger keeps us in a spiral of bad choices and leads to food addiction. But there is an additional obstacle that many of us need to overcome: emotional eating. Emotional eating is the other side of the biological basis of food addiction. When people turn to food to relieve their stress, they’re really just falling back on bad habits, reaching for the foods they’ve always eaten. When people continue to eat foods that they know aren’t good for them, this too is the result of an emotional need. We have all experienced choosing a short-term calorie load of fat, sugar, or carbs to avoid the negative emotions after a tough day. To upend emotional eating, we have to change our mind-set. We must break the bad habits we have formed and discover the necessary self-esteem to continue to make good, healthy choices every day.

Habits, it turns out, are the same in low- and high-pressure situations. In good times or bad, people simply do what they’ve always done, defaulting to their regular habits—whether it’s eating, smoking, or biting their nails. So how do you break a bad habit? By developing good habits.

Yes, it takes a conscious, concerted effort to break old habits. It takes time to develop good habits. It takes time to retrain your taste buds. It takes time to heal the body and repair the damage. It takes time to feel true hunger rather than toxic hunger. But, trust me, it’s worth it.

Here’s the secret, though, about learning to eat well. You can’t develop good eating habits without simultaneously developing good
emotional habits. The two go hand in hand. Emotional eating is when you eat for comfort during moments of great difficulty or high stress. Sweets and other disease-causing foods take you to a place of bliss. To get off the dieting merry-go-round once and for all, you have to build up your self-esteem, because the happier and healthier you feel, the less likely you are to resort to food, drugs, or alcohol to cope.

Feeling good about yourself is an active process. It involves
doing
. For many people, self-esteem stems from exercise. For others, it comes with a job well done. For some, it’s a product of helping others or developing a new skill. Losing weight and finding health can be a powerful boost to your self-confidence and self-esteem, but they occur only once you start to strengthen every aspect of your life. Focus on that before focusing on the numbers on your scale.

Just as junk food weakens the brain, self-doubt weakens the will. The combination of healthy eating and healthy emotional habits can heal both.
³
This involves changing behaviors that will strengthen your emotional health and change the emphasis of your life—from how you approach food to how you interact with people. Using food as an emotional crutch prevents you from learning proper coping skills and developing vital social skills necessary to successfully navigate life. When you are under stress and need comforting, try talking to someone. A connection to others, coupled with a felt responsibility for others, translates into a sense of purpose and self-worth, which usually results in better health. A meta-analysis of 148 studies on the correlation between strong relationships and good health indicated a 50 percent increase in the likelihood of survival for the more than three hundred thousand participants who enjoyed strong social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, health status, cause of death, and follow-up period.
⁴
The message here is that working on building friendships and helping others doesn’t merely make you healthier and extend your life; it is also an effective strategy for resolving food addiction.