The UltraMind Solution (91 page)

The six-week plan consists of four basic components. These are:

1.
A healthy eating plan designed to help you heal and optimize your brain.

2.
Basic supplements you need to take to balance and enhance your brain chemistry.

3.
Lifestyle changes including exercise, relaxation, sleep, and “brain” or mental exercises.

4.
Living clean and green to reduce your exposure to environmental toxins and support a sustainable future for us all.

It is a six-week program, with a one-week preparation phase. All four elements above are incorporated in this easy-to-follow, step-by-step system.

Let’s review how it works.

We are often locked into habits without recognizing their effect on us. Most of us are drug addicts and don’t realize it. Sugar, junk food, caffeine, and alcohol all affect our ability to function, and though they temporarily make us feel better, they often deplete us in a deeper way.

Taking a “drug holiday” is an important way to discover how you really feel and give yourself the opportunity to tune into your own body’s signals for hunger, sleep, and relaxation. Getting off sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats or trans fats, junk food, alcohol, and caffeine for one week, in fact, is powerful enough to totally change your health and your mind.

Take a risk and try it out. Even if you do nothing else, this will change your life.

Once you are finished with the preparation week, you will move into the six-week program for healing and optimizing your brain.

The key component of the program is cleaning up your diet. Getting rid of garbage foods, moving toward a diet of whole, unprocessed foods, and eliminating foods that you may have sensitivities or delayed allergies to will help you start the process of healing your brain.

I recommend everyone take a six-week holiday from gluten and dairy. Gluten and dairy are the two major food allergens that most often lead to brain dysfunction, and eliminating them for six weeks (as you will during this program) may cause remarkable improvements in the health of your brain (not to mention your body).

You will also eliminate sugar, processed and toxic foods, and you will introduce whole, healing foods into your diet. The purpose of doing so is to show you just how great you can feel by simply changing what you eat.

Part of the healing occurs because of all the junk you are eliminating, but most occurs because you introduce delicious, whole real foods. Doing so will help rebuild the very structure and function of your brain.

During the program you will start to reeducate your body-mind and reprogram your brain with improved mood, attention, memory, and behavior. By doing so you will build the foundation for lifelong healthy brain function and balanced moods, and prevent most of the age-related brain conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

At the end of the six weeks you will stick to the whole foods healthy-eating plan, I hope, for life. However, you can reintegrate gluten and dairy systematically once the program is done to test for sensitivities you may have to them. I will explain how to do that in chapter 20.

By reintroducing these foods the way I describe, you can monitor their effects on your health. (If you get a stomachache or your nose stuffs up when you eat dairy, or you feel tired and depressed if you eat gluten, it is best to stay away from them.)

The six-week program is really just a start for the rest of your life. Variety, fun, nourishment, pleasure, color, and wholeness are essential for making this way of eating your way of eating for life.

Feel free to improvise and adapt—just stick with whole real foods and you will have difficulty getting into trouble.

By the end of seven weeks (one week preparation, six weeks of the UltraMind program) you may have more energy, feel more emotionally balanced, more alert, focused, and mentally sharper. UltraWellness is now yours.

The next few chapters will give you an overview of the healthy-eating plan, supplements, and lifestyle changes you need to make during the program. They will also tell you how to set the stage for success, and teach you how to stay on the program.

Read through them. Then simply follow the guidelines and checklists in chapter 19 to take advantage of the UltraMind Solution.

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The most powerful tool you have to transform your health and improve your mood, mind, and metabolism is your fork! Use it well and you will thrive. Choose poorly and you will suffer.

The varied components of a whole-foods diet not only taste better, make you feel better, and prevent disease, but they are literally medicine. Mounting scientific evidence points to the power of food as medicine. These “medicinal” foods are simply the foods our bodies evolved eating— fresh, unadulterated, slow-burning, high-fiber, vitamin-and mineral-rich, omega-3 plentiful, and phytonutrient-dense foods.

That is why we can treat and prevent most chronic illnesses with a whole, organic, real, unprocessed diet of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, and seeds, small omega-3–containing fish like sardines and herring, and lean animal protein. It is a one-stop shopping method for dealing with everything.

In fact, all nutritional science is converging on a few basic concepts, which everyone agrees on. These are the principles the six-week UltraMind Solution is based on:

1.
Eat whole, real, fresh, organic, unprocessed food.

2.
Eat a lot of fruit and vegetables full of colorful phytonutrients.

3.
Eat foods with plenty of fiber.

4.
Eat foods containing omega-3 fats.

If you follow these four principles, then you are doing 90 percent of what you need to do to stay healthy and heal your brain. The rest are small refinements and details.

You will automatically be eating this way as long as you follow the eating plan in this program. I will discuss more about what kinds of foods to include in a moment.

But keep in mind that what is omitted is just as important as what’s included.

If you want to realize the full potential of the UltraMind Solution to transform your health and your brain in six weeks, the first step is to temporarily stop all factors that have been shown to cause brain damage.

Give your brain a break for six weeks from known braindamaging substances. If you think there will be nothing left to eat, then you will have the biggest gains to achieve in making a change. Please avoid foods in any of the following categories.

High-fructose corn syrup

Sugar-laden foods

Candy, cookies, cereals, pastries, pies, etc., including honey, maple syrup, or molasses

Flour products, all types of flour

Bagels, breads, rolls, wraps, pastas, etc.