You may be wondering why it’s only now that we’re getting around to talking about food. This might seem a little late in the process, but as I’m sure you’re already aware, food is just one small part of the weight loss equation. We all know people who eat as much as they like of whatever they want and never gain a pound. And we also all know people who are constantly dieting and starving themselves and yet can’t seem to lose any weight. People who fall into the latter category know what it’s like to deny cravings day and night, living every day as a battle between willpower and insatiable hunger.
As we’ve discussed throughout the book, when it comes to weight loss, the real issue is hormones and hormonal balance, and this extends well beyond food. Your thoughts, your beliefs, your sleep, and even the air you breathe contribute to your chemistry and hormones. Food is one of many mind-body factors that can influence your hormonal balance and your weight.
As you may have already found if you’ve started the process, reducing stress and resolving emotional traumas through visualization creates a chemical shift in your body that facilitates weight loss. There are still many ways you can alter your diet that will help you lose weight sustainably; however, the focus has to be on hormonal balance, not simply calories. You’ll also do wonders for your health, your mood, and your life by following a few simple guidelines when you eat—and also by ignoring the supposed hard-and-fast rule of dieting.
FORGET “CALORIES IN, CALORIES OUT”
While the words just eat less are usually the first thing out of a nutritional expert’s mouth, they’re just plain wrong. It might seem logical to assume that eating less and exercising more is the only way to lose weight, but it’s a faulty premise. The theory is what Dr. Ron Rosedale, founder of the Carolina Center of Metabolic Medicine, calls “kindergarten medicine.” Many biochemical researchers are only now beginning to understand the enormous complexity of the body’s metabolic processes and that the idea of eating fewer calories is not the only way to lose weight. Hormonal balance is the new model, and the very first doctor to devise a strategy that was based on this model was the late Dr. Atkins.
Although I complain about Dr. Atkins’s treatment of me, he was truly revolutionary in his approach to weight loss in one sense: he successfully disproved the age-old adage that weight loss is simply a matter of “calories in, calories out.”
As early as the 1960s, Dr. Robert Atkins suspected there were problems with this equation. Atkins understood how carbohydrates raised insulin levels and how that could lead to the body generating more fat stores. Remember, insulin is the fat-making hormone, so when insulin levels are elevated, your body generates more fat. Also, when insulin levels are elevated, the body loses the ability to burn fat because insulin prevents the body from secreting fat-burning hormones. So we end up in a state where we are perpetually making fat and never burning it.
Dr. Atkins reasoned that if we don’t eat carbohydrates, insulin levels won’t rise and we’ll generate and store less fat; we might even burn fat more easily. When he tried feeding volunteers a fat-and-protein-based diet, Atkins found that, sure enough, people could eat as much as they wanted, avoid counting calories, yet still avoid gaining weight. In fact, they could shed pounds eating mostly red meat, bacon, and butter—at least for a while.
Using the high-fat and high-protein diet, Atkins was able to conclusively show that calories in, calories out was a fallacy, even though it took almost 30 years before mainstream scientists accepted his findings. However, the Atkins Diet is still one-dimensional. Even though eating this way can keep insulin levels down, the diet promotes inflammation and digestive troubles that eventually lead to insulin resistance and a rise in insulin levels. The inflammation also causes leptin resistance, triggering insatiable hunger. Ultimately, people who lose weight with Atkins often gain it back as they do with any one-dimensional program.
Other hormone-based diets try to address the issue of elevated insulin levels and insulin and leptin resistance. But they’re all limited in scope because they fail to look at the myriad influences behind these hormonal problems. One example comes from Dr. Robert H. Lustig, University of California–San Francisco professor of pediatrics in the division of endocrinology. Lustig is a strong advocate of a low-fructose diet, and he has demonstrated with detailed biochemical equations how fructose, a sugar derived from fruit, causes insulin resistance in the liver and elevates free fatty acids in the bloodstream. This professor is very convincing when he states that he’d rather eat a piece of bread than a piece of fruit because bread has less fructose.
But the metabolism of fructose is extremely complicated and not yet fully understood. All the studies that demonstrate the adverse effects of fructose have been with done with a highly processed and concentrated form of fructose called high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Not all fructose is digested the same. Sometimes fructose is digested in the large intestine and sometimes in the liver, and, to date, no one knows why this is so. There’s still lots we don’t know about the sugar. While it’s crystal clear that HFCS leads to insulin resistance, leptin resistance, and weight gain, it’s not clear at all whether the same is true for the fructose in fruit. I’ve never seen a study in laboratory animals or humans that proves that fruit will make you fat. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you can feed a rat all the fruit it can eat and there’s a good chance it won’t gain any weight or suffer the metabolic consequences that it would if it were eating large quantities of HFCS.
Once again it comes down to the issue of processed versus real. Bread causes an exaggerated insulin response in the bloodstream, much greater than that of fruit, and it leads to leptin and insulin resistance—the very problems caused by HFCS. Even worse, bread contains gluten that irritates the bowels, causes inflammation, and leads to the release of inflammatory hormones that also cause leptin and insulin resistance. The conclusion that bread is better than fruit simply because bread has less fructose is an untested one and one that I wholeheartedly disagree with. Fruit also has live enzymes that assist in digestion, lots of antioxidants, and nutrients that are essential to the body and to weight loss.
While you might think the answer is avoiding all types of sugar, in my experience, stress and toxins are usually the triggers for the metabolic syndromes that cause leptin and insulin resistance. When you address these factors, the body becomes much more tolerant of sugars.
SOME SIMPLE GUIDELINES
After you address the stress and fear that are turning on your FAT programs, you start to understand that the premise behind these diets that focus on what to eat and what not to eat becomes unstable.
In fact the whole question of whether to eat fats, carbohydrates, or proteins is a nonissue. What we need to focus on is the type of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. The right type of fat is one of the best things you can put in your body and will help reverse the chemical syndromes that cause weight gain, allowing you to lose weight much more easily. The wrong type of fat will do the exact opposite. The same is true for carbohydrates and proteins. Your goal is to consume fats, proteins, and carbohydrates that reduce stress, toxins, inflammation, and leptin and insulin resistance.
You might think this sounds complicated, but actually it’s quite simple. A good rule of thumb is, if nature made it, it’s good for you; if it’s man-made, it’s bad. Sure, there are exceptions to this rule, but generally speaking, if you want to identify the foods that are best for you and your weight loss goals, don’t worry about calories, carbs, fats, or proteins. The simplest criteria is whether the food is processed or not.
Live, organic nuts, seeds, salads, vegetables, most fruits, cold-pressed nut and seed oils, herbs, spices, and unprocessed animal proteins all nourish your body without causing excessive insulin levels, digestive stress, or inflammation. They contain more nutrients than processed foods do, more digestive enzymes, and more essential friendly bacteria. Your digestive system can easily extract nutrients from these foods. As a result, you feel more nourished, have more energy, and won’t feel as hungry. Your cells will function better and become more sensitive to fat-regulating hormones, and you’ll lose weight much easier.
Processed foods are often stripped of valuable nutrients, and they can contain artificial sweeteners, colorings, and flavor enhancers, refined vegetable oils, and genetically modified ingredients. They may also contain pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides that disrupt the hormonal balance in your body, leading to digestive troubles, inflammation, and exaggerated insulin levels that trigger your FAT programs. Because they’re nutritionally deficient, you’ll feel hungry even after you’ve had plenty to eat. These foods are also highly addictive. Many processed foods also cause wild blood sugar fluctuations that eventually cause your body to lose the ability to regulate blood sugar and burn fat.
In the highly competitive trillion-dollar food industry, the motivation for processing foods isn’t to nourish your body or make you healthier. The motivation is to create foods that are cheaper to manufacture, cheaper to ship, last longer on the shelf, and make you want to eat more of them. And unfortunately, none of those incentives have your body’s best interest at heart.
To help guide you to the best foods, ask yourself this question: “Could I find this food I’m eating right now, in this form, thousands of years ago?” If the answer is yes, you’re nourishing yourself and allowing your body to become more efficient at losing weight. If the answer is no, you’re not nourishing your body, you’re nourishing a multinational food conglomerate instead. It really is that simple.
Now, you may not be craving real foods initially. But that changes over time. There are several reasons why we crave junk food, including leptin and insulin resistance, addictions, blood sugar problems, and parasites. So simply start by adding real foods as much as possible. In addition, I recommend adding fermented/cultured foods to heal digestion and foods high in omega-3 fatty acids to help reduce inflammation and help reverse leptin and insulin resistance. If you’re looking for delicious recipes that incorporate real foods, please visit www.TheGabrielMethod.com/cookbook-preview1.
The real solution to losing weight is already in your hands. Take the time to visualize daily, and you’ll soon solve your weight issues. But you can support your body’s desires to be thin by making better choices when you eat, and these simple recipes can show you how.
MAKING THE CHANGE
If you’ve been eating a lot of convenience foods, processed foods, and fast foods, making many of these changes to your diet will be rough going at first. Please remember that you shouldn’t try to toss out your diet overnight—you won’t last too long if you’re practicing nothing but denial. Plus, it’s likely that you’re addicted to the extreme seasoning you get in processed foods. They’re usually loaded with toxic fats and sugars and artificial flavor enhancers to help stimulate your appetite and encourage addiction.
When you first start eating more live raw foods and quality animal proteins, just add them to your diet. Go ahead and have a cheeseburger if that’s what you’re craving, but first prepare and eat a big salad sprinkled with chia seeds and a chia or flaxseed oil salad dressing, because they’re high in omega-3s. Also it would be great if the meat were organic and derived from grass-fed cattle, as there will be fewer pesticides, hormones, and preservatives and the fat will be much healthier. Maybe put the cheeseburger on top of the salad. That’s what I do and I find that to be enormously satisfying. The thought of eating the bun is very much repulsive to me at this point, but there was a time when I couldn’t imagine feeling satisfied eating a burger without the bun. Once the addiction is broken, the bun holds no more allure than a piece of Styrofoam.
As the stress in your life reduces, your digestive health increases, and your body is better nourished, you’ll find that you start to crave the live “real” foods more, and dead, toxic, highly processed “fake” foods will lose their appeal entirely.
You can also use visualization to help develop the habit of eating, loving, and craving healthy and nutritious foods. Anything you imagine yourself doing, you will be much more likely to do in real life.
Once you’re in SMART Mode (see THE OCEAN OF LIGHT VISUALIZATION FOR GETTING INTO SMART MODE), picture yourself becoming hungry during your day, whether you’re at work or at home. Imagine that you’re craving and eating real, live, healthy, vibrant, nutritious foods. See a plate in front of you. See how beautiful the food looks. Imagine it vibrating with life force vitality. See lots of different types of real foods, such as green leafy salads, yellow peppers, purple onions, red cherry tomatoes, succulent mangoes, papayas, berries, and healthy crunchy nuts and seeds full of essential fatty acids and quality proteins. All these foods are beautifully displayed on your plate. Imagine the wonderful smell of the food. Now picture tasting the food as it bursts with flavor and vitality. Taste the crunch and crackle and soft, sweet, savory flavors as they tingle your taste buds with delight.
Feel the food going into your body and nourishing every single cell in your body. Imagine that your body feels calm, centered, energized, and deeply satisfied. Then imagine having energy and vitality throughout the day as a result of the amazing foods you are eating. Hear every cell of your body saying at the same time the words, “This food is nourishing my body. I love beautiful, live, healthy, vibrant, natural foods. I am nourished and satisfied.” Then imagine any excess weight just melting off your body thanks to the vital nourishment that you are providing.