5

OTHER PIECES OF
THE OVERWEIGHT PUZZLE

You are about to be made aware of some common causes of disease and overweight that you probably don’t know about. Indeed, if everyone were to pay attention to these causes on a daily basis, most disease would simply disappear. Among the information you’ll learn in this chapter:

• How losing weight just to gain it back again damages metabolism and leads to long-term health problems.

• Why deprivation is not the way to be healthy or thin.

• What foods have sodium and how easy it is to get an excess, derailing health and weight loss.

• Which foods are acid forming and which are alkaline, and how this affects your health and weight.

• An imbalance in essential oils is common and keeps you unhealthy and fat.

• The role of hormones for overall health, and how they can inhibit or encourage weight loss.

• Food addictions and allergies are more common than you think, and they can prevent vital health and weight loss.

Diets don’t work! They are temporary measures that reap temporary results. . . . Is it fun taking off weight only to put it back on and then repeat the cycle? Do you like measuring portions, counting calories, being deprived, and taking the joy out of the eating experience?

—Harvey Diamond Fit for Life, Not Fat for Life

After failing with numerous diets and gimmicks, many people give up hope of losing weight. Some end up convincing themselves that their weight is a genetic problem that cannot be solved. “Diets don’t work,” was the conclusion of Richard, nearly fifty, who was a victim of yo-yo dieting. He began to think his problems were genetic. Although he tried numerous popular diets, including low-calorie starvation diets, low-fat diets, and low-carb diets, he failed to sustain his weight loss. In fact, Richard usually gained back more pounds than he lost. Whenever he started a diet, he often had quick results. His friends would comment, “Wow, you’ve lost a lot of weight. . . . Bet you feel great!” The problem was that he didn’t feel great. He felt worse, and he never understood why.

At six feet and 275 pounds, Richard’s obesity was damaging his health, and he felt increasingly fatigued. He ate the typical, nutritionally deficient American diet that fills you with calories and deprives you of essential nutrients. He got little exercise. He was miserable. He suffered one cold after another, severe enough to “knock me out.” It was a real labor to climb the stairs to his bedroom, resulting in huffing, puffing, and exhaustion. He looked forward to leaving work and going home to rest. He was prediabetic, suffering from high triglycerides, low levels of “good” HDL cholesterol, high blood pressure, and insulin resistance. He suffered joint pain, muscle cramping, hair loss, skin problems, and short-term memory loss.

Very concerned about his declining health, Richard decided to implement what he had learned to address his mounting health problems—not even thinking about losing weight. Like most people, Richard never thought of his overweight and health problems as having common causes. Richard eagerly adopted the NBFA Lifestyle. He cut the toxic Big Four out of his life and added more fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, raw nuts, and legumes. Richard worked to lower his toxic load by eating organic foods, eliminating processed foods and artificial sweeteners, and choosing nontoxic personal-care products. He began a program of high-quality nutritional supplements and also purchased a rebounder (mini-trampoline), bouncing on it to improve his lymphatic drainage and detoxification.

Sure enough, it worked. Richard stopped getting colds, his energy soared, his memory improved, his aches and pains gradually went away, and his skin became soft, smooth, and young looking. Life was less a chore and more fun. Richard’s mood improved. As his health improved, he started walking to work, and now he even runs up the stairs. He looks much younger. As a happy side effect of his improving health, in the first ten months, he lost fifty-six pounds. Richard surprised himself as well as his friends and coworkers who couldn’t believe the miraculous transformation.

Today, Richard’s health and weight continue to improve. He feels confident that he has finally discovered a permanent solution to his weight problem, and he wasn’t even looking for it. For the first time, he feels great after losing weight. In fact, he felt the health benefits before he noticed the weight loss. Richard has a new lease on life, feeling the best he has ever felt and able to enjoy activities that were formerly impossible for him because of his weight. The NBFA Lifestyle will help you, like Richard, to achieve what you may have thought was impossible.

Yo-Yo, Oh No!

Richard had no idea how dangerous yo-yo dieting is. Rapid weight loss, undertaken without considering overall health, interferes with natural weight control mechanisms, leading to unnatural and even dangerous eating patterns that ultimately fail. Richard achieved speedy reductions in weight by drastically reducing calories or cutting out an entire category of nutrients, such as fat, carbohydrates, or protein. Meanwhile, he continued to eat fake processed foods loaded with toxic additives, sugar, and artificial sweeteners. This is not a recipe for long-term health. Rather than cutting out a class of nutrients or a radical change in caloric intake, what is required is eating more nutrient- and fiber-rich whole foods that are filling and satisfying and automatically lower in calories, along with an increase in physical activity. Eating fewer calories than those required to maintain normal weight causes your body to dehydrate, losing water and leading to rapid weight loss. You may think you want this, but you don’t. Eating too few calories sets off biological alarm bells. The body thinks it is starving and tells you to eat more. After the dehydration phase, you start to lose muscle mass. About half of the weight loss is muscle, but when weight is regained almost all of it is fat. Since muscles burn fat, about seventy times as much as fat cells, having less muscle tissue decreases fat burning, preserves fat, and makes it easier to gain fat later on. This is how dieting makes you fat. This vicious cycle happens to a lot of yo-yo dieters, as it did to Richard.

Yo-yo dieting is detrimental to health and makes you gain weight because you keep losing fat-burning muscle and gaining back more fat. People on such diets actually make themselves fatter and sicker. It is also psychologically discouraging to keep losing the same weight over and over again, while gaining back even more. A 2004 study reported in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that the more times you lose and regain weight by dieting, the more long-term damage is done to your immune system. Natural killer cell (a special type of immune cell that targets tumors and protects against a wide variety of infectious microbes) activity becomes depressed, making you more susceptible to cancer and infections. Yo-yo dieters are also at higher risk for heart disease. A 2000 study reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that dieters who habitually lose and regain weight have lower levels of the healthy HDL cholesterol.

Statistics show that most people who go on popular low-calorie diet plans regain their lost pounds within one year, and only a tiny percentage do not regain the unwanted pounds within five years. At any one time, about one out of three Americans is on a diet, but only one out of five stays on that diet for more than a month. Amazingly, one out of three dieters actually gains weight while they are trying to lose it. This fact alone reveals that diets are ineffective.

Don’t Deprive Yourself

Your body’s innate intelligence tries to protect you from starvation and harm. When you take in less than the necessary building blocks to maintain the physical body, the body interprets this situation as starvation and begins to consume its own tissue to stay alive. In alarm, your body believes it is starving and intensifies food cravings and food-seeking behavior. If the body fails to get you to eat more, metabolism slows in order to reduce the number of calories burned and conserve energy, thus burning less fat. So the fat stays right where it is, and, in fact, fat storage is increased. When you go off the low-calorie diet, although you begin taking in more calories, you will still be burning fewer calories, because the body does not quickly reset its metabolic rate. You are worse off than you were in the first place. You gain the lost weight back—often gaining more than you lost.

Opinions differ about how many calories are needed for normal weight and functioning. On average, you need fifteen calories for every pound of your ideal body weight; however, that amount differs widely from person to person depending on genes, weight, age, sex, metabolic rate, and physical activity. For example, some athletes consume four thousand calories per day. A physically active teenage male might need thirty-five hundred calories, while a small, inactive older woman might do well at sixteen hundred. Particularly when consuming fewer calories, it becomes especially important that every calorie be nutrient-rich.

Although men lose weight faster than women, and larger people faster than smaller, as a rule of thumb, if you are losing more than two pounds per week, you are going too fast. Two pounds per week or even less is plenty. Remember that the excess weight was not added in a matter of days or weeks, and you should not expect to lose it that way either. Findings in medical literature indicate that rapid weight loss is much harder to sustain.

Calorie-restrictive diets have been found to have other serious health consequences, including increased risk of diabetes, gallstones, stroke, cognitive impairment, and premature death. The best way to handle this problem is to never starve yourself of essential nutrients. Eat plenty of real food—fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, raw nuts, and legumes. Real food supplies adequate calories and lots of nutrients and fiber to make you feel full, eliminating the desire for excess calories.

Portions Out of Control

Limiting ourselves to eating only what we need is still a challenge. Part of Richard’s problem was societal. He got caught up in a society where instant gratification, driven by advertising and consumerism, has elevated excess to a cultural art form—the “Super-Size Me” era. As the nutrients per calorie in most modern food are decreasing, the portion size has been steadily increasing. Increasing portion size is one of the factors responsible for the epidemic of overweight disease. From 1971 to 1998, the average soft-drink increased from thirteen ounces with 144 calories to twenty ounces with 193 calories. Salty snacks grew from 1-ounce bags to 1.6-ounce bags and from 132 to 225 calories. In the winter of 2004–2005, Starbucks started offering a new hot chocolate drink called the Chantico—it has 390 calories. Hardee’s Monster Thickburger has 1,420 calories! That’s a lot of calories. Not surprisingly, from 1985 to 2000, daily calorie consumption in the United States increased by 300 calories per day, while physical activity decreased.

Another unfortunate trend, nutrient-poor foods comprise an ever-greater proportion of the American diet. A June 2004 study reported in the Journal of Food Chemistry and Analysis concluded that sweets, soft drinks, and alcohol make up one-quarter of all the calories consumed by Americans—all empty calories devoid of nutrition. Salty snacks and fruit-flavored drinks make up another 5 percent, bringing the calories from nutrient-poor junk foods to at least 30 percent of total calorie intake. To supply cells with all that they need to be healthy, every calorie needs to be filled with nutrients—eating worthless junk is not an option.

Sugar, the wrong fats, and nutrient deficiency have all been shown to artificially stimulate the appetite. Put them together as junk foods, and it is no wonder that we have become a nation of fatties craving larger and larger portions. The challenge is to remove junk foods and other sugary, fatty, and nutrient-deficient foods from your life and replace them with nutrient-rich whole foods.

Common Causes of Cellular Malfunction, Disease, and Weight Gain

The reasons you gain weight and have trouble losing weight are varied, but four play a key role. They are fundamental to maintaining your cellular health and avoiding disease, including overweight. Take control of these, and you will succeed. Ignore them at your peril. These health-building keys are:

• the ratio between sodium and potassium in your cells

• the balance in your body between acid and alkaline environments

• adequate intake of essential fatty acids

• the amount of inflammation you create in your system

Other factors—including hormones, food addictions, and allergies—play important roles in weight control. However, the sodium/potassium ratio, acid-alkaline balance, essential fatty acids, and inflammation are so fundamental to healthy cell function that we have helped numerous clients to lose weight, and to reduce and even reverse heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and other chronic diseases, by teaching them how to control these factors. This could not be more simple or more powerful. If you do things right in each of these areas—and you can—you will go a long way toward preventing or reversing almost any disease.

Too Much Sodium

Common table salt (sodium chloride) is a leading cause of disease because excess sodium causes cells to malfunction. Sodium and potassium are minerals that are critical to cell function, but they must be properly balanced. Modern dietary practices create serious imbalances. Our ancestors consumed low-sodium, high-potassium diets. Their sodium/potassium ratio was a healthy 1 to 4, the result of eating plenty of potassium-rich fresh fruits and vegetables. Our current ratio is reversed to an unhealthy 4 to 1, because we are eating sodium-rich processed foods and insufficient fruits and vegetables.

Cells function like little batteries. Cells have an electrical charge created by the difference in the amount of potassium inside the cell and the amount of sodium outside. Your cell batteries supply the electricity that causes your heart to beat and your brain to function. By consuming excess dietary sodium we change the sodium/potassium ratio in our cells, which damages the “battery of life” and interferes seriously with the body’s self-regulation and repair functions, sapping your energy and making you feel run down and tired.

On average, the human body requires only about 220 milligrams (mg) of sodium per day. A teaspoon of regular refined salt contains about 2,300 mg of sodium. We recommend no more than 1,000 mg of sodium per day, or a little less than a half teaspoon. (In special circumstances, such as excessive sweating or diarrhea, higher levels may be necessary.)

Achieving a goal of 1,000 mg per day is not that difficult. Just cut out processed foods, and be careful where you eat and what you order when you eat out. About 10 percent of the sodium in the American diet is found naturally in food; about 10 to 15 percent is added as table salt, and the remaining 75 to 80 percent comes from processed, packaged foods. The refined salt in commercially processed foods causes most of our sodium/potassium imbalance. Due to our consumption of processed foods, most Americans ingest 4,000 to 7,000 mg of sodium per day, and many are exposed to as much as 10,000 to 20,000 mg per day. Processors add salt to enhance flavor, mask bad flavors, preserve color, and modify the texture of a food. The more highly processed a food is, the more likely it is to have a high sodium content.

Here’s an example of how easy it is to get too much sodium. The following nutritional information was obtained from a popular soup-and-salad restaurant chain. If you have a bowl of their split-pea soup, you will consume 1,430 mg of sodium. Choosing a couple of the salad offerings adds another 400 mg. A serving of their “healthy” nonfat Italian salad dressing adds another 1,350 mg. Two “healthy” low-fat muffins add another 1,400 mg. This “healthy” lunch of soup, salad, and low-fat muffins adds up to a whopping 4,580 mg of sodium. This is more sodium than you should have in almost five days—at just one meal! To balance your cell chemistry with potassium from just this one meal, you would need to eat sixteen bananas. Overdosing on sodium is surprisingly easy.

When your sodium intake is too high, your bones can weaken. For every 2,000 mg of salt you eat, you will lose about 23 mg of calcium in your urine. Unless you replace these calcium losses, and most people don’t eat enough bioavailable calcium to fully replace them all, then eating an average of 5,000 mg of sodium per day could result in losses as high as 2.5 percent of your skeleton annually for a total of 25 percent in only ten years—one reason that so many older people have weak bones and suffer from osteoporosis. Also, because sodium helps to regulate the amount of water both inside and outside of cells, an excess causes water retention, which increases weight.

In June 2006, the American Medical Association (AMA) voted to petition the government to require high-salt foods to be labeled. The AMA said there is overwhelming evidence that excessive salt is a risk factor for disease. It urged the food and restaurant industries to drastically cut the amount of salt in processed and restaurant food by 50 percent within a decade. It also called for the Food and Drug Administration to remove salt from the list of foods “generally recognized as safe.” The AMA should have done this decades ago, but better late than never. However, don’t wait for the government to take action, which may be long in coming. Protect yourself and your family—now.

Cellular pH: Acidity Interferes with Fat Burning

The degree of acidity or alkalinity is expressed as “pH.” Abnormal cellular pH is another common denominator of cellular malfunction, disease, and overweight. Cells malfunction when their pH is wrong because critical chemical reactions in the body are dependent upon chemicals called enzymes. However, enzymes function in a narrow pH range. If your cells change their pH for any reason, enzymes are disabled and many critical chemical reactions will not take place. Most Americans are too acidic, and too much acidity inhibits fat-burning enzymes, contributing to overweight.

The pH scale runs from 0 to 14, with 7.0 being neutral, 0 the most acidic, and 14 the most alkaline. Normal cellular pH is slightly alkaline at about 7.42. When cellular pH becomes too acidic, cells malfunction and bodily systems are weakened, creating an environment in which disease becomes inevitable. Healthy bodies are equipped with alkaline reserves that can be utilized to neutralize excess acids. When our diet regularly consists of acid-forming foods (which the Standard American Diet does), our reserves are depleted and we become vulnerable not only to weight gain, premature aging, and low energy, but also to cancer, cardiovascular damage, diabetes, osteoporosis, immune deficiency, and organ malfunction of every kind. Even a small degree of acidity can lead to fatigue and feeling generally subpar. Acidic cells lower your metabolic rate, preventing fat from being burned. In his book The pH Miracle, author Robert Young had this to say:

 

Food & Chemical Effects on Acid /

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Alkaline Body Chemical Balance

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You can thank an overly acid internal environment for the excess pounds you are carrying around. In a defensive maneuver, the body creates fat cells to carry acids away from your vital organs to try to protect them. In one sense, your fat is saving your life! But that’s why your body doesn’t want to let it go. When you eat to make your body more basic [alkaline], your body won’t need to keep the fat anymore.

Where is all this excess acidity coming from? Primarily from a diet high in acid-forming foods such as meat, eggs, dairy, white flour, sugar, coffee, chemical sweeteners, fruit drinks, and soft drinks (notice that these are all foods excluded from the NBFA Lifestyle). Colas combine sugar with phosphoric acid, producing a powerful acidic effect. Acidity also comes from stress. Any kind of stress, physical or emotional, tends to acidify your body, including the biochemical stress created by illness and allergic reactions. Stress combined with acid foods compounds the problem. Fresh fruits and vegetables generally make your pH more alkaline, as do sleep, meditation, and other forms of relaxation, and an adequate intake of minerals. The table shows the acidity/alkalinity of different foods.

You can measure your own pH at home by testing your first morning urine after at least six hours of bed rest. (See Appendix D for pH testing paper.) To do the test, tear off about an inch and a half of paper from the roll and pass it through your urine stream. The yellow pH paper will change color. A chart that comes with the pH paper matches colors with numbers. Your urine pH reading should be between 6.5 and 7.5; an ideal range would be 6.8 to 7.4. (Although testing throughout the day is interesting—you can see immediate reactions to various foods and activities—first morning pH most closely approximates what is happening inside your cells.)

If you are eating an alkalinizing diet and your pH is still too acidic, work to identify and eliminate any allergies (an allergic reaction can cause acidity for several days), reduce stress, and see Appendix D for a protocol for using supplemental magnesium to balance pH.

The Right Fats Are Essential

We discussed earlier that each cell has a wall called the cell membrane that is largely composed of fats. To prevent and reverse disease, the billions of new cells we create every day must be constructed with the right fats, in the correct proportions.

Unfortunately for us, the processed vegetable and hydrogenated oils that predominate our diet are the wrong building materials and create faulty cell membranes. Most of the oils consumed today are toxic. Almost every oil and every oil-containing product (which is almost all packaged foods) you purchase in a supermarket is toxic. These processed oils are deficient in omega-3 fats and contain trans fats, oxidized fats, and excessive omega-6s. An estimated 95 percent of Americans are deficient in omega-3 fats. This deficiency has led to an epidemic of suboptimal and deteriorating health, including diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes.

The major reason for this deficiency of omega-3s is the massive switch during the twentieth century from traditional fats and oils to hydrogenated and processed vegetable oils. Another reason is changes in livestock feeding. Traditionally fed only on grass, livestock on commercial farms today are fed grain in order to increase their fat and weight. Cattle fed on grass will have an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of approximately 3 to 1, whereas today’s grain-fed beef has ratios of 20 to 1 and higher. (Also, grass-fed beef has far less total body fat and far less saturated fat. About 10 percent of their fat will be saturated compared with up to 50 percent for the grain-fed.)

If you purchase beef, and we recommend very little of that, you should ensure that the “grass-fed” beef you are buying is also “grass-finished.” All cows eat grass in the early part of their lives. The grain feeding occurs in feedlots where cows are fattened up prior to slaughter. As consumer demand for grass-fed beef has grown, some unscrupulous beef suppliers are claiming their beef is “grass fed” even though it has been grain finished.

Chickens once dined on insects, earthworms, and weeds, and their eggs were excellent sources of omega-3s. But now it is the rare chicken that gets to eat its preferred food, and commercially produced eggs are poor sources of omega-3s. Try to find farmers in your area who allow their chickens to feed freely on what nature provides. The yolks of these eggs will be orange-yellow, the darker orange the better. In addition to doing your part to support the humane treatment of chickens (most commercial chicken farms are anything but humane, and chickens are apt to be sickly as well as low on omega-3s), you will be consuming eggs from healthy poultry, which is absolutely healthier for you. “Free range” is not enough. This is merely a guarantee that the chickens have some room to move around in their pens. Also “organic” is not enough. Organic means only that chickens are being fed organic grain. However, organic is often the best choice available, depending on where you live.

Although fish have been prized as a remaining source of omega-3s, more and more fish are now being raised on farms where they are being fed grain. This unnatural food source produces fish with fewer omega-3s and a less favorable balance of fats.

Whenever possible, buy wild-caught fish. Farmed fish also contains more toxins and should be avoided for that reason alone.

Our cell walls need a minimum of about 3 grams of omega-3 fats a day. You can get 3 grams from half a tablespoon of flax oil or one tablespoon of cod-liver oil. However, unless you have been going out of your way to obtain omega-3s from fish or flax, you are probably deficient and should take at least twice this amount in order to replenish your body’s stores. The most recent evidence suggests that once the body’s omega-6 to omega-3 ratio becomes imbalanced with too much omega-6, it can take years to restore a more appropriate balance.

Take a tablespoon each of cod-liver and flax oil daily, which together supply 7.5 grams of omega-3 fats. Each oil provides unique health benefits in addition to supplying omega-3 fats. Handle these oils with care. Omega-3s are very perishable. Make sure your oils are as fresh as possible, and keep the bottles refrigerated—frozen when you are not using them.

In addition to the task of building healthy cell membranes, the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 oils in your diet is significant in other ways as well. Omega-6 oils are inflammatory, and omega-3 oils have the opposite, anti-inflammatory effect, which plays an important role in chronic inflammatory diseases and overweight.

Inflammation Wreaks Havoc

Inflammation is a common factor in all chronic disease, including overweight. A major reason we have so much disease in our society is that we have so much inflammation. A major reason for this inflammation is our inflammatory diet. Controlled inflammation is both natural and healing. For example, if you cut your finger, the body immediately begins an inflammatory process. This process neutralizes harmful microorganisms, helps to repair the wound, and cleans up the debris resulting from the injury. Inflammation is beneficial when needed, but it is disastrous when chronic.

What causes chronic inflammation? The Standard American Diet. We suffer from chronic inflammation and disease because the American diet is pro-inflammatory: rich in pro-inflammatory chemicals, while lacking in nutrients that help to prevent and control inflammation. To help reverse this, get the Big Four and all processed foods out of your life.

More than three out of four Americans suffer from diseases of chronic inflammation. Like a fire out of control, chronic inflammation generates a constant supply of free radicals. These overwhelm our antioxidant defenses, destroy healthy cells and tissues, damage DNA, age us, and cause disease of every description, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis, allergies, Alzheimer’s disease, autoimmune disease, infections, and overweight.

The inflammatory process can be self-sustaining unless you shut it off with antioxidants. A free radical is a molecule with an unpaired electron. Because electrons like to travel in pairs, a free radical is always looking to steal an electron away from another molecule. After it steals an electron, the original free radical is neutralized. But by depriving a second molecule of its electron partner, it has created a new, highly reactive free radical, which is now frantically seeking to steal an electron from yet another molecule. In this way, a free radical can initiate a damaging chain reaction that keeps the inflammatory process going. In a healthy body, antioxidant reserves keep inflammation in check. Antioxidants are molecules that can comfortably donate an extra electron, and they can nip in the bud a potentially disruptive cascade of free-radical chemical reactions. However, in a condition of chronic inflammation, antioxidant reserves are exhausted, and free radical damage wreaks havoc, destroying and aging body tissues.

Chronic inflammation increases insulin resistance, which leads to higher insulin levels; higher insulin leads to more free radicals, while signaling cells to accumulate fat. With our cells being instructed to store fat, it is easy to gain it and difficult to lose it, unless the underlying chronic inflammation is addressed by reducing the intake of inflammatory foods and increasing the intake of antioxidants. Chronic inflammation also contributes to overweight by causing leptin resistance. Leptin is a hormone that regulates appetite. Leptin helps you feel full, prevents carbohydrate cravings, and tells the body whether to store or release fat. When the body has had enough to eat, leptin suppresses the appetite and stimulates fat burning. When inflammation causes leptin resistance, this reduces leptin’s ability to deliver proper appetite and weight-control signals, and the result is fat storage rather than burning. Since fat cells produce inflammatory chemicals, as you gain weight, there is more inflammation, which causes more leptin resistance. More leptin resistance leads to adding more fat, more inflammation, and then more leptin resistance in a vicious cycle. Yet another mechanism by which inflammation can cause weight gain is that inflammatory mediators, such as histamine, can increase capillary permeability, thus causing leakage of water into tissues.

Given the above, to improve health and reduce weight, an anti-inflammatory diet and anti-inflammatory supplements are essential. Here are some things you need to do:

• Eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, especially the colorful ones, which have many anti-inflammatory vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients.

• Get off the Big Four—they are all inflammatory.

• Eliminate dairy products, drastically reduce animal protein, and consume fewer processed grains.

• Get toxins out of your life as much as you can (see chapter 6).

• Favor anti-inflammatory or neutral fats (such as the omega-3s, raw nuts and seeds, and raw coconut and extra virgin olive oil) over the inflammatory fats.

• Avoid rapid elevations of blood sugar from eating refined carbohydrates.

• Avoid highly refined foods of any type because they strain the body as nutrients are robbed from other sources to process them.

• Reduce and/or learn to manage stress. Stress is inflammatory.

• Eliminate chronic infections.

• Get enough sleep. (Sleep deprivation can increase inflammatory markers 40 to 60 percent.)

• Get regular exposure to moderate sunlight.

• Lose weight by adopting the NBFA Lifestyle. Fat cells are pro-inflammatory, especially those that accumulate in the abdominal area.

• Take anti-inflammatory supplements such as vitamins A, C, and E as well as other antioxidants including coenzyme Q10, N-acetylcysteine, alpha-lipoic acid, beta carotene, curcumin, quercitin, and selenium. You will learn more about supplements in chapter 11.

Hormones, Allergies, and Addictions Take a Toll

Malnutrition and excess calories are at the heart of overweight disease, but a number of complex factors can play a role. Some individuals have never had success on any diet, which may be because of other factors, such as hormones, addictions, and allergies that can hinder weight loss.

Hormones

If your metabolism slows down while caloric intake remains the same, you will gain weight. The thyroid gland regulates your metabolic speed. If thyroid hormone levels drop and you become hypothyroid, cells throughout the body slow their activity. Hence, people with low thyroid levels often gain weight because they are burning fewer calories.

According to Richard Shames and Karilee Shames, authors of Thyroid Power: Ten Steps to Total Health, there is a “runaway epidemic” of hypothyroidism in this country, often undiagnosed because thyroid testing is inadequate, with mild thyroid failure showing up in about 10 percent of the general population and in up to 20 percent of older women, especially postmenopausal women.

We can think of several reasons for this epidemic. One is widespread malnutrition. Numerous nutrients are required to support healthy thyroid function, and function is impaired without them. In addition, the thyroid withdraws thyroid hormone from circulation if it perceives starvation. It does this in order to preserve precious resources. The starvation message can come from a calorie-laden but nutritionally deficient processed-food diet or from low-calorie weight-loss diets, which is one reason that people on low-calorie diets can gain weight.

Another widespread cause is environmental toxicity. Toxic exposure to fluoride (in water, food, and toothpaste) is a major problem that impairs thyroid function. Xenoestrogens (chemicals that have an estrogen-like effect on the body) from fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics are throwing our hormone systems out of balance.

Estrogen excess impedes thyroid function. Since fat cells produce excess estrogen, being overweight can lead to gaining even more weight due to thyroid hormone suppression—a vicious cycle. Estrogen dominance is a hormone issue for many women and even men: having too much estrogen relative to the hormone progesterone in women or testosterone in men. Sometimes, to break this cycle, it may be advisable to use progesterone cream. This should be done under the supervision of a knowledgeable health practitioner. We recommend the conservative approach of trying a good diet and avoiding toxins first—certainly avoiding the toxic hormones found in commercially bred animal proteins and the xenoestrogens from the pesticides in nonorganic produce.

Physicians usually prescribe thyroid hormone supplementation. In some cases this may be unavoidable, but the true solution is to get well by eating a good diet and avoiding dangerous toxins like fluoride (we tell you how to avoid fluoride in chapter 6).

Insight into the role hormones play in the epidemic of overweight children was reported in the June 2005 issue of Cell Metabolism. Overweight people have higher levels of the fat-regulating hormone leptin due to leptin resistance, just as diabetics have higher levels of insulin due to insulin resistance. Remember that leptin controls how fat is burned and causes us to feel full. The fetus of an overweight mother is exposed to higher leptin levels, and this exposure early in life appears to change the circuitry in the brain. The brain becomes less sensitive to signals from leptin (leptin resistance), so you don’t feel full as readily and fat is not burned as it ought to be. Offspring of malnourished mothers also have problems with leptin. In one study, they stored 50 percent more fat on a high-fat diet compared to those with well-nourished mothers. Individuals born to mothers who were both overweight and malnourished have to be extra careful to adhere to the NBFA Lifestyle in order to stay slim.

Addiction and Food Allergies

Most overweight people are addicted to food, and one reason weight-loss diets don’t work is that they fail to address addictions. Addictions make it much easier to gain weight and substantially more difficult to lose it. Popular diet plans include allergens, and none exclude all three of the most common allergens: gluten, dairy, and sugar. When excess calories are the problem, addictions and allergies help supply those calories.

Simple carbohydrates such as sugar and white flour are known to increase blood insulin, but they do a lot of other things as well, such as increase serotonin (a natural mood upper) and endorphins (nature’s natural painkillers). Endorphins result in the sense of euphoria called “runner’s high” after prolonged exercise. Serotonin makes you feel good, and lack of it causes depression, sleep problems, aggressiveness, and even violence and suicides.

Life is full of little pains and aggravations, and sugar and other simple carbohydrates can provide a quick fix of pleasure-enhancing serotonin and painkilling endorphins, but the fix is only temporary. Maintaining high levels of these feel-good chemicals requires constant consumption of sugar and white flour. When serotonin is constantly high, the body tries to regulate it by reducing serotonin production. Reduced serotonin production causes depression, so you have to eat more sugar and white flour to get more serotonin in order to maintain normal mood levels. With time, as occurs with street drugs, higher and higher amounts of carbs are needed to get the same effect. More carbs means more calories, and more calories mean more pounds.

Another addiction is dependence on an outside source of glucose. Glucose is used as a fuel to create energy in our cells. This molecule is so important that the body makes its own. However, when we eat a high-carb diet, we strip the body of essential minerals required by the enzymes that manufacture the glucose, and the cells that are used to make the glucose suffer from disuse, creating a situation where we become physically dependent on an outside source.

Allergic reactions to foods are far more common than most people believe, and they can cause cravings and addictions. The term “addictive food allergy” has been suggested to describe the relationship between compulsive eating and allergy. Distress to body tissues caused by allergic reactions promotes the release of powerful painkillers and soothing chemicals to ease the pain and discomfort. Opiumlike chemicals called opioid peptides are released, and these feel-good chemicals are addictive. Any amount of allergens in the diet can trigger such a reaction, which is why it is so important to avoid them completely.

Unconsciously your body craves the allergic foods to provide it with more of the opium-like chemicals, resulting in excessive eating. Instead of making you feel bad, the allergic reaction makes you feel better. As you continue to eat these reactive foods, the stress to the body can actually give you the illusion of increased energy. It’s ironic that the foods you long for most are usually the ones to which you are, unbeknownst to you, allergic and addicted. Ultimately, such reactions sap your energy by depleting you of essential nutrients and putting a burden on the body to clean up all the debris from the damage. Low energy is often a symptom of gluten intolerance, and people often turn to caffeine and other stimulants to get through the day.

As if getting too many calories is not bad enough, allergic reactions often result in water retention, which contributes to weight gain. Allergic reactions also lead to an abnormally acidic pH. Overall, this “feel-good” state comes at a very high price—accelerated aging, more disease, overweight, and early death.

The Whole Picture

To get well and stay well, which includes achieving and maintaining your ideal weight, you cannot focus on only one or a few pieces of the puzzle. All the pieces must come together to create the whole picture—your own unique picture of natural health and beauty! It may take more initial effort to understand and master each of the factors involved, but isn’t this a better use of your time and effort than going on a series of incomplete, unhealthy diets that ultimately fail? How much better to have a reliable foundation in place through an understanding of what is necessary to accomplish your goal.