How much human hair have you eaten this week?
Chances are, a lot more than you think. If you’re like most Americans, you’ve also eaten plenty of sand, wood pulp, and petroleum products as well.
In fact, if you’ve consumed a slice of bread, a scoop of ice cream, or a fast-food burger recently, you’ve almost certainly enjoyed one of these delicacies. They’re all common ingredients in packaged foods and restaurant meals.
But they’re not real food.
“Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
—MICHAEL POLLAN
Additives like these are in just about every packaged food we eat, and most of our restaurant meals as well. And by constantly bombarding ourselves with things that aren’t food, we’re creating a low level of chronic inflammation throughout our bodies. Inflammation plays a major role in weight gain, and puts us at greater risk for heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and just about every other disease worth freaking out about.
Inflammation is the key to everything. Inflammation is your body’s response to foods and additives it deems unhealthy. And perhaps the most significant reason the Pretty Intense eating plan has worked so well for me and for my test panel is that it dramatically reduces inflammation and allows your body to return to its natural, healthy state.
Coming Back to Planet Earth
Mother Earth has a lot to offer us from a food perspective. The dirt grows tasty food, the rain waters it, and the sun ripens it. The earth also feeds the animals we consume.
Most of us understand this. We are getting smarter about what we eat and realizing how important it is to feed our bodies with healthy food. But it’s not as easy as it seems.
The supermarket is stacked with bags and boxes of edibles that aren’t actually real food: stuff that’s sold as healthy (foods that claim to be “lite” or “diet” or “enriched”), or stuff labeled “natural” (a word that means nothing when it appears on a food label). We want to do the right thing for ourselves and our families, but it gets harder all the time. That’s why it’s so important to eat real food and avoid processed foods. A study in the Journal of the World Public Health Nutrition Association found that the increase in “ultra-processed” food—food that includes ingredients that aren’t, in fact, food—may be the main cause for the rise in obesity around the world.
What do you eat that’s not food? The next time you go to the supermarket, take a moment to scan the ingredients list on the foods you buy. A good rule of thumb: Anything with more than five ingredients probably contains stuff that’s not food. You probably already know that high-fructose corn syrup is a man-made sweetener that many researchers believe is worse for you than sugar, but you might not be on the lookout for some other additives that are in many, many packaged foods. Stuff like BHA (butylated hydroxyanisole, a preservative made from petroleum), sodium nitrate (an antimicrobial substance), silicon dioxide (it’s sand!), cellulose (it’s wood chips!), L-cysteine (a dough conditioner made most often from human hair), tartrazine (a yellow food dye linked to learning and concentration disorders), and about three thousand other additives that can be legally used to “enhance” our food.
Wood chips, human hair, sand, petroleum—that’s not food. Yet we eat so much of these (again, just look at what’s in your pantry) that we’re actually changing our own bodies.
“Eat like you give a damn about yourself.”
—UNKNOWN
A 2015 study in the journal Nature found that chemical emulsifiers—compounds that give packaged foods like ice cream their smooth consistency—cause an increase in the growth of unhealthy bacteria in our guts. That can lead to the inflammation that causes not only obesity but all those other health issues I mentioned. In fact, about 40 percent of the bacteria species that naturally occur in our bodies have gone extinct over the past sixty years, according to Emeran Mayer, MD, PhD, a brain researcher at UCLA. The proper balance of gut bacteria—what’s called your microbiome—is crucial to keeping you slim and healthy.
How “Healthy” Is Healthy?
Like I said, it’s not easy to figure out the right way to fuel your body. As a teenager, I lived in England for three years, racing Formula cars. Back then I would go to the local bookstore, which also had a coffee shop, and I would order a large latte (which I would not order now) and sit down with a stack of health and fitness books.
I have always been interested in the human body and how it works, and I spent hours flipping through the pages learning new ways to take care of myself. It was the beginning of my experimentation with diets: I think the first phase was low-fat, then low-carb, then dairy-free, then whole grain, then a 40/30/30 balance . . . Then I turned my world upside down with a blood test.
At the beginning of 2013, I took a test that scanned my blood against the ninety-six most common foods. Before I tell you my results, let me tell you generally what I used to eat so you can understand how shocked I was.
BREAKFAST: oatmeal
SNACK: egg whites with goat cheese
LUNCH: whole-grain sandwich with deli meat
SNACK: Greek yogurt with granola and fruit
DINNER: salmon, rice, and veggies
Pretty healthy, right? In fact, except perhaps for the deli meat, the average doctor would say I was eating as healthy as possible.
So, when the test said I had an “extremely high” reaction to egg whites, egg yolks, gluten, yeast, and all dairy items, I wanted to cry! All that discipline had been doing my body no good at all! I began to wonder if the reason I sometimes felt bloated and fatigued had something to do with my reaction to those foods.
That test changed my life. Shortly after I cut those foods out, I realized I had a higher and more consistent energy level day after day. I also did not feel uncomfortable after eating, ever.
Since then I have experimented with a variety of foods, and I’ve added eggs back into my life simply because I’ve noticed little if any reaction to them. (And eggs are the most bioavailable source of protein per calorie known to man.) But the Pretty Intense plan cuts as much gluten and dairy out of your diet as possible.
(If you ever feel bloated after a meal, it’s a sign that your body is reacting to the foods you ate. It’s not necessarily a “food allergy,” but it may be that your body is reacting to the foods in a way that can cause inflammation and, eventually, weight gain. Try eliminating wheat from your diet entirely for two weeks and see if you feel better. Then do the same with dairy. You’ll be amazed how effective this is—as I’ll explain in the following paragraphs.)
How My Diet Got Pretty Intense
The exact diet plan outlined in this book started at the beginning of 2016. I had gained several pounds of flab after doing a hormone treatment to freeze my eggs. I had never experienced the power of hormones on the body, but I was amazed by how different I looked and felt after undergoing estrogen treatment. I didn’t do anything different food-wise, and had to refrain from working out for only two weeks, but I gained fat from nowhere! I was super frustrated and decided I needed to do something new and aggressive to get it off.
So in a way, my hormone treatment gave birth to what you’re holding in your hands now: Pretty Intense.
I began doing two-a-day workouts as often as I could, and after a few weeks of that, I decided to try eating Paleo. I had heard all about Paleo from doing CrossFit (many CrossFit enthusiasts eat this way), but I always had a pretty harsh judgment against it. To me, a traditional Paleo program just didn’t offer enough food. But like I said, I needed to try something aggressive!
Paleo is based on the idea that you only eat foods that were available to ancient man before the invention of agriculture. So no grains, no dairy, no beans or legumes, no added sugars or preservatives. Instead, you focus on naturally raised meats, vegetables, fruits, and nuts.
My intention was to only do it for a week or two to reset my body with less sugar and more veggies. Well . . . I felt so good, and saw such amazing results, that I never quit.
It was not that hard to do, and I loved both the change in food and the results I was starting to see. I was starting to actually see upper body muscles and abs! What?! Let me tell you, people, I have worked out hard and I have been really picky with food, but these results were by far my best. Paleo formed the origins of Pretty Intense, which I’ve continued to tweak until I created the most effective plan I’ve ever put myself on. That is why I am writing this book.
The longer I have eaten like this, the more I have thought about it, and it’s become clear: It’s all about eating real food! Sweet potatoes come from the ground, maple syrup comes out of a tree, carrots grow in the dirt, bees make honey, and hopefully we can all find more and more pasture-raised, grain-free, cruelty-free animals for protein. Because what our animals eat becomes what we eat, too.
I don’t see ever getting too far from these principles. Real food is medicine, and I like to put the highest-quality food into the only body I will ever have.
The Trouble with Bread
Of all the changes I made to my diet, giving up bread—as well as pasta, pastries, and other products made with wheat—has made the greatest impact.
Now, you might be thinking, “What’s the problem with bread? That’s real food, right?” Yes and no. First of all, most commercial breads—even whole-grain breads—have a wild array of ingredients. Here’s a sample of what’s in one popular whole-wheat bread: high-fructose corn syrup, soybean oil, calcium propionate, datem, soy lecithin. Not food!
One of the things that bread conditioners like datem and L-cysteine do is enhance the strength of gluten, a protein that’s found in wheat. That makes the dough light and airy. It’s also making a lot of us sick.
You may know someone who is gluten-intolerant, or who has been diagnosed with celiac disease, a serious form of wheat allergy. For someone like this, just a couple of croutons can trigger an immune response that causes inflammation—and eventually real damage—in the small intestine. But you don’t need a diagnosis to suffer damage to your digestive tract: a 2011 study found that gluten causes gastrointestinal symptoms in people even if they don’t have celiac disease.
In 2013, researchers found that in mouse studies, a gluten-free diet led to reduced body weight, and inflammation and insulin resistance, and a 2016 study linked another protein in wheat, amylase-trypsin inhibitors (ATIs), to inflammation in the lymph nodes, kidneys, spleen, and brain, and suggested that it could be linked to arthritis, asthma, and fatty liver disease, among other things.
So while you may not follow every piece of dietary advice in this book, the one thing I urge you to do is to give up gluten—at least for a couple of weeks. I’m pretty sure that not eating wheat—and eating real food, not fake food—will make an instant impact on how you look and feel.