The Excitement of Being Toxic

Excitotoxins have an exciting effect on brain cells (sounds exciting!) … while causing a pathological process by which nerve cells are damaged and killed (not so fun.)

In today’s food industry, harmful amounts of excitotoxins are found in up to 80% of all processed food. MSG (one of many glutamates found in foods,) hydrolyzed proteins, and other similar substances are all too common ingredients.

When scientists want to make mice fat ASAP (for the purpose studying obesity,) they feed them MSG. Regardless, the food industry has engineered chemically created flavors such as this one that keep us coming back for more. Are we addicted? Just as tobacco companies knowingly added more nicotine to cigarettes to make them addictive, we’re now in an invisible food trap that has also imprisoned us.

With a chemical formula that makes us feel instantly fulfilled, we are actually  providing ourselves with little to no nutrients. Most of us, who may have been encouraged by our doctors to lose weight, are in truth starving to death on a cellular level.

We struggle with hunger and blame our bodies and ourselves for being weak. Meanwhile our body is doing its best to keep us healthy! It calls in search of the nutrients it needs to function correctly.
Advertisements tell us that if we eat these chemically altered foods; we will be slim and happy. However most of these foods cause weight gain and disease. Many of these chemicals both inhibit our metabolism as well as increase the production of fat (as part of the defense mechanism to isolate the chemicals).

Diet soda alone is suspected of  being a major contributor to the impairment of brain function, neurological function, vision, and increased chances of seizures (especially when regularly consumed instead of a meal.) While it advertises freedom, most independent studies show that it hooks us on even stronger sugar cravings (due to our taste buds’ reaction to the extreme sweetness.)

The FDA does not carry out independent studies to test a food before it is marketed. Instead it relies on studies funded by the same company producing the product. The heart association puts its stamp of approval on foods loaded with trans fats because the product meets the sodium requirements. Classy.

In our industrialized version of better living, we have created over 75,000 synthetic chemicals since 1940. These days over 200 chemicals can been found in some newborn’s umbilical cords. Most are either food-born, environmental, or beauty product derived (“your makeup looks killer!”)

It is time to relearn better living that is in harmony with the organic compounds of our bodies and our planet.  We need to recover. It’s no joke when our neurological system has been affected.

Spring is an excellent time for a reboot as the body is naturally designed to excel in its detoxification process. Eat dark leafy greens every day (kale, parsley and cilantro are highly recommended!) as well as gelatinous fibers (chia seeds rock!) Water and vegetables are your BFFs (consume more vegetables than fruits.)

In general, think more about what healthy stuff you can  add  to your diet rather than freaking out about what you need to eliminate. The more nutrients your body receives and assimilates, the more you’ll naturally begin to eliminate what no longer serves you.  Exercising and a clean diet need each other. Tomorrow is never better than today to do something proactive.

Hey, Are You Getting Enough Sleep?

Calorie burning efficiency is dramatically affected by lack of sleep. You must sleep! Sleep is the state where we fully integrate the relaxation response. It’s where we do much of our healing.

The average amount of sleep needed is said to average eight hours though for some it might be an hour more or less.

If You’d Like to Gain Weight, Go On A Diet

Just prior to Thanksgiving, many of the health and wellness blogs and articles shared the common focus of helping people control their appetite during the holiday.

I wondered if someone were to follow any of these suggestions to help curb their appetite, would they feel empowered?

The modern mind has become a master at transforming self-improvement into self-blame. We get trapped into feeling stuck rather than empowered. All these articles seemed to speak to our fears and shame rather than our strengths.

We live in a dieting culture where diets are beginning to create more problems than solutions.

Almost every study shows that 99% of humans who lose weight on a diet gain it back within a year or two. Why do people diet for years on end even though it isn't working?

Chronic dieting (i.e. endlessly dieting 'on and off') has become a seductively destructive epidemic. For most, it enhances self-judgment and unworthiness. In our culture it has become totally acceptable (and somewhat expected) to diet.

Well, here are six reasons why ongoing dieting doesn’t work:

1)  The body’s response to food restriction is to slow down metabolism. This is a natural survival response to prevent death by starvation. If the body senses there is a famine, it will slow down caloric burning to sustain itself on less for longer. We can actually gain weight or not lose weight when eating fewer calories.

2)  Dieting puts the body into a ‘stress response’. Mental cycles of self-judgment and self-hate increase our stress hormones, cortisol and insulin. “I’m no good, I’m too fat” is a physiology that pulls away from our digestive power, hormonally negating muscle building and fat burning.

3)  Most dieters will be a little fat deficient and protein deficient. When we are missing essential fatty acids and essential amino acids, our thermal efficiency is slowed down.

4)  Many dieters cannot find pleasure in their food. Part of our digestive power is fired in the cephalic phase in which the brain senses pleasure through the senses. When we are not getting the pleasure, metabolism is weakened. This is also why eating too fast or when distracted weakens digestion, as the senses are not involved.

5)  Many dieters skip meals, eating less in the morning and more at night. When we skip breakfast and eat a late lunch, we lose out on the heightened hours of digestion. 12-1:30pm and the hours prior to that are the strongest caloric burning hours.

6)  If we have less food, we can take in oxygen less efficiently because the body is trying to slow down its systems. Oxygen enhances the proficiency of our bodily functions.

Calories have little power over the power of the mind.

While diets can be useful and healing short term, a chronic dieting mentality is anti- weight-loss. If it worked, we wouldn't need to continuously diet!

There are a tremendous number of health issues that are a direct result of chronic dieting. These include fatigue, poor digestion, low mood, immune problems, headaches, binge eating, skin, constipation, and more. These conditions are often misdiagnosed as the problem rather than a symptom of nutrient deficiency.

When we are stressed about eating, our body is incapable of properly digesting.

To change our patterns we need to change our thoughts. We need to learn how to relax into the process. While there are many paths of personal growth and evolution, I can speak to the path of yoga, as it has been a pillar in my own personal development.

The path of yoga aids in improving health and weight for various reasons such as caloric burning, cleansing, and mental stress reduction that soothes our emotional drive for overeating. More than that, yoga works because it changes the stress physiology, which prevents us from losing weight no matter how little we eat.

What are your methods for changing your stress physiology?

Related Articles:
The 100 Year Diet Cycle
Are We Overestimating Overeating?
Understanding Macronutrient Balance

Understanding Macronutrient Balance: Fats, Proteins and Carbohydrates

The macronutrients in our diet are proteins, fats, carbohydrates, (and water)

Fat is the New Healthy: Eat Fat, Get Thin.

A common imbalance in our modern day diet is the consumption of too much unhealthy fat. These fats are the refined and hydrogenated kinds.

Many of us might be consuming significant amounts of unhealthy fats due to false advertising of food or simply by eating out a lot. However there is a large percentage of our population that is so fat conscious, that we’re not eating enough fat as a result of its bad rep.

We live in a nation with the largest fat-free food industry and yet we are the most obese. Our collective weight issues lay in the quality of fats we eat, not in fat itself. Most fat free products are extremely low in quality: yogurts are filled with processed sugars, foods are filled with chemicals, and milk is chemically altered and flooded with hormones.

Headlines news- Low fat diets are passé! Science has changed. Most low fat diets are rooted in a toxic belief that fat in food equals fat in the body. This is not an absolute truth and is often a misconception.

If we are on a fat free diet and not losing weight, chances are that our bodies have gone into starvation mode. If the body does not receive the basic macronutrients it needs to function, it will consider itself in famine. Not knowing if it will receive these nutrients anytime soon, it begins to store fat and inhibits the building of muscle in order to sustain energy. 

It’s time to get over the fat phobia. The phobia itself might be making us fat.

Poor quality fats as well as the processed carbohydrates and artificial ingredients that supplement fat-free foods tend to lead us to craving more carbohydrates and more unhealthy fat. If we are low in fat and protein, we will almost definitely find ourselves binge eating.

A fat deficient diet often leads to dry hair, dry skin, brittle hair or skin, mood issues, digestive, redness around the eyes, deficiency in fat soluble vitamins A D E, and the already mentioned inability to lose weight. Fat deficiency also tampers with memory, cognition and brain function.

When adding in EFA (Essential Fatty Acids,) we will most likely see a difference in skin and hair as well as the stabilization of our mood within as little as two weeks. Within a few months, chances are we’ll be losing weight rather than gaining it. These fats are found in unrefined oil present in food such as extra virgin cold pressed olive oil, unrefined sesame oil, fish, avocado, and nuts. We can also take a fish oil (or flax oil if vegan) supplement, which tend to be most digestible when consumed during a meal.

Carbohydrates: Forget Simple; Keep it Complex

Most of the population has a diet excessive in processed carbohydrates. If the bulk of our diet contains processed carbohydrates, we will often experience symptoms such as weight gain, fatigue, binge eating, cravings, indigestion, heightened PMS and mood swings. If consumed in large quantities over a long period of time, we may develop a variety of conditions such as diabetes, depression (as insulin blocks serotonin,) yeast infections, and ADHD.

These carbohydrates appear in fast food, junk food, packaged food, breads, and all the sugars added to our pre-packed foods. Often referred to as “empty calories,” these carbohydrates are stripped of all their nutrients during a refining process. Since the body taps into its own storage of minerals and vitamins when digesting, empty calories not only provide no micronutrients (minerals and vitamins,) but we end up further depleted after using our stored ones to digest them.

Like with fat, many of us have become carbophobic. Carbohydrates are extremely important to our health! They provide us with the energy we need to function. They are not bad! They become hazardous when the majority of our carbohydrates intake is in its lowest quality versions. We have been educated through past diet fads to fear carbohydrates and often we forget that not all carbohydrates are created equally. Be sure to get complex carbohydrates in the form of vegetables, beans, and grains. When eating whole grains, try to have the majority of them in an unprocessed form. While a whole wheat bread or pasta is preferable than its white flour version, it is still a refined food that plays its effects on our blood sugar levels.

Protein Deficiency:

Often when we try to lose weight and cut down on calories, the first calories to go are breakfast calories. We may have nothing more than coffee or a bagel and work till lunch with out fueling the body with any sustenance. If lunch then is just a salad, we may not be having much protein till dinner.  

Overeating at evening and night often has to do with daytime starvation. If this could be you, reevaluate your intake of protein and healthy fats during the day. These foods help us feel grounded and satiated. If we consume little more than carbohydrates and caffeine during the day, when its time to settle down in the evening the body will gorge on anything to help it feel grounded… going from one extreme to the other.

Focus on protein earlier in the day and include meat, fish, eggs, nuts, tofu and tempeh. Beans might work for some but as they are pretty low in protein, if this is your main source and you have some health complaints, you may need to reconsider your protein resources. If you are vegan, consider adding a high quality protein shake into your diet. Hemp, pea and brown rice are all good sources.

Too little protein can lead to sugar and carbohydrate cravings, low energy, low mood, and the inability to build muscle and lose weight. Our response to stress tends to last longer and have a stronger impact.

Stress and Micronutrients:

When the body is in stress mode, it excretes nutrients. Water-soluble vitamins like vitamin C and B as well as all minerals get released through urine (as well as through perspiration.) When stressed, a urine test will reveal a 50% increase in calcium, zinc, and other vitamins and mineral that have leached.  The body releases the micronutrients and holds onto macronutrients as fat.

Quality of Food:

When it comes to macronutrients, we need to be sure that they are nutrient dense.

The basic combination of fresh, real, home cooked, and cooked/served with love all effect nutrient density.

Much of our diet is mass-produced in a way that leaves little to no nutrients in our food. This means decreased nutrition to the body, which in turn increases our appetite and cravings because the body is looking for its needed nutrients.

When we are not getting what we need from food, the body sends out more hunger signals. This increases appetite and food cravings and will lead to binging. Often at this point we beat ourselves up thinking it’s about lock of will power.

Increase the quality: upgrade meats to antibiotic and growth hormone free (grass fed is best,) free-pasture laid eggs, home made pizza with organic cheese, organic produce, etc’. Many people have reported that taking hormones out of their meat and dairy products has resulted in weight loss.

When we mostly eat out and order out, our internal body wisdom gets dumbed down (it gets dumber!) As we start to eat in a more conscious way (simply by cooking for ourselves or taking a moment to notice and appreciate our food before eating,) we start to connect to the subtle messages we receive from our body regarding our personal nutritional needs (i.e. what foods we need and when.)

The nutrition world pulls us in various dietary directions, resulting in us losing our confidence to connect to our own body wisdom. Start a dialog with your body and you will discover things on your own.

Related Articles:
The Pros of Protein
The Food Pyramid... What Should I Eat?
Understanding Digestive Rhythm
Overeating- It's Not About Willpower

Understanding Digestive Rhythm

Starting to surf this summer, I find myself gaining a deeper understanding of the rhythm of the ocean. I watch the more experienced surfers tune into a rhythm that I have yet to feel. It reminds me of musical rhythms. I am often in awe of musician’s ability to tune into each other’s beat. This too is a rhythm I don’t truly understand.

The rhythms I find myself most intrigued by are the rhythms within our body. We all experience them, yet we may not be truly grasping their wisdom

Rhythm is everything; we find it in our heartbeat, our breath, our brain waves, or in a woman’s cycle. When rhythm is on, we are on. When it becomes erratic, we become erratic. Through yoga we discover that when the breath finds its rhythm, the mind finds peace.

When it comes to digestive rhythms, there is much to be said about timing and frequency. Some experts support three meals a day while others advocate lots of snacking. While there may not be one true way to eat, if we are experiencing weight, mood or health issues, our own rhythm is out of sync.

It is not uncommon in our culture to skip meals, or to have the first meal late in the day. Often trying to minimize calories, we have a small breakfast and supplement our appetite with a dose of caffeine. Immersed in work, we may push through lunch not feeling hungry until 2-3pm. These actions are most commonly not based in rhythm but rather in stress or in fears such as of gaining weight.

When we do this, we are over-riding our body wisdom. Our body temperature fluctuates through the day. When body temperature is at its highest, then metabolism is at its peak. This happens around noon, when the sun is highest in the sky.

Put simply, the peak metabolic hours are between 12pm-1:30pm. When we postpone lunch until 2pm-3pm, we miss these hours.

Between 2pm-4:30pm our body temperature naturally drops. Historically in Japan (before it was influenced by modern Western diets,) Sumo wrestlers would eat the same foods as all other Japanese but in bigger quantities and late at night. Mostly at 1-3am, when digestion is at its lowest.

Many of us have our biggest meals at night. One study has shown that one group of people ate a 2000-calorie diet at night and they all gained weight. The other group ate the same 2000-calorie diet during the first half of the day resulting in some losing weight and some maintaining weight.

Skipping breakfast and lunch is not sustainable- it leads to fatigue, sugar cravings, headaches, weight gain, and binge eating later in the afternoon or night. Perhaps we don’t experience it within a day but within the spectrum of a week. Holding back on calories during the week and binging on the weekend.

When the body is going through its days starved of nutrients, it is triggered into starvation mode. In order to survive what it perceives as scarcity, it begins a hormonal process to slow down the capacity to burn calories and refrains form building muscle in order to conserve energy.

The same effect can happen through a diet rich in food but lacking in nutrients. But we’ll save that for the next article about Macronutrients.…

Overeating? It's NOT Lack of Willpower! It's Physiological...

"I'm glad you're overeating," I told my friend, who was complaining she has no willpower around food and consequently is overweight.
"How do you feel right after you eat?" I asked.
"Guilty," she answered.
"And before that?"
"Calm."

Exactly!

Overeating, or any other symptom or unwanted behavior always has a beautiful reason for its presence. In my friend's case, her overeating calms her, fills her, and medicates her. While it may have negative consequences in the immediacy, it is relaxing. When we are overly stressed we have to do something overly relaxing. We each have tools to bring us down.

Our nervous system is structured in a way that we can respond to each moment in a way that contributes towards either stress or relaxation. Its either/or.

If we are concerned with weight issues, impaired digestion or matters of immunity, we often examine the body and forget to take into account the effect of life itself on health, weight and metabolism.

When we are affected by stress, we contract both physically and emotionally. When our emotional energy is stuck, metabolism is stuck. We can continue to try to battle the symptom, but unless we learn ways to increase the relaxation response and care for ourselves within times of stress (career, relationship, finances,) symptoms such as overeating will most likely prevail.

Overeating is not the problem. It is the symptom.

Overeating has little to do with willpower!
Why is it that we find ourselves eating more than we think we should or make unhealthy choices despite "knowing better?" How is it that we eat a meal and hardly remember what it tasted like?

Stress desensitizes the pleasure response in the body. When we experience stress, the body is programmed to go into fight or flight, making it hyper aware of its own pain as a survival mechanism. Decreasing sensitivity to pleasure will increase sensitivity to pain. (This is why deep relaxed breathing reduces awareness to pain.)

Without pleasure we can't physiologically enjoy the foods that we eat. Stress shuts down digestion so the neural connection between the gut and brain is severed. Without this connection, the brain can't radiate pleasure to the gut and the gut can't signal fullness to the brain. When we feel full in the belly but the mouth still wants more, the connection between gut and brain is impaired.

When calm, we are able to connect to the parts of the brain that govern wisdom and reasoning around food and digestion. Under stress this part of the brain containing the knowledge of what foods make us feel good, what makes us bloated, what energizes us, or what gives us a headache is neurologically isolated. When the survival part of the brain is activated and the connection between gut and brain is impaired, it is neurologically harder for us to listen to the wisdom around which food types or quantities make us feel more guilt than pleasure in the long run.

Pleasure helps regulate our appetite. When the body feels pleasure, the brain is able to communicate to the gut the right amount of food that will maintain pleasure. When under stress we can't feel the pleasure so we eat more in search of it.

Overeating is not about willpower. We simply don't have the proper physiology to register what we're eating and how much. When stressed, the body requires more food to taste the sense of pleasure.

Stress is not bad: it is natural. Often it keeps us on our growing edge. Detrimental stress is the self-induced kind created either by our thoughts or by holding on to stress that is no longer prevalent.

We are naturally self-correcting beings and we can physiologically produce powerful healing in the body by learning to modulate our frame of mind and heart.

As a start, make sure to improve your conditions around meals. Fast eating activates stress, multi-tasking when eating causes stress, negative self-talk or judging your food ("this food is bad for me") equals stress and equating food as fat or viewing it as the enemy is ultimately stressful eating.

Making our meals more relaxed can be as simple as adding 5 minutes to breakfast, taking 5 breaths before and after each meal or turning off the computer at lunch.

Fast eating is a reflection of fast living, i.e. living in a way that is not always self-nourishing. When we slow down, we connect to feeling. The switch in our brain that turns on relaxation turns on digestion and body wisdom. We can be eating healthy foods, but if we eat them in stress or judgment, we change our metabolic chemistry.

Where else do we move too fast? Usually we are too fast in our interaction with others- a true sign of not being present.

Approaching Your Health, Weight (or Yoga Practice) From a Place of Wholeness

Perennial philosophy is the philosophical concept, which states that each of the world’s religious traditions share a single universal truth.

We are each an individualized consciousness that is the manifestation of a Divine Ground. As human beings we possess a double nature, an egoist self and an eternal Self, which is the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. A human’s life on earth has only one end purpose: to identify the egoist self with the eternal Self and so to come to the united knowledge of the Divine Ground.

Our religions share a similar story: a tale of how we started as a whole, connected to the divine, until something occurred to create separation. In the Old Testament we learn of the temptations within the Garden of Eden, the wounding and our fall from grace.

We start to believe that we are alone, separate from the divine. We forget about the internal glory of the divine and focus fully on external victories, out-winning “others”. Our approach of ‘self against else’ leads us to hatred, violence and destruction towards others or ourselves.

Many of us struggle with health, weight and body image issues. We can spend decades of our life resenting our bodies until we exhaust ourselves fighting these issues. We often need to reach exhaustion before we have an awakening. We realize that in a physical and psychological battle against ourselves there is no winner.

Having spent years resentful of our bodies, we get trapped in the limited belief that medical and nutritional ailments can only be healed by medical and nutritional strategies. As an example, we are taught that excess weight can only be lost by less food and more exercise or by the use of a drug.

While this holds some truth, it does not paint an entire picture. For many of us the issues are not nutritional, they are psychological. Every issue we face with the body is somehow linked with heart, mind and soul. Thoughts, feeling, and beliefs all affect nutrition, too. While we can heal ourselves by dietary means, we need to move deeper into ourselves if we want to create true healing.

We carry the divine spark within us; we are perfect as we are. Yet there is a journey and on this journey, we receive clues. Each of our symptoms hints towards the things that we do that is not an expression of our authentic self. When we learn to understand our symptoms, we learn what we need to let go of.

When we don’t listen to the mild symptoms, they get louder until they grab our attention. Rather than attack our symptoms or try to rapidly get rid of them, let’s listen and learn from them. As we authentically evolve, the symptoms will dissolve.

One of my clients recently shared how once she realized that each pound of her excess weight carried a divine message, she began to feel lighter in her body. The embodiment of lightness and sense of universal support has made it easy for her to embrace a healthy lifestyle and lose weight with no feeling of fight or depravation.

Our health challenges are doorways to deeper places in our lives that call for healing. The body lives downstream to the soul. Improved health or achieving a healthy weight is the result of our practice but it is not the practice itself. The practice is carrying out our authentic service to the world.

As we empower ourselves as individuals, our metabolic power and physical vitality increases. When we learn to step out of our own way, true healing can take place.

A Winter Way Of Eating

The New England winter climate is mostly cold and dry. Just as the trees and plants around us have dried, we may experience the dryness of our own skin and lips as well as a drop in our body temperature.

As things change externally, our inner body changes in a similar manner and we must care for our bodies accordingly.

Foods For Winter

*  Since winter is cold and dry we need to avoid similar food to maintain warmth and moisture within.
*  Warm, home-cooked foods are ideal, cooked with easy-to-digest oils such as ghee (clarified butter) or olive oil, but not deep-fried.
*  Use cooking methods such as steaming, roasting, stir-frying or poaching in order to heat the food all the way through.
*  Avoid raw foods, which are cold in nature such as salads, cold fruits, ice (especially in drinks), ice cream and raw vegetables as these tend to cool the body.
*  Incorporate foods that create moisture and warmth. Minimize the consumption of crackers, rice cakes and breads, as they are very dry.

Flavor

*  The flavors that nourish and balance the body in the cold, dry, winter season are the sweet, sour and salty tastes. It's best to eat less of the astringent, bitter, and pungent flavors in winter, although all six tastes should be included in your diet.
*  From the less ‘favored’ flavors use ginger (unless you run both an extremely hot body temperature and a hot temper) and radish for pungent to keep warm, enjoy leafy greens and dandelion root for bitter, and cranberry or apple for the astringent flavor to aid detoxification during these months.
*  Root vegetables and grains will provide the sweet flavor. Refined sugars will create more harm than good.
*  For salty flavor reach for small amounts of high quality sea salt and an abundance of sea vegetables.

Food Suggestions


*  Warm hearty soups, healthy lean meat and root vegetable stews, whole grains, and roasted nuts.
*  Cereals, grains, and legumes: brown rice, oatmeal, millet, soybeans, and mung beans.
*  Meat, poultry and fish.
*  Nuts (avoid in excess if you have a lean or lanky body combined with a quick and restless mind.)
*  Root vegetables such as yams, sweet potatoes, yucca, potatoes, beets, turnips, ginger, ginseng, taro, burdock, carrots, parsnips, as well as, fennel, onions, chives, scallions, garlic and leeks.
*  Herbs, spices, condiments and oils: peppermint, basil, ginger, turmeric, parsley, gogi berries, licorice, cinnamon, cloves, chamomile, pepper, honey, and sesame oil.
*  Fruits and nuts: (at room temperature) apples, clementines, cranberries, red grapes, grapefruit, persimmons, dates, figs as well as lemons and limes.
*  If eating dairy (choose organic products!) avoid having them cold. Using ghee (clarified butter) is a great butter substitute.
*  Hydrate! Hot water and room temperature only. If drinking with a meal, sip hot water slowly.
*  The salty taste is attributed to the kidney and bladder, so by adding some salty foods in your diet during winter you can improve the function of these two organs. In Chinese medicine these are the meridians/organs governed by the water element that can be most affected by the dryness of the season. Incorporate some of the following foods to support the kidney and bladder function in winter: burdock root, eggs, fish, miso soup, nuts, tofu, and sea vegetables (such as arame, hijiki, kelp, kombu and wakame.)
*  This is not the season to be eating a fat-free salad and cracker diet. Play with steaming or roasting vegetables for salads and if eating things like toast for breakfast, spread a thin layer of ghee or butter on top.
*  To promote consistency, regularity and a sense of calm it is important in winter to keep a regular routine with your meals.

Breaking The 100 Year Diet Cycle

In modern-day culture, being healthy is commonly associated with dieting.  This is somewhat ironic since most diets leave us starved emotionally or physically. How did we come to believe that struggle and deprivation equal vitality and health?

Delving into the history of dieting, we can discover why diets have not worked well for us and how we continue to get caught up in their cycle.

At the beginning of the 20th century, with the cultural increase in weight gain, our solution was a low-calorie/ low-fat diet. The assumption was that cutting out all fats would resolve our weight issues. Thankfully, the body’s natural intelligence prevented us from starving ourselves to death and we began to experience strong cravings for fat and sugar. Deprived of fuel for energy we craved sugar. The craving for fat was the body's natural attempt to stabilize the erratic blood sugar levels that were being created by a fat-free diet. Furthermore, fat cravings intensified due to the lacking feeling of comfort and fullness that only fat would satisfy.

A severely limited calorie intake led to bingeing on fats and sugars. Contrary to what we believe, cravings and binges are not an indication of being flawed or weak. Binges are extreme responses to measures of restriction at levels that are unsustainable by a healthy human body.

Finding ourselves back in the cycle of fats and sugars, we turned to the high protein diet. This “worked” for a while, but since the body needs carbohydrates to stay balanced, we once again found ourselves bingeing on the carbs.

As a solution, the high carb diet was created. What seemed a well balanced idea, ended up sky-rocketing our cholesterol levels. The result:  the low cholesterol diet was born, bringing back the low-fat diet. And so the cycle continues. Years later these diets have returned altered with modern food supply. Although historically unsuccessful, each of them continues to be heralded as the new greatest diet.  

The restrictive aspect of dieting calls our body to respond in a rebound fashion, craving whatever the diet was lacking. Each diet came to pass as a response to the nutritional imbalance created by the previous diet.

Studies are showing that 98% of the weight lost while dieting is gained back in three to five years. Most commonly within the first year. 

A diet marketed to an entire population has us believe that we are all the same “machine.” The truth is that each person is unique, with different needs based on gender, age, ancestry and lifestyle. Furthermore, diets don’t work because they are extreme solutions. If a pendulum swings to one extreme, it has to swing equally to the opposite side. 

Breaking The Diet Cycle:

    1)     Take things slow: Step out of the extremes and don’t expect to change your eating habits all at once. Quick fixes do not help you achieve life-long health and happiness. By gradually introducing new and healthful foods and activities into your lifestyle, you will start to feel better. This will sustain healthy habits and naturally crowd out the less healthy ones.
    2)    Return to the basics: For thousands of years we lived well on all natural whole foods. As our health is globally deteriorating, we create foods that are less and less natural to try to resolve our health issues. You can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it.
    3)    Moderation and rotation: Imagine trying to express yourself fully in a language in which you know only a limited number of words. Similarly, if you eat the same foods every day, your body will only recognize certain nutrients and will not get all it needs for your cells to interact correctly.
    4)    Go all natural: In our attempts to live a healthy life, we have forgotten one important nutrient: life. Dieting has taught us to rely on synthetic versions of “food” mixed with chemicals to minimize our caloric intake. Consuming items such as artificial sweeteners simply leaves your pallet craving for more sweetness as well as for the nutrients you never received. Artificial sweeteners, hazardous to your health, can also increase your appetite and your sugar binges.
    5)    Food will fill you, but it will not fulfill you: Raise your vibration! Engage in activities that feed your sense of purpose in life. The more you work towards a goal of living each day with a sense of purpose, the less tempting instant gratification becomes.
    6)    Just say yes: No deprivation does not mean that you can eat whatever you want at any given time. It means that the more you nourish your soul, the more you will develop a stronger connection as to why you are choosing not to eat whatever is preventing you from being good to yourself. Passing on unhealthy temptation is no longer about saying no, but about saying yes to your true self. Always say yes - saying no to temptation is saying yes to yourself. Eat natural foods and nourish your soul on a daily basis.