21 Pounds in 21 Days (10 page)

When the body's pH is knocked out of equilibrium, we may start craving certain foods, as the body seeks out vitamins and minerals that will help it create homeostasis. Unfortunately, many of us have trained our brain that certain vitamins and minerals it needs are found in processed foods. Most processed foods are also acidic.

If you eat a diet high in refined foods, those are the foods you'll crave: potato chips, ice cream, extra crispy fried chicken, chocolate chip cookies. Unfortunately, some of the foods an acid body craves are also foods that it's allergic to. Again, this is because we've taught it that these foods are where it will find certain nutrients. Since we'll also experience an allergic reaction, eating these foods will actually make us feel worse.

By shifting to a balanced diet containing all the right vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and phytonutrients, an acid body can become more alkaline. As it becomes more alkaline, it immediately begins to produce healthier cells, making us feel better quickly. We can
intentionally flush the acid out of the body, helping it achieve equilibrium and making us feel more vibrant, energetic, and peaceful—the body's natural state. As we do this, the body automatically gravitates to a healthy weight—and you don't have to deprive yourself, exercise, or go on a diet.

The Confusion over Calories

The traditional American weight-loss diet encourages people to reduce the number of calories they eat in order to force the body to burn more fat. But there's a fundamental problem with this theory: the body of a
Homo sapiens
(Latin for “wise man” or “knowing man)” absolutely
hates
to burn fat. Why? For over two hundred thousand years, most of our ancestors were hunters and gatherers whose bodies adapted to having abundant amounts of food to eat after an animal was slaughtered or crops were harvested. Their bodies then allowed them to survive scarcity after that food had been consumed. To withstand this environment of literal feast or famine, the human body learned that whenever excess food was available, the body stood a better chance of riding out the inevitable lean months if it learned to convert any extra nutrients into fat. Fat not only kept our forbears warm and cushioned their organs, it stored nutrients the body could call upon to keep them alive during lean times. Given this history, it is literally human nature to store fat for future use. Though food is now plentiful in our society, we need only go back a few generations to see how this instinct to conserve flab helped our ancestors weather crop failures and famines.

With this as the backdrop, let's consider this modern-day activity we call dieting. At its essence, dieting consists of starving our body so it will lose weight. Already, you can see the problem.
Homo sapiens
's brain is so intelligent, has been fine-tuned for so many millennia, and is so intent on keeping our species alive that it outmaneuvers our dietary strategy of depriving ourselves to shed pounds. We only need to miss a meal or two before a warning alarm is sent out to the cells: “Oh, my goodness! She's starving again. Hang onto every nutrient you can. We have to
save her life!” The body then slows down our metabolism, the rate at which we consume nutrients to obtain energy from them, so that it consumes fewer while we're dieting than it does when we're nourishing ourselves properly. Once we end our diet and resume eating normally, our brain outthinks us, telling the body, “I know her by now. It's not going to be long before she starves herself again. Keep metabolizing food slowly and hang on to every nutrient you can. We've got extra room around her middle so stick everything extra onto her belly, thighs, and buttocks so we have a little extra in store for next time.”

Women's bodies, in particular, store fat around their middle so food is located close to the fetus should they become pregnant during a famine. After dieting, even if we eat the exact same amount of the exact same foods we ate before we started purging pounds, we're going to put on extra weight. Over time, repeat dieters train their bodies to hold onto more fat every time they try to lighten up. Of course, this is the average person's worst-case scenario. But placed within the context of humankind's struggle to survive scarcity and famine, who can blame our brain for taking our actions so seriously? The human body cannot overcome a quarter of a million years of conditioning in less than seventy-five years!

Adding insult to injury, since the body clings to every bit of food we feed it, it also clings to every toxin that we consume along with it—you know, those artificial flavors and colors, antibiotics, and hormones found in processed foods. The more toxins get stored in the body, the more they congest us, make us feel “off,” cause us to lose energy, and, eventually, make us sick. They also contribute to the cellulite that everyone dreads, causing our bottom to jiggle and leading us to start another diet. Now we're caught up in the cycle of rollercoaster weight loss, where we lose pounds only to gain back more weight and toxins.

Notice that as I describe this cycle of yoyoing weight, I am writing about nutrients but not calories. The culture of dieting teaches us that the number of calories we eat determines whether we gain or lose weight. While it is true that you'll gain weight if you eat more calories than you burn off, counting calories is not the answer to everyone's weight-loss dilemma. In fact, it is
even possible for the same person to gain more weight by eating fewer calories than they did in the past. How so? One way is to get caught in a cycle of rollercoaster dieting. Another is by eating low-nutrient foods.

While it's rare that we think of calories in terms of anything but weight, they're actually a measure of the amount of potential energy contained within our food. Different types of foods contain different amounts of energy: carbohydrates count four calories per gram; protein offers four calories per gram; and dietary fat weighs in at nine calories per gram. So for all the negative press it gets, dietary fat—that is, the fat you obtain from foods, as opposed to body fat, which you carry on your body—has the potential to give us more energy per gram than any other food. Unfortunately, many people have been misled into believing that because dietary fat contains the most calories, eating it automatically piles on body fat. They also mistakenly believe that reducing dietary fat means you automatically lose weight. In reality, the quality of the food we eat is a major determinant of how much fat the body holds on to and how easily we shed pounds. Food that contains a lot of nutrients gives us more energy than highly processed foods or “junk” foods, so called because they contain little nutrition. Just like your car becomes sluggish and operates inefficiently if you put cheap oil into it, your metabolism becomes lethargic if you eat poor-quality food. Low-quality calories do not burn off at the same rate as high-quality calories. To give you an example: One gram of dietary fat obtained from a low-nutrient, highly processed food like potato chips yields less energy than one gram of dietary fat from a nutrient-dense snack like a rice cake topped with almond butter. The body burns chips less efficiently. As a result, they are more likely to sit on your hips. That's why five hundred calories obtained from a nutrient-dense source can give you more energy and make your metabolism behave more efficiently than a thousand calories from junk food. This is one of the major reasons why big junk-food eaters can often be found sitting on the sofa.

Focusing solely on calories is misguided for other reasons as well. Consider a woman who plays tennis regularly so she has well-toned muscles and a low level of body fat. Because muscles
burn more energy than fat, even when she is sitting down, our tennis player will burn more calories than a couch potato or someone ill who doesn't have a lot of muscles and has a higher percentage of body fat. Yet she, too, will react negatively to eating junk food. Feed her a thousand low-nutrient calories and she'll have problems digesting them, feel sluggish, and her energy will drop. But if she eats a thousand nutrient-dense calories, she'll have a lot of energy.

So the number of calories that we eat isn't always as important as either the diet industry or manufacturers of low-calorie foods would like us to think. And the number of nutrients those calories contain is far more important than any manufacturer of processed foods wants you to know. This is just another reason why it is important to eat more whole, nutrient-dense, fresh foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, fish, poultry, and meats, and to avoid processed and refined foods, which contain the least amount of nutrients and the most toxins. If you do not eat enough food and/or that food does not contain much nutrition in it, not only will you lack stamina, rather than burning the food for energy, your body will slow its metabolism and cling to it for dear life. And where will it get stored? That's right—in your fat cells. If, on the other hand, you feed your body nutrient-dense food, it will shed fat easily and effortlessly and calorie counting will be unnecessary.

Given all of these different factors, it's no wonder that diets don't work! Each and every time we try to lose weight using a strategy that deprives us of nutrients, we swim upstream against the tide of human evolution. Like cutting our hair off, shaving our beard or legs, or trimming our fingernails and hoping they won't grow back, whenever we embark on a diet, we're fighting against human nature! For a low-calorie approach to weight loss to work, it must feed you high-quality foods that contain a lot of nutrition. Although the concept seems to defy logic, you must eat in order to lose weight!