Fasting and Eating for Health (27 page)

One must be warned, however, that fasting slows down the metabolism, and that this lowered metabolic rate can last for four to six weeks after the fast.

One must eat very carefully and not overeat or go off the prescribed diet during this period after the fast. A few pounds of weight will usually return in the next week or two after breaking the fast as the body replenishes the fluid and electrolytes that it lost while fasting.

When I fasted, my taste, hearing, and eyesight all improved. I also routinely hear this reported by others who fast. Because of this improvement in the ability to taste, simple natural foods taste better. I remember eating that first piece of lettuce after a fast and remarking that I never realized that lettuce tasted sweet before. After I arrived home from my fast in Texas, I soon went to try a taste of peanut butter, because that was one of my favorite foods in the past. I put a small spoonful of a popular brand of peanut butter into my mouth, but had to quickly spit it out and rinse the horrible taste from my mouth. My taste buds had. changed so much from fasting and become so much more sensitive that the peanut butter tasted like a mouthful of heavily salted chemicals.

You Can Win at Weight Loss

Many of you know that the conventional answer to being overweight—low-calorie dieting—is not an effective solution to the problem. For the vast 139

majority of people, being overweight is not caused by how much they eat, but by
what
they eat. It is a myth that people get heavy because they consume too many calories.

When researchers compare overweight and thin people, they find that both groups consume roughly the same amount of calories.6,7,8 What makes overweight people different is the amount of fat they eat. The facts are that as long as you are eating fatty foods you won't be able to lose weight.

The food our bodies need more than any other is carbohydrate. Our muscle cells and brains are designed to run on the glucose derived from carbohydrate.

We need 35 times more carbohydrate than protein for growth and 800 times more carbohydrate than fat. For example, an adult human requires about 20

grams of protein a day to maintain cell replacement and repair, about 700

grams of carbohydrate, and about 3 grams of fat. The average American consumes, daily, about 150 grams of protein-8 times the actual need—and often more than 100 grams of fat.

If your diet is deficient in carbohydrate, you will have to consume a great deal more in an attempt to feel satisfied. Along with that intake of food will come huge quantities of fat if you are eating the typical American diet or are following many other weight-loss plans. The effect is that you'll be overweight, your hunger won't be satisfied, and you'll crave sweets.

Not so long ago, many people believed that complex carbohydrates were fattening. Dieters would avoid starchy foods such as potatoes, beans, and pasta. It turned out that the real culprits were the high-calorie greasy toppings such as butter, sour cream, and high-fat salad dressings. Healthy foods such as vegetables, whole grains, and fruits contain adequate protein and are rich in carbohydrate, but have little fat.

If you wish to commit suicide with food, killing yourself as quickly as possible with a heart attack, cancer, or stroke, focus your diet on fat-based foods such as meats, most dairy products, vegetable oils, and salad dressings rather than on fruits and vegetables—the complex carbohydrates. Fats are the bad guys; carbohydrates are the good guys.

If the body tries to store the energy from carbohydrates it must first convert it to fat, a process that in itself consumes 23 percent of the consumed calories.

In contrast, if you eat fat, and the American diet holds about 40 percent of its calories from fat, your body stores it as fat with only 3 percent of its calories burned in the process. This is why calories from fat are more likely to increase body fat than the same number of calories from carbohydrate. To make matters worse, fats in the diet slow down your metabolic rate. In contrast, carbohydrates speed it up.

The way to achieve permanent weight control and a long healthy life—free of the leading chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and osteoporosis—is to base your diet on grains, beans, vegetables, and fruits.

These are the most powerful foods for controlling weight, and most people can 140

eat all they want of them and stay slim and healthy.

What is wrong with every single commercial weight-loss program? They are all too high in fat because they cater to the American love affair with rich, high-fat food. Weight Watchers brand foods contain 24 percent of calories from fat.

Lean Cuisine contains 25 percent of calories from fat. All commercial diet plans, since they are not very low in fat, must restrict portion sizes to offer "low-calorie" meals.

You may be able to take fewer breaths per minute for a few minutes, but in about an hour or so you will be hungry for air and will be forced to speed up your respiratory rate. In the same way, it is merely a matter of time before someone on one of these diets, trying to keep portions small, will again increase the amount of food he or she consumes. When this happens, the weight will return with-a vengeance.

Ninety-nine percent of all people who lose weight on a diet gain it back again.9 This incredibly high failure rate holds true for all weight-loss schemes, programs, and diets. Fasting merely to lose weight, and not coupled with the nutritional guidelines contained in this book, would likewise be a failure for the same reason.

All the diet plans fail because people can't be expected to stay hungry and control their portion sizes forever. The urge to eat more food eventually becomes too great, so the weight is regained. You can't eat out of boxes and consume powdered drinks forever, so though you may lose some weight, you will always gain it right back. Instead, permanent changes in your eating habits must be made. Learning new recipes and different ways to eat will enable you to -maintain your weight loss and your health.

If you desire to lose weight effortlessly, adopt a diet that primarily consists of fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans. This is a diet with less than 10 percent of calories from fat. I can assure you that the fat will effortlessly melt away from your body.

When diets attempt to keep your caloric intake very low, your body slows down its metabolic rate because it senses the need to conserve fuel. The more your food intake drops, the harder your body will try to keep from losing its fat.

The effect is significant. On a 500-calorie diet your metabolic rate can drop 20

percent below normal. This reaction is frustrating to dieters, who often find that the longer they diet, the harder it becomes to lose weight.

The unfortunate result of denying oneself food as a means of diet control is that when the dieter goes back to eating normally, fat more easily accumulates because of a low metabolic rate. This leads to the familiar yo-yo phenomenon in which dieters lose some weight, only to rebound to a heavier weight than they started with.

In contrast, I tell my patients to eat as much food as they can. In fact, when they are eating foods that are rich in water-soluble fiber but contain less than 141

10 percent of calories from fat, they can stuff themselves and still enjoy substantial weight loss.

Oils are 100 percent fat. No matter what the type, oil is 100 percent fat. Like all other forms of fat, it contains 9 calories per gram. Carbohydrates hold only 4 calories per gram. That means oil contains more than twice the calories of carbohydrates.

When we put concentrated fat in our diet, the body easily converts it to body fat. This is more important than the total number of calories we consume.

How many baked potatoes do you think you can eat to get the same amount of fat as in 1 teaspoon of olive oil? If you said 70, you are right. Which do you think will make you feel more satisfied, one teaspoon of oil or 70 baked potatoes?

Some Weight-Loss Schemes Are Dangerous

Advertisements and claims about weight-loss plans and products that aid weight loss bombard us daily. There are countless ways to lose weight, but besides the false claims and rebound weight gain that come with all these diet schemes, many of them are not safe.

For example, one way to control your weight is to smoke cigarettes, especially if you snort cocaine at the same time. Don't laugh. Some people really do this. Thank goodness most of us know this will put us at significant risk of heart attack and sudden death, so it is not our weight-loss program of choice.

Another example of a dangerous way to lose weight is to follow a high-protein, carbohydrate-restricted diet. Yet despite their proven dangers, these diets are still suggested by some physicians.

Weight loss can occur on a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet in a way similar to how sick cancer patients lose weight or diabetics lose weight when their blood sugar levels get too high. When the body can't find enough carbohydrate to properly run its machinery, it looks for emergency fuel that can be utilized in times of crisis, fasting, or starvation. This fuel is called
ketones.

Ketones are a fat breakdown product that many cells can use as an alternative (emergency) fuel rather than carbohydrate. As ketone production increases a condition called ketosis occurs and the acids rise in our bloodstream. This can be measured by checking the acidity of our urine.

If the dieter maintains a high-protein, low-carbohydrate program for a prolonged period of time, the excess protein consumed that cannot be stored in the body, as well as all the acids created by protein metabolism and as a result of ketosis, must be eliminated by the kidneys. As a consequence the kidneys become overworked and enlarged. Kidney damage will slowly occur. This is in contrast to fasting ketosis because during fasting, no excess protein by-142

products are excreted, only a mild acidosis occurs, and the fasting condition is maintained for only a short duration.

Those individuals who follow high-protein weight-loss plans inevitably speed up the aging of their kidneys and unknowingly destroy functional units in the kidneys called
nephrons.
It often takes years for this damage to be detected by blood tests. By the time it is detected, irreparable damage might have already been done, because the signs that damage has occurred will not be noticeable by blood test until more than 80 percent of the kidneys are destroyed. This can be especially dangerous in diabetics or individuals with high blood pressure because their kidneys are already under stress from their medical condition.

Additionally, as these acids are washed through the kidneys, many minerals (especially calcium) stored in the bones are washed out too. Osteoporosis very frequently occurs in people who follow this type of weight-loss plan for prolonged periods. That is, if they live long enough, because it is well established that a diet with a high proportion of animal foods increases our risk of premature death from every leading cause.

Every single person who follows a high-protein, carbohydrate restricted diet will speed up the aging of the kidneys and increase the risk of kidney stones and nephrocalcinosis (hardening of the kidney). Even worse, since animal-based foods are almost 100 percent fat and protein, and contain no carbohydrate or fiber and none of the protective antioxidant nutrients, a diet based on animal food is closely linked to early death from cancer (especially colon cancer, prostate cancer, and breast cancer) and heart attack.

Liquid protein diets, or protein-modified fasts, have caused the death of more than 60 people.10,11 Certainly Americans soon will realize that you can't purchase health in a can or bottle.

Don't be conned into a quick way to get something for nothing. You can't poison your body with toxic drugs and expect not to reap the consequences down the road. Likewise, you can't poison your body with an unhealthy high-fat or high-protein diet and expect not to pay the price with the eventual deterioration of your health.

Other Conditions Respond to Therapeutic Fasting
Nature tells us to fast. When we have no appetite during an acute illness, fasting is nature's way to accelerate recovery. Feeding the sick individual when his digestive powers are diminished and weak only serves to further complicate the illness. In an acute viral illness, fasting activates white blood cells and causes more interferon to be produced.

When animals other than humans feel sick, they do not eat. Listen to your body when you are sick and have no appetite. Fast for a few days, then proceed to a light diet of fruit and salad vegetables for a few days and you will quickly recover your health. Your body will have used the viral attack as a 143

friend to your future well-being and aided in nature's plan to.give your system a quick internal housecleaning.

Diseases such as acne and eczema, tinnitus (chronic noise in the ears), vertigo, fibromyalgia, glaucoma, cervical dysplasia, chronic neck and back pain, polymyalgia rheumatica, and many others are helped by fasting. I have witnessed patients with severe hypothyroidism (not producing sufficient thyroid hormone) who have had their blood tests normalize after fasting. Even deafness has resolved during fasting for some other condition, surprising both the patient and the doctor when the hearing returned.12

Fasting is also useful for a variety of other chronic ailments because the beneficial effects of the fast are not disease specific. Physicians who have used this approach have recorded improvement or recovery from conditions of every description that patients had been needlessly suffering with for years. Besides the diseases already mentioned, one should assume that in the vast majority of chronic medical conditions this approach may give the disease sufferer the best chance to achieve a complete recovery and avoid a lifetime of suffering or medical treatments.

Sometimes when people try to make major dietary changes without the benefit of fasting they become frustrated. Beneficial changes that can take months or years with careful eating happen quickly if a fast is utilized. Once a person begins to realize the health potential and can see the results, he or she is more likely to become committed to a lifetime of healthful living.