The End of Dieting

Feeling good about yourself is an active process. It involves doing. For many people, self-esteem stems from exercise. For others, it comes with a job well done. For some, it’s a product of helping others or developing a new skill. Losing weight and finding health can be a powerful boost to your self-confidence and self-esteem, but they occur only once you start to strengthen every aspect of your life. Focus on that before focusing on the numbers on your scale

A meta-analysis of 148 studies on the correlation between strong relationships and good health indicated a 50 percent increase in the likelihood of survival for the more than three hundred thousand participants who enjoyed strong social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, health status, cause of death, and follow-up period.4 The message here is that working on building friendships and helping others doesn’t merely make you healthier and extend your life; it is also an effective strategy for resolving food addiction.

Ice cream is addictive, for instance. A peach is not. A peach won’t make you want to eat a dozen of them in a druglike binge. With its heavy concentration of sugar and fat, ice cream will light up a primitive part of your brain that persuades you to give up control, just as cocaine persuades coke addicts to let their lives spin out of control.

Since becoming a nutritarian I’ve lost weight, but more importantly, I feel FANTASTIC! I haven’t had a cold in over a year. I no longer suffer from migraines or headaches. I have energy. I sleep well. I stopped taking antidepressants, and I no longer suffer from anxiety. I feel GREAT all the time!

Micronutrient adequacy is needed to prevent the buildup of toxins in cells, a primary cause of toxic hunger. In order to gravitate comfortably toward a more favorable weight, our diet has to be healthier and more micronutrient complete

There are two phases of the digestive cycle, the anabolic and catabolic. During the anabolic, or building, phase, you eat, chew, digest, and absorb nutrients, which slows or halts the active process of detoxification that occurs most efficiently when the body’s not actively digesting food. When digestion stops, the body enters its catabolic phase, and detoxification immediately starts to rev up. As a result, people experience detox symptoms, which they interpret as hunger. They just have to eat again, they think, even though their body is already overfilled with calories. They can either eat frequently so their body doesn’t enter the catabolic phase for any sustained time, or they can eat calorically dense meals and animal products to keep the digestion (anabolic) process active until it’s time to eat again.

The more you search for quick relief, however, the more you inhibit the detoxification, or healing, process. Uncomfortable sensations are very often the signals that repair is under way and the removal of toxins is occurring. We mistake these symptoms for actual hunger and, as a result, mistakenly eat too often and too much to lessen them, which causes us to pack on the pounds, make ourselves sick, and, in the process, perpetuate the vicious cycle of addiction

And just as the smoker becomes tolerant to nicotine, the overeater becomes tolerant to sugar and salt and fat, reducing the amount of pleasure derived from eating high-caloric foods. A recent study published in Nature Neuroscience showed that drug addiction and compulsive eating desensitize brain reward circuits.2 This means that to feel the pleasure of drugs or the pleasure of eating, we need more and more. In the brain, eating behavior is driven by pleasure and reward signals, and the brain now needs lots of stimulation (concentrated food that is highly sweetened and flavored) or lots of eating to maintain those signal levels. Anything less results in physical and emotional discomfort.

When we eat primarily foods high in calories, without incorporating sufficient amounts of protective nutrients into our diets, our cells become congested with waste products such as free radicals and advanced glycation end products (AGEs), collectively known as oxidative stress. Oxidative stress can lead to inflammation, cell damage, and premature cell death. More often than not, it is accompanied by a buildup of toxic metabolites that can create physical symptoms of withdrawal between meals.

The brain is literally wired to ensure that we repeat behaviors that make us feel good by associating them with the sweet release of dopamine and specific brain patterning. The brain records a pleasurable action as a beneficial pattern that needs to be remembered and repeated automatically.