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Hungry for Change: Ditch the Diets, Conquer the Cravings, and Eat Your Way to Lifelong Health
Hungry for Change: Ditch the Diets, Conquer the Cravings, and Eat Your Way to Lifelong Health
Hungry for Change: Ditch the Diets, Conquer the Cravings, and Eat Your Way to Lifelong Health
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Hungry for Change: Ditch the Diets, Conquer the Cravings, and Eat Your Way to Lifelong Health

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About this ebook

Pioneers in the field of nutrition and internationally renowned filmmakers, James Colquhoun and Laurentine ten Bosch join with leading experts to offer proven strategies to lose weight, prevent and reverse disease, and optimize health.

With Hungry for Change you'll discover:

• Amazingly delicious, nutritious recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and desserts
• How to navigate your supermarket: what to buy and what to avoid
• The real truth behind DIET, SUGAR-FREE, and FAT-FREE products
• How to overcome food addictions and cravings
• Why fad diets don't work
• How to read labels and what food additives to avoid
• The most effective detox and cleansing strategies
• How to eat for clear eyes, glowing skin, and healthy hair

Providing practical solutions, Hungry for Change shows that your health is in your hands and that you can escape the diet trap forever. Experts from the field of medicine and nutrition plus transformational stories from those who know what it's like to be sick and overweight give us the tools and inspiration we need to begin our journey toward health today.

Hungry for Change will help boost your energy levels, strengthen your body, and make you look and feel better every day for the rest of your life.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateOct 2, 2012
ISBN9780062220851
Hungry for Change: Ditch the Diets, Conquer the Cravings, and Eat Your Way to Lifelong Health
Author

James Colquhoun

James Colquhoun and Laurentine Ten Bosch are nutritional consultants turned filmmakers. Motivated by a chronic illness in their family, they created and filmed Food Matters and Hungry for Change as tools for individuals to take charge of their own health.

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    Book preview

    Hungry for Change - James Colquhoun

    Part I

    HUNGRY FOR CHANGE

    Chapter One

    How Did We Get Here?

    Throughout history, humans have struggled to find calories. Thousands of years ago, when we lived outdoors, we didn’t always know when or where we’d find our next meal. Our bodies held on to extra weight in order to protect us from famines. This is because when our hunter-gatherer-gardener ancestors—and this goes right up to a few hundred years ago—found sources of fat or sugar, it meant survival. It meant they could carry forth their genetic line.

    It’s not your fault, says Christiane Northrup, M.D., a bestselling author and an expert on women’s health. You’re programmed to put on fat whenever there is food available. This is how we are as mammals. We’ve lived on the earth for millennia where there was a food shortage. But now there is a lot of food available, but it’s the wrong kind. And so we’ve been programmed for millennia to store up for the winter, but the winter doesn’t come.

    The human body comes with ready-made fat programs, according to Jon Gabriel, a weight-loss expert and international bestselling author of The Gabriel Method, because these programs protect us against famines. The human body, he says, evolved to survive during a famine or a cold winter or whatever kind of stress. What this means is your body is designed to hold extra weight during a period of stress, and if you go through a stress today, your body will hold on to an extra 10 pounds to protect itself.

    Because our bodies are biologically adapted to store fat, we continue to seek out calories, particularly fats and sugars. If we taste something fatty, for instance, or something sweet, the body sends us an immediate signal that says, Yes, I want more of this. Craving these foods is perfectly normal. So when we bite into a burger or take a sip of a milk shake, and we taste those fats and those sugars again, our bodies tell us to eat, because they are used to living in an environment where there is feast and famine. The problem today, says Daniel Vitalis, a leading health, nutrition, and personal development strategist, is we’ve got feast like nobody’s business. We just don’t have any famine. We have an almost unlimited supply of calorie sources. And this is where we run into problems. We’re eating too much of the wrong foods.

    If we look around the world, we see that human beings have been able to inhabit the whole globe. They’ve been able to do it on a host of different foods—from the extreme Arctic, where people have eaten almost exclusively animal fat and muscle and organ meats, to the jungle, where people had access to far more fruits and plant material.

    One of the things we see in the food of today’s hunter-gatherer-gardener people is that it contains an extremely high amount of nutrition and an extremely low amount of calories, says Vitalis. We see people thriving and people staying lean and healthy and avoiding degenerative diseases and not putting on extra weight, regardless of what or how much they eat. We see people living in harmony with their ecosystems and their bodies.

    Today, our diet no longer resembles that. Our so-called modern foods contain a very high number of calories and a very low amount of nutrition. We no longer eat the foods we’re biologically adapted to—the simple foods: plant foods, fruits, nuts, seeds, vegetables, and animal foods of high quality. We’ve gone from living off our natural environment as hunter-gatherer-gardener people did—and still do in some places—to eating industrialized, genetically modified, and artificially produced foods. At the same time, we’ve adopted this relatively new indoor, sedentary lifestyle. Our bodies are not designed to sit at desks under fluorescent lights and eat processed junk food all day long.

    Image courtesy of Peter Menzel, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

    Image courtesy of Peter Menzel, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

    By overloading on processed food and ignoring the vitamins, minerals, fibers, and healthy fats that we need, we are essentially poisoning ourselves with calories. We are simultaneously overeating and starving ourselves to death. And so we keep eating and keep eating and keep eating, which leads to more and more problems. We see things like diabetes. We see blood sugar imbalance issues, and we see a lot of weight gain.

    This is not the case with indigenous cultures, Vitalis says. "Their diet is typically lower in calories but has ten times the fat-soluble vitamins, like vitamins A, E, D, and K, than our modern diet. And indigenous diets contain four times the water-soluble vitamins—vitamins B and C. There is more nutrition in their food than in our recommended daily allowance of nutrients. We don’t see the same chronic, degenerative diseases we see in so-called modern people. We don’t see the prevalence of cancer. We don’t see heart disease. We don’t see arthritic conditions. If we continue to live only on the processed foods we find in our modern supermarkets, we’re going to constantly have problems.

    "Because these foods make us fat.

    "These foods make us sick.

    "These foods break down our pancreas and give us diabetes.

    These foods give us cancer.

    So, how do we wean ourselves off these foods? Easy. By eating food in its simplest and most wild form. When we step outside of that supermarket setting, when we start going to the farmers’ markets, when we start going to the farms, we don’t have to worry about these problems anymore. We can let our bodies guide us. We don’t have to worry about putting on weight—or keeping it off—because the body doesn’t want to be overweight.

    Your body is designed to be healthy. It wants to be healthy. One of the biggest tricks the marketing industry has used against us is to convince us that our bodies are trying to get fat. And we have to somehow whip them into shape, stop them, fight them all the time. That’s simply not true.

    If we let our body do what it wants to do in an environment full of healthy choices, then we can live without fear of weight gain and we can live without fear of degenerative disease.

    What’s an Unhealthy Diet?

    You are what you eat. It’s a saying as old as written history. But before we can even talk about the consequences of unhealthy food choices for a nation, we have to engage in some honest talk about what is considered an unhealthy diet.

    The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) wants Americans to eat more of everything—more dairy, more meat, more grains, and even more sugar. To its mind, poor nutrition just means people aren’t eating enough dairy, meat, grains, and sugar. The USDA remains stuck in the mindset of the 1930s, when people were literally starving from a lack of calories. So the USDA policy incessantly remains, Eat more!

    But Americans don’t need to eat more. They need to eat less. A lot less. And especially less of the highly toxic, disease-promoting foods described below.

    According to Mike Adams, researcher and founder of NaturalNews.com, these are the main characteristics of an unhealthy diet:

    Primarily consists of dead foods (cooked, microwaved, etc.)

    Primarily consists of refined grains (milled, bleached, etc.)

    Lacks large quantities of fresh, living fruits and vegetables

    Avoids adequate water hydration (and focuses on manufactured beverages)

    Is very high in processed sugars and processed carbohydrates

    Contains genetically modified (GM) foods, such as corn and soy, and sugar from GM sugar beets

    Includes a large amount of hormone-laden and pasteurized conventional dairy products, such as cow milk

    Is made with hundreds of different chemical food additives, from MSG and aspartame to chemical preservatives

    Is packaged in toxic containers including plastics and epoxy resins that contaminate the food with bisphenol A (BPA)

    Primarily consists of conventionally grown, pesticide-contaminated foods

    Contains a large quantity of unhealthy oils, such as corn, soy, or partially hydrogenated oils

    Consists of a large number of fried foods or foods cooked at a very high temperature, which destroys nutrients while also creating carcinogenic compounds

    Is made with many modified, unnatural ingredients, such as hydrogenated oils, refined sugars (the refining process removes the minerals), homogenized milk fats, and so on

    Consists of a large quantity of factory-farmed and factory-fed animal products

    Profile in Health

    Daniel

    Daniel Vitalis

    I grew up in the United States in the 1980s, a red-blooded product of the industrial food complex. I was exposed to all kinds of processed and refined foods. I ate white bread, white flour, processed corn- and soy-based products. I grew up on pasteurized industrial dairy products, and my meat came wrapped in Styrofoam and plastic.

    Mostly, though, I ate food that came in different shapes and colors—foods, I understand now, that were more about marketing than nutrition. Boxed cereals were my favorite. When my mother brought me to the supermarket, a big, glitzy, glamorous mall of processed foods, I used to run right to the cereal aisle, begging her for a specific kind of cereal because of the cartoon character on the packaging. I craved it all the time.

    Like everyone else in my generation, I grew up in a giant international food experiment. Call us the Genetically Modified Generation. But here’s the thing. That experiment failed us.

    I had a lot of respiratory issues as a kid. I thought I had asthma. I was hyper-inflamed all the time, and I had no idea it was because of the kinds of food I was eating.

    Until I was about fifteen. A friend of mine handed me a copy of The Grape Cure, which basically chronicled a group of people who harvested grapes in Europe for wine. During the process, they fasted on grapes for a couple of weeks. Because of this fast, according to the book, they prevented a lot of the same chronic, degenerative diseases we see today in our culture, particularly cancers. That’s when I started to understand the idea that food could be like a medicine for us, and we could use food to cleanse and rejuvenate our bodies. And if we did that periodically, we might even be able to live longer, healthier

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