According to Dr. Joel Fuhrman, diets don’t work, because people who are already nutritionally deficient, when they cut back on calories, they become even more nutritionally deficient. As a result, their body develops a series of cravings and sensations that drives them to overeat preventing them from successfully losing weight.
Until the food addiction is addressed and removed, people cannot comfortably eat less calories. Since they desire MORE calories, not LESS, to tell them to eat less food is like telling a person to breathe less oxygen for five minutes – they’ll soon be gasping for air.
Today you can listen to Dr. Fuhrman speaking on the Food Revolution Summit here.
Dr. Fuhrman TODAY on the Food Revolution Summit
Participation in the summit is FREE. You can sign up and listen here
Why Diets Don’t Work: Nutritional Quality, Food Addictions & Weight Loss
Without attention to nutritional quality, nutritional density, and nutritional completeness, you build up toxins in your body and as the level of toxins increases in the cells, it’s as if you were smoking cigarettes or snorting cocaine – you become addicted to those toxins that come from improper nourishment to the body.
Here is how it works: When you try to eat less or stop eating, you feel shaky and weak, because your body goes into a stage of detoxification or cleansing. The more toxic you are, them more shaky and weak you will feel. You may get headaches, stomach cramps, etc. Eating food relieves these sensations, because eating stops the detox. So you have to keep eating just to feel okay. It becomes a vicious circle.
Until you understand the powerful addictive nature of conventional food – of processed foods, junk foods, and concentrated animal products – and the consequences of not eating enough of the plant foods: fruits, vegetables, beans, mushrooms, nuts and seeds – and not getting the phyto-chemicals and antioxidants that the body needs – you are setting yourself up for failure.
Not knowing these simple facts sets people for weight gain and makes it impossible to lose weight or have a long and healthy life.
The point is nutritional quality does matter, it’s not just about the amount you eat, it’s not just about calories.
Certain foods have powerful effects that make you lose weight irrespective of the calories consumed.
2000 calories for some person can cause a person to become heavy, and 2000 different calories in different person can cause them to become thin, based on the factors in the foods, especially the factors in foods such as greens, mushrooms and onions, that make it difficult for the body to store fat.
Basically it’s a whole biological system that gives us the instinctual connectivity between the amount of calories we need and how much we enjoy eating that works. It works and it makes people desire and enjoy the food they require and no more. We shouldn’t desire to be 180 pounds, or 220 pounds. We shouldn’t desire to eat until we are 200 pounds or 300 pounds. And we don’t when we eat the proper nutrients. When we don’t eat the proper nutrients, we get unrelenting food cravings and we are not just uncomfortable – we become food addicts. An average American person is a significant food addict.
We need to shift our perspective about nutrition and change the way we think about what we eat. It’s not about the volume amount of food, weight amount of food, or even a caloric amount of food, it’s about the nutritional amount that’s important.
Your hunger diminishes as you meet your nutritional needs better. And the perception of hunger changes.
People find that hunger is a pleasurable sensation not a painful sensation. And when they felt hunger, it made food taste so much better, because of the enhancement of the taste sensation. So people actually prefer to wait to eat till they are hungry, and they prefer not to overeat at lunch, because they want to be hungry for dinner, because eating when they are hungry is such a pleasurable sensation/so intensely pleasurable, that the body becomes an automatic computer, directing people to the precise amount of calories to maintain the perfect weight, and people don’t become overweight.
Listen to the Interview with Dr. Fuhrman on Responsible Eating and Living
Download and listen to an interview with Dr. Joel Fuhrman on Responsible Eating and Living and here, where he talks at length about diet and health.
Joel Fuhrman M.D. is a board–certified family physician, best-selling author and nutritional researcher who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. As one of the country’s leading experts on nutrition and natural healing, Dr. Fuhrman has appeared on hundreds of radio and television shows including: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN, Today, Good Morning America, the Discovery Channel, TV Food Network, CNBC, the Dr. Oz Show. His own PBS television show, “3 Steps to Incredible Health,” aired nationwide in June 2011. His book, Eat to Live, published in 2003 (Little Brown) has gone through over 20 printings and been published in multiple foreign language editions. The revised version was released by Little Brown in January 2011 and is still on the NY Times best-sellers list. His recent works include Disease-Proof Your Child and has had published a total of 7 books on human nutrition to date. Dr. Fuhrman is actively involved in scientific research in human nutrition. His discoveries on food addiction and human hunger were published in the scientific journal, Nutrition Journal, in November 2011 entitled, The Changing Perception of Hunger on a High Nutrient Density Diet. His research activities include working with researchers at the National Institute of Health on dietary interventions for specific autoimmune diseases. Visit his website here.
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