Why You?

- Albert Schweitzer, M.D

Warning: The information provided within these pages is not what most physicians or pharmaceuticals want you to know. Because if you put the contents of this book into practice, you'll likely never need to see a medical doctor or take a medication for as long as you live.

Disease will never enter your life, and health will overflow. You will have boundless energy and inner calm, enjoy radiant skin, lustrous hair, bright eyes, clear thoughts, fluid movements, a high mind, and the beautiful body you were destined to have.

Over the course of these next 40 days you will adopt the perfect diet and make it your own, kick those pesky habits and shed unwanted pounds while looking better and feeling younger than ever before.

And you will have nothing to owe and no one to thank but yourself.

Why This, Why Now?

- Egyptian pyramid inscription

We live in a consumerist’s society, where technology has outstripped the ability of doctors to utilize this technology. MRIs and CTs are ordered, biopsies, endoscopies and other invasive procedures performed, and yet, people are getting sicker and sicker. Medicine is a money making machine. Health care has become wealth care. It is a trillion dollar a year industry, with a gargantuan beast fed by the implicit encouragement of disease and the propagation of drugs to treat the disease.

Next time you reach for that burger, ask yourself, “Who eats who?” If current trends are allowed to continue, more than half of us will die from cancer, heart attack, or stroke. All three diseases are caused by eating animal products. Meat, eggs, and dairy. We eat the beef and then we become like cattle, fattened up by fast food, and then led to slaughter in the ICU, where big industry (medicine and the pharmaceuticals) profits. Vending machines and banners advertising fast food are now at schools. As a result, tissue analysis reveals fatty plaques (indicators of future heart disease) in the blood vessels of teenagers.

The Numbers

In this section we’re going to quickly go through a few numbers which will be important in our quest for optimal health. Let’s start with BMI.

BMI
Your body mass index, or BMI, which is calculated from a person's weight and height. According to the standard definition, your body mass index “provides a reliable indicator of body fatness for most people and is used to screen for weight categories that may lead to health problems.” A BMI of 19-25 is normal.

BFP
There are many ways to calculate one’s body fat percentage. The more exacting methods involve submerging yourself in water, or pinching your love handles and various other body parts with a caliper. Some gyms offer body fat testing as part of their membership. We’ll use a simpler if less precise method, one that involves only a tape measure, scale, and plugging some values into a computer. To calculate your body fat percentage, or BFP, you will need to get some measurements. First, take the tape measure and wrap it around your waist at the level of your navel. Do it before eating, and resist the temptation to suck in your stomach overly much.

And Exercise

Exercise is defined thus: bodily exertion for the sole sake of training and the benefits of health. Exercise is not walking to work, or climbing a flight of stairs while working, taking out the trash, or bringing in the groceries. Unless you are a professional athlete, don’t try and count the activities of your job toward the recommended requirements for exercise, which are as follows:

The American College of Sports Medicine makes these exercise guidelines:

a) 30 minutes, 5 times a week of moderate cardiovascular exercise
Or
a) 20 minutes 3x/week of vigorous cardio
- choose from biking, swimming, jogging, jump rope, hiking, stair
climbing, vigorous walking, etc.
And:
b) 10 sets of strength exercises, 8-12 reps each, 2x/week

- Hippocrates

I. Veggies
1. Broccoli

A cruciferous vegetable of the cabbage family, broccoli is loaded with phytonutrients and renowned for its anti-cancer, anti-oxidant properties. First eaten in Italy, it is high in vitamin C, calcium, beta carotene, folate and fiber; choose compact florets, store in the crisper, add raw to salad, steam for 5 minutes and toss into brown rice or whole grain pasta, or wrap around some seaweed or whole grain pita.

This leafy green of the chard and beet family is not just for Popeye anymore. Originally from Persia, it’s loaded with iron, calcium, potassium, and fiber. Buy it crisp, add it raw to salads or sandwiches, or mix it in with cooked vegetables. I often boil a whole pound of spinach (for one minute), season, and consume. It has only 100 calories and is loaded with nutrition. Kale, collard greens, and Swiss chard, though harder to find and longer to cook, are all healthful alternatives to spinach.

Here's what we'll need to have (or have access to) before we begin:
2-month calendar
a tape measure
diet and exercise log
a blender
a juicer
tupperware (1-2 25 oz square containers, 1-2 32 ounce rectangular ones)
a 16 oz measuring cup
1 stainless steel skillet
1 stainless steel 3 quart steamer
a 24-32 ounce water bottle (must have!)
an accurate scale

In these next thirty days, it’s time to practice what we’ve been preaching. Having selected a menu appropriate to your tastes, and workouts which match your areas of interest, it’s time to put it all into practice. Each day you’ll write down what you eat and drink, how much you move, and how you feel.

Remember the time factor. To really be efficient, shop once or twice a week, at the same time. Go to the store with your list, and hit the periphery first. You’re going to be cooking for three days at a time, so buy enough fresh vegetables and fruit for the week. Use your refrigerator’s crisper. Whole grains have a longer shelf life, so you can stock up on those. Bread does well in the freezer.

In the space reserved for journal entries: How did you feel each day on waking up? What was your energy level on a scale of 1-10? Which meal is your favorite, when do you feel most hungry? Most active? Write about your bathroom habits. How many times do you go daily? What time of the day? Do you need to strain? Describe the shape/consistency of your stool (don’t be put off, be thankful for what comes out of you, as it is the remnants of that tasty meal you bought and cooked yourself).

- Thomas Edison

As a medical student I became intimately acquainted with the human organism in all its complex and variegated splendor. The body in health is an amazing machine. The study of Anatomy (body parts) and Physiology (body processes) is enough to make even the staunchest disbeliever recognize the likelihood of a Higher Power. Then came Pathology, disease-based processes, and Pharmacology, the drugs used to treat disease, and I came face to face with the Devil. And during my hospital training, an even ruder awakening awaited me. If studying disease in textbooks was bad, much worse was to see disease running rampant inside the human body. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the hospital is not filled with healthy people, but I didn’t expect patients to be so sick! I have seen disease in all its atrocious manifestations. Everything gone wrong. Kidneys and livers failing, lungs burnt beyond recognition, devastating tumors, florid heart disease, and often all of this going on in the same individual. A man - we’ll call him Mr. B - with high blood pressure, diabetes, heart failure, pulmonary disease, arthritis, chronic pain, and gout who had never smoked, drank or done drugs in his life. His only indiscretion was this: since graduating high school, subsisting on a diet mostly of meat and fast food, he had gained an average of 5 pounds per year, so that when I met him at the age of 60 he weighed over 300 pounds, or twice his ideal weight of 150. One simple lifestyle decision, how much and what kind of food to eat, was largely responsible for the disease that had racked and ruined Mr. B’s life.

- Ben Franklin

Despite economic vicissitudes, the health care system is growing, and will continue to grow. Did you know that the cost of health care in America equals the gross national product of the 4th richest country in the world? And though they spend a fraction on hospitals, and enjoy wine, cheese, bread (all the stuff that most books tell you to swear off), the French are not nearly as sick. Yes, health care is a trillion dollar industry, more costly than war, and despite advancements in genetics, new diagnostic and therapeutic modalities, and cutting-edge medications, patients are sicker now than they’ve ever been, and from projecting data, it looks only to get worse. During the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in the U.S. Over 60% of adults, and over 30% of kids, are overweight or obese. Twenty-four million people, roughly 10% of the population, have diabetes. And here is the scariest statistic: more than 40% of the population will get cancer at some point in their lives. That is two people in every American family! Scary!

According to the Centers for Disease Prevention, the leading causes of death in the USA are heart disease, cancer, stroke (CVA), diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and suicide/depression. What do they all have in common? They are all preventable!

- Anonymous

Doesn’t that quote describe the average restaurant experience to a T? But let’s leave the restaurants alone for a moment and concentrate on our education. We waste so much of our youth memorizing innumerable facts - the capitols of obscure countries, the dates that various wars took place, the square root of pi, or the number of yards in a mile - and evaluated from the standpoint of contribution to our health, wealth or happiness as individuals, most are irrelevant. Useless, even. Sadly we never familiarize ourselves with the basic currency of our own bodies, and even when the attempt is made, often the sources we turn to (CNN, the health section at your bookstore, this “expert” or that) provide us with inaccurate information. Well, now is the time to learn the language that once spoken fluently will guarantee all A’s on the report card of wellness. Okay, Ill get off my pedestal, if you promise to read the following VERY carefully.

-Genesis 1:29-30

A diet consisting of nutrient-rich, low calorie foods high in water content and readily digestible is a diet of superfoods. Superfoods are whole, plant-based foods which if eaten in the proper order and correct combination, maintain the proper pH balance to ensure the body’s optimal functioning and speedy regeneration.

This statement is to be our motto. It is broken down and brought to life in the pages that follow.

Now that we've discussed calories in, it's time to place our attention more exclusively on
Now that we’ve discussed calories in, it’s time to place our attention more exclusively on calories out. In the battle of diet and exercise, diet invariably wins. (Remember our 80-20 rule?) We’ve touched on this but it deserves reiterating. I don’t want to defeat my own purpose, because I’m a big workout fan, but I recognize that many out there (including family and friends) would rather spend a summer day on the sofa than in the swimming pool. And if your diet is clean, I say more power to you! Think of the amount of time it takes you to eat your average lunch. Let’s say that lunch is a Big Mac, medium fries, medium Coke. That’s 1300 calories. You can probably eat it in ten minutes, twenty tops, but do you know how long it would take you to burn it off? Of all exercises, running is the best calorie burner, bar none. Running burns an average of 100 calories per mile. To burn off your McDonald’s feast, you’d have to run thirteen miles, which at a ten-minute mile pace would take you 130 minutes, or over 2 hours. Roughly six times the amount of time it took you to take those calories in. Scary. And after such calorie laden, nutrient deficient fare you probably won’t be running anywhere but to the bathroom. And sadly, many exercise fanatics use their activity level as an excuse to indulge in foods their taste buds desire (such as that huge muffin or scone). So the caloric benefits of even a long workout are quickly nullified by a few bites of processed food.

The first ten days are a time of adjustment, in which you'll get used to putting
The first ten days are a time of adjustment, in which you’ll get used to putting onto paper what goes into your belly, and really become aware of what you eat. It may be startling to note some of the junk that in the course of a day you unconsciously plop in your mouth, a rude awakening perhaps. In these days, write down everything religiously. Chart your water consumption for the day, and devote a line or two to any exercise you do as you phase into the program. And don’t forget to make a journal entry. At the bottom of each page, write how you feel about yourself, your energy, sleeping habits, etc.

These first ten days you will also rid the pantry and refrigerator of edible temptations (anything not on our list of foods), and replace the processed foods and dead flesh with fresh clean edibles that our the food for a new you.

First, take stock of what’s in your fridge. Open it up and write down the first five food items you see. Do it without thinking. And do the same for the freezer. Now, open your favorite pantry shelf, the one you go to more than the rest, and write down those five foods. With the list in hand, what do these foods say about you? How many of these foods appear on the list of foods that lead to optimal health? If you didn’t know a person and were told to describe them given this list of foods, what do you think they say? Junk food junkie? Carb lover? Sugar freak? Someone who hates to cook or is due to go shopping? Check back with that person once these forty days are up and they’ll be sure to call you a health nut.

As we’ve reached the end of this 40 day journey, it’s time to once again hop on the scale, snap that picture, take those measurements, and subject yourself to the rigors of that fitness test. Write down last month’s figures.

BMI
BFP
Weight
Waist
Fitness Test
Now write down the product of the new and improved you.
BMI
BFP
Weight
Waist
Fitness Test

Time to take a step back and assess. How does who you are now compare to who you were forty days ago? What you choose to do from this point on is up to you, but regardless of how you choose to live your life, you will never be the same as you were before you took up this book. Branded on your being is the ability to fashion a diet and exercise program that rivals the best personal trainer, chef, or how to book, and the power to transform yourself the way not even a plastic surgeon can.