The Winter Wellness Diet: How to use the cold to fire up your metabolism and melt the fat away! What are the first 3 letters of diet? D-I-E! Yep, because generally when people go on diets, the structure of it all is too much to handle for any significant amount of time. Hence, you’d rather die than stay on the diet any longer. It would be naive to think that some people don’t succeed with dieting to lose weight or get healthy, but generally those people are ones who change their lives during the dieting period. No diet will ever work if you go back to eating, exercising and living life the exact same as you did before you started torturing yourself. The Winter Wellness Diet will help you lose weight, it will help you get healthier, BUT it is a lifestyle change as much as anything else. Other fad diets that I’m sure you’ve heard of are designed to be money makers. Just because a “doctor” came up with the diet or endorses it doesn’t mean it’s healthy. There are big bucks in creating a brand name, a logo and then licensing that to companies to put on their products. In addition, writing a “best selling” book is pretty profitable for these people as well. I’m not trying to get this published (unless you know anybody who wants to pay me). I just want to share good health and nutrition principles with anyone who wants to live a healthier, leaner life that tastes good and feels good. You’ll never see a “Winter Wellness Approved” logo on a food package. Why? Because, you literally have access to pretty much any piece of fresh fruit or vegetable you can get your hands on. Buying food in a package that has been shipped thousands of miles to get to your grocer is probably the first thing you’ll stop doing, not the first thing you’ll start looking for. So take a journey with me the next few months and see how good it can feel to lose weight, have more energy, detoxify your body and never get sick again! WHY WE GET FAT AND UNHEALTHY Throughout this book, take off your conventional thinking hat and put on your common sense hat. You will read a lot of information that you have never heard, or never heard presented in this way before. Gaining weight is not an overnight thing. Our bodies weren’t designed to gain weight, we have forced them into that situation. We aren’t bears that put on huge stores of fat so we can live through winter hibernation. Weight gain actually stems from us depriving our bodies. Yep, that’s right. We don’t give our bodies enough of the quality nutrients that it needs and our body responds by gaining weight. If we consistently eat a diet that is nutrient deficient, our body responds by lowering our metabolism (generally) so that when we eat the same amount of calories, less are used, therefore we need less calories. Our bodies are defending themselves from well---US! If we are using less, but consuming the same amount, much of that excess will be stored as fat. Understanding the following point will be invaluable in creating your mindset to be healthy and lose weight. Our bodies need nutrients. If we are consistently consuming food that is deprived of nutrients (i.e.. doesn’t have enough) then our body will signal us to eat more. Here is a metaphor to explain this situation: Your body is like your household finances. Nutrients are money and eating is the work you do to get the money. If you need more money what do you do? Work more/eat more. What if that is still not enough? Then you go get a second job, or a third. This is how your body views nutrients. It needs more, but is doing the best it can with what you feed it. Our budgets need a lot of money and our bodies need a lot of nutrients. Inevitably, if you eat more, you will gain more weight. That’s why you may be hungry all the time. Your body is hungry, but not for food, it’s hungry for nutrients. Many of us don’t understand this and so are doomed to over-eating which leads to weight gain. Nobody wants to work a second job or a third job to get enough money for the bills. The same can be said for eating. At their core people don’t want to eat 5000 calories per day. You may ask how some people eat like crap and stay skinny. Well, first of all, being skinny doesn’t mean you are healthy. A high metabolism may be a benefit, but it’s not a cure-all. (21)(2) I’ve read about some scientists researching an enzyme or lack there of in the digestive system. Some people have the enzyme which encourages fat storage while some people don’t which means they can burn fat as energy more often. Either way, that gene has nothing to do with whether or not you get enough nutrients. Lot’s of skinny people get sick all the time, have diseases or get cancer just the same as overweight folks. So that’s why I submit we define being unhealthy as, “not getting enough nutrients.” Everyone is different. As you are reading this, you may feel that you could lose some extra pounds, or if that’s not a problem, not getting sick and not worrying about cancer would be nice right? We’ll get into the nuts and bolts of the nutrients our body needs later on, but for now go with this: Gaining weight and getting sick is the result of not getting enough of the nutrients that our body needs to operate and stay healthy. Everyone is different and therefore will have different specific needs. There are basic needs common to everyone and this book will give you the knowledge to meet your basic nutrient needs. In addition, the more you learn about different nutrients the better you can help your body meet its individual needs. The best medicine is the knowledge of how to recognize your unique needs and meet them. WHY DIETS FAIL (1) Diets at their core are designed to deprive our bodies of calories. Conventional thinking says that over-eating, or too many calories are what makes us fat and/or unhealthy in the first place. We just addressed the root causes of being unhealthy and overweight, so already you can begin to see that just cutting calories is not the solution. Your body is a giant battery and has fat stores in it. When you deprive it of the food energy it needs, yes, it will begin to burn fat for energy. The fat is converted to glucose (blood sugars) and then burned as the energy you need. However, this is a short-term fix. The second you cheat or break your diet (eat more calories) your body reacts by storing even more fat. You have confused it into thinking that you may starve yourself again and so the reaction is to put on even more weight to prepare for this possibility. You have probably heard this referred to as the “yo-yo effect.” That brings us to the next reason diets fail. They are temporary! No “diet” I have ever heard of can last forever. Additionally, we are hard wired to want variety. Boredom is a real human emotion and it relates to our food as well. Unless we grew up eating a very limited diet, and have never deviated from it, our senses desire variety. Given that, in any calorie cutting diet, there is not enough variety to keep us from cheating. Even if you have enough will power to make it to your “weight loss goal” most people go back to eating that diet, tasty with variety (and unhealthy foods) and just put the weight back on for the previously talked about reasons. If you are always worried about what you can and can’t eat, that makes the diet harder to stick to. Education is the key to any kind of progress in life. That’s why this book is going to make it simple to know what you should and shouldn’t eat, and make it easy to have those foods around at all times! I would like to take a moment to address nutrition education. This is often why many other “diet” plans fail. The participant is none the wiser to how their body works. They are just following a specific plan of caloric deficiency with no idea how it’s actually affecting them inside. You may have heard or read horror stories of people going vegetarian or vegan and getting really sick or their teeth falling out etc... Some of these stories may be true, BUT the fact is that you don’t get sick and your teeth certainly don’t fall out if you are getting the proper nutrients. With other diets, you’re hungry, your breath stinks, you get constipated etc... The Winter Wellness Diet is different because it addresses all of your body’s nutrient needs. This allows your body to detoxify, repair and have tons of energy in the long run. Diets in the conventional sense are expensive. Buying specific food, drinks and supplements at the start often has a big impact on a budget. I did a review of the new Zone 1-2-3 diet last year and products ran upwards of $700 per month! That’s in addition to the regular food you buy at the store (or farmer’s market if you’re going green). $700 is either enough to keep most people away from dieting, cause them to quit sooner, or get really mad when they “yo-yo” back to their original weight or more and feel like they wasted their money. Now, I can honestly say that I have never experienced this feeling because of my weight, but depression can be a big deterrent to starting a diet. (25) First of all on a physiological level, if your body is deprived of the correct nutrients, depression can be a predictable result. (22) There are many nutrition therapies for depression as it has been found that many causes of depression come from hormonal imbalances in the body. Basically, the brain doesn’t get enough nutrients to operate properly and ends up not producing the correct hormones in the correct amounts. (3) CBS reported on this in 2004 and nutrition therapy for depression gets more popular every year. Depression can absolutely be a huge obstacle. Maybe you think that if people find out you’re on a diet they will judge you. Well, I’ve got news for you, if you are unhealthy, overweight or both people are judging you anyway. But I say, WHO CARES! Even if the world thinks there is no way you’ll succeed with this diet, this time, all you have to do is prove them wrong once. Am I right? You’re not making this choice to lose weight or get healthy for anyone else but yourself. Let’s do this, you and I, together. WHY THE “WINTER” WELLNESS DIET (WWD)? Let’s get away from philosophy and talk some tactics for a minute. Traditionally, winter time is when we stay inside with the heater, fireplace, lot’s of blankets, cats on our lap, and any other warm situation you can think of. Even though I live in Orange County, California I still get cold in the winter, it’s all relative. Chicago residents I am sure will beg to differ and yes, you have a point. Keep in mind you can’t use the cold to fire up your metabolism if you get frost bite. I am introducing a whole new idea for a diet based on one of the oldest traditional North American cultures, the Inuit eskimos. This is not the Inuit diet though. That is a diet fad that some people follow eating high fat, high protein “Inuit style” food because Inuits are generally regarded as long-lived and disease free. However, there are many shortfalls to this diet and many obstacles that people don’t even think about. The Inuits eat a lot of their diet raw. They eat raw livers and other organs along with drinking seal blood. You know why they do this? To get the proper nutrients so they can stay alive. Vitamin C which is an important part of the WWD is generally hard to come by with the Inuit diet. Without fresh fruits and vegetables, Vitamin C is only available by eating the raw organs of freshly killed animals and drinking their blood. Feel like doing that? Yea, me neither. (4) Plus, the Inuits don’t actually live for any amazing amount of time. Average life expectancy ranges from 60-80 years which is nothing special. Ok, but why bring up the Inuit diet? Here’s the deal. They live in the Arctic. It’s cold up there and they need to stay warm. Humans (mammals) are warm-blooded and therefore we have to stay at or around 98.7 degrees or we will have some serious issues. When it’s hot, we sweat to cool down. When it’s cold, we burn extra calories that are converted to heat energy to warm us up. This is the premise for the WWD. The Inuit eat upwards of 6000 calories per day in the Winter! Yes, that’s how many calories it can take to keep them warm enough to avoid hypothermia. Keep in mind that they also wear furs, coats, and have some modern heating amenities. So no, you won’t be trying to freeze yourself. The only way to consume 6000 calories a day is to eat a LOT of fat. Since the traditional Inuit diet is rich in protein and fat, some of the protein and most of the fat is converted to glucose in the liver for energy because your cells use the glucose as energy. Let’s take a second very briefly to talk about how the body converts food to energy. This is a brief lesson, although important, it is not a lesson in molecular biology. ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is the primary energy that our cells burn for fuel. Mitochondria in the cells generally take glucose (blood sugar) to make this fuel our cells need to operate. However, when we run low on glucose, our body uses two other sources to make ATP. Protein can be converted by the liver into glucose. This happens when we consume more protein than our body needs to use OR when we really need glucose and our body takes protein from our muscles and converts it. The second way is that our body converts our fat stores and converts them into glycerol and other fatty acids which the mitochondria can convert into ATP. I know the science of it isn’t all that fun to read about, but it’s important to understand when considering “diets” and how they work. Many fad diets out there suggest that you cut out the carbs and just eat protein. The reasoning behind this is that your liver can convert the extra protein to glucose (as explained above) to power your cells. In addition when the protein runs out, then your body will burn fat for the same process. This is called glucogenesis and it is a survival mechanism, not a means for everyday functioning. What an awesome scenario right? I mean if you’re trying to lose weight, by eating a really high protein diet you can burn off your fat. WRONG. See the problem is that meat and fat don’t have the vitamins and minerals that your body truly needs. Burning protein and fat for energy is a short sighted idea for losing weight. It has nothing to do with getting healthy, AND as previously stated the second you go off the diet, your body will most likely “yo-yo” back. Taking vitamins and other supplements don’t solve the problem as I will explain later in the micro-nutrients section. HOW DOES THE COLD TURN UP OUR METABOLISM? Now that you have a little more information than the average person about why these other diets don’t work, let me finish the reason why the WWD can work for you. When the weather cools down in the fall and gets cold in the winter our biological need to stay warm kicks in. If the Inuit need 6000 calories a day just to stay warm and stay alive, then you and I living with relative modern comforts can use that knowledge to our advantage. Like I said, the only way to get 6000 calories is to eat a lot of fat because it has twice the amount of calories of protein or carbs. So here is how the WWD works: We are going to cut your fat intake drastically this fall and winter. We are going to go on a diet that is high in the nutrients your body needs, vitamins, minerals, carbs, protein and cut your fat intake down to only supplying your basic need. When it gets cold your body kicks in that natural instinct to burn more calories. To stay warm it will start accessing those fat stores and melt them away! There is only one way to gain weight: you consume more calories than your body uses. There is only one way to lose weight: you consume less calories than your body needs. This winter we are going to consume more nutrients (but less calories) than your body has ever gotten before while letting that metabolism fire up and burn off all those extra pounds of fat. Your body need nutrients to survive and thrive, not calories. Unfortunately the modern climate of large food companies and supplement companies all trying to sell more product have been able to infiltrate our government systems and influence policies. The modern food pyramid is a load of crap. The modern recommendations for percentages are crap. 40% carbs, 30% protein and 30% fat. Folks, we need to put back on our “common sense” hat and stop blindly following the advice of the people that want to sell us stuff. That’s what this diet is all about, common sense thinking outside the box for the healthiest you yet. I will break down the details of the essential nutrients we need for our bodies to be healthy and start to drop weight in just a little bit. Keep reading. CHANGING OUR DIET IS ONLY HALF THE BATTLE The WWD is all about getting healthy from the inside out which results in weight loss, more energy and an overall feeling of vitality. You can absolutely lose weight by simply changing your diet and giving your body the nutrients it has been starving for your whole life. I have worked with many people, overweight their whole lives, who lost weight simply by changing the way they eat. I’m not talking about going on a diet. I’m talking about lifestyle changes that result in eating different food for the rest of your life. Changing your diet doesn’t involve never eating your favorite foods again. Changing your diet means that you take a step back and assess where you get your calories from. If your typical diet has been 40% carbs, 30% fat and 30% protein like a typical American diet resembles, I doubt that you are reading this book looking and feeling the best you’ve ever been. Here is the new look percentages that we are going to focus on. 65-70% carbs, 20-25% protein and 10-15% fat. Digest those numbers because they are going to be your north star, your compass, what guides you for the next few months. A simple change in mindset is all it will take. Let me explain briefly how I came to those numbers and why it’s important to you. If you want to be the best basketball player and could have anyone be your coach, would you choose Michael Jordan or the guy who sat the bench and never scored a point? If you want to be the best cyclist do you talk to Lance Armstrong or your neighbor who occasionally goes for a weekend ride? If you want to be the richest person in the world do you talk to Bill Gates or the person working at the drive through? The same goes for health. If you want to be the healthiest and fittest you’ve ever been, do you take advice from the healthiest, fittest, disease free, longest-living cultures or the American society that has the highest cancer rates, the most obese and unhealthiest population in the world? Well, it just so happens that there have been studies published and books written on the healthiest, longest-living, (almost) disease-free societies in the world. I have read as many of these studies and books as I can get my hands on and a select few have really shaped my view of how to be truly healthy. (5,6) The top 2 that I connect with are T Colin Campbell’s ,“The China Study” and John Robbin’s, “Healthy at 100.” The China Study was a: “research project culminated in a 20-year partnership of Cornell University, Oxford University, and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, a survey of diseases and lifestyle factors in rural China and Taiwan. More commonly known as the China Study, "this project eventually produced more than 8000 statistically significant associations between various dietary factors and disease." The findings? "People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease ... People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease. These results could not be ignored," said Dr. Campbell.” As for Healthy at 100, John Robbins writes about 4 cultures with the longest life spans on earth: “Bringing the traditions of these ancient and vibrantly healthy cultures together with the latest breakthroughs in medical science, Robbins reveals that, remarkably, they both point in the same direction. The result is an inspirational synthesis of years of research into healthy aging in which Robbins has isolated the characteristics that will enable us to live long — and most important — joyous lives.” I am not a scientist who has devoted my life’s work to researching statistically significant findings or an anthropologist who discovers the secrets of other cultures. No, I am a person who is passionate about living the longest, healthiest, disease-free and joyful life that I possibly can. I ask Michael Jordan to be my basketball coach, Lance Armstrong to teach me how to ride and 1 billion people in China to provide me with evidence on what type of diet I should be eating. That’s how I came to believe that a diet high in fiber-rich, plant based foods and low in fat can help me lead the life of my dreams and have the energy and longevity to share it with others! Like I said, diet is only half the battle though... EFFICIENT EXERCISE IS THE OTHER HALF OF THE BATTLE Many of the rural cultures described in, “Healthy at 100” naturally work exercise into their lives. They live in areas where getting a whole body workout is just part of living an everyday life. Going to the gym isn’t necessary because they are lifting, hiking, pushing, pulling and working all day long. For you and I who live in suburbia, chances are that our daily routine involves less strenuous activities. Therefore, going to the gym or finding a way to exercise is not just important, but essential to our overall health and well being. Exercising is not just about burning calories and raising our metabolism. It’s important, but there are other critical reasons to exercise and get plenty of physical activity. For weight loss, exercising to burn calories and raise our metabolism is essential. When it comes to getting healthy though, it’s crucial you understand how that exercising is affecting you inside your body. Raising our heart rate pumps blood around our body and increases the circulation. Blood carries oxygen which is vitally important to every cell in our body. So the more we get our blood pumping, the better our circulation is and the more cells in our body get the amount of oxygen they need to operate efficiently. Generally our blood pressure comes down which means the most important muscle in our body, our heart, doesn’t have to work as hard to circulate the blood. Knowing that, now we can talk about exercising more effectively in order to circulate that blood around better. Blood (and oxygen) goes to the muscles that are working the hardest. Just hopping on the elliptical (called precor sometimes) machine at the gym is better than nothing, but it doesn’t really stress our muscles for maximum benefit. I believe these types of machines are part of a great warm up. They get our hearts pumping and blood starting to flow. To lose more weight we need to burn more calories. Since we don’t want to spend all day in the gym I’ll give you some philosophies to consider for the most efficient workout (most calories burned for the time spent). For short bursts of energy our muscles typically use ATP derived from glucose (carbs) already present in our cells. The endurance muscles that are used for longer, cardio workouts are accessing our fat stores and burning those for energy. It all has to do with the types of activity you are doing and the oxygen that is present at the time. I’ll leave it to the author of a different book to explain that to you if you’re truly interested. For now what I am suggesting with the WWD is to exercise in such a way that you keep your heart pumping hard the whole time. Work in weights so you are using multiple muscles and burning energy in multiple ways which increases the efficiency of your workouts. *A good warm up is important to get your body in calorie burning mode, but it also helps prevent injury. If you hurt yourself and can’t work out, you aren’t losing weight or getting healthier. I have seen this time after time, someone gets all motivated to work out and lose weight and OUCH, an injury, and they can’t work out for weeks. *Weights (dumbbells) can help you work more muscles and in different ways to burn more energy *Switching exercises throughout your workout will work different muscles, resulting in better blood flow and circulation throughout your body with more calories burned. *Keeping breaks to a minimum to drink water or quickly catch your breath will help maximize the time you are working your muscles THE SECRET THIRD HALF OF THE BATTLE FOR HEALTH Yes, I know that’s an oxymoron, but there is another important step to getting healthy and losing weight. The third step is what holds a lot of people back from achieving real changes. We need to eliminate the toxins from our bodies. Sounds simple right? You may ask, “Isn’t that why I am exercising and changing my diet? To eliminate those toxins from my body?” Yes. It’s important to consider how the process works. Remember why we tend to yo-yo around on conventional diets? Our body doesn’t trust us. It thinks that we are going to starve it again (in the sense of a calorie restricted diet) and so puts on as much weight as it can to prepare for the next diet you try. See, when you change your diet and start giving your body what it truly wants nutritionally, that’s when it can finally start to get comfortable. Your body starts to trust that you will continue to give it the nutrients it needs to operate. This doesn’t necessarily happen overnight, but it can fairly quickly. When this happens we need to guard that trust with our lives. Our ability to get and stay healthy depends on our body’s ability to trust us. Seriously. However, be prepared for what will happen if you are unhealthy, malnourished, overweight or all the above. TOXINS. We throw that word around so much in our society that it becomes comfortable. Well, get ready to get uncomfortable. When our bodies detoxify, it can be very uncomfortable. Keep in mind this is a good thing in the long run. When asked: Would you rather have toxins in your body or out? What is your response? How and why does the detox work though? Your body has been craving more nutrients your whole life. When you start to feed it those on a consistent basis, it will start to get rid of some of that excessive weight. Just like the metaphor about getting another job for more money. If you get a raise at your first job, then you may not need that third job for the extra money. If you do really well and get a promotion and another raise, then you may not need job number two anymore either. Get it? If nutrients are money and eating is your job, the more nutrients/money you have, the less you need to eat/work. If you start giving your body more nutrients, it can start dropping that extra weight. It generally increases your metabolism to burn the fat away, or actually just releases the fat altogether and you poop it out. Back to toxins. Fatty tissue is where most of the toxins in your body are stored. Your body doesn’t use fat as much because it runs on carbohydrates and so fat cells are the perfect place to store the excess toxins. When you start eating better food and exercising more, now your body wants to access those fat stores either for energy or to eliminate them. Well, this releases those toxins back into your blood. When this is happening on a large scale all over your body, you will feel sick. Also, you may get headaches, feel nauseous, get acne (or acne may get worse if you already have it), metallic taste in the mouth (from eliminating toxic heavy metal stores), body odor and more! Oh yes, it will be fun. Just remember to ask yourself the question: Would I rather have toxins inside me our out? Clean blood and a healthy liver. These are the two most important things to getting healthy, losing weight and living a long life that is free of sickness and disease. With the traditional Western diet, these two organs are literally put through the ringer. We overwork them to the point of exhaustion cleaning out chemicals from our food, processing excess hormones and too many animal proteins. When the liver and kidneys are over-worked, the excess load of toxic chemicals and heavy metals in our blood are stored in our fat and other fatty tissues (ironically, like the kidneys and liver). Detoxifying is your body trying to finally rid itself of these foreign substances. The only way to do this is put them in your blood stream to get them out. So be ready. Everyone is different so don’t anticipate exactly what will happen, just know that when it does, it is for the best. LOTS OF WATER