Book Excerpt: Sexy Forever

PART I
What’s Making — and Keeping — Us Fat?

THE TOXIC CONNECTION: THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM
For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.
—RACHEL CARSON, SILENT SPRING

EXPERTS WEIGH IN: WHAT ARE YOU UNKNOWINGLY TAKING IN?
Most of us are aware of toxins to which we are exposed in our food, water, and air; however, we are also surrounded by hidden ones. I asked Brenda Watson, author of The Detox Strategy, where else we are unknowingly taking them in. Her answer will shock you: Let’s begin with your bed. There are several ingredients that your body absorbs while you sleep, including toluene, a chemical linked to birth defects and emitted from the polyurethane foam that makes your bed so comfy, and perfluorooctanoic acid, a chemical that makes fabrics stain resistant but which is a hormone disruptor linked to ADHD in children.

Keep reading…

Then there are fire-retardant chemicals, some linked to learning disabilities and thyroid dysfunction, and some, like antimony, linked to heart and lung problems. As of July 1, 2007, all mattresses manufactured or imported into the United States must be treated with these fi re-retardant chemicals. How about your carpet? Most likely it is synthetic and full of these same stain- and fire-resistant chemicals. When you brush your teeth, you know that warning label that says to keep your toothpaste out of reach of children under the age of six? Well, this label exists because your toothpaste exposes you to sodium fluoride, which is linked to enzyme disruption and thyroid problems. Also in your toothpaste may be sodium lauryl sulfate, which is linked to organ and reproductive toxicity, and triclosan, an antibacterial agent that’s registered as a pesticide with the EPA and is linked to organ toxicity and possibly cancer. Most mouthwash contains formaldehyde and ammonia, several flavoring and coloring chemicals, as well as some chemicals that have leached from the plastic in the bottle. It’s a huge problem, and difficult to minimize.

Depending on the type of shampoo and soaps you are using, you expose yourself to coloring agents, dyes, artificial preservatives, and propylene glycol, a suspected carcinogen. Most antiperspirants contain aluminum zirconium, which is toxic to the nervous and reproductive systems; a chemical called BHT, believed to be a hormone disruptor and neurotoxin; other chemicals that give the products their distinctive
smell; and then there is more of that propylene glycol, linked to irritation and immune system toxicity.

If you dry-clean your clothes, you’re exposed to a plethora of chemicals, including perchloroethylene (PCE), a chemical believed to be capable of causing cancer, especially in the liver and kidneys. It is also shown to affect developing fetuses. Even if you don’t get your clothes dry-cleaned, what about synthetic fibers in your clothing (think polyester), which may be giving off small molecules of plasticizer fumes?

It goes on and on. It’s in your makeup, cosmetics, hair spray (its ingredients can affect your nervous, reproductive, and immune systems), hair gel, mousse, and cream conditioner, which are equally toxic.

How did it get like this? How did our beautiful planet become so contaminated?
Our waters no longer run clean, our precious air is polluted, and oil has gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, contaminating our shores and our seafood. Chemicals are everywhere—in our homes, in our offices, in our gardens, and most unfortunately, in our bodies. And this toxicity is making us very unhealthy and very fat.

Remember this: you must be healthy to lose weight!

First, let’s examine what the word toxin means. A toxin is a poisonous substance; it’s taken from the Greek word toxikon, which means “arrow poison.”

For our purposes, there are two types of toxins: environmental and internal. Environmental toxins include household chemicals, industrial pollutants, food additives, and pesticides. Internal toxins consist of waste products created by normal metabolic processes within the body. These toxins are produced as a result of our digestive system breaking down proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

We are bombarded with external toxins: car exhaust, paint fumes, industrial solvents, plasticizers, household cleaning products. Every breath we take is laden with tiny amounts of pollutants and poisons. I was hugging my little granddaughter the other day and I said, “You always smell so clean and fresh,” but then I realized her clean clothes smelled like the laundry detergent and fabric softener her mom used, the same ones I had been using for so many years.

I used to spray my house with aerosol room fresheners and clean with foaming chemical cleansers; I used hair spray and tanning lotions and cosmetics laden with chemicals. We have all grown accustomed to the daily conveniences of modern life, but we don’t make the connection between these and our unexplained weight gain and ailments. How about that new-car smell? You got it—it’s a chemical. And it’s making you fat.

Kids are now born with this crazy toxic burden, which is a tragedy. The researchers at the Environmental Working Group (EWG) examined the cord blood, which circulates between a baby and its mother’s placenta, of infants born in U.S. hospitals to study how many toxins are passed on.

The results were startling: the EWG found that newborns begin their lives with exposure to as many as 287 of the 413 toxic chemicals being studied. A range of between 154 and 231 toxins were found per baby, and 101 toxins were found in all of the babies. The 287 toxins included 180 chemical compounds that have been shown to cause cancer in either animals or humans.

Once we’re born, we go on to accumulate tiny traces of poison every day. We have pollutants in the air we breathe both indoors and out, our food, our water, our soil, our backyards and gardens. Ever wonder how come you never see a bug in a grocery store? Ever wonder why you don’t see insects or rodents in hotels, even with all the room service trays left around? Hmmmm . . . must be the chemical spray. Yes, supermarkets, hotels, and most places of business are routinely sprayed with pesticides, so that we never have to endure the sight of those little critters. But at what cost to our health?

We spray weed killers like Round-Up as if they were some miracle. According to Dr. Russell Blaylock, renowned neuroscientist and one of my dear friends, “The ‘miracle’ is that there is an 800 percent increased risk of multiple myeloma [a cancer of the white blood cells] connected with users of Round-Up.” In Los Angeles, Department of Recreation and Parks trucks proudly state on the sides, “We use Round-Up!” They are spraying it everywhere, and we are breathing it, walking through it, sitting on green lawns covered in it, playing in it, and worst of all, contaminating our food with it.

According to Brenda Watson in her book The Detox Strategy, “Our diets and health are unfortunately largely controlled by three giant sectors and driving forces of the economy: food and agricultural corporations, including processed food giants; pharmaceutical companies; and the chemical and manufacturing industry, which aims to create unnaturally occurring products that may be superior in some ways to naturally occurring ones, yet incredibly harmful to humans in other ways. Because these three sectors are huge economic generators we are led to believe their activities are okay, that processed and chemically altered or modified foods and agriculture, as well as chemically engineered goods and drugs, are actually better than what nature would provide. But this is far from the truth. They may be better in the sense that they make our lives easier, but the cost is exposure to potentially harmful substances.”

There are many of us saying the same thing. We are noticing what has happened. We are noticing that business is in control of our environment, our food, and our health. But the majority of the population is in a fog. In this case, ignorance is not bliss. And wearing blinders to the dangers of toxicity is to invite disease, obesity, and a shortened life.

Let’s talk about some of the areas where ignorance is leading us to dangerous
grounds. Take fluoride. How did its widespread use come about? Fluoride is a huge problem for humans despite what the American Dental Association (ADA) has to say about it. It’s crucial to install reverse osmosis filters on all your faucets, including in showers and bathtubs, for protection, but fluoride eats away at the filters, so they must be changed every three months. If fluoride does that to a filter in three months, imagine what it is doing inside your body! “You have to understand it’s all a payoff system,” says Dr. Russell Blaylock. “Fluoride is a waste product. Communities keep trying to refuse it, and they come back every year and try again. They offer cities contracts, government contracts, and dangle the possibility that they are going to do a big project if this community agrees to fluoridate the water supply.

“Fluoride is one of the most poisonous substances on earth. It tends to accumulate in the body, particularly in the bones, thyroid gland, and brain. It lowers IQ. It’s associated with Down syndrome, and it triggers toxicity in the human body. But the people who are promoting it (primarily the government and the ADA) have so much influence through the media that you really can’t get the truth out. People are just not aware how enormously toxic fluoride is, particularly when combined with aluminum. When you mix them together, which is what happens in drinking water, they combine chemically and form a substance that acts as a false transmitter for what are called G protein receptors in brain cells, as well as other cells, and wreak all kinds of havoc. We also find that some tumor cells have these G-type receptors, some of which are glutamate (chemical) receptors, and that fluoride activates them.” So this connects to the findings that fluoride increases cancer growth and cancer mortality. Plus, its toxicity to your body makes you fat. Imagine—you can get fat from your drinking water.

PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) are another major source of our toxic burden and need to be eliminated from our bodies. PCBs are highly toxic chemicals found in adults and also in the cord blood of newborns! PCBs were originally manufactured for use as coolants in electrical transformers, and then they went on to serve many other industrial uses. Because they were found to be so toxic and dangerous to our health, PCBs have been banned worldwide since the 1970s. Yet they are so persistent in the environment that they are still found in fish, animals, and people. For example, they are found in cattle feed, which then makes its way into the cow, then into the milk and meat, and ultimately into human stomachs. Stay with me. Solutions are on the way, but having knowledge is vital!

In global samplings of butter, the highest levels of PCBs have been found in butter made in Europe and North America.

WHAT ABOUT PLASTICS?
For the sake of convenience we have enjoyed the ease and convenience of nonstick pots and pans, and we have untold ways of using plastic in the kitchen, from soft sandwich bags to hard storage containers and bottles. These conveniences make modern life much easier than it once was, but again, at what cost to our health?

Bisphenol A (BPA) is an ingredient used to make a wide variety of plastic goods and to line metal food and drink cans (that’s why those canned products slip so easily out of the can). The convenience is hardly worth this toxin, which is associated with birth defects of the male and female reproductive systems. What is troubling is that BPA is unregulated, allowed in unlimited amounts in consumer products, drinking water, and food.

Our Teflon-coated pots and pans have been touted as the nonstick miracle, but unfortunately the toxins from Teflon stay forever in the environment and in your body. When Teflon is heated, the chemicals emitted into the air will kill some birds if they are in the same room. What do you suppose this off-gassing is doing to us?

Aluminum also has been linked to Alzheimer’s, as it is a powerful neurotoxin that damages brain cells. Yet it is found in a number of our everyday products, including the vaccines given regularly to children. Almost all water and food contain some form of aluminum, as it is used by municipal water supplies as a flocculating agent to remove dirt. It is also widely used in food processing, foil and utensils, antiperspirants, paints, cosmetics, and baking powders as well as over-the-counter painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, antacids, and douche preparations (ouch!).

Look in your kitchen right now and see how many of these products you use on a daily basis. You will start to see the enormous size of the toxic burden we are all carrying in our bodies, residing in our fat. Think of your most-stuffed storage closet. What do you do when you can’t fit any more in it? You enlarge the closet to hold all the contents. That’s what is happening to you. The more toxins you take in, the more fat is required to store them.

TOXIC OVERLOAD
A little knowledge (which is what we call ignorance) is, in fact, a dangerous thing. Almost everyone, at least in the industrialized world, knows that drinking water from a filthy pond or polluted lake can cause life-threatening diarrhea, but still only a few realize that holding on to resentment, anger, and fear, or eating fast foods, chemical additives, and artificial sweeteners, is no less dangerous than drinking polluted water; it may just take a little longer to kill a person than a tiny
amoeba can.
—ANDREAS MORITZ

Major ailments are now so commonplace that we pay little attention to
how widespread they have become: asthma, diabetes, fibromyalgia, infertility,
Parkinson’s disease, bone cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma, as well as autoimmune diseases such as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and Hashimoto’s
thyroiditis.

Toxin-induced sicknesses are growing like weeds. Yet we haven’t connected the dots. Toxins make us fat and make us sick, and are the missing piece to the puzzle of why we can’t lose weight and why we feel so lousy. Where is the tipping point? What chemical, what fume, what pesticide, what toxin is the one that puts you over the top? Obesity rates have more than doubled in the past thirty years. Doesn’t it raise the question of why? Toxins make you fat. It’s that simple, and that complex. Here’s why. Mitochondria are the little powerhouses inside every living cell in your body. They provide power for your cells by creating energy from fats and sugars, thereby driving your metabolism and fueling your whole body. When toxins enter your body the buildup damages the mitochondria, your cellular power plants, so they no longer work effectively. As a result, fats and sugars that aren’t being burned for fuel pile up all over the body in the form of extra pounds. Also, without the mitochondria working optimally, you lose your physical energy. You see it every day—middle-aged people who are out of gas, have no energy, always feel sluggish. Is that you? If so, you probably don’t have the energy to exercise, and this fatigue causes food cravings, usually for sugar and carbohydrates. So now there’s a domino effect—but you are the one getting knocked down, while you get fatter and fatter.

Every one of us is living in a toxic world.

We are under the greatest environmental assault in the history of mankind. Toxins are everywhere; they’re in our homes, our offices, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we consume, the cosmetics and creams we put on our bodies. Just by living in this day and age we build up a toxic load. These toxins move throughout the bloodstream alongside the nutrients, the oxygen and other essentials, our bodies need. These man-made chemicals, originally designed to help us live better lives, were never intended to be inside of us. At some point these toxins reach critical mass in our bodies, and then we’re in trouble. What microwaved food covered in plastic, or diet soda, or trans-fat-laden fast-food burger, or pesticide will be the tipping point to toxic overload and an entrée to disease and obesity?

BEAST OF BURDEN
Americans’ average toxic burden is higher than it’s ever been. And the obesity rate in this country is off the charts. So connect the dots. It’s not a coincidence. Scientific studies show a strong correlation between levels of toxic burden, higher body weight, and the risk of diabetes. Yet not all people who carry a toxic burden are fat. Some people are better at fighting back, but this toxic load will surface in ways other than obesity: fatigue, autoimmune diseases such as lupus or fibromyalgia, cancer, allergies, and food intolerances to wheat, gluten, dairy, and sugar.

Toxic overload comes on slowly, one day at a time, one year at a time, with the symptoms creeping up and getting worse and worse. It starts with relatively benign things like exhaustion, and then more serious conditions erupt such as asthma, gut disturbances, food intolerances, depression, arthritis, heart disease, cancer, Parkinson’s, and diabetes. These are all terrible conditions and diseases that are debilitating to the human body.

NOWHERE TO RUN
No matter how the toxins get into our bodies, whether through the lungs, stomach, or skin, they all meet the liver at some point and from there get sent to the kidneys and colon for elimination, become trapped in bones, muscles, tissues, or other organs, or they get locked in the liver itself, or they get stored away in fat cells!

The fact that many toxins get trapped in fat cells deserves special attention.
Fat cells don’t get broken down easily, so the toxins literally weigh the body down. If you carry excess fat, burning up that fat releases toxins into the bloodstream for proper removal. As toxins accumulate, they act in unsuspected ways. You begin to experience health problems like allergies, colds, migraines, and infertility, or major diseases like breast cancer and dementia.

Avoiding fat-soluble toxins sounds like a solution, but it is very difficult to do. We are constantly exposed to fat-soluble toxic chemicals used as solvents, glues, paints, or cleaning products. Toluene and benzene are solvents (meaning they are capable of dissolving other substances) that we typically encounter in daily life when we pump gas, shop for clothes, buy a new car, or pick up the dry cleaning.

These fat-soluble chemicals collect in the fatty tissues of the body rather than being excreted quickly. They are particularly damaging to people who are deficient in nutrients called essential fatty acids, because a body deprived of essential fats is a body that will grab on to most any oily substances, even toxic substances like diesel fuel! These compounds can cause liver and kidney damage as well as skin irritation. This information is depressing, right? I know I sound like doom and gloom in contrast to my usual optimistic self. Stay with me. Solutions are coming, but first, know thy enemy.

It is clear that daily exposure to toxins makes us ill. Some people will develop conditions sooner than others, but if you do not change your diet and lifestyle, toxicity will most likely affect you at some point. But there is another dimension to the definition of what is a toxin that is frequently overlooked. And substances you wouldn’t normally view as toxic or poisonous absolutely can be: pharmaceutical drugs, excessive caffeine, even alcohol. I point this out so you don’t deceive yourself that things like over-the-counter painkillers and tequila are good for you. They are instead toxic to our system; they are foreign substances to the body, especially your liver, which has to process all of them. A cup of coffee a day and the occasional glass of red wine or tequila shooter can be handled by the body if the toxic burden you are carrying is under control. We are going to learn how to reduce this burden on your body so that these pleasures can be enjoyed.

DETOX FOR HEALTH
Detoxification is a constant bodily process. We are continually eliminating
toxins through our digestive, urinary, skin, circulatory, respiratory,
and lymphatic systems. Nature is wondrous and has thought it all out for us. These systems are brilliant, but sad to say, these marvelous systems are being taxed to the point of near uselessness by the chemical onslaught of today’s world. We regularly consume poor-quality food contaminated by pesticides and animal proteins that have been injected with chemicals such as antibiotics and growth hormones. As a result, people today are sick and fat, with detoxification systems that just are not able to cope.

The word detoxification also relates to the treatments employed to help support the function of these natural detoxification channels. In this sense detoxification is about taking an active role in stimulating your body’s innate ability to cleanse itself.

Most people think of colon cleansing as the only way to detoxify, but this is a very narrow view. Detoxing is not about taking a laxative and going on with your poor diet and lifestyle habits. It’s about doing internal cleanses on a regular basis, changing your diet to healthy, nonpoisonous (organic) food, using fresh herbs and spices as natural antioxidants, and switching out household cleaners to green nontoxic ones. The more you reduce your toxic burden, the faster you will experience improved health and a thinner body. Toxins are very difficult to eliminate, and you have to make a concerted effort to reduce your personal toxic burden if you are to have true hope for success.

WHY A HEALTHY LIVER IS KEY TO LOSING WEIGHT
Body fat accumulation, especially around the midsection, suggests that your liver is not functioning as efficiently as it could. Detoxification is the way to a healthy liver—and a slim waistline. When your liver works efficiently, it’s much easier to lose weight. If your liver gets overloaded, increased levels of toxins will be circulating in your blood, and those toxins can damage your organs and glands and interfere with their ability to function properly. Toxicity confuses your body and creates poor health. As a result, you cannot metabolize well, you will have no energy, you will not absorb nutrients essential to life, and you won’t be able to fight disease. If your liver is sluggish and bile production is insufficient, instead of breaking down fat and processing it your liver stores it away, usually in a big spare tire around your middle. Constant stress on the liver interferes with both bile production and detoxification, leading to stress, fatigue, weight gain, and toxic buildup inside your body.

So what puts extra stress on your liver and interferes with your liver’s ability to efficiently detoxify? Here is a list of just a few of the most common culprits:

• Sugar and artificial sweeteners.
• Trans-fatty acids (found in partially hydrogenated oils). Partial hydrogenation of vegetable oil is a process that turns healthy oils into essentially “plastic” oil and creates killer trans-fatty acids.
• Most over-the-counter pain relievers and practically all prescription drugs, including blood pressure medications and cholesterol lowering drugs.
• Regular alcohol consumption. Two servings (preferably of red wine) a couple of times a week is fine; more than that becomes toxic to your system. Look for organic wine as a best choice, sold at stores like Whole Foods.
• Constipation. If the colon is backed up, the liver dumps the toxins into the cells and the toxins build up in the body. Regular colonics, enemas, or coffee enemas are good ways of irrigating the colon and cleaning out constipation.

Therefore, if during any given day you put artificial sweetener in your coffee, eat at a fast-food restaurant, take an Advil, pop down your daily Lipitor prescription, and are constipated from toxins and lack of exercise, then accept that you have totally messed with the natural function of your liver, your vital detoxification organ. Most Americans are doing this on a daily basis. And we wonder why we are sick and fat!

When you couple your toxic burden with hormonal imbalance, the combination is a setup for weight gain and disease.

If you are overweight, you are not healthy. If you are not hormonally balanced, you are not healthy.

If you consume, live with, breathe, or bathe in chemicals, you are not healthy, and that pretty much includes everyone on the planet. Not to worry. I have a plan for detoxing and losing weight.

WHAT ARE WE EATING?
Food is now nothing more than plastic for people’s mouth entertainment.
—DR. STEVEN NELSON

Family meals are a ritual of the past. Now instead, children graze or forage; but unlike previous hunter gatherers, they do not come up against a scarcity of food, but rather a surfeit of it. Nothing is easier for them than to overindulge, and the appetite grows with the feeding. Their tastes never develop beyond the most instantly gratifying types of food; sugary and fatty, and they eat like children for the rest of their lives.
—WALL STREET JOURNAL

We now know that chemicals are everywhere and that they are insidious. The toxic load they put on the body is awful, but there is another reason they impede weight loss. Here it is: our bodies crave nutrients, yet we eat foods and so-called diet foods that have no real nutritional value. This leaves us craving more and more of this bad food, and as a result we eat more and more chemicals and more and more preservatives. We ignorantly consume genetically modified foods, not realizing that these foods are void of nutrition and can lead to weight gain and disease.

No one knows the long-term dangers of these new engineered foods.

Why do we keep trying to out-think Mother Nature?

Look at corn and soy. They are some of the top genetically modified crops. You think you’re choosing a healthy alternative, but you’re not. All genetically modified (GM) soy contains fat, which is a great carrier of toxins. A high soy intake has been linked with lower thyroid function, so if you are switching to soy products for health and weight loss, it could actually be working against you.

Before we go further, it might help to know what I mean by genetically modified foods. These are foods that have been genetically altered to withstand spraying with pesticides or to introduce other new characteristics. In modifying the seed, we don’t know what other effects might result. Might the modification produce new toxins? Trigger allergies? Increase antibiotic resistance? In a recent study of rats fed a diet exclusively of genetically modified foods, all the rats developed organ damage, and many died.

In the movie Food Inc., writer Michael Pollan says, “The way we eat has changed more in the last fifty years than in the previous ten thousand. You go into the supermarket and you see pictures of farmers, the picket fence, the silo, the thirties farmhouse, and the green grass. It’s the spinning of this pastoral fantasy. The American supermarket has on average forty seven thousand products. There are no seasons in the American supermarket. Now there are tomatoes all year round, grown halfway around the world, sprayed with pesticides, picked when they were green, and ripened with ethylene gas.” It’s the same with strawberries, bananas . . . and the list goes on and on.

This is just the beginning. Until recently we just didn’t think about things like pesticides and ethylene gas. How are these new chemicals affecting our health? We are now engineering our foods so that they don’t go bad in the refrigerator or become rancid as quickly. But at what price to us?

Corn is the main ingredient in feed for chicken, hogs, and cattle. It’s cheap. In the United States today, 30 percent of our agricultural land base is being planted with corn, largely driven by government policy. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) can be found in virtually everything, and since its introduction in the 1950s, it has been one of the main contributors to the incredible rise in diabetes here.

More smoke and mirrors:
The food industry is trying to change high-fructose corn syrup’s name to “corn sugar.” Be on the lookout; it’s the same bad stuff. According to Pollan, “Corn is the great raw material. You get that big fat kernel of starch and break it down and reassemble it.” This is how they make high-fructose corn syrup; it is also where we get maltodextrin, diglycerides, and many of the other unpronounceable ingredients in processed food that we’ve become so used to seeing. They are now part of everyday life. We have to understand how widespread this is to grasp the profound effect chemicals are having on our health and the rise in obesity. When you go to a supermarket, what looks like a cornucopia of choice is not. There is an illusion of diversity, but actually there are only a few large companies involved, and so much of our industrial food turns out to be clever rearrangements of corn.

Corn has conquered the world in a lot of ways. It is a remarkable plant, and land that used to produce 20 bushels of corn an acre can now produce 200 bushels an acre, which is an astonishing achievement for breeders (I wouldn’t call them farmers any longer). Chemical fertilizers also deserve credit, as do pesticides.

But again I ask: at what cost to us is this remarkable achievement? Disease and obesity are at all-time highs. A diet of high-fructose corn syrup and refined carbohydrates leads to spikes of insulin and gradually a wearing down of the system by which our body metabolizes sugar.

We’re now even feeding corn to fish. Whether we are eating farmed tilapia or salmon, we’re eating corn. Think about it—we are teaching fish to eat corn, and cattle have been retrained to go against their natural evolutionary inclinations to eat grass. Now we are feeding them corn to fatten them up cheaply. Yes, corn is high in starch and is fattening—very fattening—and our protein is being fed a diet of it. Then we are eating that animal, which fattens us up. Add to that the numerous products we all have on our pantry shelves loaded with corn derivatives, and you get the picture.

The industrial food system is always looking for greater efficiency, but many new steps in efficiency lead to problems. One result: feed corn to cattle and the dangerous E. coli O157:h7 bacterium hits the world stage. How does this happen? It’s their new diet of corn, which is not natural for cattle, giving them infections and making them less healthy (and since they are not getting the proper nutrients, we don’t either). Combine that with the overuse of antibiotics and the filth in feedlots where cattle stand ankle deep in their manure all day long, and it’s a recipe for disaster. When these feces-covered cattle are sent to the slaughterhouse, they are thrown on top of each other, and contaminated meat gets mixed up with non-contaminated meat. That’s how E. coli gets into our meat supply. Remember the poor little boy who died from E. coli–tainted meat from a Jack in the Box? This is the meat that ends up in fast-food restaurants, the food of choice for the majority of Americans.

Gone are the pastures with cows lazily grazing on natural green grass. Recently I drove up Highway 101 from southern California to Big Sur for one of my favorite vacations, a stay at the Post Ranch Inn. Along the way I was pleased and delighted to see gently rolling hills covered with beautiful green grass, where brown and white cows were happily grazing. In describing this pastoral scene to a supplier I work with, I proudly pointed out that I had been touched by this beautiful scene. What she said shocked me: “I know it looks perfect, but regrettably, this is not the end stage; this is just a temporary stop on their way to the feedlots. Most all American cows are sent to the feedlots, and once they get there, they are all shoved together with no room to move. Then they are force-fed corn to fatten them up. There’s more money in fat cows. It’s pretty difficult to find grass-fed cows in the United States anymore.”

Did you know that many countries ban American beef? According to CNN, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea have all banned U.S. beef imports at some time in the last decade.

Yet according to Michael Pollan, if you take cattle off their corn diet, within five days they will shed 80 percent of the dangerous strain of E. coli in their gut. But does the cattle industry do this? No. Instead they use ammonium hydroxide to try to kill it. Ammonia kills bacteria, but it doesn’t get to the root of the problem. The end result is more chemicals for us— plus the added bonus of more disease and more obesity.

Imagine.

We need nutrients for survival. To be healthy and thin, we need real food that has not been sprayed with poison or had its genes tinkered with. Unfortunately, genetically modified foods are not labeled as such in the United States. That is why organic food is the healthy choice—truly, the only real food choice.

Harmful foods have invaded our pantries without most of us ever realizing
that by consuming them we are playing a huge part in contributing to the epidemic of obesity and poor health. Think about the craziness of this. The world is on a low-fat craze, yet obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are at an all-time high! Obviously what we have been doing isn’t working. Low-fat foods, diet foods, and foods laden with chemicals are not the answer.

The body operates on nutrients. They are essential to life and health. You can’t be healthy if you are not getting the proper nutrients, which includes healthy oils. But things have gone so wrong in today’s world, and these changes are tragic for us.

Food is nowhere near as nutritious and nutrient-dense as it used to be. For instance, take apples. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, apples today have fewer minerals than apples grown in 1990. That means you have to eat more apples to get the same nutritional value your grandparents received from eating just one! This is only one example. Our fruits and vegetables are now largely grown in mineral depleted soil, so the nutrient content is dramatically reduced compared to before. Because of this, our bodies now require proper supplementation to get the needed minerals and vitamins.

Essential nutrients play a big role in everything about your health, including your ability to burn stored body fat and maintain a healthy weight. If you don’t get enough of the essential vitamins and minerals to enable your organs and glands to function properly, your health will suffer. Weight gain and degenerative disease are connected; a lack of nutrients combined with the slowdown of our metabolisms creates hormonal imbalance and sets our bodies up for disease. Unfortunately, not much attention is paid to mineral deficiency in orthodox medicine. Yet replacement helps to speed up the weight loss process, with the bonus of better health.

DRINKING IN OUR FAT
News flash: Artificial sweeteners make you fat! There is no such thing as “junk food,” only “junk diets”!
—DR. HELEN A. GUTHRIE

Ever wonder why people who walk around all day drinking diet sodas are not thin? The average diet soda addict drinks anywhere from a six-pack to a case of diet soda daily. Because diet sodas are made from chemicals, there are no nutrients for the body to extract, and this confuses the brain, whose job it is to look at all food as building blocks. When you drink diet soda, the brain finds nothing recognizable as nutrition to make healthy cells; as a result, the brain tries again and again to get fed, triggering cravings for more. When you are depleted because of toxicity, you tend to go for sugars and carbohydrates . . . or more diet sodas. This results in more and more chemicals and further activates cravings for foods that make you fat.

Diet sodas make you crave fattening foods.

I was appalled when the makers of soft drinks decided to oblige the First Lady’s campaign to end childhood obesity by banning sugared soft drinks from vending machines in schools. Why? Surely it’s great to get rid of the soda . . . except the sugared versions are being replaced by diet sodas! The chemicals in diet sodas have been directly linked to the worst kinds of brain tumors and are major contributors to obesity.

According to Dr. Russell Blaylock, “There is powerful evidence that MSG and other excitotoxic chemical food additives [such as the artificial sweetener aspartame] induce extreme obesity that lasts a lifetime (it’s related to a loss of leptin receptors in the hypothalamus). Recent studies have also shown that aspartame induces obesity in a number of people, probably for the same reason. The rise in childhood obesity is accompanied by a rise in metabolic syndrome, which is also produced by early life exposure to MSG and probably aspartame. Often forgotten is that soy contains high levels of glutamate and can trigger similar reactions as MSG. Because so many children have been exposed to high levels of MSG, as they age we see a large number of people from fifty on with uncontrollable obesity. The characteristic of this form of obesity is that it is very difficult to remove with dieting and is quite resistant to exercise. The astronomical rise in type 2 diabetes is in large part secondary to early MSG exposure, and when combined with the massive intake of HFCS [high-fructose corn syrup] and simple sugars, the rates go up even higher.
Stopping the excitotoxin exposure is vital for ending obesity and for the
sake of health for all people.”

According to J. J. Virgin in Six Weeks to Sleeveless and Sexy, “In a recent study, rats were given sugar water and then rat food. They ate what they needed to maintain their weight. Then the same rats were given artificially sweetened water, and again they ate what they needed to maintain their weight. The problem arose when the rats went back to drinking the sugar water, as they could no longer correlate the degree of sweetness with the amount of calories, so they overate.” When you eat sweet, you crave sweet. As this author points out, “If you are trying to retrain your taste buds to perceive a blueberry or an apple as delicious and sweet, it will be impossible to do so if you keep confusing your taste buds to think that artificially super-sweetened jam is the level of sweetness that sets the bar.” Again, not to worry. I will provide several natural sweetening solutions in the coming chapters.

In order for a product to be labeled “artificial sweetener,” it must contain chemicals— stay away from them!

MYTH: TOXINS ARE HARMLESS IN SMALL AMOUNTS
At this point in your life, your body is weighed down by a toxic burden and cannot handle any more chemicals. Fresh organic food is the best place to start healing, and in eating it you feed the little powerhouses (mitochondria) that fuel your weight loss and every vital system in your body. Say goodbye to the chemicals and poisons you have unconsciously taken in until now.

Unfortunately, we will never again be able to live an existence that is devoid of chemicals and toxins unless we move to the most remote part of the globe and eliminate all modern conveniences and technologies from our lives, and even then acid rain and chemical-laden clouds would likely be passing overhead. But don’t be overwhelmed. Simple changes add up, creating an internal environment predominantly made up of healthy cells rather than unhealthy cells. This new ratio will change your health, and as a result the pounds will drop away. Having a high ratio of healthy cells to malfunctioning cells is a key to beating the present unavoidable environmental assault. And it’s key to staying Sexy Forever.

We can get fat because of overeating and lack of exercise, but in middle age we now know there’s more to it. When we’re overweight we feel fatigued, but this fatigue and the accompanying fat are, as we have established, a result of environmental toxins. It’s the toxins that make it impossible for your body to absorb nutrients. When you don’t absorb nutrients, your body is essentially starving, which makes you hungry for more and more food. But the body can’t get what it needs because of this devastating toxic burden. This cycle will not stop without intervention, and as a result, you will gain more and more weight. Without nutrients the body begins to decline in many ways. If you reduce your load of toxins, you will have more energy and fewer pounds of fat. When you start absorbing nutrients again, you won’t crave poor quality foods, and you will start gravitating to foods that have high nutritional content. The body is smart, but it can’t help you out when chemicals are blocking all entryways for nutrition. Imagine trying to run your car without gas. But just getting rid of the fat doesn’t get rid of the toxins. They are reabsorbed into your body and new fat immediately starts to collect. This is what creates the vicious cycle.

HELLO TV DINNERS, GOODBYE HEALTH
We need to retrain ourselves to eat as we were meant to eat. I believe one of the ways we got started on this path was with TV dinners. When I was a kid, I used to beg my mother to buy TV dinners. I thought they were a treat, but when you actually think about it, TV dinners are a form of poison. Let’s just start with the aluminum trays, which we heated on high. (If you recall, you used to be able to taste the aluminum.) So right there you have a big dose of heavy metals, which have been linked to brain tumors, among many other things. The food itself was of poor quality and non-nutritious. The oils used were bad. And the most exciting part of the meal was the gooey, sugary, apple-y, chemical-y thing they called dessert. TV dinners began our transition from real nutrition to toxic, chemical filled food, and the obesity rate rose commensurately, as did rates of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Don’t be afraid of real food. If you want to stay Sexy Forever, first and most important, you must eat real food—in other words, foods that come from nature, not man-made foods, not fake foods, not any foods with chemicals.

BECOME AWARE OF FOOD ADDITIVES
You must also become informed about food additives. Harmful glutamates
such as MSG may be hidden in food ingredients such as caseinate, autolyzed yeast enzymes, beef or chicken broth, natural flavorings, soy protein, hydrolyzed protein, soy isolates, and soy protein concentrates.

This is how large manufacturers get around listing MSG. (That being said, these ingredients do not always contain MSG.) If you are truly serious about losing weight and getting healthy, you must be vigilant about avoiding these substances.

WHAT WE SHOULD BE EATING: BUTTER AND OTHER GOOD FATS
It is important to become knowledgeable about good and bad fats. The wrong choice of fats will have a serious effect on your health and your ability to lose weight.

Omega-3 fats are heart-healthy fats.

The right choices of fats are crucial to the membranes of every one of the trillions of cells in your body. Omega-3 fats create a soft, pliable membrane around each cell, allowing for water and air (hydration and oxygenation) to flow through. Life is water and air, and the good omega-3 oils that promote life are perilla oil, flaxseed oil, and fish oil. Animal fats from healthy animals like grass-fed cattle are also acceptable in moderation; it is a shame these healthy, naturally occurring fats have been demonized by the food processing industry.

When your cells have the proper amounts of water and oxygen, the mitochondria (the energy source of your cells) work optimally, and a side benefit is rapid weight loss. Well-functioning hydrated cells also reverse the aging process and create a smoothly functioning, healthy body. When water and air are not penetrating the cells, your energy slows or stops, resulting in potentially serious effects on your health, all while setting you up to get fatter and fatter.

Trans fats and too many omega-6 fats are harmful.

Trans fats found in partially hydrogenated oils, margarine, and shortening are the worst type of fats because they are completely unnatural. Less known are the dangers of omega-6 fats, which are found in safflower oil, sunflower oil, corn oil, peanut oil, soybean oil, cottonseed oil, among others. Too many omega-6 fats and not enough omega-3 fats creates a hard membrane around each cell, like an eggshell. Free radicals entering your body can cause the membrane to crack, and now you have a malfunctioning cell. When you reach a point where you have more malfunctioning cells than healthy cells, you will most likely become very ill, possibly with diseases such as cancer and heart disease. Along the way your weight will soar. A simple step such as changing the oils you consume can positively impact the health of your cells; there is no drug that can do that. I think Sally Fallon in her book Nourishing Traditions says it best: “During the sixty-year period from 1910 to 1970, the proportion of traditional animal fat in the American diet declined from 83 percent to 62 percent, and butter consumption plummeted from 18 pounds per person per year to four. During the past eighty years, dietary cholesterol intake has increased only 1 percent. During the same period the percentage of dietary vegetable oils in the form of margarine, shortening and refined oils increased about 400 percent while the consumption of sugar and processed foods increased about 60 percent.” Americans are dying of heart disease from sugar, processed foods, bad oils, margarine, shortening, and refined foods. We are getting fatter and fatter eating all this poor quality food.

WHAT WE SHOULD BE EATING: MORE PROTEIN
Overall, we need high-quality protein at most every meal. By high-quality, I mean protein that has not been contaminated by chemicals, pesticides, growth hormones, or antibiotics. Protein is extremely important and is involved in every life function from your bone marrow to your skin. Proteins are found in both animal and vegetable sources. Animal-source protein is complete protein because almost all animal proteins contain all eight essential amino acids in optimal proportions. This ratio of amino acids is very valuable to your body.

Studies prove that too little protein in your body results in health problems that range in severity from a suppressed immune system and physical weakness to stunted growth and mental retardation. It takes a diet of at least 30 percent protein to maximize the biochemicals (eicosanoids) in your system that enhance your immune system, decrease inflammation and pain, increase oxygen flow, improve endurance, and more. Fish is a great source of protein. Chicken and beef are a great source of protein but chicken should be organic and beef grass-fed whenever possible; conventionally raised poultry may suffer from the same problems of poor-quality feed and overcrowding that conventionally raised cattle and pigs do. Russia doesn’t want our chicken, and they have a food shortage. That should tell you something!

Russia, along with several other countries, has banned poultry from the United States because of the chlorine (a known carcinogen) used in the processing.
Besides, organic chickens taste so much better. If you cannot afford organic, look for natural poultry and meats raised without antibiotics or hormones. These are always better choices and will contribute to your daily health and nutritional requirements.

DETOX FIRST, LOSE WEIGHT AFTER
Losing weight without getting rid of the toxins ensures that you will gain back all the fat and more. Think about it—just getting rid of the fat doesn’t get rid of the toxins, which are reabsorbed into your body. This creates a vicious cycle. Losing weight without learning to eliminate chemicals is like a merry-go-round. And it’s why dieting doesn’t work. Plus the toxic load makes it more and more difficult for people from age forty on to lose weight.

Now do you understand why losing weight has been a frustrating battle for you? Are you ready to get off that not-so-merry-go-round?

Here we go.

Reprinted from the book SEXY FOREVER by SUZANNE SOMERS. Copyright © 2010 by SUZANNE SOMERS. Published by Crown Archetype, a division of Random House, Inc.

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