50,000 years ago humans lived in a state of dietary insecurity. Agriculture had not been developed yet so food supply was determined by whatever was available with each season. For humans living in Europe and north Asia winter was a time of almost no food at all. To survive you had to live off of whatever fat you were able to store during the fall and late summer. Nature evolved specific genes to help with this – what I will call our sugar genes.
Food sources during the spring and early summer have very little sugar in them. Vegetables and greens and anything else we could forage or catch during this time of year kept us lean and fast – good for survival and reproduction. But late in the summer and into fall the sugary fruits start to ripen. Unique to these foods is the appearance of the molecule fructose, a sugar twice as sweet as other natural sugars. Fruits are nature’s way of attracting animals to eat the fruits and thereby spread the seeds they carry to new locations.
We developed genes that did several things to help us prepare for the coming winter. Our taste buds developed a love of fructose to drive us to eat fruit. Our metabolism developed the inflammatory state we now call metabolic syndrome to trigger maximum weight gain. And our brain developed the mechanism that shut off our normal hunger satisfaction when we eat sugars – fructose in particular. The brain also developed a huge pleasure reward signal that turned into an addiction response to drive us to eat as much fruit as we could possibly stuff into our belly. The result is our addictive love of sugar that never fills us up and makes us gain lots of weight.
Nature’s goal is to get us to gain 20 to 30 pounds of weight before winter hit. With that much stored fat we could survive for two to three months without any real food source. We would simply live off our fat stores until spring brought us new greens and vegetables to eat.
Fast forward to today. We have food security in this
country. The quality of the food may be questionable, but there is an abundance of it available all year long. We don’t all starve for two or three months every winter. We still love sugar, especially this time of year as the days get shorter and our brain starts telling us winter is around the corner so we better chow down to prepare for a starvation time. We try to pretend to simulate winter starvation with our New Years resolutions to diet and exercise more, but these usually don’t work. The end result of food security and sugar available in abundance is the obesity epidemic we have today.
Does obesity matter? From my perspective obesity does not impact our spiritual growth. We will get the growth we need. Life is a no-fail system – we all make it eventually. What we do that produces obesity (eat) is often tied to how we connect with others, which is the key experience that evolves us spiritually. So one could argue that obesity is a byproduct of what we do to connect with others to grow spiritually. The benefit to eating sugar is that it acts as a disassociative drug to reduce feeling. This makes being with people easier, as open heart connections usually involve a level of feeling the suffering all humans have – not comfortable.
Inflammatory obesity does have negative health consequences, all of which are abundantly publicized by the media. Depending on how much you are motivated to avoid these consequences you might want to modify the drive to consume mass quantities of sugar in small or large ways. Since sugar happens, the question becomes what can we do to temper the impact it has on our health? Are there ways that we can still enjoy the delights of sugary holiday treats without destroying our bodies? Today I will discuss two ways to support ourselves so we can still enjoy the season – how to decrease the impact of eating sugar in the short run and how to build up our resistance to the effects of sugar before we even start with the holidays.
One trick that is a huge help to your metabolism when it comes to sugar consumption is to cram it all into one blast to the system in any 24-hour period. In other words, if you are planning to attend a feast or gathering where the expectation is that you will be indulging in lots of carb and sugar rich food, avoid any carbs the rest of the day. Try to eat all your carbs and sugars within a one-hour time period, then give your body 24 hours to recover. How much you eat is not as relevant as keeping it all within that one hour.
Giving your body a 24-hour recovery period and limiting the dietary abuse to only one-hour within any 24 hour time period significantly helps keep the body from slipping into metabolic syndrome and blood sugar imbalance. It is something that is doable during the holidays and still gives you the latitude to have fun.
How relevant is this concern to you? There seem to be some people that don’t have the sugar gene and can eat anything and never have a problem and others like me that only have to smell the aroma of food to gain 6 pounds. But simplest measure of relevance is seen in what you have right now – your waist size. Put simply, if you have the sugar gene fully active to keep you alive through times of no food like winter, you are likely to show this as an increased waist size. The International Diabetes Federation defines obesity for women as a waist size of more than 31 ½ inches and for men as a waist size of more than 35 ½ inches. If your waist is larger than this then this article is relevant to you.
There are many different measurements for defining obesity, but simple waist size repeatedly comes up as the best single predictor of future problems. This is probably because it focuses on abdominal weight. It is the abdominal weight that is linked to inflammation around the vital organs, which is where disease is most likely to hit you the hardest. Weight in the thighs or in the upper chest may be unwanted, but it is not particularly linked to disease processes. Waist size is the best simple predictor of future medical problems. Some countries like Japan now penalize people with waist sizes larger than 35 inches by charging them higher health insurance fees. This creates a financial incentive to keep the weight off.
So Halloween, the official beginning of the sugar season is only about three weeks away. That gives us just enough time to give our internal house a good cleaning in preparation for the Holiday season. One of the prime concerns is the development of fatty deposits in the pancreas. The pancreas is the organ that produces the insulin responsible for moving sugar from the bloodstream into the cells. Fat in the pancreas interferes with proper beta cell production of insulin, first as metabolic syndrome and later as actual type 2 diabetes. Liver problems result from fatty infiltration into the liver. This is caused primarily by over-consumption of sugar, specifically the fructose in sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Fatty deposits in the connective tissue around the intestines triggers high production of inflammatory chemicals actually produced by those fat cells.
So the idea is to do a pre-holiday cleanse to get rid of as much of these fatty deposits in the wrong areas as possible. This will also clean out the liver, which is responsible for detoxifying the whole body.
To get the body to clean fat out of the wrong areas we have to get the body to burn this fat for energy. Nothing else coaxes this fat out of the organs. Only the body demanding energy from fat will do this. This only happens when there is no sugar to burn for energy. To push the body into fat burning mode requires us to consume less than 20 grams of sugar/carbs per day. That is not very much. A single slice of bread is more than that.
Additionally, if we want the body to burn stored fat we can’t be feeding it any fat in our diet. The body will always burn the fat from our food before dipping into its stored fat energy. It will even convert protein from our diet into sugar to burn as fuel before it starts using up fat stored in fat cells. Anything beyond the approximately 40 grams of protein the body needs to replace what it loses as cells die, the body can turn into sugar. So that means eating basically fiber foods without the fat, sugar, carbs, and protein. That sounds crazy until you figure out that what that means is eating vegetables. Most vegetables – the low carb ones – are mostly water, fiber, phyto-nutrition, and minerals. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what has been used for thousands of years for cleansing the body internally – a vegetable diet.
There have been hundreds of vegetable cleansing diets over the years, and they all work basically the same way. Push the body into a fat burning state and keep it there for two to three weeks while providing the phyto-nutrients that stimulate cleansing and healing of the organs and gut. Plants also provide the fiber to carry away the poisons as well as feed the healthy gut bacteria. Plant minerals keep your blood electrolytes balanced so your cells have the electrical energy to expel the poisons and run smoothly.
Recent research has discovered that ultra low calorie healing diets work almost as well when practiced every other day as long as the body is kept in the fat burning state. That means every other day we can eat more fat and protein, and only leave out the carbs and sugars. This really makes the cleanse a lot easier, as you only need to do the vegetable low calorie days every other day.
It takes three days to convert your body into the fat burning state, so if you start today (Sunday), by Wednesday night your body will slip into fat burning and you can start the cleanse. For those three days you would eat meats, eggs, vegetables, nuts, dairy/cheese (if you tolerate it), herbs, spices, oils, and vinegars, in any quantity you wish. You avoid any sugars, starches, beans, grains, potatoes, fruits, or any other sources of carbohydrate. Stay away from all sweeteners except stevia, lo han, erythritol, and xylitol.
During the cleansing period you eat non-starchy vegetables, herbs, spices, and vinegars. You can use the sweeteners mentioned earlier. This works well as green smoothies (no fruit), salads, stir-fry, and soups. Do this either every day or every other day for two to three weeks. If you are alternating days then on the “eat more” days you include meats, eggs, nuts, and tiny amounts of oils. For many reasons dairy products are left out of cleansing diets. On all days drink lots of purified water – either fresh or made into teas or cold brew coffee. Try to include the bitter greens like beet tops, dandelion, kale, and the like as these stimulate the liver to flush itself out.
Most people feel better when they cook their vegetables, as too many raw vegetables tend to create gas and other bowel issues. Raw is a good choice if you have already adapted yourself to lots of raw veggies. But average person is not there.
This inner house cleaning will strengthen your system in preparation for the upcoming holidays. Your immune system will be stronger to better ward off the seasonal illnesses caused by eating too much sugar – especially if you do as I suggested earlier and always give your body a 24-hour recovery period after eating sugar/carbs. Because you are burning the fat stored in your system you will always have plenty of energy while doing this cleanse. The only typical slow-down is for a couple hours on the third day as you slip from sugar burning into fat burning.
I will be starting up again this Sunday to help myself prepare for the holidays. I know how this cleanse feels because I just finished one three week round of it in the middle of September. It feels just fine and I had plenty of energy. I don’t recommend going more than three weeks at a time of the every day veggie only cleanse. But the alternate day program works really well as a long-term weight loss program. I have read studies on folks that have done this for a year and a half and only got healthier as a result. This program is also the same one used on seniors in an old age home that got them off most of their meds and out of their wheelchairs. It is a very powerful intervention for the body. It likes being cleaned out every so often.
Between Halloween and New Years I won’t be writing about cleansing or diets, but instead will focus on healthy treats that fit into the season. The next three weeks is the last push for building health through decreasing food intake. I like to enjoy the holiday season also.