It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways (4 page)

Proteins are made up of long chains of amino acids, which are the building blocks for all sorts of biological structures. The amino acids in proteins are necessary for building, maintaining, and repairing muscles, connective tissue like tendons and ligaments, skin, hair, and even your bones and teeth. In addition, most enzymes and many hormones in the body are actually proteins.

Fats are either in free form (free fatty acids) or built into complexes. Fatty acids belong to one of three types or families: saturated, monounsaturated, or polyunsaturated. Fats allow you to absorb fat-soluble vitamins and essential nutrients from food, help to transport nutrients across cell membranes, and are critical to maintaining proper immune function. Dietary fats are also the building blocks for brain tissue, nerve fibers, reproductive and stress hormones, immune messengers, and cellular membranes. Finally, fat is also an excellent slow-burning energy source, perfect for supporting lower intensity activity.

The energy contained within each type of macronutrient is measured in calories. Carbohydrates and protein each contain four calories per gram; fat contains nine calories per gram. Diet books and experts have long attributed weight problems to simply eating too many calories, and specifically, too much fat. After all, fat is more than
twice
as calorie-dense as either protein or carbs!

If only it were that easy.

While calories do count for something, good health depends on far more complex factors—and simply reducing calories (or fat) isn’t the answer. The foods you eat exert a powerful psychological influence, stronger than any act of willpower. They influence your hormones, silently directing your metabolism. They affect your digestive tract, your body’s first line of defense. And they impact your immune system and your risk for any number of diseases and conditions.

Your good health starts with the foods you eat. And determining which foods make you more healthy starts with our four Good Food standards.

“This program has shown results that I didn’t think were possible. Prior to the Whole30, I recognized that I had severe difficulties dealing with food cravings and knowing when to stop eating. Cheat meals turned into cheat feasts and cheat weekends. My frustration with controlling my cravings and urges skyrocketed. Daily I asked myself, ‘How can I get these urges under control? Why do I feel like I need these bad foods? Where should I go for help?’ Whole30 is the answer. I haven’t felt the deep desire to binge since I’ve submerged myself into this program. I don’t feel like I have to struggle to make decisions when trying to decide what to eat. The way I eat now is how I honestly desire to feed myself.”

—Aubrey H., Manassas, Virginia

Surprised that we’re leading off with psychology and not calories, energy, or metabolism? Stay with us, because we suspect this section is going to resonate with you. As a rule, we think the foods that are good for your body should also not mess with your mind. And we think the
psychological
effects of your food choices are perhaps the most important factors to consider during your healthy-eating transformation.

How many times have you tried a new plan, bought new foods, and stuck to the new menu for a few weeks, only to fall right back into your old habits—and old waistline? (Every time you’ve tried to “diet,” we suspect.) Want to know why your previous efforts have failed?

But you knew that already, didn’t you?

Calorie-restrictive plans have been found to help folks lose weight, but only in the short term. Most folks can’t sustain their new dietary habits, and after a year or two, the vast majority end up gaining back even more weight than they lost
.
(Kind of a bummer, right?) The truth is, simply reducing your calories isn’t likely to change or alleviate your food cravings, even if you do lose weight. And we’ll show how your cravings, habits, and patterns are critical to your long-term success.

In addition, creating healthy dietary habits isn’t just about restricting or eliminating certain foods. You already
know
that fast food, junk food, and sweets aren’t good for you. You
know
you shouldn’t eat them if you want to lose weight, get off your medication, or be healthier.

Yet you continue to eat them.

You struggle with food cravings, bad habits, compulsions, and addictions. You know you shouldn’t, but you feel compelled to eat these foods. Sometimes, you don’t even
want
them, but you eat them anyway. And you have a hard time stopping.

All of which makes you feel guilty and stressed—and more likely to comfort yourself with even more unhealthy food.

We’re here to tell you:

You are not lacking willpower. You are not lazy. And
it’s not your fault
that you can’t stop eating these foods.

Now we’re not trying to say that the choices you make aren’t your own or that you don’t have any responsibility for your current health status (or waistline). But what you have to understand is that these unhealthy foods have an unfair advantage. They are
designed
to mess with your brain. They are
built
to make you crave them. They
make
it hard for you to give them up.

And until you know their dirty little secrets, you will never be able to leave these foods, and your cravings, habits, and patterns, behind.

We are going to spill their secrets.

We are going to help you understand
why
you crave the foods you do and explain how these unhealthy foods trick you into eating them. Then we’ll show you how to outsmart your cravings once and for all.

Specific food
cravings
can turn into poor eating
habits
in just a few days, leaving us stuck in a cycle of relentless urges, short-term satisfaction, and long-term guilt, shame, anxiety, and weight gain. To effectively change our relationship with food (and maintain new, healthy habits forever), we need to understand what is behind our cravings, habits, and patterns.

It all starts with biology and nature.

If we were hunting and foraging our food in nature, our bodies would need some way to signal to us that we’d found something useful. For example, bitter tastes signify toxic foods while sweet tastes signify a safer choice. Thanks to nature and our biology, our brains have been hardwired to appreciate three basic tastes: sweet (a safe source of energy), fatty (a dense source of calories), and salty (a means of conserving fluid). When we came across these flavors, neurotransmitters in our brain would help us remember that these foods were good choices by sending us signals of pleasure and reward, reinforcing the experience in our memories. These important signals from nature helped us select the foods best suited to our health.

But there is one very important point to keep in mind with respect to these signals from nature. They weren’t designed to tell us which foods were
delicious
—they were designed to tell us which foods were
nutritious
.

The trouble is that in today’s world, the ancient signals persist —but the foods that relay them are anything but good sources of nutrition. And that creates a major disruption in our bodies and in our brains.

Over the last fifty years, the makeup of our foods has dramatically changed. Our grocery stores and health food markets are packed with shelves of processed, refined
food-like
products—which no longer look anything like the plant or animal from which they were derived.

Food scientists caught on to the fact that our brains respond strongly to specific flavors (such as the aforementioned sweet, fatty, and salty), and armed with this knowledge, they began to modify our whole foods. They sucked out the water, the fiber, and the nutrients, and replaced them with ingredients like corn syrup, MSG, seed oils, and artificial sweeteners, colors, and flavors. All of this with the specific intention of inducing cravings, overconsumption and bigger profits for food manufacturers.

They’ve turned real food into
Franken
-food.

These foods light up pleasure and reward centers in the brain for a different reason than nature intended—not because they provide vital nutrition, but because they are
scientifically designed
to stimulate our taste buds. The effect is a total disconnection between pleasurable, rewarding tastes (sweet, fatty, and salty) and the nutrition that
always
accompanies them in nature.

In nature, sweet tastes usually came from seasonal raw fruit, rich in vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients. Today, sweet flavors come from artificial sweeteners, refined sugars, and high fructose corn syrup. In nature, fatty tastes usually came from meats, especially nutrient-packed organ meats. In modern times, fats come from a deep-fryer or a tub of “spread.” In nature, precious electrolytes like sodium came from sea life, or from the animals we ate. In modern times, salt comes from a shaker.

Do you see the problem with this?

Modern technology has stripped the nutrition from these foods, replacing it with empty calories and synthetic chemicals
that fool our bodies into giving us the same powerful biological signals to keep eating.

This means we are eating more calories with less nutrition.

These Franken-foods are ridiculously cheap to produce.

They unnaturally electrify our taste buds.

They contain little, if any, nutrition.

And they mess with our brains in a major way.

You may be thinking, “If these foods taste so good that I can’t stop eating them, maybe I should just stop eating foods that taste good.” But that just sounds miserable to us—and flavor restriction would probably be just as unsuccessful long-term as caloric restriction! Thankfully, this strategy is wholly unnecessary. The problem isn’t that these foods are
delicious
.

They are the essence of empty calories—foods with
no brakes
.

The idea of food brakes can be explained by
satiety
and
satiation
. They sound the same, but biologically speaking they are two separate and distinct concepts.

Satiety
occurs in your digestive tract—specifically, in your intestines. When you’ve digested and absorbed enough calories and nutrients to satisfy your body’s needs, hormones signal to your brain that “I am well nourished now,” which decreases your desire for more food. Satiety can’t be fooled or faked, as it is dependent on the
actual nutrition
in your food. But since digestion is slow, these signals may take several hours to be transmitted, which means they can’t do a very good job all by themselves to keep you from overeating.

That’s where satiation comes in.

Satiation
is regulated in the brain and provides more timely motivation to stop eating. It’s based on the taste, smell, and texture of food, the perception of “fullness,” even your knowledge of how many calories are in a meal. As you eat, you perceive various sensations (“This is delicious,” “I shouldn’t eat the whole bag” or “I’m getting pretty full”), all of which send your brain status updates to help you determine whether you still want more. But unlike satiety, satiation is an
estimate
dependent on your perceptions, not an absolute measurement.