Sexy Forever: How to Fight Fat After Forty (4 page)
Read Sexy Forever: How to Fight Fat After Forty Online
Authors: Suzanne Somers
Tags: #Health; Fitness & Dieting, #Aging, #Diets & Nutrition, #Diets & Weight Loss, #Weight Loss, #Women's Health, #General, #Diets, #Weight Maintenance, #Personal Health, #Healthy Living
You’ll find
- The Detox Phase—the first thirty days designed to release the toxic burden and blast off those first pounds.
- Level 1 Weight Loss Phase—where you’ll adopt a plan to enjoy incredible meals while you chisel down to your goal weight with your supercharged metabolism.
- Level 2 Lifestyle Phase—the maintenance plan where you learn to stay Sexy Forever!
- Jump-Start Your Success—outlining the most cutting-edge natural tools and products to make every step of the plan faster, easier, and more convenient. (I promise not to use the word
miracle.
) - Recipes—delicious, all-new recipes, with menus for fabulous eating every day.
It’s all here for you and yours for the taking.
Sexy Forever
is the answer to staying thin and healthy forever. Food is about to become your friend: delicious, fabulous, nutritious, incredible food! Get ready. Your life is about to transform. I will be with you every step of the way with additional support and resources at my online companion to this book
SexyForeverPlan.com/book
.
Stay with me
and imagine you …
Sexy Forever
!
What’s Making — and
Keeping — Us Fat?
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
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XPERTS
W
EIGH
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W
HAT
A
RE
Y
OU
U
NKNOWINGLY
T
AKING
I
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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. 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 fire-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 weedkillers 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.
