What Are You Hungry For? (9 page)

If you want your life to be pure and free of the opposite theme,
toxicity,
all of these changes will give you a new story and a new body at the same time.

Your body needs fuel, so the theme of
energy
begins with extracting calories as food gets digested. But much more is implied in this theme. The food you eat should add to the vibrancy, excitement, and joy in your life—these are the kinds of energy that bring true fulfillment, far beyond blood sugar levels. What you don’t want is to promote the opposite theme,
inertia,
which is flat and dull. When you look at food in terms of the bigger theme, here are some guidelines:

Do:

Don’t:

Energy is a perfect example of how intimately connected mind, body, and emotions are. You can walk away from the table feeling buoyant and joyful, the perfect outcome to feasting. Or with the same calorie intake, you can walk away feeling as if nothing has happened—the meal was just a mechanical routine. For this reason,
energy
is a holistic theme whose aim is not to extract nutrients as efficiently as possible but to make eating a joyful experience.

I remember reading a memoir in which the author, who had fallen in love with a European, found herself on a brisk day in the Alps. It was May, and the scenery was stunning. She had every reason to feel uplifted, and she was. But what stuck in her mind centered on food. The little group of friends she was with were having a picnic that consisted of fresh-baked bread, tiny new peas just picked from the garden, and creamery butter. At that moment, in such a setting, these simple foods became part of a magical memory.

Yet on their own, peas are peas, bread is bread, and butter is butter. The amount of calories they contain is fixed and unchanging, no matter whether you pull them out of your refrigerator, where they’ve been sitting awhile, or eat them at the peak of freshness. But we are sensitive on other levels, and each one has its own energy signature. There’s no scientific measure to tell you why a freshly plucked rose handed to you by someone you love isn’t the same as a refrigerated rose packaged in a plastic sheath at the supermarket. There’s no way to quantify this, but the energy is certainly different.

When you look at the whole package of
energy,
the food you eat should match the story you want to live, which means:

As
fresh
as possible, without dullness, repetition, and routine.

As
colorful
as possible, giving delight to the eyes. Food is a rainbow brought down to earth.

As
cheerful
as possible, maximizing moments of happiness and pleasure. There’s wisdom in the Jewish proverb, “Better to eat straw in a manger than a feast in a house of discord.”

It’s ironic that many Americans feel they have to go abroad to enjoy eating. They bask in the slow lunches that take hours on a terrace in Tuscany. They feel excited in a Parisian café where pride in cooking and eating can be felt in the air. By contrast, eating at home tends to be quick, efficient, and routine. Fuel gets put into your stomach. Otherwise, there is no nourishment to the senses or the soul. The modernist architect Le Corbusier called a house “a machine for living,” which sounds rather bleak. It’s just as bleak when meals turn into pit stops for refueling.

Your body isn’t looking for fuel the way a diesel truck is. It’s looking for a myriad of nutrients. The ones that work as fuel are few and easy to outline:

Carbohydrates
convert quickly into energy as measured through blood sugar levels.

Proteins
break down into energy more slowly and are largely used to rebuild cells, not for providing energy you can feel.

Fats
are directed to be stored in the body and take the longest time to turn into energy.

To a nutritionist, carbohydrates are the body’s basic fuel and should form the largest segment of everyone’s daily diet. A small amount of protein is needed every 24 hours to rebuild tissues (about 3 to 6 ounces, which is much less than most people assume; one sizable portion of lean fish is adequate). Fats are necessary but can be
reduced to as little as 1 to 2 tablespoons a day of added oils without harming your health; in fact, severe fat restriction is the only known way to reverse clogged coronary arteries—your body won’t call upon these crannies of hardened fat unless deprived of any other source in your diet.

Into this clear picture all kinds of confusion has been introduced, particularly regarding carbohydrates. Decades ago, athletes who ate at the training table were given red meat, on the assumption that increased protein was necessary to build muscle mass, and with more muscles, an athlete should be able to reach maximum performance. But in a series of experiments performed at Yale University, two groups of athletes were put on exercise bicycles and told to pedal to the point of exhaustion. The athletes who performed best weren’t the ones who ate protein but the ones who ate carbohydrates before a game. The practice of “carbing up” was born.

In order to give you quick energy, carbs are processed by insulin produced in the pancreas, a rapid-fire mechanism that takes mere seconds if you drink a soda or any other form of sucrose, the simplest of sugars and the fastest to enter your system. It seems that a lot of problems would be averted if Americans didn’t load their bodies with refined, or simple sugar. In nature, carbs are complex. They take longer to break down, which helps even out blood sugar, while refined white sugar causes blood sugar to spike. Just as important, natural carbs are packaged into whole food, so a buffer is created by fats and proteins; taken straight, refined white sugar has no such buffer.

Unfortunately, the implications are worse if you gain weight. Americans have long risked a condition of insulin overload (hyperinsulinemia) that is due to injecting too much quick fuel through refined white sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. Even though the latter is based on fructose, which isn’t as simple a sugar as sucrose (fructose occurs naturally in fruits and many vegetables), the refining process in making corn syrup removes this advantage.

What troubles doctors is that there’s a seeming epidemic of hyperinsulinemia, and the condition is a vicious circle: the more insulin your body produces, the less effective your body is at extracting energy. Fat gets deposited, and the fat secretes hormones that heighten insulin levels, making it even less effective. Meanwhile, diabetes lurks on the horizon, along with links to high blood pressure and a host of other disorders. You can’t necessarily judge through symptoms whether you have hyperinsulinemia, but the telltale signs are similar to those of diabetes:

Rather than going on a symptom safari, however, it’s better to stand back and realize that the vicious circle between overweight and excess insulin needs to be broken. A little vigilance makes all the difference.

Eat the natural carbs contained in whole foods (fruits, vegetables, cereals).

Don’t drink sugary sodas; cut out refined white sugar; and use honey, maple syrup, and other natural sweeteners. Use all sweeteners moderately.

Reduce your intake of hidden sugar in processed foods.

For grains and cereals, prefer whole grains over refined ones.

Eat complete meals with several kinds of foods rather than
snacks—give yourself a buffer between the sugar you eat and your blood sugar.

The good news is that losing weight will take care of excessive insulin in most people. Type 2 diabetes, which is now widespread as a result of the obesity epidemic, generally reverses once people get back to their ideal weight. It’s good for everyone, even if your blood sugar is normal, to pay attention to the starches and sugars in common foods. Recently attention has been focused on the glycemic index (GI), which ranks each food according to how complex its carbs are. The numbers indicate how quickly a particular food gets converted to glucose, or blood sugar. Slow is better than fast because it prevents spikes in blood sugar, delivering a more even, consistent flow of energy. (Eating the right foods doesn’t solve the problem entirely, however. If you eat too much to begin with, the overload on your digestive tract won’t be beneficial. In addition, carrying excess weight, particularly belly fat, causes the fat cells to secrete hormones that confuse and impair the signals for hunger and satiation that are bound up with insulin and glucose—in short, the best strategy is to make good choices about how to eat and to return to your ideal weight.)

Since you are learning a mind-body approach to weight control, I don’t think it’s helpful to fret over glycemic values any more than it is to fret over calories. It’s enough to know that refined and processed foods are on the wrong end of the glycemic index, while whole foods tend to be on the right end. Take a glance online at a published version of the GI, which ranks high-glycemic (bad) and low-glycemic (good) foods. This will be enough to give you the lay of the land.

Moreover, the GI isn’t infallible. Glycemic values vary from person to person, they can cover a wide range within a single food, and the effect on blood sugar over time isn’t listed. A rough guideline is good enough. There are a few surprises, like potatoes and parsnips, which
are high on the glycemic scale even though they are whole foods. White bread and white rice, which also have a high glycemic index, go through a refining process. The key words to avoid are
refined, processed,
and
manufactured,
as Dr. Andrew Weil likes to remind us.

The most important thing about the
energy
theme is to look beyond the food-as-fuel issue. Eating gives you energy, but it should also invigorate your life.

Before you eat, ask yourself:

If the answer is
yes
to all of these questions, you will be getting the best energy from your food. If the answer is no, then don’t eat, or postpone eating until the negative elements have changed.

Another tip is to eat to the point where you feel satisfied but not stuffed. Stop eating when there’s still space in your stomach. Half-way through a meal, put down your fork, and wait 5 to 10 minutes. Check to see if you’re still hungry, and then decide if you need more to eat.

As always, don’t deprive yourself; make it satisfying to say, “I am adding energy to my story.” Since that is the story you want to live, every choice that boosts the theme of
energy
and opposes the theme of
inertia
is a small victory.

Balance
doesn’t deserve to sound boring or dull. It should be considered precious, like the golden mean, a perfect state in which everything exists in the right proportion. The opposite theme,
imbalance,
means that something has been pushed to extremes. The more extreme, the harder it is for the mind-body system to return to balance. Our society glories in all kinds of extremes, and risk-taking is promoted as an exciting way to live. The story is different as viewed by your body, which reacts to extreme situations as stress, releasing stress hormones like cortisol that are meant to be temporary and fleeting but can course through the body all day and ultimately contribute to hypertension or osteoporosis. When you are out of balance, including the state of overweight, your body fat triggers a harmful array of stress hormones, leading to hidden imbalances throughout the system. Here I concentrate on the dietary side of
balance,
one of the most valuable themes to bring into your life.

Do:

Don’t: