Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [6]
Your body is an amazing machine; it’s constantly calculating what’s coming in through the food you ingest, and it registers whether you are getting enough calories and nutrients to satisfy your needs. To help with this process, there are receptors in your digestive tract which notify your brain how much and what kind of nutrients and calories are being processed. A sort of switch goes off when we are satiated, and we therefore stop eating. That’s how nature intended it. But with massive advertising campaigns glorifying fast food and steak dinners and making it all look so tasty and fun to eat, it’s no wonder we start craving—and going for—that sort of heavy, fatty food. When we indulge, those natural-born internal receptors get thrown off. The unnaturally high amount of concentrated calories throws the system off, which leads to overeating.
No matter how many calories you are ingesting, if you aren’t getting what you need nutritionally, your body sends you out for more in the form of cravings or a yearning to eat something else. It’s a primal urge, and hard to ignore. It’s literally a survival mechanism that kicks in.
The body is saying (sometimes rather urgently), “I haven’t gotten enough nutrients, go get more food!” The problem is that meat, cheese, and refined carbs don’t have what it takes to satisfy the body’s needs, so the body is never satiated on a diet that is made up mostly of animal protein and junky processed food. In order to truly feel fulfilled, you need to eat good nutrient-dense, fiber-rich food. When you do, your body will feel filled up (the stretch receptors will say, “Ah, enough, thank you!”), and because you will have satisfied your essential need for real nutrients, your body will leave you alone. You will not be assailed by constant, gnawing cravings, and in essence, your hunger will be turned off. A general lack of nutrition is one of the main causes of overeating, but when you consume whole, natural foods full of fiber and vitamins, the tendency to overeat goes away and you naturally settle in to your optimal weight. You can read more about this in an excellent book called The Pleasure Trap by Douglas J. Lisle, PhD, and Alan Goldhamer, DC.
So why have these high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets (think Atkins, the Zone, and Eat Right for Your Blood Type) stayed around for so long? Probably because most of us have developed a great love for the taste of rich, fatty food and gratefully follow the advice of anyone who says it’s okay to keep eating it. Simple as that, really; we want to be told it’s okay (and good!) to keep doing what we’re doing. But alas, high animal protein with low carbs is not a good idea. Not at all. Kathleen Zelman, a spokesperson from the American Dietetic Association, in fact, calls Atkins “a nightmare diet.” And a study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that people who were on the diet for only twelve weeks experienced substantially heightened levels of “bad” (LDL) cholesterol. The effects differ from one person to the next, but for some the problems persist, which points to a much higher risk for heart attacks.
Dr. Neal Barnard, founder of the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) explains the problem this way:
Low-carb diets are based on the mistaken notion that bread, potatoes, rice, and beans are fattening, and so these foods are banished from the diet. When you stop eating carbohydrates, your body rapidly loses water. In the first few days of a low-carb diet, you’ll be in the bathroom surprisingly often, and the first few pounds of “weight loss,” are not fat loss at all. They are temporary water loss. That water weight will soon come back.
Over the longer period, a low-carb diet causes weight loss only because carbohydrates are about half of what most people eat. If you take away all the pasta, fruit, bread, potatoes, and other carbohydrate-rich foods, you are taking away half