| WATER POWER YOU CAN LEAD A HORSE TO WATER, BUT… |
Well, maybe you can’t force a horse to ingest something he doesn’t want to swallow, but you can force a human being to. We do it to ourselves all the time. It’s called dieting. Going on a diet is, essentially, eating according to force and will. You use your own will to force yourself to stay on the program, whether it’s eating high protein or high fat or high both, eating eight times a day, or eating under 2000 calories, or drinking instead of eating. On all dietary programs, it is your will that determines what you eat, when you eat and how much you eat. It has nothing to do with pleasure, hunger, thirst – or any other natural process that arises from either your body’s or psyche’s needs. This is why every diet ultimately is doomed to failure. I start with weight because it is a pandemic problem in our culture. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the population of obese men and women in America has increased from 12% in 1991, to 17.9% in 1998, and to 23.9% in 2000. In their study, they suggested that these figures may be much too conservative. Overweight is, at times, the most visible sign of ill-health. While it may have become politically correct to think generously about overweight people, it is not medically correct. Recent studies provide strong evidence that being overweight isn't just bad for you, it kills you prematurely. The October 1999 Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that concluded: "Obesity is a major cause of mortality in the United States of Americans 18 years and older.” Approximately 280,000 deaths a year are directly attributable to being overweight. If one were able to calculate the number of deaths indirectly attributable to overweight, the number would be enormous. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at over a million Americans, and concluded that obese people — defined as being more than 30 percent over their ideal body weight — run a significant risk of dying early, even if they’re in relatively good health and don't smoke. Remember though: although I am only starting our discussion with the issue of weight. Weight is just the surface picture, one of the most obvious and sometimes earliest manifestations of a state of ill-health and unbalance in the body. Weight, ultimately, cannot be regulated without many other biochemical factors coming into play. Why do we not do what we should do and do what we should not do when it comes to food? If you are overweight, the odds are you feel at the mercy of your food cravings. You know you should eat less than you do, or differently than you do. But you just can’t bring yourself to do it. Obviously, what we know and what we do are two different matters. We do not always choose to do what is best for us. (There are still hordes of smokers in this country; they have not all been living under a rock for the last 50 years, oblivious to the dangers of smoking; yet their habit persists.) This, then, is the important question: why do we not do what we should do and do what we should not do when it comes to food? Why do we finish off a perfectly satisfactory supper with a sugar-laden dessert, knowing that our guilt in the morning will be a justifiable penance? Why do we add more salt to our food than any competent heart specialist would recommend? Why do we engage in 3 a.m. eating jags, when a host of research shows that most weight gain is acquired from eating between 9 p. m. and 7 a.m. when the body needs to be resting? Is the answer as simple as that we are at the mercy of our cravings? Well, maybe. But that answer doesn't really get us very far. It only leads to new questions. Why are most of our cravings for salt and sugar? Why do we feel hungry in our minds when our bodies are sated? In other words, what is the nature of food craving? If we can figure out the answer to that one question, we will have come a long way toward helping ourselves to be able to eat healthier and, thus, be able to maintain our ideal weight as well as keeping our bodies in a state of optimal health. It has become popular to answer these kinds of questions from a psychological perspective. As a psychoanalyst, no one knows better than I the psychological components that go into food habits. Yet, after studying my patients and my spa clients as long as I have, I have become convinced that there is more to the story. Food practices arise as much, if not more, because of biochemical reasons as they do for psychological reasons. The implications of such a premise are far-reaching. It means that our food decisions are not really choices, at all, or at least not in the usual sense of the word. Rather, they are rooted in biochemical urges -- more like what psychoanalysts would term compulsions. The nature of a compulsion is that it actually by-passes consciousness; we just do it automatically. That's the bad news: that to the extent that we follow unhealthy dietary practices, it is often beyond our control. We may feel temporarily relieved at such news, but absolution of responsibility doesn't help us to improve our habits. It's like the criminal insanity defense. The murderer may not have known what he was doing, or whether what he was doing was right or wrong, but what's the consolation when the body is still dead? What’s the consolation if we’re still FAT? There is good news, however. The good news is that the body operates like the U.S. government; it has a system of checks and balances. When we have a food craving -- the kind of feeling that leads us to choose a food without our conscious will -- all that is happening is that our body is engaging in its attempt to correct itself. It's one of the myriad ways the body has of attempting to heal itself. So far so good. But if the body is attempting to right a wrong, why are our food cravings so often for foods that are bad for us? How many of us have craved a carrot -- a food rich in beta-carotene and vitamin B -- over ice cream -- a food rich in nothing except fat, sugar and cholesterol? The answer is: we are misreading the signals. When a craving develops, the body is in a mild case of stress. A biochemical situation has occurred in which our system of checks and balances leaps into action. Too much salt, for instance, will stimulate a craving for sugar. Similarly, too much sugar will make us want to taste salt. If we think about it, the food cravings most of us have always have to do with either salt or sugar. This itself is interesting and meaningful. Western science has identified four basic tastes to food: salty, bitter, sweet and sour. In traditional Eastern systems there are two others: pungent and astringent. Ancient East-Indian pharmacology and medical science enumerates 64 basic taste qualities. Yet, with all these varieties possible, most Americans crave the experience only of the two tastes of salt and sugar. In overindulging in these two cravings, we have essentially destroyed our palate's ability to experience the full range of possibilities of taste. The craving is deceptive, though. We think we want sugar or salt, and indeed, much of the time, we indulge ourselves in gratifying our craving. The deception, though, is more than problematic. It's outright dangerous. If we indulge our sugar craving by eating refined sugar, we satisfy our hunger but meet none of our body's nutrient requirements. All of the vitamins, minerals, fats and proteins that would have come from a food in its natural state are still needed by the body. These nutrients, then, will be pulled from the body's own reserves in order to support the metabolic activity stimulated by the sugar. A condition of nutrient debt is created. So, it is not just that sugar puts on weight. It is not just that it doesn't have nutrient value. It actually creates a condition of stress in the body. Given enough of these stressful events, the body will become exhausted. If we indulge our craving for salt, we create an imbalance in the potassium/sodium ratio in the body. Potassium is important for its role in the contraction of muscles, including the heart. An excess of sodium causes an accumulation of water, bringing about an increase in blood volume, blood pressure and heart rate. Too little potassium, which is found in fresh fruit and vegetables, and too much sodium is a sure trigger for cancer, heart disease, kidney failure and stroke A familiar picture: a bad mirror So, now that you’ve satisfied your food carvings (in spite of your knowing better, and not wanting to), you’re left with the inevitable result: too much fat. See if this picture looks familiar to you: It may not come as a sudden revelation. You may have been able to successfully pretend it wasn’t so bad, or been able to just shove the thought below your conscious awareness. Maybe you became obsessed with mirrors, on the eternal search for the perfect mirror, thinking that some of them were like those concave mirrors in the fun houses, and they made you look fatter than you actually are. Or maybe you just gave up, as I did for a while, looking in mirrors altogether. But finally the day arrives when you can’t stand it any longer. You can’t stand the way you look in the mirror, and you allow yourself to know that the problem is not the fault of a bad mirror, the problem is the fault of a bad body. The scale reflects your hatred of the state you have gotten yourself into. You have gotten to the point where you can’t stand you way you feel. You can’t stand knowing how people see you. “That’s it,” you say to yourself. You have to do something about it. You make the firm decision that the diet starts TODAY. So, there is information that has been perking along in your brain for a while. It’s the NEW diet. Call it the zone diet, the air altitude diet, or the everything you want to eat but can’t resist – it doesn’t matter what you call it. It almost doesn’t matter what it requires you to do because at this point you are so desperate that you’ll agree to do almost anything. You begin your first day. Things are going along swimmingly. You strictly adhere to the specified program. You feel great, not because you have lost weight (too early in the game for that), but because you have finally reined yourself in; you are now disciplined, at long last. It doesn’t seem too hard now that you have committed to it. The end of the first week: you’re still going strong. You’ve lost 6 pounds. You’re feeling a little smugly and you think, "Well, that wasn’t so bad after all. I’ll just keep on going and I'll be able to take this weight off in no time!" You know, as any serious dieter knows, that the weight loss is mostly water. But you don’t care. The scale is the judge and jury, and according to the scale, you’ve taken off pounds. In fact, to sway the judge and jury in your favor, you may even curtail your in-take of water (a seriously dangerous habit which we’ll get to later). The second week ends. You’re still being “good.” But being good doesn’t necessarily lead to good news. To the contrary, bad news: the scale doesn’t reflect any weight loss. Oh dear. The third week ends and you’re still on the program, still being good. But the scale shows only a few more pounds. The results are discouraging. And, more importantly, you’re not feeling so good. Either you’re perpetually constipated, or your energy is low, or you’re depressed like never before, or your breathe smells and tastes like a sewer, or some of the weight you had taken off has now mysteriously reappeared (more on that later), or all of the above. I’ll stop the story here because you know the end. The end is that you go off the program. You gain all the weight back, and you swear you will never go on a quick-fix (or long-fix) diet again. And you don’t. At least for a while. You don’t until you get to that point of desperation again, and you hear about the next, newest sure-fire method that 8.7 of your friends have lost 16.7 pounds on. Why all diets are doomed to fail The National Institutes of Health recently conducted a study that documents dieters’ failures. They found that organized diet plans do not work for 95% of all dieters. Three reasons they cited for these high failure rates were: 1. Diets are a short-term solution to a long-term problem. 2. Most diet programs rely on deprivation. 3. Organized diets fail because the associated caloric intake is too low, Let’s look at these reasons point by point. Point 1: Diets are a short-term solution to a long-term problem. By the time a weight problem has become noticeable, there has been an eating dysfunction that has been present over a long period of time. You may not like my calling it an “eating dysfunction” because the term comes to scarily close to the term “eating disorder,” and you don’t make yourself throw up, or consume ridiculous amounts of food on eating binges. But nevertheless, if you are overweight, you do have an eating dysfunction. You might even say you have an eating addiction. The fact is: you are not in control of your food decisions; your impulses are. One doesn’t gain weight overnight. Even if the dysfunction began as a strictly psychological problem, by the time the weight has become manifested, it has evolved into a complex biological condition. Treating the condition of overweight by simply restricting food is the same as treating the symptoms of a disease instead of addressing the underlying causes of the disease. When diets focus on scale weight, or calories, they only serve to perpetuate the weight loss - weight regained dieting cycle. Point 2. Most diet programs rely on deprivation. Most diets dictate such Draconian measures as forbidding favorite foods, providing skimpy portions or, as with liquid diets, no portions at all. This deprivation method flies in the face of everything we know about the psychology of overweight. There is almost always a psychological aspect to weight problems. Generally people overfeed themselves when there is a history of emotional deprivation. Food has acquired symbolic meaning, and it is used to quell uncomfortable feelings. In these cases, food has become a form of self-medication. A dietary program that advocates food deprivation only further aggravates what is usually a pre-existing, long-standing problem. This method, too, then serves to perpetuate the weight loss - weight regained dieting dilemma. There is almost always a rebound effect, and in order to regain emotional equilibrium loss from the state of deprivation, the dieter binges on forbidden food. Often the weight gained back exceeds even the weight loss. Deprivation diets are based on the idea that only the horse being led to water can decide whether or not he wants to drink. This concept is based on the use of will. We lose weight because we decide that we want to, and we force ourselves – against all desire (even against common sense) – to abstain from weight-gaining foods. Losing weight through deprivation is difficult because we are not mere machines of will-power. We are creatures of desires and needs, as well. And those differing aspects of our self are constantly in battle with one another, sometimes one winning out over the other, sometimes the other winning out over the one. We prefer to live from the pleasurable place of desire, so in the end, desire wins, at least for a time (until our conscience kicks in, for the umpteenth time and the umpteenth diet). Point 3: Organized diets fail because the associated caloric intake is too low. This sounds like a total contradiction. This is the most difficult point to understand, but it is the most important. One would think that the lower you set you caloric-intake sights, the better off you are with weight loss. The less you eat, the more weight you lose. Right? Wrong. The body doesn’t work that way. The checks and balances system of the body means that its proper functioning is a delicate balancing act. When one system goes out of whack, another tries to compensate. The whole body is reading and righting itself all the time, consistently and persistently making its adjustments to itself. When you go into starvation mode (read low caloric in-take), your body interprets the deficient caloric intake as a life-threatening situation. It resorts to its built-in defense, trying to defend you against what it perceives to be eminent starvation. Your body attempts to conserve energy from the small amounts of food you are providing it with. It goes into the stores of body-fat you already have (thus the weight loss). But your body has made a pact with the devil; the only way it can conserve energy is by slowing down your metabolism. Here is the important point in our elementary lesson on biochemistry: in its effort to compensate for the perceived starvation threat, your body makes an automatic metabolic adjustment. This adaptation results in two biochemical processes: it causes lower (caloric) energy consumption and, as well, results in a tendency to store excess (fat) reserves. Consequently, your body's natural defense against starvation -- which was actually triggered by your dieting – has now created an impenetrable barrier against losing weight. You are storing fat rather than getting rid of it. Once the metabolic rate has slowed to the point where caloric stores are put into reserve, the body has gone into a famine mode of operation. When the dieter finally goes off the diet, the body goes out of famine mode and into feast mode. The dieter feels uncontrollably hungry, and indulges in the unstoppable, reactive food cravings. While this feels to the dieter like it’s a psychological weakness, this urge to binge is actually a biochemical response of the body. The body is attempting to right itself. The impulse to binge is so overwhelming that few of us can resist it, not because we are weak in will-power or undisciplined: it is because the body has understood that it will die unless you substantially increase your caloric in-take. So when people fall off the wagon with their diet, it is always done in a big (unhealthy) way, not in incrementally larger (healthy) portions. It is actually the body which has reasserted its needs over our will, and, rather literally, forcing us to do it this way. And all this is not even the worse news. The worse news is that now that you are off dieting, a new problem comes up. Now you notice that your body is even more susceptible to weight gain than it was before you started the diet. If you tried a low-calorie diet, your body did exactly what it should have done; it attempted to conserve energy by automatically slowing down its metabolic rate. But now that you have returned to eating normal amounts of food again, your body's metabolism has trouble re-adjusting back to its normal rate. Once that happens, even more of the caloric-energy from the normal amount of food you eat, goes into storage. And what do we call that (excess) stored energy? We call it FAT. This is the basic biochemistry of why deprivation diets don’t/can’t work. Virtually everyone (remember, 95%) who tries dieting will gain back most, if not all, the weight they've lost! Many end up weighing even more than when they first started dieting! Not only are diets doomed to fail, they are dangerous Diets and other radical food programs, particularly the ones that count calories, will absolutely, no question about it, endanger your over-all health. I am going to give you the science for this point, too, so that you can understand why this is true. Overweight means. technically, a state in which you have begun to store too much caloric energy in fat reserves. There are various reasons why this happens. It can be due to illness or inactivity. The most frequent cause is aging: as we get older our metabolism changes. When we were 30, our 3 times a week moderately energetic walk was enough to keep a balance between the amount of energy we burned and the amount of calories we took in. But at the age of 50, our metabolism has slowed down. This is almost inevitable. It happens to almost everyone as part of the aging process. And then, in order to maintain the same weight, we need to either exercise more or eat less. These are the bare facts, as unhappy as they are. Any dietary program that tells you otherwise is lying. We, of course, measure weight in pounds. One single pound of body-fat is equivalent to 3500 calories (of stored energy). This amount is much greater than the average person's daily caloric needs. To translate this into terms that anyone who has ever been concerned about their weight will understand: what this means is that in order to metabolize just one pound of body-fat, a woman would have to go on an absolute fast – no food at all -- for two full days. A man -- whose daily caloric needs are usually much higher -- would take at least a day to burn-up 3500 calories. If you decided you wanted to lose 20 pounds of stored body- fat, it would take you 25 to 30 days of strict, low-calorie (starvation) dieting (and that's being optimistic). All kinds of chemical processes occur in the body when you suddenly change how you are eating. Dramatic changes can upset your body's natural processes for assimilation of food nutrients, for cell rejuvenation, for muscle-building and energy conversion. Prolonged dieting can also cause a process known as katabolism. This is essentially a break-down of your lean muscle. It results in decreased vitality and increased body toxicity. If you lose lean muscle mass during a diet, you'll actually increase your chances of gaining weight in the future. Perhaps most importantly is that dieting and loss of lean muscle mass results in a long-term reduction in body metabolism. Now: let’s find the key to what will lead us to a sensible, do-able weight-loss and health-gain program. Read on. WETTING YOUR APPETITE Hopefully, by now you have sworn off all diets forever more. But you’re still stuck with that extra weight. So if you’re not going to diet, if you are convinced that one more bout with food deprivation will give you a nervous breakdown, then how exactly are you going to get that weight off? The answer is so simple. It’s an answer that is not even controversial. It’s a simple yet universally accepted truth that none of us ever take seriously. The answer is: WATER The answer to weight loss and health gain is adding this one major, crucial element that few of us get enough of. We have all been told, from childhood, to drink lots of water. Every agrees on this wisdom: physicians, researchers, mothers, diet gurus, holistic health teachers. We all know we should drink more water than we do (just as we know which foods are good for us and which ones aren’t). But few of us do. The Nutrition Information Center at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center recently surveyed people about their water drinking habits. Two out of 3 Americans know the rule about drinking eight 8 oz. servings of water daily. Yet, only 1 in 2 actually follows this guideline. 21% of respondents said they drink eight or more glasses of water daily, 35% drink three or fewer servings, and 9% drink no water at all. What we need (as opposed to what we want) When we are in the midst of a food craving, particularly either sugar or salt, most of the time what the body really needs (as opposed to wants) is simply pure H2O -- pure, clean, unadulterated WATER. In not reading the signal properly, we feed the body precisely what it needs the least of, the same salty or sugary substances that created the deception in the first place. The body becomes even more depleted of water. An overload of salt or sugar has created a condition of mild dehydration in the body, and the body is asking that its fluid demands be met. We read the signal as wanting more food (usually sugar). Yet, a mere glass of water will satisfy the craving. I know that this explanation sounds ridiculously simplistic -- too easy to be true. Yet, I, and other smart doctors and researchers who have understood the value of water, have recommended water as a cure for food cravings to scores of people with absolutely impeccable results. Unfortunately for all the people who have suffered needlessly, it is only recently that any of us have begun to see the error of the ways of traditional western medical thought in regard to water. When science began its inquiry into the human body, it followed the basic principles that had been established in chemistry. The 25% solid matter of the body was considered to be the solute, the substances that are dissolved and carried in the blood and serum of the body. The 75% water part was seen as the solvent, meaning that whatever it touches, it begins to dissolve that substance. Following the laws of chemistry and test-tube experiments, it was assumed that the solute composition of the body was the truly important part of the body. The solid materials were seen as the regulator of all bodily functions. The solvent, the water in the body, was seen as a mere space filler whose only function was a means of transport for the important solutes. This erroneous assumption prevented researchers from even asking the question of whether or not the regulation of the fluids of the body ever go awry. Now that we understand the multiple functions of the solvent, the water in our bodies, we know that the answer is that the fluids in our bodies can and do go awry, and much more often than we would imagine. Most of us have an undiagnosed condition of sub-clinical dehydration. The traditional assumption that we only need to drink water when we experience "dry mouth" is totally false, and is, as well, a dangerous assumption. In fact, dry mouth is the last outward sign of dehydration. Food craving, in particular sugar craving, is a much earlier sign, but one that is not read correctly, and thus not responded to appropriately. So is tiredness. Fatigue can occur when the body is trying to carry out its normal functions on a limited supply of water. Many of us eat when we’re tired in order to get the energy surge that food gives us; what we need, however, much of the time, is just water. Actually, the list of symptoms we can have from a state of sub-clinical dehydration is almost endless. The science of water and weight The biochemistry behind the fact that drinking a sufficient quantity of water is the best way of losing weight is actually quite simple. The kidneys cannot function properly without enough water. If the kidneys are not doing their job well enough, then they will dump their overload into the liver. Normally the liver has the function of metabolizing stored fat into usable energy for the body. But if the liver has to do part of the kidneys’ job, then it can't do its own job well enough. It metabolizes less fat than it should, and the un-metabolized fat stays stored in the body. Weight loss cannot occur because of the excess fat now stored in the body. Simply put, a decrease in water intake causes fat deposits to increase, and conversely, an increase in water intake reduces fat deposits. Alkalizing your body We cannot understand the science of weight without regarding the acid/alkaline balance of the body. All ingested substances (water as well as food), and all situations, be they physical or psychological, affect the body by creating either an acid or alkaline reaction, and leave either an acid or alkaline residue. The acidity or alkalinity of a substance is determined by its pH. The pH of a substance measures the concentration of hydrogen ions, which can be either positive or negative. Fewer negative ions means less acidity and more alkalinity; more positive ions means more acidity and less alkalinity. The pH reading is one of the strongest indicators we have for the state of health of a person. Within a certain pH range, the person is healthy and energetic. Whenever there is disease of any nature present, the body will give a pH reading that is outside the normal range; this is almost always over-acidification. The pH of the body is crucial in an overweight condition. One of the checks and balances system in the body is the chemical reactions the body has to too acid of a condition. The body has buffers, which are chemicals that neutralize, bind or dilute strong acid conditions. There are seven different types of buffers, but there is one in particular that has a specific effect on weight. This weight-buffer is found in low density lipoproteins, commonly called fat buffers, and these work to bind acids in the fluid systems of the body – the blood, lymph and extracellular fluids. Normally, the fat buffer allows the body to excrete the excess acids through urine. But if the excretion is not sufficient, either because there has been an overload of acids or because the eliminative channel is compromised, then these fat-laden acids are moved protectively away from the organs that sustain life. As a defensive move, the acids are moved into the body cavities, hips, stomach, thighs, or anywhere else that they can be stored without being directly life-threatening. In short, overweight is the body’s checks and balances response to over-acidification. Fat cells carry acids away from the organs in order to protect the organs from the damaging effect of the acid. The miracle of no more food craving When the body's need for water is met, the liver can return to its normal operation of metabolizing stored fat, and more fat can be used as fuel. When the body is well-hydrated, it is also alkalized. Water has the specific effect of maintaining alkalinity in the blood, lymph, intracellular and extracellular fluids. This is where the miracle starts. In a well-hydrated, alkalized body, there is a loss of food craving almost overnight. Weight stabilizes automatically at the correct weight for every body type. In the case of overweight, the fat cells literally dissolve away, carried off by the water. As you’re losing your weight When the body gets all the water it needs to function optimally, all body system fluids will be enabled to stay in balance. When this happens, you reach what we can call the "breakthrough point". This is the point at which glandular function improves and metabolism is stabilized. Stored water is released as the new water comes in. If you are beginning your water rehydration program as an overweight person, you will need even more water than your thinner counterparts. Larger people have larger metabolic loads. Since water is the key to fat metabolism, it follows that the overweight person needs more water to metabolize excess fat. As you lose weight, you will need water to help with all the unpleasant side-effects of weight loss. Water helps maintain proper muscle tone. As water enters the cells, it actually plums the skin. Water will help to prevent the sagging skin that usually follows weight loss and will leave the skin clear, healthy and resilient. You will also need the water to flush out waste. Weight loss releases lots of waste from the body – including of course metabolized fat -- and water helps rid the body of this waste. In order to continue to lose weight, you cannot afford to lapse on your re-hydration program. If you stop drinking a sufficient quantity of water, your body fluids will again be thrown out of balance. Once again all your old symptoms will return. You will be at the mercy of your food cravings; you will feel lethargic; you will begin that awful cycle back to weight gain. If you do lapse, however, you can stop the process dead in its tracks. All you will need to do is once again increase you water intake. Consume even more water than before, and force yourself to reach another breakthrough point. The formula is quite simple: more water, less fat. Less fat; less weight. Forcing the horse to drink </ |