EAT! Empower Adjust Triumph!

EAT!

Empower. Adjust. Triumph!

BY

NANCY S. MURE PhD

Photo Credit: Nancy S. Mure, PhD

Cover Design: Janiele Scueta

Copyright 2015 by Nancy S. Mure, PhD

SmashWords Edition

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

What is a Plateau?

Body Mass Index

Why Diet Plans Don’t Work

You Want to be Nourished, Not Fed

What Commercial Diet Plans Don’t Teach You

If a Diet Sounds Too Good to be True…

What’s the Next Course of Action

Why You Should EAT!

Change How You Perceive Yourself

Make a Pact

What are Whole Foods?

Common Whole Foods List

We’ll Start at the Core

PART I: Empower yourself by…

Developing a Healing Mentality

Getting to the Gut of the Matter

Knowing About Processed Foods

Knowing About GMOs

Hidden GMO Ingredients List

GMO Foods are Roundup Ready

Knowing About BT Toxins and Leaky Gut Syndrome

Join the GMO Labeling Movement

Cleanse and Detox are Marketing Hooks

Avoiding Foods That Have Commercials

Eating Organic

Learning What You Can Eat

Knowing Habits Lead to Diseases

Understanding Digestion and Proper Food Combining

Knowing The Truth About Dietary Fiber

Understand Your Acid/Alkaline Balance

Sample I – Acidic Diet

Sample II – Alkaline Diet

PART II: Adjust…

Excess Sugar Out of Your Life

Artificial Sweeteners Out of Your Life

Your Salt Strategy

Wheat, Gluten, Barley, Rye and Oats Out of Your Life

Dairy Out of Your Life

Calcium Equivalent List

Your Fat Intake Upward

Your Intake of Animal Protein

Your Acid/Alkaline Balance

Your Intake of Nature’s Fast Foods

What is the Fast Food Five?

Your Intake of Green Foods

Your Use of Vinegar

Your Activity Level

Your Water Habit

PART III: Triumph!

Accept That Withdrawals are a Temporary Part of the Process

Triumph in the Kitchen

Triumph in Social Situations

Triumph at Ordering in a Restaurant

Triumph Over Your Appetite

Create Go-To Meals

Disconnect From Junk Food

Recognize the White Trifecta of Addiction

Know How to Turn Yourself Off to Fast and Processed Foods

Get a Little Angry

Get a Hobby

Call on Your Willpower

Powering-up Your Palate

Getting to the Business of Powering-up the Palate

Triumphant Instructions for Powering-up the Palate

Triumph by Putting it all Together

Simple Salad Dressing Options

Sample Menu Combinations

Put a Little Soul Into It

Triumph by Eating S.O.U.L. Foods

Triumph by Growing Your Own Soul Foods

Soul Smoothies: Triumph by Investing in a Juicer or High-Speed Blender

Are You Ready to Take Your Life to the Next Level?

If You Can EAT! You Can Lose the Weight!

Notes

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A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

The advice and strategies herein may not be suitable for everyone. Every reasonable effort has been made to make this book as accurate as possible. The purpose of EAT! is to educate and represents the opinon of the author. It is a review of scientific studies available at the time the book was written and is presented for information purposes only. No individual or physician should use the information in this book for self-diagnosis, treatment, or justification in accepting, declining or providing any medical therapy for any health problems or diseases. The fact that an organization or website is referred to in this work as a citation or potential source does not mean the Author endorses the information that the organization or website may provide or endorses any recommendations that it may make. Further, digital readers should be aware that internet websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and read. Any applications of the advice herein is at the reader’s own discretion and risk. Therefore, any individual with a specific health problem or someone who is taking medication should first seek advice from his/her healthcare provider before starting any nutritional program. The author, author’s companies and the publisher shall neither have liability nor responsibilitly to any person or entity with respect to loss, damage or injury caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book. The names and trade names of products and businesses discussed in this book are for editorial, reference, and informational purposes only. The author/author’s companies are not affiliated with or sponsored by any manufacturers of any products.

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This book is dedicated to anyone who has lost

their energy and vitality and wants it back.

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FOREWORD

Since I penned the first of nine FIT FOR LIFE books, which, by dint of selling 14 million copies in 35 languages, attained #1 status on the New York Times bestseller list, the world has changed.

Globally, there are more than 1 billion overweight adults, and the number is growing. In the U.S. alone, there are upwards of 108 million dieters who usually make several attempts at weight loss each year. Eighty-five percent of these dieters are female. It has even affected our children in unprecedented numbers.

Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Atkins, South Beach, SlimFast and other fad commercial diets, are simply not designed to give the dieter permanent results. With the diet industry marketing and selling garbage foods that contain sugar, colorings, additives, GMOs and other mystery ingredients the human body doesn’t recognize, the modern day dieter is addicted, in poor health and confused. Can we blame millions of dieters who burn out, become disillusioned, and angry after achieving short-term results? Can we really blame them for going back to their old ways in frustration after their diet plans failed them?

According to the Weight and Eating Disorders Program at the University of Pennsylvania nearly sixty-five percent of dieters return to their pre-dieting weight within three years. Most who participate in weight-loss programs regain about one-third of the weight lost during the next year and are typically back to baseline in three to five years, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. However, in our on-demand culture of immediate gratification, weight loss can become frustrating. Dieters simply can’t out-train or outrun their acidic Standard American Diets anymore. In their frustration, Americans are seeking that silver bullet. EAT! offers a viable solution through the very thing that gives us life – Nature.

EAT! – Empower, Adjust, Triumph – are the pillars for weight loss success in this motivating and thought-provoking book about losing ridiculous weight and gaining back your health. Rooted in the philosophies of Natural Hygiene, EAT! provides a simple, common sense approach to proper eating and helps the dieter adjust their current diet plan to accelerate weight loss and bust through any plateau without hunger or deprivation and with NO complicated calorie or carb counting ever!

While fast food is a hugely misunderstood term, mocked by experts and scorned by the public as being unhealthy, the idea of a fast food diet being healthy may seem misleading. Few realize that the fastest, most readily available foods don't need to be cooked, have only one ingredient and come from one source – Nature. These wholesome foods are truly super foods – nutrient-rich, absorbable sustenance that takes less energy to digest than is contained in the food itself! Eating Nature’s fast foods will ensure that any dieter will bust through any plateau and lose ridiculous weight, by making a few simple dietary swaps.

After FIT FOR LIFE, other books have made similar claims, but didn’t catch on because they lacked the simplicity and nutritional magic of EAT! The hidden magic is in the motivation and in the powering-up of the palate to enjoy the taste of Nature’s foods again. Some may be highly sensitive to certain foods and some may not. But one thing is certain – we can change our tastes. Ironically this is a very popular practice among chefs and one that is cleverly used in this book to help power-up the taste buds you had at birth so your body can signal you to stop eating naturally.

As a reader of EAT! you will become educated and empowered in your weight loss efforts by learning that foods with commercials should be avoided. The cornerstone of all my books is the importance of cleansing toxins from the body – naturally! You’ll learn how the terms cleanse and detox have been hijacked by clever marketing campaigns which are not long term fixes to any weight loss plan but only provide a short-term, temporary result. You’ll understand that it’s important to look at your habits because they do lead to your diseases, and you will be relieved to discover that if habits are changed, disease can be thwarted.

You will learn to adjust your intake of processed foods and swap them out for Nature’s fast foods. You’ll marvel at how proper food combining is the catalyst for easy digestion and accelerated weight loss. You’ll learn that you can get all the vitamins, minerals and other nutritional elements you need by upping your intake of green foods while benefitting from a more alkaline diet by lowering your intake of animal protein. You will gain an understanding of why removing artificial sweeteners out of your diet is a life saving idea and you’ll marvel at the real truth about dairy in the American diet. Further, you’ll discover how to adjust your activity levels sanely and safely and still lose the weight.

As a final point, you’ll triumph over your habits in the kitchen, in social situations, in ordering at a restaurant, by creating your own go-to recipes from the natural, unprocessed selections on your current diet plan. You’ll learn to emotionally disconnect from fast and processed foods, recognizing that salt and sugar are meant to addict you. You’ll learn to dramatically reduce, or stop using altogether, these stimulants easily and swiftly. Most importantly you’ll discover how to call on your own willpower to get you through it.

As you know, interest in weight loss continues to surge. A whopping $20 billion is spent in the U.S. on weight loss books, drugs and weight loss surgeries each year. Readers will be both intrigued and relieved by this easy to understand, simple Natural Hygiene-rooted approach as they eat and EAT! to get rid of that unwanted weight.

Fans of FIT FOR LIFE, and health books in general, will be interested in this simplistic yet effective concept in weight loss because it’s easy to grasp, instructional, and most of all it’s empowering.

Nancy Mure has masterfully created the cheerleader on the sidelines for those wishing to lose weight, telling them "You can do this! – You can break your weight-loss plateau! – You can lose that unwanted weight!"

Harvey Diamond

Author, FIT FOR LIFE,

http://www.vpnutrition.com

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PREFACE

"As commonly employed, the word indigestion denotes not a disease, but an admonition. It means that the individual so complaining has not yet found an appropriate diet…that he takes food unsuited for him, or too much of it.

~ The Nineteenth Century, Volume 17 ¹

To be American today means to be overfed, undernourished and fatigued. It means disease, a multitude of medical treatments and numerous prescriptions. It means, immobility, chronic illness and even cancer. We are fat. More than one-third (34.9% or 78.6 million) of American adults are obese and spend billions each year on weight-loss programs and products. We are addicted. Research shows that the heaviest Americans have become even heavier the past three decades.² We are misinformed.

It should be no surprise that dieting rivals baseball as the country’s national pastime. If the familiarity of dietary recommendations from the less than standard, Standard American Diet has led you toward leaning on a commercial diet plan to take off excess weight and gain back your health, beware. Their members may be fed but aren’t eating the most nourishing food. Sure, diet plan members are losing weight – to a point – but they aren’t keeping it off. And there’s a very disappointing a reason for that.

Sixty-one percent of what Americans eat is processed food,³ even on commercial diet plans. Processed foods contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs), additives, colorings and ingredients that many of us can’t pronounce or digest. These foods are toxic and they’re one of the many reasons you may be hanging on to weight.

Surprisingly, processed and fast foods are permitted and often encouraged on commercial diet plans. This feeds into the eat anything you want and lose weight mentality many commercial diet plans pitch. It also begs the question: How could a body lose weight while processing processed junk? The answer is, it can’t. Sooner or later the body is bound to stall in its weight loss efforts. Predictably, the dieter will go off the plan, return to their mode of living and sadly, compromise their health.

The big reveal is, a healthy body will lose weight. That’s not to say a sick body doesn’t lose weight – it does, but from a prospective of health, when the processes of a toxic body begin functioning efficiently again, letting go of unwanted weight becomes efficient as well. The two go hand-in-hand. A healthy body – one whose cells and tissues are not jammed up with toxins from processed, fast foods, GMOs and additives – will drop to its natural weight more efficiently than a body fed processed foods.

So how do you kick off your weight loss success? The same way you maintain any successful relationship, by communication and listening. We never think much about the way our body communicates with us, but the human body talks to us all the time. The body’s preferred method of communication is symptoms. Symptoms are the body’s way of signaling discomfort and disease or in the case of a weight loss plateau – requesting an adjustment. For example, delay your morning cup of coffee and in a matter of time, there’s a symptom – a headache, which is the result of caffeine withdrawal. This is the body’s way of saying, I want coffee—give me coffee and your headache will disappear.

In the same way, your body sends a symptom to direct you how to eat. When diet is proper, there is peace in the land. When diet is improper symptoms appear. When it comes to symptoms, there are two simple ways to interpret your body’s state of health: silence and disruption. When the body is silent – when we aren’t aware of our organs, joints, limbs, fatigue or any unpleasant sensations – it can be assumed that we have health. This physiological silence indicates by all accounts that there are no aches, pains, inflammation or sensitivities. Liken this state of health to a baby who is calm, content and peaceful. This behavior indicates to the parents that the child is experiencing no discomfort or pain. The baby is robust. He coos, smiles and is relatively pleasant. This physiological show of silence allows us to make the assumption that the processes of the body are running smoothly and health is maintained.

On the other hand, when there’s disruption in the body we’re quickly alerted to a break in the status quo of bodily functions. This happens with a show of symptoms. Now, imagine a screaming baby. Screaming is an indication of discomfort or pain. More often than not, when there’s pain, the body is on high alert. Several organs become engaged in the reparative process to remedy the symptom. Perhaps the screaming baby was overfed and the resulting symptom is indigestion. Along with indigestion are symptoms such as gas, bloating and constipation. The baby’s body is sending out an all-points bulletin, via physical pain and screaming, that the digestive organs are overworked and in distress. The organs that produced the baby’s stomach pain – gas, bloating, etc., – are engaged and felt. Symptoms are communicating a disruption in the baby’s health.

Throughout our lives we will come to know our bodies well, and we should – we live in them! For this reason, when something in the body feels off it’s important to recognize the body’s sometimes subtle attempt at communication. Symptoms are a time to listen. Frequent colds, insomnia, and general sluggishness are symptoms. By medicating symptoms instead of uncovering and eliminating their root cause, we are ensuring symptoms will appear again in a more advanced way. The thing about disease is, it continues. Very often the last thing we attribute the cause of our symptoms to is our lifestyle and dietary habits. I know, because it has happened to me.

I am one of two in this world – an identical twin, always recognized as a child by having the fuller everything. In all honesty, I would have never known I was the chunky one of the two growing up if everyone hadn’t pointed out this slight difference each time they tried to tell my sister and I apart. Somehow being the heavier twin became my childhood moniker. As self-consciousness set in, my life became an internal war between my love of food and my weight.

It was senior year in high school. Low fat this and that dominated the market and the fitness craze was emerging. I had this friend – she ate one peach per day. She was thin and I wanted to be thinner so I tried her method of eating one peach per day. I graduated high school fifteen pounds thinner. Of course, I gained the weight back over the summer and as I went through my twenties, looked to commercial diet plans like SlimFast, NutriSystem, Atkins and Weight Watchers to learn how to manage my weight.

However, I never knew what obesity felt like until I became pregnant. I gained a whopping sixty-nine pounds, weighing in at two hundred and eighteen pounds before giving birth and remaining two hundred and eighteen pounds after birth. Two years later, I became pregnant again – gaining fifty-four pounds, thinking I’d done better. The complications with the first pregnancy produced anxiety, labored breathing, extensive swelling of the lower limbs, pre and post-pregnancy, mastitis and post-pregnancy underactive thyroid. The second pregnancy left me hemorrhaging and fighting for my life.

I mistakenly viewed pregnancy as a time to indulge every craving and like many pregnant mothers I had many of them. My enthusiasm for the culinary arts had me whipping up any meal I coveted on cooking shows or in magazines. The resulting heartburn had me driving through McDonalds every evening for a vanilla shake.

Post pregnancy left me fat, hypothyroid, fatigued, hormonally challenged, highly anxious and feeding on-demand, which resulted in raging fever and mastitis. When I reflect today on the mess that was me, I can say with one hundred percent certainty that every one of these conditions would have been avoided, including my hypothyroidism, had my dietary and lifestyle habits been better.

That being said, I have always been an imaginative cook, and an enthusiastic one. Food was my muse and my instrument of creation. Therefore, it came as no surprise that during my pregnancy food was the dominant thought. I was lead by an eclectic palate, acting on cravings, giving no thought to nutrition or my own health. This fondness, as I’d like to think of it, continued throughout my childbearing years and beyond.

I didn’t fully lose the weight from my pregnancies until almost three years later, when I thought I found the diet plan of my dreams. This dream diet plan instructed eating five to six times per day, hard-core training six days per week and allowed one free day to eat whatever I wanted. I rationalized that training hard was a good tradeoff for being able to eat, so I was game. I trained hard at sunrise, ate the bars, shakes and meals according to the plan, indulged on the free day, built muscle and lost weight in three months. To keep the weight off, I continued with the diet plan and rigorous fitness regimen for four years, and even enhanced my workouts by becoming a distance runner.

Well into the fourth year of following the sketch of this diet plan, I’d been trying to heal a hip injury I thought came from running. At the time, I’d been training and running upward of five times per week. Personal stress was at an all time high. The ache appeared in my right hip. It showed itself as a constant tenderness that no amount of rest could relieve. Being out of the gym had me feeling like a fish out of water and the thought of having to wait hours to get five minutes of my medical practitioner’s time had my anxiety levels rising. I dreaded the onerous process of seeing one practitioner then getting passed off to an imaging facility for scans. I wanted a diagnosis and a remedy – a real remedy, one that could determine the root cause of my pain and guide me toward eliminating my soreness permanently. I wanted to get back to training.

Frustrated, impatient and itching to hit the pavement, it was hard to convince myself to take a break from running. I swapped running with the elliptical machine and spin classes. But the hip still hurt. Walking hurt. Sleeping hurt. The constant soreness became more of a mystery to me.

By chance, I found the answer at my thrice-monthly visit to the Integrative MD, whom I see routinely for hypothyroidism. After reading my blood work and a quick examination, the diagnosis of bursitis rang through me like a bell.

Bursitis is an inflammation of the bursa, the sac that cushions the joints. It is common in Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. The doctor said.

I don’t recall which news upset me more. The fact that I had a chronic itis or that I was officially autoimmune. I expected some long, drawn-out medical reason for why my hip was hurting, then another long, drawn-out medical reason for how I needed to treat it, then a prescription for pain, but there was none of that. The doctor’s advice was delivered in three swift words: Change. Your. Diet.

When I heard those words I thought, That’s it? Change my diet? That’s going to heal my hip and stop my body from attacking itself? My mind was spinning. I was on