Emotional Eating

By Courtney Pool

In the journey to heal emotional eating, does it matter what kind of food we’re eating? My personal experience of healing emotional eating has said yes, it surely does. While emotional eating is a symptom of imbalances that are not food-related, I have found that eating a healthier diet is a profound way to support the healing of emotional eating.

Fueling our bodies with processed food and animal products only makes for harder work in healing emotional eating. Our bodies as well as our brains get physically addicted to processed sugar, flour, salt and grains, cooked, low quality oils, chemical food additives and colorings, and even naturally occurring substances such as casein in dairy products. We then have to deal with not only our emotional addiction to food, but also our physical addiction. With the confusion about how much of the issue can be attributed to physical addiction and how much is otherwise, the depth of the emotional eating imbalance, as well as the causes, and therefore the plan of action for healing, are difficult to discern. You are not hungry, but you really want to eat chocolate cake, or chips, or whatever your favorite thing is. How much of that is because you are physically addicted to the food, and how much of it is because there are other issues?

Still, the issue is emotional eating, and often our foods of choice in that pattern may be exactly these junky, processed foods. As we slowly transition to a healthier diet and our bodies detoxify, a few things happen. First, we begin to crave less junk food and more healthy food. This is a natural process for anyone who is making a consistent change for health. We find more healthful recipes that we really love, and we begin to prefer them as much or more than what we used to eat.

We also begin to create a new frame of reference for what health and vitality is. We know experientially what it is like to live with minimal or no sickness, high energy levels, bounding creativity, sharp intellect and focus, great sleep, a general feeling of wellness, and many other wonderful benefits, all thanks to living and eating naturally. Subsequently, we begin to associate more pain with the numbing and deadening brought on when we overeat or binge on addictive foods, and over time, we are less willing to compromise how fantastic we feel for the temporary fullness and the temporary satisfaction of our taste buds.

When we get to a place where the foods we reach for emotionally are rarely or never processed ones, then we can clearly arrive at the truth of our emotional attachment to food. Perhaps now you still eat emotionally, but you reach for raw, organic nuts or dates, or maybe raw vegan desserts. Emotionally, enough of most any food will satisfy what we’re using it for, so even a great deal of blueberries or a pile of seaweed can do the trick. However, we can often conclude that we are not likely reaching for a pile of blueberries or even a bag of nuts because we are physically addicted. Now that the physical addiction is gone, we can face the issue appropriately, and begin to explore why we eat when we are not hungry.

My belief is that animal products made from suffering, abused animals carry an energy of suffering, abuse, and death. So, when we are focusing on healing emotional eating, which can be such a sensitive and delicate process, how supportive is it to continually bring into our being energy which suppresses and directly contradicts the positive, uplifting energy required to heal an emotional attachment to food? Organic plant foods, particularly if they are grown locally or at home and you eat them fresh, are incredibly supportive of healing, I believe, on more levels than just the physical.

Emotionally eating almond butter doesn’t do as good a job at its role (to numb, fill, calm, etc.) as emotionally eating conventional dairy ice cream does, even if we eat the same amount. Since it doesn’t mess with our physiology as much, those root reasons for emotional eating don’t go away as much, which can be cause for panic and more eating… or can be an opportunity. We now have the opportunity to sit with that space and observe and investigate what is really going on. The self-inquiry can begin to happen, whereas had we knocked ourselves completely out with Moose Tracks, no growth or discovery may have been made. In other words, healthy foods are less sufficient for the purpose of emotional eating, thereby creating a space to begin to heal!

Ultimately, I believe we can heal emotional eating regardless of what we are eating, because again, the root of emotional eating is never food-related; if those issues are addressed, the emotional eating is addressed, as well.

The question is: can we make that journey easier on ourselves? Absolutely.

Courtney Pool has been studying raw food nutrition and natural health for 5 years, including with Dr. Gabriel Cousens, M.D. at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center, for over 3 years. Courtney blogs, writes, and speaks on nutrition, holistic living, eating disorders and related issues, and personal and spiritual growth and is a Juice Feasting coach, having fasted herself for over 130 days.

Medical Advice to My President

Photo Credit: Vanity Fair

As a doctor, I want to get a few things straight, Mr. President.

Right, left, or in-between, our country needs you. Your wife and girls need you. They need you in good health, and setting a good example, not least because talking about healthcare is so much more credible when we do what we can to not need it.

Here’s the bad news: You have not one, but two risk factors for heart disease: smoking and high cholesterol. You’re not a teenager anymore. It’s time to take this seriously.

The good news—great news, in fact—is that you can change them both. But frankly, I’m worried. If you have had trouble sorting out smoking and cholesterol, then millions of other Americans must be in the same boat, which is to say completely in the dark about the very same problems.

So let me lay it on the line:

First, smoking. Tobacco is a tough habit to break. I know. When my hospital banned smoking, I wondered how the doctors would take it—after all, the doctors’ lounge had a dull haze 24/7. But we broke that habit, and so can you. There is no magic here. Just keep trying until you quit for good. And it gets easier every day that goes by without a cigarette.

Second, cholesterol. Here, let’s clear up a few myths.

First, exercise won’t lower your cholesterol. It may bump up “good” cholesterol slightly and improve your basketball game or your stride, but you definitely can’t count on it to lower your “bad” cholesterol. It won’t.

Second, we almost certainly cannot blame genes. For the vast majority of people, high cholesterol comes down to diet.

Third, switching from beef to chicken and fish has almost no effect on cholesterol. It lowers “bad” cholesterol only about 5 percent–and that’s not enough.

The answer is behind your house, in the White House garden. Foods from plants have essentially no cholesterol and are free of the animal fat that causes the body to make cholesterol. If you skipped meat, dairy products, and eggs for even a few weeks, chances are your cholesterol would drop right into the normal range.

What’s that? You love burgers and chili? Fair enough. So make it a veggie burger. And I can show you a vegetarian chili that is so good, you’ll never know the difference.

And when you conquer your health demons, you’ll inspire every American child to do the same. Lest you think this is a trivial issue, one in five teens has an abnormal cholesterol test today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And it only gets worse as they reach adulthood. One in three children is overweight, and one in three will eventually develop diabetes.

You can help them by stubbing out the smokes for good and adopting a healthy, plant-based diet. And as a shining example of good habits, you will have done more good for the health of the American public than any prior president.

People may disagree on how to make healthcare work. But I hope that a bit of advice on how to be healthy will reduce the risk you’ll ever need it, and help you stay well and strong. That’s food for thought.

Shattering the Meat Myth

Blessing us with hot knowledge on this Meatless Monday, health and wellness warrior Kathy Freston provides another powerful case for the plant-based diet. She offers historical, anthropological, and biological testimony to refute the idea that we evolved to consume mass quantities of meat and animal products. By now, we think you’re out of excuses: Go Meatless with us today!

I often notice the frequently stated notion that eating meat was an essential step in human evolution. While this notion may comfort the meat industry, it’s simply not true, scientifically.

Dr. T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus at Cornell University and author of The China Study, explains that in fact, we only recently (historically speaking) began eating meat, and that the inclusion of meat in our diet came well after we became who we are today. He explains that “the birth of agriculture only started about 10,000 years ago at a time when it became considerably more convenient to herd animals. This is not nearly as long as the time [that] fashioned our basic biochemical functionality (at least tens of millions of years) and which functionality depends on the nutrient composition of plant-based foods.”

That jibes with what Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine President Dr. Neal Barnard says in his book, The Power of Your Plate, in which he explains that “early humans had diets very much like other great apes, which is to say a largely plant-based diet, drawing on foods we can pick with our hands. Research suggests that meat-eating probably began by scavenging—eating the leftovers that carnivores had left behind. However, our bodies have never adapted to it. To this day, meat-eaters have a higher incidence of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other problems.”

There is no more authoritative source on anthropological issues than paleontologist Dr. Richard Leakey, who explains what anyone who has taken an introductory physiology course might have discerned intuitively: humans are herbivores. Leakey notes that “[y]ou can’t tear flesh by hand, you can’t tear hide by hand… We wouldn’t have been able to deal with food source that required those large canines.” (Although we have teeth that are called “canines,” they bear little resemblance to the canines of carnivores).

In fact, our hands are perfect for grabbing and picking fruits and vegetables. Similarly, like the intestines of other herbivores, ours are very long (carnivores have short intestines so they can quickly get rid of all that rotting flesh they eat). We don’t have sharp claws to seize and hold down prey. And most of us (hopefully) lack the instinct that would drive us to chase and then kill animals and devour their raw carcasses. Dr. Milton Mills builds on these points and offers dozens more in his essay, “A Comparative Anatomy of Eating.”

The point is this: Thousands of years ago when we were hunter-gatherers, we may have needed a bit of meat in our diets in times of scarcity, but we don’t need it now. Says Dr. William C. Roberts, editor of the American Journal of Cardiology, “Although we think we are, and we act as if we are, human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us, because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.”

Sure, most of us are “behavioral omnivores”—that is, we eat meat, so that defines us as omnivorous. But our evolution and physiology are herbivorous, and ample science proves that when we choose to eat meat, it causes problems, from decreased energy and a need for more sleep up to increased risk for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Old habits die hard, and it’s convenient for people who like to eat meat to think that there is evidence to support their belief that eating meat is “natural” or the cause of our evolution. For many years I, too, clung to the idea that meat and dairy were good for me; I realize now that I was probably comforted to have justification for my continued attachment to the traditions with which I grew up.

But in fact top nutritional and anthropological scientists from the most reputable institutions imaginable say categorically that humans are natural herbivores, and that we will be healthier today if we stick with our herbivorous roots. It may be inconvenient, but alas, it is the truth.

Photo Credit: Kurt Elster

Originally posted at HuffingtonPost.com

Rush Limbaugh Should Be More Conservative

Meatless Monday is the perfect day to take a look at the connection between our health and diet. Read on to learn more about the state of America’s health and Neal Barnard, MD’s prescription for wellness.

Rush Limbaugh was rushed to a Hawaii hospital in late December, reportedly suffering from severe chest pains. The concern was a possible heart attack, but fortunately, tests showed no such problem.

This health scare should still be a wake-up call. As a doctor, I’m offering one bit of advice, not just to Rush, but to all Americans: We need to be more conservative. As conservative as possible, in fact.

With our diets, that is. Many Americans are far too liberal with their servings of meat, dairy products, eggs, and other less-than-healthy foods. And they are getting more so with each passing year. Per capita annual meat intake has risen roughly 70 pounds in the last century, and cheese intake has jumped by nearly 30 pounds in the same time period.

This huge load of cholesterol, fat, and calories has fueled epidemics of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other health problems. And these diseases are taxing our health care system like never before. As a nation, we now spend $147 billion on obesity-related medical costs every year. During these tough economic times, we should be tightening our belts. But let’s face it: Our belts are rapidly moving in the opposite direction.

In our grandparents’ day, people knew the value of humble beans, vegetables, and fruits, often growing them in their own family gardens. These foods have essentially no cholesterol and very little saturated fat. It pays to give them renewed respect. Indeed, people who stick to an entirely plant-based diet, as part of an overall healthy lifestyle, can do more than just prevent heart disease; they can actually reverse it, as was demonstrated in the now-classic studies of Dean Ornish, M.D.

A plant-based diet can also help you slim down, improve diabetes and hypertension, and feel like yourself again. It can also fight some types of cancer. Fruits and vegetables are packed with antioxidants and other nutrients that boost the immune system. And fiber-rich vegan diets help quickly flush carcinogens and other toxins from the body.

The only good thing about a health scare is that it reminds us how important our diets and lifestyles are to our well-beings. It’s time to trade our cheeseburgers for veggie burgers, beef tacos for bean burritos, and remote controls for tennis shoes. Yes, that’s my prescription for Rush—but it’s also my prescription for us all.

A Solution For Diabetes: A Plant-Based Diet

Neal Barnard, MD

I’ve been researching the most common and devastating diseases Americans are dealing with, with the aim of finding a common thread running throughout both cause and reversal. As it is now, one out of every two of us will get cancer or heart disease, and one out of every three children born after the year 2000 will be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. These are devastating diseases, certainly to those who are burdened by them, but also to a health care system that is struggling to keep up.

The extraordinary doctors and nutritional scientists I’ve talked with seem to be saying – and saying fervently – the same thing: a diet high in animal protein is disastrous to our health, while a plant-based (vegan) diet prevents disease and is restorative to our health. And they say this with peer-reviewed (the gold standard of studies) science to back them up. Even the very conservative ADA (American Dietetic Association) says: “Vegetarian diets are often associated with a number of health advantages, including lower blood cholesterol levels, lower risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure levels, and lower risk of hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Vegetarians tend to have a lower body mass index (BMI) and lower overall cancer rates.”

Diabetes does not just mean you take a pill or injection every day. It means you can lose a decade of life. And you while you inch toward that uncomfortable end, you deal with an increased risk of heart attack, blindness, amputation, and loss of kidney function. It’s a very serious disease. The good news is that diabetes can be halted and reversed in a very short time through some diet modifications.

To understand diabetes better, and to learn how to reverse it, I’ve talked with Dr. Neal Barnard, president of The Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine. He is an adjunct associate professor of medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine, and the author of numerous scientific articles in leading peer-reviewed journals, and a frequent lecturer at the American Diabetes Association’s scientific sessions. His diabetes research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Government’s research branch. He is also the author of Dr. Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes.

KF: Why is type 2 diabetes suddenly so prevalent?

NB: Diets are changing, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Diabetes seems to follow the spread of meaty, high-fat, high-calorie diets. In Japan, for example, the traditional rice-based diet kept the population generally healthy and thin for many centuries. Up until 1980, only 1-5% of Japanese adults over age 40 had diabetes. Starting around that time, however, the rapid westernization of the diet meant that meat, milk, cheese, and sodas became fashionable. Waistlines expanded, and, by 1990, diabetes prevalence in Japan had climbed to 11-12%.

The same sort of trend has occurred in the U.S. Over the last century, per capita meat consumption increased from about 150 pounds per year (which was already very high, compared with other countries) in the early 1900s to over 200 pounds today. In other words, the average American now eats 50 pounds more meat every year, compared with a century ago. In the same interval, cheese intake soared from less than 4 pounds per person per year to about 32 pounds today. Sugar intake has gone up, too, by about 30 pounds per person per year. Where are we putting all that extra meat, cheese, and sugar? It contributes to body fat, of course, and diabetes follows. Today, about 13% of the U.S. adult population has type 2 diabetes, although many of them are not yet aware they have it.

KF: What causes diabetes?

NB: Normally, the cells of the body use the simple sugar glucose as fuel, the way a car uses gasoline. Glucose comes from starchy or sweet foods we eat, and the hormone insulin escorts it into the muscle cells to power our movements. Glucose also passes into our brain cells to power our thoughts. In type 2 diabetes, the cells resist insulin’s action, so glucose has trouble getting into the cells.

KF: What happens to the body when one develops diabetes? What’s the fallout?

NB: If glucose can’t get into the cells, it builds up in the blood. It is as if gasoline coming out of a gas pump somehow can’t get into your gas tank, and it ends up spilling over the side of your car, coming in through your car windows, and dribbling all over the pavement. It is a dangerous situation. The abnormally high levels of glucose circulating in the bloodstream are toxic to the blood vessels, especially the tiny blood vessels of the eyes, the kidneys, the extremities, and the heart.

KF: Is it really that serious, or can we just take a drug for it?

NB: A person with diabetes loses more than a decade of life, on average; about three-quarters will die prematurely of a heart attack. It is also a leading cause of blindness, amputations, and loss of kidney function. Many drugs are available, from insulin to oral medications and an ever-increasing variety of other medications. In order to protect the heart, many patients are also put on medications to lower cholesterol and blood pressure. A person with diabetes who walks into my office is typically using $3,000 to $5,000 worth of medications each year. And yet these medications only slow the progression of the disease; many people have serious complications despite being on medications.

Let me emphasize that this grim scenario does not have to occur. If an unhealthy diet is the cause, a better diet can provide the answer to this problem.

KF: How can we avoid it?

NB: The key is to help our body’s insulin to work normally. So long as your body’s insulin can escort glucose into the cells normally, diabetes will not occur. The resistance to insulin that leads to diabetes appears to be caused by a build-up of fat inside the muscle cells and also inside the liver. Let me draw an analogy: I arrive home from work one day, and put my key in my front door lock. But I notice the key does not turn properly, and the door does not open. Peering inside the lock, I see that someone has jammed chewing gum into the lock. Now, if the insulin “key” cannot open up the cell to glucose, there is something interfering with it. It’s not chewing gum, of course. The problem is fat. In the same way that chewing gum in a lock makes it hard to open your front door, fat particles inside muscle cells interfere with insulin’s efforts to open the cell to glucose. This fat comes from beef, chicken, fish, cooking oils, dairy products, etc. The answer is to avoid these fatty foods. People who avoid all animal products obviously get no animal fat at all, they appear to have much less fat build-up inside their cells, and their risk of diabetes is extremely low. Minimizing vegetable oils helps, too.

And we can go beyond prevention. When people who already have diabetes adopt a low-fat vegan diet, their condition often improves dramatically. In our research, funded by the U.S. Government, we found that a vegan diet is more effective than a traditional current diabetes diet, and is much safer than a low-carb diet.

KF: What about the claim that a vegetarian diet has too many starches, which raises blood sugar?

NB: Starchy foods, such as whole grains, beans, and vegetables, are healthful foods, and the body is designed to use the glucose that they hold. In type 2 diabetes, the body has lost some of this ability. But the answer is not to avoid starches, but to restore the body’s ability to use them. After all, cultures whose diets are traditionally high in carbohydrate–Japan, China, Latin America, etc.–have had very low diabetes rates until meat, cheese, and other fatty foods displace their healthy carbohydrate-rich diets; only then does diabetes becomes more common.

The Atkins fad unfortunately left many people imagining that carbohydrate (that is, starch) is somehow risky. That notion is as unscientific as suggesting that water or oxygen is dangerous. The body needs all these things for good health.

A similarly persistent but misguided idea is the blood-type diet approach. A popular book on this subject said that people with type A blood should follow a vegetarian diet but that people with type O blood should not. Unfortunately many readers with type O blood followed this advice, which turned out to be quite wrong. The fact is, people with type O blood do as well as everyone else on a plant-based diet. A vegan diet is helpful and effective, regardless of blood type.

KF: Can diabetes be reversed?

NB: Yes. When people begin a healthful diet, most see big improvements in weight, cholesterol, and their blood sugar. Their need for medications diminishes, and some may not need medications at all. In some cases, you would never know they had had diabetes. However, I caution people not to simply throw their medications away. They need to speak with their doctors so they can alter their medication regimens only when and if it is appropriate.

Let me describe a case: A man named Vance joined our study. His father was dead by age 30, and Vance was 31 when he was diagnosed with diabetes. As our study began, he started a low-fat, vegan diet and gradually lost about 60 pounds over a year’s time. His blood sugar control returned to normal, and his doctor discontinued his medications. Imagine what it feels like to see family members assaulted by this disease, but then to realize that you have effectively tackled it by making healthful adjustments to your diet.

Vance also encouraged me to mention that it is not only blood sugar that gets better, his erectile dysfunction also improved dramatically, too–in case anyone needs an extra motivator.

For more information, go to http://www.pcrm.org/health/

Originally posted at The Huffington Post.