Calories vs. nutrients: the law of health is unbiased

Just about every diet known fails to provide a long-term solution to healthy weight loss, and here’s why: most diets treat the “calories in vs. calories out” problem as the issue and use the scale as the measure of success. This is like preparing for a cross-country road trip, ignoring your gasoline source is dirty, filling the tank only half way, and still expecting fuel economy. Whereas you may have gained some initial weight from eating too much and not exercising, the problem is that the consistent and continual consumption of bad calories and inactivity has caused a metabolic dysfunction that cannot be reversed by simply reducing the calories and increasing your exercise. To reverse the damage, you must heal.

In the short term, putting on fat is a normal function of energy storage; think of it as a flood plain that absorbs excess water after a heavy rain. It serves a short-term purpose and is perfectly normal. But if the rain never stops and the flood plain never drains, then it ceases to be a flood plain and the standing water becomes a breeding ground for disease. It is the long-term exposure to the WRONG calories and exposure to toxins, combined with inactivity and/or stress that damages our metabolism and is the cause of obesity.

Simply put, weight gain and obesity are a symptom of a metabolic dysfunction. If you’re significantly overweight or obese, it took some time for you to get that way and as such, it’s safe to say your metabolism is not working properly. The flood plain will cease to be a flood plain if the rain never stops; to return it back to its natural state will require more than simply a sudden stop of the rain. In this context, your metabolism is not working properly because you never stopped eating junk; to fix your damaged metabolism will require long-term healing.

It’s safe to say, therefore, that your metabolism is damaged for one or both of these two reasons: a) ill-nutrition, i.e. a significant, long-term ingestion of nutrient-deficient foods which in and of themselves have high concentrations of salt, sugar and/or fat, creating a nutritional imbalance, or b) a similarly significant, long-term exposure to synthetic chemicals or toxins at a rate faster than your body can safely eliminate.

Just to be clear on what we mean by “ill-nutrition”, eating excessive amounts of fast food and junk food, is bordering on toxicity (watch the movie “Super Size Me” to get the jest of this) due to the unnatural and unhealthy amounts of salt, sugar and fat which the body treats as toxins. For example, if you drink two ounces of sea water, your body instantly recognizes this amount of salt all at one time as too much, and consequently rejects it by inducing vomiting.

But if you sip the sea water a little at a time, you may not vomit, but your body will retain water to dilute the unnaturally high amount of sodium in your system and slowly eliminate it via sweating and/or urinating. This is important to note because it shows that the body has a built-in threshold of what is unhealthy and it intuitively will take evasive and/or compensatory measures to manage it safely.

As such, whether eating too much of the wrong (i.e. nutrient-deficient) foods or being exposed to high levels of toxic chemicals, both are treated by the body the same way: stored in fat for the day it can safely eliminate the unwanted chemicals. So the real issue of why we gain weight to begin with is chronic toxicity. Most diets fail in offering a sustainable solution by not tackling the toxicity issue head on.

This is why measuring success using the scale is stupid. The scale is not a toxicity meter, nor does it measure nutritional imbalance. I believe that if you change your current thinking about weight loss to mean “fat” loss and understand why you gained weight (fat) in the first place, you will be better equipped to develop a more realistic, long term and sustainable strategy for healthy weight (fat) maintenance.

This change in thinking goes from having a goal-oriented mindset of wanting a thin body, to a steward mindset, where the duty is to promote the body’s metabolic health. This can be achieved by asking simple questions like: “Am I eating empty calories, or am I eating nutritious food?” “Does it nourish, or just tickle my taste buds?”

The bottom line is that most diets fail because they’re afraid to confront dieters with a lifestyle change, and/or, to be realistic about the fact that a sustainable weight (fat) management strategy is hard, takes time and involves careful and on-going detoxification. Let’s be honest, most diets acquiesce to dieters’ desire for a quick-fix solution and avoid educating them properly and offering them what their bodies really need for healthy, sustainable and permanent weight (fat) loss.

The only way to achieve healthy, sustainable and permanent fat loss is to cooperate with the law of health that says that what you plant is what you’ll harvest. Plant junk, get junk; plant “quick-fix” diet, get a temporary, short-term and unsustainable condition. In contrast, plant nutrition, get healed of your metabolic dysfunction; once healed, the weight (fat) will take care of itself. Simple? Yes! Easy? NO!

There’s a catch. Due to the innumerable possible biological factors impacted by phytonutrients in an infinite number or combinations, there’s no guarantee you’ll get exactly what you want.

There is, however, a strong possibility that you will experience greater health. How? The law of health is unbiased, that is, it doesn’t favor any one person over another. Just like the law of gravity, if you violate the law of health, you WILL suffer ill and unintended or unwanted consequences. Cooperate with the law of health, and it’s very probable and highly likely you will enjoy health as God intended for humans.

As you move in this direction, you will realize that “weight” is no longer an issue for you and you will be happy with whatever your DNA has predetermined for you when in optimal health.

How does one achieve optimal health? The evidence is clear and unmistakable: switch to a whole food, plant-based diet, increase your physical activity daily, and manage your stress by resting your mind, body & spirit so that your body’s healing mechanism can do its job. God created our bodies to heal themselves, but we must do our part every day and at every meal.

Regardless of where you came from, how much or how little you’ve achieved, what you drive or where you live, and regardless of whether or not you believe in it, God’s law of health is unbiased and, like gravity, works to prosper you providing you respectfully cooperate with it.