There are probably a thousand different diets out there telling you how to lose weight.  Every one of them in one way or another is designed to help you eat less.  This is the simple truth to losing weight - eat less.  Exactly which foods to cut out or cut back on will vary from person to person in effectiveness because we are all biochemically different from each other.  Some people get better results cutting back on fats, others by cutting out carbs, some by avoiding foods you are sensitive to, and so on.

Any way you look at it you have to eat less.  This is why most diets fail - we don't want to eat less.  We believe we are hungry.  It is true that in many ways we are starving for healthy real nutrition.  But the hunger most people feel has to do mostly with stomach fullness.  In a lifestyle of food abundance many of us simply eat too much and this causes us to put on excess weight.  It also stretches out our stomachs so that they require a lot of food to fill them up enough to give us the signal that says we have eaten enough to fill us up.  Our gas tank is too big for the type of foods we are putting into it.

The Japanese have a great expression concerning healthy eating habits: Hara hachi bu. Hara hachi bu means "Eat until 80% full" (literally, stomach 80%).  It takes 20 - 30 minutes before what you have eaten impacts and registers in your brain.  If you eat either until your stomach is distended or until your brain is satisfied, you will have overeaten.  So stop at 80% full.

We eat foods that are extremely concentrated in terms of calories.  Not only do we eat too large a volume of food, but the food we eat has triple to quadruple the number of calories per unit volume compared to the diet of our hunter gatherer ancestors.  A pound of food eaten by our pre-agricultural ancestors may have had only 400 to 500 calories while a pound of food in our modern diet will have 1600 to 2000 calories.  For our stomach to feel like it is getting enough food we are doomed to overeat calories if we eat modern food. 

Then there is the fact that just to get the food they needed to survive our ancestors had to do a heck of a lot of physical work to procure that food.  That means that they burned up a lot of calories just getting the food they needed.  They didn't have a car to drive the four blocks to the supermarket to load up on all the high calorie density food they wanted.  They usually had to work all day just to get enough to eat.  Where the average American burns 2000 to 3000 calories a day, our ancestors burned nearly twice that.

So is there any wonder why we have an obesity epidemic today?  Our food is so concentrated we automatically eat too much, and we don't burn nearly as many calories anyway.  That means fat cells filling up with unused food energy every day and saving it for lean times that never come.

On a practical level there are four food groups - Proteins,Fats, Carbohydrates, and Fibers.  Most modern nutrition ignores the last food group or puts it down as a subgroup of the carbohydrate family.  In my view this misses a huge understanding of practical nutrition.  Chemically it may be right, but functionally it misses the boat.  It allows us to keep doing what we are currently doing - which means we will keep getting the same results - poor health.  If we upgrade fibers to its own food group and understand that they are just as important as the other food groups, then we will begin to improve our dietary health.

The average American eats less than 15 grams of fiber per day.  That is like 1 heaping tablespoon a day.  Our ancestors on the other hand typically ate 100 to 150 grams of fiber per day.  Fiber is the bulk that fills us up.  Fiber is the magic food that keeps us from overeating because it lowers the number of calories in each pound of food we consume.  Fiber based foods typically only have 200 to 300 calories per pound after cooking.  Compare that to lean meats at 800+ calories per pound and typical junk and snack food at 1600 to 2000 calories per pound.  As an extreme example let's take our favorite snack food - the potato chip.  It weighs in at over 10,000 calories per pound.  This is why chips are rated as the number one worst food for causing obesity.

So, if you wanted to fill up on food to not be hungry, which food do you think might work better to help you keep your calorie count down - a fiber food or a typical American junk food?  Foolish question - obviously fiber foods work the best to fill us up.  Some of the dietary savvy of you might be asking "yes, but what foods produce the most satiety?"  Satiety is that feeling that says you are still satisfied an hour later.  The answer is not fiber foods, but proteins.  We will come to that in a minute.  Fiber comes in second.

The big question you should all have now is what are the fiber foods?  NO, we are not talking about high fiber cereals in pretty boxes in the breakfast cereal isle of the grocery store.  You won't find any 200 calories per pound cereals.  In fact your average all bran high fiber cereal measures out at 1140 calories per pound.  You are better off eating a pound of lean Tri Tip beef at only 800 calories per pound.  High fiber foods are the non-starchy vegetables.

Artichoke
Asparagus
Bamboo shoots
Basil
Beans: green, Italian, wax
Bean sprouts
Beet greens
Bok Choy
Broccoli
Brussels sprouts
Cabbage: all types
Cauliflower
Celery
Chard
Chayote
Collard greens
Cucumber
Eggplant
Fennel
Garlic - fresh
Ginger root
Green onions or scallions
Herbs - fresh
Jicama
Kale
Kohlrabi
Leeks
Lemon grass
Lettuce - all varieties
Mung bean sprouts
Mushrooms - all types
Mustard Greens
Okra
Onions
Oriental radish or daikon
Pea pods
Peppers, all varieties
Radishes
Rutabaga
Sauerkraut
Spinach
Sugar snap peas
Summer squash
Swiss chard
Tomatoes
Turnips: root and greens
Water chestnuts
Zucchini

When you consider all the varieties of these non-starchy vegetables we are talking about hundreds of different foods.  These foods form the bulk of the fiber food group.  Other fibers include psyllium seed husk, chia seed, and flaxseed, plus non-nutritive fibers like polydextrose and cellulose as well as prebiotic fibers like oligosaccharides and arabinogalactans.

Sweet fruits and vegetables do not belong in the same food group.  Fruits are carbohydrates and should be eaten in very limited quantities - no more than 12 ounces on average per day (11/2 cups fresh fruit).  Vegetables belong in their own group - the high fiber, high mineral, low calorie group.  Three to five pounds of vegetables can be eaten per day.

Backs in our ancestor's day sweet fruits were much closer to vegetables in fiber and sugar content.  Our selective breeding of modern fruits has resulted in much higher levels of sugar and much lower levels of fiber and other vital nutrients.  For instance oranges only a few hundred years ago had 10 times the vitamin A of modern oranges and ¼ the sugar.  Modern varieties of fruits we get today are more like candy than food.  The high levels of fructose make eating fruit a problem as our liver can not handle more than 15 - 20 grams of fructose a day.  It does not matter whether that fructose comes in the form of high fructose corn syrup, cane sugar, or fresh fruit.  In fact a recent study found a large percentage of school kids are showing up with fatty liver disease from eating too much fructose - a disease formerly found only in advanced alcoholism.

If you want to really boost your nutrition and decrease your weight you will make the fiber food group occupy 50% to 80% of your diet (by weight).  Right now with the concentrated food diet we eat, we consume more calories than we can use while eating a pound or two of food per day.  Eating from the fiber group for most of our foods we could eat five pounds of food per day and only be consuming half the calories we are currently taking in.  How does that sound?  Eat three times as much but end up only consuming half the number of calories.

In its simplest form, this idea looks like eating 3 - 4 ounces of protein and 1 to11/2 pounds of vegetables three times a day.  You would be totally full and satisfied physically.  In fact you would feel stuffed and you would be getting the best nutrition of your life.  The most nutritionally dense food yet measured is Kale - a fiber food.  And here you would be consuming the most nutritious foods available in huge quantities.  If you have any serious health concerns like diabetes, heart disease, or any other degenerative disease, this is how I would counsel you to eat.

Despite the lies you have been fed all your lives by the Agricultural industry controlled FDA, there is no such thing as a necessary essential carbohydrate in the diet.  We do not need grains and certainly do not need any sugars in our diets.  There are essential fatty acids (like DHA), but they are all contained in the vegetables and protein foods when we choose well, particularly when we include nuts and seeds as part of the protein group.  There is very little added fat we need in our diet.  Fatty seafood, nuts and seeds, and vegetables will meet all our essential fat needs.  3 -4 ounces of protein food three times a day meets all our essential protein needs.  The essential vitamins and minerals we need are all in the vegetables.  That covers us as far as essential nutrients to stay healthy.

Wouldn't it be useful to have a high fiber food that also was high in protein and contained essential omega-3 oil?  I know two good ones - Chia seed and Flaxseed.  Chia seed is especially nice as it forms a wonderful gel that can be used to fill you up with fiber before a meal so you don't want to eat as much.  Depending upon how much water you use, the gel can be light and drinkable (mix it with something flavorful) or it can be thick like tapioca pudding.  I mix mine with Dr Dave sweetener and Cocoa powder to make a chocolate pudding.  One ounce of Chia seed has 11 grams of fiber.  Right now in the office I have 1 pound bags of Chia seed for only $12.  I also have some free samples for those of you that would like to try it out. 

Fiber is the single biggest nutrient missing in our modern diet.  Because it is missing, our food has become too concentrated, too full of calories.  This not only makes us fat, but also is the cause of most if not all of our degenerative diseases - the so-called diseases of affluence.  These are the diseases that will kill most of us - just because we are not eating our fiber - our vegetables.  So mother had no idea how right she was when she told us to eat our vegetables.  Unfortunately the advice was negated by having dessert after dinner as a reward for eating our vegetables.  That told us clearly that dessert must be more highly valued as it was the reward food.  We need a better reward system than a bodily poison like sugar.

Do I actually expect that anyone will eat this way unless they have a serious health issue they are dealing with?  No.  But unless we have some realistic view of what our body really wants to be healthy, we have no compass for making better choices.  The messages from the media and our government are not giving us any idea of what a healthy diet really looks like.  For instance just this morning I read an article about how a study was just released showing that the average teenager consumes two cans of soda a day - the equivalent of 44 packets of sugar.  The article was saying that this exceeds the government recommendation of only one half a can of soda per day for maximum health.  One the surface this sounds like good advice - reducing sugar consumption.  But on the other hand our brain has just registered that one half a can of soda (11 packets of sugar) a day is the right amount for a healthy diet.  See the problem?  Here is the solution: 

The food pyramid we are all familiar with tells us to eat 6 to 10 servings of bread and cereal each day to be healthy.  This is absolutely insane.  This is why we have the onslaught of modern degenerative diseases - too many carbs.  Can a small percentage of people eat this way and be healthy - yes.  Can most people?  No.  The media and government are paid for by the very companies that are selling the food that has created the health crisis we are all faced with in these modern times.

What can I realistically hope for?  Maybe that we all eat a few more vegetables and less concentrated junk food.  Hopefully I have communicated the need for much greater levels of fiber in our diets.  Simple fiber sources like Chia seeds are an easy way to increase our fiber consumption and reduce our overall calorie load.  Maybe up our fiber consumption to just 30 grams per day.  Little steps toward greater health is what I actually am shooting for.         
 

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Cinnamon improves insulin response and decreases blood glucose

     One of the most basic systems in our body is our blood sugar system.  It regulates the energy available for everything that happens inside of us.  Consequently having stable blood sugar is of vital importance.  Anything that helps us towards that end is a good thing - but how appropriate a support can you find then a spice that we frequently mix with sugar anyway?  Hooray cinnamon!

 

Cinnamon 

 

 

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~ Oscar Wilde

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About Dr. DeLapp

Dr. DeLapp has been a philosopher, non-force Chiropractor, medical intuitive, and health innovator for over 30 years.  He began experimenting with  medical intuition in 1972 while studying physics at UC Davis.  In addition to physics he designed and completed an individual major in the philosophy and psychology of education.  Shortly after he choose to pursue a career in the only truly health oriented profession available at that time, Chiropractic.  He graduated with honors in 1981 with his doctorate and opened a private practice. 
Since that time he has continued his research into the effects of consciousness and learning on health. 
He developed the Biomagnetic Retraining system for correcting movement abnormalities. 
Since 1991 he has focused on developing a powerful system for uncovering and assisting the mind-body connection in health and personal growth.  The in-depth coaching, guided by the subconscious direction from the body, is called Heartflow and the simpler mind-body retraining for health and unfoldment he has named Gracework.  Both are available at Fair Oaks Health.

Dr David DeLapp DC
Chiropractor

Ellen Flowers FGM
Spiritual Life Coach

 

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