FertilehealthyAiming for success, not perfection…

I was first introduced to The Gabriel Method by my fellow blogger and good friend (although we’ve never met in person) Kat.  Her endorsement prompted me to order the book.  While I was waiting for my copy to arrive in the post, my friend Terri, who had introduced me to Vilma, my fairy-godmother biochemist/healer, sent me a text saying, “OMG, I have just found this amazing book and you HAVE to read it.”

So, I did.  It blew me away.

Jon Gabriel used to weigh over 400 pounds and he lost the weight without dieting or depriving himself in any way.

We have all heard it said a thousand times:  Diets don’t work.  In his book Jon Gabriel explains exactly why they don’t work and it makes perfect sense to me.

According to Gabriel our weight is controlled by the most primitive part of our brain – the limbic or animal brain.  This system does not care whether you want to look good on the beach this summer or at your high-school reunion.  It doesn’t know what about beaches, bikinis, reunions and cannot conceive of the future.  Its main concern is to keep us safe in the moment – from starvation and predation – and insulated in cold weather.  Those were the threats that faced our ancestors.  In times when food was scarce and before central heating their bodies had to preserve fat to keep them alive.  But they also needed to be able to escape predators, so the body would always be maintaining a balance between too much fat and too little fat.

Our lives are much different now, but our bodies don’t know that.  When we starve/deprive ourselves emotionally, mentally or physically through dieting, the body turns on what Gabriel terms the “FAT programs”.  Stress, fear and distress, whether emotional, physical or mental, can also turn on the FAT programs.

The Gabriel Method is about beating those FAT programs.  Gabriel explains how to convince the body that it’s safe to be thin and to make it want to be thin.  The primary tool here is a CD that places you in SMART mode (Super Mental Awareness Re-education Training Mode) and reassures the animal brain that it is safe to lose weight.

The nutritional chapter of this book is unlike any other and I highly recommend this approach.  It’s all about abundance, not lack (remember deprivation will turn on the FAT programs).

The exercise advice is geared towards turning OFF the FAT programs.  My husband has been practicing these principles with great results these last few months.

The book concludes with an Appendix about the chemistry of the FAT programs.  It is fascinating!

I’m about to start following The Gabriel Method myself and will definitely keep you up to date.  As for the book, I highly recommend it!

Here are two short clips of Jon Gabriel.  In the first one he introduces himself and The Gabriel Method and in the second he tells an amazing story about his cat, Jessie, whose FAT programs got turned off dramatically one day.

There are many Jon Gabriel videos on Youtube, so you can probably get the gist of the book from them, but if you’re interested you can also get the first chapter from Jon Gabriel’s website.

Oh, and another reason why I love this book so much?  Gabriel says to stay off the scale!

I’ve been reading about and researching healthful living for years.  I know what to do to be healthy.  I know why I need to do these things.  Yet, making these changes  have always been difficult for me and I have failed many times in the past.  That pattern is by no means unique to me – I see it all around me.

The Pleasure Trap:  Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health & Happiness by Douglas J. Lisle and Allan Goldhamer addresses this issue.

I got this book for my birthday and have read it twice in the last month.  I will no doubt read it many more times, because this is the key I’ve been waiting for.  The key to freedom from “bad habits”, addictions and compulsions.

Lisle and Goldhamer reveals how our physiology, evolved in times of scarcity, when survival was a daily struggle, works against us in current landscape of excess.

They deal extensively with what motivates us and how our modern life thwarts our motivation.  More importantly, they teach us to get in touch with our biological guidance system again and live healthily and  happily.

The whole book is utterly fascinating, but I was particularly interested in part about the Law of Satiation.  We have within us the ability to eat exactly the right foods, in the right amounts for us, but in our society that ability is being circumvented by the kind of food we eat, external cues and convenience.  As a result, we are unable to maintain a proper weight or optimum health.

If you are addicted to food, read this book.

If you struggle with your weight, read this book.

If you have any health problem whatsoever, read this book.

The Pleasure Trap is beautifully and skillfully written and easy to read.  I will come back to it again and again.

From the Inside Flap
A wake-up call to even the most health conscious people, The Pleasure Trap boldly challenges conventional wisdom about sickness and unhappiness in today’s contemporary culture, and offers groundbreaking solutions for achieving change. Authors Douglas Lisle, Ph.D., and Alan Goldhamer, D.C., provide a fascinating new perspective on how modern life can turn so many smart, savvy people into the unwitting saboteurs of their own well-being.

Inspired by stunning original research, comprehensive clinical studies, and their successes with thousands of patients, the authors construct a new paradigm for the psychology of health, offering fresh hope for anyone stuck in a self-destructive rut. Integrating principals of evolutionary biology with trailblazing, proactive strategies for wellness, they argue that people who are chronically overweight, sick and ailing, or junk food junkies aren’t that way because they’re lazy, undisciplined, or stuck with bad genes. The authors reveal that most are victims of a dilemma that harkens back to our prehistoric past-”the Pleasure Trap.”

Drs. Lisle and Goldhamer then call upon their clinical experience, scientific investigations, and a recent revoution of understanding in human motivational psychology to provide you with solutions for the challenges of keeping on a healthful course-and how to make the most of your life.

I LOVED this book!  Borrow or buy it, but definitely read it.

The end.

Okay, it’s not really the end.  Even though I’ve been a lazy blogger all week, I’ll tell you a little but more about “Slow Fat Triathlete“.

Jayne Williams was well on her way to 300 pounds and the big four-oh and spent her days in a soulless cubicle.  Like so many of us, she was full of aches and pains.  She started her road to fitness by walking, then running on grass for a few minutes.  When her legs hurt she swam.  Eventually she got on a bicycle.  Her fitness improved, her weight came down and she was feeling good.  Then she was introduced to sprint-triathlon and thought that she might be able to do that.

This book is the story of how she became a triathlete (at the time of writing she had done a half-Ironman distance race too and many Olympic distance races).  Admittedly a slow and fat one, but a very enthusiastic one.

Jayne is funny, articulate and inspiring.  She addresses all the issues that we worry about:  what shall I wear (always a problem for the more generously proportioned), how will I get into my wetsuit, where can I get a particular item, how do I find out about races in my area, etc?  She really covers everything, has great tips and provides many resources.

This is not a training manual, it’s a refreshing introduction to the world of sport.  For someone like me, who hasn’t competed in anything since my early teens, this book is an eye-opener.  She teaches us that if we take it slowly enough, are sensible and work hard enough we can “live our athletic dreams in the body we have now”.

I no longer harbor any dreams of doing a triathlon myself, but I do want to run a 5K (maybe more) one day.  And thanks to Jayne, I now know that I don’t have to wait until I’m thin.  She really has inspired me to build up my fitness slowly, but consistently.

The best piece of advice in this book (repeated often)?  Don’t fret over what you look like while exercising.  Oh, and a sense of humor really helps!

This book was a joy from cover to cover and I strongly recommend it to anybody who has ever entertained the idea that they can’t do something.  Jayne Williams will tell you that, given enough support, information and time, you can.

I am inspired!

Thank you all for the kind and heartfelt birthday wishes! I had a lovely time.

My family all gave me gift cards (which I’d requested) and my in-laws gave me a set of heavy crystal candle holders.

The sweetest gift was a copy of the newspaper of the day I was born – 5 September 1969.  My parents have kept kept this memento, even though they’ve moved dozens of time since then.  And now it’s mine to keep.

Regular eating and consistent exercise resume today. (Isn’t it great that “healthy” is now the default way of eating?)

I’m kicking off the week with a book review…

Everyone should read this book.

Okay, maybe not everyone, but certainly everyone who eats!

This book had me spell-bound from beginning to end.  Craig and I read it together, which was great, since we could discuss it as we went along.  It’s the kind of book that you want to discuss.

I’d read some of Michael Pollan’s articles in the past, but this is the first complete book of his that I’ve read.  He does not disappoint, and it’s easy to see why The Omnivore’s Dilemma was named by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 10 Best of 2006.

Pollan does not tell the reader what to eat, but he follows the path of our food from field to table (or wrapper).  He describes three meals and where they come from – a typical fast food meal, an organic meal and a foraged meal.

In the process he reveals the true cost of cheap food and the fact that industrial food has turned us into industrial eaters.

I found the section on organically grown food of particular interest.  What does organic mean?  Free-range?  Pastured?  What is the significance of grass fed beef over grain-fed beef?  Are all organic foods necessarily sustainably grown with minimum impact to the environment?  Where does eating local fit in?

I was shocked to discover the multitude of “sins” an organic or free-range label can cover.

My favorite part of the book was the story of Joel Salatin and his beyond-organic Polyface Farm.  I learned so much here and this section gave me hope that in time, more and more people will come to see the value of food that is grown and raised synergistically, sustainably, using the sun’s energy and with zero waste.

The foraging part of the book, while highly philosophical, serves to highlight that in today’s world we can’t live totally off nature.  We need agriculture.  It is up to each and every person to evaluate the implications of their food choices on farming and production practices.  In other words, once armed with the knowledge of where our food comes from and how it’s grown and raised, we can decide to keep supporting those practices or not.

Eating is political.  What we eat is how we vote.  Being informed is crucial.

Which is why I strongly recommend The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Let me start by saying that I wholeheartedly believe in the connection between our pH balance and our health.  I have learned a lot about it over the years and have seen first hand (and read many accounts of) the difference that an alkaline-forming diet can make to our health, especially our healing.  My whole approach is to eliminate the acid-forming foods and substances and balance my body’s pH through diet.  I will do a more in-depth post about this in future.

So, I was excited to read a whole book about the subject.  I just wish it hadn’t been this book.

There were a few things about The pH Miracle – Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health by Robert O. Young and Shelley Redford Young that don’t sit well with me.

He starts off well, by explaining why this particular aspect of health has been ignored by the medical establishment.  No surprises for me there – I have read a lot about how medicine got hi-jacked by the germ-model and the pharmaceutical industry.  Essentially, modern medicine is based on the premise that disease is something outside us that invade us and cause problems.  Except that most of what we suffer from in today’s society does not fit into this model – our systems are breaking down all by themselves, due to poor lifestyle choices and bad diets.  There are no pills for that, but you wouldn’t say so if you look at the modern medicine, where we throw drugs at every problem or cut out or kill the rogue tissue instead of healing it.  It will never make sense to me, but it sure makes a lot of money for a lot of people.

Young describes the effects of acidity on the body – chronic degenerative disease – and how our modern diets contribute to acidosis.  At this point I’m still with him.

It’s when he tries to pin the cause of over-acidity on yeast overgrowth (Candida) – also caused by diet – that he sort of loses me.  I think that it will certainly play a role, but I’m not 100% convinced by the assumptions he makes here…  I guess more research is needed in this field, but for now, I’m taking a lot of his assertions with a grain of salt.  I, for one, have many health issues but Candida is not one of them.

Because his focus is on “microforms”, his diet is very restrictive.  I’m sorry, but I can’t endorse any diet that forbids fruit.  Fruit is the most perfect food – it’s healing, alkaline-forming and powerfully protects against disease and it should be eaten in abundance.

He lost all credibility with me when he started on the supplements he believes we should be taking. Supplements by the bucket load!  Even if I wanted to follow his plan, I can’t see myself spending that much money on supplements.  The average family surely can’t afford to live this way. I don’t believe that the path to health runs through the supplement aisle.

I have no doubt that this plan would turn your health around if you were desperately ill, because it will alkalize you in a relatively short period of time.  Therefore I will keep the book in case the need should arise, but I will not attempt or advocate living by the letter of this plan for any length of time.

I really want to get the word out about the importance of balancing our pH and eating more alkaline-forming foods, but I don’t think this book is the right vehicle for that.  It’s too extreme and based on a rather tenuous theory.  I’ve ordered another pH book and will read and review it in the months to come.

In the mean time, eat some fruit.  It’s good for you!