About this Book

If you’ve done every diet, taken every pill and read every book, you’re probably wondering if there’s any point giving it one more shot. But you’ve possibly been seduced by conventional propaganda that places your health and weight in the hands of weight-loss experts, the gymnasium, medical doctors and the pharmaceutical industry. There’s a very definite payoff - for them - in getting vulnerable individuals to believe their self-serving promotional spiel.

But what the universal weight-watcher’s guide won’t tell you is that losing weight -   yes, a considerable amount of weight - is about healing. Despite the notion we’ve grown up with, that we cannot heal without prescriptions, pills and surgery, conventional wisdom says something else.

Losing weight with the aid of medical props places the power to heal in the hands of practitioners, charlatans and sometimes the Internet. Alternatively, when you take responsibility for your own life, you shift the focal point of healing, from the ‘outside’ to the ‘inside’. And anyone who has done this genuinely and completely will tell you that it works.

Weight loss is an attitude. It’s a conscious and active choice. Once you make this all-important shift, it means you are ready to take ownership of yourself, your weight and your life. It means you have truly and intimately acknowledged that you - and only you - have the power to heal yourself.

In this book, we’ll discuss the natural way to losing weight - no pill popping, no crash or fad diets, no calorie counting or rigorous aerobic exercise. The human body is a wonderful precision machine that is constantly seeking a state of equilibrium or homeostasis.

In fact, its need for balance is so great that, rather than falling apart, it will bend itself out of shape to accommodate abuse in order to survive.

The greatest threat to this state of equilibrium is toxic abuse from disastrous dietary choices, an erratic lifestyle, chronic stress, constant stimulation of the senses and emotional trauma, to name but a few of the many things we subject our bodies to and still expect to stay in good health.

Practices such as these invariably lead to a state of toxicity. In this book, we shall see how adipose tissue is a defense against mental and emotional toxins. We shall also see why some bodies react to toxicity by turning overweight while others react with cancer or hypertension.

We shall also examine, at the biochemical and physiological level, how careless habits and everyday choices punish and abuse our bodies, how they throw our enzymes, hormones, neurotransmitters, digestive processes and immune system out of gear. By doing this, we turn diseased and obese and blame it on a ‘genetic predisposition’.

The good news is that there is a supreme logic and wisdom to the human body, one that we inherited over millions of years during the course of evolution. But we need to create the conditions for the body to function as nature intended it to.

An overweight or obese body is a body in distress. But the human body is also amazingly resilient. So despite the abuse it has been subjected to, it is possible to reverse the processes that led to this state and rebalance the body’s biochemistry to achieve its normal, optimal weight.

Sometimes it takes the smallest things. Did you know that mindful eating as opposed to gulping down your food is a simple yet powerful aid to relieving stress and hence shedding excess weight? Or that past traumas and other emotional toxins, quite literally stored in your body’s cells, can make you fat?

Alas, we have become so divorced from our own minds and bodies that we often fail to See a simple truth: that a mind and body in harmony with itself and with its surroundings is happy, healthy and of normal weight.

There is indeed a small but growing number of people who are realizing the awesome power within themselves, and unlocking this power to return from a condition of morbid obesity to optimal weight.

It is an amazing and personal journey that you can undertake once you discover just why the very things we dismiss so nonchalantly - eating right, getting a good night’s sleep, and remaining physically active - are the very tools that will help you flush out toxins, rebalance your enzymes and hormones, and embrace a healthy lifestyle.

Let me put it this way. If conventional medicine was indeed the panacea we are led to believe it is, why are health budgets ballooning all around? Why are two-thirds of Americans either overweight or obese and the number still rising? And why have so many diet pills or obesity ‘wonder drugs’ been taken off the market by the federal health authorities?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average American is already 23 pounds overweight. If the trends of the last three decades continue, researchers estimate that 86% of American adults will be overweight by 2030, and by 2048, every adult American could be at least mildly overweight.

Obesity is not just a life-threatening condition. It is also very, very expensive. According to some surveys, overweight individuals on average spend $1,400 more a year on medicines than individuals who are not overweight.

Obesity is an expensive illness because of the costs of treating diseases closely linked to this condition - diabetes, heart disease and other ailments - which are common among the overweight.

As for the national budget, surveys in 2009 indicate that obesity-related conditions now account for 9.1% of all medical spending, up from 6.5% a decade ago. During the same period, the obesity rate rose 37%.

In terms of overall costs, after heart disease, cancer and diabetes, obesity-related health spending has reached $147 billion, double what it was a decade ago. And diabetes, a disease closely linked to obesity, costs the US tax-payer $190 billion a year. According to Reed Tuckson of the United Health Foundation, by the year 2018, obesity-related medical expenses will top a staggering $344 billion.

But if we listened to natural wisdom, instead of conventional medicine, we wouldn’t be giving away billions of dollars to doctors, hospitals and drug companies to turn our bodies into living chemical laboratories.

We would tune in to our innate wisdom and follow nature’s meticulous plan for us. We would heal ourselves.