Kiss Your Fat Goodbye: The Ultimate Guide to Losing Weight and Building a Healthy Body for Life

Chapter 1 An Overview of Overweight Twenty years ago I was doing a lecture, one of my first for the Huxley Foundation. Afterward a couple came over to me to tell me the problems they had had with their son, who had been institutionalized his entire adult life. They showed me a picture of him. He was obese, weighing almost 300 pounds. He had been labeled a manic-depressive, incapable of functioning in society. When he went through periods of mania, he was deemed a danger to himself and oth­ers. When depressed, he would lie in his bed for days on end. They told me he had been to see over twenty psychiatrists but to no avail. They were desperate and asked if I had any advice for them. I asked what their son’s diet was like and was told that he ate institu­tional food plus almost $100 a week of what his parents gave him in confections, such as candies and potato chips. He was also a milk junkie, consuming large amounts of dairy products such as butter, cheese, and ice cream. I asked if their son had ever been through a detoxification pro­gram. They didn’t know what detoxification was, so I outlined what a full-body cleansing program entailed and gave them suggestions for what they could do if they chose to put their son on this type of health-rebuilding program. I told them that the only sure-fire way to help their son lose weight and feel better both emotionally and physically was to remove the toxins from his diet and direct him toward healthier eating habits. They would start with a complete detoxification program and gradually remold his dietary lifestyle. So they tried it. First they stopped bringing him sweets and restricted him to no junk food within the hospital setting. Believe it or not, in just three weeks, enough of an improvement had occurred that he could be moved from the institution to a therapeutic house. He had also lost fif­teen pounds. While he was not able to go home at this point, he could now take charge of his own eating habits and create whatever diet pro­tocols he wished. I guided them in mapping out a diet that included fresh vegetable juices each day, plenty of salads, grains, and legumes, and nutrients for rebalancing brain chemicals. Within one month of his arrival at the therapeutic house, the son no longer manifested any manic-depressive tendencies and was able to go home. Within a year and a half he was down to 165 pounds and was functioning normally. This is an extreme example of someone who was a victim not only of an excessive weight condition but of an emotionally stunting chemical imbalance due to a junk-food diet. This man’s poor dietary habits along with an allergic addiction to milk had seriously distorted both his brain chemistry and his behavior, not to mention his body shape. He had just never found a therapist who understood what was happening and made the connection between what was going on with his body and what was going on in his mind. Fortunately, with some nutritional guidance and a lot of determination on his part, this man was able to turn his life around. I begin my book on weight control with this example not because I think that most people with weight problems have severe mental problems–that’s obviously not the case. But I do want to stress my point that dietary and other lifestyle habits are closely connected not just with your shape and what your scale says but with how you think, feel, and act. All of these factors are intertwined to an extent that our society doesn’t generally acknowledge. If you are overweight, you should un­derstand at the outset that changing your eating habits for the better could change all of these factors for the better. You also should know that if you are overweight, you are far from alone. There are millions of people out there just like you, who share your feelings of frustration a