One month to reset your metabolism for lasting fat loss
One week to discover the carbs that are right for you
We are genetically wired to eat more and move less – the exact opposite of what health authorities advise us to do. So instead of berating yourself for struggling to lose weight or for ‘cheating’ on your diet, cut the guilt, arm yourself with this knowledge and follow Robb Wolf’s groundbreaking plan. He’ll show you how to:
With weekly shopping lists and over 60 recipes, Wired to Eat will give you a personalised weight-loss blueprint to transform your diet, and your life.
ROBB WOLF is a former research biochemist, health expert and author of the New York Times bestselling The Paleo Solution.
For Sagan and Zoe
I ’M A FORTY-four-year-old father of two and husband to one (she is Italian and kind of territorial). I’m in pretty good shape and fiddle with Brazilian jujitsu and ‘old guy’ gymnastics. Twenty years ago, I was a biochemist working in the areas of cancer and autoimmunity research. And I was ill. So ill, due to ulcerative colitis and a number of other niggling problems, that I was facing a bowel resection, statins, blood pressure medications and antidepressants. That was the good part. The darker portion of the story went like this: I thought I was going to die, and the idea was pretty appealing, considering how much my life and health sucked.
I was a mess.
Through an interesting set of circumstances, which you’ll hear about later in the book, the idea of a Palaeo or ancestral diet made its way on to my radar, and out of abject desperation, I tried this seemingly wacky way of eating. This decision saved my life. All my health problems resolved in a matter of months. I shared this transformation with my doctors, including my gastroenterologist, rheumatologist, general practitioner and therapist, all of whom said, ‘It’s great that you’re doing better, but it has nothing to do with your dietary changes.’
Some people in the medical and academic world play an interesting game – if you say to them, ‘I hit my hand with a hammer and it hurt’, their response is ‘Well, naturally!’ But if you tell these same people that changing your nutrition had a profound impact on your health, their response is, ‘Well, that’s nice, but it’s just anecdotal.’ There is a common saying in Scienceland: ‘A million anecdotes do not one shred of evidence make’. This is true, but if you see a million of the same anecdotes, perhaps it’s time to apply some scientific rigour to the question, yes?
Whether my experience of profound health improvement by modifying what I ate was scientific or quasimystical, it convinced me that working through the mainstream outlets was not where I wanted to spend my time. I’d been on a path to attend medical school but the prospect of becoming like my medical providers and professors effectively euthanised my desire to be a doctor. I wondered how I could best help people with their health and fitness, and spending eight years learning about disease and disease management seemed like a circuitous route at best. So I made a serious career shift and opened a gym. Well, actually, two gyms. And they happened to be the first and fourth CrossFit affiliate gyms in the world. I incorporated the Palaeo diet philosophy and tenets into my business, which included education about sleep, nutrition and smart movement. I combined these elements to create a supportive, challenging group health and exercise model that people loved. Our clients achieved remarkable success, ranging from profound weight loss to dramatically improved health. Our results were so impressive that my little 4,000-square-foot gym in Chico, California, was picked as one of Men’s Health magazine’s ‘Top 30 Gyms in America’.
Word got out that what we were doing was different than the standard approach to health and fitness, and people wanted to know how to do this for themselves, their patients and clients. I started blogging so I could reach an audience outside our local community and spent a lot of time travelling, not just in the US but also internationally, to speak in front of tens of thousands of people on this topic. The more people who tried something like a Palaeo diet, the more remarkable stories I heard. The concept seemed to be spreading faster than a venereal disease on a college campus. I started a podcast that climbed to the top of the iTunes charts and wrote my first book, The Palaeo Solution, which became a New York Times bestseller. I was as surprised as anyone by this success. Soon enough, the ‘just anecdotal’ reports on how this way of eating was changing lives (now in the millions) shifted to some interesting scientific studies. There might be something to this ‘fad diet’ after all.
Still, there were some problems brewing. Both academics and the media loved to portray the Palaeo diet as some kind of historical reenactment, poking fun at the ‘caveman’ motif, which became inseparable from the Palaeo diet idea. For many people, the whole caveman schtick was a non-starter. So although many millions were benefiting from the information people like myself were sharing with the world, far more people would not give Palaeo eating more than a glance due to an emotional response to the idea. My goal has always been to help as many people as possible, so this ‘marketing and image problem’ was a significant hurdle.
Perhaps even more frustrating, however, was the tendency for people who actually followed the Palaeo diet to turn the general concepts into quasi-religious doctrine. Those newly converted to Palaeo tended to be quite dogmatic in the insistence that this was ‘the one true way’ to eat. Often, these devotees had reversed serious health problems with this way of eating, so their enthusiasm was understandable, but not many people enjoy the company of or the message from someone who comes across as a holier-than-thou diet zealot.
The reality is, some of these people might have had success on a low-carb version of Palaeo and never considered that other people, and even they themselves, might benefit from a higher-carb version. A remarkable number of people are insulin resistant for reasons I will detail later. If these people restore their blood sugar levels through a low-carb diet, better sleep and exercise (thereby reversing that insulin resistance), they often find they can tolerate eating more carbs and still lose weight. In Wired to Eat, I’ll explain why this is and detail the latest research surrounding this idea. With my new programme, you will discover where you are in this story and learn the amounts and types of carbs you can eat while staying lean and healthy. And that’s just the beginning.
The Ancestral Health or Palaeo diet model I talked about in my first book is incredibly powerful, but these concepts are tools and starting points, not final destinations. As you’ll soon learn, one size does not fit all, and that has never been more evident than now with the newest research on Personalised Nutrition. As you will discover in Wired to Eat, you now have the opportunity to go beyond general guidelines and find which foods, including which carbs, work best for you, regardless of your age, weight or health status. And that’s what makes the plan in this book so unique. By the end of your journey, you will understand the genetic and epigenetic factors that govern how you are wired to eat, but perhaps more important, you will finally have a plan customised to your body to help you lose weight, regain your health and live the life you want to live. No more guessing which foods are right for you. In a little more than thirty days, your life and health could be radically transformed for the better as you heal your gut and refine your personal eating plan.
IF I HAVE learned anything over the years, it’s that we all tend to benefit from general guidelines, but our individual needs may be profoundly different than those of our neighbour. This can create a bias that makes us think what worked for us or someone we know will work for everyone. So although we’d like to keep things as simple as possible, when we gear things for an individual’s needs, things can get complex in a hurry.
Understanding how and why we need to change our eating and lifestyle to be healthy or lose weight can be relatively easy in practice (‘Hey, buddy, just do this!’), but if people need convincing, if they need to understand the whys and the details, well, that takes some work. So which is better: simplicity or complexity? Well, it depends. Both approaches have pitfalls. An overly simplistic view of the Palaeo diet led to a mindless process of asking, ‘Is this food Palaeo?’ versus the more appropriate question, ‘Is this food a good option for me?’ On the other hand, if the details on how the diet works start to look like Advanced Chemistry, a typical reader would rather roll around naked in broken glass. I will aim to strike a balance between the two extremes, giving you sufficient information in a simple way so you understand how these choices will help you live a healthier life.
There is a (likely) fictional account of the famous artist and inventor Michelangelo that describes how he produced his masterwork sculpture David. He was asked what his process was for creating such detailed and lifelike work, and he responded with something to the effect of, ‘I cut away everything that did not look like David.’ Sculptors, woodworkers, engineers and artisans of all types use a variety of tools and strategies to produce their work. The tools used in the beginning are for the ‘rough work’, while other tools are used to produce the refined, finished product. As powerful as the Palaeo diet or Ancestral Health perspective is, in this book, that strategy is used as a ‘rough’ tool. Ultimately, I will help you find your own customised eating plan that will help you achieve your goals.
Recent research has shed light on the need to go beyond doctrine in order to find what works for us individually. In Wired to Eat, I will show you how to use this information to create your own effective, customised eating plan that can change your life and your health. How’s this possible? In recent studies, hundreds of people were fed a variety of foods and their individual blood glucose responses were tracked over time. To everyone’s surprise, there was not a one-size-fits-all ‘best diet’, but rather massive variation, from person to person and in the types of foods each individual reacted favourably or negatively to. This is groundbreaking because it indicates some foods create a healthy response in some people while creating a negative response in others. It shows that we can find the foods that work with our physiology instead of against it. We have never had an opportunity like this, as our previous efforts, although well intentioned, have lacked the precision we now have with this new approach to eating called Personalised Nutrition. Personalised Nutrition, in practical terms, means that you will be able to test specific foods in order to determine which work for your weight loss and health journey. Personalised Nutrition allows us to use big-picture concepts like the Palaeo diet to get going in a good direction, but then we can ‘map’ exactly which foods are best (or worst) for us. You’ll discover that there may be ‘bad’ foods you’ve been avoiding for years, like rice or potatoes, that your body can actually tolerate. On the flip side, you may also discover that there are ‘healthy’ foods you’ve been eating that are causing more harm than good on your weight loss and health journey.
With Wired to Eat, I attempt to reach people with two key concepts: one, an understanding of the genetic and environmental factors, such as sleep, stress, hyperpalatable foods and community, that make it easy for us to overeat; and two, the powerful tool of Personalised Nutrition. Understanding how we are wired to eat will remove the morality and guilt often associated with attempting dietary changes. This is a plan that allows you to refine all the food rules you’ve been taught while discovering what works best for you. The programme laid out in these pages will help you rewire your brain and appetite, allowing you to better control your blood sugar, and determine the foods that are right for your health and weight loss. Using the science of epigenetics, we will understand that our genes are not our destiny.
By altering our sleep, food, exercise and social connections, we will shift all the factors governing our metabolism in a way that makes success easy. Additionally, we will lean heavily on the latest behaviour change insights, which support the idea that we are not all the same. Some people will find success by abstaining from certain trigger foods. Others will be able to moderate their intake of (rather than avoid completely) certain foods. After reading this book, and doing a little self-experimentation, you will know which strategy will work best for you. Once appetite and blood sugar are in check, you will find it easier to lose weight and prevent or reverse a number of health problems, ranging from obesity and diabetes to heart disease and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
How will we do all this? Glad you asked. In Phase One, we will determine what your primary needs and goals are (who you are and where you want to go), and from this we will use a simple but powerful 30-Day Reset (a much more detailed programme than appeared in my first book) to rewire your appetite and get you moving in the right direction. With it, you will discover if you are insulin resistant (or not), and based on this finding, we will adjust your carb intake to reflect your relative metabolic health. I have teased people in the past for believing they are ‘unique snowflakes’, but the joke has been on me in that regard. We are all unique – we are all outliers to some degree. To address the nearly infinite variety of individuals, I have developed Phase Two, a unique 7-Day Carb Test plan based on the latest science concerning Personalised Nutrition. Using easy-to-understand subjective measures, like how you feel after a meal, as well as a blood glucose monitor that will set you back £10 to £40, we can precisely determine what amounts and types of carbohydrates and other foods allow you to keep your blood sugar within healthy ranges.
Let’s take a look at what I hope to accomplish in the book and give you a sense of where we are going and how the programme will change the way you eat and live for the better.
Millions of people start a diet each year, but the vast majority fail to achieve the results they desire. Why is that? Is it a moral failing on our part, or is there more to the story than a ‘weak will’? Instead of moralising eating, perhaps we should consider that we live in a world that is ill suited to our genetics, that our food, sleep, movement and social connections (the Four Pillars of Health, as I call them) have changed in ways that our bodies find difficult to adapt to. If we understand how our world has changed, how our genetics are wired for a different world, we can free ourselves of the shame and misplaced morality associated with the inherent difficulties of change. We can finally stop blaming ourselves for our inability to lose weight and get healthy. We’ll start the book with an understanding of why your weight-loss challenges are not your fault and help you understand how and why the plan in the book will change your life.
Humans are the most adaptable organism on the planet, but our food and environment have changed so rapidly that we are now ill-equipped to deal with the modern world. Our genetic tendency to overeat is the root cause of everything from diabetes to neurodegenerative disease. You’ll learn about these concepts as well as our tendency to indulge in nearly limitless flavour and palate options. We now eat like professionals. And yes, that’s as bad as it sounds.
Before we get to the programme and the how-to, I’ll help you understand the importance of digestion. It is far more significant to your health than simply understanding how many calories we eat. We will learn that, yes, calories do matter, but so do the amounts and types of food we eat, as the different macronutrients (protein, carbs and fat) have very different effects on our hormones, which dramatically alter our sense of satiety and fullness.
You will learn that thousands of scientific studies suggest that many of the degenerative diseases we face – from diabetes to obesity to autoimmunity – are tied to a breakdown in our digestive process, specifically in the gut. We will learn how refined carbohydrates alter our gut in ways that predispose us to insulin resistance and a host of conditions, ranging from heart disease to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. We will also learn how certain foods (such as those containing gluten) may be involved in the development of autoimmune disease and systemic inflammation. Armed with this information we now have a tool to take the general principles of the Ancestral Health approach and create a programme customised to your individual needs.
The Palaeo diet is more misunderstood than a Goth kid living in Arkansas. As such, we will consider the common misconceptions around the Palaeo diet and do something totally wacky: look at the scientific evidence. The Palaeo diet approach is a powerful tool, but it is merely a starting place. Human evolution did not stop in the Paleolithic era, and although many conditions may greatly benefit from this basic approach, we can now customise our eating and lifestyle in a way that optimises weight loss, health and enjoyment.
Once you’ve learned why it’s hard to avoid the temptations of modern processed food, it’ll be time to start doing. With my 30-Day Reset, you’ll figure out what your goals are and what eating plan is right for you. Central to this story, we will discover if you are insulin resistant and, if so, to what degree. This information will help us determine which path you take as the insulin-resistant individual and it will have you eating on the lower-carb end of the spectrum (possibly exploring the use of nutritional ketosis and fasting), at least until you reset your system by losing weight and reversing your insulin resistance. We will look at the strategies of prepping your home and outside life to stay on track and make lasting progress.
We’ll then move on to the 7-Day Carb Test plan, which will change your life by helping you determine the foods that are right for your body and for your weight loss. Modern technology like wearable blood glucose monitors allow us to discover which foods and what amounts produce the blood glucose response that is best for us. We will look at some of your commonly consumed carb sources and map how you respond to them. This information is critical if you're going to create the health and weight loss plan that is most effective for you. It is a truly groundbreaking feature of Wired to Eat,because it’s key to understanding how to normalise your appetite, reduce inflammation, lose weight and get healthy.
And no eating plan is complete without a quick word on cheating. In my twenty years of working with people, I have seen how they undermine their success with regard to food and lifestyle changes. Perhaps the most injurious is the misguided notion of ‘cheating’ on our eating. We don’t ‘cheat’ on our food. We do not need a ‘healthy relationship’ with our food. We simply need to understand that there are consequences to our food choices. The mind-set surrounding the ‘cheating’ mentality is almost a guarantee of failure and puts the focus in the wrong place, when the real problem is most probably a lack of love and connection. Now is the opportunity to change our minds and our lives.
Beyond the eating plan, which is crucial for ultimate well-being and health, we also need to rebalance the other three important pillars in our lives: sleep, community and movement. Our food choices are important, but chow is only part of the story when we consider our health and our waistline. We will first look at sleep and photoperiod, as inadequate sleep and altered circadian rhythm dramatically influence our metabolism and food choices. We will then look at exercise (movement) from an ancestral perspective and understand that the most important activity we can do is the one we love and will stick with. In looking at stress, we will learn that there are important things we can do to minimise stress, but ironically, it may be far more important to change our perception of stress than to try to become a monk on a mountaintop. Finally, we will look at the forgotten feature of health and happiness: community. Humans are social beings, and without adequate social connection our health and longevity can be as negatively impacted as if we had a pack-a-day smoking habit.
The Wired to Eat programme will make change as simple and effective as possible. You will find easy-to-fix meals that will help you succeed on your weight-loss and health journey. All have been developed by Charles and Julie Mayfield, authors of the bestselling Palaeo Comfort Foods books. These are delicious, time-efficient meals that will make it easy to maximise your weight loss and stick with the programme over the long haul.
For some of you, the basic plan I’ve outlined may not be enough, so I’ve also provided a chapter on the ketogenic diet and fasting that might be the answer for your needs, particularly if you are type 2 diabetic or suffering from (or at high risk for) neurodegenerative disease. Ketogenic diets have been used for nearly a hundred years to treat conditions such as epilepsy, while fasting may have been used for several thousand years to remedy a host of ailments. Fasting and ketosis offer profound options for conditions ranging from obesity to neurodegenerative disease, yet most of the medical community considers them to be dangerous, despite the fact research demonstrates them to be both safer and more efficacious than most of the conventional therapies. You will learn if you are appropriate for fasting or ketosis, how to do it and what to monitor to know if this is indeed the right tool for your needs.
Similar to my first book, I’ll offer some latitude as to how you tackle this material. If you are a hair-on-fire self-starter and are ready to jump in and get going, you can skip to the prescriptive chapters in Part Two. I counsel against this, however. If you understand the mechanisms of why change can be hard, many of your questions and possible confusion will be addressed. You do not need to understand this material for the programme to work any more than you need to understand the physics of an internal combustion engine to drive a car. But. There is a massive amount of conflicting information available at your fingertips. Your family, friends and co-workers are likely to try to scuttle your progress for both well-and ill-intentioned reasons. You will be deluged with material from the media, which is confusing and contradictory. I explain all these details so you know how your body works, how the world has changed and why that makes for a difficult set of circumstances with regard to weight and health. This book is not 7 Easy Steps to Jaw-Dropping Abs. It is a story that builds a chapter at a time and, as that story unfolds, you will understand both how you are wired to eat and how to take advantage of the latest research to work with your genetics instead of against them. All of this cerebral/logical stuff is probably not what will get you to try or stick with the programme, but it is the strategy many people use to avoid change, so yes, I do recommend you take each chapter in its due course. How I can help guarantee your success, however, is if I can help you feel, not just understand, but feel that the difficulty you may have faced your whole life is not your fault, merely a set of circumstances that you and I need to work through. This is the culmination of nearly twenty years of working with people to help them improve their health, lose weight and live the life they want. This is an amazing time we live in, as we now have the knowledge and tools to make change (almost) easy. I am fully committed to helping you and I hope you are ready to experience life-changing benefits of the plan in Wired to Eat.
YOU HOLD IN your hands what is commonly referred to as ‘A Diet Book’. If you have good sense – meaning you do not play the lottery, gamble or worry too much about shark attacks – you should probably put this book down and back away slowly. Or perhaps fling it as far as you can and scream, ‘Kill it! Kill it with fire!’ Why? Because … well, diets generally fail.
Abysmally.
The only process that fails people more often than diets is starting a campfire by vigorously rubbing snow cones against wet toilet paper.
You may be wondering, What the heck is this guy doing? Am I supposed to be inspired by this? Well, I am trying to sell you on the idea of both reading and implementing the contents of this book. But a relationship should be built on honesty. That considered, you need to know there are no tricks, potions or gimmicks that will make this change easy. Based on my nearly twenty years of experience in and around things like weight loss and elite human performance, cancer and autoimmunity research, I know the ideas expressed herein can dramatically improve how you look, feel and perform. I also know without a doubt that for some people, effecting the changes I recommend here will be tough. Critically important, but potentially tough. Slick ad-copy mavens would have me write that this process will entail ‘effortless weight loss that will leave you feeling satisfied and energised!’ That will happen for some people. For others, the lifeline I’m throwing you via this book is going to look more like a bag of rocks. But that very toughness, the difficulty most people experience in trying to change diet and lifestyle habits, is completely normal. In fact, it would be silly (or at least uninformed) to expect diet and lifestyle changes to be easy.
If you have struggled with diets in the past, you are not the exception – you are the rule. Conservative estimates are that more than 45 million Americans start a diet each year, many trying four or five times per year to affect long-standing, meaningful weight and health changes. The vast majority fail. A recent piece by NPR made the point that most Americans better understand how to do their taxes than how to eat well. The government and media pummel us with trite bits of advice like ‘Eat Less, Move More’ or, my longtime favourite, ‘Everything in Moderation’. In a world where fizzy drinks are cheaper than bottled water, what does moderation even mean? We are told it’s all about ‘calories in, calories out’, so ‘just eat less’. If you can’t get with the programme, you are a weak-willed glutton, right?
Wrong.
If we look at the epidemic rates of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, conditions that are well known to be caused by not ‘eating less, moving more’, it is clear that this simple advice is either too simple or just plain wrong. And the first part of this book will explain why this and many other weight loss theories are, if not wrong then massively ill informed.
I want you to understand that the difficulties you face, be they health or weight related, are not your fault. Thus, we will begin the story of how you are wired to eat by first looking at why the modern world may be working against the fundamental genetic programming we all carry within every cell of our bodies. Once you understand this concept, in the next chapter, I’ll begin to explain how and why we are wired to eat and what we can ultimately do about it.
I know we are just getting to know each other, but let me tell you something that you might find preposterous. If you live in a modern Westernised society of relative leisure and abundance but are not fat, ill and diabetic, you are, from a biological perspective, ‘screwing up’. Really. Our species is here today because our genes are wired to eat damn near everything that is not nailed down. Related to this is an expectation, again woven into our genes, that the process of finding food requires that we are active. In unambiguous terms, we are genetically wired to eat simple, unprocessed foods, and to expend a fair amount of energy in that process (walk, run, lift, carry, dance!). But modern life affords us the opportunity to move hardly at all, while finding ourselves surrounded by the most varied assortment of delectable food imaginable. It is now possible to order food to your door, work from home and count the number of steps we take in the dozens, when our not-distant ancestors routinely walked 5 to 10 miles per day. This is our conundrum.
The scientific proposition I will draw from throughout the book is called the Discordance Hypothesis. An oblique-sounding term, but actually quite simple: organisms, be they sequoias, sand flies or people, tend to have a set of genes that are reasonably well suited to their environment. Your environment is everything from your food to the weather to how much sleep and sunlight you get. Changes in that environment can be positive, negative or neutral for the creature in question. I, and many other scientists, make the case that although there have been undeniable benefits from easy access to food, indoor plumbing and reality TV, this ease and entertainment has come at a price – namely, an explosion in what we call Western degenerative diseases: obesity, diabetes (types 1 and 2), Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and a host of other conditions.
So it comes down to this: the tendency to ‘eat all the food’, bail on the latest ineffective diet trend and look at the gym as being just north of a prison sentence, is normal. It ain’t crazy. But eating a modern diet and sitting on our backside for an endless number of hours is not good for how we look or how we feel.
Overhauling your environment – that is, your approach to food, sleep and movement – may all seem a bit daunting, but you can make some amazing improvements and obtain life-changing results. The solutions I put forward in this book focus on understanding how changes in our sleep, food, activity, exposure to sunlight, gut microorganisms and lack of community are causing health problems. By extension, this understanding will provide a road map (which leans heavily on the tool of Personalised Nutrition) for how to fix what ails us. The change is doable, but you need to commit to the process. So it’s not your fault you find yourself here, but if you want a different outcome, you will need to do some things differently.
Change comes in many forms and is most often good: it keeps us growing and engaged and makes life interesting. But we reasonably have only so much capacity to adapt. Sometimes change looks like a slow-moving bulldozer you can see coming from a mile away. Avoiding danger is easy, as long as you are not lying unconscious in front of it. At other times, it happens like a meteor impact wiping out most of life on earth. We need to understand how changes in our food and environment are testing the ability of our genetics to cope with a world that they (and we) may be ill suited to thrive in. Our world in which generations of our ancestors lived has changed in remarkable ways, and although much good has come of this, there are some downsides, too, which need to be managed lest we end up at the hurting end of the change bulldozer.
Although we will spend significant time exploring the first pillar of health (food) we will also consider how changes to our sleep, exercise and social connections (community) have worked in a synergistic fashion to undermine our health. I do not use the term pillar arbitrarily here: these concepts are all critically important to our success. You will learn how good sleep, healthy movement and loving relationships all play into our health and appearance.
Things have really changed for human beings, and some of this change has come at a high price. More than ten thousand years ago, our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. They ate largely whole, unprocessed foods that changed with location and the seasons. The work involved with finding food, shelter and the necessities of life was not easy. People were not lifting weights and jogging on treadmills, but they did a lot of hard physical activity. And this hard work was followed by significant amounts of rest; our ancestors generally kept the hours the seasons dictated. Although not an idyllic paradise, people ate nutritious foods, slept a lot and got significant amounts of exercise during their daily activities. Another important feature of the ancestral life-way was the remarkable amount of social support. People lived in extended family groups that offered literally cradle-to-grave social connections.
With the advent of agriculture, most people shifted from a foraging or hunter-gatherer life-way to a settled, agricultural approach. This transition generally meant a reduced variety of foods and a host of well-documented ailments. Living in close proximity to larger numbers of people as well as animals appears to have posed a significant immune challenge for our early agricultural ancestors. Reliance on starchy, low-nutrient foods such as grains also appears to have posed a significant challenge with regard to growth and nutrient deficiencies. From the perspective of sleep and circadian rhythm, we still tended to go to bed not long after the sun went down and got up when the sun came up. And although work on farms required significant amounts of physical labour, we got a lot of downtime.
Fast-forward to about two hundred years ago: people left the farm for factory work and urban life. Gas lighting was limited to the large urban centres, so the amount of additional ‘daytime’ people could experience via artificial light was not remarkably different than it had been ten thousand years earlier. Social networks and extended families continued to be relatively strong. Though increased mobility allowed people to follow work opportunities, entire families tended to move together.
And then the lightbulb was invented. The long-lasting, electrically powered, incandescent lightbulb became relatively cheap and ubiquitous, and it democratised a number of things like learning and entertainment. Where previously only the wealthy could afford significant amounts of artificial light, now almost everyone could partake of this miracle. This opened up whole new ways of doing business and dramatically changed industry. Factories could run all night, the concept of shift work was born and human innovation exploded. As good as all this was for most of humanity, we began sleeping less in general and started our first experiments with shift work. Antibiotics were only a few decades in the future, and although these wonder drugs would save millions of lives, the unintended impact on our gut microbes (and overall health) would not be well appreciated until the beginning of the twenty-first century.
About thirty years ago, the explosion of microprocessors and technology innovation ushered in the Internet, 24/7 commerce and dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of cable TV channels. If we wanted entertainment, education, or distraction, it was only a dial-up phone connection away (and now just a dip into your pocket for your smartphone). We work much more and sleep much less than we did even in the 1980s, about 2.5 hours less per day on average for most Americans. This change in not only sleep but also our constant exposure to artificial light (which affects every body system you care to consider) is perhaps the most profound change humanity has experienced.
As we will see in subsequent chapters, our food system began to rapidly change, shifting us away from largely traditional home-cooked meals to grab-’n’-go options, as well as an avalanche of processed, hyperpalatable foods. Palatability refers to how tasty something is. Grass is generally ‘not that tasty’, i.e., it’s a low-palatability item (unless you are a horse, in which case it’s pretty damn tasty). Chocolate ice cream with toffee chunks and salted almond sprinkles … well, that’s extremely palatable!
Our gut microbiota probably underwent a profound change due to antibiotic use, modern medical procedures and an increasing focus on products like hand sanitisers and antimicrobial soaps. It’s worth noting that changes in the gut correlate strongly with increasing rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease and neurodegeneration. In a later chapter, we will explore how alterations in the gut can play into these conditions.
In terms of exercise, until quite recently humans moved to survive. We had to gather food, firewood and water while shifting encampments based on weather and the season. Anthropologists have estimated that hunter-gatherers walked 5 to 10 miles most days. Today, many of us walk less than a half mile every day as we shuffle from house to car to office and back again.
On a social level, the past thirty years have seen the most profound changes in all of human history. Our highly mobile, information-based society has been a boon for work opportunities, but an unintended consequence has been a profound increase in social isolation, particularly for the elderly. Humans are social animals. We evolved in small groups, and this process has literally altered our genetics to ‘expect’ certain amounts and types of interaction with not just other people, but the natural world around us. Social isolation is recognised as a huge stressor and appears to be a key piece of addictive behaviour, including overeating. Although epidemiological in nature, studies have indicated that inadequate social connectivity increases early death potential as much as a pack-a-day smoking habit.
Inadequate sleep, constant stress and bad food have become the norm. So if everyone is doing it, if we wear our sleep deprivation, hard work and ability to eat like a waste disposal as a badge of honour, what could be wrong with that? It’s simple: our bodies haven’t caught up to these changes. Ten thousand years might seem like a very long time, but in the context of our genes, it’s more like a meteoric environmental change than that slow-moving bulldozer.
In the chapters that follow, I’ll go into more detail about the health and weight loss benefits of orienting our sleep, food, movement and community along lines informed by the knowledge of our ancestors. For now, recognising these changes within the context of how our genetics are wired (a world of more sleep, ample sunlight, whole food, loving relationships and significant physical activity) makes the bars of an invisible cage suddenly spring into view. We are then faced with the choice of opening that cage and leaving, or clinging to our current condition. I wish we could all keep doing the same things and expect different results, but that does not seem to be the way the rules of this game have been written. If we want a different result, we need to do something different. Shocker, right? You’d be surprised how many people I’ve worked with who faced potentially life-threatening conditions put a heroic effort into figuring out how to keep doing what they were doing while expecting a different outcome.
My main tool to help you is information, which effectively motivates only a small percentage of people. Most of the processes governing eating and movement happen at a deep level in the brain, the level dedicated to sex, survival and good feelings. So although the information presented here is my best effort to accurately describe the challenges we all face in this modern world of hyperpalatable foods, sedentariness and abnormal light exposure, I realise that information alone is not enough for most of you.
In my first book I laid out a great ‘Arthur Murray Dance School’ process of ‘just put your right foot here, your left foot there’, and it has helped a lot of people. But as many people as that book has helped, many more need a bit more than to be told to ‘do this’. They need systems, accountability, and tools that bring synergy between the impulsive and logical portions of the brain. To that end, this book will provide detailed plans on how to discover your individual reaction to food so we can get the right ‘air fuel mixture’ (food) to help you look and feel your best. I will also help you understand your psychology and impulses around food, exercise and relationships so you can leverage your strengths and firewall your weaknesses. I have worked with many high-level mixed martial arts (MMA) competitors, and one of my jobs as a coach is to help the athlete prepare mentally and physically to fight the fight on their terms, not their opponent’s terms. Helping you understand your wiring and tendencies will put you in a similarly advantaged state.
You hold in your hands what is commonly referred to as a ‘diet book’. For some unknown reason, you have read this far. Now all I ask is that you keep going, give the material honest consideration, and, most important, devote a small portion of what will hopefully be a long, enjoyable life to testing the ideas I’ve developed here. At worst, in a little more than thirty days, you will decide I’m another idiot who wrote a diet book. At best, you may look at your life as the time before and the time after you understood how you are wired to eat.
IF YOU TAKE in much in the way of media – be that TV, print, or even the interwebz – you have probably seen ads or offers for seemingly fool-proof fat-loss plans. ‘Try this one weird trick to lose 50 pounds!’ The scientist in me says, ‘Well, maybe it will work.’ My slightly toned-down public persona might say, ‘This seems a bit farfetched.’ But if you catch me in private, after I’ve had a drink or two, you’ll probably hear, ‘This is a bunch of overly simplistic bullshit.’
The lifestyle too many of us find ourselves in – besieged by hyperpalatable foods, poor sleep and too much stress – is not amenable to a simple solution. Many people try altering their diet and lifestyles each year and the vast majority fail. Again and again. This failure, however, is context specific. In our not-so-distant past, lazing about whenever possible and eating everything in sight was how we survived. Yet in our modern world of plenty, inactivity and overeating are disastrous. This mismatch between our genetics and our modern world is at best complex: our sleep, food, activity levels, gut health and social connections (or lack thereof) all conspire to make health and a stable weight difficult to maintain.
If there is one ‘simple’ trick that will make better eating easy, it is fixing the neuroregulation of appetite. This is the natural process of our brain literally telling us if we are hungry or not. If the neuroregulation of appetite is functioning properly, we will eat enough to have great energy, but remain lean and healthy. The challenge is that our food, sleep, activity, gut microbiome, stress levels and emotional connection to food all affect the neuroregulation of appetite in potentially unfavourable ways. So although our sound bite is ‘just fix your appetite’, there are a number of moving parts that go into that. Which is why this is a book and not a bumper sticker.
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone in this day and age who is not familiar with the concept of a ‘calorie’ – that it is the amount of energy a given food contains. We’ve all heard that the secret to weight loss and good health is to eat foods with fewer calories or just fewer calories overall. So, we read labels (a problem right from the start, since labels usually mean processed food) and try to keep our total caloric intake under some limit based on our size and activity level. This all seems reasonably scientific and straightforward but this veneer of ‘science’ is actually a problem.
Although our physiology does track our net energy balance via body fat and blood glucose levels, people often reduce this story to the overly simplistic idea of ‘calories in, calories out’. Hormones and neurotransmitters like insulin, leptin and ghrelin are equally important and inseparable elements of how much we eat (the neuroregulation of appetite) and influence if we are lean or overweight. Calories do count, but not all foods produce the same hormonal and metabolic effects. The strict calories in, calories out supporters would have us believe that 2,000 calories of sugar are metabolically equivalent to 2,000 calories of pork loin, broccoli and sweet potato. Intuitively, this should smell as bad as products from Fukushima Fish Farms, Inc., but we do not need to rely on intuition – science shows this overly simplistic view, that ‘it’s just about calories’ is simply not true.
You probably have a better social life than I do, so you have probably never asked yourself, How do I know how much food to eat? It’s a simple yet important question when we think about the process of overeating. We’ve all eaten meals that have made us feel happy, satisfied and energised mentally and physically. We do not get hungry again for several hours, and when we do, the hunger is mild, just enough to get our attention and remind us, ‘Hey, it’s time to eat!’ We have all also consumed meals that have left us feeling bloated and generally miserable. Our energy was poor, our minds were foggy, and, ironically, we were hungry again not too long after eating, often while our stomach was still uncomfortably full. How can this be?
When most people think about hunger or fullness, they largely focus on their stomach and how ‘full’ it has become. There is certainly something to this, but the story is much more complex. Most of what we perceive to be hunger or fullness occurs in the brain.fn1 Stomach distension is an important part of the satiety signal cascade, but it can be overridden by the brain. You could be ravenous, drink a large cup of water (which is often a recommended technique of failed weight-loss programmes) and still be ravenous. Our bodies need energy in the form of food – not too much, not too little. We have complex systems that monitor how much food we have taken in versus how much energy we have expended. Additionally, our body-fat level is monitored. These variables, which consider both our short-term and long-term energy status, determine our neuroregulation of appetite. I’m going to go into a bit of detail with regard to the hormones and neurotransmitters that govern appetite, and when you understand how this process works you will appreciate how and why the 30-Day Reset will be so effective in rewiring your appetite, which will help you to lose weight and get healthy. Before we get to that, let me use a simple analogy we are all familiar with to provide some context.