Food addiction—a genuine biological addiction to sugar, flour and processed foods—drives our overeating behavior.

And it makes us have FLC Syndrome, which means we “Feel Like Crap.”

It’s quite simple: Eat crap = Feel like crap.

When we eat crap (anything that turns to sugar), our bodies produce hormones—primarily insulin. When insulin is pumped out in excess, it does two horrible things.

First, insulin is a super fat-storage hormone, which causes all the calories we eat to be laid down as belly fat.

Second, it completely messes up our appetite control systems, making us crave sugar and carbs. And then the vicious cycle continues.

In fact, when we eat sugar and refined carbs, they reprogram our fat cells so those cells are hungry all the time. It’s the fat cells being hungry that makes us overeat. The fat cells are demanding to be fed. Then they suck up all the calories we eat, causing weight gain.

The conventional wisdom of why we gain weight—that we eat more calories than we burn—is simply dead wrong.

It’s the toxic, bad calories—calories that quickly turn to sugar—that are causing our country’s obesity and chronic disease epidemic. For decades, there’s been a misinformation campaign orchestrated by Big Food, aided and abetted by the U.S. government. The message is all about energy balance, that there are no good or bad calories, that all calories are the same, that losing weight is all about eating less and exercising more. That advice has gotten us nowhere—except being trapped under the weight of our obesity and diabetes epidemic.

Why We All Need a Medical Detox Program

I used to work in the emergency room where I treated heroin addicts and alcoholics. We had to use a carefully designed medical detox program to “bring them down” from their drugs. Otherwise they would get agitated, anxious and even have seizures. In human and animal studies, the exact same thing happens when they quit sugar. It has to be done carefully.

A detox is designed to quickly rewire and reprogram hormones and biology so we don’t have cravings. One doesn’t go through a bad withdrawal and he or she can actually learn what it feels like to be back in an alive and healthy body. It’s about getting back to our original factory settings.

What to Eat and What to Do

The basic idea is simple. Eat whole, unprocessed, real foods. Cut out food that causes inflammation and blood sugar and insulin spikes. Each day is carefully designed to create specific changes in the body’s hormones and neurotransmitters, to rewire our biology very quickly and get all the signals back in balance so we naturally feel good and crave real food, not junk. We are never hungry during the detox, we never count calories, fat grams, or carb grams, and we can eat as much as we need to feel satisfied.

The magic of a detox diet is in eating the right foods and in keeping a daily schedule of special practices that, though very simple, have been scientifically proven to help us lose weight. Plus, you’ll keep the weight off and create long-term health.

These simple tips can double weight loss and success…things like taking a bath, taking a five minute breathing break, walking, designing our eating lives, creating an Emergency Life Pak (of food), journaling, tracking results, taking the right supplements and a super fiber, connecting with others for success, and more.

How Cooking Can Save Our Lives

The propaganda that the food industry has convinced us of is this: That cooking is hard, expensive, time-consuming and messy. That’s why we have outsourced cooking to corporations and are now the sickest, fattest nation in the world because of it.

I recently visited a poor, seriously sick and overweight family in South Carolina and taught them to cook good food on a tight budget. This family of five lives on food stamps and disability, and used to eat only processed foods, green beans from a can, and fast food. The father was on dialysis and needed a new kidney but couldn’t get one because he needed to lose 40 pounds first.

By teaching them to cook real food from real ingredients, by getting them to understand how the food industry had duped them with all the “healthy” processed options that are still junk, they had a radical transformation. The mother lost 67 pounds and got off her blood pressure meds. The father lost 45 pounds and got a new kidney, and the 16-year-old son lost 40 pounds.

Anyone can do this. And everyone should do this—at least for 10 days. Read the “book” of your body. It will tell you the story of what works and what doesn’t.

You’ll see how radically different you can feel in just 10 days.

Relephant:

Why Cooking Can Save Our Lives 

Good Bye Detox

Heroin, Cigarettes & Food: Protecting Against Relapse