aim of this paper is to show how making the right food choices can transform and heal both the mind and the body.
INTRODUCTION
I was a sick little girl who grew up with a lot of trauma and drama. It was like there was a tiger hiding around every corner, and you never knew when something bad was going to jump up and bite you. I still remember the day that my uncle was murdered – I was 4-years-old, and I saw my mother and my grandmother fall to the floor sobbing in grief. I used to sooth my anxiety when I was young with my best friend, sugary food. The poor quality food and the chronic stress in my home attacked my immune system. I was sick a lot and I became a frequent flyer at the local hospital.
A few years later my grandmother came to live with us. She had diabetes. She and I shared the same diet. We both loved sugary cereals and we started eating them for dinner as well as breakfast. She used to make the most amazing warm Syrian bread smothered and drowning in honey. By the time I was 11, I was giving my grandmother her insulin shots because my mother had to work 3 jobs so that we could survive. I spent so much time around doctors that I wanted to be one.
When I was 15 I was attacked and dragged down an alley. I was nearly raped, but I fought with the attacker and I got away. I decided there and then that I was never going to be a victim and that is when I learned how to fight for real. But in my early 20s I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer that metastasized and came back 3 times, which is unusual. My cancer completely ruined my plans for medical school and I became so devastated and overwhelmed that I sunk into a deep depression. This time the attacker was inside my own body and I realized that I was fighting with an invisible phantom and I was in for the fight of my life. It was so much harder to fight for my own health, and I was up against a huge adversary.
At one point, I was so sick, that I was on 9 prescriptions and taking medications to manage the side effects of the medications. When I complained, my doctor told me that I was in denial and that maybe I should see a psychiatrist. I did not agree. You have to become a warrior for your own health, so I fought. Now I am in my 40s and I am healthier than I have ever been.
HEALING THE MIND WITH FOOD
Food can be both a medicine and a poison. Today, it mainly seems to be the latter. Many people eat highly-processed, pesticide-sprayed, genetically-modified, low-fiber, and high-glycemic index foods, each and every day. These types of foods are so damaging to health. And it is not just us humans that are being affected.
Bebac and Mokolo are gorillas who live at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. Even though they were barely in middle age, they were dying of heart disease – the number one cause of death for western lowland gorillas living in captivity. Captive western lowland gorillas also demonstrate odd behaviors, such as pulling out their hair and regurgitating their food and re-eating it. These behaviors are not seen in wild gorillas. This perplexed zoologists, and some began to suspect that the gorillas’ diet was to blame. Why? Because almost all captive gorillas are fed vitamin-rich, high-sugar, and high-starch nutritional cookies to ensure that they get all of their nutrients. However, in the wild gorillas obviously do not eat foods like this. The zoologists at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo decided to radically change the gorillas’ diet to see if they could improve their health. So, they started giving them their natural diet of wild greens, nuts, seeds, bamboo and flax, and instead of putting their food in one place they scattered it around their enclosure so they had to go and look for their food. This new approach worked wonders. The new diet contained twice as many calories as the nutritional cookies; however it took the gorillas up to 75% of their day to forage for their food, so they became much more active. Within 1-year, they had lost 65 pounds each and they had also stopped regurgitating and re-eating their food.
Bebac and Moloko were not happy with their new diet at first. It took them about a week to accept that they were no longer going to be receiving their daily sugar-fix. The same is true with patients; we tell our patients that it will take about a week to break their sugar addiction. Once that week is over they will start to feel better and they will get healthy.
Even though we know how bad certain foods are for us, people keep on eating them. Nutritious and healthy food can be so beneficial, yet people keep opting for food that is more poisonous than nutritious. Moreover, it is often the people that desperately need healthy food (e.g. people in churches, hospitals, homeless shelters, prisons, and drug rehab centers) that are fed the worst diet.
Figures from the CDC show that the incidence of attention deficit disorder (ADD) has increased by 53% since 2001, with 20% of boys and 11% of all children being diagnosed with it. However, 2 studies from Holland have showed that simply eliminating sugar, gluten, soy, dairy and food dyes significantly improved the symptoms of nearly 70% of children with ADD.1,2 So, just cleaning up their diet can have a dramatic effect. Let me show you how this works in large groups.
In 2011, Pastor Rick Warren, Mark Hyman, my husband Dr Daniel Amen, and I helped to set up the Daniel Plan health program in the one of the largest churches in America. The decision to set up the Daniel Plan came about in the fall of 2010, when Pastor Rick Warren baptized over 800 people and he realized that they were all fat. He realized that he was not healthy and neither were most of the people in his congregation. By using the principles of the Daniel Plan, the church lost over 250,000 pounds in less than a year along with many other benefits, such as reductions in blood sugar and blood pressure.
The Bible belt is widening, but not in the way that we had hoped – the states of Tennessee, Oklahoma, Georgia, and Mississippi are at the center of our obesity epidemic. We are targeting this population, but fortunately these principles do not apply only to strictly churchgoing folks. Sinners can be helped too! So there is hope for us all. My husband and I also helped to plant these principles into several large drug treatment programs. One of them is with newly court ordered criminals and the results have been just incredible.
The secret is that you have to develop warriors and empower them in order to create massive change. Figure 1 shows Laura, one of our affiliates. She went through our program herself and lost 55 pounds. She no longer suffers from IBS, rosacea, and hot flashes. As she became healthier, she came to realize that she had to share this information with the people she serves (she is the director of one of the largest chemical addiction recovery programs in America). She came to understand that not removing the disease-promoting food in her center really amounted to negligence, as the center was unconsciously contributing to their patients’ illness. Together, we helped to radically transform their menu and we added an exercise program. The results have been truly astounding.
Figure 1. Laura before (left) and after (right) embarking upon the Daniel Plan.
Here are just a few comments from people at Laura’s center who were helped by the Daniel Plan:
Chad: “I am far less impulsive. I thought I was stupid but I now realize it was brain fog and my mind and self-esteem are so much better.”
Alejandra: “I have so much natural energy and don’t crave caffeine throughout the day.”
Jason: “The doctor told me due to drugs I had brain damage and would not be able to work. But being on the program my energy and focus is so much better. I’m also sleeping through the night.”
William: “As the days went by my mind began to clear, plus my focus, memory and even speaking abilities were better. Plus I lost 55 lbs in 87 days and I have a 6 pack… the kind that won’t get me arrested!”
Thomas’ story is my favorite. When he first came
