(Page 4 of 6)

Once your body gets to a certain level of better health, you begin to feel the difference between true hunger and just eating due to desire, appetite, or withdrawal symptoms. Your body is healthier at this stage and you won't experience the withdrawal symptoms such as weakness, headaches, lightheadedness, etc., that most people associate with hunger.

It is our unhealthy tendency to eat without experiencing true hunger that contributed to our becoming overweight to begin with. In other words, to have become overweight in the first place, appetite, food cravings, and other addictive drives that induce eating have come into play. Poor nutrition induces these cravings (addictive drives), and nutritional excellence helps normalize or remove them. My experience with thousands of patients following my healthful, high-nutrient eating plan is that most of these people no longer get the discomfort that they formerly mistook for hunger. Even when they delay eating and get very hungry, they no longer experience stomach cramps, headaches, or fatigue accompanying their falling blood sugar. They merely get hungry and they enjoy this new sensation of hunger in the mouth and throat, which makes food taste better than ever. Many of my patients have told me they enjoy this new sensation; they like being able to be in touch with true hunger and the pleasure of satisfying it.

The one point I want to emphasize is that it does not require any precise measuring of calories or specific diet to maintain a thin, muscular weight. It only requires that you eat healthy food and that the hunger drive be real.

Very few Americans have ever experienced true hunger. The ability to sense true hunger, which is a mouth-and-throat sensation, does not occur until after you are eating healthfully and have a high nutrient-per-calorie diet. Then, when the period of withdrawal from excessive eating of unhealthy foods and caffeine is over, you can be in touch with true hunger. You will learn more about headaches, hypoglycemia, and hunger in chapter seven.

The Only Way to Significantly Increase Life Span

The evidence for increasing one's life span through dietary restriction is enormous and irrefutable. Reduced caloric intake is the only experimental technique to consistently extend maximum life span. This has been shown in all species tested, from insects and fish to rats and cats. There are so many hundreds of studies that only a small number are referenced below.

Scientists have long known that mice that eat fewer calories live longer. Recent research has demonstrated the same effect in primates, (i.e., you). A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that restricting calories by 30 percent significantly increased life span in monkeys. The experimental diet, while still providing adequate nourishment, slowed monkeys' metabolism and reduced their body temperatures, changes similar to those in the long-lived thin mice. Decreased levels of triglycerides and increased HDL (the good) cholesterol were also observed.25 Studies over the years, on many different species of animals, have confirmed that those animals that were fed less lived longest. In fact, allowing an animal to eat as much food as it desires can reduce its life span by as much as one half.

High-nutrient, low-calorie eating results in dramatic increases in life span as well as prevention of chronic illnesses. From rodents to primates we see:

• Resistance to experimentally induced cancers
  
• Protection from spontaneous and genetically predisposed cancers
  
• A delay in the onset of late-life diseases
  
• Nonappearance of atherosclerosis and diabetes
  
• Lower cholesterol and triglycerides and increased HDL
  
• Improved insulin sensitivity
  
• Enhancement of the energy-conservation mechanism, including reduced body temperature
  
• Reduction in oxidative stress
  
• Reduction in parameters of cellular aging, including cellular congestion
  
• Enhancement of cellular repair mechanisms, including DNA repair enzymes
  
• Reduction in inflammatory response and immune cell proliferation
  
• Improved defenses against environmental stresses
  
• Suppression of the genetic alterations associated with aging
  
• Protection of genes associated with removal of oxygen radicals
  
• Inhibited production of metabolites that are potent cross-linking agents
  
• Slowed metabolic rate
  

The link between thinness and longevity, and obesity and a shorter life span, is concrete. Another important consideration in other animal studies is that fat restriction has an additional effect on lengthening life span. Apparently, higher-fat intake promotes hormone production, speeds up reproductive readiness and other indicators of aging, and promotes the growth of certain tumors.

In the wide field of longevity research there is only one finding that has held up over the years: eating less prolongs life, as long as nutrient intake is adequate. All other longevity ideas are merely conjectural and unproven. Such theories include taking hormones such as estrogen, DHEA, growth hormones, and melatonin, as well as nutritional supplements. So far, there is no solid evidence that supplying the body with any nutritional element over and above the level present in adequate amounts in a nutrient-dense diet will prolong life.

This is in contrast to the overwhelming evidence regarding protein and caloric restriction.

This important and irrefutable finding is a crucial feature of the H = N/C equation. We all must recognize that if we are to reach the limit of human life span, we must not overeat on high-calorie food. Eating empty-calorie food makes it impossible to achieve optimal health and maximize our genetic potential.

Tags: Diets and Weight Loss

About the Author

Joel Fuhrman, M.D., is a board-certified family physician who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. He is the author of Fasting and Eating for Health and a former member of the U.S. World Figure Skating Team. He lives with his wife and four children in Flemington, New Jersey. For more information please visit www.drfuhrman.com