I think it's time for us to talk about the diet myth. The diet myth is
a pervasive myth, and it's one that I fell into for a very, very long time,
until I learned a few things that I'd like to share with your right now.
The first is that the word "diet" is unique in our use for humans.
This is what I mean. You see, animals in the wild have a diet.
Humans go on diets. This may seem like a small change of semantics,
but I want to really get into it with you here for minute, because it's important.
You see, the original meaning of the word "diet," the old Greek and Latin words,
what they meant were lifestyle. So diet was something that someone had
as a lifestyle. It was not a temporary alteration to their eating patterns
in order to fit into that outfit for a specific event. It was not a temporary
change to their normal habits. A diet was something that they lived
into and lived through. Now, we've taken that word and we've
changed it, and that causes all kinds of problems. Like I said,
every animal in the world has a diet. Elephants have a diet.
Cheetahs have a diet. Leaf-cutter ants have a diet.
Mosquitoes have a diet, don't they? Think about it. Like an elephant's diet is
eat 200 kilograms of grass and fruit and bark and that sort of thing,
and drink about 70 liters of water every day. That's their diet. If they're on it,
they're more healthy. If they're off it, they're not. If you look at something
like the cheetah, you'll find that the cheetah's diet is to eat about 2.5
kilograms of fresh meat every day. Their diet is so specific that they won't
even eat meat off an animal that's already dead, say, like a hyena will do.
Their diet is quite specific. And the leaf-cutter ant's diet is
not leaves, you might be surprised. What they do is they go off into the
jungle and they collect up leaves and they bring them back to their home and then
they use those leaves to farm fungus, because they're fungivores,
they eat fungus. What I'm trying to say here is that every species on Earth has
a diet, and we are no exception. We have a diet. And yes,
there are some subtle differences between people's metabolism systems and men and
women and that sort of stuff, but here's what we're really wanting
to say, right, everybody needs vitamin C. Everybody needs calcium.
Everybody needs iron. Everybody needs certain fats.
Everybody needs certain proteins. Our needs are consistent
across the species. We might want to make subtle changes within those needs,
but our needs are consistent across the species. And so when someone fools us
into or manipulates us into going into a temporary diet, what they're really doing
is asking us to create imbalance. Most diets work on the basis
of creating imbalance. For example, somebody goes on a diet and then they eat
less food and they start to starve themselves. How long is that going
to work? For some people, a day or two; for some people, a week or two;
for some people, a month or two; but in almost every case,
they'll end up slingshotting back and putting the weight back on plus some.
Other diets rely on creating imbalance through focusing on a particular food,
a particular food that may well stimulate weight loss, but that particular single
food does not meet the full spectrum of nutritional requirements that
a human needs. And so the diet works for a period of time, until eventually,
the body is screaming for the missing nutrients and that triggers cravings,
which then go out to create a problem. And that problem is the yo-yo diet.
What I want to be very clear about is we are now in an age that it is time to move
beyond the diet. And we're in an age where it needs to happen quickly.
Look, these days, there's all this political debate about universal health
care and how it should be funded and should the government be involved.
I want to be really clear with you. We do not, in the developed world,
have a health care crisis. We have a self-care crisis.
What does this mean? Look, are you going to eat better so you can
live forever? No, but what about your quality of life right now?
Would you like more energy on a day-to-day basis? Would you like your memory
to work better? Would you like to sleep better? Would you like to have a more
powerful sex drive? Would you like to have more energy in the afternoon,
when everybody else is getting tired? Would you like to be healthy more often?
And how about this? This is kind of sad but really think this through.
A hundred years ago, cancer and heart disease weren't even
near the top 10 killers in the western world. And today, they count for 66%
of death, 66%. One in three people that you know, unless they start making some
lifestyle change, one in three people that you know are going to die
from heart disease, and another one in three, from cancer. This is not something
to put off until next year. This is not something to put off
until tomorrow. This is something to think about now. So what does that mean?
It means starting to get rational. It means starting to get knowledgeable.
It means starting to take steps toward improving your diet.
And that does not mean worrying about cutting out all kinds of things.
It means worrying about getting your needs met. You see, your health is far more
determined by getting your nutritional needs met then by removing the toxins.
When you're really well-nourished, your body has a tremendous capacity
for cleansing itself of toxins and when you're really well-nourished,
your body doesn't crave a lot of those nonfunctional foods anymore.
And so the steps that we need to take right now dramatically increase your
intake and your quality and quantity and variety of fruits and vegetables.
Fruits, maybe a little more rarely; vegetables, in an unrestricted way
whenever you can. Get high-quality proteins from the best possible sources
you can. Make sure you're drinking lots and lots of water. It's the only thing you
need to drink. And if you want to have a little bit of herbal teas, go for it.
Once you've achieved all of that, you might find that you change your
relationship with some of the less functional foods. That's fine,
if it happens. It's not the most important thing. The most important thing is that
you get what you need to be healthy.