{"id":21691,"date":"2013-12-11T15:18:06","date_gmt":"2013-12-11T20:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nomeatathlete.com\/?p=21691"},"modified":"2019-10-23T12:27:55","modified_gmt":"2019-10-23T16:27:55","slug":"eat-to-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nomeatathlete.com\/eat-to-live\/","title":{"rendered":"My ‘Eat to Live’ Challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Five years ago, a 10-day challenge<\/a>\u00a0led to my eventual decision to go vegetarian (and to start this blog).<\/p>\n

A few years later a 30-day\u00a0vegan challenge<\/a>, which I completed successfully, actually taught me that I wasn’t ready to go vegan yet. But when I was\u00a0<\/em>ready<\/a> six months later, that month-long experiment was probably to thank.<\/p>\n

Why should we do uncomfortable challenges like these, with food or anything else? For me, the answer is clear: you might just discover something you love, when you learn that actually doing the thing is easier than worrying about how tough it surely must be.<\/p>\n

But even if your experiment doesn’t lead you to change your life, a challenge around something so near-and-dear as food will almost certainly teach you something about yourself.<\/p>\n

And so …<\/p>\n

My Latest Challenge<\/h3>\n

For several years I’ve long been intrigued by the “don’t eat extracted oils” philosophy. Because if I’m honest, oil isn’t a whole food, and I’m fond of saying that I eat whole foods.<\/p>\n

I also knew that I ate a lot of salt, woke up every day with an urge for a small, strong cup of coffee, and enjoyed a single (usually strong) beer almost every night.<\/p>\n

I was comfortable with all of these things, citing moderation<\/a>, lots of exercise, and no tendencies toward serious addiction (when it comes to ingestibles, at least).<\/p>\n

And yet, I must not have been 100 percent comfortable with these choices … because I’ve always been fascinated to hear about people who enjoy these things, like me, but deliberately choose never to indulge in them.<\/em><\/p>\n

So, almost two years removed from any restrictive diet challenge, I decided it was time for a new one.<\/p>\n

Enter Joel Fuhrman, M.D.<\/h3>\n

\"BookI first came across Joel Fuhrman when I found his book\u00a0Disease-Proof Your Child<\/em><\/a>, which somehow led me and my wife to\u00a0Super Immunity<\/a>\u00a0—<\/em>\u00a0currently the nutrition book that I recommend to anyone who will listen.<\/p>\n

Only in this backdoor manner did I find out about Eat to Live<\/em><\/a>, his #1 New York Times bestseller. When on my book tour several people told me they had followed the the Eat to Live\u00a0<\/em>plan and lost 20, 30, or even 60 (a woman last week in Raleigh!) pounds as a result, I was deeply curious, even though I had zero interest in losing weight.<\/p>\n

Why? Because the point of Eat to Live<\/em> isn’t weight loss. It’s health. And I found Dr. Fuhrman’s scientific approach in Super Immunity<\/em> so appealing, so sensible, and so convincing that I didn’t want to just pick and choose a few elements to incorporate before slowly returning to my set point. I wanted an immersion, to understand what “eating to live” really feels like.<\/p>\n

The ‘Eat to Live’ Plan<\/h3>\n

Fuhrman pulls no punches. With an internet full of incentives for people to tell us what we want<\/em> to hear — that some hot new study shows that salt, alcohol, caffeine, chocolate, saturated fat, etc. are somehow good for us — Fuhrman recommends only what his years of intense research and medical practice have taught him.<\/p>\n

And those recommendations, predictably, aren’t quite so much fun to eat (or tweet).<\/p>\n

The diet he believes to be the healthiest possible for achieving your ideal weight and maximizing longevity and resistance to disease, and the one I’ve been eating for the last 10 days, includes:<\/p>\n