Why Healthy Foods May Be Doing You More Harm Than Good

The paleo diet and other approaches are powerful tools, but they’re merely a starting place. Recent research has shed light on the need to go beyond doctrine in order to find what works for us individually. In my new book, Wired to Eat, I will show you how to use this information to create your own effective, customized eating plan that can change your life and your health.

How’s this possible? In recent studies, hundreds of people were fed a variety of foods and their individual blood glucose responses were tracked over time. To everyone’s surprise, there was not a one-size-fits-all “best diet,” but rather massive variation, from person to person and in the types of foods each individual reacted favorably or negatively to. This is groundbreaking because it indicates some foods create a healthy response in some people while creating a negative response in others. It shows that we can find the foods that work with our physiology instead of against it.

This new approach to eating is called Personalized Nutrition. Personalized Nutrition, in practical terms, means that you will be able to test specific foods in order to determine which work for your weight loss and health journey. You’ll discover there may be “bad” foods you’ve been avoiding for years, like rice or potatoes, that your body can actually tolerate. On the flip side, you may also discover that there are “healthy” foods you’ve been eating that are causing more harm than good.

I want you to understand that the difficulties you face, be they health or weight related, are not your fault. If you live in a modern Westernized society of relative leisure and abundance but are not fat, sick, and diabetic, you are, from a biological perspective, “screwing up.” Our species is here today because our genes are wired to eat damn near everything that is not nailed down.

Millions of people start a diet each year, but the vast majority fail to achieve the results they desire. Why is that? Is it a moral failing on our part, or is there more to the story than a “weak will”? Instead of moralizing eating, perhaps we should consider that we live in a world that is ill suited to our genetics, that our food, sleep, movement, and social connections have changed in ways that our bodies find difficult to adapt to. The program laid out here will help you rewire your brain and appetite, allowing you to better control your blood sugar, and determine the foods that are right for your health and weight loss.

In Phase One, you can determine what your primary needs and goals are (who you are and where you want to go) and from this we will use a simple but powerful 30-Day Reset. With it, you will discover if you are insulin resistant (or not), and based on this finding, adjust your carb intake to reflect your relative metabolic health.