Feel Great, Lose Weight

Links

• Goodreads

Key Takeaways

• Changes should be sustainable to be long lasting. They should match our lifestyle and our preferences.
• You should work with your body, not against it.
• There's no one-size-fits-all diet or rule. You should find what works for you.

What We Eat

• Our body craves fatty, sugary, and salty foods because they're calorie-dense and were scarce in the past.
• Processed foods are designed to be addictive.
  • The brain releases dopamine when we eat these foods.
  • Food engineers utilize this and use bliss point in processed food to make them more addictive. The book calls these foods blissy foods.
  • All processed foods contain some level of sugar, salt, and fat.
    • Baked foods like supermarket bread are also processed foods and contain high levels of sugar and salt.
• The brain relies on leptin to regulate hunger.
  • The dopamine released by blissy foods can interfere with leptin and make the brain less sensitive to it, causing leptin resistance and making us eat more.
• Sugary food can cause a spike in blood sugar levels, which can lead to a crash later, resulting in a loop of craving more sugary food.
  • Drops in blood sugar levels can also cause irritability, mood swings, and fatigue and make you hungry.
• Day to day food is fuel for our body, not a source of pleasure.
  • Delicious food makes us eat more.

Action Points

• Remove blissy foods from your meals.
  • Your food shouldn't form habits and cravings.
  • Replace them with whole foods.
  • Keep them out of your house or if not possible, keep them out of sight.
  • Replace processed snacks with fruits, nuts, or seeds.
  • If you can't replace bread, traditionally baked whole grain bread is a better option.
  • Note the ingredients of the food you buy or even better, eat food that don't come with an ingredient list.
  • One-ingredient meals or meals with a few ingredients help your body to fix leptin resistance.
• Use the same core ingredients for all your meals and make them monotone.
  • Eat takeout or restaurant food only occasionally.
• Shop and eat single ingredient foods.
• Keep single ingredient foods in your house.
  • Frozen vegetables and fruits.
  • Chopped garlic and onions.
  • One-ingredient snacks like nuts and seeds.
  • Lentils, beans, brown rice, and whole grain pasta.
  • Batch cook and keep food in the fridge or freezer.