David Ludwig

And remember, the fleeting moments of pleasure from eating poor-quality food pale in comparison to the enduring rewards of feeling good.

Nothing says ‘starting over’ like a kitchen purged of unhealthy foods and restocked with nutritious ingredients. Let’s clean out your kitchen so you’ll have space for all the delicious and nutritious foods to come.

You’ll completely abandon the calorie-counting approach to weight loss. Instead, you’ll focus on eating the right foods in the right combinations to reprogram fat cells so they release their excess calorie stores. The fastest way to do this is by replacing refined carbohydrates (the primary driver of insulin secretion) with fat, and achieving the right proportions of unprocessed carbohydrate and protein at meals and snacks.

Meals with the same calories can produce dramatically different outcomes a few hours later.

Highly processed carbohydrates are among the lowest-quality components of the food supply, accounting for the majority of diet-related disease in the United States today— they’re highly concentrated in calories but devoid of real nutrition.

Ironically, the standard treatment for diabetes since the 1970s has been a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet—the same diet that contributes to the problem in the first place! We wouldn’t give milk sugar lactose to someone with lactose intolerance. What’s the sense in giving so much carbohydrate to someone who, by definition, has carbohydrate intolerance?

Foods with similar nutrients can affect hormones and metabolism in profoundly different ways, determining whether we store or burn calories, build fat or muscle, feel hungry or satisfied, struggle with weight or maintain a healthy weight effortlessly, and suffer from or avoid chronic inflammation.

The usual ‘eat less, move more’ approach misses the root cause of weight gain, produces side effects, and is destined to fail for most people. In this way, lowcalorie diets may actually make matters worse.