What if you could cure all your health problems and lose 10 pounds in just 7 days?

That’s an amazing claim, hard to believe for sure, but I have seen this miracle so many times in my practice (and now from all the people who have posted on my website who followed my ideas) that even I am starting to believe it!

My true goal is to help people feel better. Period.

Because I once was seriously ill with chronic fatigue syndrome, I know what it’s like to wake up every morning feeling like you can’t go on or to have a thousand and one other minor complaints that lower your capacity to enjoy life.

Now, of course, with more serious illness, it may take more than one week to find the cause and the cure (although by using the systems of UltraWellness and functional medicine, it is possible for so many millions with chronic illness to get better over time).

Functional medicine is medicine by cause not symptom. The ONLY way to truly heal chronic disease and address weight problems and disease is to get to the ROOT of the problem, to find the cause, and then get rid of it and help the body heal.

And two of the major factors that make people sick and fat are being toxic and being inflamed.

So, the secret of the 7 days is to very quickly stop the things that make you toxic and inflamed (sugar, caffeine, alcohol, junk food, processed foods, etc.) and do things that help you detoxify and cool off inflammation (eat whole real foods, stop all potential food allergens, clean out your bowels, deeply relax, and more).

That’s when miracles can occur.

The scientific research supporting the role of inflammation and toxins in illness is overwhelming, but most doctors don’t know how to help their patients deal with it.

Think of it as an experiment and try to prove it to yourself. Don’t believe me.

I was trained in conventional medicine, practiced it for 10 years, and helped many people using the tools I was trained in—namely, medications and surgery.

While I worked in the emergency room, those tools worked amazingly well, bringing people back from the brink of death and relieving suffering.

But I realized that I wasn’t helping the tens and tens of millions of Americans (125 million to be exact) who suffer from some type of chronic illness. And that doesn’t include the millions who just don’t feel well.

In fact, I now believe that most people walk around just accepting feeling mediocre—tired, achy, brain fog, memory problems, depression, headaches, congestion, allergies, digestive problems, joint pains, PMS, skin problems—things that may not even be a disease, yet rob them of the possibility of feeling great.

Who can say they are fully alive, full of energy, and able to greet the day with joy and enthusiasm?

How many of us can really do that?

Well, I know this is possible for most people. And the sad thing is that most people don’t know why they feel less than fully alive and healthy and don’t connect it to their behavior or habits.

The key to creating health is figuring out the cause of the problem and then providing the right conditions for the body and soul to thrive.

It isn’t taking another medication!

Over the last 20 years of practicing at Canyon Ranch, founding The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, MA, and working with dozens of other leaders in the emerging field of functional and systems medicine, I have found the few simple things that make the most difference for the most people.

That is why I write the books I write. But I was overwhelmed by how the lives of people who never even saw me as a patient were changed. Here is an email someone sent to me after trying the simple things I recommend for getting to the root of weight and health problems.

Through reading and following the eating plan in your book, I have discovered I am gluten intolerant. Six weeks after starting your plan, I had lost not only 13 pounds but also, the all-over bloated feeling, excess gas, stomach discomfort, and thickening around the middle that I was experiencing. The puffiness and dark circles under my eyes are gone, and I am no longer depressed.

I feel terrific, which is my motivation for staying with the plan (including 45 to 60 minutes a day of strength training and yoga). I have read the comments of others, and like many of them, I no longer enjoy foods that are bad for me and crave the foods that are good for me.

Unfortunately, feeling terrific is not enough motivation for some people. And I am amazed and even saddened that there are so many other people out there with a defeatist attitude. Many of my friends told me the discomforts I was experiencing were a normal part of aging and that I needed to learn to accept it. 

Wow, were they ever wrong!! Your book has shown me caring for my physical self is essential, especially as I age. I am 48, and thanks to your book, I am not getting older, I’m getting better, and growing old gracefully is not an option but a cop out.

THANK YOU!!!!

PS. The only thing I am missing now is conversing with someone I can relate to.

When I read these stories, I realized that I could offer what I have been giving to my patients one on one to help them feel great very quickly and lose weight immediately without compromising my true goal of helping people get to the root of their health and weight problems.

And it occurred to me that what I do for nearly every patient who comes to see me is to give them a chance to see just how sick they have been and how powerful making a few simple changes can be in just one week.

Once they see by directly feeling how their food choices and their behaviors make them sick—and they experience a taste of UltraWellness—then, they are empowered to make changes that can help them feel great and lose weight for the long term.

The most important things to address at the outset for weight loss and creating UltraWellness are inflammation and toxicity. These are among the two most important causes of chronic disease and obesity.

So, I put together a simple program called The UltraSimple Diet Challenge, including all the tricks and tools I have used successfully with thousands of patients for so many years.

In one short week, I teach them how to detoxify and to cool off chronic inflammation.

That is The UltraSimple Diet.

I asked many of you in my online community to try it and give me feedback. I was overwhelmed by the response. We had thousands respond but could only accept about 150 into the testing.

Even though I know what I recommend is effective, I was very surprised by the power of the program in people who I had never even met or for whom I created a customized plan. It had dramatic effects.

We had 131 people complete the program. We asked people to track their medical symptoms—things like headaches, fatigue, digestive problems, congestion, joint pain, depression, and more.

In just one week, they had an average of 51.15% reduction in their symptoms. And they lost an average of 5.53 pounds (and many lost over 10lbs) and lost an average of 1.37 inches from their waist and 0.94 inches from their hips!

To me, the weight loss is nice, but it’s not the main objective (it’s a nice side effect and happens automatically if you deal with the underlying roots or causes of illness).

The real benefit is the possibility of experiencing UltraWellness, a state of deep and true health and vitality. And it happens so quickly. You don’t need to believe me—just try it for one week.  Join me for a webinar on May 29 to learn about how you can join The UltraSimple Diet Challenge that starts in just a few short weeks. It’s only seven days—anyone can do it!

And tell your friends. Pass this along.

I believe that if enough people really get to experience the difference in their health created by one week on The UltraSimple Diet Challenge, it will change them forever. It could create a cultural shift that may be able to fight the overwhelming power of the food and pharmaceutical industry, which controls our health.

Empower yourself, transform healthcare!

To read Part I of this two-part blog please click  here .

Please leave your thoughts by adding a comment below—but remember, we can’t offer personal medical advice online, so be sure to limit your comments to those about taking back our health!

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

If I told you there was one diet that could cure arthritis, fatigue, irritable bowel, reflux, chronic allergies, eczema, psoriasis, autoimmune disease, diabetes, heart disease, migraines, depression, attention deficit disorder, and occasionally even autism and that it could help you lose weight quickly and easily without cravings, suffering, or deprivation, you might wonder if Dr. Hyman had gone a bit crazy.

But it’s true. And the story goes like this.

Food is medicine. Bad food is bad medicine and will make us sick. Good food is good medicine that can prevent, reverse, and even cure disease. Take away the bad food, put in the good food and magic happens.

The problem with current medical thinking is that it treats diseases individually, requiring specific diagnoses and labels: “you have migraines,” “you have depression,” “you have psoriasis.” And then you get the migraine pill, the antidepressant, and the immune suppressant.

What if you didn’t have to treat diseases specifically or even need to know their names? In fact, I often see patients—like one I saw yesterday—who came with 20 pages of analysis from a dozen doctors from the Mayo Clinic. Her “diagnoses” were “muscle pain, fatigue and insomnia,” and she had been given no recommendations for treatment. Not very helpful!

I recently saw a patient treated at Harvard by multiple specialists. She was on 42 pills a day for severe allergies, asthma, and hives. She even died twice and had to be resuscitated after anaphylactic shock. In just a few short weeks, simply by changing her diet, she got off all her medications, and her allergies, hives, and asthma were gone.

Another patient, who suffered for decades with reflux and irritable bowel and whose symptoms weren’t controlled with acid blockers and “gut relaxers,” got complete relief from his symptoms one week after changing his diet.

What if you could just treat the whole person with dietary changes, upgrading the information given every day to your body through food? Food is information carrying detailed instructions for every gene and every cell in your body, helping them to renew, repair, and heal or to be harmed and debilitated, depending on what you eat. What if you could send messages and instructions to heal your cells and turn on healing genes? And what if, by some simple changes in your diet, you could get rid of most of your chronic symptoms and diseases in just one week (or maybe two!)?

That is entirely possible. Some people call it detox, Some people call it an elimination diet. I call it the inclusion and abundance diet.

I call it UltraSimple!

The best part of this approach is that you don’t have to trust me or any “expert.” You simply have to trust your body. It will tell you very quickly what it likes and doesn’t like.

If you are constantly putting in information that is making your body toxic, sick, and fat—hyper-processed industrial junk food, sugar, flour, chemicals, additives, MSG, high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, artificial sweeteners, inflammatory foods, or what I call anti-nutrients—it acts like poison in the body. It inflames your gut and your cells leading to whole-body inflammation that you experience as pain, allergies, headaches, fatigue, and depression and that leads to weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease.

This one diet, The UltraSimple Diet—getting the junk out, getting inflammatory foods out, adding healing, detoxifying, anti-inflammatory foods—has the power to heal in a way that medication can’t and never will be able to.

I have used it for decades with tens of thousands of patients with remarkable results. We are beginning studies at Harvard that will look at how to tackle the toughest diseases with a simple change in diet.

This approach can work faster and better than any medication. The power of this simple diet change—getting rid of the bad stuff and putting in the good stuff—can often reverse the most difficult-to-treat medical problems and give people the experience of profound wellness, even if they don’t have a serious illness. It is something everyone should try just once. Most of my patients say, “Dr. Hyman, I didn’t know I was feeling so bad until I started feeling so good.”

Let me share a story, one that is very common in the world of functional medicine, which is the science of treating the roots causes of disease, the science of creating health.

One patient, a medical school professor and doctor, came to see me after struggling for years with psoriatic arthritis. He was crippled by pain and inflammation, despite taking powerful immune-suppressing drugs, including an ibuprofen-like drug, chemo drugs, and a drug called a TNF alpha-blocker that suppresses the immune response so much that its side effects include overwhelming infection, cancer, and death. Still, he wasn’t better, and at 56 years old, he was planning to quit. He couldn’t operate any longer and could barely walk up the stairs. He had psoriasis all over his skin, and it was destroying his joints. He also had reflux, depression, canker sores, constipation, and trouble with concentration. His liver function tests were abnormal, and he was overweight.

He had a horrible diet. He ate oatmeal with milk and sugar for breakfast, tuna with soup and cookies for lunch, and fish or meat with vegetables and potato or pasta for dinner. He snacked on cookies and protein bars. He avoided chocolate and fatty foods. He ate out more than five times per week and craved sweets and caffeine, consuming three to four cups of coffee and one diet soda per day. He drank about 12 alcoholic beverages per week, including wine and the occasional scotch.

So, I put him on The UltraSimple Diet, getting rid of industrial food, caffeine, alcohol, and sugar and adding whole, real foods. I also got rid of the most common food allergens and sensitivities.

At his first follow-up visit, he arrived pain-free and said he hadn’t felt so good in years. He reported an 80% reduction in pain, could climb stairs more quickly, and was no longer limping. All his pain and stiffness were gone. His hands had been swollen and difficult to open, but now, the swelling was gone and he could operate again. And he had quit all his medications after the first visit (even though I told him not to). His reflux and migraines were gone. His mood had improved, and he was less irritable. He was no longer constipated. And he lost 15 pounds.

If there is one thing I could encourage everyone to do, it is to take just one week to see just how powerful a drug food can be. There is nothing to lose but your suffering. It doesn’t take months or years to see change. It happens in days or weeks.

In my next blog, I will explain exactly what this diet is, why it works, and how it heals your body. And I will show you how to get started.

Please leave your thoughts by adding a comment below—but remember, we can’t offer personal medical advice online, so be sure to limit your comments to those about taking back our health!

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

It’s Mother’s Day, a time to celebrate the person who brought us in to this world, who taught us the basic lessons of life and planted the seeds for who we become.

Today, I want to celebrate my mother because she taught me something so essential and enduring that it has become my greatest passion: cooking. And through cooking, touching, feeling, preparing, and savoring good, real food made from real ingredients, I get to inhabit fully my home and my kitchen; to heal my body; and to connect with friends, family, the Earth, and the larger community in which I live.

Cooking, I have come to see, is a truly transformational act. The closer we can get to the food we eat, the shorter the link between field and fork, the better off we will all be. We have outsourced our cooking to the industrial food system. By taking back our kitchens—which we can do simply, easily, and inexpensively—we can create a tidal shift in our food system.

Mothers are exactly the allies we need to lead this food and cooking revolution. Sadly, most mothers today were not taught by their mothers to cook. The food industry deliberately celebrated “convenience” 50 years ago and in so doing, disenfranchised an entire generation of Americans from their kitchens and the essential act of cooking, the glue that delicately holds together our society, our health, and our connection to the Earth and to each other.

So, for Mother’s Day, I asked my mother to share her connection to food, handed down through her mother, which she then gifted to me, helping me learn the beautiful connections between gardening, cooking, eating, and wellness. And I have taught that to my children who have become wildly gifted cooks, making delicious home-cooked meals from real ingredients.

Here is what my mother shared with me:

My mother, Mary, was born in 1908 and was raised primarily in the country, when she was not boarding at the Lexington School for the Deaf. Her language, as was my father’s, was sign language. Today, it is called ASL, or American Sign Language.

Making food for her family was her passion. She shopped every day for food, so that it was ‘fresh.’ Everything she bought was organic. There were no mass pesticides, no destruction of the soil with chemical infusions, no spraying of plants before World War II or immediately after.

She cooked every day, three meals a day for my brother, my father, and me. Her instructions to me were clear when I married, “Buy fresh; eat fresh.” I do remember her hands flying in sign language as she instructed me in the purchase of cauliflower. “Make sure it is white without spots.” As for tomatoes and apples, she ignored the local inhabitants, the worms, and said, “Cut them out. Good enough for the worms, good enough to eat for you.” Summer corn was always a treat, dropped into boiling water, lid on, stove off. “Don’t spoil the vitamins.” 

She saved the water in which she sometimes overcooked the green beans, the corn, the peas, and the asparagus. It was the base for her soups, which were legendary. Sometimes, a cooked chicken leg was thrown in for flavor, lots of minced garlic, a can of whole tomatoes. And oh, her cabbage soup sweet and sour was wonderful.

I still prepare her cabbage soup. A fresh young cabbage, sliced as one would for coleslaw. Put it in the pot; salt it a bit with kosher salt, so that it wilts. Then, add a whole onion, a carrot or two, sliced in chunks, one parsnip, and a can of whole tomatoes squished in my hands. Let it cook down for about 20 minutes. Cut half a juicy lemon, slice two quarters, squeeze and drop into the soup, rind and all, add one tablespoon of brown sugar. A little water if necessary. And simmer for about an hour. It is delicious, and purely vegan. You can put in a small beef short rib, and that will give it yet another flavor.

My mother spoke with her fingers and cooked with her knowing fingertips. No recipes, not ever. Her mother, my grandmother Fanny, was a part-time caterer. So, cooking was probably in their DNA, as it is in mine and in my son Mark’s.

Her philosophy was clear. Be kind. Be kind to others. Be kind to yourself. Be kind to your body. Know what your body wants.

My father Ben came home each night in anticipation of my mother’s aromatic cooking. Her meals were simple: a protein, a carbohydrate, and a green vegetable, usually peas. We ate meat from time to time—mostly chicken—and fish and spaghetti. We all loved her spaghetti, her version. Pasta, tomato sauce, a bit of butter, and that was it.

The whole concept of shopping for fresh food changed when we moved as a family to Europe, particularly to Spain where Mark was born. Food shopping happened daily; there were no supermarkets. There was the butcher, the baker, the produce stalls, the herb stalls—all housed separately in a market. The most famous of these was the Ramblas in Barcelona, a treat for the eye, where rabbits were butchered as you watched, where Mediterranean fish gleamed on cabbage leaves, where piles and piles of fresh fruit and vegetable teased the eye, cheese makers with local Manchego, bakers with crusty bread all waiting for me, the customer, with a story to go with my purchase.

Just enough food for the day. We had no refrigeration, just an icebox. Each morning, the iceman arrived, extracted any bit of ice left, and put in that day’s ice. Left over food was slipped in to a large pot of continually simmering liquid to create the next day’s soup. No scraps for the garbage can. Everything was used.

When we moved back to North America and settled in to the suburbs of Toronto, Canada, we had a large backyard. I took a portion of that yard and planted a vegetable garden. Mark helped. We planted marigolds around the perimeter to keep out pests. No pesticides. We had fun. We had our hands in the soil, dirt under our fingernails. We raised scraggly carrots, beans, lettuces, radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes and had the enormous pleasure of eating our own produce.

We learned that food takes time, that life takes time. It was all part of nourishing the family, at the source whenever and wherever possible. 

On this Mother’s Day, I wish all families a happy cooking day, a happy cooking life. But today, do make sure someone else cooks for Mom.

Please leave your thoughts by adding a comment below – but remember, we can’t offer personal medical advice online, so be sure to limit your comments to those about taking back our health!

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

with Mark Hyman, MD and Lissa Rankin, MD

We live in an era in which individualism is rewarded and collectivism is seen as weak. We raise our children to be independent and self-reliant. It’s so hard for us to ask for help. Interestingly, we also practice medicine this way. We teach our future medical leaders to separate the body into individual disconnected parts. We allow patients to believe that their distinct symptoms are totally isolated and unrelated. If this kind of medical system supported better outcomes, creating healthier and happier communities, then it would be acceptable, and we wouldn’t even need to discuss this. But the simple fact is it isn’t working, and we are now at the brink of a health revolution through which medical visionaries are now working together to bring in a new era of living well and feeling great.

In my work as a functional medicine doctor, I see the patient as a whole person instead of merely as an assortment of disconnected parts. The body is an extraordinary system; every part is connected via an intricate web of body, mind, and spirit. In functional medicine, we seek the root causes of illness so that we can address the underlying triggers that have thrown the patient off balance. In order to heal properly, the whole patient requires attention; that includes the emotions, thoughts, and spirit of a human being—not just the physical body.

Throughout the many years I’ve worked with my patients using this model of medicine, I‘ve been astounded by the resiliency of the human body. It’s humbling to realize that, even though I was taught in medical school to believe that a patient’s recovery is completely in my hands, in fact, it is the patient who has the most power. My job is to be a facilitator who gently assists the body back to its natural state of health. I do this by encouraging a paradigm shift in the hearts and minds of patients. We discuss the role of whole foods, water, air, light, rest, movement, sleep, rhythm, connection, love, meaning, and purpose. (For more information on the seven fundamental systems in your body that can bring back balance, see my book The Blood Sugar Solution).

We need doctors who understand how well the body reacts when the whole system is treated, not just the symptoms. One doctor in particular, Lissa Rankin, has made a career out of a calling she felt to serve her patients on the most authentic level possible. She inspires me along with the thousands following her online health and wellness community, Owning Pink. She began this site as her own way of revolutionizing healthcare, encouraging people in need of healing to own all the many facets that make them whole:  their relationships, their professional lives, their creative lives, their spiritual lives, their sex lives, their environment, their physical and mental health, and more.

Lissa’s work is functional medicine at its best, addressing the truth that we all need each other to lean on, to help heal, to connect, and to flourish. Lissa and I share the belief that there is nothing more productive and exciting than a collective of people united together to combat feelings of loneliness and powerlessness in the face of illness. Because she and I feel a special calling to do this work, I wanted to invite her to share with us some insight into her unique approach to healing. Here are some questions I asked her followed by her comments.

Dr. Mark:  On your blog at LissaRankin.com and on your community site, Owning Pink, I see a lot of importance placed on finding one’s truth and authentic nature. I, too, encourage my patients to reflect on how to live with more purpose. How can synchronizing this authentic energy with another person help heal a broken mind, body, and spirit?

Lissa: In my first TEDx talk, I introduced a radical new wellness model, which I also discuss in my upcoming book Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself (Hay House, May 2013).  The wellness model is based on a “cairn,” those stacks of balanced stones you tend to see marking trails and sacred landmarks. In the “Whole Health Cairn” wellness model, the foundation is not the body, as it is in so many wellness models that suggest that a healthy body is a prerequisite for a healthy life. Instead, I think the foundation is the part of you I call your “Inner Pilot Light.” Call it your intuition, your inner doctor, or your highest self, this part of you always knows what’s true for you, even if the rest of you may not want to face your personal truth because it often commands change, and change scares us. Your Inner Pilot Light is always radiant, never extinguished, 100% authentic, and will never lead you astray. I help people tap in to their Inner Pilot Light here, but as healers, I believe that’s one of the most essential parts of our jobs, not to dictate what our patients should do or prescribe the one and only way to optimal health, but to help our patients tap in to their own unique Inner Pilot Light, so they can make treatment and life decisions that are in alignment with the core of who they are. When you make decisions from this place of truth, the body tends to naturally come back in to alignment with its natural state of health.

Dr. Mark: You speak about the healing power that occurs when a group of men and women come together in a safe, sacred community in which each person feels invited to share the emotions, thoughts, and experiences he or she is having. How has the community you’ve helped create shaped your current understanding of medicine?

Lissa: When I first started blogging, I had lost both my health and my mojo (which I define as “MOre JOy”), and I was determined to get it back. I thought I was telling my story as part of my healing process, and as a healer, I wanted to offer up my gifts and be of service to others. But I couldn’t have anticipated how much the tribe I attracted online would wind up healing me, not just emotionally, but physically.

After having researched Mind Over Medicine, I now realize that the healing provided to me by this community was physiologic. After years of trauma that took place during my medical education and after years of working in the hospital and feeling deeply disconnected and after two divorces, I felt very lonely, and I now understand that my nervous system was on permanent overdrive. What Dr. Walter Cannon at Harvard termed “the stress response” was triggered because my brain felt constantly threatened—as lonely people’s minds often do. When this happens, the body is filled with stress hormones like cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, and the sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” response, gets stuck in the permanent “on” position, which is poison for the body.

Dr. Mark: In your upcoming book, Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself, you talk about the notion that there is good medicine in believing that anything is possible. Can you elaborate on the science behind belief and why invoking a sense of personal empowerment to heal oneself is the missing link in today’s healthcare?

Lissa: In modern medicine, the notion that you can heal yourself seems to have been relegated to the realm of New Age hocus pocus, and yet, the medical establishment has been proving that the mind can heal the body for over 50 years. We call it the placebo effect, and we’ve been trying to outsmart it for decades. It’s an inconvenient truth that gets in the way of proving that new treatments are more effective than letting nature take its course.

But the placebo effect is nothing to be avoided. It’s something to embrace, because it provides concrete evidence that the body is equipped with innate self-repair mechanisms that have the power to cure, mechanisms that can be turned on with a combination of positive belief and the nurturing care of a healer. The data suggests that the placebo effect works 18-80% of the time because it triggers the relaxation response, turning off the stress responses that often accompany illness and flooding the body with healing hormones that allow the body to heal itself.

Dr. Mark: What is the number one thing you want people to know that might surprise them but nonetheless, could change their life for the better?

Lissa: I believe we are here on this earth to fully express the divinity within us, to fully self-actualize, if you will. We’re so programmed to cover up this divine spark within, to wear masks and pretend to be someone other than who we really are so we can conform more easily to some artificial idea of what makes a good person. And yet, I fully believe that the best thing you can do for your health—and your life—is to be unapologetically YOU, to tap in to that Inner Pilot Light, and to let your radiance illuminate the world.

Please leave your thoughts by adding a comment below—but remember, we can’t offer personal medical advice online, so be sure to limit your comments to those about taking back our health!

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

Everybody feels stress and knows it intimately, but very few of us think about what stress actually is.

Stress is a thought. That’s it. No more, no less. If that’s true, then we have complete control over stress, because it’s not something that happens to us but something that happens in us.

The dictionary definition of stress is, “bodily or mental tension resulting from factors that tend to alter an existent equilibrium.” It is your thoughts out of balance.

The medical definition of stress is, “the perception of a real or imagined threat to your body or your ego.” It could be a tiger chasing you or your belief that your spouse is mad at you (even if he or she is not). Whether it is real or imagined, when you perceive something as stressful, it creates the same response in the body.

A cascade of adrenaline, cortisol, and other stress hormones floods your system, raising your heart rate, increasing your blood pressure, making your blood more likely to clot, damaging your brain’s memory center, increasing belly fat storage, and generally wreaking havoc on your body.

The operative word here about stress is that it is a perception, also known as a thought or point of view. There are objective stressors, to be sure—war, death of loved ones, financial troubles, starvation, dental work. But how these affect us determines our body’s stress response. Imagine Woody Allen and James Bond, each with a gun pointed at his head—same external stressor but entirely different responses.

When I was very sick with chronic fatigue, barely able to work, a single father with two kids, thinking I had to go on disability, I worried constantly. I couldn’t sleep and everything seemed stressful. Then, a wise man told me I had to stop worrying. I argued with him strenuously, providing a comprehensive list of all the real external events that were stressful to me. He just kept repeating that worrying was toxic; he said, what really mattered was how I viewed the situation, and he kept telling me I just needed to stop worrying.

And slowly, very slowly, I trained myself to watch my thoughts, my perceptions, and when a stressful thought came into my head, I stopped, took a deep breath, and just let go. It’s like a muscle—it gets stronger the more you use it, but if you let go, it relaxes.

But of course, life takes over and things happen, all the “D’s:” divorce, death, deadlines, demands, dumb thoughts, and dumb schedules. And as anyone does, I get sucked in to negative thinking, which creates stress in my body. My sleep gets interrupted, my muscles get tight, my mood gets cranky, but then I breathe and remember that stress is all in my head.  We get so attached to our way of thinking, to our beliefs and attitudes about the way things should be or shouldn’t be, that it makes us sick.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t respond to injustice or experience intense feelings of joy, happiness, sadness, loss, or pain. I do. But I try just to be fully in them when they come, then experience the next moment, then the next and the next, and just show up with my whole self with love and attention. That’s the only thing I can do.

Most people, when they look at my life, think I’m crazy and wonder why I’m not more stressed—running a medical practice; writing books and blogs; teaching all over the world; working on health policy; volunteering in Haiti, churches, and orphanages; being a father, son, brother, partner, friend, boss, and more. But it’s actually quite simple. I don’t worry about things much. I simply wake up and do the next thing as best I can.

And when things get out of control, which they do, I simply make a gentle U-turn. It’s like a GPS for my soul. Your GPS doesn’t yell at you and call you stupid or judge you for taking a wrong turn. In the sweetest voice imaginable, the GPS reminds you to take the next possible U-turn.

Each of us has to find out how to make our own U-turn. There are some wonderful ways I have discovered that work very well for me!

Here’s how I make my U-turns (and I try to pick one or more each day):

1. Move. The best way to burn off the stress hormones without having to change your thinking is to move and sweat. Run, dance, jump, ride, swim, stretch, or skip—do something vigorous and lively. Yoga is also fabulous, as it combines movement and breathing.
2. Breathe. Most of us hold our breath often or breathe swallow, anxious breaths. Deep, slow, full breaths have a profound affect on resetting the stress response, because the relaxation nerve (or vagus nerve and not the Las Vegas nerve) goes through your diaphragm and is activated with every deep breath. Take five deep breaths now, and observe how differently you feel after.
3. Bathe. For the lazy among us (including me), an UltraBath is a secret weapon against stress. Add 2 cups of Epsom salt (which contains magnesium, the relaxation mineral), a half-cup of baking soda, and 10 drops of lavender oil (which lowers cortisol) to a very hot bath. Then, add one stressed human and soak for 20 minutes. Guaranteed to induce relaxation.
4. Sleep. Lack of sleep increases stress hormones. Get your eight hours no matter what.  Take a nap if you missed your sleep. Prioritize sleep.
5. Think Differently. Practice the art of noticing stress, noticing how your thinking makes you stressed. Practice taking deep breaths and letting go of worry. Try Byron Katie’s four questions to break the cycle of “stinkin’ thinkin’” that keeps you stressed.

You can also try my UltraCalm CD, featuring guided mediations and relaxation techniques.

Also, I highly recommend tapping, a technique that combines ancient Chinese acupressure and modern psychology. Pick up a copy of Nick Ortner’s new book The Tapping Solution to learn more. Another great stress-relief technique to try is Holosync, an audio technology designed by the Centerpointe Research Institute, which instantly (and effortlessly) puts you into states of deep meditation—literally, at the push of a button. Visit Centerpointe’s website to find out more. Also, check out meQuilibrium, a digital coaching system created by experts to change the way you respond to stress. It teaches specific skills to help you get a handle on all of the emotional, physical, and lifestyle imbalances that keep you from feeling your best.

Enjoy, and happy U-turns!

Please leave your thoughts by adding a comment below—but remember, we can’t offer personal medical advice online, so be sure to limit your comments to those about taking back our health!

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

Watch me on the Katie Couric show as I discuss Food and Lifestyle Prescriptions for Common Health Problems.

For common health problems, there are often simple diet and lifestyle solutions that get to the root of the problem without the need for medication, which often does little more than mask the symptoms. What we eat, nutritional deficiencies, how we move (or don’t move), and stress levels all impact our well-being.

Here are a few simple strategies you can use to take care of the following common health problems.

Pain and Inflammation

Chronic pain is so common that it affects almost all of us at one time or another. A poor diet, lack of exercise, and chronic repetitive motion (like sitting at a computer screen for eight hours a day) often trigger pain. The most common cause of pain is our inflammatory diet—processed food laden with sugar, trans fat, and refined oil. Hidden or subtle food sensitivities can also cause chronic inflammation. The most common triggers are wheat, gluten (a protein found in wheat, rye, barley, spelt, and kamut), and dairy. Eliminating these foods for two weeks can often dramatically reduce pain and inflammation.

Lack of exercise and stretching and hunching over a computer all day are a big source of back, shoulder, and neck pain. And lastly, lack of sleep (we sleep two hours less each night now than we did 100 years ago) can increase muscle pain and inflammation.

Certain super nutrients, including omega-3 fats found in fish oil and turmeric found in curry, can also help reduce inflammation. In fact, turmeric is often called nature’s ibuprofen.

Here are some simple things you can do to reduce pain and inflammation:

1. Eliminate processed and junk food.
2. Dramatically reduce or eliminate sugar.
3. Do a two-week trial of an elimination diet, getting rid of all gluten and dairy.
4. Try turmeric, taken as one 500mg capsule twice a day.
5. Take 2–3 grams a day of EPA/DHA (fish oil).
6. Exercise—walking 30 minutes a day is a good start.
7. Sleep eight hours a night.
8. Try stretching exercises, including back and shoulder pain-relieving yoga exercises:

• Cobra or Back Extensions—hold for two minutes
• Bridge Pose—hold for one minute
• Pelvic Tilts—do 30 tilts
• Knee To Chest—hold each knee for 30 seconds and both together for 30 seconds
• Knee-Drop Side Twist—hold for 15–30 seconds
• Hip Flexor Lunge—hold for 30 seconds on each side
• Half-Pigeon Pose on Back—hold each side for 30 seconds
• Cat and Dog Stretch—do 30 times
• Yoga Mudra Shoulder Stretch—hold for one minute

Memory Loss

A number of things can trigger memory loss. I call them the “four S’s:” sugar, stress, (lack of) sleep, and (lack of) sweating. Sugar causes pre-diabetes and diabetes, which often lead to significant memory loss. In fact, Alzheimer’s is now being called type 3 diabetes. So, get rid of sugar and flour products. Stress shrinks the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain. So, find your pause button every day and make time for some stress relief. Lack of sleep can cause impaired brain function, leading to CRAFT syndrome, which stands for “can’t remember a _____ thing.” Exercising to the point of breaking a sweat is a great brain optimizer because it releases BDNF or brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a Miracle-Gro for the brain that stimulates the growth of new brain cells and new brain cell connections. All it takes is 30 minutes of brisk walking each day.

A few supplements have also been shown to help improve memory and brain function:

• Fish oil or EPA/DHA (omega-3 fats) for brain cell structure and functioning. Take 2–4 grams a day. 99% of Americans are deficient in omega-3 fats, yet DHA makes up 60% of the brain.
• Special forms of B12 and folate—1 mg of methylcobalamin and 1–2 mg of 5-methylfolate a day.
• Coconut butter (MCT or medium chain triglycerides) for brain fuel—1 tbsp a day of extra virgin coconut oil.

Visit the Healthy Living Store for great, quality supplements that have been vetted by me.

Constipation

You should have a bowel movement at least once a day. Chronic constipation can lead to colon cancer and even Parkinson’s disease. Constipation can be caused by low thyroid function, dehydration, magnesium deficiency, intestinal infections, and more. But for many people, this simple home remedy can fix the problem forever:

• Take 2 tbsp daily of ground flax seeds (which contain fiber, lignin, and omega-3 fats).
• Take 150–300mg of magnesium citrate twice daily in capsule form. You can take more if you need to go to the bathroom. If you get loose stools, cut back. If you have kidney problems, consult your doctor before using higher dose magnesium.
• Take daily probiotics—50 billion CFUs of lactobacillus and bifidobacteria.
• Drink eight glasses of water daily.
• If you don’t feel better after trying this remedy, get your thyroid checked.

Cholesterol

Most of us think that high cholesterol comes from eating cholesterol or fat. Nothing is further from the truth. Sugar, especially high fructose corn syrup, turns your liver into a cholesterol factory, manufacturing triglycerides from the sugar, which is then transformed into dangerous small cholesterol particles. Anything that turns to sugar is a problem—sugar, white flour, white rice, etc. All of this “white stuff,” including trans fats (shortening is pretty white), in your diet turns to “yellow stuff” in your arteries. Cut down or stop eating those things.

Here are a few simple things you can do to optimize your cholesterol:

• To increase cholesterol-lowering fiber in your diet, try PGX, a super-fiber made from Japanese konjac root. You can have it as shirataki noodles, as a powder or as a capsule. If you use the powder, take 2.5–5 grams in a glass of water 15 minutes before a meal.
• Red rice yeast lowers cholesterol. Take 1,200mg twice a day.
• Fish oil, 2–6 grams a day, lowers triglycerides and cholesterol.
• Get some exercise. Interval training (like wind sprints) fixes insulin resistance, the main cause of abnormal cholesterol (small dense particles).

Puffy Eyes and Fluid Retention

Nobody loves puffy eyes. They can be caused by environmental and food allergies or sensitivities (especially gluten and dairy) and low thyroid function. You should get those things checked, but here are some yummy foods than can reduce fluid retention and puffy eyes:

• Green tea  (a diuretic and antioxidant)
• Dandelion greens (a diuretic)
• Asparagus (a diuretic)
• Green juices with asparagus, celery, dandelion greens, and cucumber

Dry Skin and Bumps on the Back of the Arms (Chicken Skin)

Many people suffer from dry skin or even chicken skin bumps on the back their arms. These may be signs of an omega-3 deficiency, a vitamin A or zinc deficiency, low thyroid function, or sensitivities to foods like gluten and dairy. Your doctor can test you for all of these. See my free guide called How to Work with Your Doctor to Get What You Need for information on how to test for these problems. Here are some home remedies to try:

• Eat three servings a week of sardines or wild salmon (omega-3s).
• Take 2–4 grams a day of fish oil or omega-3 supplements.
• Try rubbing flax and borage oil on dry skin.
• Take a good multi-vitamin and mineral supplement that includes vitamin A and zinc.

Join me in helping us all take back our health by leaving a comment below and by following me on Twitter @markhymanmd and on Facebook at facebook.com/drmarkhyman.

Last week, I flew to Greenville, South Carolina to meet with the Kluge family. I talked with them about their health, looking to understand the roots of their family crisis of morbid obesity, pre-diabetes, renal failure, disability, financial stress, and hopelessness. We talked about how they could dig themselves out of their scary downward spiral, a spiral that is affecting more than 150 million Americans (including tens of millions of children) struggling with the physical, social, and financial burden of obesity and its complications.

I thought that, perhaps, in knowing one family intimately, I could understand how we might find a way out of this slow motion disaster, a threat to the security of our families and our nation far greater than al-Qaeda or terrorism.

What I learned was this: we have to cook our way out of this mess. 

Food Terrorism: Our Biggest Threat

The threat is food terrorism—the wholesale hijacking of our health, our palates, our brain chemistry, our kitchens, homes, and wallets by Big Food. Lobbyists working on behalf of the $1 trillion food industry have staged a takeover of our government. The average congressman spends five hours a day pandering to Big Food and other corporate lobbyists to raise money to stay in power. This leads to policies that support the production, sale, and promotion of disease causing, hyper-processed, industrial, factory-made Frankenfoods.

Why should the USDA pay $4 billion a year to soda makers by allowing food stamps to be used to purchase sodas? Our government serves up 29 million servings a day—over 10 billion servings a year—of soda to our poor. So much for the food stamp mission of “good food for hungry people!”

Government agricultural subsidies, food programs (like Women, Infant, and Children nutrition; school lunch; SNAP or Food Stamps; etc.), Food and Drug Administration policies (such as classifying high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners as generally recognized as safe), and Federal Trade Commission policies (like allowing $30 billion of junk food marketing mostly to kids), directly results in our obesity and chronic disease burden.

The costs are staggering. By 2040, 100% of our federal budget will be needed to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. Our federal debt soars, our kids are sicker, leading to an achievement gap that limits our capacity to compete in the global marketplace, and 70% of our kids are too fat or unfit to fight, threatening our national security. These are not small problems. They threaten our future, not just the fat and sick among us, but all of us.

A Visit to a Food Desert: Rescue Mission on One Kitchen

So, with this in mind, I traveled to the South, the epicenter of our obesity and diabetes crisis. If I understood the obstacles to turning the tide of obesity for just one family then, maybe, just maybe, it would help me find the key to ending this madness. I went there to help with a new documentary on childhood obesity with Laurie David and Katie Couric called Fed Up, coming out in late 2013 or 2014, which I hope will be for childhood obesity what An Inconvenient Truth was for climate change.

Pickens County, South Carolina, where the Kluge family lives, is a food desert, not just because there are almost 10 times as many fast food and convenience stores there as supermarkets. The Kluges’ kitchen was also a food desert with barely a morsel of real food. There were no ingredients to make real food, only pre-made factory food science projects with unpronounceable, unrecognizable ingredient lists. Unless you look at the glossy pictures on the front of those packages, there is no way to know if what’s inside is a Pizza Stuffer, Pop-Tart, Cool Whip, a corn dog, or Hamburger Helper. They all contain the same processed ingredients: high fructose corn syrup, flour, salt, hydrogenated fats, MSG, colors, additives, and preservatives, all squeezed into injection-molded inventions of different colors, shapes, and textures, but all containing nearly the same ingredient list.

A government health survey of South Carolina found that 90% of people there don’t get enough exercise, 92% don’t eat more than two vegetables a day (which includes fries and ketchup), and 33% had at least one soda a day.

And so it was with the Kluge family. The parents Tina and John and their 16-year-old son Brady are all morbidly obese. Brady has 47% body fat and his belly is 58% fat. He said he is worried he will soon be at 100% body fat. His insulin levels are sky high, which drives his relentless sugar cravings and food addiction and promotes storage of more and more belly fat. Being obese at 16, his life expectancy is 13 years less than thin kids and he is two times more likely to die by the age of 55 than his thin friends. His father John, at age 42, suffered renal failure from complications of his obesity. The whole family is at risk.

They desperately wanted to find a way out but didn’t have the knowledge or skills to escape from the food terrorists. They blamed themselves for their failure, but it was clear to me that they were not the perpetrators but rather the victims. When I asked them what motivated them to want to change, the tears started to flow, and John said he didn’t want to die and leave his wife and four boys. His youngest, Nicholas, is only seven years old. John cannot get a kidney transplant to save his life until he loses 40 pounds, and he had no clue how to lose the weight. He was trapped in a food desert and in the cycle of food addiction.

Now that science has proven that processed food—and especially sugar—is addictive, the conversation has changed. When your brain is hooked on drugs, it is a fiction that willpower and personal responsibility alone will solve the problem.

Cooking Our Way Out of Obesity and Disease

None of Kluges knew how to cook real food. They didn’t know how to navigate a grocery aisle, shop for real food, or read a label. They had been hoodwinked by “health claims” that made them fat and sick, including “low fat,” “diet,” “zero trans fats,” or “whole grain.” Whole grain Pop-Tarts? Zero trans fats in Cool Whip? It is 100% trans fat, but since the serving size is small, and the food lobby forced Congress to permit them to label a “food” as having zero trans fat if it has less than 2 grams per serving, they can legally lie. The Kluges didn’t know that chicken nuggets have 25 or more ingredients and only one of them is chicken. Actually, it is a chicken-like substance.

They grew up in homes where things were either fried or eaten out of a box or a can. They made only two vegetables, boiled cabbage and canned green beans.  They didn’t have basic cooking implements, such as proper boards for cutting vegetables or even meat. They had some old, dull knives they never used, hidden under the cupboard. Everything they ate was pre-made in a factory. They lived on food stamps and spent about $1000 each month on food, half of that spent eating out in fast food places. Eating out was their family sport.

Tina’s mother had a garden, but Tina never learned how to grow food, even though they live in a beautiful, temperate rural area. She didn’t know how to chop a vegetable or sauté it. She knew grilled chicken is healthy but said she couldn’t feed that to her family seven days a week.

The Cure Is in the Kitchen: A Doctor’s Recipe for Health

So, after much thought, as a doctor, I realized the best way I could help them was not to shame or judge them, not to prescribe more medication or tell them to eat less and exercise more (a subtle way of blaming them) but rather to teach them to cook good, real food from scratch, even on a tight budget, showing them they could eat well for less.

We got the whole family cooking, washing, peeling, chopping, cutting, touching real food: onions, garlic, carrots, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, salad greens, even asparagus. Tina, to my surprise, pulled out a bunch of fresh asparagus from her fridge (which, I suspect, she got knowing I was coming to their home) and told me how she hated asparagus. “Once, I had asparagus out of a can, and it was nasty,” she said.  “But then a friend told me to try one off the grill, and even though I didn’t want to, I tried it, and it was good.”

My theory about vegetables is this: if you hate them, you’ve never had them prepared properly. They were likely a canned, overcooked, boiled, deep-fried or highly processed and tasteless mush. Just think of overcooked Brussels sprouts or mushy canned green beans.

I showed Tina and the kids how to peel garlic, cut onions, and snap asparagus to get rid of the chewy parts. I taught her to sauté them in olive oil and garlic, to roast sweet potatoes with fennel and olive oil, and to make turkey chili from scratch. We even made fresh salad dressing from olive oil, vinegar, mustard, salt, and pepper instead of using gummy bottled dressings laden with high fructose corn syrup, refined oil, and MSG.

The little boys came running into the kitchen, lured away from their Xbox by the sweet, warm smells of chili and roasting sweet potatoes in the oven, smells that had never come from their kitchen before. They all ate the food and were surprised at how delicious and filling it was.

After a happy, filling, healing meal of real food, cooked in less time and for less money than it would have taken them to drive to Denny’s and order deep fried chicken nuggets, biscuits, gravy, and canned green beans, Brady, the morbidly obese, nearly “super obese” teenager with a body mass index of almost 40, Brady, who struggled to get healthy against all odds, who wanted to go to medical school, who wanted to help his family, said to me in disbelief, “Dr. Hyman, do you eat real food like this with your family every night?” I assured him I did.

I left for home amidst tears of relief and hope of a different future for the Kluge family. I wish I had time to take them shopping, to show them how to navigate a supermarket, to teach them to plant a simple garden in their backyard, to take back their health.

Eating and Cooking Well for Less

I left them with my cookbook, The Blood Sugar Solution Cookbook, and a guide from the Environmental Working Group called “Good Food on a Tight Budget” about how to shop for, cook, and eat real food for less. Five days later, Tina, the mother, texted me to let me know that the family had lost 18 pounds and was making chili again from scratch. We can end this mess one kitchen at a time, one meal at a time.

Time and money are the biggest perceived obstacles to eating well. Neither is real. We have bought in to the insidious marketing messages: “You deserve a break today.” Give me a break!

Americans spend eight hours a day in front of a screen. We spend two hours a day on the Internet, something that didn’t even exist 20 years ago that we have now somehow found time for. What’s missing is the education, the basic skills, the knowledge, and the confidence. When you don’t know what to buy or how to cook a vegetable, how can you feed yourself or your family? The Kluge family taught me that it is not a lack of desire but the prison of food addiction and food terrorism that holds them hostage. But there is a way out, a Navy SEAL raid on our captive millions.

Michael Pollan’s new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, brilliantly lays down the argument that we have to cook our way out of our healthcare, environmental, and financial crisis, that cooking is essentially a political act, or, as I have said, cooking is a revolutionary act. His new book beautifully re-acquaints us with the essential act of cooking, the act that uniquely makes us human but which we have abdicated to the food industry. We have, he argues, become food consumers, not food producers or makers, and in so doing, we have lost our connection to our world and ourselves.

He says, “The decline of everyday home cooking doesn’t only damage the health of our bodies and our land but also our families, our communities and our sense of how our eating connects us to the world.”

Cooked is a beautiful mediation on cooking and the use of fire, air, water, and earth—the ancient skills of food preparation that we have lost. But the subtext here is that cooking is fun, freeing, and the most essential and real activity we can do every day.

And as a physician, one who is deeply concerned about our fat and sick nation, about my children’s and your children’s future, I say the best prescription for this ailment is something so simple, so easy, so healing, so affordable, so revolutionary, and so accessible to almost everyone. It’s this: cook REAL FOOD in your HOME with your family and friends.

I dream of one day creating a national Eat-In day like the one I just celebrated with few thousand from my online community, only on a larger scale, during which millions participate, a day where we all cook, share, and eat real whole food, made from scratch with family and friends. It’s simple but revolutionary.

Please leave your thoughts by adding a comment below–but remember, we can’t offer personal medical advice online, so be sure to limit your comments to those about taking back our health!

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD