Sexy Forever: How to Fight Fat After Forty by Suzanne Somers

drinking the sugar water, as they could no longer correlate the degree of sweetness with the amount of calories, so they overate.” When you eat sweet, you crave sweet. As this author points out, “If you are trying to retrain your taste buds to perceive a blueberry or an apple as delicious and sweet, it will be impossible to do so if you keep confusing your taste buds to think that artificially supersweetened jam is the level of sweetness that sets the bar.” Again, not to worry. I will provide several natural sweetening solutions in the coming chapters.
    In order for a product to be labeled “artificial sweetener,” it must contain chemicals—stay away from them!
MYTH: TOXINS ARE HARMLESS IN SMALL AMOUNTS
    At this point in your life, your body is weighed down by a toxic burden and cannot handle any more chemicals. Fresh organic food is the best place to start healing, and in eating it you feed the little powerhouses (mitochondria) that fuel your weight loss and every vital system in your body. Say goodbye to the chemicals and poisons you have unconsciously taken in until now.
    Unfortunately, we will never again be able to live an existence that is devoid of chemicals and toxins unless we move to the most remote part of the globe and eliminate all modern conveniences and technologies from our lives, and even then acid rain and chemical-laden clouds would likely be passing overhead. But don’t be overwhelmed. Simple changes add up, creating an internal environment predominantly made up of healthy cells rather than unhealthy cells. This new ratio will change your health, and as a result the pounds will drop away. Having a high ratio of healthy cells to malfunctioning cells is a key to beating the present unavoidable environmental assault. And it’s key to staying Sexy Forever.
    We can get fat because of overeating and lack of exercise, but in middle age we now know there’s more to it. When we’re overweight we feel fatigued, but this fatigue and the accompanying fat are, as we have established, a result of environmental toxins. It’s the toxins that make it
impossible
for your body to absorb nutrients. When you don’t absorb nutrients, your body is essentially starving, which makes you hungry for more and more food. But the body can’t get what it needs because of this devastating toxic burden. This cycle will not stop without intervention, and as a result, you will gain more and more weight.
    Without nutrients the body begins to decline in many ways. If you reduce your load of toxins, you will have more energy and fewer pounds of fat. When you start absorbing nutrients again, you won’t crave poor-quality foods, and you will start gravitating to foods that have high nutritional content. The body is smart, but it can’t help you out whenchemicals are blocking all entryways for nutrition. Imagine trying to run your car without gas.
    But just getting rid of the fat doesn’t get rid of the toxins. They are reabsorbed into your body and new fat
immediately
starts to collect. This is what creates the vicious cycle.
HELLO TV DINNERS, GOODBYE HEALTH
    We need to retrain ourselves to eat as we were meant to eat. I believe one of the ways we got started on this path was with TV dinners. When I was a kid, I used to beg my mother to buy TV dinners. I thought they were a treat, but when you actually think about it, TV dinners are a form of poison. Let’s just start with the aluminum trays, which we heated on high. (If you recall, you used to be able to taste the aluminum.) So right there you have a big dose of heavy metals, which have been linked to brain tumors, among many other things. The food itself was of poor quality and non-nutritious. The oils used were bad. And the most exciting part of the meal was the gooey, sugary, apple-y, chemical-y thing they called dessert.
    TV dinners began our transition from real nutrition to toxic, chemical-filled food, and the obesity rate rose commensurately, as did rates of diabetes,