This year we’re focusing on energy—which of course comes from eating food. But overeating—eating more than we need to meet biological demand—can weigh us down, literally, with energy stored as fat.Our nation is obsessed with food and weight. We love to eat, eat a lot of the wrong things, and eat more than we need, so we’re constantly looking for ways to lose weight. Food psychologist Marc David reports that nearly 50% of little girls in the U.S. ages 3-6(!) are already concerned about their weight and report that they are on a diet, while about 1/3 of American adults are on a diet at any given time.Did nature make a mistake in giving us an appetite that drives us to overeat?Dr. Doug Lisle, PhD, co-author of The Pleasure Trap, has an answer for this. Our primitive ancestors and their appetites were perfectly adapted to their environment. Three instincts gave them an evolutionary advantage: 1) the drive to experience pleasure; 2) the drive to avoid pain; and 3) the drive to be efficien…

Have you ever won a stare-down with a tray of Christmas cookies?  You’ve probably heard that people gain an average of five to ten pounds between Thanksgiving and New Years. The good news is that the real average is more like one to two pounds. The bad news is that most of that weight is never lost. And people who are already overweight tend to gain pounds faster than normal-weight individuals do. Whether you are following the Beyond Health lifestyle to lose weight, or to get well and stay well, the next few months may challenge your resolve like no other time of year. The holiday season—for many now stretching from Halloween to the Superbowl—is a marathon of festive celebrations with friends and family that attempt to bring cheer to what might otherwise be a cold and gloomy time of year. The Challenge of Cheer It’s always harder to maintain your diet when you leave your house, but during the holidays, there is a whole lot of leaving the house. And the ten…

. . . or taking good care of your nerve cells?  Alzheimer's disease has become an epidemic. Many people today fear losing their mental capacity more than they fear having a heart attack or getting a cancer diagnosis. One in eight individuals aged 65 and under now has Alzheimer's. For those aged 85 and older, it's one in two! Bad as this is, if the epidemic continues to grow at its current rate, the number of people in the U.S. with Alzheimer's could triple by the year 2050! Though these odds are alarming, Alzheimer's is easy to prevent. In fact in healthy cultures in the past, it didn't exist. The risk factors for getting Alzheimer's are familiar to anyone who's read my books: poor diet, nutritional deficiency, toxins, stress, free radical damage, chronic inflammation, blood sugar disregulation and insulin resistance (from eating sugar and other refined carbohydrates), excess body weight, stress, not enough exercise, particular prescription drugs, excessive use of salt and dehydr…