Review: The Slow Down Diet By Marc David

Happy New Year! Making a health and wellness resolution is the new tradition of New Year, so here is a book on diet that I highly recommend. This is by far the best book on healthy eating I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot), serves well any time of the year for all age and gender groups.

Although The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy, and Weight Loss is about healthy eating and full of case studies of weight loss, it NEVER discusses numbers such as calories, fat grams, etc. Pretty unique, huh? Instead, Marc David, who is a nutritionist and psychologist, writes how our mentality affects the process of digestion and overall metabolism.

What you eat is NOT what you get

Marc David skips the part about numbers for a good reason — because it’s largely meaningless. Just because you eat, say, 40 grams of protein or 1000 mg of calcium, doesn’t mean you receive that much of protein or calcium. If your metabolism is down, you cannot assimilate what you eat. And if your metabolism is down, you cannot fully burn what you eat — which leads to weight and other health problems. Further, there are various hormones that determine how the calories get utilized.

Our metabolism is different from one person to another, and it changes within the same person. This is why dogmatic approaches such as “We must never eat any animal products.” fails. Yes, eating plant-based diet is helpful for many people, but there is no one ultimate best way to eat.

For instance, if you eat under stress, worrying about work, money, relationships or eating on the run (I heard some people eat in the moving vehicle!?), your sympathetic nervous system becomes dominant and your adrenals produce stress hormones like cortisol and insulin. Sympathetic nervous system drives the blood to your muscles, not to your midsection where your stomach is. This made sense when the stress was caused by a bear and we had to run as fast as possible.

So our bodies are designed to sacrifice digestion when we are under stress. It was okay when the stress was short term — we could eat and digest after we got away from the bear. Today, however, we are under constant stress, so our digestive system, too, is routinely stressed.

At the same time, stress hormones work out another reactive strategy in our body — it stores fat. It’s kind of like us restricting spending and trying to save money under bad economy. Studies show that the same persons eating the same diet can gain or lose weight and fat depending on the stress level under which they eat.

8 factors that improve your metabolism

The author discusses eight factors that affect our metabolism:

1. Relaxation
The above explanation is only tiny part of stress response in our body. There are more, like bone loss with stress. So slow down and relax. Eat like the French and Italians, blessing the foods and enjoy the company of your loved ones. Consciously breathe deeply — it gets you to relax. (And I say, don’t fool yourself thinking that eating in front of the TV is relaxing. It’s not.)

2. Quality
Foods contain not just known nutrients but also more organic information. This is confirmed by quantum physics — every matter is energy and information. And this information in the foods affects our metabolism. So eat the best quality foods that convey good information to your body. Fresh, organic, whole foods that are prepared with love. If you choose to eat meat, choose happy, humanely-raised animals that are free of growth hormones, antibiotics, and stress.

3. Awareness
30-40% of digestion is due to cephalic phase digestive response (CPDR), meaning your recognition and awareness of the foods. So don’t multitask, be present when you eat. Enjoy the look, smell, and taste of your foods. This naturally controls your appetite.

He also writes about the “brain in the gut”, enteric nervous system (ENS). Our head brain doesn’t tell the gut how to digest — our gut brain figures it out and tells some more to the head brain. We can be the best nutritionist for ourselves by trusting our own ENS.

I guess slowing down and eating high quality foods helps boost your awareness of eating. So these factors work in tandem.

4. Rhythm
Our metabolism change according to the circadian rhythm, so eating to the rhythm helps our body. It’s best to eat the largest meal at lunch, not dinner. Eat breakfast to jump start your daily metabolism, eat substantial lunch, and eat light dinner well before bedtime. And sleep well — remember, stress makes you fat.

5. Pleasure
Enjoy your foods. Eating is inherently pleasurable — we are wired this way. When we eat (without the sense of guilt and shame), endorphins are produced, making us feel happy, and — take note — endorphins also burn fat. Our pleasured body also produces a chemical called cholecystokinin, boosting digestion and telling the body when to stop eating. (So, counter to common belief, good pleasurable meals don’t make us eat endlessly. It has natural appetite control system.)

Eating for pleasure doesn’t mean you want to party with sugary foods, caffeine, and alcohol. Health is the ultimate pleasure factor. (The author does emphasize including healthy fat to boost the sense of pleasure.) Also, bring in more pleasure and joy to your other areas of life. This reduces the need to seek pleasure only in foods and thus prevents overeating.

6. Thought
What we think and feel about foods affects our metabolism. Our thoughts in the cerebral cortex (the higher brain) are transmitted to the limbic system (the lower brain), causing feelings. Then the hypothalamus in the limbic system sends out messages to various parts of the body, regulating sympathetic / parasympathetic nervous systems, hormones, etc.

Do you have a friendly relationship with foods? Or are you loaded with negative beliefs about foods — leading you to negative consequences? (Remember The Biology Of Beliefs by Dr Bruce Lipton?)

7. Story
We all have stories about ourselves. Is your self story filled with love and energy? Or is it a story of a victim? Victim story dampens your metabolism. Change your story to an empowered one and boost your metabolism.

Marc David further suggests aligning the way you eat with your life purpose. I think this is cool. (You know I’m big on living on purpose.)

8. The Sacred
Even though science hasn’t uncovered the exact relationship between our soul and the body, our spiritual well-being affects our physical health. Marc David maintains spiritual qualities such as love, truth, courage, commitment, compassion, forgiveness, faith, and surrender are as essential to the body as food and water. They support our metabolism. By contrast, when we choose to, say, carry grudge rather than to forgive, our own metabolism carries its weight.

Dump the calorie equation thinking

The mechanical idea of “(Calorie intake) – (Calorie output) = Weight gain / loss” is so outdated. I hope you are starting to see this. Instead, slow down and naturally lose weight.

I strongly recommend this book if you’ve ever had challenges in eating better, if you ever felt your willpower to quit eating certain foods or certain amount wasn’t strong enough (most likely, it has nothing to do with willpower, he maintains), if you have weight or other health problems, or if you want to learn truly healthy way to eat. Gee, that might mean the majority of the population, I guess.

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