I am aware of what it’s like to have a craving for desserts.
You may be saying to yourself, “F**k Antebi’s nonsense. I don’t have to give up desserts. I have to just change them to not include junk food. Every once in a while I can have crème brûlée, ice cream cake, chocolate cake from that gourmet restaurant, or movie concession candy.”
If we allow ourselves to have that attitude, we will both do harm to your body chemistry and continue to have cravings, no matter how much “moderation” we exercise. In a sense, we are keeping your taste buds open, and they are anxiously looking forward to our next bad dietary decision.
Having said that, we can make our own delicious desserts at home with fruits and nuts and very pure ingredients. Avoid white sugar and white flour like the plague, though.
When we surrender processed sugar from our diet we are likely to experience a detox. Some find it easy and some don’t. But it’s advisable to eat plenty of fruit during this detoxing, provided that we’re active enough to burn off the fruit sugar.
It’s difficult to come up with specific measurements regarding how much fruit you can eat and how much activity you will need to engage in to burn off a given number of calories. But generally speaking, if you remove processed food from your diet and make the other dietary corrections advised in this book you should be able to eat a great deal of fruit without gaining much weight or having blood sugar problems.
People who have diabetes are an exception, though, and their chemistries will vary from case to case. A person with type one or type two diabetes should go slowly when they’re adding more fruit sugar from whole fruits and starchy vegetables and swap out calories from animal protein with fruit and vegetables.
In a diabetic’s case, the reduction and elimination of animal protein of any kind will help take the burden off the liver. This will have a chain reaction in their chemistry in a positive way. I’ve seen this happen many times watching people do long-term juice cleanses that included highly caloric freshly made fruit smoothies. Every type of body chemistry will benefit from the inclusion of more fruit and the reduction of animal protein simultaneously—this exchange will result in enormous improvement.
Herein lies the controversy: There are many people in the health system who believe that protein is a problem solver for everything. I’ve read books that have advice for recovering from surgery, with the recommendation of eating more protein for accelerating healing. I’ve read brilliant books that say so many things correctly in regards to dealing with cancer, but then at the end they recommend more protein. I know this is a mistake.
Protein in the degrees that we eat it in the western modern diet becomes inflammatory. Just think about a balloon under pressure. That is what inflammation is like to our entire body. Inflammation is caused by something and it’s not caused by fruit and it’s never caused by vegetation. You have to over eat to such a large degree that you were fermenting food to cause inflammatory response.
If you're a "need-a-dessert-once-and-while-kind-of-person, you may have to let this go if you want your new program to work for you. We must be willing to give up obvious junk food, even when it's served with a nice meal, at a nice place, and/or on a nice occasion. This is another highly critical adjustment to our lifestyles. Don't succumb to peer pressure, whatever kind of pressure may be.