Kindle Notes & Highlights
These feelings are not excuses, rationalizations, or signs of poor willpower. They represent your body’s awareness that you are not just a person—you are an ecosystem.
“Sometimes digestive issues show up where you don’t expect them,” I explained. “After all, you are one body—one whole, made up of many interconnected systems that are always in communication.
Yet even people who don’t have celiac can be sensitive to gluten, just as they can be sensitive to eggs, dairy, and soy. That’s because gluten triggers the production of zonulin.
If you are overweight and especially if you have been struggling to lose that weight, your current microbiome is not your friend. Regardless of any diet you might go on, the microbiome presently living in your body is determined to make you store fat.
Unhealthy levels of insulin, blood sugar, leptin, and ghrelin—levels determined by an unhealthy microbiome—are why so many dieters feel hungry and unsatisfied with their supposedly healthy diets and why they so often gain back all the weight they lost.
Experiment with focused eating by devoting one entire meal to simply savoring your food. Choose a quiet, peaceful atmosphere in which to eat, perhaps with soft background music playing. Light a candle. Set a beautiful place for yourself. Put flowers on the table in a nice vase or choose other ornaments that give you pleasure to look at.
After all, only a tiny portion of the genetic material within our bodies belongs to us. The genes of our microbiome outnumber ours by 150 to 1.
So we in effect train our immune system to “go crazy” and then we hand it a gun. It’s powerful, it’s out of control, and it’s overwhelmed with potential targets.
