Adapted from Dr. Fuhrman's book Cholesterol Protection For Life:
When I began my medical practice as a specialist in nutrition, I focused my attention on individuals who were looking for nutritional intervention as a means of reversing their medical conditions to recover their health and avoid taking medication or having invasive surgery. The inevitable outcome was that when my patients were committed to superior health through nutritional excellence, they were able to reduce and eventually stop their dependency on medications for high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol and a host of other conditions. Spectacular disease reversals were the norm, not the exception.
I found that when people ate a diet comprised of the most nutritious and powerful "anti-cancer" plant foods their cholesterol dropped more powerfully than it could from the typical cholesterol-lowering medication. Their diabetes went away. I soon said, "Let's not just treat your diabetes and control it. Let's get rid of it and make you non-diabetic."
The focus was never on caloric restriction; rather, it was on eating more high nutrient food, and as a result, eating less of everything else that was not a high nutrient food.
Besides reversing chronic disease and preventing heart disease and cancer, I found that my patients were able to reach their ideal weight with ease. No calorie counting, no complicated formulas, pills or unfulfilled promises. The basic plan is simple: just take the healthiest foods and make them taste great and eat as much as desired. My patients dropped the weight they could not lose before, and they achieved these results relatively quickly.
The traditional viewpoint is often stated that if you lose your weight too rapidly it won't stick and you will gain it all back. I have never advocated that people be in a race to lose their excess weight. I see no reason, however, to eat unhealthy foods or to eat when you are not hungry under some notion that losing weight slower would be better. The reality is that your body just drops its unhealthy weight relatively quickly and naturally when you eat so well under the Eat to Live program.
The permanence of the results can be attributed to the fact that the program is knowledge-based. Knowledge motivates the change, not willpower. The Eat to Live diet-style supplies spectacular results in the weight loss arena that are permanent because once a person becomes a nutritional expert and experiences the results, they Eat to Live forever. The secret is to gain the education first. You must do the work; read Eat to Live, or gain the knowledge on line from my membership services, but you must study and understand the science. If the preponderance of evidence and logic does not make perfect sense to you, don't do it. The more you learn, the easier it becomes to eat this way for the rest of your life.