A PERSONAL NOTE ON MY
EXPERIENCES WITH FOOD

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.
—HIPPOCRATES

Sitting at my friend's home in the Umbrian countryside, looking out over the olive orchard and fields of sunflowers, having just had a home-cooked meal prepared by Simonetta, it was clear to me why so many Italians are thin and happy. Family, friends, and fresh, whole foods are all interwoven into the pleasure of being alive.

The meal was served on a long wooden table, set with beautiful ceramic plates painted with sunflowers. Simonetta made light chicken meatballs with a fresh tomato sauce, accompanied by an arugula and radicchio salad and a side salad of vine-ripened, freshly picked garden tomatoes, fresh basil, roasted peppers, and grilled eggplant, drizzled with fresh extra-virgin olive oil made from the olive trees surrounding the old stone farmhouse in which we dined.

The food in this ancient countryside is grown and prepared locally. A meal from a box or can is a strange notion in these hills; food made with labels a hard thing to find. No one here is on a diet. Food is a source of pleasure, not anxiety. How far so many of us have come from this simple way of preparing, eating, and enjoying real, whole, fresh foods!

Looking back on my life, I realize how important whole foods have been to me since a very early age. I was born in Barcelona and spent my first four years there, discovering the smells of the marketplace and freshly prepared Catalan dishes. My mother always had a small garden and since the age of eighteen, I've grown my own vegetables. I inherited the love of fresh food and cooking from my mother, and the joy of eating from my father. Bringing together family and friends and preparing nourishing, delicious meals from whole, fresh ingredients is one of my life's greatest pleasures.

Now, as a doctor specializing in nutritional medicine, I realize how fundamentally important this simple pleasure is. Our bodies and souls thrive on fresh, whole real food. To eat well is to be healthy. Food is medicine. It cures us.

Despite how simple this seems, it is the cure for most of our chronic diseases and the obesity epidemic. It is one of the keys to living a fulfilling and vitally healthy life in this modern age, just as it was millennia ago in the Mediterranean countryside.

What I am asking you to do is eat foods that come from the earth, not from a box or can or prepared by food scientists in a factory. These factory-processed foods are unrecognizable by our genes and our cells, which respond the best they can. They accommodate to these foods by making us sick.

You can make a different choice. This book will help you take advantage of ancient cultural wisdom about food and modern nutritional science. Your cells, your genes, and your soul will thank you.

Food is our source of nourishment. It is also a source of pleasure, and eating is a way of celebrating with family and friends. Yet for many of us, food has become an enemy—a source of confusion, bewilderment, frustration, and even anger.

Most of us know that the way we eat does not help us thrive. In fact, over two-thirds of Americans struggle with their weight. In addition, many of us worry that what we eat will increase our risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia. We battle cravings and desires that no longer match our body's true needs…and we know it. Yet we are stuck in an awful cycle, trapped by patterns of eating we don't know how to escape.

UltraMetabolism and this cookbook are based on principles that will help you reverse that downward spiral and become friends with food once again, so it can become a source of nourishment and healing and the key to achieving UltraWellness—lifelong health and vitality.

I decided to create this cookbook because of the many requests I received for more delicious recipes like the ones originally included in UltraMetabolism: The Simple Plan for Automatic Weight Loss. We worked diligently to put together a remarkable set of recipes that have been tested relentlessly by both professional chefs and everyday folks to ensure they are easy to make, delicious, and, most important, follow the exact nutritional guidelines I described in UltraMetabolism, which I will review for you a bit later.

I've designed this cookbook to be as user-friendly as possible—all of the recipes are organized so you know specifically in which phase of the UltraMetabolism program you can use them, and they are all tagged so you can quickly determine whether a particular recipe contains something you might be allergic to, whether that's wheat, dairy, eggs, or any other common allergen.

IMPORTANT: Before reading further, please go to http://www.ultrametabolismcookbook.com/guide and download The UltraMetabolism Cookbook Companion Guide, which contains dozens of helpful tips and resources to make cooking easier, quicker, and more delicious.

UltraMetabolism: The Simple Plan for Automatic Weight Loss gave many the chance to know what it's like to feel good again—to have more energy, to be free from many chronic symptoms, and to lose weight automatically without suffering. UltraMetabolism is a program based on eating in harmony with our genes, eating the real, whole foods on which our bodies were designed to function—not the processed, altered, alien food devoid of nutrients and nourishment that, unfortunately, most of us eat today.

One of the things that twenty years of practicing medicine has taught me is this: The same things that make us sick also make us fat. By dealing with the underlying causes of disease—what we eat, how we move our bodies (or don't), and how we deal with stress—we can effectively address at least 80 to 90 percent of all illness, as well as the current obesity epidemic.

However, nutrition is not traditionally considered a part of medicine (except that it provides the energy needs of the body). Through no fault of their own, most physicians are nutritionally illiterate, because they received little or no nutrition education in their medical training.

Yet food is the most powerful tool we have to promote good health and treat disease. It is the single best medicine in my medical tool kit. Conversely, food can also cause disease and suffering. Food is both healer and slayer.

Copyright © 2007 by Hyman Enterprises, LLC.