Robb Wolf - Wired to Eat: Turn Off Cravings, Rewire Your Appetite for Weight Loss, and Determine the Foods That Work for You

Im a forty-four-year-old father of two and husband to one (she is Italian and kind of territorial). Im in pretty good shape and fiddle with Brazilian jujitsu and old guy gymnastics. Twenty years ago, I was a biochemist working in the areas of cancer and autoimmunity research. And I was sick. So sick, due to ulcerative colitis and a number of other niggling problems, that I was facing a bowel resection, statins, blood pressure medications, and antidepressants. That was the good part. The darker portion of the story went like this: I thought I was going to die, and the idea was pretty appealing, considering how much my life and health sucked.

I was a mess.

Through an interesting set of circumstances, which youll hear about later in the book, the idea of a Paleo or ancestral diet made its way onto my radar, and out of abject desperation, I tried this seemingly wacky way of eating. This decision saved my life. All my health problems resolved in a matter of months. I shared this transformation with my doctors, including my gastroenterologist, rheumatologist, general practitioner, and therapist, all of whom said, Its great that youre doing better, but it has nothing to do with your dietary changes.

Some people in the medical and academic world play an interesting gameif you say to them, I hit my hand with a hammer and it hurt, their response is Well, naturally! But if you tell these same people that changing your nutrition had a profound impact on your health, their response is, Well, thats nice, but its just anecdotal. There is a common saying in Scienceland: A million anecdotes do not one shred of evidence make. This is true, but if you see a million of the same anecdotes, perhaps its time to apply some scientific rigor to the question, yes?

Whether my experience of profound health improvement by modifying what I ate was scientific or quasimystical, it convinced me that working through the mainstream outlets was not where I wanted to spend my time. Id been on a path to attend medical school but the prospect of becoming like my medical providers and professors effectively euthanized my desire to be a doctor. I wondered how I could best help people with their health and fitness, and spending eight years learning about disease and disease management seemed like a circuitous route at best. So I made a serious career shift and opened a gym. Well, actually, two gyms. And they happened to be the first and fourth CrossFit affiliate gyms in the world. I incorporated the Paleo diet philosophy and tenets into my business, which included education about sleep, nutrition, and smart movement. I combined these elements to create a supportive, challenging group health and exercise model that folks loved. Our clients achieved remarkable success, ranging from profound weight loss to dramatically improved health. Our results were so impressive that my little 4,000-square-foot gym in Chico, California, was picked as one of Mens Health magazines Top 30 Gyms in America.

Word got out that what we were doing was different than the standard approach to health and fitness, and people wanted to know how to do this for themselves, their patients, and clients. I started blogging so I could reach an audience outside our local community and spent a lot of time traveling, not just in the US but also internationally, to speak in front of tens of thousands of people on this topic. The more people who tried something like a Paleo diet, the more remarkable stories I heard. The concept seemed to be spreading faster than a venereal disease on a college campus. I started a podcast that climbed to the top of the iTunes charts and wrote my first book, The Paleo Solution, which became a New York Times bestseller. I was as surprised as anyone by this success. Soon enough, the just anecdotal reports on how this way of eating was changing lives (now in the millions) shifted to some interesting scientific studies. There might be something to this fad diet after all.

Still, there were some problems brewing. Both academics and the media loved to portray the Paleo diet as some kind of historical reenactment, poking fun at the caveman motif, which became inseparable from the Paleo diet idea. For many people, the whole caveman schtick was a nonstarter. So although many millions were benefiting from the information people like myself were sharing with the world, far more people would not give Paleo eating more than a glance due to an emotional response to the idea. My goal has always been to help as many people as possible, so this marketing and image problem was a significant hurdle.

Perhaps even more frustrating, however, was the tendency for folks who actually followed the Paleo diet to turn the general concepts into quasi-religious doctrine. Folks newly converted to Paleo tended to be quite dogmatic in the insistence that this was the one true way to eat. Often, these devotees had reversed serious health problems with this way of eating, so their enthusiasm was understandable, but not many people enjoy the company of or the message from someone who comes across as a holier-than-thou diet zealot.

The reality is, some of these folks might have had success on a low-carb version of Paleo and never considered that other people, and even they themselves, might benefit from a higher-carb version. A remarkable number of people are insulin resistant for reasons I will detail later. If these people restore their blood sugar levels through a low-carb diet, better sleep, and exercise (thereby reversing that insulin resistance), they often find they can tolerate eating more carbs and still lose weight. In