Michael Kuech - Your Super Life

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Contents

Anyone who is health conscious is by now aware of the benefits of eating plant-based foods. Mother Nature has imbued plants with natural chemicals called bioactives that interact with the cells in our body. The results of these interactions are powerful, sometimes more powerful than pharmaceuticals, that they are able to deliver their benefits to us three times a day. The power of health therefore lies in the decisions we make each time we sit down for a meal or reach for a snack. Your Super Life is a guide to help you make those decisions.

I first met Kristel de Groot and Michael Kuech and after they contacted me to share Michaels story as a cancer survivor. He conquered his cancer with medical treatment, but he restored his health using food as medicine. Kristel and Michael know that good health is not simply the absence of diseaseits something much more than that. When Michael was deemed cancer-free by his doctors, he still felt unwell inside. With Kristel at his side, he embarked on a journey back to true health for them both deep into the Amazon rainforest, into wheatgrass fields in Germany, and into the aisles at organic markets where they discovered the power of food as medicine.

In Your Super Life , Michael and Kristel share the fruits of their journey by showing you how to eat in a new way. They describe easy steps for changing daily habits that will help your sense of wellbeing. Just as I believe, the path towards better health should focus on what to add to your diet, and not just elimination. Combining all their knowledge of powerful ingredients that they have collected over the years, Kristel and Michael make it easy for you to cook recipes that not only taste good but are easy to make and are packed with foods with bioactives that activate your bodys health defenses.

The title of this book Your Super Life says it all. There are many remarkable foods with healthful properties, but at the end of the day, theres only one thing that is truly super: your own body. Feed it, nurture it, empower itand your body will pay you back in spades with years of vibrant health. Its time to start eating the Your Super way.

William W. Li, MD

New York Times bestselling author of Eat to Beat Disease and Eat to Beat Your Diet

Michael remembers that day like it was yesterday. January 5, 2014. He was twenty-four years old and a former pro tennis player who appeared to be at the pinnacle of good health. It was cold and rainy in Aachen, Germany, and Michael sat on a sterile exam table while the doctor, who was busy scanning him with an ultrasound machine, told him hed found something suspicious. A few moments later, as Michael sat in his office, the doctor confirmed: Its testicular cancer. Surgery was scheduled for the very next day. Thankfully, surgery and two rounds of chemotherapy removed the cancer from Michaels body. But Michael felt like a shell of himself. Youre cancer-free, the doctor said. Look at me, Michael responded. Hed lost all his hair. He was the weakest hed ever felt. But that was it. His doctor had done what he could do. He was fixed.

Michael was relieved that the chemo was effective, but he was also scared. He kept wondering, Why me?, especially late at night when he was unable to sleep, which was most nights. He became obsessed by this existential question; he was so young and had felt invincible before. He thought hed been healthy. Why did he get sick? And, even more so, he wondered: Why does anyone get cancer in the first place?

The only thing Michael knew definitively was that he never wanted to get sick like this again. So he started to do some research on cancer prevention. What he found shocked him. Did you know that in 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that between 30 percent and 50 percent of cancers can be prevented by avoiding risk factors like smoking, consuming alcohol, and exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollution, and by implementing prevention strategies such as regular physical activity and eating a healthy diet full of fruits and vegetables? In other words, the food we eat can be a powerful tool to help prevent cancer.

But its not just cancer. The WHO also found that a diet low in saturated fats, limited in salt and sugar, and high in fruit and vegetables (at least five portions a day!), lentils and beans, nuts, and whole grains like oats, millet, and brown rice can also help prevent other chronic diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Michael thought: This is it. I might not be able to control all my risk factors related to cancer and other chronic diseases, but I can control what I eat. I can absolutely make sure I fuel my body with the best possible nutrition in order to minimize the risk of going through this again. In that moment, Michael stopped feeling scared and started feeling empowered. He could do this.

The Seeds of Change

Michael didnt yet know how he was going to do it, but he knew he was ready to make a major change in the way he ate. Luckily, he had Kristel, his college sweetheart, to guide him. Ever since theyd met five years earlier, Kristel had been the resident health nut in his life. He was pretty sure she could help.

While its true that Kristel was the only person Michael knew whod bring thick, bright green smoothies to her morning classes during grad school in London, her relationship with food, health, and her body had its own complicated history. Kristel first made the connection between food and wellness years earlier, when she was ten or eleven years old. From infancy, shed suffered from very bad, painful eczema. For years her mom tried to figure it out, carting her from doctor to doctor and hospital to hospital and trying holistic solutions as well. Nothing seemed to work. But Kristel noticed that after eating certain foods, like sugar or dairy products, shed have a bad flare-up. That taught her that there was a relationship between what she put in her body and her skin health.

But this awareness was far from a solution. Kristel came to the United States for college in the early 2000s and, like most first-year college students, gained a lot of weight. She bought into the idea that she had to be skinny. Food was her enemy. She did all the popular diets, everything from low-carb to that lemonade-with-cayenne thing. She read her first plant-based-diet book during this time: Kris Carrs Crazy Sexy Diet . Kristel was intrigued by the purported health benefits of plant-based foods and the way they supported detoxing your body, but still found herself in an endless cycle of trying the next new thing that promised to help her lose weight and always stressing about and monitoring her food. Meanwhile, despite all the health crazes she was attempting, her eczema continued to cause her pain. During good times, she could keep it managed with a steady stream of antihistamines and steroid creams. During bad times, shed have painful, itchy rashes all over her face, chin, neck, arms, wrists, and even behind her knees, despite the medicine and creams.

She hit rock bottom at age twenty-two as she was finishing her masters degree. After years of extreme cycles of not eating, feeling depressed, and then overeating until feeling sick, she decided enough was enough. And then, Michael was diagnosed with cancer. For Kristel, Michaels diagnosis was a wake-up call. Her mom had had cancer when Kristel was twelve years old and now Michaelshe wanted to do anything she could to reduce her own chance of getting cancer and to help Michael stay in remission. Kristel also realized that Michael wasnt healthy , he was cancer-free and there was a difference.