Carr - Crazy sexy diet: eat your veggies, ignite your spark, and live like you mean it

Dr. Dean Ornish

Its not just because of what shes done, which is extraordinary. Its who she is.

Faced with an overwhelming cancer diagnosis, Kris grabbed the reins and became a voracious student of all things health and wellness. She transformed her life and became a shining example of an empowered participant in her body, mind, and spiritual health. She was able to integrate the best of modern medicine and ancient healing traditions to transform a diagnosis of death into vibrant living.

Many patients have told me, Being diagnosed with cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me. A skeptic might reply, What are you, crazy? To which they might hear, Thats what it took to get my attention to begin changing my life in ways that have made it so much more joyful and meaningful.

Not that we look for illness or suffering, but sometimes, for reasons that may be a mystery, there it is. What we do with it makes all the difference in the world. Even when we cant be cured, we can be healed, becoming more whole. When we become active participants in our healing, it may bring meaning to our suffering, which makes it more bearable. Often, our physical illnesses improve as well.

Change is hard. But if were in enough pain, the idea of change becomes more appealingWell, it may be hard to change my diet and lifestyle, but Im in so much pain Im willing to try something different.

In 2009, the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn for discovering telomerase, an enzyme that repairs and lengthens damaged telomeres, which are the ends of our chromosomes that control aging. Dr. Blackburn and her colleague, Dr. Elissa Epel, studied women who were under chronic emotional stress because they were taking care of children with autism or chronic diseases.

They found that the more stressed the women felt, and the longer they felt stressed, the lower was their telomerase and the shorter their telomeres. This was the first study providing genetic evidence indicating that chronic emotional stress might shorten a womans lifespan.

What was particularly interesting to me was that it wasnt an objective measure of stress that determined the effects on their telomeres; it was the womens perception of stress that mattered. In other words, two women might be in comparable situations, but one had learned to manage her stress better by empowering herself and taking charge of her life. As a result, her telomeres were longer.

We tend to think of advances in medicine as a new drug, laser, surgical proceduresomething high-tech and expensive. We often have a hard time believing that the simple choices that we make in our lives each daywhat we eat, how we respond to stress, how much exercise we get, and (perhaps most important), how much love and intimacy we havecan make such a powerful difference in our health and well-being, but they do.

For more than thirty-three years, my colleagues and I at the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and the School of Medicine, University of CaliforniaSan Francisco have conducted a series of studies showing that what was once thought impossible was often achievable.

We found that a whole foods, plant-based diet (such as the one described in this book), moderate exercise, stress management techniques such as yoga and meditation, and learning to give and receive love more fully (what we euphemistically call social support) could often reverse the progression of coronary heart disease, early-stage prostate cancer, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, hypercholesterolemia, obesity, depression, and other chronic diseases.

We found that changing your lifestyle changes your genes. So often, I hear people say, Oh, its all in my genes, theres not much I can do about it, what I call genetic nihilism. In men with prostate cancer, we found that making these comprehensive lifestyle changes for only three months caused changes in over five hundred genesturning on diseasepreventing genes and turning off genes that promote many chronic diseases, including a series of oncogenes that promote breast cancer, colon cancer, and prostate cancer.

Your genes are a predisposition, but your genes are not your fate.

Along with Dr. Blackburn, we also measured telomerase levels in these patients. We found that telomerase increased by almost 30 percent in only three months. And while comprehensive lifestyle changes may increase telomerase, even drugs have not yet been shown to do this.

These studies are empowering many people with new hope and new choices.

So is Kris Carr.

Joy, pleasure, and freedom are sustainable. Because the mechanisms that affect our health are so much more dynamic than had once been realized, most people find that when they make the lifestyle changes described in this book, they feel so much better, so quickly, it reframes the reason for change from fear of dying (which is not sustainable) to joy of living (which is).