Kathie Madonna Swift - The Swift Diet: 4 Weeks to Mend the Belly, Lose the Weight, and Get Rid of the Bloat

T en years ago, Kathie Swift, our nurse partner Nina Silver and I holed up in my red-shingled house in western Massachusetts and together became the UltraWellness Center. For those first few months, I was working in my office upstairs, Nina was in the living room and Kathie, as befitting my head of nutrition, was in the dining room, just off the kitchen. Today, the functional medicine center that Kathie, Nina and I built employs a staff of thirty working out of a well-equipped building set against the Berkshires woods. Kathie, of course, played an important role in that growth and success. In fact it was she who first pointed me toward what we now call functional medicine, an approach that seeks to uncover the root causes of disease, always with the emphasis on healthy diet and lifestyle.

When we were both working at the Canyon Ranch spa in the Berkshires in the nineties, Kathie introduced cutting-edge nutritional medicine concepts to the doctors and nutritionists there. And she introduced me to Dr. Jeffrey Bland, the father of functional medicine, who became a mentor to so many of us. At Canyon Ranch, where I was comedical director and Kathie the nutrition director, we were able develop and apply these functional medicine ideas in a clinical setting. Although I was that rare doctor who had actually studied nutrition in a serious way, it was Kathie who really taught me to think rigorously about the role of nutrition in health. In contrast to the pill for every ill mentality that almost every doctor absorbs in medical training, with Kathies help I came to see how food itself could be powerful medicine with which to treat and actually reverse disease. She was so open and enthusiastic about partnering with me at the Ranch, and together we refined an approach that was effective for thousands of clients there. When I left Canyon Ranch, to build the UltraWellness Center, she was the first person I called to join me. Since then, shes helped me with several of my books, including UltraMetabolism , to which she contributed the recipes. (As youll see in The Swift Diet , Kathie is an accomplished and creative home cook.)

Its no accident that Kathie and I share this quest to push beyond conventional medical wisdom. We both had to figure out how to heal ourselves before we could fully help our patients. Ive written about my struggle with chronic fatigue and mercury poisoning in a number of my books. Here in The Swift Diet , Kathie opens up for the first time about her battle with chronic fatigue syndrome brought on by an undiagnosed sensitivity to gluten. Her success in healing herself with a high-fiber, mostly plant-based diet fuels her passion to find the right answers for clients and readers with gut and weight issues. And she never stops. She has the ability to synthesize enormous amounts of data in order to connect the dots, to create meaning where there was none. In The Swift Diet she draws on the latest research on the role of gut bacteria to distill a practical step-by-step guide to health and healthy weight loss.

I think the microbiome is an enormously important emerging story. Were seeing that the bacteria that live in the gut help regulate the interlocking systems in the body, including the immune system and insulin metabolism. Ive seen it in the research literature and Ive seen it in clinical practice: different diets can have different effects on weight, even though they may contain the same number of calories, because of how they affect the gut bacteria. Kathie has been at the forefront of this field, giving talks around the country to general audiences and to her professional peers. Shes been the driving force behind the Dietitians in Integrative and Functional Medicine within the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, shes a founding member of the Institute for Functional Medicines nutrition advisory board and, for the past decade, shes organized an influential annual conference on health and nutrition, Food As Medicine, sponsored by the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, DC, where Ive been honored to serve on the faculty and board of directors. Kathie has become something close to a one-woman bridge between the worlds of functional medicine and mainstream nutrition.

Shes also adept at making the connection between body and spirit. Over the past seven years, as shes developed and led workshops on weight loss, digestion and detox at the Kripalu Center in the Berkshires, shes integrated mind-body techniques into her nutrition work, addressing the stress piece of the health and weight-loss puzzle. Just as I started out my career as a yoga instructor, Kathie is now a certified qigong teacher!

My friend and colleague Kathie Swift is one of the leading innovators in nutrition in this country. She has devoted her life to discovering how we can heal ourselves through food, and shes inspired a host of others to do the same. If youve bought The Swift Diet , youre about to join that select but growing group.

Mark Hyman, MD