Neal D Barnard - The Cheese Trap: How Breaking a Surprising Addiction Will Help You Lose Weight, Gain Energy, and Get Healthy

I was caught in the Cheese Trap.

For years, I was the girl whose idea of a gourmet meal was a pot of cheese fondue followed by cheesecake. I would think nothing of spending three days chipping away at a pound of Jarlsberg, eating no other food, and proudly calling it my 1,700-Calories-a-Day Diet! Every two weeks for several months at a time, I would stop at Zabars on my way to unemployment to buy what they called Cheese Ends, which was nothing more than what was left over after they cut up blocks of cheese. Five different little chunks in every bag, and Id buy at least five bags with my hard-earned unemployment dollars. I was not only unemployed; I was also fat, constipated, and had pimples. My skin was puffy and toxic looking. I weighed 54 pounds more than I do today. And I was so intestinally clogged that I had to spend time in a clinic because I hadnt been able to take out the trash for seventeen days. Seventeen days of constipation.

All because of cheese.

Not milk. (I never had a full glass.)

Not yogurt. (Not my thing.)

Not cottage cheese. (Yuck.)

It was the cheese. And I craved it every day.

I can honestly say that the single most important step I took in my health journey was giving up dairy productscheese, in particular. I had been voraciously reading about the effects of different foods on your body because I had lost my parents at an early age and needed a way to make sense of their deaths. I was seventeen when my father died of a heart attack at fifty-two, and I was barely twenty-six when my mother succumbed to the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis. She was fifty-eight. I knew my health needed improving, so I started making changes. But nothing had quite the impact on my health like giving up cheese. In fact, I consider the day I gave up cheese foreverWednesday, August 15, 1979my true health birthday. This was the day when everything I had been reading about dairy products came together, and it finally hit me: The only thing dairy is supposed to do is turn a 50-pound calf into a 300-pound cow in six months. (If those are your aspirations, knock yourself out!) A human being has twenty-seven feet of intestines and one stomach, while a baby calf has nine feet of intestines and four stomachs! Why are we drinking cows or goats milk and not orangutan milk our closest mammal relative? And you would never make cheese from the breast milk of your next-door neighbor, but you are sucking from the udder of a cow you dont even know! And cheese is even worse! More concentrated and full of salt and bacteria. What was I thinking?

When I gave up dairy, everything about me changed.

My skin cleared, my cheeks de-puffed, my nose narrowed, my eyes brightened, my body streamlined.

Gone was the bloated feeling after eating. And the sore throats and colds Id gotten four times a year since I was a kid. Mucus was no longer coursing through my body, clogging my sinuses, pores, and digestive tract. The spare tire I thought was going to be there forever disappeared, because I was finally able to take out the trash. Every. Single. Day. (And then some!) I stopped yo-yo dieting because I was no longer taxing my body by ingesting a food it wasnt designed to break down. I dropped the extra weight in a healthy way, and Ive kept it off since that fateful day in 1979. Everything else improved, too, including my attitude, sleeping habits, speaking, singing, breathing, and breath. I no longer felt a general malaise. It was as if a fog lifted and I could think more clearly, all because I was no longer held prisoner by my cheese addiction. I was no longer an unsuspecting mouse caught in the Cheese Trap!

Ive known Dr. Neal Barnard for over fifteen years as the best resource for great cutting-edge health and medical information. There is no one better at taking dry, esoteric scientific data and making it not only understandable, but also entertaining! Time and again Ive seen him captivate an audience by walking them through a process from what they think they know about a subject to a greater understanding that stays with them years later. His images and explanations are so simple, yet so profound, you know you will be using them to explain to other people why you might have made a certain health choice.

In this remarkable book, you will learn everything youve ever wanted to know about cheese and why its got such a stranglehold on most of us. Dr. Barnard has broken down all of the research and food science in such a way that you will never look at another piece of Cheddar, Swiss, or mozzarella in the same way again. All cheeses will be gone for Gouda! (Sorry, I couldnt resist!)