Part One: Orientation

1: Why I Can Help You

My name is Marcus Antebi. I was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1969, and I am grateful because I’ve had a rich and full life that I plan to continue for the next 50+ years. 

I survived 13 years of skydiving and retired with over 2,300 jumps. I survived competitive Muay Thai fighting. I started a juice company called Juice Press in 2010, and when I exited we had 85 stores. 

The thing that makes me qualified to write this book is the most noteworthy thing that I’ve done in my life: I’ve been clean and sober since 1985 when I overcame my addiction to marijuana. I tried all kinds of drugs, and by the time I was 15 1/2 years old I was done. I went to an inpatient rehabilitation facility for 90 days.

Some thought that inpatient treatment seemed a little bit dramatic for marijuana addiction, but I found it necessary. I’m glad that I requested that level of treatment, and it served to get me on a path of lifetime recovery.

I also became passionate about recovery in the process of growing up watching my father and sister struggle with their weight and the role of food in their lives. Doing so left a painful impression on me—I felt powerless to ease their suffering. I was very close to my father and I spent years trying to understand his childhood and how his trauma was associated with his diet and lifestyle patterns. I believe I developed a complex from my father’s problems. I wanted to save my family from their addictions and suffering, but I wasn’t able to. So, I am converting all of my pent-up energy, emotions, and knowledge of the subject matter into this project and a number of similar efforts. I find that writing out and organizing information focused on self-help topics is very satisfying and therapeutic to me.

At Juice Press I needed to be a prolific writer of many kinds of self-help and commerce-related documents for customers and team members. Now I’m excited to move on to books.

My mentor is a great man named Fred Bisci. At the time of this writing he is 90 years young and has been 100% raw vegan for approximately 55 years. He had a nutritional practice for many years and has a remarkably deep level of understanding of diet and the human body. I am a devoted vegan myself.

I’ve been practicing yoga since 1997. More than any other type of physical exercise, practicing yoga has been the thing that has helped me learn how to concentrate and focus; that is something that was always very difficult for me. This focus has helped me keep positive and avoid my tendency towards addiction.

That’s essentially my story. I don’t have university degrees or formal education; my college education took place on the streets and in the process of being wholeheartedly devoted to living and instructing others in healthy lifestyle practices over a 35-year period.

Writing about health and wellness is something that I have become very passionate about. I stepped down from Juice Press in order to focus primarily on this book and getting this important plan out to you.

My current health and wellness company, goodsugar™, is a platform for helping us improve and maintain our health. I’m not seeking to just sell products. In my life and in my companies, social and environmental responsibility is still of paramount importance. I want to help people get on the right path to a lifestyle that incorporates good physical and mental health, respect for our planet, and service to others.

I sincerely hope that my writing will be encouraging and beneficial to you as you seek to make yourself a better person and our world a better place.

2: Who This Book Is For and How to Use It

As individuals like you become more aware and positively shift your eating patterns, you are changing the entire world. This is how consciousness works: Your awareness and consciousness become part of a collective consciousness. 

The fundamental components of existence are air, water, FOOD, shelter, warmth, human contact, safety, habits and routines, dignity, love, enjoyment, stillness, and connection with the cosmos and divine consciousness. Today, most people are divorced from the third most fundamental component of their existence, FOOD. 

This book is about food. However, all of our absolute necessities are bound together by the same thread. The thread is mechanically linked to the laws of the Universe. Whether you read this as a spiritual statement or as an intellectual one (as I intended it to be) does not matter as long as you receive the message.

I have learned that the correct path to relearning food and dietary patterns must be a holistic, all-encompassing one that entails surrender. It’s necessary to surrender yourself in order to master yourself. Surrender to your healing. Surrender to pain. Surrender to your amazing power to recover and grow. Surrender to compassionate words. Surrender and lead yourself toward self-realization right now! Surrendering may be a gradual process that takes time, or you may be able to do so in an instant—it could take one second or it could take your entire life.

There’s absolutely nothing better that you could be doing than living your life in the best way possible right now. If you can’t do that, it may be that you're stuck in something that’s difficult to deal with. We all get stuck. Some more so than others. But the ones who are the most stuck then recover to become some of the most amazing healers and creators of all time. 

Let’s not be sad and let’s not feel alone. We are not alone. Plus, it seems that every single human that ever existed struggled. There’s nothing wrong with you and there’s nothing wrong with me. We are just working on things and figuring sh*t out. So take a deep breath and thank someone or something that you love that we are here and that we will be for a long enough time. 

Do you really need anyone's help in dealing with food and dietary issues? The answer is almost certainly yes. Maybe you have 200 pounds to lose, or maybe just three to five pounds of excess weight that keeps you from being totally in love with your body. We’re all on a similar journey to better health in general and weight control in particular, and we can all benefit from the input of others to some degree.

Having spent more than a decade in the health and wellness food industry, I have determined who can benefit most from this particular book. This book is best suited for people whose diets have made them feel like they’ve “hit bottom''—people who are more than ready to make critical lifestyle changes.

I don’t offer cheats, fast tips, or shortcuts. If you’ve been a consumer of diet products, then you realize that eventually all of those things fail us.

At this point, hopefully, you are ready to do the repair work that’s both necessary and effective. You will have to take your own journey to understand your all-encompassing relationship with food and with all of the substances that you put into your body.

There’s quite a bit of content in this book. Each section is numbered, and the various sections can be read in any order over any amount of time. I recommend that you take this book with you everywhere you go and read from it constantly. Even if all you can handle is one minute at a time or half a section at a time, keep the book with you. Keep it by your bedside. Randomly open it to any page at any time and read; it is all useful, helpful and life-affirming.

During the early years of my recovery, I had many books similar to this. I kept them next to my bedside and in my backpack. I’d continually read portions of them at different times, and I gleaned through the various books until their messages sank in.

Generally speaking, it’s very difficult for a person who is confused about their overall life and the circumstances around them to take in new things. If you’re in a similar situation, I find it helpful to surround myself with things that help me learn; this book will help you learn, so keep it close.

3: Purpose and Structure of This Book

The purpose of this book is to help anyone interested in weight loss, weight control and good health make a number of dietary changes for the better. The first such change is to abstain from processed foods. Next, I want to help readers make all of the other tweaks to diet and overall lifestyle that I know will cause them to function and feel better: Functioning and feeling better are critical in sustaining long term weight and health goals. Finally, my goal is to help readers look deeper into their emotions and thought patterns in order to develop a greater sense of peace. I am hoping to help you find your way back to your path of self-realization. The first step is to change the patterns in our lives that lead to suffering and distraction.

I have divided this book into seven parts: (1) Orientation; (2) The Primary Work; (3) The Psychology Work; (4) The Dietary Change Work; (5) Advanced Work Into Action; (6) Essential Mindfulness, Meditation, Prayer, and Service; and (7) Integrating and Maintaining This Program Into Your Life.

Each subpart of the book is numbered as a section (from 1 to 142). The numerical order of these subparts does not necessarily reflect their value in importance from highest to lowest. Each subpart is a critical component of this comprehensive program. 

This book was not created as a highly commercialized diet program with unrealistic or impossible promises of success. It’s not at all along the same lines as the old Thigh Master® TV commercials. Thigh Master® was much easier than anything I know of in the health industry. 

This program is a true self-help guide. The emphasis is on ‘self,’ meaning that you have to do all of the work. This program has no contraptions, no 14-day promises, and no miracle pills. Only your correct decisions and efforts over the long term will deliver lasting results for you.

Having said that, I must be truthful and say that almost any popularized diet that requires that you abstain from processed food, no matter how ineffective the rest of the program may be, will work to help you lose weight and feel better. While that may be enough for some. But many studies and my experience observing others have shown me that if no other steps are taken, the weight comes right back after a short period of time.

Even diets that seem to be sustainable for a few months or years are not worth the superficial benefit of a tight and toned body if those diets are toxic to our chemistry. They can be toxic because they require that we exaggerate the macronutrients to one degree or another. They may also require that we eat far too much animal protein in particular than what the natural parameters of the human body are set to function best at.

Tightness and good tone may be indicators of only one aspect of health; we can have six-pack abs and still be on a collision course with illness and disease.

This program focuses on all-encompassing lifestyle and diet choices. The program in this book is comprehensive and it will require a great deal of attention, focus and concentration on the things we are about to look at. It will also require time on the reader’s part to absorb all of the comprehensive content. It will take longer than “The 7 Minute Abs” program takes, but it will offer a great deal more. 

If any person follows this program step by step, they will get better. I know this to be true from my own life experiences as well as from my interactions with others, including extensive consultations with nutritionists and medical doctors.

The website www.goodsugar.life will complement this book. It will offer many more suggestions relating to dietary choices and lifestyle practices. 

Be patient as you embark on this journey. Make changes at a pace that is suitable to your comfort level. If you’re consistent and focused as you do so, you will experience impressive results. Even if you are drowning in your distractions right now, just holding this book and striving to read each page is going to make you better. Buy The Book 

You will find this book to be quite different from most books that speak of diet and nutrition. This is so because I’ve found it necessary to cover quite a number of things and to focus on three issues in particular.

One issue is the shortcomings of certain popular diet programs. Another is the necessity of incorporating all-encompassing holistic lifestyle practices into weight control and health improvement efforts. The third issue pertains to the use of sound psychological and metaphysical principles when approaching lifestyle changes of any kind.

Psychology is of critical importance in long-term sustainable weight loss, weight control, and healthy living, but some of us are intimidated by books on psychology. This is so for a couple of reasons. At times the material that’s covered in those types of books seems pedantic and dry, and as such not particularly interesting to read. And another issue is that the material is sometimes presented in a way that doesn’t give readers sufficient guidance on how to apply the valuable insights and principles to their daily lives.

Spiritual books often bring us comfort—they can be inspiring and encouraging. But the subject matter is often not contextual enough for those who wish to apply spiritual principles to their specific dietary needs and struggles. Although spirituality looms large in dietary change efforts, the current pantheon of books about diet and lifestyle do not address such changes to a sufficient enough degree in a spiritual context.

I’ve needed a book such as this my entire life. I needed it 35 years ago when I was a very uneducated eater intoxicating myself daily with food. Even with the changes I have made, I still need this book today. I wrote this book to give back what I learned in the hope that others will find it useful. I practice all of these principles in my daily life, and I have been sober regarding my eating behaviors for 25 years, and 35 years with regard to drugs and alcohol.

To elaborate a bit on diet plans that sound absurdly simple, they almost never work past the short term. This is the case because they don’t specify all of the work that the dieter needs to do. They usually focus almost entirely on food. They almost never address behavior and don’t provide steps to deal with deeply-rooted emotions that trigger bad dietary habits. It’s unpopular to tell dieters that difficult psychological work on their part is a necessary component of permanent weight loss. For that reason, diet programs that emphasize hard work and sometimes painful introspection don’t sell well.

Many, perhaps most people aren’t interested in diving deep and getting their weight control problems fixed once and for all, or they are unable to see the connection between psychology and weight loss. Popular diet programs don’t often get to the heart of our issues with food. One has to overcome a lifetime of bad habits, developed to anesthetize their pain, in order to create healthy habits around food. We have anxiety, lack of focus, lack of discipline, and lack of knowledge, all of which work against us in weight control and healthy living.

Throughout this book, sometimes I’ll speak to you with a lot of compassion. Other times I’ll present you with disturbing information about you and the things you eat that will probably make you upset. Everybody, including myself, needs a wake-up call when they’re doing something that puts them at risk.

I will repeat this over and over again: Many weight loss programs seem simple on the surface. But, again, much more often than not, they don’t work. You’re usually trained like a circus animal to perform tricks on your body. The methodologies that fad diets employ consist of what are popularly termed “biohacks.” These diets work to a degree, but they are not the winning solution to the good health, long-term weight loss, and weight control that you desperately need.

The winning solution consists of the steps outlined in this book. I know this from personal experience. I am asking you to make the program described in this book your top priority for several months. After reading this book in its entirety and making an honest, concerted effort to put its information into practice, keep going back to it. You will find things that you may have missed in earlier readings, and you will find things that are particularly applicable to things going in your life at that point in time as you progress on your journey.

As you do so, not only will you lose weight and keep it off, but your attention span will improve, you will become more focused, and your overall physical and mental health will improve tremendously. The more you hear the invaluable messages presented in this book, the more they will stick.

This book details a comprehensive weight loss and lifestyle improvement program that can be implemented by anyone. This first edition covers quite a bit of ground, addressing a wide variety of interrelated topics. I will make every effort to make whatever stylistic corrections are warranted in future editions. But I am asking you to seriously consider the book’s content and make the commitment to do the work. 

4. The Secret To Self-Help

There are two epic secrets to improving one’s life. One of them is to train yourself to take baby steps in everything that you do in connection with self-help. For example, if a book is really thick and it’s promising to teach you how to liberate yourself from pain and suffering, you might keep that book on your shelf for 10 years because its size intimidates you. Think about the irony in that. 

A book that promises to relieve us from our suffering sits untouched for years—we would rather suffer than make small efforts towards improvement. Why is that? It’s because we are afraid of a shift in reality, or because we don’t know how to take the first step and so we become paralyzed, or it may simply be that we never grew out of being lazy. It makes no difference what the causes of inaction are: We need to solve the problem, and the way to solve this problem is to take steps—really, really small steps—and take them every day.

Every time something becomes too big of a step, break it down into smaller steps. Read one page in this book every day. Just one page is all you need, and you’ll be drifting into the path of wellness. Not because I am a guru, or that my words are great, but because you are taking action.

The next secret to learning great lessons is to teach them. That is the essence of 12-step recovery, which we can borrow from. The 12th step in recovery is about being of service and helping others. The reason why this is put into action in a self-help program is because if a person is busy trying to show others how to help themselves, they’re teaching themself that same lesson. Therefore, anything that you are struggling with, find someone struggling with the same thing to a greater degree, and help them. There is always someone out there who can benefit from your kindness and compassion. (More about this later.) 

Back to taking baby steps. If we’re having trouble starting an activity that seems too difficult, we’re likely not aware of how to break it down into smaller tasks that are easier to accomplish. Maybe we have to break that task down into five or ten smaller steps.

I will use my early experience with meditation as an example. I first thought that meditation was a waste of time because I could not connect with the universe and creation and become fully enlightened the first time I tried it. I could not approach meditation because I could not imagine myself sitting and wrestling with boredom for an hour. The idea of meditation seemed pointless because I did not feel any benefits right from the start. Instead of relaxing me, it made me more stressed out than before.

But then I realized that if I approached meditation the way I approached building a retail store—incrementally, step-by-step—I could accomplish something. In building, I was patient with the process. Each day we would finish a little bit more and then move on to the next thing. We couldn’t start electrical work until we framed the walls. We couldn’t build a cabinet until the floor was complete.

I can approach meditation in the same manner. I can sit for 2 minutes and say, “I am meditating,” over and over again. I can declare to myself right now, while I am writing this, “I am in a single-minded focus and I am meditating. Instead of thinking about joining the cosmic conversation, which I think is a complex accomplishment, I just need to practice a still mind, with one thought, not ten, and this is my foundation.” 

When we approach a difficult task with patience, visualizing the smaller tasks first, putting the big picture aside for a moment, the task becomes more approachable. How did I write a book this dense? I started with the title. I opened the document and started writing page one. I made a commitment to write only one page per day. If I missed a few days, I made up for it when I resumed writing. I maintained the simple task of writing one page per day. Then one day I looked at my book draft and I had written hundreds of pages. The momentum was there.

At that point I was inspired to organize all the topics, and I did so. The next task was to find an editor. The task after that was to find a person who could lay out the book for submission to the printer. I worked on the book by taking on these and other small steps and putting aside any anxiety regarding completion of the finished product. 

I made the small steps important. I trusted in this process. Absorb and understand this, and work at improving your life in the same way. Avoid the painful attachment of not being at the “finish line.” Be at the starting gate. Then be in your next step. Be content to be working on something. Be in the process. This may take some time to absorb and incorporate. The first step was to read this. The next step may be to think about it. The step after that will be reading it again. Little by little, complete your steps and don’t worry if you don’t get as far along as you’d like as fast as you like. You’re going to accomplish your goal, and don’t worry if it takes a good while to do so.

5: Maintaining Healthy Dietary Patterns is a Big Step Towards Self-Mastery

There are a number of concepts that anyone wanting to achieve long-term weight loss and a healthy lifestyle must understand. Some of those concepts may seem esoteric or metaphysical in nature, but understanding them is crucial. A number of positive behavioral changes will be crucial as well. These changes include meditation, writing assignments, dietary improvements, exercise, and prayer, to name a few. 

The first concept to consider is that we actually have a relationship with food and that that relationship is likely dysfunctional. We need to mend and improve our relationship with this activity that provides us with energy and ultimately with life. In the process of doing so, we need to understand what we are doing that is out of alignment with our nature. We also need to understand what things have gone wrong with respect to what humans now consider food, how we treat animals for our food, and how food is manufactured, marketed, and distributed throughout the world. This awareness is crucial to being able to complete and sustain a comprehensive recovery.

This understanding is essential because humanity’s overall concepts around food are absolute madness. Fixing the world is not your problem. However, escaping the proverbial asylum is. It’s a problem easy to solve by simply becoming aware of the suffering humanity causes itself and other creatures. Then, stop participating in it. Easier said than done! Humanity’s deeply ingrained false assumptions about diet have made us sick as a species and have adversely impacted our world drastically in many, many ways. A couple of examples are outrageous amounts of single-use plastics used to wrap low-nutrient, toxic foods that are adrift in our once pristine oceans and a tremendous number of swollen landfills spanning the globe.

You are now on a journey to break free from the system that we all were indoctrinated into and to develop new ways of thinking. These new ways tie into your overall success with your desire to change your diet and lifestyle patterns. Following is a brief summary of some of the false notions about food that currently prevail on our planet: 

1. Food should come from a factory.
2. Animal protein is a solution to the world’s hunger problem.
3. Animals were placed here to be enslaved by us and their bodies can be used for whatever purpose we see fit, and no amount of cruelty to them is too great.
4. Protein is a solution for every physical problem we encounter.
5. Fruit is bad for us and not an essential part of our daily food intake.
6. Vegetables are a side dish.
7. Processed food is so convenient that even though it’s a scourge on mankind and on the planet, its manufacture and use is acceptable. 
8. Drugs and surgery are there for us to continue unhealthy lifestyle patterns because they can fix us right up.
9. Food is a device we can use to repress feelings such as anxiety.

So much has gone wrong that it’s hard to decide where to begin in describing the problems. These problems are interconnected. Governmental regulating bodies allow food corporations to package and label toxic food. Supermarkets and other stores sell such food without consciousness of the damage their industry causes. People, even those who are well-meaning, raise their children by feeding them things that produce lifelong cravings for addictive and destructive foods. Other problems include issues pertaining to the human psyche, the relationship that we in the modern world have with our planet, and the unique obstacles that each individual encounters while on a path towards self-improvement.

You have to ask yourself: What is the level of my individual desire for self-mastery? It should go beyond just the desire for weight loss. We all should want to reach our higher power. We all should want to be the best that we can be.

To succeed in doing so, we must learn more about true human nature—that which goes beyond ourselves. Exploring our own human nature enables us to better understand our deficiencies as individuals and as a species. One such deficiency—perhaps the foremost one—is that of our child-rearing practices. If other species reared their offspring in ways similar to the ways that we do, they would become extinct.

It is my strong opinion that everything that becomes broken in the human mind happens during the formative years of our life. I link the damage done to our children to everything terrible that happens to humanity, to its creatures, and to the world. 

If we were focused on rearing our children and teaching our peers ways of living that were applicable to our potential for higher consciousness, things in the world would be quite different. We would teach self-worth, self-love, self-esteem, the need for a harmonious relationship with the planet, proper relationships with food, the need for exercise, and the necessity of frequent meditation. These things would be revered as the tools that would enable us to survive and flourish. 

We human beings need continuous step-by-step training—from the day we are born until the day we die. We should never stop learning. We should never stop practicing at life.

The most critical time of training is that which takes place during the first 20 years of our lives. This foundational training is crucial—it’s the Boot Camp of Life. This training doesn’t guarantee that we won’t have a variety of struggles, but it should prepare us to deal with those struggles as they arise. I repeat what myriads of others have said: Our training has gotten far away from what is right.

The possibilities of what we could create are limitless, but many things that we create do not serve our best interests. One example: We don’t need fast food restaurants that serve nothing but incredibly unhealthy, toxic garbage. Such places are a blight on humanity.

The goodsugar Diet™  Lose Weight Burn Fat Boost Immunity and Expand Your Mind by Marcus Antebi (Excerpt fromt the first 5 sections.)