If you are looking for a faster way out of the Pleasure Trap, you will learn a great deal more about
eating and fasting in Step 4: How to Lose Weight the Nutrient Rich® Way. But even if you take the
typical 30 to 90 days to adapt and begin experiencing intense pleasure from whole healthy
nutrient-rich foods, isn’t that worth it? What’s a month or two if you could then be fit, healthy,
happy, more energetic and high-performing, slow-aging and naturally at your ideal weight—while
loving food—for the rest of your decades?
Avoiding the Ultimate Diet Trap—and All the Others
Now you’ve seen that as modern foods have become increasingly stimulating, our taste nerves have
become desensitized. This means that we have "gotten used to" the modern diet’s excessively
stimulating effects, setting up a devastating trap—wherein a health-promoting diet seems relatively
unappealing, while self-destruction feels better and seems safer.
When you are stuck in this pleasure trap, you are vulnerable to all the other diet traps. Eating whole
natural plant foods is the most pleasurable and fulfilling way to eat there is; you’re just trapped in a
place where you can’t see it. Stuck there, every other trap can come and prey on you.
Let’s now look at some of the other very common traps you may fall into while lost in the Pleasure
Trap.
The Top 10 Diet Traps
Diet Trap #1: Eating a Nutrient-Poor Diet that Does Not Include 90% or More Plant-
Based, Nutrient-Rich Food
Only three to 10% of the population has a nutrient-rich eating style that enables the body to
function and perform well. The rest of the population eats predominantly nutrient-poor foods,
which is what causes the overweight condition, low energy and performance, and health
complications..
Diet Trap #2: “Starvation is Good”—Going Hungry the Low-Cal, Low-Fat Way
The idea that “eating less” is always necessary to lose weight and even for health is one of the most
pervasive in the culture. And it’s one of the most wrongheaded. In this diet trap, hunger is not only
seen as a necessary suffering; sometimes it’s even revered or exalted.
Eating less of the food that does not supply the nutrients you need to succeed is a failing strategy.
It’s eating large amounts of junk, and then switching to smaller amounts of junk. Would your car
run any better if instead of filling the tank with weak adulterated gasoline, you started only half-
filling it with weak adulterated gasoline?
Unfortunately, so many people have fallen for this classic diet trap. It’s accepted as “sense” when
really it makes no sense. You cannot sustainably eat smaller quantities of nutrient-poor and