Foreword by M. Doug McGuff M.D.

The ONE Diet is a perfect name for the book you are about to read. It is not just another in a long string of diets that you have tried…it is THE diet that correlates with the genome within your body that has been evolving over billions of years.

Go get a new roll of toilet paper. Look at it. Let this entire roll represent the history of the human species. Holding the roll in your left hand, tear off a single square of the tissue and hold it in your right hand. What you hold in your left hand represents the amount of time that our species lived off the land as hunter/gatherers. What you hold in your right hand represents the agricultural revolution.

Now, take the square that you hold in your right hand and use a razor blade to cut off the tiniest sliver from the end that you can manage. This tiny sliver represents the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is the slice of time where you will live out your life. Within this slice is a growing epidemic of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and depression. Also within this slice is every diet book that has tried to address this problem, using various manipulations of foodstuffs from the agricultural revolution.

Now let us return to the roll of tissue that you are holding in your left hand. Over this entire span of time, there was not a single obese human. Humans like every other animal, autoregulated to an ideal body composition without even thinking about it. Along with the lack of obesity, anthropologic evidence suggests that the diseases that track along with obesity (diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, etc.) were also not present. Throughout this expanse of time free of obesity and disease, there was just ONE diet. The ONE Diet was a hunter-gatherer diet.

The ONE Diet will take you on a journey that begins at the ending. In order to make room in your mind for what the diet that shaped your genome looks like, the authors first must do some house cleaning. My dear friend and co-author John Little is also the authorized biographer of Bruce Lee. I remember watching a video interview of Bruce Lee with John when he was discussing how best to teach a pupil. He likened the learning process to a tea ceremony. Both participants in the tea ceremony have tea in their cups. In order for a teacher to give a pupil his tea, the pupil must be willing to pour his tea out of his cup.

Mr. Philips and Mr. Shawcross also realize the importance of this concept and will painstakingly show you what is wrong with the contemporary Western diet and how it foils your attempts to achieve a healthy body composition. They will show you how and why you have been frustrated. More importantly, they will show how your frustration has been used by marketers and scam artists to manipulate you and get your money.

Having dispelled the “conventional wisdom” that has grown out of the experience within that tiny sliver of time in your right hand, The ONE Diet will end at the beginning. The authors will explain what the diet that drove the development of your genome looked like. Once they show you what that diet looked like, they will show how to approximate it in the modern environment. Rather than simply suggesting “Paleo re-enactment,” the authors will show you what to avoid in the modern environment and what to include so that the correct metabolic and hormonal environment exists.

One of my favorite aspects of this book is that it focuses on an aspect of body recomposition that all the other books in the Paleo genre have largely ignored: the psychological aspect. The authors understand that no matter how powerful the arguments, or how deep your understanding, if you have unresolved psychological issues you are doomed to failure. Throughout The ONE Diet, there are discussions of the potential psychological roadblocks and strategies for how to overcome them.

One of my major dissatisfactions with other books advocating an evolutionary-based diet is that after giving a beautiful treatise shattering the conventional wisdom on diet, they would launch into a discussion of exercise that involved a conventional wisdom that was as inaccurate as the diet they just debunked. Not so with The ONE Diet. The authors correctly recommend a high intensity program that is brief and infrequent. Such an approach to exercise creates an optimal metabolic and hormonal environment that will work synergistically with your new diet without creating overtraining or burnout. And rather than trying to cover the exercise topic as extensively as the diet, they simply outline a solid starting point and make appropriate references for readers who want more.

You now hold in your hands The ONE Diet. It is NOT the next new thing. It is a very old thing…billions of years in the making. It is what drove the evolution of the genome which makes up your body. It cannot fail. As the philosopher, Francis Bacon said: “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

In Health and Strength,

M. Doug McGuff, MD

Co-Author of Body by Science