Excerpt: The Denim Diet by Kami Gray

Long to get back into a slim pair of jeans without compromising your health or the environment? Wardrobe stylist Kami Gray shares her lifestyle habits that can make it happen in her new book, The Denim Diet: 16 Simple Habits to Get You Into Your Dream Pair of Jeans. Skeptical? Read this excerpt from her book.

The Denim Diet
By Kami Gray
New World Library
$14.95

Item #11: Lean and Green
Getting Lean Means Better Planetary Health

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. 
—Albert Einstein

Eating foods on the List not only transforms your body and makes you healthier; it also helps transform the Earth and makes our planet healthier. The foods you choose can reduce the impact you make on Mother Earth. You are requiring less energy from the planet when you eat food that is minimally processed. When you choose whole grains, the planet's energy and resources aren't expended taking apart the grain and processing, refining, and bleaching it. Those whole grains you're eating are eventually processed or broken down, though. Guess where that energy comes from? You! So not only are you saving Earth's precious resources and the energy required to process whole grains into white foods; your body is using its energy to break down those whole grains instead. That's good news for you. When your body uses more energy, you become less fat. With white foods, all the good stuff, like the nutrients and the fiber, are thrown away and end up as waste. By eating whole grains, you are conserving the planet's energy, becoming less fat, and being less wasteful. Another way to cut back on waste is to choose real, whole, raw foods like fruits, vegetables, nuts, and whole grains, which use less packaging than processed and prepared foods.

Eating foods on the List makes you lean and green. While you're losing fat, becoming a smaller you, consuming only what you need, purchasing fewer packaged foods, and eating fewer refined foods, you are making a smaller impact on the Earth. Less impact is good. The name for this in green terminology is "reducing your carbon footprint." A carbon footprint is the amount of greenhouse gas emissions a person produces through his or her activities. Believe me, I'm not an alarmist. In my supersmart, serious-minded, know-it-all family, I'm the superficial, lighthearted one, and I tend to remain overly optimistic and hopeful in the face of challenge and difficulty. Plus, I get bored easily and find it excruciatingly painful to listen to their long, drawn-out lectures about the state of the planet. But when it comes to decreasing carbon dioxide and other emissions of greenhouse gases, you and I can't be that relaxed. That's what we've been doing, and it's not working. We are rapidly plunging into a major crisis, and every single one of us needs to step up and make drastic changes or we're not going to have to worry about Social Security, college savings, getting Alzheimer's, or looking cute in our designer denim because we cooked our planet . . . or at least cranked up the heat too high.

There are countless ways to reduce your carbon footprint in an effort to curb global warming, such as flying less, walking or biking to work, adjusting your thermostat, using energy-efficient lightbulbs, living in a smaller home, installing solar panels, moving to an urban area, getting rid of your lawn and planting a drought-tolerant native garden instead (or at least not watering your lawn, and ditching your gas-powered lawn mower for a manual version), buying food from local sources, and reducing the number of new things you use and purchase, like cars, grocery store bags, furniture, and even (cringe) designer jeans. By adopting some of these practices, you'll not only be making a difference and doing your part; you'll significantly stretch your dollar.

My love of fashion would create a serious problem with my bank account and credit card balances if I didn't habitually shop vintage and resale. Many resale boutiques sell new-to-you shoes and clothing for men and women and specialize in current, red-hot styles. I've found countless pairs of two-hundred-dollar jeans for thirty bucks. I'm also nuts about vintage clothing (and shoes, furniture, purses, scarves, and jewelry) and not above shopping at thrift stores, either. Don't think of it as used; think of it as recycling and doing your part to reduce waste as you're reducing your waist! Thanks to websites like Craigslist.org and Freecycle.org, new-to-you stuff is just a mouse-click away. Even better, five hundred tons of used items are not being thrown into landfills every day, resulting in enough stuff to fill a stack of garbage trucks five times the height of Mt. Everest each year.

Doing something as simple as bringing your own bags to the grocery store instead of taking new ones has a far-reaching impact. The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States consumes 100 billion plastic shopping bags every year. It takes roughly 12 million barrels of oil to make that many plastic bags.In addition to not consuming or buying so many brand-spanking-new things, we need to stop thinking about global warming and climate change as a political issue or even a national issue; it's a global issue, and we need to set our differences, finger pointing, and excuse making aside and scrape the yucky brown stuff off the fan together. At this late stage, who gives a crap (absolutely my last pun) how we got here? Let's open our eyes and see things as they are and make sweeping, radical changes so the Earth doesn't become uninhabitable. If some of the world's smartest scientists are wrong and global warming and climate change are just a natural and inevitable cycle, then great! Regardless, shouldn't we do everything in our power to slow down this process? If we don't, the price we will pay will be positively earth-shattering. (Time for the punitentiary?)

ITEM #11: Lean and Green

1. Choose whole foods such as whole grains, nuts, seeds, fruits, and vegetables that use your energy—instead of Earth's energy and resources—for processing and require less packaging.

2. Significantly reduce your carbon footprint: fly less, walk or bike to work, live in a small home, move to an urban area, buy food only from local sources, and reuse items instead of constantly buying new things.

3. Bring bags with you whenever you go shopping.

The Denim Diet by Kami Gray is available in bookstores now.

Read our Savvy Review of The Denim Diet.