the golden ratio

When it comes to actually following The Diet Code program, the practice is much simpler than the theory. But the Golden Ratio, the formula underlying The Diet Code, is rooted not only in the history of mathematics, but also in the origins of the universe. Whether you’re a closet mathematician or you’re just looking to feel better and lose a few pounds, understanding the science behind The Diet Code will help explain why eating The Diet Code way feels so right and so natural. The science behind this plan is the same that guides human biology - that’s what The Diet Code is all about: eating the way we are built to eat.

A couple of years before Columbus made his first trans-Atlantic voyage Leonardo da Vinci completed a five-point rendition of the human body. His now famous Vitruvian Man drawing (represented on THE DIET CODE cover) of spread-eagled arms and legs bound by a circle revived a symbol tracing back 6000 years to Mesopotamia: the pentacle.
The ancient Greek mathematical school of Pythagoras (often credited with the earliest documented use of the Golden Ratio) saw such perfection in the pentacle they called it Hygeia, or health. It's five elements even comprise the component recipe for bread! In medieval lore the pentacle stood for the five chivalric virtues of the Grail knights. Further, the word grail itself derived from Mesopotamian graal -- the term for the center or sacred heart of the pentacle outlined by its five triangular arms. The Greeks named this secret space pentemychos and regarded it as the mystical gateway to all realms.
An uncontested property of the pentacle is that it configures the Golden Ratio and its very special mathematical proportion known as phi.

The natural world is an astonishing display case of applications of phi, or the Golden Ratio. Phi first describes curves and spirals and then growth and movement. It can be found everywhere from a snail shell or ram’s horns to the arrangement of vertebrate skeletons and tree branches; it patterns the flight of birds and swim courses of fish, the form of ocean waves, and the shape and spin of galaxies. Another famous Italian got it right: the universe really is written in the language of mathematics. Plenty of examples of phi are also found throughout the human body – in the placement of human joints, the development of the human fetus, and the design of our kidneys, circulatory system and cerebrum.

The Golden Ratio keeps showing up because it works, and works well. It’s a formula that guarantees efficient, economic – and beautiful – design. Great artists and architects throughout history have imitated it and reiterated it, and musicians, geometers, and scientists among others have also used it to guide their work. In doing the same, Da Vinci was in good company.

In exploring the reaches of the Golden Ratio, Leonardo essentially applied ancient wisdom, revivifying ideas form even before the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. What he observed in the world around him, he presented in his art and other work. What appeals to us so mightily, whether in the Mona Lisa smile, the interlaced façade of Notre Dame, the curves of a Stradivari violin, or the seminal Great Pyramid – or even, as you’ll see, a properly assembled plate of food – is the rightness of the design. We sense it reflects the correct order of things, an experience of what the world is, the reality of our own bodies – whether we’re conscious of those connections or not. All of us are subconsciously in tune with the inherent design of the universe, and recognize such beauty when faced with a reflection of that natural law. From each expression of the Golden Ratio, we get a sense of recognition: we are in a way looking at ourselves.

Now this universal math forms the foundation of The Diet Code, the diet most closely aligned with the human body, a diet designed the same way your body is – a diet as efficient and effective, as it is beautiful.