Authors: Mary Enig
Special Weight-Loss Tip: Drink Your Oil
Want a surefire way to escalate weight loss? Twenty minutes before each meal, take some coconut oil!
By mealtime, coconut’s satiation effect will be in full force, so that you won’t feel hungry. You may even feel full before finishing your meal, so that you eat less and lose weight.
The easiest way to take your coconut oil is to make a Coconut Infusion: place 1 to 2 tablespoons of softened coconut oil into a mug and add hot water (or hot herbal tea), allowing the oil to melt before drinking. Use the following formula to determine the amount:
To keep coconut oil soft during the winter months, put it on top of your refrigerator, above your stove, or in a warm cupboard.
Principle Three: Eat Nutrient-Dense Foods
Although most people don’t realize it, obesity is actually a symptom of nutritional
deficiencies
. That’s why food
quality
—not just quantity—is key to successful weight loss—and why eating nutrient-dense foods is the third Core Principle of Quick and Easy Weight Loss. As you know from the previous chapter, these foods provide complete protein, healthy fats, and unrefined carbohydrates, plus the vitamins and minerals your body needs to build, maintain, nourish, and heal all the cells in all your systems.
We recommend that you always consume real foods, as opposed to isolated vitamins or even multivitamins. Instead of synthetic vitamins, we recommend the superfoods described in Chapter 5—including cod-liver oil, acerola or amla tablets, bitters, high-vitamin butter oil, desiccated liver tablets, wheat germ oil, and nutritional yeast—which naturally concentrate many important nutrients that support each other, preventing the imbalances that often occur when vitamins are taken singly. These foods will give your body plentiful amounts of the nutrients it needs to run at maximum efficiency and health.
25 Ways to Enjoy the Benefits of Coconut
You’ll find recipes for many of these coconut delights in Chapter 9.
Although you can derive great benefit from Quick and Easy Weight Loss with or without superfoods, when you make the additional effort to incorporate them, you’ll be surprised to see your energy soar
and
those pounds melt away. To understand why, just remember our simple axiom:
The higher the nutrient content of your food, the less you need to eat to satisfy your basic nutritional needs.
The Burden of Nutrient-Poor Food
Like Julia, you probably associate diets with deprivation. Unless you’re suffering, you couldn’t be eating healthy, right? Wrong! For many years, as the consumption of trans fats, empty carbs, and fast and processed foods has expanded American waistlines, many people have incorrectly assumed that the antidote is some form of fasting diet. But the solution to a nutrient-poor diet is to restore nutrients, not take even more of them away. As Julia discovered, when your body has ample amounts of needed nutrients, it
releases
fat.
Julia: Cleansing and Fasting Didn’t Work
As the receptionist in the executive suite of a Fortune 500 corporation, Julia had a sedentary but hectic job. Hoping to deal with creeping weight gain and shake off her lethargy, she decided to try a cleansing diet of fruits and vegetables, foods she loved. Although she felt really good for a few days, she lost no weight.
Then she decided to fast. She did the first ten days of a Master Cleanse fast, drinking nothing but water with lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. Her body felt cleansed, but she felt hungry, a little tired, and out of focus. Nevertheless, she persisted and after completing the cleanse was delighted to see that she had lost six pounds.
Unfortunately, neither her delight nor her weight loss lasted very long. Julia went off the cleanse and returned to regular meals, emphasizing salads, tofu, and a little brown rice. To her horror, after two weeks of this boring diet, she had not only regained all the weight she’d lost, but had put on an additional three pounds.
Then Julia learned about the dietary benefits of coconut and began taking a tablespoon of coconut oil before each meal.
During her first days on the coconut oil, she maintained her meager diet, but soon began to enjoy modest portions of richer foods, such as omelets, beef, and full-fat cheeses, and she was amazed to discover that by taking the coconut oil, she could eat only small portions. After a week of taking coconut oil with a diet she considered “bad,” Julia weighed herself and was amazed to discover that she had lost four pounds. A week later, she dropped another two, and her pants felt loose.
Five weeks later, Julia had maintained her new way of eating, as well as her weight loss.
Principle Four: Restrict Calories Moderately: A Little but Not Too Much
Why do we recommend modest calorie restriction? Research consistently shows that lowering your caloric intake (and/or increasing exercise) is the most direct route to weight loss. Calorie restriction ensures that you don’t take in more energy than you expend, but instead begin to use up your body’s stores of fat. On the other hand, to restrict the amount of calories even more than the amount we specify is to deny your body what it needs to breathe, beat the heart, and perform other vital functions. Extreme calorie restriction is tantamount to starvation. The body responds with cravings and, as a result, you may wind up bingeing or eating undesirable foods. Even if you have the willpower to maintain the calorie restriction, your body may react to this perceived emergency by storing fat and altering your metabolism for the worse.
That’s why, on our diet, you’ll offset calorie restrictions by eating a moderate amount of protein and, compared with other diets, a relatively high amount of fat to induce satiation.
You’ll also cut back on carbohydrates from sweets and refined grains. As shown in the groundbreaking book
The No
-
Grain Diet
by Joseph Mercola with Alison Rose Levy, refined grains convert to sugars in your body and set off the same insulin reaction as sweets. You feel energized for a while, but then you sag—and reach for another snack to make up for it. On Quick and Easy Weight Loss, you’ll be eating
healthy
carbs, prepared in a way that makes them tasty, digestible, and very satisfying.
What’s the Right Level of Calorie Restriction?
The degree to which you can safely and effectively restrict calories to lose weight depends on two factors:
This basic requirement ranges between 1100 and 1800 calories, depending on your size, build, and sex. A woman who weighs 132 pounds, for example, needs about 1300 calories just to support basic body functions; one who weighs 154 pounds requires 1500 calories. She’ll need about 500 to 700 additional calories for normal light activities, and much more if she is very active.
If you eat so little that the number of calories in your food drops below the amount required for these basic functions, your body starts to think it is starving, and its alarm bells go off.
What’s Wrong with Soy?
Today, many dieters try to meet their health requirements by eating foods based on soy, promoted as beneficial in many popular books and weight-loss plans. However, soybeans contain several natural toxins, and high-temperature chemical processing adds many more. As early as 1972, a soy-industry textbook (
Soy Beans: Chemistry and Technology
) listed a number of well-documented toxic effects from soybeans—everything from endocrine disruption to undesirable changes in many organs.
The most serious problem with eating soy while you’re trying to lose weight is that soy is a
goitrogen
, that is, it depresses thyroid function. When your thyroid gland malfunctions, you tend to gain weight even when you eat very little. Dr. Dan Sheehan and Dr. Daniel Doerge, government researchers at the National Center for Toxicological Research, discovered that the antithyroid component of soy is the isoflavones or phytoestrogens, which inhibit the synthesis of thyroid hormone. All soy foods, including tofu, soymilk, protein bars, and meal replacements, contain these thyroid-inhibiting isoflavones. In 1999, these researchers actually wrote a letter urging the FDA to require a health warning on soy foods, rather than the health claim that the agency eventually approved.
What’s more, the effects of soy foods can be deceptive. Dieters who rely heavily on soy often report initial weight loss and energy increase, since at first the thyroid gland works harder to counteract the effects of soy isoflavones. But after a time, the thyroid gives out, with hypothyroidism the result. The dieter rapidly regains the lost weight, and then gains even more—plus, the dieter feels lethargic, unfocused, cold, and sometimes depressed.
And soy contains other anti-nutrients: phytic acid blocks mineral absorption, and enzyme inhibitors block the enzymes needed for protein digestion. Animal studies carried out in 1974 indicate that soy protein isolate, the major ingredient in modern soy foods, creates increased requirements for vitamins D, E, K, and B
12
and deficiencies in many important minerals. Long-term consumption of high levels of soy foods can lead to serious nutritional deficiencies—definitely the wrong way to go if you’re trying to lose weight. Yet, the U.S. government allows a health claim for foods containing soy protein, and many government agencies and health organizations encourage consumption of large amounts of soy foods.
Promoters of soy for weight loss point to the Asian diet, which they claim contains a lot of soy. In fact, soy consumption is relatively low in Asia, ranging from an average of two tablespoons per day in Japan to two teaspoons per day in China. Even so, thyroid problems are widespread in Asia, particularly in China. How much better to emulate the traditional practices of tropical peoples, who consume large amounts of thyroid-supporting coconut!
Since some people’s motors burn faster and hotter than others, the point at which calorie restriction becomes excessive is different for everyone. Thus one woman who weighs 132 pounds may lose weight even if she eats 2500 calories, because she has a fast metabolism that burns calories efficiently; but someone of the same weight who has a slower metabolism may need to restrict her diet to 2000 calories to lose weight. By including coconut oil in our 2000-calorie plan, we ensure that you don’t depress a slow metabolism even further.
In any diet, then, you don’t want to restrict calories below the minimum number needed to support the basic functions, plus the amount needed for all your normal activities. Doing so will cause the body to lower its metabolism in order to prevent starvation. When that happens,
you cannot lose weight, no matter how little you eat.
Quick and Easy Weight Loss Plan
Phase One: Moderate Weight Loss
Follow the 2500-calorie diet for two weeks. If you lose weight during this period (as many people do), continue this diet until your ideal weight is achieved. If you don’t lose weight on Phase One, or need a more stringent diet for those last few pounds, move on to Phase Two.
Phase Two: Calorie Restriction
Follow the 2000-calorie diet until you achieve your desired weight, continuing to take your coconut oil before each meal and cod-liver oil before breakfast, as in Phase One.
Once you have achieved the weight that is right for you, you can move into Everyday Gourmet
(see Chapter 8). However, you will probably need to limit desserts. If you gain weight on Everyday Gourmet, even when leaving out desserts entirely, first increase your intake of coconut by one tablespoon before each meal. If that doesn’t stabilize your weight, follow Phase One indefinitely, or at least whenever you want to take off a few pounds.
Quick and Easy Beverages