Authors: Mark Hyman
Tags: #Health & Fitness / Diet & Nutrition / Diets, #Health & Fitness / Body Cleansing & Detoxification
The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body's Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast (7 page)
We know you can’t modify your genetic code. But we also know that you can change how your genes function, which ones are activated or silenced by what you eat. New research has found a way to switch genes on and off or affect how they work. This science is called epigenetics.
You have 8 billion letters in your genetic code, or “book of life.” Quite a big book! The code won’t change, but which letters get “read” does change based on inputs from the outside—starting in your mother’s womb. The environment created for you in the womb—what foods, stress, and toxins she was exposed to—will determine how your genes get set for life. This “reading” or bookmarking is how epigenetics determines much of what happens to you during your lifetime. If your mother ate sugar and junk food and was deficient in vitamins and minerals, the messages from the sugar and nutritional deficiencies will get programmed into your genes and increase your risk of obesity and diabetes.
What’s worse is that those changes can then get transmitted to your offspring. So what your grandmother ate during her pregnancy, and what toxins she was exposed to, will influence your genes and your grandchildren’s genes and risk of disease. But like a cycle of abuse in families, this cycle can be broken.
Switching to real food, optimizing your nutrient status, and lowering your load of environmental toxins can help you reprogram your genes in this lifetime. You can change the bookmarks in your book of life so your body is consistently reading instructions from the slim, healthy chapters—not the fat, sick ones.
How long can you hold your breath underwater? If I tell you to use your willpower to hold your breath for fifteen minutes and that I will
give you a million dollars if you do, there is still no way you can do this. We are programmed for certain needs: air, water, food, sleep, and sex. These things are essential to our survival. If you are addicted to sugar and I tell you to resist giving in to your cravings by using willpower, I might as well tell you to hold your breath for fifteen minutes. It won’t work.
No one
wants
to be overweight or suffer the emotional or physical consequences of diabetes or obesity. But willpower simply isn’t enough to overcome the cravings for chips, cookies, soda, and more. We’re up against powerful biochemical mechanisms created by food addiction. Willpower is useless when industrial junk food and sugar are in charge of your brain chemistry.
The very good news is that breaking these addictions is easier than you might think—if you know what to do. And it doesn’t take weeks or months. Simply following the exact instructions in the 10-Day Detox Diet will quickly reset your brain chemistry and give you back control over your eating behavior. You don’t have to struggle to let go of your cravings; your cravings will naturally let go of you.
Your body is an extraordinary instrument—a thing of wonder that when tuned to the right frequency plays the most beautiful songs of well-being, balance, health, and energy. The trick is to tune up your biology, tune up your hormones, and tune up your metabolism so everything plays in harmony. When that happens (and on this program, it will), you’ll find that your cravings disappear very quickly—generally within a day or two. It does take a little leap of faith, but please take that leap; your body knows what to do!
This has been one of the best experiences of my life. I have confidence that I can get my weight down to normal and live to be a healthy old girl. No suffering. To break my addictions with no pain has been truly remarkable. I didn’t know I could do it without hunger… I cannot thank you enough.
—DIANA STEUF
A research finding got big headlines recently. “New Study Finds That Overweight People Have Lower Death Rates Than Thin People.” Nonsense. This makes for sensational headlines, but looking at the real facts of this and other studies helps to clarify that being overweight negatively impacts your health and longevity in a number of ways.
The study analyzed 100 other studies encompassing 2.88 million people with over 270,000 deaths. Those who were overweight based on a BMI (body mass index) of 25 to 30 seemed to have a lower risk of death than those who were skinnier, with a body mass index of 18.5 to 25. However, those who were obese, with a BMI of
more
than 30, had a much higher risk of death. Is the take-home message that you should gain more weight to live longer? Hardly.
There are many problems with the study. It included very skinny people in the “normal weight” group, people who are often quite sick, like my sister, who recently died of cancer and was rail thin at her death. Chronically ill people, especially those with cancer, die very thin. In fact, the lowest risk of death was in the group with a BMI of 22 to 25.
Other factors also confuse this study. Body mass index doesn’t account for how much of your weight is from body fat or muscle mass. Shaquille O’Neal, one of the greatest basketball players in history, has a BMI of 35 (which is considered morbidly obese), but he is muscular, not fat. You can also be what I call a skinny-fat person, with a low body mass index but very little muscle; even though you are of normal weight, you are fat on the inside. If you have skinny arms and legs and a big belly, you may be of normal weight but still have a high risk of death.
The only way to correlate weight with mortality is to look at muscle and fat composition, as well as disease markers such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, insulin, inflammation, and other markers that show you how sick you are independent of weight.
This was also a global study, and it is well known that Asians and East Indians can have diabetes at much lower body weights. So while interesting, this study doesn’t prove anything significant, and it certainly doesn’t suggest that you can carry excess weight without also carrying increased risks of chronic disease and premature death.
There is also some research that says if you are overweight but fit, your risk of disease is lower. Certainly fitness at any weight reduces the risk of disease and death, but to promote the benefits of being fat and fit only suits the food industry. In fact, the Center for Consumer Freedom, a food and tobacco industry front group, published a white paper on the “obesity hoax.” The liberal media and the government, they say, are perpetrating a big hoax on Americans. We are not fat, they insist, and diabetes is not on the rise. Oh, please! If you believe that, just take a walk through your local mall.
The Center for Consumer Freedom is funded by Coca-Cola, Monsanto, Philip Morris Kraft (which changed its name to Altria to escape negative cigarette- and junk-food-related brand perceptions), and other food industry giants—though on their website they hide the sponsors because they fear attack by food activists, those militant, vegetable-eating terrorists. Oh my!
These are the same companies that espouse the wonders of pesticides and oppose bans on smoking in public places. The group defines its mission as fighting against “a growing cabal of food cops, health care enforcers, militant activists, meddling bureaucrats, and violent radicals who think they know what’s best for you, [who] are pushing against our basic freedoms.”
“Don’t believe your eyes,” implies the Center for Consumer Freedom. The Center maintains that contrary to all the observable data, we are
not
a fat nation. It’s just all those food fascists confusing us, including food and nutrition experts from Yale, Harvard, and similar second-rate institutions. What’s scariest is that this industry front group has more than 100,000 Facebook likes.
What’s the group’s advice? “Instead of focusing solely on food, focus
on physical activity.” Really? Remember, you have to run for four miles every single day for one week to burn off just one supersize fast-food meal. But of course
that
doesn’t show up anywhere in the Center’s report.
My counsel is this: Don’t believe the sensational headline hype, and don’t take health advice from industry front groups. Do pay attention to the toll that excess weight is taking on your vitality. Because what a huge body of scientific literature really shows us is that obesity comes with a whole set of metabolic changes and imbalances that create a smoldering fire of pre-disease that often leads to full-blown disease.
There are a very few people who can be overweight and metabolically healthy, but they are anomalies. Most have dangerous inflamed belly fat, abnormal small cholesterol particles (the ones that cause heart attacks), high blood pressure, and high levels of insulin, causing both insulin and leptin resistance. Their sex hormones are messed up, causing sexual dysfunction in men, and infertility, hair loss on the head, facial hair, abnormal menstrual cycles, and acne in women. Their blood is inflamed and more likely to clot and cause heart attacks and strokes. Their risks of breast, colon, prostate, pancreatic, liver, and kidney cancer are increased. Their excess weight overloads their joints, causing arthritis and mobility issues. And many have depression, memory problems, and “pre-dementia,” all caused by hormones and biochemistry disrupted by belly fat. In fact, Alzheimer’s is now being called type 3 diabetes.
So no, it is not wise to kick back and think you are fine if you are a bit overweight. Get your biomarkers tested and really find out. The basic tests you need are listed
here
. Go to www.10daydetox.com/resources to learn more about these tests, which will help determine whether your weight is putting your health in jeopardy.
If you think you can exercise your way to weight loss, I am sorry to say you are in for a big disappointment. Do you treat yourself to a post-workout sugar-laden smoothie, muffin, or other “healthy” snack? Suck
back some Gatorade to quench your thirst after your thirty minutes on the treadmill? While some after-sports snacks can help enhance repair and recovery, for most of us, unless you are an endurance athlete or run around like Kobe Bryant for forty-eight minutes on the basketball court at full speed, they are causing more harm than good. In fact, using exercise to lose weight without changing your diet is asking for failure. You can change your diet and lose weight, but if you exercise and keep your diet the same, you may gain some muscle, improve endurance, and be healthier overall, but you won’t shed many pounds.
Remember, if you consume one twenty-ounce soda, you have to walk four and a half miles to burn it off. If you consume one supersize fast-food meal, you have to run four miles a day for one whole week to burn it off. If you eat that every day, you have to run a marathon every single day to burn it off.
The simple fact is that you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet.
Having said that, I don’t want you to get the impression I don’t think exercise is important. It is an essential component of the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet. Exercise is critical, but not for the reasons you think. Here’s how exercise helps and why we need it:
It makes your cells and muscles more sensitive to insulin so you don’t need as much. Less insulin = less belly fat.
It reduces the stress hormone cortisol. Too much cortisol and you become insulin resistant and store belly fat. Too much cortisol also makes you crave sugar and carbs and seek comfort food.
If you do interval training (going fast and then slow, as with the wind sprints you did in high school), you can speed up your metabolism and burn more calories all day long, even while you sleep.
Strength training builds muscle, and muscle burns seven times as many calories as fat. Even if you are skinny, strength training is key because it prevents “skinny fat” syndrome.
Exercise improves memory, learning, and concentration.
Vigorous exercise is a better antidepressant than Prozac.
Exercise protects your heart and reduces your risk of heart attack and stroke.
Exercise reduces inflammation (the cause of almost every disease of aging).
Exercise boosts detoxification of environmental chemicals.
Exercise balances hormones and reduces breast and other common cancers.
Exercise improves sexual function.
Speaking of sex, there is one more little myth I need to blow up for you. Somewhere we all got the idea that sex was good exercise and that a bout of sexual activity burns 100 to 300 calories for each participant. That reminds me of a patient I saw when I was a resident. I asked her if she was sexually active. She said, “No, I usually just lie there.” But even if you don’t just lie there, a vigorous lovemaking episode usually lasts about six minutes (the average in America) and burns about twenty-one calories. If you just sat and watched TV, you would burn fourteen calories in the same time. So find other ways to exercise, or study tantric sex and strive to make love for an hour or more.
Just know that even then, you probably still can’t “love” your way to weight loss. You’ll have to get out of bed and start moving—and you’ll still need to change the way you eat.