The Doctor's Diet: Dr. Travis Stork's STAT Program to Help You Lose Weight & Restore Your Health (48 page)

When it comes to cholesterol, your goal is to have less of the bad stuff (LDL and triglycerides) and more of the good stuff (HDL). The Doctor’s Diet can help you meet that goal. The combination of weight loss, improved diet, and exercise can have a very positive impact on cholesterol levels. Many people who follow diets like mine see their cholesterol numbers improve dramatically.

We talked a lot about blood sugar earlier, so we don’t have to go over it all again. But what does bear repeating is the fact that when blood sugar is high for long periods of time, blood vessels suffer. High blood sugar can cause your blood to get kind of sticky, which means you’re
more likely to form dangerous blockages and clots in your blood vessels.

When you follow The Doctor’s Diet, you are taking giant steps to get blood sugar in control and lower your heart disease risk.

Let’s face it: a slim belly is a sexy belly. But a slim belly is also a healthy belly—and that has nothing at all to do with how you look in a swimsuit.

I’ve already mentioned that deep belly fat (the kind you can’t pinch), which is also called visceral fat, isn’t just an unattractive spare tire sitting around your waist making your pants too tight. It’s actually very metabolically active—which means it plays a part in the everyday business of running your body. Belly fat releases fatty acids into your blood, pumps out inflammatory agents, and produces hormones. Too much belly fat wreaks havoc on your heart.

The other reality about excess fat I’ve described is that it also requires a tremendous amount of oxygenated blood that must be pumped to it every minute of every day by your heart.

The more fat you have stored (in your belly and throughout your body), the harder your heart has to pump. All that extra pumping can actually cause your heart to enlarge in an unhealthy way—which is why obese people are likely to have larger-than-normal hearts.

Despite all this activity, belly fat contributes virtually nothing positive to your body (unless you’re stranded on a desert island without food for a few months and need to live on the energy stored around your waist). Instead of being a helpful player in your body’s physiological community, your visceral belly fat makes trouble for you and your heart by raising LDL cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar, and blood pressure.

As with most heart disease risk factors, you have tremendous power over your belly fat. The tools are at your disposal in this book because eating right, losing weight, and being active all help trim your waist. Cutting back on pro-inflammatory foods helps, too—we’ll talk more about that later in the book. Luckily, a lot of overweight and obese people find that the fat around their belly is the first to go when they start to shed pounds.

Even if overall you’re not carrying around much extra weight, having extra visceral belly fat greatly raises heart disease risk. I’m sure you’ve noticed relatively thin people with thick bellies—even they can benefit from trimming down at the waist.

I love it that the human heart is so responsive to weight loss. Not all heart diseases are reversible, but many are, and when you start losing weight, your heart really can benefit!

But wait, there’s more to this story. One of the reasons heart disease risk goes down with weight loss is that shedding fat lowers inflammation. Next, I’ll tell you more about this exciting weight loss payoff.

Whenever I see video on television or the Internet of wildfires raging in states like California, Idaho, and Arizona, it reminds me of inflammation in the human body. When we are in control of it, fire is a huge gift to humans. Like fire, inflammation helps us in so many ways. But when it’s out of control—when it burns for long periods of time—it can be a killer.

Inflammation goes up when we gain weight, eat certain foods, and live a sedentary lifestyle. But the good news is that we can bring it down. As soon as you started The Doctor’s Diet, you began making changes that can cool down chronic inflammation. And as you lose weight, you’ll spray even more cold water on chronic inflammation that’s spreading like wildfire throughout your body.

On the one hand, inflammation is an amazing biological response that we couldn’t survive without. It’s your immune system’s response to danger. When something harmful invades your body and threatens it—for example, a virus or bacteria—your body’s inflammation response turns up the heat in an effort to protect you from it.

Just as a police dispatcher sends officers to the scene of a crime, the immune system sends white blood cells to the area, along with several other kinds of inflammatory chemicals, including certain hormones and a kind of molecule called cytokines. Together they pummel the invader, fighting infection and helping your body to heal.

Think of this kind of inflammation—doctors refer to it as acute inflammation—as a controlled burn: things heat up for a while, but then they cool down again after everything is back on track.

On the other hand, when there’s too much inflammation, it’s not just the enemy that gets burned. Out-of-control, nonstop inflammation is like a wildfire, damaging healthy cells as well as invaders. Instead of bringing about healing, excess inflammation goes too far, harming the cells and tissues it’s supposed to be helping. Rather than promoting
health, your white blood cells, cytokines, and other inflammatory substances take on healthy cells and interfere with your body’s ability to heal.

Having an inflammatory response that continues to simmer for a long time is called chronic inflammation. Eventually, long-term chronic inflammation can cause lots of harm to your body. It can damage organs such as the heart and the brain. It can interfere with cell division and contribute to the growth of tumor cells. It also messes with blood sugar levels and makes your cells less responsive to insulin.