The Hormone Reset Diet
Read The Hormone Reset Diet Online
Authors: Sara Gottfried
HORMONE
RESET
DIET
HEAL YOUR METABOLISM
TO LOSE UP TO
15 POUNDS IN 21 DAYS
SARA GOTTFRIED, M.D.
For my beloved family,
David, Gemma, and Maya
The book you hold in your hands may be just what we need to end dieting for women. As I’ve written in my previous books, it’s not your fault that you’re overweight. The obesity rate has tripled in the past fifty years, and it’s not because of a lack of willpower. It’s because
your hormones have been hijacked by Big Food
—the giant food corporations that are similar to “Big Tobacco” and its efforts to get people addicted to cigarettes. Big Food knows how to manipulate processed food so that it’s hyperpalatable and ultimately gets and keeps you addicted to these harmful food-like substances. The result is that your hormones then begin to work against you.
Enter Dr. Sara Gottfried. As a board-certified gynecologist, she is uniquely qualified to understand the private suffering that women experience with food addiction and body shame. As a Harvard-educated physician scientist, she knows how to separate good science from bad, and can translate the science into entertaining yet accurate language that everyone can understand. As a woman, she has personally struggled with and healed her own food addiction. That combination is extremely rare in medicine—few doctors are willing to admit publically their own stories of vulnerability and
recovery. Not only does Dr. Sara share her stories quite poignantly, she puts them to work to change the conversation we’re having about food addiction and what has been proven to solve it.
Women have specific needs compared with men and their needs are largely ignored by the $60 billion weight-loss industry that specializes in perpetuating the food lie that in order to lose weight, you must count calories.
You may have noticed that women tend to trail men when it comes to weight loss—they tend to lose weight more slowly. There are a few possible reasons for this, including:
•
Hormones.
Women have less testosterone, which boosts metabolism and keeps you lean. Men are genetically programmed to be larger and have more muscle mass and less fat. As a result, men can get away with eating more food, and when they choose to lose weight, they often get quick results.
•
Food preference.
Generally, men like meat, and women love carbohydrates—though this also may be linked to food addiction.
•
Stress.
Women tend to have more challenges with stress compared with men, according to national surveys. Their stress response system is more sensitive and vulnerable, which may explain why women are more likely to eat under emotional stress.
•
Cooking.
Women are primarily responsible for cooking the family meals. That means more work burden on women to plan menus, grocery shop, and prepare meals—plus additional temptation to taste, nibble, and lick food during cooking.
•
Dieting.
Approximately 80 percent of women are dissatisfied with their body and beat themselves up over a few extra pounds, and most are on a diet. Men are less likely to diet as a hobby. Still, there’s a gender difference in expectation: women have more pressure to look like societal norms of the ideal body.
Fortunately, these gender differences can be addressed and, in many cases, turned into an advantage when you seek weight loss. Dr. Sara is here to show you how.
Remember, it’s not overeating that makes you fat. It’s being fat, and the hormonal chaos that led to the fat, that makes you overeat. Forget calorie counting, and begin to focus instead on the quality of your diet. This is important for both men and women, but women suffer more when it comes to food addiction, and women need a specific fix that speaks uniquely to their circumstances.
If you’re a woman and having trouble with overeating, keeping your portions under control, or sugar cravings, then I highly recommend
The Hormone Reset Diet.
I’m in constant contact with people who struggle with their weight. I’ve found that people often know what to do, but the problem is that most people don’t have the discipline to follow through.
So instead, they fall for the tempting illusion of expensive surgeries, over-hyped exercise machines, weight loss pills, or some fad diet … and actually end up gaining even more weight.
Stop the madness. Recognize that food addiction has taken over your ability to modulate food, and a “cell to soul” approach is needed. Allow the wisdom of Dr. Sara and functional medicine to come to your rescue, and heal your food addiction once and for all. It’s time to reset your hormones with your fork and learn to be lean naturally.
Mark Hyman, M.D.
Lenox, MA
2015
Women, Food, and Broken Metabolism
I
used to be fat and …
I’m a doctor.
After decades of starving myself and feeling as though I were living in someone else’s bloated body, I quit the war. In the process, I came to understand that what we’ve been taught about dieting is wrong—even what I was taught in medical school more than twenty-five years ago. Harsh deprivation, beating myself up over the waning willpower, daily fights with food and whether to be “good” or “bad” in my nutritional choices—these dieting skirmishes actually left me more stressed; worsened my hormonal imbalances, body shame, and food addiction; and kept me out of a genuine conversation with my body and what it actually needs.
It took me many years to learn the lesson, which occurred after trying nearly every diet, including the no-carb, low-carb, carb-cycling, low-fat, high-fat, low-protein, high-protein, no-salt, lemonade and honey, and Mediterranean diets.
The truth? These diets don’t work for most women because they fail to address the hormonal root cause. Hormones dictate what your body does with food. Fatness is the result of major hormonal
misfires in women, and forceful approaches to losing weight fail to address the hormonal root cause in strategy, tactics, and delivery.
Fortunately, there is a solution. You can rediscover a body you’re happy with—in which you shed the weight, feel trim and sexy in your skin, and restore your hormones and health—without a daily battle. After earning a medical degree, becoming a wife, birthing two babies, and getting certified as a yoga teacher, I ultimately learned that there’s an alternative to the suffering over weight that doesn’t involve shame or guilt. In short, you need to correct hormonal misfires with your fork. I learned how to eat in a way that optimizes hormones and reinstates a healthy weight in women, and now I want to share my discoveries with you.
As women, we’re at a disadvantage when it comes to getting fat. We are exquisitely sensitive to the ravages of stress and inflammation—you may notice the telltale signs as sugar cravings, extra weight hanging around your waist, moodiness, lack of sleep, or perhaps an overwhelmed feeling. These are clues that your hormones have begun to turn against you, which sets off a vicious cycle of inflammation (the type that makes you overweight) and more difficulty regulating the hormones that help you burn fat (also known as the hormones of metabolism, or the engine for burning calories). When misfiring hormones are allowed to spiral downward, you’re left with hormone anarchy and, ultimately, a broken metabolism; and
you store fat no matter what
—even when you try popular diets like Paleo or Weight Watchers. Soon the bathroom scale seems weirdly stuck 10 or 25 pounds higher than you’d prefer. If you struggle to get and stay lean, I promise that your hormones are to blame. Your hormones govern nearly all aspects of fat loss, from where you store fat (and how much) to your cravings, appetite, gut bacteria, and even your addictive patterns with food.
The good news is that you can turn this problem around—in twenty-one days. In the pages of this book, you’ll find a novel step-by-step plan that I’ve designed to help women of all shapes and sizes,
ages and ethnicities, to lose weight and feel lighter, from your cells to your soul—a formula that has had amazing results for thousands of women just like you. I’m excited to share it with you now.
The prevailing nutritional paradigm is what I call “outside in,” which refers to the hard-driving, forced march of restricting calories and maybe carbohydrates. These strategies are external and focused on physical requirements, instead of resetting your internal world and addressing the emotional issues you face. The “calories in, calories out” mind-set is the old-school approach of a one-sided conversation with the body:
You need to eat this, not that. Submit to my will.
The problem is that coercion doesn’t work for women, who don’t like to be forced, deprived, or disempowered. The outside-in approach tries to beat you into submission. It’s a boot camp for your body, when what a woman’s body really needs is three days at a spa. The female body responds far better to the coax than the shove.
When you get a flat tire, you fix it. You don’t drive around on the tire rim for ten thousand miles, ruining your car and polluting the environment. The same should be true of your metabolism. The problem is, unlike with a flat tire, sometimes you don’t even know that your metabolism is broken. When it’s broken, you’re stuck in the fat-storage mode, depositing fat every time you eat instead of using it as fuel to energize you. When this occurs, no matter what you do—especially after age forty—you get fatter. It’s not just a problem of vanity; it’s as if your body is driving on a flat tire that will eventually ruin not only your metabolism but also your health if you don’t repair it. Later in the process, you may develop insulin resistance (when your cells become numb to the hormone insulin) and then diabetes, heart disease, and dementia. The good news is that you
can
repair your metabolism and prevent or reverse these conditions.
When your metabolism is broken, the road to fixing it involves seven hormones that are responsible for the breakdown: estrogen, insulin, leptin, cortisol, thyroid, testosterone, and growth hormone. Each of these hormones is interconnected and interdependent with the foods you consume every day. What you are going to do is spend three short days focusing on each of these seven hormones, alone or in combination, and in a total of twenty-one days you will be fundamentally repaired and ready to turn food into energy. This is your birthright.
The idea behind the Hormone Reset is simple: in three-day bursts, you’ll focus on making specific dietary changes, starting with eliminating meat and alcohol, which resets your estrogen, liver, and gut microbiome—the genetic material of the trillions of microbial critters that live in your body. Every three days you’ll cut out specific metabolism-wrecking foods and trade up for better foods, which will reset your misfiring hormones, building on the collaboration and regulatory synergy between them so you can feel like yourself again, in body harmony.
Why three days? Because that’s the minimum amount of time to reset a metabolic hormone. When you disrupt these seven hormones in three-day bursts, it takes you a total of twenty-one days to recreate a collaborative team of your metabolic hormones. By the end of twenty-one days, you’ll be ecstatic to observe how you feel. You’ll stress less, eat clean, and move more.
After resetting your hormones, you’ll add nutrient-dense foods back into your body, one by one, in a process called “reentry.” By working with the innate intelligence of your body, you’ll learn to notice, listen to, and once again
trust
your own experience when it comes to the
foods that trigger your immune system into alarm mode and cause problems with weight gain. This simple strategy of adding foods back in slowly and with keen observation of your body’s feedback gives you all the information you need for a future of health and vitality—based on an optimal and steady weight.
Besides making incremental dietary changes over the next twenty-one days, and beyond, we’ll delve into the heart of your cravings, addictions, and habits; your ways of dealing with stress; your most deep-seated hopes and dreams for your body; and maybe even your fears and doubts about not being able to control your eating. We’ll also take a bold look at how you fully inhabit your body and life.
When you’re preoccupied with food, your hunger may actually be a sign of something hormonal plus something deeper. While it may suggest leptin resistance (when your cells become numb to leptin, the hormone of hunger and satiety), my opinion is that incessant hunger represents a yearning for a spiritual connection. You are experiencing a physical problem that can be solved with a combination of physical and spiritual solutions.
When you deal with the
real
issues that drive your weight gain, you don’t just lose weight; you get your life back. This approach will reward you long after reaching your goal weight. I’ll point you toward ways of rebuilding your confidence, integrating relaxation into your daily life, staying present, and dealing with your crazed emotions.
Many women don’t have a proven structure to guide how they eat throughout the day. Usually they start off with good intentions and say confidently to themselves, “Today will be different. I’m going to be good and stop eating the refined carbs. I’ll eat more vegetables. No alcohol. No sugar.” But when you lack a plan that’s proven to help, you end up distracted, lost, and craving the breadbasket or brownie. By six
P.M.,
maybe you pour a glass of wine and
start munching on potato chips while making dinner for your family because you’re hungry for a change in your emotional state. Fastforward a few hours, and you’re heading to bed, frustrated with yourself and your body. You feel a lack of integrity with your stated aspiration for how you want to look, eat, and live. Further, it’s really hard to break through—and get the lean body you want—because you get stuck in this destructive cycle. At the end of the day, perhaps you say to yourself, “Darn it! I didn’t do what I wanted with food yet again. I failed myself. There’s another day lost.”
I don’t want this frustration to sweep over you another day. If you follow my plan, you won’t have a single day of going to bed exasperated with yourself and your lack of willpower. You’ll experience something far better. This plan has worked for thousands of women who have felt hopeless, scared, ashamed, and unlovable—and it can work for you too.
Remind yourself from this day on that working from the inside out (instead of outside in) takes time, which in my experience is a minimum of twenty-one days. I’ll be your guide along the road. You’ll also be empowered to become the ultimate authority on the best foods for you.
With the Hormone Reset you’ll learn how to
• reset your weight, nutrition, hormones, and habitual patterns, from cell to soul;
• build new habits that keep you from depending on willpower;
• become rewired to self-care;
• approach the process as a new devotion, not a slog;
• close the gap between your intention and your behavior; and
• stay present to the here and now of your relationship to food—the good, the bad, and the ugly—because otherwise you may miss a sacred opportunity to learn more about yourself, the effect food is having on your hormones, and how you use food beyond mere sustenance.
I know you’ve been promised solutions before and you may feel hopeless. This time is different because I have thousands of case studies from all types of women that prove resetting metabolic hormones works. I’m asking you to trust me until you can see it for yourself.
Your body is sending you divine messages that desire to be decoded, understood, processed, and assimilated. Listen. Your body is not lying to you. When you trust the signals from your body as truth and allow them to guide your choices, you become like a windmill that generates renewable and clean energy for the power grid. It’s an alchemical shift when you get lean from cell to soul, and I’ve learned—as a seasoned gynecologist and scientist—that there is unlimited potential for you to feel brimming with energy, fun, and passion when you truly understand how to nourish the female body. I have one word to describe it: grace.
As you may know, grace does not easily coexist with chronic stress, a muffin top, or high blood sugar. When you reconstitute internally and change your ecosystem, you transform externally, and it’s palpable. You’ll look, feel, and become biologically younger. There’s a bounce in your step. You switch to the “lean” position instead of the “fat” position. Obstacles to weight loss melt away. Loving people are attracted to you. You know the type I’m referring to: the people who make you feel more fully yourself.
If you don’t heed the call your body is sending to you—in the form of weight gain, belly fat, fatigue, and feeling old before your time—there may be repercussions. A subtle biochemical downshift may take over your body, showing up as food addiction, shame, regret, prediabetes, chronic pain, autoimmune conditions, depression, grief, and the deepest sadness of what might have been. Why wait? The Hormone Reset asks you to evolve in two essential ways: to eat in a way that is aligned with your female genetics (the cellular method) and to integrate the physical aspects of this food plan with your psychology and spirituality (the soul method).
You can no longer afford merely to go through the motions of living: the dysfunction in your work, the porous boundaries with your kids and work, the ailing relationship with your partner, the lack of meaning in your job, or the high-stress lifestyle that has taken over your life. It’s time to turn your struggles around with a feeling of certainty about your body and future. Most of our beliefs are generalizations about our past, based on painful experiences and a lack of success. Many of us don’t decide in a fully conscious and empowered way what to believe, and we get stuck with beliefs that are limiting and unnecessarily constricting. Over the next three weeks, we will take on these limiting beliefs and habitual patterns, and swap them for something far better. I did it, and you can too.
Like many of you, I have struggled to be lean most of my life. I feel fortunate that through circumstance—combined with luck and the application of my medical knowledge—my struggle with weight and food ended when I was in my thirties.
I first gained weight when I was about ten years old. I craved sugar, especially my grandmother’s chocolate chip cookie dough. My grandmother told me that the dough contained raw eggs so I shouldn’t eat it. But I didn’t listen. It’s my first memory of considering an adult’s opinion about nutrition and dismissing it in favor of the taste of food. Taste trumped wisdom. I wanted to stop but couldn’t. In that moment, I became a food addict.