The Hormone Reset Diet (12 page)

Food List:
Soaked chia seeds, freshly ground flax seeds, organic vegetables (especially spinach, kale, and other greens), lentils, legumes, low-glycemic fruit (berries), and fiber capsules and powders (to be added to shakes).

3.
Eat good fats.
When you give up toxic meat, you have the opportunity to fill up on healthy fats instead. When I began learning about nutrition in the 1980s, there was a prevailing myth that eating fat makes you fat and clogs your arteries. The truth is that there’s good and bad fat, but it doesn’t break down along the lines that you might think. Saturated fat is not the villain. There are good and bad types of saturated fat, just as there are good and bad types of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). Keep this rule in mind: eat natural, unprocessed fat that’s present in whole foods. Healthy saturated fats include organic coconut oil and virgin red palm oil (not to be confused with red palm kernel oil), which are the best oils for cooking because they are stable at higher temperatures, plus they taste delicious! PUFAs from whole foods make the membranes of your cells more flexible and heal your metabolism. Avoid damaged, industrial PUFAs such as corn, cottonseed, safflower, and soybean oils. For some people, like myself, a variation in the PPARG gene provides weight loss benefits when you consume more of the good PUFAs compared with saturated fat. In other words, I lose weight when I eat fish instead of burgers.

Food List:
Healthy sources of polyunsaturated fats include cold water fish (salmon, halibut, mackerel), crustaceans (oysters, shrimp, crab), borage and evening primrose oil, pastured ghee (clarified butter), nuts and nut oils (pine nuts, walnuts, almonds), poultry and pastured eggs, and seeds (chia, flax, sunflower). Healthy sources of monounsaturated fats include avocados, dark chocolate (80 percent or more cacao), duck fat, nuts and nut butters (macadamias,
cashews, pistachios, pecans), olive oil, avocado oil, macadamia oil, olives, seeds (pumpkin, sesame). Healthy saturated fats come from coconut oil, medium chain triglyceride (MCT) oil, and red palm oil.

SAMPLE MENU

Here is a suggested menu for resetting your estrogen. For nutritional data, check out the Notes section.
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Soy has been popular for more than five thousand years in Asia. Why have we recently demonized it and made the choice to consume soy endlessly confusing? Sometimes I will order tempeh while out to dinner with friends, and they stare at me in horror, convinced that I will become estrogen dominant and develop breast cancer overnight, and that my thyroid will stop working. I disagree: small amounts of whole soy, preferably organic and fermented, have been shown to be a great choice when you go meatless. Allow me to unravel the mysteries of soy and offer sane, evidence-based rules of engagement.

Here are my recommendations:

Avoid GM soy.
Genetically modified (GM) soy crops were widely introduced in 1996, and today up to 94 percent of soy available in American grocery stores has been genetically modified. Unfortunately, there is evidence that GM crops cause harm to your gut, microbiome, sex hormones (including aromatase, which is involved in estrogen synthesis), and insulin. For this reason, I assume GM soy is guilty of harm to your body until proven innocent, and I advise you to avoid it by choosing organic whole soy or soy that is labeled “Non-GMO.”

Eat whole soy.
In Asian countries, people eat moderate amounts of whole soy as part of a healthy diet. In the United States, Big Food pushes weird and highly processed foods under the guise that it’s healthy. Does “soy protein isolate” sound like a good idea? Instead of eating the whole-food version of soy, we try to isolate the “healthy” part, and it may be the reason behind the conflicting results, and by extension, the confusion about whether soy is good or bad for you.
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I recommend eating only whole soy—not the isolates, not the processed version, but fresh soy food, such as organic tofu and edamame.

Eat fermented soy,
such as miso and tempeh. Several recent studies show that fermented soy at a dose of approximately 60 grams per day raises progesterone, lowers cholesterol, and prevents hyperglycemia.
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Fermentation removes genetically modified components.

Short version: Don’t let soy confuse you. Eat whole and non-GM soy, preferably fermented. If your thyroid is slow, limit yourself to two servings of whole soy per week.

When I completed my residency in obstetrics and gynecology in 1998 I was thirty-one and worked at a health maintenance organization (HMO). I was a bit of a purist and thrilled to practice the evidence-based medicine that I’d spent nine long years learning, night and day. I was assigned to a retiring physician and took over his practice of three thousand patients. It stunned me to find that most of them came in for their annual visits requesting Valium and other tranquilizers, so they could sleep and generally cope with a stressful life as a modern woman, and asking for a water pill, so they could deal with their fluid retention.

I was shocked and more than a little judgmental. This wasn’t the evidence-based medicine I had learned at Harvard Medical School and the University of California at San Francisco, where I’d served my residency. I didn’t get it. What was everyone so strung out about? Then I turned thirty-five, and I completely got it.

When women are between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, many lose their sanity. I certainly did.
As
soon as I found myself in my mid thirties with two young kids, I finally understood the “It’s the end of the day; I desperately need a drink to unwind” thing. You grab whatever you can to deal with the slowing metabolism and the growing difficulty coping with your life as you know it—full of bills, screaming children, demanding bosses, and spouses who feel equally spent. A glass of wine seems like just what the doctor ordered.

Not this doctor. I have faith that you can find ways to cope with the mounting stress without resorting to methods that halt your metabolism, use up your goodwill, and raise your bad estrogens. You can do this.

Carl Jung, M.D., the famous psychiatrist, said that a “craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.” He continues: “… ‘alcohol’ in Latin is ‘spiritus’ and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison.” I agree.

So, let’s create wholeness and union with a Higher Power. Start by replacing “I must have a glass of _________ [fill in the blank]” with an alternative, such as “I’m going to try a different strategy that doesn’t pump me full of bad, nasty estrogens.” I love the idea my yoga teacher told me about samskaras, our conditioned patterns that create a groove in our minds. The more you repeat your habituated ways of thinking, the deeper the groove. Samskaras can be good or bad; it just depends on what you repeat. So, when you replace the negative thoughts with positive ones, you are making a new groove. In case you think this is some New Age baloney, I turn to the science
of neuroplasticity, which basically says the same thing: the neurons that fire together, wire together.

My personal favorite exercise is to “take in the good,” which I learned from neuropsychologist Dr. Rick Hanson, author of
Hardwiring Happiness.
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1.
Have a positive experience.
This activates a positive mental state. Choose a positive experience that happened recently and consider it fully. Perhaps it was a physical pleasure, like inhaling roses on a walk, or an emotional pleasure, like feeling close to someone who matters to you.

2.
Enrich it.
Next, install the positive experience in your mind. Get a feeling for how it affected you on a sensory level—associated feelings of wellness, sights, smells, and how it made you feel. Allow yourself to open to the feeling and let it fill your body, mind, and spirit.
As
Dr. Hanson recommends, find something fresh or novel in it. Recognize how it could nourish you, which rewires your brain away from alcohol and toward what is good for you.

3.
Absorb it.
Let the positive feelings from this experience seep into you, providing soothing and calmness, filling you with gratitude and positive emotions. Create the intention that this feeling of being on your own side is sinking into you. Let the good become part of you. Surrender to it—not in a passive manner but in a way that serves your highest good.

This is self-directed neuroplasticity. You are rewiring your brain for pleasure that is not linked to alcohol. Make it a habit by practicing it daily for seventy-two hours.

Along with banishing alcohol and conventional meat, you can help to balance your estrogen levels with supplements, such as vitamin
B12, folate, magnesium, and an amino acid called methionine. These supplements can help produce good estrogens and decrease formation of bad estrogens. But if I had to pick only one supplement to get your estrogen back into balance, it’s fiber: as I mentioned, women should consume 35 to 45 grams per day or more, and it is difficult to achieve those numbers with food alone.

For those of you suffering with hot flashes and night sweats as a result of estrogen imbalance, add Siberian rhubarb to your protocol. It’s been shown in randomized trials—the best-quality evidence—to make women in perimenopause and menopause more comfortable, and it has an excellent safety profile.
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We compartmentalize as a survival instinct. We put health in one compartment, weight in another, relationship in a third compartment, and work in yet another. When it comes to our metabolic hormones, we can’t afford to think of them separately. My hope is that you can integrate how you eat, move, think, and supplement so you can feel whole and alive, and feel that you are reaching your full potential.

My goal for you is to craft the best possible health. If you’ve been struggling with weight, body image, or erratic eating your whole life, I ask you to be gentle and to start with loving and kind words toward yourself. Even if it feels hokey, try it. As I hope you’ve learned by now, many of your health issues don’t stem from the fact that you are weak or lazy or have no willpower. Your body might just need recalibration. So, stop blaming yourself, and put your energy into the positive direction of your own growth and healing.

The Power of Positive Thinking
guru Norman Vincent Peale suggested that you list all your weaknesses, your failures, your doubts—everything negative—on a single piece of paper. On a second page,
list all the good qualities you would like to have. Put away the first piece of paper and keep the second handy in your pocket or purse so you can read it over and over. Make an effort to edit and customize the statements I’ve included in the following meditation so that they work for you. Some people consider them a prayer for wholeness or a way to connect with a Higher Power.

This practice uses intention, words, imagery, and feelings to evoke loving-kindness toward yourself and others. When you repeat the script, you express an intention, planting the seeds of loving wishes.

To practice your loving-kindness meditation, sit comfortably and without distraction. Take five deep breaths with slow, long, and full exhalations.

State to yourself as a mantra the following:

Repeat as many times as you need to in order to feel complete. When you are ready, bring to mind a benefactor, someone it is easy to feel loving-kindness toward—perhaps a child or a pet—someone with whom you have an easy relationship. Have a sense of that being in your heart. Then begin to send blessings to the loved one: