The Hormone Reset Diet (13 page)
Read The Hormone Reset Diet Online
Authors: Sara Gottfried
May you be filled with loving-kindness.
May you be happy.
May you be full of grace.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.
Next, recite again for yourself:
May I be filled with loving-kindness.
May I be happy.
May I be full of grace.
May I be healthy.
May I live with ease.
For folks who’ve been practicing loving-kindness, it doesn’t feel complete unless you extend the blessing to someone you’ve had a conflict with. Add a final phase of the meditation to someone you hold anger or resentment toward:
May you be filled with loving-kindness.
May you be happy.
May you be full of grace.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.
I have great news for those of you who hate to exercise! During the Meatless reset, I want to kick-start your metabolism with a simple goal:
sit less.
Rather than sweating for additional hours at the gym, begin to reset estrogen (and insulin) by sitting 90 minutes less each day. Several recent studies confirm the wisdom of reducing sedentary time—and even suggest it might be better than a vigorous workout.
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These studies looked at patients with insulin resistance and found that the people with the least amount of time spent sitting, including time sitting at your desk or watching television, had lower blood sugar and cholesterol levels in addition to other risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The
benefit to health persisted for those who sat 90 minutes less than the control group, even after adjusting for time spent exercising.
While these studies do not prove a cause and effect between sitting less and reversal of estrogen dominance and insulin resistance, they suggest that we may need to redesign the current recommendations of 150 minutes of vigorous exercise per week for people with diabetes and ideally one hour per day (according to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and the International Association for the Study of Obesity). Vigorous exercise does help your mood, energy, brain, and focus, but it plays only a minor role in weight loss because it boosts appetite.
Here’s how I sit less:
I write a lot, and for now, that means I’m mostly sitting. But before I sit, I do a set of twenty-five push-ups or twenty-five jumping jacks.
When I talk on the phone, I never sit. I walk around and climb the stairs in my home or office. It brings a whole new understanding to “phone it in.”
Increasingly, I work at a stand-up desk. (My husband built one for me for less than $30, called an Ikea hack.)
When I sit, I work in sprint–recovery cycles. I set a timer on my smartphone that rings after fifty minutes, and I get up and move for ten minutes. Sometimes I sprint a few blocks near my home or perform a wall sit or do a few abdominal crunches.
Drink lots of filtered water—60 or more ounces per day—which will make you get up to pee once an hour.
Consider getting a treadmill desk! Many of my lean friends have one, and the idea is that you walk slowly while working at a standing desk. My brother-in-law just explained to me how to build one on the cheap, and it’s easier than you might think.
Swing a kettlebell! I learned this one from Tim Ferriss, author of the
New York Times
bestseller
The 4-Hour Body.
Make sure you have good form by learning from an expert how to swing these heavy devices (mine weighs 35 pounds) so you don’t injure yourself.
Based on your response to the self-assessment at the beginning of the chapter, you can start your estrogen reset without getting any laboratory testing beforehand. Your Meatless reset should improve your estrogen levels within seventy-two hours, but I’d like you to stay meatless (and alcohol free) for the full twenty-one days of the program. If you are not making the progress you had hoped for, consider talking to your practitioner about additional testing, such as your progesterone-to-estradiol ratio. Ask your clinician to measure your estradiol, the main estrogen, and your progesterone levels in your blood or saliva. You don’t need a doctor’s prescription in most locations.
“I’m utterly amazed at the person staring back at me in the mirror. I have lost weight and inches, but more amazingly, I feel so good. My skin is clear, my mood is steadier, my clothes are looser, and I feel energized to exercise. Now that I’ve gotten rid of my cravings, I feel like I can accomplish even more! I see each meal as an opportunity to nourish my body and not as an emotional experience to smooth the edges of a stressful day. Weekly (daily!) indulgences of dessert and wine don’t appeal to me. I feel so empowered to make choices that make me feel good each and every day! Although I still feel I have too many stressors in my
life, I feel totally equipped to handle them, and if my ‘to do’ list isn’t finished, I am not defeated.”
—Linda
“For the first time in thirty years, I have started to lose weight. Previous to the first [Hormone Reset], I would sit at a level of going up and down in a 5-pound range. Now I am losing weight each week. I lost 12 pounds during the first [round] and 6 pounds this [round]. I did not put any weight back on after [my first time], and I am sure I will continue to lose pounds because I now have much better eating habits and understanding [of] what foods the body needs to be healthy. To me, as a breast cancer survivor, I feel like I have the world by the tail and that I have a great many happy and healthy years ahead.”
—Judith
“I’m pretty darn proud of having gone off the sugar and caffeine early and sticking with it! (Not to mention my pride in staying on the wagon since Day 1!) I am going to take the money I save from buying cocktails and buy myself something pretty when I hit my goal.”
—Jeanine
Recent research shows that an important way to reverse estrogen dominance in women is to connect with others. Closeness with a husband, partner, or girlfriend has been shown to raise progesterone levels in women, which ameliorates estrogen dominance. This makes sense to me, because I know that one of the best ways for stressed women to shift to a more proactive, energized, and buoyant mind-set is to connect with others, particularly women. This discovery explains why women “tend and befriend” as an effective way to cope with stress.
Care for yourself by making sure you take time out of your busy schedule to connect with your family and friends. This kind of attention will pay dividends to your well-being. You are worth it.
Sugar Free
INSULIN RESET:
Days 4 to 6
W
e all know the problem with sugar. It’s addictive. It’s bad for your teeth. It makes you lethargic, cranky, and enslaved. It feeds the bacteria in your gut that make you hang on to fat, which then makes you gain even more fat. But you might not understand that sugar is the main reason you can’t fit into the form-fitting dress you wore a few years ago. It’s not that you are eating too many calories and not exercising enough. It is far more likely that you can’t zip the dress because you have insulin resistance, where your cells become numb to insulin. Why does this matter? Because insulin can control whether a calorie makes you fat. It’s another important example of how hormones dictate what your body does with food. Current science suggests that a calorie of carbohydrate is more fattening than a calorie of protein or fat because of the effect on insulin. Too many of the wrong carbs cause insulin resistance. In fact, the solution to lasting weight loss is to maintain normal insulin levels.
Got your attention? Let me explain. Insulin is a hormone in charge of how you derive energy from the foods you eat. Your body runs on glucose, and insulin is one of the master switches. When serving you properly, insulin takes the glucose from the occasional cupcake you
eat and stores it in the cells of the liver and muscles as glycogen—a storage form of glucose that can be broken down readily when you need fuel. You are filling up your tank with the gas it needs to run, and sometimes an aggregate of several thousand glucose molecules are kept in the glycogen storage space, like stacking Legos, depending on your fitness. But the catch is that you can only store a small amount of glycogen at any given time. When you eat a cupcake or two every day, there may not be room left in your tank to store the glucose as glycogen. Then insulin turns devious, transforming from a fat-
burning
hormone into a fat-
storage
hormone once the glycogen storage tank is full. Day in and day out, you are stuck converting carbohydrates into fat instead of using it for the fuel you desperately need, and storing the fat in your liver, waistline, and other organs. That’s why so many women find themselves in a frustrating cycle of being 10 to 40 pounds (or more) overweight, lacking in energy, unable to zip the hot dress, and feeling hopeless.
Is insulin the reason you, like millions of other women, can’t lose weight? Together we will figure it out. But I’m here to tell you that sometimes weight loss is a simple matter of resetting your insulin. I know many of you might say I’m asking the impossible. If you can’t imagine life without your bars of chocolate stashed in your desk drawer, glove compartment, and purse, I understand. I’ve been there. But I implore you: you can do this for three days. And when you do, you’ll find your sugar addiction broken and the pounds melting away.
Insulin resistance is the most common hormonal reason I see in my medical practice for slow metabolism and weight gain in women. To see if you fit into this category, check off which symptoms apply to you or have occurred in the past six months.
Do you crave sweet foods? Do sweet foods calm you down?
Have you tried to stop eating sweets but found you couldn’t? Is it difficult to stop eating carbohydrate-rich foods, such as chocolate, ice cream, or french fries?
Have you been told your blood sugar is higher than normal, or do you know that it is greater than 85 mg/dL (milligrams per deciliter)?
When you go without eating for more than three hours, do you feel shaky, anxious, or irritable?
For women, is your waist measurement 35 inches or greater (at the belly button)? For men, greater than 40 inches?
Do you have a body mass index greater than 25? (To calculate, see Measurement #2: Body Mass Index, Waist-to-Height Ratio, and Basal Metabolic Rate, page 27).
Have you been told that you have polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a condition that includes irregular periods, acne, increased hair growth, and sometimes infertility and cysts on the ovaries?
Do you have difficulty losing weight? Do you gain weight easily, maybe even aggressively?
When you skip a meal, do you feel fatigued and/or cranky?
Do you exercise three times per week or less?
Have you been told you have low HDL (good) cholesterol and/or triglycerides?