The Hormone Reset Diet (14 page)

Do you have high blood pressure (systolic greater than 140 or diastolic greater than 90)? Have you been told you have heart disease or atherosclerosis?

Do you have a fasting insulin level that is greater than 5 µIU/mL (micro international units per milliliter)?

• If you have five or more of these symptoms,
you are very likely insulin resistant, and I urge you to address this hormone imbalance quickly, since it puts you at significant risk for prediabetes and diabetes.

•
If you have four or fewer of these symptoms,
you might have insulin resistance, and I recommend asking your doctor for a blood (serum) test of your fasting glucose and insulin. Even better, request a two-hour glucose/insulin test.

You can reset your insulin pathway within seventy-two hours if you follow the rules. This is not just my opinion; it’s based on rigorous science.
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That’s right, you can step into the grace of metabolic intelligence in a mere three days. You will train your body to be the fat-burning machine you’ve always wanted. Grace is your birthright, and what I’ve observed in twenty-plus years of medical practice is that it is given to humans who earn it. You can earn it too.

Hormones are a vital part of our body’s cell-to-cell communication and response system. When that system breaks down, many problems occur. Eighty percent of the time that includes weight gain, according to a quantitative survey I’ve performed among my patients.

Insulin and its receptors fit together like a key fits into a lock. How do you know when your insulin hormones and receptors don’t fit well? Here’s an easy test: lift up your shirt and look at your belly. If yours could be mistaken for Jennifer Aniston’s, your insulin is probably fine. If your stomach is spilling over your yoga pants (or you just prefer to wear yoga pants so that you don’t have to squeeze into your jeans), it’s time to reset your insulin so that it’s in the target zone.

Insulin is the gatekeeper of many other hormones of metabolism, which is why I put the Sugar Free reset second, after the easy win of Meatless. High insulin leads to estrogen dominance, and it also raises testosterone too high, which may make weight-loss resistance
worse. Additionally, insulin is a cousin to leptin, the hormone made in your fat cells that tells your body, “Darling, put down the fork.” As I’ll explain in chapter 5, leptin signals a sense of satisfaction while eating, and insulin resistance raises leptin levels, eventually leading to leptin resistance, which means you don’t get the signal to stop eating. To correct the problem, you’ll flip the switch on insulin, and you’ll get additional benefits: you’ll improve your estrogen even more than you achieved in our first reset (Meatless), plus you’ll begin to reset your testosterone and leptin.

In the Sugar Free reset, you will dramatically reduce sugar and eat a low-glycemic food plan. This has been shown to reset the lazy insulin receptor and to reset testosterone, which is a hormone that tends to rise with increased stress and insulin resistance.

I hate to tell you bread lovers, but carbohydrates are not essential to survival. The foods that are necessary are healthy fats (such as omega-3s) and clean proteins, which contain certain vital amino acids. But you would survive without carbohydrates.

That doesn’t mean that you need to remove carbohydrates completely. Severe restriction can actually raise your reverse T3, a metabolic hormone that blocks your thyroid receptor (see chapter 7). Severe carb restriction may also raise stress hormones, such as cortisol (see chapter 6). Instead, you should be like Switzerland: in a neutral zone, where you eat enough carbs to prevent problems with your thyroid and cortisol, but not so many that you store more fat, which some call the “carb threshold.”

When you start the Hormone Reset, I want to limit your selection to the slow-burning carbs that come from plants, included in your pound of vegetables per day, plus clean proteins, such as crustaceans, seafood, beans, small servings of nuts, and seeds. Become familiar with how many grams or ounces of carbs you’re taking in. The
neutral zone with carbohydrates varies from person to person, and it has a lot to do with your genetics and how insulin resistant you are, but the target is approximately 20 to 49 grams of slow-burning net carbs per day for weight loss.

Measuring your net carbs was discussed in chapter 2 (page 32): Take the total carbohydrate content of your food and subtract the fiber content. For instance, if you steam 6 ounces of asparagus and eat it, you’re getting 6 grams of carbohydrates plus 6 grams of fiber. So, the net carbs are zero: 6–6 = 0.

See the following chart for more information.

When you’re insulin resistant, you tend to have other hormonal problems, almost like the “buy one, get one free” deal at your local supermarket. High insulin levels make your ovaries secrete more testosterone. Your cells also produce more bad estrogens, and you become leptin resistant. Fortunately, when you start the three-day Sugar Free reset, the other fat-storage imbalances likewise improve.
In fact, a low-glycemic food plan also reduces testosterone and its related hormones by 20 percent, according to research from Australia.
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In this study, a group of twelve men ate a low-glycemic-load food plan (25 percent energy from proteins and 45 percent from low-glycemic carbohydrates). Within seven days, their insulin improved and their testosterone dropped significantly, as measured by the free androgen index.
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Here’s the best news: it’s never too late, and I’ve never found a lost cause in my twenty-plus years of taking care of patients. It’s my aim to meet you where you are and to move you forward slowly or quickly as you reset your hormone receptors.

Foods high in sugar trigger the reward centers of your brain. A perfect storm may occur in people who are vulnerable to food addiction: they eat sugar, resulting in high blood sugar and low dopamine in the brain. When they keep eating sugar, they develop problems with dopamine communication. They need more and more sugary foods to raise their dopamine and feel “normal,” and they experience withdrawal symptoms when they remove sugar.

Women are twice as likely to be addicted to food as men.
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Women tend to diet, restrict, and binge more than men, which seems to trigger the brain to overeat addictively. Interestingly, women with the greatest hormonal upheaval at perimenopause report the highest rates of food addiction.
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When I was a kid, I figured my discernment would improve as I got older. Then as I got older, I realized that my discernment isn’t fancy:
I simply am able to distinguish my inner divine voice from my inner saboteur—the voice of my ego or of grasping.

For the next twenty-four hours, focus on your inner saboteur and its wily ways. Take some time to root out the mental and emotional obstacles, beliefs, and attitudes that may sabotage your success with the Hormone Reset. As you become more familiar with your inner saboteur, you learn there are many ways that voice shows up in your life. What does your inner saboteur say to you? When is the voice the loudest? Or is there some other way that you can become more intuitive about this aspect of yourself regarding food? To get you thinking, here is Doreen’s example:

Noticing how your inner saboteur undermines you is the first step! Next, we will start the process of how to quiet the saboteur and then swap the harmful voice for faith, trust, ideologies, and convictions that are more aligned with your personal food code. What’s fascinating is that most people don’t even realize they have this inner voice until they slow down and listen. We are so sure these stories are true. I’m here to tell you that the saboteur is smart—but you are smarter! With a little introspection, you can start to tell your saboteur that you are sick of its stories and have chosen a truer path of intuitive health.

In
Emotional Freedom,
Judith Orloff, M.D., talks about that intuitive state between wakefulness and sleep when negative or spooky “waking dreams” can besiege you. She says you have the right to tell them to stop. “It’s fine to ignore them or insist they desist, either inwardly or aloud,” she writes.
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Apply that same intelligence to your saboteur!

Insulin is one of seven crucial hormones (estrogen, leptin, cortisol, thyroid, testosterone, and growth hormone are the others) that collectively determine your metabolism, or how fast or slow you burn calories. When your cells become resistant to insulin, your body is programmed to raise your insulin levels higher and higher. This is troubling because these hormones regulate your metabolism, and “higher and higher” hormones do not lead to a faster metabolism. In fact, chronically elevated hormone levels signal that your feedback loops have gone rogue.