The Hormone Reset Diet (15 page)

When your hormones are elevated, your metabolism gets slower and slower, while you get fatter and fatter. This is why you may hear your girlfriends complaining that they’ve been restricting their food intake, exercising like crazy, and surviving on lettuce leaves without losing weight. The insidious hormone-resistance and biological-feedback loop is the root cause of most women’s continued weight gain, belly fat, wrinkles, exhaustion, autoimmune disorders, inflammation, sugar cravings, and even chronic illness.

You may wonder why you’re programmed to become insulin resistant when you overeat certain foods. Like many challenges, the tendency to raise insulin levels excessively and slow down metabolism comes from our ancestors’ feast-or-famine livelihoods, when they had to be able to store excess energy at the time of feasting in order to survive a time of famine. Not only is the survival strategy of preparing for a famine no longer necessary, it backfires. As an achievement-oriented woman with significant drive, I can power my way through a situation and turn on a famine of my own creation. Put another way, I can produce insulin resistance in my own body simply by feeling overly stressed.

The only way to reverse this resistance and reprogram your hormonal levels is to repair and grow new hormone receptors.

This is an exciting idea that hasn’t been fully explored in mainstream
medicine for several reasons. Some of the data on hormone resistance are new. Some of the data on how food can reverse insulin resistance are ignored, in my opinion, because they rely on nutrition as the solution, and most medical schools teach very little nutrition. Personally, I had a total of about thirty minutes in my medical training. In other words, it’s not intentionally omitted by your doctor; it’s simply a lack of education and resulting prioritization. Finally, reversing insulin resistance with the way you eat, move, think, and supplement doesn’t support the financial goals of Big Food and Big Pharma. Big Food wants you eating packaged foods, more carbohydrates than you need, and “hyperpalatable” foods (foods that have been engineered, with added fats, flavors, and additives, to become addictive). Big Pharma then wants your doctor to prescribe many fancy drugs for the problems that develop from eating a Big Food diet.

Food increases blood sugar. Insulin lowers it by escorting glucose, like a bodyguard, into three different places in your body. Insulin is a regulatory hormone, made in the pancreas, that causes cells to absorb glucose from the blood and take it to the liver, muscles, and fat tissue. When insulin is in good working form—not too high and not too low—it sends a small amount of glucose to your liver, a large amount to your muscles to use as fuel, and little to none to your fat storage. When you’re a perfect hormonal specimen, your pancreas produces exactly the right amount of insulin to have your blood sugar softly rise and fall within a narrow range (fasting levels of 70 to 85 mg/dL).

But when you eat too much sugar, your pancreas slows down, and eventually, insulin becomes the overwhelmed bodyguard. Here’s what wears out the bodyguard: eating too much sugar causes wild fluctuations,
both too high and too low, in your blood sugar, and insulin can’t keep up. As a result, your pancreas keeps making more and more insulin. Insulin levels rise chronically high, which is called insulin resistance. Blood sugar then stays high because very little glucose is escorted to the liver and muscles, and most is deposited as fat. In fact, your fat tissue can expand up to four times its size to accommodate the storage of glucose.

There are several ways you can reset insulin’s bodyguard role without using drugs:

• Eat foods that stabilize blood glucose,
i.e., clean proteins, slow-burning carbs, and healthy fats. This will lower your insulin levels into the target zone and is the most effective way to activate insulin (see the Sugar Free reset rules, page 88).

• Exercise
so that your liver and skeletal muscles can store more glucose as glycogen and use it as fuel (see the Exercise section, page 94).

• Take supplements
that help to sensitize your cells to insulin again, and rehab the bodyguard (see the Supplements section, page 92).

Let’s follow the path of a bite of cupcake in order to understand the science of insulin and how it can get out of whack. Normally, you absorb the cupcake into your bloodstream as a sugar, such as glucose. An increase in your blood sugar level triggers your pancreas to make more insulin, which attaches to your cells and removes sugar from your blood so it can be used as energy. Initially, your insulin targets mainly muscle and liver cells.

When you have insulin resistance, your cells have a decreased capacity to respond to insulin. To compensate for the decreased sensitivity
to insulin, your pancreas secretes more insulin to try to grab the attention of the worn-out cell receptors. Higher levels of insulin then create inflammation, make your blood sugar swing from high to low, and cause you to feel hungry soon after eating. When insulin remains high, you are no longer a lean, mean, fat-burning machine. Because your cells cannot absorb the glucose normally, your liver converts the glucose into fat.

Fortunately, insulin resistance is reversible. Even if you feel totally out of control with your sugar cravings, I can help you. That’s because when you cut out sugar, your cravings will heal and your insulin will normalize. Make this important change for yourself.

Keep in mind that sugar is powerfully addictive.
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I put sugar in the same category as addictive drugs like crack or heroin. Take Oreos, for example. One study from Connecticut showed that rats fed the iconic cookie liked it as much as cocaine and morphine.
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When the rats ate Oreo cookies, the pleasure center of their brains, the nucleus accumbens, lit up like a Christmas tree—the same area in the brain that lights up with cocaine. Sugar and cocaine both stimulate the addictive part of the brain with a neurotransmitter called dopamine, known for its role in pleasure and satisfaction. Rats in the study even broke open the cookie to eat the sugary middle first. Still not sure if you’re addicted to sugar? One study showed that 34 percent of people seeking weight loss are food addicts.
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Sugar substitutes fare no better. Indeed, one study suggests that saccharin is eight times more addictive than cocaine.
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Let’s start! Remember, the seventy-two-hour reset is a simple way to take care of the chronic symptoms that plague you, especially fat gain. Each cycle takes a mere three days to reverse and reset
your body’s hormone receptors. Of course, the Hormone Reset is a twenty-one-day program, so as you focus on each reset and tune into the changes that reset brings, you’ll achieve the full benefits of the program by continuing each reset for the balance of the twenty-one days. The Sugar Free reset is one crucial piece of the puzzle.

My clinical experience has taught me that resetting your insulin is the single most important action you can take to lose excess fat. Perhaps you have been trying to lose weight for years, or even decades, leading you to feel hopeless, stuck, and desperate. You are not alone.

You need to cut the sugar. This includes all the usual suspects, such as cakes, cookies, muffins, and soda. If you think you can simply switch to another sweet, addictive substance, sorry again. “No sugar” includes sugar substitutes too, with the exception of stevia. Scrutinize labels because sugar lurks in the most unsuspected places and hides under various names. Look for grams of sugar. With this reset, you’ll be aiming for no more than 15 grams per day, 10 less than the 25 grams per day currently recommended for women by the American Heart Association.

It’s easier than it sounds. Research confirms that you can repair your insulin receptors in seventy-two hours. The seven resets of your Hormone Reset will resynchronize your entire system when performed sequentially and in aggregate.

SUGAR FREE RULES: DO THESE EACH DAY

Follow these simple yet powerful rules to reset your insulin, and continue the rules you’ve already implemented from chapter 3 (Meatless):

1.
Eliminate sugar and sugar substitutes.
Avoid these because they raise your blood sugar: white table sugar, honey, agave, brown sugar, sucralose (Splenda), maple syrup, and molasses. The only sweetener that is permissible is stevia. Limit carbohydrates to only
the slow carbohydrates that don’t spike your insulin, such as sweet potatoes, yams, pumpkin, and quinoa. Stay away from hidden sugars in ketchup, salad dressings, sauces, and packaged cereals. If sugar is one of the first six ingredients, avoid it. Stay off the liquid sugar, including soda, diet soda, juice, lemonade, and alcohol.

2.
Eat one pound of vegetables,
some cooked and some raw. For those of you who are losing steam around eating vegetables, I urge you to keep eating three to four cups (sixteen or more ounces) per day. For instance, eat a salad for breakfast (not as weird as you might think!) or make a frittata with eggs and spinach. Have a salad plus a serving or two of green vegetables at both lunch and dinner. That’s seven servings! The easiest way to accomplish this task is to lightly steam a pot of vegetables, such as broccoli, mushrooms, asparagus, and red bell peppers, every few days and have them on hand to make a salad for lunch and dinner. Aim for low-glycemic vegetables with low starch, not corn (a fruit when fresh, and deemed a grain when dried) or other starchy vegetables. Choose vegetables that are dark, because dark vegetables are low in glycemic index and high in important nutrients. Often it’s more affordable to have a box of organic vegetables delivered from your local farm, which is what I do. I take my greens (kale, collards, spinach) when they first arrive, chop them finely, and store them in a bag in the freezer. Then, as I steam my vegetables I add the greens near the end, or I add them to my salads or to my Hormone Reset shakes.

3.
Eat protein at each meal,
approximately 4 to 6 ounces of fish or chicken, beans, or quinoa. Fill up on legumes, especially the magical white kidney bean, which contains a carb blocker. Aim for a total of 75 to 125 milligrams of protein each day, which is approximately 25 to 45 grams at each of three meals.
Food List:
Lentils (fast cooking!), black beans, pinto beans, white kidney beans, fish (cod, salmon, mackerel, sardines), and free-range, pastured, or organic chicken.

4.
Eat at least every four to six hours.
If you feel like you always need a snack and frankly are willing to eat cardboard after three hours, that’s a clear sign that you are insulin resistant, have blood sugar instability, and need the reset in this chapter! I do not recommend snacks unless absolutely necessary—the goal is to reset your insulin level. And if you feel like you need snacks, it might mean you’re not getting enough protein at meals. If you feel hypoglycemic before four hours have elapsed between meals, drink 8 ounces of filtered water and set a timer for twenty minutes. Try one or more of the Cell to Soul Practice suggestions in any of the chapters 3 through 10. If twenty minutes elapse and you’re still famished, eat ten almonds or walnuts.

5.
Eat one half-cup of low-glycemic fruit
(glycemic index 55 or less), such as berries, avocado, or olives. Banish all other fructose, including the high-glycemic fruits, such as bananas, mangos, and grapes—and wine!
Food List:
Avocado, berries, coconut, olives.

6.
Eat the highest quality, most nutrient-dense organic food
you can afford. Focus on low-glycemic index greens, such as kale, chard, dandelion greens, spinach, and collards.

7.
Eat probiotic foods.
Fermented foods contain natural probiotics, or healthy bacteria, that can take your health to the next level. Not only do they add good bacteria into your stomach and your gut, they’re also powerhouses when it comes to detoxification, especially of heavy metals.
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Nearly every culture has a version of a fermented food: yogurt, kefir, miso, and fermented vegetables, including sauerkraut, pickles, and kimchi.
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Kimchi.
In Korea, the average consumption of kimchi is 40 kilograms per year! The lactic acid that is produced during fermentation of kimchi stops the growth of bad bacteria and is useful in the prevention of conditions such as obesity, diabetes, yeast infections, urinary tract infections, and gastrointestinal cancers. One recent study showed that kimchi improved fasting
glucose and cholesterol levels.
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Nutritionally, kimchi is low in calories and carbohydrates but contains high amounts of fiber, vitamins A and C, and minerals such as calcium and iron.

SAMPLE MENU

Here is a suggested menu for resetting your insulin. For nutritional data, check out the Notes section.
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