The Hormone Reset Diet (21 page)

• activates cellular repair and mends injury;

• normalizes cortisol levels during the day (and the corollary: one bad night of sleep raises cortisol);
⁹
and

• improves memory.

One study showed that women who sleep five hours or less per night weigh more
but eat less
than women who sleep seven hours or more. Clearly, if you want to master your weight, you must master your sleep.

Exercise, relaxation techniques, bedtime rituals—all of these plus the Hormone Reset Diet helps with insomnia. There are countless websites and many books on sleep. One recommended to me that focuses on cognitive behavioral therapy is
Say Good Night to Insomnia
by Gregg D. Jacobs, an insomnia specialist at the Sleep Disorders Center at the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center. Here are a few of his suggestions:
¹⁰

• Get out of bed within a half hour of the same time each day—even weekends—regardless of how much or little you slept.

• Exercise by taking a brisk walk about three or more hours before bedtime, which will improve your sleep by causing a greater rise and fall in your body temperature.

• Boost your exposure to morning sun (around ten
A.M.)
to establish a more consistent circadian rhythm and increase melatonin.

Burnout occurs when life demands and chronic stress exceed your coping, which may lead to a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. You may be surprised to learn that emotional eaters
overeat
in response to stress, whereas normal eaters
undereat
in response to stress.
¹¹
Burnout is an important precursor to emotional eating, uncontrolled eating, and weight gain.
¹²
We know your eating patterns affect whether you gain weight and become obese. Stressed people crave sugar, fat, salt, and alcohol. When your life or work burns you out, there’s a much greater likelihood of disordered eating in a misguided attempt to reverse sadness, loneliness, or boredom. In order to reset normal eating, we need to address the root causes of burnout, which can include unrelenting stress, wayward cortisol, fatigue, dependence on coffee, perceived lack of control, and even loss of self-respect.

Let’s summarize: When you get stressed, cortisol rises, you overeat, you drink coffee, cortisol rises higher, and then you get fat. Stress makes most women become hypervigilant and struggle with sleep. Coffee, excess cortisol, and even cortisol resistance are the most common hormonal reasons for slow metabolism in women.

We hear all sorts of conflicting information about the benefits and drawbacks of caffeine. You might be wondering just how harmful your cup of coffee is to your health, especially if you’re addicted and feeling skeptical about why you need to cut it out of your food plan. I’m here to set the record straight on caffeine and weight, and settle once and for all why you must give up your beloved caffeine for the next three days and for the remainder of your Hormone Resets.

The problem with caffeine is that most people consume too much,
then show signs of toxicity. How much is too much depends on your age, your cortisol levels, your stress resilience, and how you process caffeine. For the average adult, toxicity occurs at 500 to 1,000 milligrams. Lower doses may cause toxicity if you metabolize caffeine slowly. Furthermore, the cascading hormonal effects from caffeine add to stress and sugar cravings. I know that you coffee worshippers may take offense. Let’s start with an objective look at where we are right now with respect to the scientific answer to the question “Cuppa joe—yes or no?” (For citations, go to www.HormoneReset.com/bonus.)

Bottom line? All of us benefit from taking time off from caffeine and seeing what happens—to our sleep, weight, and energy.

We know coffee isn’t the only culprit when it comes to our nation’s amped-up stress boosters. You can suffer from caffeine toxicity in many ways. We drive ourselves hard and expect our bodies to meet every demand we heap upon them. But sometimes this backfires, particularly when you reach a certain threshold of caffeine. Furthermore, your safe level of caffeine and your liver’s ability to detoxify you from caffeine declines with age and with liver congestion. Your cortisol levels naturally rise with age; a person of sixty-five has far higher levels of circulating cortisol than a twenty-five-year-old, and drinking caffeine may contribute to menopausal weight gain.

When you drink too much caffeine, you’re robbing your own bank. The theft results from the high biological cost of overstimulation, excess production of stress hormones, and ultimately, depleted reserves of your adrenal glands. When you’re overweight and stressed, the scorecard favors periodic removal of caffeine.

It’s time to stop robbing your body’s bank: eliminate caffeine and reset cortisol immediately. Try it for the remainder of the twenty-one
days. You might like how you feel so much that you continue, and I strongly urge you to do so.

CAFFEINE FREE RULES: DO THESE EACH DAY

Follow these simple yet powerful rules to reset your stress and cortisol levels, and remember to continue the rules you’ve already implemented from the previous resets:

1.
Eliminate all caffeine.
This includes coffee, black tea, green tea, soda, and energy drinks.
Caffeine Alternatives List:
Hot water with lemon and cayenne, hot water with cardamom, herbal teas, mushroom teas (see Resources).

2.
Continue eating one pound of vegetables per day,
along with healthy, plant-based fats and proteins and small servings of low-glycemic fruits.

3.
Keep your net carbs between 20 and 49 grams per day.

When you’re overweight and highly sensitive to caffeine and cortisol, it doesn’t matter if you have two cups or ten cups of caffeine; the drawbacks are similar.

• A typical 8-ounce (240-milliliter) cup of instant coffee contains about 100 milligrams of caffeine—about twice as much as a cup of tea or a 12-ounce (360-milliliter) can or bottle of soda.

• One ounce of dark chocolate contains 12 milligrams of caffeine, which is why I suggest that you eat no more than one ounce of dark chocolate (80 percent cacao or higher) but skip the coffee.

SAMPLE MENU

Here is a suggested menu for resetting your cortisol. For nutritional data, check out the Notes section.
¹³

When you remove your upper, you won’t need your downer—otherwise known as alcohol. But as a woman of a certain age, I need a periodic reminder of why it’s not a good idea to pour a glass of wine at six P.M.

Alcohol raises your cortisol level and makes you more stressed, not less. Sure, there’s the little buzz at the beginning, and who doesn’t love that? But it’s another hijacker of the restorative sleep you need to clean up the metabolic mess that you’re in. It also raises breast cancer risk, even at low doses of as little as three glasses of zin per week.

You will not be surprised to learn that alcoholics have a problem with the stress-response loop in their bodies, particularly in the hippocampus, the part of the brain where you perform memory organization and consolidation, plus emotional regulation.
¹⁴
Not only does the brain shrink and stop rewiring, but also, when you drink more than two servings per day, 639 genes are changed for the worse. Why should you care about the 639 genes? They regulate vitally important functions, such as the actions of the cortisol receptor (known more generally as the glucocorticoid receptor), mineral transport (such as zinc, performed by the SLC39A10 gene), and inflammation (IL1R1).

The bottom line: keep your fat loss going by resetting your cortisol, and stay off alcohol through the full twenty-one days of your Hormone Reset. If you need some concrete ways to help you, see Ways to Wean Yourself Off Alcohol in chapter 3 (page 65).

1.
ChiWalking.
Lose weight, strengthen your core, and improve your posture—all before breakfast! Check out the Exercise section (page 141) for instructions.

2.
Sun salutations.
There’s no better way to wake up than saluting the sun! Go to a beginner’s yoga class or follow the instructions on my YouTube channel.

3.
Bellows breathing.
This energizing yogic breathing is better than any upper. Inhale and exhale fast through your nose, with your mouth shut. Aim for one to three breath cycles per second, and continue for ten to thirty seconds. Your breath duration in and out should be equivalent, but as short as possible, like a bellows. Don’t be afraid to make some noise.

4.
Meditation.
News flash! Meditation isn’t the same as sleeping or just some woo-woo way to focus the mind. On the contrary, a short meditation can leave you feeling energized and alert, and it’s a killer swap for caffeine. Find a comfortable cross-legged position and take a few deep breaths. Then slowly start to breathe normally. When thoughts arise, simply bring your awareness back to your breath.

5.
Five minutes of burst training.
You don’t need anything fancy to get your morning blood flowing. Do twenty-five push-ups, really taking time with the “down” part of the push-up, and practice staying present with what you see while you get your heart moving.

6.
Five minutes of fun-factor cardio.
There’s no excuse not to do five minutes of fun cardio at home. Blast some Taylor Swift, run up and down the stairs, anything that gets you a little sweaty will do. Just don’t overdo it.

When it comes to your caffeine-free reset, I recommend supplements that increase your metabolic rate safely without overstimulating your nervous system, a side effect I often observe with weight-reduction
formulas that contain caffeine. One of my favorite supplements is decaffeinated green tea extract. Here’s why: your risk versus benefit from caffeine is subject to your own individual tolerance, and that’s why I believe everybody benefits from taking time off from caffeine and seeing what happens with sleep and weight loss. Green tea clearly has benefits for the majority of people based on the best evidence, but be aware that much of the health improvements with regard to weight loss and insulin sensitivity seems to result from polyphenols—a group of powerful antioxidants from tea leaves—not necessarily from caffeine.
¹⁵
Green tea (
Camellia sinensis
) contains the highest concentration of polyphenols, called catechins.
¹⁶
The most abundant is epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), which is linked to cancer-prevention activity,
¹⁷
lower blood glucose,
¹⁸
reduced risk of heart disease,
¹⁹
and modest weight loss of up to 8 pounds.
²⁰
I recommend EGCG at a dose of 400 milligrams twice per day. You get the benefit without the caffeine.

In my cell-to-soul philosophy, which is informed by Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine, and ayurveda, the urge for caffeine is an important sign that the body, mind, and/or spirit are out of balance. I’ve learned to get curious about cravings and query the deeper message coming from our bodies. You might be burned out, need more social connection and love, need more sleep, or discover that you may not like your work or your spouse. Whatever you learn, you are much more likely to find a source of true energy within yourself that doesn’t deplete your body. You might try a restorative yoga pose like butterfly, a green smoothie, a cup of hot water with fresh lemon and cayenne, a good conversation with a girlfriend, or even an adaptogenic supplement that balances the body. Sources of true energy provide a more modulated ride that doesn’t have
extreme highs and lows, and the result is more-stable blood sugar, fewer sugar cravings, and no more hormonal roller-coaster rides.