The Hormone Reset Diet (22 page)

I often look to other cultures to see their perspective on stimulants like coffee. In ayurveda, the five-thousand-year-old Indian system of natural healing and traditional medicine, coffee overactivates your mind and takes you further from the goal of balance, which should be felt as the stilling of the mind. Ayurveda translates as the science of life, and at the root of balanced living is optimal digestion of not just physical nutrients but emotional and spiritual food as well. When you are in a state of balance, your nervous system and endocrine system perform well without stimulants and your energy is consistent. No roller coaster. Just a sustained, buoyant feeling of energy and optimism, and it rests on the key circadian driver of deep sleep each night. This is called the
sattva,
the ideal state of calm and equilibrium.

In Chinese medicine, you are born with a fixed amount of energy, known as prenatal chi, which you received from your parents. Your prenatal chi cannot be supplemented; it can only be conserved. Coffee depletes your natal chi. Because of the difficulty of giving up coffee and the importance of resetting cortisol, I recommend “left nostril breathing,” which my friend and Harvard psychologist Sharon Melnick calls “back-to-sleep” breathing.

Coffee makes you more reactive, meaning that you’re less able to hit the pause button before you react to some emotional trigger. Besides the weight loss you can expect when you quit coffee, another benefit is that you can more easily shift from being reactive to being proactive, which is a cardinal sign of stress resilience, emotional growth, and psychological maturity.

Being reactive is good for grim conditions, such as hunting wild animals for sustenance or self-defense. But it’s not good for enduring relationships, a happy marriage, satisfying parenting, personal
growth, quality of life, or—for our purposes—achieving and maintaining lean body mass. As my colleague Rick Hanson taught me, reactivity makes us “overlearn from bad experiences and underlearn from good ones”: we’re Teflon for positive experiences and Velcro for negative ones. Being reactive, or triggered emotionally like a cornered animal, feels bad and sidelines your ability to tap into more advanced emotional resources. It leads to overeating, drinking too much alcohol, watching too much TV, maybe even using shopping as a balm. Most of all, reactivity limits your body’s repair mechanisms, which are essential to keeping you in physical and emotional balance.

Left nostril breathing can help you get a handle on your reactivity. Do it when you wake up too early or are in a potentially explosive situation.

Here’s how to do it:

• Cover your right nostril with your right thumb, and inhale through your left nostril while counting slowly to ten.

• Hold your breath for another count of ten.

• Move your right ring finger to cover your left nostril, release your thumb to uncover your right nostril, and exhale through your right nostril while slowly counting to ten.

• Inhale through your right nostril while counting slowly to ten.

• Hold your breath for another count of ten.

• Move your thumb back to cover your right nostril and exhale through your left nostril while slowly counting to ten.

• Repeat this sequence three times.

When you are resetting your cortisol pathway, you need to perform “adaptive” exercise so that you don’t raise your cortisol even further
and fry your hardworking adrenal glands. As you know by now, cortisol is produced in your adrenals. When you run around with stress overload, certain forms of exercise, particularly running and spinning, raise cortisol. I recommend ChiWalking or jogging instead. The benefit to ChiWalking or running compared with the regular way that you walk or run is twofold: you retain more energy and prevent injury. I’m a runner. In my twenties and thirties, I experienced several knee injuries, including a constantly tight IT (iliotibial) band. At some point, I felt like the impact might be too much on my poor body, and I began to look for ways to avoid further stress. ChiWalking is a great choice if you find walking stale or if walking doesn’t seem to help with losing weight.

Danny and Katherine Dreyer get the credit for knitting together the concepts of tai chi with walking, jogging, and running in their book
ChiWalking.
However, I have to credit my dad for my interest too, because I remember seeing a
ChiRunning
book (also by Danny and Katherine Dreyer) in his study while I was home from college. ChiWalking is different from regular walking because you use your body more efficiently and reduce impact. The magic is in the engagement of your core muscles and the change in the foot strike.
²¹

Here’s a primer on how to do it:

1. Place your feet together, distributing your weight evenly. Wiggle your toes, gently bend your knees, and imagine a triangle of your weight spread evenly between your big toe, little toe, and heel.

2. Align your spine. Put your hand on your heart and lengthen through your crown, to reduce swayback (common for women, which causes low back pain).

3. Keep your chin level with the ground. Look to the horizon, and allow the information that comes in through your eyes to energize you. Relax your eye muscles, and relax your body.

4. Relax your shoulders. Your shoulders are not earrings—they do not belong up near your head, in the vicinity of your earlobes. Let your arms swing from your shoulders, back and forth, like you’re rubbing a volleyball in front of you at belly level.

5. Engage your
dan tien.
Yes, I know it’s a weird, new term, but just focus on this: your
dan tien
is where your life force is centered. It’s in an important place: three fingerbreadths below your navel and two inches deep into your core. Pull your energy into your body, concentrating at that spot, and focus it.

6. Place all your weight onto one leg (this leg becomes your yang). Lift the foot of your other leg, which is now empty of weight (this leg becomes your yin), and move your foot forward to take a natural step. Transfer your weight from your front foot to your back foot, until all your weight is on the back foot. Lift the toes of your front foot and turn it on your heel until the toes point outward at a 45-degree angle, then place your front foot back on the floor and shift weight to your front foot. Pick up your back foot and move it toward your front foot. You are now ChiWalking, sister!

7. Lean forward at the ankles to walk faster.

After you complete your three days of resetting cortisol by going caffeine free, it’s time to focus on the bigger project of resetting your inner clock to lock in your improved metabolism. Studies show the connection between an inner clock gone haywire and getting fat.
²²
What’s the best way to reset your inner clock?

• Get at least twenty minutes of bright sunlight each morning. This helps you make more melatonin, which is another inner clock regulator, along with cortisol.

•
Make bedtime darker by removing from your bedroom all exterior light, alarm clocks, toys, and other electronics with LED lights. The light suppresses your pineal gland (the endocrine gland in the middle of your brain that secretes melatonin).

• Take your vitamins. Melatonin is made in your body from serotonin, and you can make more with the help of a little vitamin B6 and vitamin C. Aim for 50 to 100 milligrams per day of vitamin B6 and 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams per day of vitamin C.

• Actively hit the “pause” button on stress by making it a habit every day to feel and express gratitude or any other positive emotion. I have a favorite app on my iPhone called Inner Balance that helps me do this, or I share a long, lingering hug with someone I love. We know that hugs raise oxytocin, the hormone of love, bonding, and social connection, and it’s your best ally against chronic stress.

After you complete the seventy-two-hour Caffeine Free reset, I urge you to stay off caffeine for the rest of the twenty-one-day Hormone Reset. Many of my clients find that weight loss and maintenance are easier without the battery acid.

There are two tests that I recommend in the Caffeine Free reset: heart rate variability and diurnal cortisol.

I have found that feeling chronically stressed is one of the greatest obstacles to weight loss. Yet most of my patients feel chronically stressed. No wonder they have trouble losing weight! Learning how to de-stress is crucial to reaching your weight-loss goals and being able to dump the caffeine.

Stress is in the eye of the beholder. You might think stress is based on external factors, but it’s your internal response to the external stressors that matters most. The good news is that this inside job creates an exciting opportunity to navigate your response to external factors—that is, your internal landscape is under your control.

I know a woman who has learned a mantra from a teacher informed by Christian and Eastern traditions:
I give up my desire for esteem and affection, for power and control, for security and survival.
Now,
that’s
letting go of the need to react to your emotional buttons.

We all have stressors we can’t control. But you are creating the emotional distress that accompanies chronic stress. Women are wired to take on others’ needs. But I want you to focus on actively de-stressing by not just getting off caffeine but also owning your role in stress, establishing boundaries on what you can reasonably accomplish within your current bandwidth, and applying proven strategies to improve your sleep and reduce your stress load. Detoxifying your food and drink won’t have the full impact if you continue to keep your mind and spirit toxic with your thoughts and emotions. We all need to address the mental, emotional, and psychological toxins in addition to meat, sugar, and caffeine. Getting off coffee is a big step, but you also need to make a point each day to de-stress and reset your cortisol levels. Your body will reward you by repairing your metabolism and losing stubborn fat. I can feel your commitment! And if that commitment wanes, act “as if” and I promise it will become a habit. Amen!