The Hormone Reset Diet (32 page)

Another possibility is taking a particular worry to its utmost conclusion and asking yourself what’s the worst that can happen if one of your worries comes true. Of course that’s not for everyone. Some of us might just worry more.

When we let go of something—negative feelings, an old hurt or wound, something we really needed to say—we feel lighter too. Whether or not you’re trying to lose weight, discharging heavy emotions and petty annoyances leaves you with a lightness. It feels like lifting a weight off your shoulders.

Norman Vincent Peale, author of
The Power of Positive Thinking,
suggested a way of examining your negative emotions. For twenty-four hours, every time you feel frustrated or irritated, write it down—no matter how petty or minor the annoyance. At the end of twenty-four hours, review the list. Does it give you insight into what you need to let go of?

In your journal, write down your negative thought and then your positive counterstatement. Over time, you’ll be able to detox your mind, releasing unnecessary fear and worry. And while you are at it, use that very same journal each night to write down things that went well or things you feel grateful for in your life. Science shows that this process, done repeatedly, will bring you more happiness through simply acknowledging the positive.

Yoga encompasses the belief that we all have an inner fire that needs to be stoked for proper digestion and detoxification. To this end, yoga has many
kriyas,
or cleansing practices, designed to clear the physical and subtle bodies. I love
agni sara,
a
kriya
that burns up impurities in the energy bodies. It’s an advanced practice that is
considered foundational for many yogis:
agni
means “fire,” and
sara
means “essence.” In this practice, you contract the muscles from the floor of your pelvis to your diaphragm while emptying out your breath. The act of creating heat in the internal organs boosts circulation, improves elimination, and releases toxins. These aren’t the only benefits. Working with the core also helps you connect with your center, bring awareness to your breath, and get in touch with your emotions.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Stand in a comfortable position with your feet spread 3 feet apart and your knees bent at 90-degree angles (known as “horse stance”).

2. Bring your hands to your thighs, coming into a slight squat while keeping your back erect, not rounded.

3. Exhale completely. Holding the breath out, contract your pelvic floor and abdomen, “sucking” your belly in and up. The whole front of your body should be contracted and the breath should be emptied out. Pump the diaphragm in and out five times, while still not breathing, keeping all breath out.

4. After the final pump, take a deep inhale and release the contraction.

5. Continue with these exhalations and inhalations, making them as smooth and steady as you can.

6. Repeat the sequence five times, and gradually build up to thirty repetitions.

Your body is designed to detoxify, but sometimes there are roadblocks. In my first book,
The Hormone Cure,
I talked about the importance of organ reserve—the capacity of an organ, such as your liver,
thyroid, or adrenal glands, to function beyond its baseline needs. When it comes to detoxification, the most important organs on your team are your liver, gut, skin, kidneys, fat, and lungs. You can detoxify your lungs with exercise, sweating, and breathing practices. Moreover, it’s worthwhile to test your liver in a simple blood test (performed by most doctors in an annual checkup) called alanine aminotransferase (ALT). The ALT level in your blood is primarily produced in the liver, as well as in lesser amounts in the heart, muscles, kidneys, and pancreas. The ALT level indicates whether the liver is diseased or injured.

“I completed my chemo, radiation, and Herceptin treatment for breast cancer. I had gained weight and lost many other things, my self-esteem and my not-so-bad-looking body and my beautiful hair. My friend recommended your program, and it worked for her! I was ready to look and feel better. Needless to say, I feel great and lost 12 pounds in a delightful way, and I even did it while on vacation!”
—Rhona

“My main reason for going on the [program] was to eliminate unnecessary toxins in my body. In the middle, I experienced serenity and lots of energy. I learned much more than I expected to learn from the program, and Dr. Gottfried does an amazing job in explaining not only what you need to do, but why, and she uses the latest information available today from the best science out there. It is a great learning experience, and you will feel great afterwards.”
—Mark

Courage transforms fear.
I encourage you to use this as a sacred time to clear off the dust and discover how courageous you can be toward yourself. Take an inventory of your fears. Release your fears along with the toxins. Start anew from the powerful, strong center within—a resource you can always count on, no matter what is happening in the external world. Cross the bridge from fear with courage and reach toward your deepest and most heartfelt dreams.

Remember to invite the Divine into your life by setting up a regular practice of prayer—whether it’s attending church, walking in the woods or near the ocean, or just spending quiet time clearing your mind each day.

I suspect you’ll be surprised at how many environmental toxins and synthetic chemicals we expose ourselves to each day. Many of these products are metabolism blockers. It’s important to identify the worst culprits, reduce your exposure, and replace them with healthier alternatives.

Good luck with the Toxin Free reset. I’ve seen profound results when it’s approached with an open heart and mind. When you give yourself permission to release ingrained habits that don’t serve you anymore, integrate what you’ve learned, and honor what is unique for your body, my hunch is that you just might find a profound and renewed connection to your life.

C
ongratulations. You’ve completed a major step in reclaiming your body and your health. At times, it hasn’t been easy. But you did it! After twenty-one days, you are recalibrated, pure, and clean. Before we start reintroducing foods we’ve eliminated, let’s reflect a moment. Take a deep breath, draw in the positive, and revel in all you’ve accomplished. If nothing else, the Hormone Reset Diet shows you that you can get better, smarter, and wiser with age when you develop certain practices that support, rather than diminish, your long-term health.

Now what? Like an astronaut coming back to earth after a successful mission, you can’t just haphazardly step out and hope for the best. You’ve reset your hormones, and we need to protect your new habits. Accordingly, you need to plan carefully for your reentry into the orbit of real life.

I know you can see that the end is near, and you may be tempted to jump ahead and start eating a few “challenge foods” before your body is ready. I strongly urge you to be patient with Reentry, which starts on Day 22 and lasts as long as you need to collect data and integrate the information. (You may need to take more time. Most
people add back three foods only between Days 22 to 30, but duration varies depending on the foods you reintroduce). During this time, you will add back one food at a time and see how your body reacts for three full days. It may just be the most important part of the Hormone Reset. Why? Because you are collecting very important data about your body that will continue to guide your personal food code for months and years to come.

You’ve removed the most allergenic foods and metabolic blockers that make your immune system overreact. You have a sacred opportunity, hard earned, to stay in close contact with the innate wisdom of your body and to learn intimately how it responds to food.

Just as you took three days to reset each hormone and remove the worst food culprits, we will reintroduce only one reset food at a time—and closely observe your response. When you do this, you will cultivate a whole new level of body awareness. Attune to the wisdom of your body. Ultimately, your goal is to act in a way that creates a positive outcome.

The first step in Reentry is creating a personal food code, which states in written form your personal commitment when it comes to food and nourishment.

When you write things down, you will be able to track subtle and tiny adjustments that your body makes in response to food. Remember that you can edit your personal food code during the Reentry phase. It’s a living document that will shift according to your internal and external demands.

In drafting your personal food code, consider how you want to be in relationship to food and health. This is your chance to dream big! The idea is to create your boundaries around food and to live deliberately and aligned with the food guidelines that you’ve established for yourself.

Your personal food code can be short or long. Use bullet points. Call it something that speaks to you: “Manifesto,” “Feminesto,” “Road Map.” As author Dr. Rick Hanson advises, this could be a “handful of words, or dos and don’ts. Whatever its form, aim for language that is powerful and motivating, that makes sense to your head and touches your heart.”
¹
He goes on to suggest that it needn’t be perfect to be of great value and that periodic revisions are highly encouraged.

This is my personal food code that I use as a touchstone for my meal plan. I offer it as an example for you to gain inspiration or to edit for yourself.

• Focus on awareness when it comes to food. Learn to do what’s best for my body, cell to soul.

• Meditate every morning for thirty minutes.

• Approach the planning, shopping, chopping, cooking, and eating as a sadhana, a spiritual practice.

• Choose organic, non-GM, pastured, clean, and best-quality foods that are known to keep my blood sugar balanced. Eat more superfoods, and be mindful of the subtle energetics of the plant.

• Drink more filtered water.

• Write down all meals with portion sizes the night before, and stick to the plan the next day.

• Eat prior to parties and events where the food won’t meet my food code or is unknown.

•
Avoid dairy, gluten, sugar, and grains. (I’m intolerant.)

• Take three deep, lower-belly breaths, inhaling the aroma of the food, before taking the first bite.

• Listen attentively—specifically, put the fork down and chew (chew a lot!). Stop eating when I’m 70 percent full.

• Model healthy eating for my children and my community.

Keep revisiting, revising, and updating your food code over time so that it truly works for you. When you overindulge or eat foods that are best avoided, recalibrate. Record what helps you get back on track. Record what derails you. Keep refining so that your food code is like your code of ethics around food—your bottom line when it comes to creating your best health.

It’s essential that you continue to foster mind–body alignment as you progress through Reentry. In the ongoing dialogue between food and your body, you may learn in this phase exactly what foods must be eliminated from your long-term food plan. About ten years ago, when I first went through the elimination diet that became the Hormone Reset, I was very sad to learn that I can’t tolerate gluten or dairy. Even more sadly, I found that I couldn’t cheat at all. There is something very beautiful and solemn about listening to the will of your body, instead of imposing the will of your mind onto your body.

In my experience, there are three different mind-sets that happen during Reentry.

•
Easy Peasy.
Some people who go through Reentry add back one challenge food at a time, taking three days to listen to how the body responds, and they don’t have any adverse reactions that signal intolerance. Minimal detective work is needed.

•
Let’s Get This Going, Already.
Others get impatient and add back two foods at a time, such as cheese and grains. Then they gain weight or experience bloating and gas, but don’t know which food was the trigger. They lost the benefit of the clean slate, since it’s impossible to know which challenge food was the problem.

•
More Challenging than Expected.
Still others notice that they become addicted again when they reintroduce their challenge food, and they see the breakdown in their body awareness—the disconnect between mind and body as they add a food back into the matrix—especially sugar, or liquid sugar in the form of alcohol. Your body may send you the divine message that the challenge food isn’t digesting well or you can’t tolerate it, but your mind doesn’t want to adjust. This situation requires the most detective work, curiosity, and body awareness.

In each situation, you can use key questions:
How is this food talking to me? What is it trying to teach me?
Normally the food–body conversation is one-way:
I need to eat X for dinner.
But it turns out the food–body conversation is two-directional. Listen closely, and you might be surprised at what you hear.

The idea of reintroducing food after an elimination diet is not novel. The process of elimination and provocation is the gold standard when it comes to identifying allergenic foods. Yet for harried modern women, what is new is body awareness, plus a newfound ability to adjust and tweak in response to the subtle effects of food on the female body. This calibration of finer reactions allows you to personalize your food so it suits you best. Indeed, it is your path to personal power around food and weight, and it is the secret to staying lean and sustaining your progress.

Remember the Chinese proverb: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day;
teach a man to fish
and you feed him for a lifetime. Similarly, at this point in the program, it won’t serve you for me to tell you what to do and for you to robotically go through the motions while ignoring the reactions of your body. That would be giving you the fish, but the female body is not one-size-fits-all. Your best food program is a complex mash-up of your biological age, stress, mind–body practices, life stage, genetics, metabolic rate, fitness level, and vulnerabilities and strengths.

Instead of simply receiving the fish, accept my invitation to evolve and become wiser about how food affects your body, hormones, and weight. Now that you have a clean slate, you’re ready to learn to fish with the process of trial, tweak, and triumph. It will allow you to get in touch with your food truths, and very few people have this blessed chance to learn about how food talks to their biology. I revere this moment in time now that you’ve completed your Hormone Reset. I challenge you to hit the pause button and become completely present to it before you race back to business as usual.

Now that you’ve cleaned up your food, removed the most common food irritants, and broken your addictive patterns, another opportunity before you is to upgrade the nutrient density of the foods you choose to keep in your food plan. I encourage you to turn to the highest quality protein and vegetable sources to get the nutrient density you need.

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s …
superfoods!
These foods are just as exciting as they sound: foods that are superconcentrated with nutrients and thought to boost the immune system, increase energy, and create balance in the body. You might have heard of them: cacao, maca,

raw hemp, sea vegetables, bee pollen, and medicinal mushrooms, to name a few.

These super allies, found at your local health food store, are said to lower your cholesterol, reduce your risk of cancer, and boost your mood.
²
What’s the deal with the super magic of these superfoods? The superfoods are rich in the subtle energy and intelligence of the plant kingdom, the undefiled nutrients from the freshest possible sources that go directly from a farm to you. Here are my favorite superfoods:

• oysters

• wild-caught salmon

• turkey

• blueberries

• broccoli

• oranges

• tomatoes

• pumpkin

• greens such as kale, chard, and spinach

• green tea

• walnuts

• yogurt

The functional medicine expert and acupuncturist Chris Kresser, one of the most articulate and thoughtful leaders in the Ancestral Health movement, taught me a lot about the Paleo diet, such as that all organisms are designed to adapt and survive in a particular environment. If the environment changes faster than the adaptation, there’s a mismatch, which may lead to negative consequences. This is not just his synthesis but the fundamental rule of evolutionary biology. Therefore, there’s a certain diet that humans are fairly well adapted to eat: fish, wild game, pastured and clean meat, vegetables, sweet
potatoes, seeds, and nuts. About ten thousand years ago, the rise of agriculture introduced us to grains, legumes, alcohol, and dairy.

This explanation led to a major aha moment for me. I realized that some of us (myself included) aren’t well adapted to these Johnny-come-lately foods. While some of us do fine with them, I’m intolerant. When I eat them, I damage my gut, become inflamed, and gain weight. Now that we are in Reentry, I’ll ask you: How well adapted you are to consuming meat, grains, legumes, alcohol, and dairy?

The time has come. You need to take the slow descent back into the atmosphere. Take a final check before all systems go. It’s time to begin your Reentry, the essential piece of the puzzle in discovering your food intolerances and allergies.

REENTRY RULES

You will be reintroducing one food at a time and observing your response for three days. Here are the steps for a smooth Reentry:

1.
Draft your personal food code in your journal.

2.
Choose your challenge food
—the one you had the hardest time giving up or craved the most. Keep in mind what my friend JJ Virgin, author of
The Virgin Diet,
taught me: sometimes the hardest food to give up and the one you miss the most is the one that you’re most reactive toward, either as a slow-down for your metabolism or as a food intolerance or allergy.

3.
Eat your challenge food at one meal,
beginning on Day 22. Eat the food again on Day 23 and Day 24—ideally at the same meal and only once per day.

4.
Trial, tweak, and triumph.
Watch your response to the food for three days, including the food–mood connection, what happens
in your gut (bloating, gas, bowel movements, gurgling), to your body (discomfort, aches and pains), and to your pulse. Use the techniques and measurements I’ve described throughout the book, including weight, blood sugar, pulse, and food–mood journaling.

5.
Once you have carefully taken stock of your reactions
over three days, pick the next challenge food to test during the second set of three days.

6.
For those of you who want to take the reintroduction more slowly,
that’s fine. Just don’t go more quickly. Some people need to be on an elimination diet longer to reap benefits like weight loss and improved blood sugar. There is no one-size-fits-all, but the most important priority is attuning to what is true for you.

7.
You don’t need to reintroduce all foods.
For instance, I know that I can’t eat dairy, grains, or sugar. In my case, I will first reintroduce berries on Day 22 and trial, tweak, and triumph. On Day 25, I might eat grass-fed beef. On Day 28, I may drink a small glass of wine. As previously mentioned, your length of reentry will vary depending on how many foods you reintroduce.