The Hormone Reset Diet (11 page)

Look, if you love meat and/or alcohol, I get it. Frankly, my mouth is watering as I write about grilled burgers. The good news is that by removing meat and alcohol for the next three days, and then continuing for the full twenty-one day program, you can finally lose that stubborn weight. This will initiate a virtuous chain reaction—starting first with estrogen but then later involving other hormones, such as insulin (detailed in chapter 4) and leptin (detailed in chapter 5). It’s time to push the reset button on estrogen—clear out meat, toxins and contaminants, and alcohol—and finally begin to get lean.

We’ve established that estrogen is what makes you feminine. When it’s in the normal zone relative to its counterpart—progesterone—estrogen makes you feel happy, sane, slim, and emotionally connected. These hormones are like fire and ice, and when in balance, progesterone is the ice that keeps the fire of estrogen under control.

My research and experience reveal that the majority of women who struggle with their weight have estrogen dominance, especially after age thirty-five, when progesterone begins to wane. Red meat and alcohol exacerbate the imbalance. Pursuing our analogy further,
there’s too much fire and not enough ice. You make too much estrogen, and not enough progesterone. The increased fire is not a good thing: it creates inflammation in the body that can be hidden but causes fat loss resistance, mood problems, and gut issues.

Estrogen dominance isn’t just a problem of increased estrogen levels in your body. It can also result from high or low levels of other hormones like excess insulin, medical problems like obesity (fat cells make estrogen), and other environmental exposures, such as skin care products and plastics. We will address these concerns in future chapters.

One reason that estrogen dominance is connected to fat-loss resistance is because of the cross talk between two important hormones of metabolism: insulin and estrogen. When you are insulin resistant, which means your cells can’t absorb the extra blood glucose your body keeps generating from the food you eat, your liver converts the glucose into fat (see chapter 4, page 86). Those extra fat cells are now extraneous estrogen-making laboratories. Rather than being your best friend, excess estrogen does a backflip and wreaks havoc on your ability to burn and lose fat. The best pattern interrupt is to eliminate meat (and alcohol) and increase fiber.

To make matters worse, beginning in your early forties you become resistant to estrogen because your receptors go into semiretirement and your estrogen levels climb higher to try to get the attention of those receptors. As a result, your memory falters, you feel irritable, and fat attaches like Krazy Glue to your waist. You are now officially resistant to fat loss, regardless of your weight, and it gets even worse in menopause.

Put it all together, and you can understand why so many women
begin to experience slow metabolism and fat-loss resistance after age forty. The solution is to forgo meat and alcohol and consume one pound of vegetables per day.

The bottom line: too much estrogen keeps you fat by creating a vicious cycle, which must be broken to help you lose weight permanently.

When I broach the topic of estrogen dominance with postmenopausal women, they bristle and tell me they are past all of that. They think of estrogen as a young woman’s hormone, responsible only for menstruation, mood swings, and fertility. Nothing could be further from the truth. Regardless of your age, it’s crucial to understand estrogen and how it is working in your body. Too much estrogen relative to progesterone can cause mood problems, bloating, fibroids, insomnia, and anxiety at any age—until you die. In addition (I’ll repeat myself so that it sinks in),
estrogen dominance is the main reason women have a harder time losing weight regardless of age when compared with men. Lest you are still fuzzy,
too much estrogen causes weight gain.

Estrogen, along with other hormones, is responsible for how you respond to food, drink, and supplements. The seven metabolic hormones determine whether the food you eat is burned or stored as fat. So, instead of dismissing this hormone, I implore you to understand what it does and its central role in your weight loss.

When you understand that being overweight involves more than just how much you eat and how little you exercise, you have an advantage
in the quest for a healthy body weight and lean body mass. That’s because you’ve learned how to work with the innate intelligence of your body instead of against it. I’ve found that when estrogen dominance is the primary reason for weight gain and weight retention, most of those women eat large amounts of conventional red meat and cheese, crave refined carbohydrates such as french fries (and don’t get the fiber they need to guide estrogen expertly through the body), juggle tons of stress, and drink too much alcohol. The result is that estrogen dominance blocks their metabolism—the speed with which they burn calories—in several ways.

First, their microbiome has too many fat bugs (bacteria that hang onto fat) and not enough skinny bugs (bacteria that promote the burning of fat). Second, omnivorous women with estrogen excess don’t remove that excess in their bowel movements like women who eat a more plant-based diet—which contains more fiber and stimulates removal of excess estrogen. Third, estrogen dominance makes a woman more likely to have bloating and constipation. Finally, women who eat red meat have higher rates of blood sugar problems, as indicated in a recent large-scale study of red meat consumption, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome in nearly a hundred and fifty thousand people, published in the prestigious
Journal of the American Medical Association.
⁹
However, this study was observational and didn’t prove that red meat is the cause of blood sugar problems.

Other studies suggest that processed meat may be the greater evil.
¹⁰
Research shows that processed meats (meats that have gone through a chemical process to extend shelf life, including ham, hot dogs, lunch meats, sausage, and ham hocks) are full of nitrates and nitrites, and are associated with diabetes, accelerated cellular aging, and cancer.
¹¹
Indeed, one study showed that ham worsens blood sugar far more than eggs.
¹²

If you wonder why it’s so hard for you to lose weight when a friend or spouse sees pounds melt away on the exact same eating plan,
it’s likely you have different root causes of fatness. Over the next seventy-two hours, as you start the Meatless reset, observe closely how much weight you lose. If you drop a significant amount—in the range of 3 to 5 pounds over three days of the first reset—bingo! You’ve found your first answer: your estrogen imbalance, caused by meat and alcohol, is keeping you fat.

If you are a woman with estrogen dominance, resetting your estrogen is a crucial piece of the puzzle. Fortunately, you hold the keys to the kingdom and can impact your estrogen ratio at any age. When you balance your estrogen and reset your ratio, you’ll find a whole new relationship to food, weight, and your body.

The Paleo diet has become very popular and emphasizes the consumption of vegetables, seeds, nuts, fruits, and meat like our Paleolithic ancestors ate. It also advocates avoiding the foods that came into our food chain later, such as grains, dairy, and legumes. It’s true that our Paleolithic ancestors ate wild meat when they could find and catch it, and that it was anti-inflammatory. As discussed previously, today’s meat offered at most grocery stores and restaurants is nothing like the wild game our ancestors ate—it
promotes inflammation
and makes us hoard fat. Because we women are so efficient at fat storage, I believe that’s a common reason why Paleo doesn’t give women the results that men enjoy when it comes to losing weight, getting lean, and reducing inflammation.

In short, conventional meat isn’t a woman’s best choice. To find out if meat is making you fat, give it up for three days and let your body (and the bathroom scale) inform your relationship to meat.

On the other hand, I don’t believe that a one-size-fits-all is the right approach for women to get lean. As you perform the Meatless reset, keep in mind that many women find that their energy lags when they cut out meat. The key, once again, is to cultivate body awareness and to use this reset to discover your response to meat and alcohol. Former President Bill Clinton found that when he began following a vegan food plan after his heart attack he was too tired and couldn’t keep up with his grueling schedule. He added salmon and eggs, and that boosted his energy. Clean proteins like pastured eggs and wild-caught fish are excellent choices when you’re resetting your estrogen load.

As you’ve learned, hormones are the master switches of metabolism, and they tell your cells what to do. Therefore, the key to keeping your metabolism humming is not to do the same old thing day after day but to disrupt the status quo. When it comes to resetting your estrogen levels, you need to do so sporadically. You want to shuffle your body’s organizational chart so that your estrogen works more efficiently than before.

Receptors take seventy-two hours to turn over. In the next three days, you’ll start by removing red meat from your diet and replacing it with clean vegetables, fiber, and proteins that help balance your estrogen. You’ll stay off of meat and alcohol for the full twenty-one days. Without meat weighing you down, you’ll fill up on veggies and filtered water, priming your system for resetting your estrogen for good. You’ll change the bacteria in your gut that might be contributing to estrogen dominance by encouraging more
Prevotella
compared with the
Firmicutes
phylum of bacteria,
¹³
a favorable shift that may be linked to weight loss.
¹⁴

Since you’re on a fast track to weight loss, I want you to support these changes by getting rid of other causes of estrogen dominance: dump the alcohol on Day 1, and begin to wean off caffeine. (Caffeine is linked to estrogen dominance, and removing it causes withdrawal symptoms, so I urge you to begin the slow wean now in order to be off caffeine by Day 10, the cortisol reset.)

By going meatless, you’re not only addressing your weight by resetting the hormones of metabolism, you’re also potentially saving your life. I’m not being dramatic here. Too much estrogen gives you a greater risk of breast cancer. Ask cancer researchers what they eat. Usually the answer is vegetables; no meat; no sugar; plant sources of fat, such as olive and coconut oil; and healthy proteins, such as nuts, seeds (like quinoa), and wild-caught salmon.

I’m not claiming that all meat is bad, but there are powerful arguments to limit your consumption of conventional meat. Beyond the link to a greater risk of diabetes, breast cancer, and metabolic syndrome, there’s the harm to the environment. Raising livestock requires high water usage (at the time of writing, California is experiencing a severe drought) and contributes significantly to increased greenhouse gases because of the massive release of methane gas from cattle (i.e., cow farts). In fact, a pound of red meat requires 2,500 gallons of water versus 23 gallons to produce a pound of lettuce.

Try substituting other protein sources, such as fish, crustaceans, pastured eggs, pastured chicken, and lentils, because they will help you reset estrogen and your microbiome.

There’s no such thing as humanely produced meat. There’s more humane and less humane, but keep in mind that currently in the United States, 9.8 billion animals are raised annually for food and slaughtered.
¹⁵
Allow me to do the math: that’s 26.8 million animals slaughtered per day, and 1 million per hour. Our passion for meat is relentless, unhealthy, and inhumane. Over the next three days, connect with your compassion for animals.

The goal of this chapter is to reset your estrogen by having you forgo meat and alcohol plus boost your fiber intake for three days in order to promote fat loss. The directions are simple: skip eating meat for three days, eat a pound of vegetables daily, and increase your fiber intake by 5 grams per day. These small steps will yield dramatic results.

MEATLESS RULES: DO THESE EACH DAY

1.
Forgo meat and alcohol.
Eat a minimum of one pound of vegetables per day, divided over three meals, with healthy proteins. One pound of vegetables is approximately five to ten cups, depending on the vegetables, whether raw or cooked (I recommend a 50/50 split). Not sure how to fit in so many vegetables? Make vegetable soup. Find some of my favorite recipes that are delicious plus chock-full of fresh vegetables and fiber in the Recipes section (page 267).

Food List:
Lentils, beans of all types, nuts, nut butters (such as almond butter and cashew butter), seeds, cold-water fish that are low in mercury (cod, salmon, tilapia, mackerel, sardines), shellfish, and pastured chicken and eggs. For nutrient-dense vegetables, choose greens like kale, Swiss chard, collards, watercress, bok choy, cabbage, spinach, arugula, and chicory. Other vegetables include broccoli, radish, turnip, carrots, squash, bell pepper, kohlrabi, and cauliflower.

2.
Increase your fiber intake by 5 grams per day,
to an optimal range of 35 to 45 grams per day (40 to 50 grams per day for men). Increased dietary fiber improves the ability of the liver to clear excess estrogen—that is, more fiber lowers estrogen levels in the body—and you poop more estrogen out of your system. For example, with one cup of steamed broccoli and one cup of lentils for lunch, you’ll get 22 grams of fiber. While you might be enticed
by the plethora of “fiber-rich” packaged foods such as breads and cereals found throughout your grocery store, please stick to fiber that grows naturally. It turns out that along with added fiber, most of these processed foods have added sugar and salt too.