The Hormone Reset Diet (16 page)

When it comes to your insulin reset, I agree with Hippocrates: food is your best medicine. However, exercise and supplements can help you get to the next level in resetting this important hormone by going sugar free. As a board-certified physician, I don’t rely on anecdotes when it comes to supplements. The supplements I recommend have data to back up taking them. A list of insulin-resetting supplements, including alpha lipoic acid, berberine, chromium, fenugreek, cinnamon, bitter melon, probiotics, vanadium, and others, and a summary of the science can be found at www.HormoneReset.com/bonus. Yet the supplement I find most helpful in the Sugar Free reset is one that addresses sugar cravings with a combination of L-tyrosine and 5-HTP. I love tyrosine because it helps women focus and reduces cravings. It’s an amino acid—the building block of protein—and it gives you the clarity and energy that people seek from sugar, but without the side effects. It has a precursor to dopamine, the brain chemical of focus and pleasure. It has been shown to help in reducing stress hormones. 5-HTP is also an amino acid, and a precursor to serotonin and melatonin, which are happy brain chemicals. I recommend a dose of tyrosine 500 to 1,000 milligrams, and 5-HTP 50 to 100 milligrams, and both should be taken one hour before breakfast and lunch.

My patients know to expect more than a signed prescription when they come to me. I’ve listened to thousands of women tell me that they feel overwhelmed, overworked, and totally stressed out. The connection is undeniably clear in my practice, and science backs me up: the vicious cycle of chronic unmanaged stress feeds insulin resistance. That means we need to replace your vicious cycle of stress
with a virtuous cycle of self-care. This involves not only the food you eat but also the thoughts you think.

As a yoga teacher, I’m all for cultivating positive emotions and deep relaxation. I think it’s a crucial part of maintaining a healthy body and mind. But my vision for you goes beyond relaxation to a state known as “coherence,” a term essential to the philosophy of HeartMath, a nonprofit research and educational institute in Santa Cruz, California.

Coherence is a powerful physiological state that moves beyond relaxation and promotes optimal healing. When you reach this state, you have the ability to transform negative states like anger, stress, depression, and anxiety. When you attain coherence, you’ll be relaxed but energized and aware, highly responsive, flexible, in the flow, and in the zone—that is, the normal zone of optimal cortisol, glucose, and insulin.

Science shows that the best way to reset stress is by synchronizing the two halves of the nervous system: the sympathetic (fight or flight) and the parasympathetic (rest and digest) to reach coherence. HeartMath has shown that coherence can significantly lower cortisol and reduce blood sugar.

Here is a practice to create quick coherence by applying a version of the Institute of HeartMath’s methods.

When you are resetting your insulin pathway, you need to burn some calories with exercise daily to improve the benefits. I recommend the Hormone Reset Burst 7, during which you exercise at your usual pace (walk, jog, or ride a bike) for five minutes to warm up, then sprint at your highest effort for thirty seconds, then recover at your usual pace for two minutes. Repeat this for a total of seven cycles of thirty-second bursts. This form of exercise has been shown to lower insulin and raise growth hormone, an important “fountain of youth” hormone of metabolism described in chapter 8.

I recommend that you perform a fasting blood sugar test each morning to track your progress. While it takes a bit of practice, I strongly encourage you to learn how to test your blood sugar and use it as important feedback (see Measurement #6: Blood Sugar, page 30).

If you find that your blood sugar is normal (i.e., between 70 and 85 mg/dL), test yourself once per week and measure several postprandial blood sugars. (Use the same technique to check your blood glucose two hours after a meal.)

If the idea of pricking your finger raises your stress hormones, ask your health-care professional to measure your fasting glucose and
insulin at your local laboratory. Once again, you’re looking for the optimal range for fasting glucose between 70 and 85 mg/dL, and fasting insulin of 5 µIU-mL. Your clinician may prefer to order a more thorough test called the oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT), which is tedious but more accurate for diagnosing patients with prediabetes or diabetes.

I’ve listed the normal and optimal ranges for tests related to insulin resistance (see Resources, page 291). Your doctor was probably taught to obey the mainstream “normal” ranges, which are derived by your laboratory and include the values for 95 percent of the population (the highest 2.5 percent and lowest 2.5 percent are excluded). In other words, to paraphrase acupuncturist and author Chris Kresser, these “normal” values are just common, not optimal. Since at least one in three Americans have insulin resistance, I want you to set a new goal of being in the “optimal” range, indicated in the third column of the table.

Record all blood sugars in your journal. Remember, even normal-weight individuals have problems with unstable blood sugar. I have found that women reverse prediabetes rapidly by following my Sugar Free rules, and the numbers prove it: the average fasting blood sugar dropped from 104 to 83 mg/dL, which is normal!

I’m excited for you to go sugar free and start resetting your insulin pathway. With this evidence-based way to lose weight for good, you’ll stop suffering from the vicious cycles of wild blood sugar swings, sugar cravings, and increased belly fat. I believe you’ll discover this is one of your most important steps toward your Hormone Reset.

When you’re insulin resistant, you tend to have other hormonal problems. Your cells also produce more bad estrogens, and you become leptin resistant. High insulin levels make your ovaries secrete more testosterone than is healthy. (Remember, imbalanced testosterone keeps you from shedding the pounds. You want your testosterone to be just right: not too high and not too low.) Fortunately, when you start the three-day Sugar Free reset, the other fat-storage imbalances likewise improve.

I’ve learned over the years that you need to
want
the things that are good for you, even if they’re hard. You may find it difficult to live without your nightly glass of white wine or after-dinner ice cream. But when you realize that you feel more energized and lose weight faster, I think you’ll be motivated. Your body is the vessel of your soul, and some folks—like myself—consider it your sacred duty to
feed your body and soul the best nutrients. If food is information for your DNA, sugar feeds your body the wrong information. I’m not saying you should deprive yourself of a small piece of your child’s birthday cake or a piece of dark chocolate after a nice dinner. But daily consumption of refined sugar is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. It causes diabetes and prediabetes, which results in a fate that may include heart disease, high blood pressure, and cancer.

Even with all of my urging to banish sugar and refined carbohydrates, I want you to go easy on yourself if you slip. Ambitious women tend to hold themselves to an impossible standard of perfection. To paraphrase a favorite meme from Harry Truman: imperfect action trumps perfect inaction. If you backslide, take notice, but get right back on the path.

When you look at the long-term picture instead of settling for instant gratification, you create integrity. You may or may not believe in God or prefer to consider this concept more generally as “Source” or “Highest Self,” but my point is the same: food is your portal to integrity in many other areas in your life, including your mind, body, spirit, finances, and relationships. When you make the choice to do what it takes to stay healthy, you are sending your body a powerful message that it deserves the best.

N
ow that you’ve done the hardest work of going meatless and sugar free in the last two resets, you’re ready to restrict your use of fructose—the form of sugar that gives fruits, honey, sports drinks, and most sodas their sweet taste. I promise, this reset is easier! The good news is that when you put these three resets together, you’ve got the winning combination to get the three most important metabolic hormones activated to support you: estrogen, insulin, and leptin.

Maybe you’re in love with your stash of dried apricots, which contain seventeen times the amount of fructose as fresh apricots. Fructose is the sugar that’s naturally found in fruit, but it is also added to processed foods for taste and preservation—you may know one form as high-fructose corn syrup.

Fructose consumption is at an all-time high in the American diet, and it is linked to problems with insulin and another hormone called leptin, which is in charge of hunger. When you’re overweight and/or experience blood sugar issues, fructose may become a problem when calorie intake is too high. In fact, fructose is 73 percent sweeter than table sugar,
¹
which makes it highly palatable and encourages
overeating. Plus it’s processed differently in the body. How much fructose is too much is subject to debate and probably depends on your current metabolism, what you eat (and overeat), genetics, how much you exercise, and your fitness level.

In my experience with patients, I have found 20 grams or less per day is ideal for a reset. I’ll show you how to accomplish that in this chapter.

Why limit fructose? You’re probably consuming too much because 75 percent of foods have sugar added in various forms, and some experts argue that it’s the primary reason you’re fat.
²
When you eat small amounts of fructose and your blood sugar is normal, you’re okay. But if you eat too much, your liver can’t process the fructose fast enough for the body to use it as fuel. Instead, your body starts converting the fructose into fats, sending them off into the bloodstream as triglycerides, and depositing them as fat in the liver and elsewhere in your belly.
³
Other issues with fructose overload include insulin resistance,
⁴
leptin resistance,
⁵
and cognitive decline.
⁶

Fructose excess is like the biggest slide at the water park on a hot summer day. When there are too many kids on line, it gets backed up. Then kids get impatient and start cutting the line, wandering away, and jumping in the pool anyway.

The result?
Total chaos,
and in the body, it means
you get fat.

Are you having problems with the water park in your body; that is, fructose excess and, by extension, leptin resistance? Let’s find out by continuing our detective work to see if leptin is your dominant hormone imbalance.

Take this self-assessment to see if you might be eating too much fructose and having a problem with leptin, an important hormone
that regulates your body fat. Do you have or have you experienced in the past six months …

A strong, sometimes insatiable appetite?

Binge eating, especially after five P.M.? Eating after seven P.M. or within three hours of going to bed?

A tendency to skip breakfast or wait an hour or longer after rising in the morning to eat?

A love of drinking fruit juices or sodas, more than one serving per day?

Excess weight or obesity (a body mass index over 25)? Count this item twice if you’re 30 or more pounds overweight.

Menopausal weight gain, especially at your waist?

Increased fat in the skin covering your triceps muscles, sometimes affectionately known as “kimono arms”?

A diagnosis of metabolic syndrome or insulin resistance (more than five symptoms listed at the beginning of chapter 4, page 77)?

Weird or profuse sweating patterns compared with ten or twenty years ago?

Fatigue after exercise and difficulty recovering completely?

Joint problems—painful joints, joint destruction, bursitis, arthritis—or your doctor has suggested knee, hip, or shoulder surgery?