The Hormone Reset Diet (2 page)

When I was fifteen, I started restricting food and calories, longing to be thin and to look cute in my jeans. I’d starve myself all day, relying on willpower and diet soda (remember Tab?), and end up bingeing on freshly baked chocolate chip cookies or sugary pastries. In my freshman year of college, I ballooned to 150 pounds (I’m five feet, five inches tall). That summer I started running and drinking
bee pollen smoothies, and lo and behold, I was 125 pounds by the start of sophomore year. Every time I had a new boyfriend, I would eat like he did and gain weight. I would be fat and happy. Then our breakup would lead to a loss of appetite. I would become thin and sad.

My weight came into sharp focus when I got engaged. I had six months until my wedding day to get thin. The Atkins diet was popular at the time, so my fiancé, David Gottfried, and I started eating more eggs and bacon, and “Please hold the toast!” David dropped 20 pounds, and I dropped 2. I stared at my tight wedding dress in frustration. As a gynecologist who was board certified in everything that goes wrong in the female body, I knew something was amiss. I filed my observations away and went on with my wedding preparations, forcing myself to lose weight with willpower, calorie restriction, and overexercising, like a drill sergeant determined to fit into my wedding dress. I became an uptight, slightly thinner bride. But I gained the weight back within a single week during our honeymoon in Hawaii!

In my thirties, I spent way too much of my time and brain obsessing over food and how to restrict it. I was a working mom. I plugged away during the day as a busy doctor and came home for a second shift of childcare and preparing a meal for my family. I felt a large void in my life, probably because I found the idea of “having it all” ridiculously impossible and exhausting, and I didn’t realize that I was trying to fill that void with refined carbohydrates and glasses of wine. I was stressed, fat, toxic, unhappy, resentful, and inflamed—and nothing seemed to help. Even my blood sugar suffered: tests showed levels consistent with early diabetes.

My defining moment came in an unlikely setting: a Madonna concert. As she sang and danced for more than two hours, I was moved by her physical majesty, by the grace of how fully she embodied her feminine power. I had a flash of insight. Did I want to reach my highest potential? Or did I want to keep making excuses and stay on the
downward spiral of getting fatter, more burned out, and further from my inner vision of greatness? It was one of those moments of deep clarity—some even call them surrender points—that addicts talk about, when the pain of staying the same comes into sharp relief. I decided that it was time to take action and to apply my medical knowledge to help myself.

The next day I joined a program for food addicts. I wasn’t an obese, bingeing type of addict. I was highly functional and looked relatively “normal” from the outside. Still, there was an obsessive quality to food and eating that kept me hooked, especially during high stress.

I learned more about women, food, and the importance of a spiritual solution in that program than I had ever learned in medical school. Within two months, I lost 25 pounds, reset my hormones and blood sugar, and healed my broken metabolism. I stayed in the program for two years—stable at the same weight, week after week—but eventually left for several reasons. The program didn’t seem to help my other hormone issues, such as with thyroid and estrogen. In fact, some of the food rules seemed old-school and failed to address important nutritional gaps. Ultimately, I was motivated to learn how to help myself and all women calibrate their hormones and, by extension, their metabolisms without having to surrender to the rigid structure of a program with regular meetings.

Here’s what led to the book you have in your hands:

• I took my deep knowledge of the female body from the past twenty years as a board-certified gynecologist and physician-scientist;

• I studied the latest advances in our understanding of food addiction, since this piece is often missing from popular diets and disproportionately affects women;

• I combined the best practices from my experience in the food addiction program and removed the parts that didn’t seem necessary to my recovery;

• I learned why women eat for a state change—also known as emotional eating—and developed effective alternatives;

• I added extensive and current research about hormone imbalances, resets, and detoxification;

• I interviewed world experts on hormones, introduced novel information about gender differences in fatness and how women can turn vulnerabilities into advantages in the battle of the bulge; and finally,

• I turned it all into my own personal plan, culled from my knowledge based on twenty years of medical practice, which has worked for me and now works for thousands of other women like you.

I taught the Hormone Reset program for the first time in 2008 to a group of women in my integrative and functional medicine practice in Oakland, California. The process and synthesis showed me the key steps that women need to take to break the shackles of food addiction, heal emotionally, form new habits of eating the best types and quantities of nourishing food, and recalibrate to eating for the right reasons. The results were transformative: The women felt at home in their bodies again and were excited to repeat the program every three to six months with me. They described many of the feelings that I experienced myself. Consistently, they lost weight—about 10 to 50 pounds—and they told me they felt younger than they did ten or twenty years ago.

I’ve tested, honed, and improved my Hormone Reset program in my medical practice, my in-person group programs, and online for the past six years. In this book, you now have access to the same wildly successful twenty-one-day weight-loss program. You have everything you need to break the addictive cycle of eating the wrong foods, stressing, and feeling fat once and for all. With it, you can restore your broken, overstressed body and find the grace and magnificence promised you by the wonders of your own unique biology.

I
t’s time to lay the foundation for your Hormone Reset. Preparation is behind every lasting change when it comes to your body and losing weight for good. Otherwise, modernity conspires against you such that your nervous system is toast, you feel overwhelmed and poisoned by hormones, and you are at the mercy of food cravings. I’ve found the best antidote is intention, so I’ve created a plan for you to prioritize space for the sacred—in your head, heart, and schedule—in the day or two before starting your Hormone Reset.

The preparation phase is a time of emotional, physical, and spiritual arrangements, if you allow it to be. It takes planning to connect to your inner divinity so that it may guide you to your cure. Setting the right intention will create the ideal vibrational tone for the body to begin to reset hormones, release weight and toxins, and heal addictive patterns. You have nothing to lose (except weight, of course!) and everything to gain. On your mark, get set …
prepare
!

Does your weight keep you from living your biggest, fullest, richest life? Do you suffer from food addiction? Are you a stress case?
Welcome to the club!
You are in the right place, because we are going to fix these issues, starting immediately. Take the following self-assessment to find out if you need the Hormone Reset. In the past six months, have you experienced …

Looking in the mirror and not liking what you see?

Limiting certain activities until you finally lose the weight, such as sex or going to the beach?

Eating or craving certain foods, even when you’re not hungry? Snacking all day? Observing that you get hungry not long after eating a meal (i.e., within less than four hours)?

Noticing that your weight seems to fluctuate constantly?

Jumping from one diet to another, looking for the magic bullet? Occasionally restricting your food, though you’re able to sustain this only a short while?

Feeling tired or sluggish after eating?

Hiding food or eating in secrecy? Keeping a secret stash of chocolate or sweets in your special drawer or cabinet?

Weighing yourself every day? Being in either a good or a bad mood for the day depending on the number on the bathroom scale?

Eating more than you planned or bingeing? Noticing that you have avalanche foods: you take one bite, and shortly thereafter, the whole container is gone? Feeling guilty about how much (quantity) or the types of food (quality) you’re eating? Eating until you feel uncomfortably full?

Purging? Overeating and then taking a laxative, vomiting, or exercising to make up for it?

Experiencing health issues from overeating—including diagnoses from your doctor, such as prediabetes, diabetes, high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome—or just being told you need to lose weight to get healthier?

Observing that you need more of certain foods for them to bring you the same pleasure as they used to provide, such as chocolate, wine, or french fries?