The Hormone Reset Diet (33 page)

SAMPLE MENU

As an example, the menu option on the following page includes what to eat when your challenge food is dairy. For nutritional data, check out the Notes section.
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This is one of the most common questions I get at this point in the program. The short answer is yes, you are welcome to continue the resets for longer if you love the way you feel and want to continue improving upon your results, but a better solution is to shift after twenty-one days to Reentry and to perform the Hormone Reset Diet
once every three to six months. Note that you will continue to see results in the Reentry phase, but they may not be as dramatic as what you’ve experienced in the past twenty-one days.

However, it’s important that you transition from resets to Reentry
at some point in time. What you should not do is go straight from an extended period of resets to eating “normally” again. That’s why I failed so many times before I discovered how the Hormone Reset works for me. The Reentry phase is critical for determining which foods are causing you to misfire, causing a reaction for you (allergic, intolerance, or hormonal/metabolic weight gain), and for giving your gut time to adjust to eating more of a challenge food again. If a food causes a reaction, keep it out of your food plan. Please allow at least six to fifteen days for the Reentry.

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Continue your daily rituals.
Whether it’s a bath at night or hot water with lemon and cayenne in the morning, remember that these rituals help you systematize the resets that you are programming into your body and mind.

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Take your shake.
Drink at least one shake per day and continue to get your pound of vegetables each day. (Yes, you can still do two shakes per day if you want to extend detoxification, but I don’t recommend longer than ninety days total. There is such a thing as over-detoxing!)

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Can I get a witness?
Focus on taking the role of an impartial observer. Instead of getting frustrated or feeling like you just reversed all the great work you’ve been doing or despairing that you can never eat this beloved food again, stop and take a deep breath. Now mentally remove yourself from your body and observe what’s happening from the point of view of an (empathetic) stranger. It’s never fun to feel bad or have your favorite things taken from you. But ultimately, this experience is a good thing because it’s giving you more information about your body—information you can use to make healthy choices.

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Be okay with your choices.
Some days your choices may mean indulging and dealing with the consequences. Other days you may choose to eliminate a substance from your diet completely. The choice is yours, and you are free to revise that choice at any time. But for today, just observe—and be kind to yourself.

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Replete with red meat?
If after trying cleaner sources of protein and completing the Meatless reset you are convinced you really need red meat for energy, limit your intake to small amounts (4 to 6 ounces two or three times per week) of organic, grass-fed, or wild meat.

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Measure and measure again.
Keep closer tabs on your measurements, particularly weight, blood sugar, hips, and waist. You’ve been measuring your weight once every three days during the resets. Now you want to weigh yourself daily, perform your other measurements, plus track your pulse, food–mood interactions, and other symptoms. It’s easy to lose track. When you don’t measure, you have to trust that eyeball estimate. My experience is that if I don’t measure food portions, for example, I consistently overestimate what one cup looks like.

The most important supplement for you to take throughout Reentry and beyond is berberine. It’s an anti-inflammatory! It’s an antioxidant! It’s an insulin sensitizer! Berberine lowers blood sugar as effectively as metformin, a common prescription used for women with polycystic ovary disease and diabetes, and that may come in handy during Reentry.
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Found in the roots and barks of certain herbs, berberine helps treat or prevent fungal, parasitic, or bacterial infections.
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I recommend 500 to 1,000 milligrams two to three times per day.

As a kid, I used to visit my father’s family in Minnesota. Our relatives there, who were originally from Finland, all seemed to have dry saunas. We would hang out in the sauna as a family and then take a dip in a nearby icy lake. We kept alternating hot and cold because it felt so invigorating. Little did I know that this is one of the detoxifying techniques known as hydrotherapy. Hydrotherapy augments your body’s natural detoxification. You can also replicate this technique in your shower: two minutes of hot water running over your body followed by two minutes of cold water. Try two to three cycles and see how you feel.

If your shower isn’t doing it for you, try a local gym with a dry sauna, do a Google search for an infrared sauna near your home, or try a cryosauna, which uses the principle of “cold thermogenesis” to reduce inflammation, burn fat, and help reset your metabolic hormones.

My current obsession is to do plank pose for sixty seconds twice per day! There are a lot of benefits: confidence, core, back and arm strength, and more. It returns you to your center. I promise you big results for a tiny amount of time.

During Reentry, it’s important that you get enough protein. Aim for 75 to 125 grams per day, depending upon your level of activity and weight. Some of the best protein sources and amounts for the average-weight woman are on the following chart.

Eat More Clean Protein

Testing your pulse gives you valuable information about how you are responding to what you are ingesting. Perform the following three steps:

1. Before you eat one of your challenge foods, take your pulse when you are at rest.

2. Eat your challenge food.

3. Wait ten minutes, and check your pulse again. If your pulse has increased more than ten beats per minute, that suggests a reaction.

Please note that you may experience delayed reactions, such as itchy skin, rashes, or some of the other allergic responses, which can take three to four days to occur.

• Lost 18 pounds, 4 inches off her waist, and 4 inches off her hips.

• “I’ve determined that I’m a sugar addict and must not include it in my diet. Looks like I can’t enjoy any more of those cakes and cupcakes I love to make.”

• Blood sugar is down 25 points.

• “Had my first cup of coffee this morning and hate to say it didn’t taste as it did” pre–Hormone Reset.

The final word for Reentry is “balance.” On this journey, you’ve taken yourself to an extreme. You’ve spent time, money, brainpower, and internal resources in order to complete the twenty-one-day challenge. As you embrace Reentry, I want you to think of that pendulum swinging back to the center. My hope is that you don’t feel like you are deprived or missing out, while at the same time you don’t binge on sugar and alcohol. Balance. It’s what makes us shine and become our best selves.

Take a look at all the things that help you feel balanced. Taking a five-minute break every hour? Saying “probably not” to another school volunteer opportunity? Then look at things that make you feel imbalanced. Overscheduling? Checking your smartphone constantly? Just like each person will have her own experience of Reentry, each person has her own definition of balance. It depends on
your personality, life circumstances, and environment. What does balance mean to you?

The Reentry period is a good time to remember to practice the “Serenity Prayer” written originally by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and adopted by twelve-step programs: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I
want to honor you for the extraordinary effort you’ve put into your Hormone Reset. I applaud your commitment, and I trust that it’s paid off in terms of weight loss, inches lost, and glowing skin. If you are like my patients, your hormone problems are vastly better, and you have a glorious sense of feeling energetic and well rested. You’ve forged your own path and had inevitable breakthroughs with your unique biology.

Now that you’ve completed your Hormone Reset, it’s time for the final, and perhaps most important, step of sustained weight loss: the continuation of a new way of eating. Most diets fail because people eat “clean” for a short time and then rebound to their old habits of either eating the wrong foods or eating too much food—or both. In order to sustain your weight loss and other benefits, we’re going to change that.

In this chapter, we will review and refine your progress, self-awareness, and momentum so that you stay lean. As with the seven hormonal resets and the Reentry phase of your Hormone Reset, Sustenance is not about calorie restriction or weird juices. It’s about defining and instituting a scientifically proven approach to staying on the path. This kind of sustenance might be a paradigm shift but
one that will nourish you rather than deplete you. Sustenance will make you feel alive, instead of lethargic, grateful instead of resentful, hopeful instead of disheartened.

Now that you’ve reset your system and discovered your new baseline, you have new taste buds that are hungry for nutrient-dense food and a new set of receptors for the seven hormones of metabolism. Plus you’re a fat-burning machine.

It’s time to learn how to sustain your Hormone Reset habits. You have all the information you need. Your future is here. It’s time to embrace it.

You know how your computer gets locked up occasionally and you have to restart it to get it operating smoothly again? That’s what it’s like when you shift to the last phase of your Hormone Reset: a reboot of your system. You are crossing a new threshold in your body. Your body is clean and tuned, your gut has been repaired, your mitochondria are working smoothly, your immune system is happy, and you’ve quelled the inflammation that makes you fat. Now what do you do?

One word:
sustenance.

When I first started dieting in high school at age fifteen, I thought that diets were something you do for about a week or two, and then you arrive at the maintenance phase, which meant (or so I thought) that the weight stayed off. Now I know that maintenance is not a destination but a dynamic process. I also know, from both my work and my personal experience, that maintenance is the glue. It holds together your ability to stay clean and lean, cell to soul. And it can be the hardest and most critical phase, as we know from the grim statistics of how most diets fail. We also know how yo-yo dieting is actually worse for you than never dieting at all, because it wrecks
your metabolism. But maintenance—or as I prefer to call it, sustenance—can also be the most exciting phase, because you are creating new habits that will make you live a longer, leaner, healthier, and happier life.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I offer a new way of approaching the sustenance phase. Instead of looking at this phase as a time to rest on your laurels and resume the eating habits that led you to this book in the first place, I want to harness the power of your newly clean body and mind, and direct that power toward taking your health to a whole new level.

I like to think of the twenty-one days of your Hormone Reset as your debutante ball. You’ve worked hard to prepare for that moment—the dress, the hair, the venue, the flowers, the dance moves. But once the party is over, the real work of becoming an adult begins. In the same way, once your Hormone Reset is over, the real work of sustaining your newfound clean body and weight loss begins. Just as a teenager has a mentor to lead her on her journey, you have me to guide you on this new path.

Of course, I have a scientific basis for my rules of sustenance. In a nutshell, keeping your insulin balanced is the gateway to sustaining your weight for life. You may not have lost all the weight you want to release, but I recommend that you perform your Hormone Reset each quarter (i.e., every three months). Remember the scales that represent divine justice? One of the depictions shows the goddess Themis with a sword and a scale. Think of insulin—in balance—as your powerful sword.

Your problem is hormonal. All paths of fatness lead back to that rascal hormone, insulin. Yet just as you can reset your insulin in as little as seventy-two hours, you can ruin it again in just as much
time. So the key to maintenance and preventing weight regain is to keep insulin in its sweet spot: not too high and not too low.

The idea that weight gain is hormonal is a mind bender for most people, so I want to reiterate that you should focus on your seven hormones of metabolism instead of the faulty notion of paying attention only to calories in and calories out. Put another way, positive energy balance (more calories into the body than out) describes what happens when someone gets fat but not
why
he or she gets fat. The “why” is hormones, as we discovered together.

When it comes to maintaining weight loss, “big doors swing on little hinges” (as W. Clement Stone—businessman, philanthropist, and self-help book author—famously said). What are the little hinges that can lead us to success? Regrettably, the studies on weight regain are ambiguous and poorly designed. Among the studies that are available, the data show that roughly 20 percent of people who lose weight are able to maintain it for one year.
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It’s as if the brain is wired to make you regain weight, so the trick is to reverse the increased appetite and the decrease in resting and exercise-induced metabolic rates. Since the problem of weight gain and regain is hormonal, not caloric, I believe we can do better with maintenance when we really zero in on the little hinges that swing big doors.

1.
Eat enough protein.
If you don’t get enough protein in your diet, you get hungry, start eating more refined carbs, and regain weight. Science shows that insufficient protein leads to weight
regain, and the corollary is true as well—that additional protein prevents weight regain.
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Women with adrenal dysregulation often don’t get enough protein. Keep in mind that if you love to snack, eating sufficient protein also keeps you from getting the munchies.

2.
Avoid refined carbs.
Eating foods with a low-glycemic index/load leads to lower fasting insulin and inflammation—and that’s a good thing for getting lean.
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Refined carbohydrates, not calories, make you fat. Avoid the bad or fat-boosting carbs—sugars, starches, bread, pizza, refined flour, and pasta. In general, the fewer carbs you eat, the leaner you’ll be. Protein and fat are essential to your health; carbs are not. Reducing calories won’t work for fat loss unless you cut back on carbs. If you don’t, you will be hungry and your metabolism will slow down. This is a key problem with most restrictive diets and why they fail. We don’t want that, so no more restricting calories. As you’ve learned, refined carbs that are rapidly digested (and low in fiber) are one of the likely food-based causes of inflammation, heart disease, maybe even cancer. All told, they create a bad neighborhood for your DNA.

3.
Keep your eyes on net carbs and triglycerides.
The best evidence does not prove that saturated fat clogs your arteries. The true enemy is triglycerides, the fat your liver makes like crazy when you’re overeating carbohydrates and other low-fiber sources of fructose. That’s why I recommend you continue to eat foods like nutrient-dense vegetables (one pound per day), clean and anti-inflammatory proteins (such as crustaceans and cold-water fish), and healthy fats (such as coconut oil and ghee from grass-fed cows).

Pilots rely on their navigational controls to monitor speed, elevation, fuel usage, and pressure. You have a dashboard too. When you’re willing to change the root causes of your broken metabolism—from estrogen dominance to slow detoxification—you have the controls right under your fingertips, and the evidence documented in your journal.

Your dashboard leverages the fact that your neurotransmitters and hormones work together. You can bring your whole dashboard into a safe zone by recalibrating how you eat, sleep, move, and think. No emergency oxygen mask required.

Here are the instruments and levers that stay on my dashboard, and I work at them every day:

1.
Start your day with a shake.
We know from the National Weight Control Registry that eating breakfast is essential to maintaining weight loss. We also know that food intolerances are on the rise, so I recommend that you continue to start your day right and set yourself up for success by drinking a medicinal shake. Choose a protein powder for the shake that’s anti-inflammatory: free of gluten and dairy, and low in sugar (less than 5 grams of sugar per serving). Watch out for whey, too, if you find you’re intolerant.

2.
Dial in your macronutrients.
Our knowledge base of what helps keep weight off has changed over time. Now the best information is that successful losers keep it off by limiting refined carbohydrates and eating more healthy proteins and fats.
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In fact, since 1995, when we first started tracking the people who are successful at maintaining weight loss, the number of people on a low-carb diet (defined as less than 90 grams per day) has nearly tripled, from 6 to 17 percent. Successful losers are eating more fat—up from 24 to 29 percent of total calories—and
saturated fat consumption has increased from 12 to 154 grams per day. What does that mean for you?

• Keep your total net carbs between 20 and 49 grams per day.
When you want to maintain your weight, inch up to between 50 and 99 grams per day. Eat slow carbs, particularly vegetables, sweet potatoes, and plantains. (Read labels to count grams of carbs. Also see Measurement #9 on page 32 for a description of how to calculate net carbs.) In my opinion, lower levels of carbohydrates may be risky if you have thyroid or adrenal issues—which most women have! Eat your pound of vegetables per day, drink your shake, and have an occasional roasted sweet potato! I eat 3 ounces of sweet potato at dinner twice each week and find it helps my sleep and adrenal function.

• For protein, get about 75 to 125 grams per day.
Remember that two eggs contain 13 grams of protein, and 4 ounces of chicken breast has 25 grams.

• For healthy fats, aim for approximately 30 to 50 percent of total calories per day.

3.
Crowd out the junk.
This habit works really well when you have a tendency (or outright hard addiction) to certain foods, like sugar, alcohol, or caffeine. You must continue to eat good quantities of healthy food each day—crowd out the physical junk or bad food. I think of it as the 80/20 rule: aim for 80 percent vegetables and 20 percent clean protein. Remember that protein makes you satisfied, and insufficient protein makes you crave carbohydrates. Our goal is to make sure you get enough of the fun, yummy, and nutrient-dense whole foods so you’re not hungry for those frenemies (yummy-looking things that are bad for you). As an example, drink a shake for breakfast, and plan your lunch and dinner to be low in sugar. Eat a large salad with a clean protein (fish, shrimp, or chicken), and continue to eat one pound (or more) of vegetables each day. Additionally,
I want you to crowd out the emotional junk, or what scientists call “internal disinhibition”—the thoughts and feelings that derail you from eating the best fuel possible. Having strategies in place, such as the Cell to Soul Practices in chapters 3 through 10, will help you get and stay lean.
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4.
Keep measuring.
This habit ensures continuous metabolic accountability and improvement. I challenge you to find the top five measurements that track your progress best, and keep them in mind as a list that you review daily (steps, sleep) and weekly (waist and hip circumferences, blood sugar, body fat, pH). Here are a few more details about how these measurements help support your maintenance:

• pH.
New research suggests when you’re too acidic from high stress and eating acidifying foods, you gain weight.
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This may be particularly true in women.
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• Blood sugar.
Check this once a week so that you can calibrate your blood sugar before it gets out of hand. Ideally your fasting blood sugar is 70–85 mg/dL.

• Waist and hip circumferences.
Science shows that your hip measurement is the best estimate of fat mass.
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Measure weekly.

• Blood panel.
Getting this evaluation once every three to six months gives you important data on your hormone levels, such as thyroid. See Resources for where to get blood panels drawn, but the best option is to order labs through your health professional.

5.
Rotate your food.
If you found in Reentry that you had a mild reaction to a food, you may decide to continue to eat it, but in rotation. (If your reaction was moderate to severe, you should completely remove that food.) Eating the same food day after day makes you more likely to develop an allergy and more serious adverse reactions. But if you only eat a food once every four days, a reaction is far less likely to occur. From the reset
chapters (especially Grain Free and Dairy Free), you know that grains and dairy are the most common allergenic foods. Even if you didn’t have a reaction to them during this round of your Hormone Reset, you may in the future. Be vigilant and limit your risk by rotating these foods.

6.
Master your sleep.
Recent evidence shows that sleep is crucial to staying sensitive to insulin. If you skimp on sleep, you are more likely to overeat the next day. When you have less REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, you lose insulin sensitivity.
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The bottom line: mind your sleep so you don’t fall down a hormonal flight of stairs and regain weight. I recommend eight hours per night.