Chapter 3 What Is the Hormone Fix?

So what exactly is the Hormone Fix? What does it involve?

The Hormone Fix is a novel breakthrough diet with enhanced lifestyle strategies that is designed to balance your hormones. As an ob-gyn, I’d love to tell you that this involves tweaking those familiar reproductive hormones—progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, and DHEA—but it’s not, at least not directly. The Hormone Fix focuses on mastering three control hormones: insulin, cortisol, and oxytocin. When those are in balance, your other hormones turn into a sweet, beautiful hormonal symphony.

Central to making this happen is a combination of a modified ketogenic diet and an alkaline diet, or what I call my Keto-Green Diet. What you eat is 25 percent of the whole picture. Lifestyle changes make up the other 75 percent of the Hormone Fix program.

Historically, when I put women on a ketogenic diet—a diet that is high in good fats, adequate in protein, and very low in carbohydrates—because I believed it would help them lose weight rapidly, improve energy, and boost memory, they’d invariably complain about feeling miserable and cranky. I knew exactly what they were talking about. I felt the same way on a keto diet—I call it going “keto crazy.” And that just wouldn’t do. However, I was forty-eight at the time, with my menopausal hormone imbalance and stressful life situations, and I was gaining weight again, experiencing memory issues and brain fog, so I needed a better solution and I needed it fast!

I dug into the medical research. I found an obscure journal article published in 1924 in the Biochemical Journal from the Biochemical Laboratory in Cambridge, England. It pointed out that making a ketogenic diet more alkaline could be very beneficial and therapeutic. This information gave me an aha moment. What if I put more alkalinizing foods such as greens and other veggies into my version of the ketogenic diet? After all, when you stay in ketosis (a fat-burning state) too long—this is especially true for women—your body becomes acidic, creating chronic inflammation that forces your body to hold on to its fat stores. I’ve seen this play out numerous times among my female patients.

I decided to be my own guinea pig. I checked my urine repeatedly with strips that measured ketones (signs of fat-burning) and pH (a measure of urine [not blood] acidity and alkalinity). As it turned out, I was persistently acidic, brought on by strict low-carb eating. No wonder I felt irritable.

My diet clearly needed a major alkaline boost. More on this later, but in brief, too many acidic foods in your diet can upset hormone balance, hurt your immune system, inhibit digestion, increase metabolic syndrome, cause osteoporosis, and contribute to premature aging, not to mention, make you feel nuts!

I refined the diet to include more alkaline vegetables that support hormone balance (especially green veggies, hence the name Keto-Green Diet), along with dietary strategies to maintain a fat-burning state initiated by ketogenic nutrition. Very quickly I felt better. I stayed in a fat-burning mode longer, without any unpleasant side effects. I lost my extra weight and kept it off. I felt energized. The combination of keto and alkaline eating made all the difference.

I then turned on eight of my friends and patients—my first test panel!—to my Keto-Green idea. I created for them a diet and lifestyle plan that was both ketogenic and alkalinizing. I asked them to follow it for eight weeks and measure their ketones, pH, weight loss, and attitudes. Seriously, there’s no sense in looking good if you’re not feeling good!

Their results were amazing! They all lost pounds rapidly. They were generally not hungry and had no cravings. Each of them saw their hemoglobin A1c drop (this is a general measure of how well blood sugar is controlled). Even their C-reactive protein (CRP) fell, indicating that there was less health-damaging inflammation going on in their bodies. Also, to a woman, they eliminated their annoying menopause symptoms such as hot flashes…all without going crazy.

Pretty soon I put more and more clients on the keto-alkaline diet, now christened my Keto-Green Diet. I observed and recorded their results, and eventually connected the dots, realizing that there is a lot more to this than diet alone. Lifestyle, from sleep habits to stress management, also makes a huge impact in the quality of our lives and relationships—which is what women really want upgraded at this point in their lives.

All of my experience and research had now come full circle. I discovered that the best way to lose weight and ensure optimal health is to combine an alkaline diet and lifestyle changes, along with getting into ketosis.

Seemingly like magic—but very much based on science—the Keto-Green Diet works wonders for all women, including those in the tenacious stages of fluctuating hormones associated with perimenopause, menopause, or postmenopause. No one else had addressed any of this in the medical or nutritional communities. No one had put the pieces together before. But after all my work and observations, and seeing the results with my own eyes, I knew I had the answers for millions of women, including you.

I was encouraged and inspired when I realized that this would work for women of all ages, but especially for those in the midst of or going through menopause. In this population of women, doctors are seeing an increase in cardiovascular disease, cancer, premature aging, and Alzheimer’s disease. The current medical approach medicalizes and stigmatizes menopause. I prefer to first take a holistic approach whenever possible. With this we could reduce the number of expensive medications and invasive procedures that may cause serious side effects and even harm.

The bottom line is that proponents of ketogenesis got it partly right by utilizing ketones as fuel. So did alkaline-diet folks by recognizing how crucial staying alkaline becomes to staying lean, sane, and healthy.

So combine the two and then add the lifestyle component, and bam—you’ve got a really powerful plan that uniquely balances female hormones and results in rapid energy, mental clarity, reduced hot flashes, and many other incredible changes. It is exactly what you need to get slim, feel sexy, and be in control once again.

The Role of Ketosis in the Hormone Fix

So how does this all work?

The word “ketogenic” means “ketone-producing,” a reference to the splitting of fat molecules into ketones, which, like sugars, can be converted into energy. Your cells then switch over from burning sugar to burning fat. When this happens, you are in ketosis. Your body is using fat as its primary fuel source in the absence of carbs.

A ketogenic diet is traditionally very high in fat and very low in carbohydrates, with adequate amounts of protein. As a result, foods such as breads, cereals, pasta, rice, and potatoes are essentially eliminated from this diet. Although keto diets typically include dairy, I eliminate most dairy foods on the 10-Day Keto-Green Quick Start Detox due to their carbohydrate content and the fact that they can trigger food sensitivities in some people, as well as hormone disruptions.

Ketogenic nutrition is based on thousands of years of history. If you go back in time, way before twenty-four-hour supermarkets, restaurants, and refrigerators, even before humans figured out how to farm, our ancestors were eating meats they hunted and vegetables they gathered. Their meals were low-carb and included plenty of animal protein and lots of fat. They were the first keto dieters. In general, men would eat more of the meats and fats than women, because they needed more of those nutrients for energy to hunt and protect the tribe.

You might be wondering what the difference is between a strictly ketogenic diet and a paleo diet, since both are tied to ancestral nutrition. Paleo eaters base their diet on what our Paleolithic ancestors would have eaten, and they restrict grains, dairy, legumes, processed foods, and alcohol. They typically have a higher carbohydrate intake and don’t worry about getting into ketosis. The major difference is that a keto diet is typically higher in healthy fats and lower in carbohydrates than a paleo plan. It also does not villainize any specific food group. You can be paleo and follow a ketogenic plan. My Keto-Green plan pulls in the best of both, for hormone-balancing, while emphasizing alkalinizing foods as well as intermittent fasting and lifestyle factors.

Worth noting too is that our ancestors got up with the sun and walked an average of ten miles every day, staking out new settlement possibilities, exploring uncharted territories, or searching for food. At night, they went to bed just after dark. Depending on the time of year, they probably got eight to ten hours of sleep. This ancient, nomadic lifestyle meant that they often endured extended periods of time without eating.

Today we call this “intermittent fasting,” and it is a key component in achieving ketosis. Essentially, in my Keto-Green plan, it involves going thirteen to fifteen hours without food between dinner and breakfast the next day. Some of the benefits of intermittent fasting are that it accelerates fat-burning, allows the food you’ve eaten to completely digest and your gut to rest, and supports a robust population of healthy gut bacteria, which is essential for hormones and weight control. You’ll learn how to apply intermittent fasting in Chapter 4.

There is evidence in fossil records that our ancient ancestors lived well into old age—if they survived the perilous period of infancy to age fifteen, when young people died off from disease, injuries, and accidents. Their natural diets, along with daily periods of not eating, probably helped by supporting their immune system.

In more modern times, anthropologists have watched native tribes develop obesity and diabetes in just a few generations after being introduced to complex carbohydrates such as wheat and rice. Why is this? We have the same genes as our ancient ancestors—genes that are adapted to a natural diet in which food was hunted, fished, or gathered. But today we eat from a vastly different food supply with processed foods full of refined sugars, salt, unhealthy fats, and questionable additives and preservatives, resulting in a society riddled with obesity, cancer, autism in children, and other diseases. We are exposed daily to toxins and unnatural substances in our foods to the detriment of our health and the health of our children—a situation that angers me as a doctor, scientist, and mom. Our genes—which are survivor genes (not fat genes)—just can’t handle modern diets.

I recall many times when moms tearfully brought their young teen daughters to see me. After starting their periods, these girls began gaining weight, along with getting terrible acne and suffering from cramps and moodiness. They worried that they were destined to be “fat” and “ugly.” What I told these beautiful young women was that they don’t have “fat” genes, but they do have Pocahontas genes or Amazonian genes. That gives them a more positive image of themselves. I told them they are designed to thrive and survive in harsh conditions. As long as they get back to nature and eat foods they can pick, peel, fish, hunt, milk, and grow versus the processed and packaged foods, they can stay naturally thin and fit. It’s basically the same message I give to older women going through menopause and beyond. We need to honor our design with natural food and natural living through our various life stages.

One of the keys to doing so is the ketogenic diet. This diet strictly restricts carbohydrates, which are energy foods, including starchy carbs such as potatoes, as well as fruit and sugary processed carbs. For most of our lives, we use glucose from carbs to fuel our bodies. But come midlife, the body cannot metabolize a lot of carbs—or fats, for that matter—as well as it used to, due to shifting hormones, enzymes, and gut bacteria. We become metabolically stalled and very good energy conservers, which causes weight gain. We truly just don’t need as many carbs.

When we eat carbs the digestive system dismantles them into glucose, which is sugar. The pancreas releases insulin to drive that sugar into muscle cells, liver cells, and fat cells to be used as energy. We certainly need energy, but most of us spend our days living indoors in relative ease. So after all this energy goes unused by our muscles, insulin drives that extra blood sugar into our fat stores “just in case” we need it later. Insulin is a fat storage hormone, and even more of it is cranked out when we eat a lot of carbs, snack throughout the day, and eat late at night.

Because most of us never need that stored fat later, those fat deposits build up day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. If you continue to eat a high-carb diet (and you have lots of insulin in your system), your body gets stuck in that fat storage mode. That means more pounds, more cellulite, and more belly fat—and a higher risk of cancer, heart disease, dementia, and poor quality of life. These health bombs certainly aren’t what we’ve worked so hard for, and for so long!

Keto eating and getting into ketosis defuses these bombs—and helps restore hormone balance and health. Here’s what you gain from getting your body into ketosis, especially the Keto-Green way.

Ketosis Prevents Insulin Resistance

Beyond the visible weight gain from eating too many carbs, there is the less visible: a dangerous, insidious condition called insulin resistance. Insulin resistance occurs when your body can’t take proper command of insulin, which is required to usher glucose into cells for energy. As a result, the pancreas reacts by churning out more insulin, so blood levels of the hormone begin to rise. Over time, the cells simply can’t keep up. They stop responding to the insulin and become insulin resistant. Insulin resistance also puts you on the road to full-blown type 2 diabetes.

To better understand this, think of insulin like a key that unlocks the cell doors to let glucose in. If the key and lock on the door are new and well oiled, the key turns readily without a lot of force and the lock opens smoothly. Insulin resistance, on the other hand, is like an old rusty lock on that door. The key won’t turn, the lock doesn’t work, the doorknob can’t turn, and insulin is shut out. You are then insulin resistant.

A ketogenic diet prevents and reverses insulin resistance. In fact, it makes you insulin sensitive, so you don’t have to worry as much about high blood sugar, weight gain, and various menopausal symptoms—especially hot flashes (one cause of which is insulin resistance).

I’ve seen this happen in client after client. Stacy is a great example. At age fifty-three she was struggling with declining health, fatigue, and “hormone hell” (as she put it), and had a strong family history of diabetes, which affected both parents and all her siblings. Being her own best advocate, she tested her hemoglobin A1c level and it was 5.6 percent, meaning borderline pre-diabetic. While it is true that the normal range for HbA1c is between 4 and 5.6 percent, levels between 5.7 and 6.4 percent indicate you are pre-diabetic—that is, you have a higher chance of or are on your way to becoming a diabetic. And every 0.1 percentage point increase above 5.3 percent significantly increases the risk of diabetes, Alzheimer’s, dementia, cardiovascular disease, and more. She wasn’t willing to wait for a diagnosis to do something about it. After following the Hormone Fix, Stacy reduced her HbA1c to 5.0 percent in a year, reducing her risk of diabetes and improving her overall health greatly. Now she is active on her farm, riding horses and “tinkering away,” as she says, because she has the energy to do so.

Ketosis Optimizes Your Blood Sugar

Eating ketogenically is especially helpful for people with type 2 diabetes, but it is beneficial to almost everyone. This is because a keto diet optimizes blood sugar and insulin levels. Scientific studies among people with type 2 diabetes have found such dramatic glucose improvements that patients were able to discontinue or reduce their diabetes medications—as my father did when he was seventy-nine.

So if you want to regulate insulin and blood sugar and get your body out of a fat-storing mode, you need a scarcity of carbohydrates. With fewer carbs, your body goes looking for other energy sources. After about three days without carbs, most of the insulin retreats from your system, and your body will go into ketosis and start burning fat.

Ketosis Tames Your Appetite

A ketogenic diet also curbs your appetite and stops your cravings. Eating fat and protein stabilizes hormones that control your appetite and makes you feel fuller. One of those hormones is leptin. Secreted by fat cells, leptin is nicknamed the “satiety hormone” because it sends a message to your brain that you are full and don’t need to eat any more.

But if your body gets into a fat-storing mode, due mostly to snacking or eating too many carbs, more leptin is produced. When that happens, the body eventually stops hearing the hormonal messages telling it to stop eating. It is like the begging dog at the dinner table whom you tune out while you just keep eating your meal, not paying any attention (you know what I mean). This is termed “leptin resistance.” Eating ketogenically prevents leptin resistance—and therefore reduces cravings. I used to have intense food cravings that made me think of food all the time, but after going more keto, I was liberated from them, and I can’t wait for you to experience this too.

Ketosis Prevents Disease

The ketogenic diet is also effective in certain medical situations. It is a treatment modality used today for people with seizure disorders, such as epilepsy, because ketones cross the blood-brain barrier and make for good brain fuel.

Keto diets have also been used in the treatment of cancer. When a person adopts a ketogenic diet, several anti-cancer changes occur. Ketone levels increase, and glucose levels decrease. Cancer cells—which like to gobble up glucose—are thus starved, so they tend to self-destruct. Good news for women: studies show that a ketogenic state, combined with intermittent fasting, can lower your risk of developing breast cancer.

Ketosis Improves Memory

The brain requires estrogen to metabolize glucose, the primary brain fuel, as well as support the health of our mitochondria (energy factories within each cell). But when estrogen falls off, our brains get deprived of fuel. This is a reason we experience “brain fog” and are at risk for age-related brain disorders like Alzheimer’s disease. Fortunately, ketones can cross the blood-brain barrier and become the ideal brain fuel for improving memory and clarity.

The Downside of Keto Eating Without the Green

As you can see, there are many great reasons to get started on a ketogenic diet, but I wouldn’t be doing my duty as a doctor if I didn’t warn you about a few issues.

Keto Flu

Many people on this type of diet experience what’s called the “keto flu,” as their body gets used to burning ketones for fuel instead of glucose. The most common symptoms are headache and fatigue, but some people also experience nausea, upset stomach, and brain fog.

Keto flu usually lasts only a few days, but in rare cases it can last up to two weeks. If you can get past the keto flu, you’ll experience a few weeks of magic: more mental clarity and energy with less hunger. You may also drop a dress size or two, watch your skin improve, and see mysterious aches and pains simply disappear.

I know what you’re thinking: “This sounds wonderful! I’m going to stay on a ketogenic diet the rest of my life!” But then all of a sudden you feel terrible, like the keto flu, only worse, thanks to…

Keto Craziness

A ketogenic diet that’s very carb restrictive can, at least temporarily, wreak havoc on your mental state by messing with brain chemicals that help stabilize mood. I call this going “keto crazy.” I’ve experienced this myself, and all I can say is that it turned me into a witch! I’ve heard this complaint from my premenopausal patients too.

There’s an entire cascade of hormonal events that can throw you into keto craziness as you get older. You see, when you’re younger, your body makes a lot of the hormone progesterone, a neuroprotective hormone that is vital to brain health. I call it the “calm, cool, collected hormone.” With progesterone in ample supply, your body can better tolerate a keto diet.

Progesterone increases an important brain chemical known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). It preserves the brain’s ability to grow and change through the years in response to new challenges, and to resist depression, memory loss, brain shrinkage, and other problems. Progesterone also prevents cell death in brain cells, protects the sheaths around nerves, and reduces the anxiety-provoking effects of glutamate, another type of brain chemical.

The challenge after your thirties is that progesterone begins to decline, and with it, the ability to fully protect your brain and nerves. Low progesterone also causes levels of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) to fall off. GABA is an amino acid and one of the brain’s chief calming neurotransmitters. When you’re low on GABA, you tend to become more anxious, depressed, and sleep deprived—all of which lead to keto craziness if you go on a 100 percent keto diet without the green (alkaline) factor.

Increased Toxicity

Every day, we ingest and are exposed to thousands of chemicals from processed foods, heavy metals, pesticides, personal care products, and prescription drugs. To guard your health against these worrisome toxins, the body likes to store them in fat tissue. Think of that tissue like storage units you rent to stash your extra stuff. The more stuff you accumulate, the more space you need for storage. Your body works the same way. It hangs on to fat so there is enough storage space for toxins. But after you get into ketosis and start breaking down that fat, that toxic payload is discharged into your system.

When toxins hit your system, free radicals are generated. These are unstable atoms or molecules that contain one or more unpaired electrons in their outer orbit. Free radicals attempt to become stable by “stealing” electrons from cell membranes.

Like the borders in your garden that keep weeds from invading your plants, cell membranes protect cells from free radical invasion. If cell membranes are penetrated by these molecular invaders, more free radicals—like fast-growing weeds—are generated. A chain reaction is set into motion that eventually results in cellular damage and disease. In the short term, free radical attacks can make you feel inflamed and foggy-brained; in the longer term, they can cause memory loss, heart disease, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, and many degenerative diseases.

Increased Acidity

A ketogenic diet can also make your system more acidic than usual if you are eating more acidic foods, like meat and cheese, and forgoing certain necessary alkalinizing vegetables (more on this below). Frankly, this is not ideal in the long term for women, especially menopausal women. It’s healthier for your body to be in an alkaline state, in which you will feel energized and healthy.

IS A STRICT AND STRAIGHT KETO DIET RIGHT FOR EVERYONE?

My answer is no. You should not follow a 100 percent keto diet without physician guidance if you:

Have liver or kidney disease
Have suffered a recent heart attack
Are a type 2 diabetic taking oral medications for your condition
Have type 1 diabetes
Have severe hypoglycemia
Are pregnant or nursing
Have been diagnosed with symptomatic gallstones
Have the APOE4 gene (a gene commonly associated with late-onset Alzheimer’s disease)

The Role of Alkalinity in the Hormone Fix

In simple terms, an alkaline diet is a way of eating that emphasizes non-acidifying foods over acidifying ones. You base your food choices around those that lower the acid levels in your body. It is a versatile diet that suits all of us.

As with keto eating, data about our early human ancestors suggests that once upon a time humans consumed mostly an alkaline diet—so in truth our ancestors were eating a Keto-Green Diet!

A study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2003 analyzed 159 hypothetical pre-agricultural diets (since we don’t know for sure exactly what our ancestors ate ten thousand years ago). It found that 87 percent of these diets were “net base producing”—which means they were eating an alkaline diet, not an acidic one.

By contrast, the average Western diet has been shown to be “net acid producing.” We already know that this sort of diet has created an obesity epidemic and is causing health issues such as cancer, heart disease, and a range of neurological disorders. Now it is becoming clearer that an alkaline diet may help prevent many of these illnesses. One reason is that it is better matched to our genetic makeup and supports healthy and diverse gut microbiota.

To understand alkalinity, let’s flash back to high school chemistry, where you’ll probably remember studying pH and acids versus bases (alkaline substances). If you can’t recall, or would rather not go back mentally, let me provide a brief refresher course.

We measure pH on a scale ranging from 0 to 14, with 0 at the acid end, 14 at the alkaline end, and 7 being neutral (pH stands for “power of hydrogen”; it measures the total hydrogen ion concentration in a solution). The ocean has a pH of about 8.1. Your pool? An optimal pH for a pool is 7.4, which mirrors the pH of the human eyes, as well as the pH of our mucous membranes.

The human body works hard around the clock to maintain a slightly alkaline pH level in the blood, and to do so, it must clear out any excess of acid. Your body has a precise mechanism for maintaining its blood acid-base balance, and the mechanism ensures that the pH of blood doesn’t shift much at all. It is tightly controlled by the kidneys and lungs to stay at around 7.4, with a very tight range from 7.35 to 7.45. This is critical for human life, because even a small variation in blood pH is life-threatening. This tight regulation declines with age, and there can be an increase in metabolic acidosis because most modern diets are acidic. That’s another reason why eating alkaline is even more important as we age.

While the blood pH stays in a very small range, the rest of your body varies in pH level. Your stomach, for example, is very acidic, typically maintaining a pH of less than 3.0 so that it can fully break down the food you eat and kill ingested pathogens. The pH of your vagina is 3.8–4.4, which is protective and kills off unwanted bacteria, but this pH increases as we age. The skin has a pH below 5. By contrast, the pH of the intestines and pancreas is 8.0. Most cells work best when they are on the alkaline side. The pH of urine, however, fluctuates and serves as a window on what is happening at the cellular and hormonal level. Ideally, it is good to see the pH of urine at 7, on average. After intense exercise, we expect it to be more acidic; after a relaxing day in nature, it will likely be more alkaline.

The pH of every system in the body is fine-tuned to its function. Think about it this way: the acidic systems, as a rule, protect and are a first line of defense against pathogens for your body. The alkaline systems nourish, restore, and repair. And the food you eat and the lifestyle you live impact that balance.

Which Foods Are Acidic and Which Are Alkaline

When you’re in doubt about what’s acidic and what’s alkaline, ask yourself two simple questions: Does this food grow from the ground or on a tree? If so, it is probably alkaline, but not always. The other question is whether the food is a flesh food from an animal. Animal flesh foods such as meats are acidic. So are processed foods, especially those with sugar, artificial sweeteners, salt, and other added ingredients. In Appendix A you’ll find a detailed list of alkaline foods, organized according to their carb content. But here’s a chart that illustrates what I mean conceptually:

Some foods have a different pH outside the body than they do inside the body, however. Lemons are a good example. Outside the body, they are an acidic fruit with a pH of 2, but they have an alkalinizing effect inside the body. In fact, lemons confer great alkalinizing effects and are healthful in many ways.

In general, fruits, vegetables, certain vegetable oils, herbs and spices, and nuts and seeds are the most alkaline, due to their nutrient content. Meat, poultry, dairy, sugar, processed foods, caffeine, alcohol, and so forth are the most acidic. Of course, there are some outliers: grains, which grow from the ground, are slightly acidic. And some carbs, such as potatoes and sweet potatoes, are alkaline. As mentioned, you have to be careful about eating a lot of carbs, even the alkaline choices, because doing so can prevent your hormones from getting back in balance and your body from going into ketosis. The diet plans I provide in this book will guide you.

As I have alluded to earlier, staying alkaline is not only about food. There is also a huge lifestyle component that is key.

Recently, a friend of mine celebrated one evening with a meal of largely acidic foods—cocktails, beef, and a chocolate dessert. The next morning she tested her urine. To her surprise, she was quite alkaline. Why? Well, the fun, laughter, and love she shared with her friends ignited production of two feel-good hormones—oxytocin and dopamine—and decreased her stress hormone, cortisol. The result: more alkalinity. In other words, food is only part of the picture!

In fact, only about 25 to 50 percent of becoming alkaline is dietary; the other 50 to 75 percent is influenced by lifestyle factors. These factors include your level of hydration, how much you sleep and exercise, how positive you are (and, conversely, how stressed you are), how often you have bowel movements, and how much you are in touch with nature (getting natural light, walking barefoot, and so forth). This is fascinating, and you’ll learn more about it in Part Three.

The Benefits of Becoming More Alkaline

In general, an alkaline diet prevents acidosis, which is at the root of many diseases. If your diet (and lifestyle) is too acidic—say, you’re a habitual diet cola drinker—your body’s overall pH load becomes overly acidic and can result in something called chronic low-grade acidosis. This indicates extreme acidity in your body. With it, a lot of your mineral levels, such as magnesium, calcium, and potassium, are likely to be low. This is where negative impacts to your health hit hard.

Alkalinity Impacts Bone Health

If your diet doesn’t supply enough alkaline minerals or they become depleted from a continued acidic eating pattern and lifestyle over time, your body is forced to pull alkalinizing mineral buffers (calcium and magnesium) from its primary mineral storage reserves—your skeleton—in order to provide vital minerals throughout your system to maintain blood pH balance. Over time, this robbing of key buffering minerals can demineralize and weaken your bones. Indeed, in a study published in 2005 in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, both pre- and postmenopausal women and older men eating an acid-forming diet were found to have lower bone mineral density in the spine and hip. Bone mineral density is a measurement of the level of minerals in the bones, which indicates how dense and strong they are.

But if you eat more alkaline foods, particularly vegetables, your bone density increases, protecting you from bone-crippling osteoporosis. Many studies have been done supporting this conclusion. For example, a 2011 study from researchers in Seoul, Korea, studied postmenopausal Korean women with osteoporosis (and age-matched controls) and found that vegetables were an important source of calcium, other minerals, and vitamins that strengthened bone. Postmenopausal women who ate a vegetable-rich diet were able to boost their bone mineral density. In contrast, other studies have shown that diets high in dairy foods actually cause a reduction in bone mineral density.

Alkalinity Helps Your Heart

Heart disease is another health issue related to a high-acid diet. Just as acid rain eats away at stone, metal, and paint—almost any material exposed to the weather for a long period of time—acidosis irritates and inflames bodily tissue. The acids wear away the cell membranes, including the interiors of blood vessels and the very fabric of the heart. This ongoing process of erosion weakens the heart and vessels to the point where they are very susceptible to breakdown. Some studies show that as acidosis rises, there is a rise in homocysteine, an amino acid normally present in blood. However, at high levels, homocysteine is a risk factor for numerous cardiovascular diseases, including atherosclerosis, or clogging of the arteries, in which these blood vessels become less elastic and blood flow is impaired. I compare blood flow to traffic. When highways are congested, vehicles move slowly. Likewise, when arteries are clogged, blood moves sluggishly. The extra effort required to pump blood also boosts blood pressure, which is not a good thing.

Acidosis increases the production of the stress hormone cortisol—another risk factor for heart disease. (More on cortisol in Chapters 1 and 8.) Proof of this was reported in 2008 in the British Journal of Nutrition. Japanese women with acidosis caused by diet were shown to have higher systolic and diastolic blood pressure, putting them at risk for heart problems. Alkaline diets, on the other hand, reduce and control levels of cortisol. So when you switch to an alkaline diet and lifestyle, you prevent the dire consequences of acidosis.

Alkalinity Improves Fat-Burning

An alkaline diet assists the body in burning fat. First, as I mentioned, alkalinity (along with a low-carb diet) decreases levels of cortisol. Second, an alkaline diet helps you work out more intensely. Researchers at St. Louis University have found that alkaline diets improved physical fitness of individuals in comparison to acidic diets. Improving your exercise performance can translate into greater weight loss and more energy.

Alkalinity Maintains Lean Muscle Mass and Youthfulness

Muscle tissue is the most metabolically active tissue in the body, so with more muscle, you burn more calories, even at rest. Unfortunately, as we age, we lose muscle mass. Loss of muscle decelerates your metabolism, and you’re more likely to gain weight. You’re also at a greater risk of falls and fractures; muscle loss can render you unsteady on your feet.

An alkaline diet protects muscle. A study that looked at a diet rich in potassium and magnesium (ample in fruits and vegetables), as well as a reduced acid load, found it preserved muscle in women. The researchers note: “Although protein is important for maintenance of muscle mass, eating fruits and vegetables that supply adequate amounts of potassium and magnesium are also relevant. The results suggest a potential role for diet in the prevention of muscle loss.” Studies have also shown that a higher intake of foods rich in vitamin K (fruits and vegetables) is associated with more lean muscle. You will feel more energetic and more youthful, and you’ll notice fine lines and wrinkles diminish.

Alkalinity Prevents Magnesium Deficiency

The fourth-most-abundant mineral in the body, magnesium is in charge of more than three hundred essential functions. It helps maintain normal nerve and muscle function, a normal heart rhythm, ideal blood pressure, and a healthy immune system. Magnesium is also involved in activating vitamin D, which is necessary for healthy bones, weight loss, immunity, heart health, blood sugar control, protection against cancer, and more.

Several studies have noted that women with osteoporosis have lower magnesium levels than those without. This is because magnesium regulates calcium absorption. Magnesium deficiencies also result in anxiety and sleep issues, headaches, and other negative side effects.

Many of us are deficient in this essential mineral, for two reasons: our foods are grown in magnesium-depleted soils, and high acid diets tend to siphon magnesium from the body. Fortunately, a diet high in alkaline foods supplies a healthy amount of magnesium for our bodies to function at peak levels.

Alkalinity Reduces Pain

I have really felt this benefit myself when I’ve gone alkaline, and I’ve heard about it from my patients as well. As their bodies become more alkaline, women report to me that they have had less joint pain, menstrual discomfort, and inflammation. Studies support the fact that chronic acidosis is associated with persistent pain and inflammation, especially back pain.

Add this to the fact that our fascia, the connective tissue in our body, also has hormone receptors in it. Along comes the hormonal decline associated with peri- and postmenopause. There are fewer hormones available to enter the cells of the fascia, so it weakens, causing greater aches and pain as we get older.

But none of this has to happen. Take Darla, one of my Magic Menopause clients, who at age fifty-five was really limited in her activities due to serious knee and foot pain. She was contemplating surgery when she joined my program. Going Keto-Green and improving her natural hormone balance completely eliminated these symptoms in just a few weeks.

Alkalinity Improves Detoxification

It can be a dirty environment out there—and inside our bodies too. Fortunately, our bodies are good housekeepers, automatically doing the job of cleaning out or neutralizing toxins through the colon, liver, kidneys, lungs, lymph system, and skin. Still, our bodies can get overloaded with undesirable things like mucus, old fecal matter, mineral deposits, toxic chemicals, bacteria, mycotoxins (mold-related substances), and more—all of which accumulate in various organs and tissues, affecting their operation. For this reason, we need to detoxify periodically.

An alkaline diet is effective for detoxification. Alkaline foods, such as fruits and vegetables, are great detoxifiers of the body, whereas acid foods are inflammatory and mucus-forming. Acids can morph into free radicals, causing tissue damage. When you eat more alkaline foods, they cool and soothe inflamed tissue, heal ulcerations, and enhance cellular functions. In short, they promote cleansing of toxins from the body. This will keep you from getting the keto flu, which is partly a detox reaction.

How We’re Going to Fix Your Hormones

At five feet eight inches tall, I maintain a weight of 150 pounds (as mentioned, I once weighed 240). I have four daughters and a busy family life, I run online programs for women and a foundation in honor of my son, and I lecture regularly around the country and world, training physicians. Yet I manage to stay healthy and at my ideal weight (or close to it, depending on my stress levels) by following the principles of the Hormone Fix.

It works at any stage of your life by merging all the benefits of a healthy keto diet with those of an alkaline diet, as well as incorporating important lifestyle strategies. To sum up, during menopause and other periods of hormonal change, this program can help balance your hormones, aid in weight loss, enhance your sex drive, increase your energy levels, help you sleep better, and reduce inflammation.

Balance Your Hormones

We’ll dive more deeply into this in the next chapter, but suffice it to say that the unique combination of keto and alkaline foods optimizes three key hormones—insulin, cortisol, and oxytocin—so that you experience fewer symptoms like hot flashes and mood swings. If they do occur, they’re usually shorter and less troublesome. As you balance these three hormones, your many other hormones come into balance more quickly.

Drop Pounds and Inches

As many of my patients and clients can attest, weight loss is a serious challenge during menopause. The Keto-Green Diet optimizes the hunger-regulating hormones leptin (satiety hormone) and ghrelin (hunger hormone), normalizes insulin and cortisol (two fat-storing hormones), and eliminates cravings so you can lose weight and comfortably keep it off.

Enhance Your Libido

The diet is rich in healthy fats, which improve the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins. This is especially true for vitamin D, a necessity for healthy function of your sex hormones. It also will improve your lipid profile, while helping balance testosterone and the other hormones depleted by menopause. Results: increased libido and more spark between the sheets!

Stop Energy Drain

Menopause can often leave you feeling fatigued and wiped out. My Keto-Green Diet helps maintain steady energy levels because healthy fats and ketones provide a clean, efficient energy source and support healthy hormone levels, especially when combined with an alkaline diet.

Reclaim Quality Sleep

When your diet is filled with sugar and carbohydrates (even those seemingly innocent 100-calorie fruit snack packs can spike and crash your blood sugar), your sleep is impacted. When you combine a high-carb diet with hot flashes, restless legs, heart palpitations, and other menopausal symptoms, your sleep can really suffer. The Keto-Green Diet balances blood sugar levels and optimizes hormones to improve sleep and reset your circadian rhythm—the body clock in which our physiological processes are synced to the twenty-four-hour solar cycle of light and dark.

Soothe Chronic Inflammation

When you cut your finger, the redness and swelling around the wound are signs of inflammation. This short-term type of inflammation, known as acute inflammation, is beneficial because it means your immune system is responding to injury and intruders, such as bacteria, in order to heal your body.

With chronic inflammation, your immune system fails to shut down. Instead, it releases a continuous stream of inflammatory substances that damage cells and accelerate aging. This deadly form of inflammation can increase during menopause, sparking unpleasant symptoms like chronic pain and playing a significant role in nearly every disease on earth. My Keto-Green Diet counters acidosis and inflammation and may reduce joint pain, back pain, and other inflammatory conditions, as many women in my programs and on this diet have experienced.

So get ready, feel encouraged, and claim your sexy youthfulness! You no longer need to accept hot flashes, low libido, brain fog, and other miseries of hormone imbalance. You hold tremendous power over your health and your quality of life. In all my years of researching and working with women (and men) on nutrition and hormone-reset programs, my Keto-Green approach is the best way I have found to get healthy, balance hormones, boost your energy and mood, become a highly efficient fat-burner, feel sexy again, and have loving relationships. What’s not to love about that?