Tanya, age 52, came to me at her wit’s end. “I live on egg whites, salad, and salmon,” she told me. “If I’m feeling really decadent, I have a few nuts as a snack or some berries for dessert. I do my workout as soon as I get home from work, and on weekends, I run five miles a day. But I’m always tired and always hungry. How can I eat so healthy and still be 50 pounds overweight? My doctors say I must be lying when I tell them what I eat. I think it’s my thyroid, but they say my numbers are normal and that I just need to eat less and exercise more.”
Naomi, 29, goes faithfully to the gym every day after work. “I never have dessert,” she told me, almost in tears. “I never have bread or pasta or chips or carbs of any kind, really. Six days a week, I run on the treadmill, or go for a spin class. But every year, I keep gaining weight. What’s wrong with me!”
Roberto has always eaten comfortably and exercised moderately, and for most of his life, his weight has been stable. In his late 40s, however, he gained 25 pounds, seemingly out of nowhere. When I ask him why he thinks he’s suddenly having trouble, he doesn’t know what to answer. As we continue to talk, though, he tells me that in the last few months, his wife has gotten laid off, his son was diagnosed with a learning disability, and his mother has entered a nursing home. His eating and exercise habits haven’t changed—but his life has.
“I’m doing everything right—and yet, it’s all going wrong.”
These are the words I hear from my clients time and time again. They eat carefully—often too carefully, cutting out every trace of “fun food.” They exercise vigorously—often too vigorously, stressing their bodies and pushing themselves too hard. Or maybe they skip exercise completely, believing that if they aren’t able to give an hour a day, five days a week, their bodies won’t respond at all. They often skimp on sleep and struggle with stress. Then they wonder why they can’t lose those extra 10, 20, or 50 pounds. What exactly is going wrong?
If you can’t lose weight—especially after following what you think is a healthy diet and exercise routine—there are basically two reasons:
• reactive foods
• metabolism.
So let’s look at these two weight-loss culprits one by one to see just exactly how they are sabotaging your weight-loss efforts.
In the ideal world, you could eat just about any healthy food you can think of, and your body would respond appropriately. You’d digest that food, absorb its nutrients, and benefit from its contributions to your energy, well-being, and health.
However, for a number of reasons, we are not in that ideal world, and as a result, we often react to a particular food with an immune-system response known as inflammation. Inflammation is actually a healing process that can be tremendously helpful to your body as a short-term response to a specific infection or injury. However, when inflammation is triggered too often, it becomes chronic. And that’s where the trouble begins.
In Chapter 4, you will learn exactly how certain foods can trigger inflammation, which in turn triggers weight gain. I call these inflammation triggers reactive foods, because your body is having an inflammatory reaction to them. They are a major culprit in weight gain, because even if you cut back on calories, exercise like a fiend, and otherwise “watch your weight,” reactive foods can sabotage all your efforts.
Think that reactive foods are not your problem? Think again. Everyone I have ever met is eating at least three “healthy” foods that are inflammatory for them—not necessarily for everyone, but inflammatory for their unique biochemistry. That’s why foods like spinach, tilapia, oatmeal, skim milk, asparagus, and cauliflower could be the issue behind your expanding waistline. The very foods you thought would keep you healthy and lean may be doing just the opposite.
Besides weight gain, other mild inflammatory reactions include headache, skin issues, hormonal problems, mood swings, constipation, and bloating. Left untreated, chronic inflammation can cause far worse problems, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and even cancer.
A number of studies support the relationship between inflammation and chronic disease. For example, in the prestigious journal Nature, researchers Lisa M. Coussens and Zena Werb review the research on inflammation as a factor in the development of cancer. In their 2002 article “Inflammation and Cancer,” they suggest that “inflammation is a critical component of tumour progression.” In “The Linkage Between Inflammation and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus,” published in Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice in 2013, N.G. Cruz and colleagues assert that “inflammatory responses may have a role” in type 2 diabetes. These are just two of many, many articles pointing to the dangers of inflammation.
Can “healthy” foods really cause problems like that—foods like salmon, turkey, beans, and raw kale? You bet! Those foods may work wonderfully for your best friend. But if they are not right for you, they will provoke inflammation. And then you start to have issues. The good news—maybe even the great news—is that your reactive foods will stop causing you problems as soon as you cut them out.
Sometimes you might just need to eat certain foods less often. In my office, we say, “rotate or react”; that is, if you don’t rotate your foods, you might start to produce a mild food sensitivity. For example, if you eat pizza and bagels every day, you can very easily become gluten intolerant, especially because pizza and bagels are so much higher in gluten than bread, pasta, and other baked goods. Stick to bread a few times a week, and you might be fine!
Do you have to give up the foods that are causing reactions forever? Probably not. On The Metabolism Plan, you’ll have the chance to test every food that is important to you so you can find out whether it is inflammatory or healthy for you. When you discover foods that cause inflammatory reactions, you’ll cut them out of your diet immediately. Then you will retest them in three months to a year to see when you can add them back in. It’s very likely that you will be able to start eating them again without any issues at all.
How will you know which foods you can eat? That’s the really terrific part of The Metabolism Plan: I’m not going to tell you what kind of diet you need to be on. Paleo, vegan, omnivore, whatever: It’s your choice! All I want you to do is test the foods you love and see how your body responds to them. When you eat a food that causes inflammation, you’ll gain weight the next day; if a food is good for your chemistry, you’ll lose weight the next day. Either way, you are in charge of your metabolism and your weight.
Can you test fun foods, too? Sure, you can even test Scotch if you want to! Instead of feeling that all your indulgences are off-limits, you’ll discover that many can be a regular part of your diet, and some can be a semi-regular part of your diet—all without you gaining permanent weight or triggering other health issues.
But reactive foods are only one part of the problem. The other is your metabolism, so let’s take a look at that.
How do you feel about your metabolism? Maybe you’re envious of friends who have a “fast metabolism” and seem to eat whatever they want without gaining an ounce. Maybe you worry that your own metabolism is “slow” because you seem to gain 2 pounds just looking at a cookie.
Well, guess what? Whatever you think about your metabolism, you are going to find out how to boost your metabolic function so that you can lose weight while enjoying delicious foods and devoting only a little time each week to exercise. To get these fabulous results, though, you need to understand what your metabolism is and how it works.
Your metabolism is a set of chemical transformations that takes place within your body to transform the food you eat into your bones, blood, muscles, organs, nerves, and biochemicals, as well as into the energy that sustains you. Your metabolism determines how hungry you are, how often you need or want to eat, and how much food you need to sustain you. It also determines whether you gain, lose, or maintain weight, as well as how much energy you have.
In a perfectly healthy body, your metabolism continually maintains a healthy weight, seemingly without effort. Keeping your body at an optimal weight is meant to be an easy task, something that your body does as simply as breathing.
However, when your metabolic function is disrupted, your body will put on weight that it absolutely refuses to let go. In fact, the harder you try to lose weight—the less you eat, the more you exercise, the harder you push yourself—the more your body will dig in and hold on to weight. Your body is sending you a very clear message: “What you’re doing is not working.”
Getting to this point can be such a painful experience. You start to feel like there is something wrong with you. You wonder why everyone else seems to lose weight so easily. You can’t help asking yourself, “What’s wrong with me?”
Well, I am here to tell you that nothing is wrong with you. You are perfect. And so is your body, which is speaking to you every day, trying to tell you what it needs. The only problem is that you don’t yet have the tools to understand what your body is saying. Once you finish this book, you will have those tools, and you’ll be able to see just how perfect you are!
So what’s disrupting your metabolism? Here are the major factors.
• Reactive foods: As we just saw, when you eat foods that provoke inflammation, you almost inevitably provoke weight gain as well. That’s the issue we focused on in The Plan, and it’s a common problem—maybe even the most common reason behind weight and health issues. But there are others, which this book will also help you take care of.
• Thyroid: Your thyroid gland produces thyroid hormone, the fuel that powers your cells while regulating metabolic function. When your thyroid function is disrupted, your metabolism is disrupted, too, and you gain weight or aren’t able to lose it. Until your thyroid gets the support it needs—the right nutrients, sufficient sleep, and adequate stress relief—you are most likely to be facing weight issues.
I don’t want to worry you, but you probably have a thyroid problem without even realizing it. Sad but true: Many people with thyroid issues have not been properly diagnosed, and many more have been diagnosed but are not getting the proper treatment they need. You’ll learn more about this in Chapter 2, but meanwhile, do not assume this aspect of metabolism does not apply to you. It might very well be the source of all your weight issues.
• Stress: Stress disrupts your thyroid as well as other aspects of your metabolism. A certain amount of stress is stimulating and energizing, but chronic stress can play havoc with your metabolism and therefore with your weight.
• Sleep: Lack of sleep is a form of stress that disrupts both your thyroid and endocrine system, leaving you with a sluggish metabolism that makes it nearly impossible to lose weight.
• Exercise: Believe it or not, exercise can also be a form of stress when it challenges your body too much. The right type of exercise can help you lose weight, relieve stress, and rev up your metabolism to optimal levels. However, the wrong type of exercise can disrupt your metabolism and sabotage your weight-loss efforts.
The good news is that once you understand what’s going on with food, thyroid, stress, and exercise, you can support your metabolism rather than disrupt it. But first things first. Let’s look at all the myths about metabolism and clear them up, one by one, so that you truly understand what your metabolism needs.
You probably wouldn’t be surprised if eating a diet full of processed foods or high in dietary sugars would cause weight gain. But what if, like Tanya, you’re living on egg whites, salads, and salmon? What if, like Naomi, you’ve ruthlessly cut carbs out of your diet, never allowing yourself a single indulgence?
Well, apart from the fact that these kinds of restrictions are depressing, there’s another problem:
Many supposedly “healthy” foods may not work for your chemistry.
These foods may be perfectly healthy for somebody else—but for you (and thousands like you), they are what I call “reactive.” That is, as we have seen, they provoke your immune system to produce inflammation, which causes immediate weight gain.
How is this possible? It starts with histamine, which causes your capillaries to dilate. Capillaries are your tiniest blood vessels, and they respond to changes in fluid very quickly. When these dilated capillaries leak fluid into your tissue, your weight goes up immediately.
But this causes an inflammatory response that does not just cause water weight. (A shame, because water weight can be reversed within a day.) It also kick-starts any health issues you might have: constipation, acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), arthritis, migraines, and so on, in an inflammatory response that can last up to 72 hours.
To control this response, your body produces a stress hormone known as cortisol. Cortisol has many functions, and we’ll learn more about it throughout this book. For now, let me just tell you that cortisol uses the same biochemical building blocks as several other key hormones, including progesterone and testosterone. So the more cortisol your body produces, the more your hormones are thrown out of whack, disrupting your water balance, metabolism, thyroid health, sex drive, and immune response. To make matters worse, elevated cortisol levels also trigger increased glucose, which leads to elevated blood sugar.
So now we have a new set of problems, because when your blood sugar goes up, it feeds a type of intestinal bacteria known as yeast, or candida. Intestinal yeast has specialized glucose sensors, enabling it to zero in on this new supply of sugar. That’s great for them, but not so good for you, because that hungry yeast alters your gut flora—the bacterial population that lives in your gut and helps promote digestion, a healthy immune system, and a number of other bodily functions. Since 70 to 80 percent of your immune system is located in your gut, you’re now looking at a disrupted immune response as well as digestive dysfunction, skin problems, hormonal issues, chronic pain, autoimmune disease, depression, brain fog, and anxiety. A high yeast population also means never-ending carb and sugar cravings. Long term, you’re at risk for obesity and diabetes.
Every single time you eat a food that doesn’t work for you, this whole process begins. And that is why it’s so vital for you to do The Metabolism Plan: It’s not just your weight; it’s your health.
We’ll look more closely at inflammation in Chapter 4. For now, take a look at the following reactive foods list and see if some of your go-to weight-loss foods are on it—foods are listed in order of the percentage of people who react to them. If you find them, you’ve just learned part of the reason you are struggling with weight and symptoms.
You’ll learn more about the “healthy eating trap” in Chapter 4. And during your 30 days on The Metabolism Plan, you’ll have the chance to test foods so you can find out exactly which ones are reactive for you. Maybe you’ve been choosing a “healthy” turkey burger and mashed cauliflower, only to discover that those foods are making you fat and sick, and you would have been just fine with a cheeseburger and fries. Maybe yogurt doesn’t work for you—but fried calamari does. Maybe salsa is your enemy but guacamole is your friend. Won’t it be a relief to find out once and for all which foods cause you to gain weight and which you can safely enjoy?
This is such a widespread, durable myth that I’ll give you the truth loud and clear: Your metabolism does not naturally slow down as you get older. At least, it doesn’t have to. What does happen as you age is that your thyroid function is more affected by hormonal fluctuations, and your digestive function starts to slow down. This process is amplified by a lifetime of eating reactive foods and perhaps also the wrong types of exercise combined with excess stress.
So once again, there’s quite a bit of good news: As soon as you start eating and exercising in the ways that are right for you, your thyroid levels balance, your digestion improves, and your metabolism can rev up to your teenage levels—or beyond. I’ve even had clients go to their middle-school weight!
Think of these next 30 days as your own personal investigation into your metabolism. What kinds of foods, exercise, sleep, and stress relief does your body like? When you know the answers, you can give your body what it wants. Your body will reward you with a healthy weight, great mood, tons of energy, and glowing good health.
Let me give it to you straight. If you want to lose weight and can’t, if you want to lose weight and can only do so with an enormous amount of effort, or if you seem to be “mysteriously” gaining weight, it’s almost a sure bet that your thyroid is involved. A staggering number of Americans have thyroid issues without even realizing it. So many of my clients come into my office in tears over weight issues, never realizing that their weight problem is fundamentally a thyroid problem.
But it’s more than just weight, because you can have thyroid dysfunction even at your perfect weight! Thyroid problems can mean that you have no energy and no sex drive. You’re constipated and moody. Your hair is falling out and your digestion is rotten. You can’t focus and your memory seems to be completely gone.
Once you give your thyroid the support it needs, though, that can all change. Overnight.
The chances that you have a thyroid problem go up exponentially if you are a woman over the age of 40 because for us, thyroid issues are a veritable epidemic. And guess what? Obesity in that population has also reached epidemic proportions. And yes, there is a connection.
Here’s a fact that I find really upsetting: Even if you’ve been tested for thyroid problems and your tests come back “normal,” you may still have a thyroid problem. So your doctor says you’re fine—but you keep gaining weight.
To make matters worse, the problems don’t end even when you are prescribed some thyroid medication, because you might easily be getting the wrong type of thyroid hormone or a dose that is too low. That’s beyond frustrating: It looks as though you are being correctly treated, but your thyroid is still underfunctioning and your metabolism is still out of whack. So the weight problems continue, no matter how you tinker with diet and exercise. Your doctor might tell you that everything is fine—but your body knows better.
You’ll learn more about your thyroid in Chapter 2. And when you start your 30 days, you’ll test for the best ways to support your thyroid, so that it is finally able to operate at peak efficiency and your metabolism can return to normal. A lot of other symptoms will probably disappear along with the unwanted weight: constipation, skin problems, memory issues, anxiety… the list goes on and on.
If medication were enough to solve your thyroid problems, my office wouldn’t be filled with clients who are overweight, exhausted, depressed, and lacking a sex drive! Medication is simply not enough to make you feel 100 percent.
The great news? Going on The Metabolism Plan may be able to help you decrease your medication. The exciting thing about the 30-day journey ahead is that you’ll find out which foods and lifestyle your thyroid needs, making it stronger and more functional.
Your body needs time to rest and repair. In fact, that’s when you can lose the most weight! I know you might be able to get by on six hours of sleep, but for every two hours of sleep you don’t get, your weight loss is impaired, anywhere from 0.2 pound to more than a pound. See for yourself how much extra weight you can lose on those Saturdays and Sundays when you get to sleep in or when you cut out those 5:30 a.m. boot camps.
I’ve seen it with thousands of clients, and with myself as well: Too much exercise raises cortisol, which cues your body to gain weight. Learning how to do the right amount of exercise—but not too much—is key to weight loss.
That’s because when you relieve stress—including physical stress, like intense exercise—you lose more weight. It’s a crucial point, and one of the reasons The Metabolism Plan is going to change your world.
Why? Because exercise is a two-part process. First, you exercise… then you rest and repair so that your body can restore itself on a higher level. Exercise, restore; exercise, restore. That’s the way you achieve peak physical fitness, a healthy weight, and a metabolism that runs efficiently.
Some people do benefit from daily training, and I’ll tell you how to figure out whether you are one of those people. You might just be genetically gifted—a natural athlete who benefits from a daily workout.
For most of us, though, every day is too often, especially as we age and our body begins to repair itself more slowly. The accumulated inflammation of many years might also take its toll, especially if other stressors in our life are on high. So just about all of us need a repair day after an exercise “stress” day. In fact, if you exercise too frequently, your body will perceive this as additional stress and start gaining weight in response. So in the next 30 days, you’re going to test how often, how long, and how intensely to exercise, so you can be sure your workout routines are exactly right for you.
Kick that Fitbit to the curb! Walking is not the greatest exercise for most people, so let me lay it out for you.
If you are completely unused to physical activity, walking is probably a good choice for you to get back into some kind of movement. Walking 20 to 30 minutes a day at a brisk pace can be an effective form of exercise for you, just until you get in shape.
However, once you are in shape, walking won’t be enough of a challenge to count as exercise. Your body will quickly adapt to walking and the weight loss will stop. Yet if you walk more than 30 minutes, your body might perceive walking as stress… and stress cues your body to gain weight. In fact, some of my folks who have the hardest time with weight loss are the ones who take their dogs on long walks!
I know a lot of people are very attached to walking, and if you are one of those folks, don’t panic. I’ll help you find the balance that works for you so you can figure out how much walking is too much while still keeping your puppies happy.
Cravings are not about control. They are usually due to factors that you would never guess play a huge part in your 4 p.m. snacks or midnight cravings—hormones and inflammation. As soon as you know how to moderate stress and avoid reactive foods, you’ll be amazed at how your cravings evaporate.
Meanwhile, please don’t believe those ugly myths about yourself—that you have no self-control, that your health and weight issues are your own fault because you lack discipline. It’s not about willpower; it’s just basic biology. Your body wants to get to a healthy weight. And getting there is so much easier than you think.
Nothing makes me sadder than to hear a client say, “I’ve got a terrible metabolism.” Your metabolism is ready to operate at peak function—you just need to support it through the choices that are right for you. It’s not your fault that you haven’t known what your body needs—but now you will! So let’s start by looking at the gland that regulates your metabolism, governs your energy, and helps determine your weight: your thyroid.