I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying, “Knowledge is power”? That’s my motto, and it’s how I want you to operate. The Metabolism Plan is based on you gathering information about every aspect of your diet—which foods and even which restaurants work for you. This isn’t some diet regimen that you mindlessly follow, stuck with the same “no’s” forever. This is your opportunity to create your very own personalized diet and exercise plan, fine-tuned to your body, changing as your body changes, so that you are always in peak physical, mental, and emotional condition.
Your body speaks to you in a dozen different ways, every day, all the time. That twinge in your left knee? That’s your body saying, “Inflammation! Eggplant is not for us.” That foggy feeling when you hit four o’clock and want to fall asleep at your desk? That’s your body saying, “Too much animal protein at lunch!” That exhausted feeling post-workout? That’s your body saying, “Boot camp doesn’t work—please switch to something gentler!”
The Metabolism Plan is based on you listening to your body. Every morning you will take your temperature, and every day you will weigh yourself. (More about that in a minute, but you’ll learn to love the scale, I promise!) Those readings will show you exactly how your body feels about what you’re giving it to eat and how you’re asking it to exercise.
Like anything else, understanding your body takes practice, but in this case it’s just relearning a language you used to speak. Throughout your first 30 days on The Metabolism Plan, you’ll get much better at interpreting what your body is saying and figuring out the foods that are right for you. So many people have told me that they forgot what it’s like to have pain-free days, days where they weren’t bloated, constipated, and achy. They thought that feeling bad was now their new norm. Well, pretty soon, feeling good will be your new norm—and any bad feeling will be a clear message that empowers you to take effective action.
You are the one who will decide which foods you can eat and which you should avoid for now. You won’t have to guess or wonder why those numbers on the scale seem so random. You will be testing—getting your own personal data on your own biochemistry and developing a bio-individual diet.
This is just as true for exercise as for food, by the way. As you will see in Chapter 5, some of you can benefit from CrossFit, while others should stick to swimming or rock climbing or yoga. Both the food and the exercise your body loves will probably change over the years, and when you understand how your body works, you’ll be able to keep changing your diet and your workout regimen to fit your body.
So here’s what you’re going to do. After a three-day cleanse in which you’ll rest up and allow your body to heal, you’re going to test food on even-numbered days and exercise on odd-numbered days. By “test,” I mean that you’ll try out either a new food or a new form of exercise. Every morning, you’ll take your BBT to see how your thyroid is reacting, and you’ll weigh yourself to see whether you’ve had an inflammatory reaction to anything you did the day before. (Remember, inflammation causes your body to gain weight immediately.)
This is going to be great, because you will know for sure whether a food or exercise is right for you. If it is, stick with it. If not, drop it. By the end of 30 days, you will have amassed a long list of friendly foods that you know will keep you at a healthy weight, and friendly exercise that you know is right for your body. You’ll have figured out which foods to stay away from—at least right now. (You can always retest them, and as we’ll see later on, you should keep retesting.) You’ll know which exercises stress you out and cause you to gain weight. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll be eating and exercising exactly the way your body needs—and the payoff is your dream body.
Here’s the basic science:
• The foods that make you gain weight and provoke your symptoms are the ones that trigger inflammation.
• Everybody’s body chemistry is different—a unique response to your history, genetics, environment, and lifestyle. Therefore, each of us has a different list of foods that trigger inflammation.
• To learn which foods are most likely to trigger inflammation (“reactive foods”), check out the chart here—but remember, these are the numbers for most people. Your own responses might well be different, which is why you’re going to test every single food. Because I want to lay the odds in your favor, you’ll start with the foods that are least reactive for most people, so you can quickly put together a list of friendly foods that will become your mainstays.
• No matter how healthy a food is supposed to be, it might be reactive for you. If so, you’ll immediately gain weight, develop symptoms, or both.
• The amount of weight you gain tells you just how reactive a particular food is for your chemistry. If you gain only 0.1 pound, that food is not the worst thing in the world and you can probably enjoy it every so often. If you gain 2 pounds, that’s a highly reactive food for you, so avoid it now and retest in a year or so.
Here’s one last key point, and it might be my most important point ever:
A lot of so-called healthy foods are actually reactive for a lot of people, especially as we age.
It’s distressing to know that your weight has been going up from so-called healthy foods like tofu or quinoa. And maybe for some people these foods are healthy. For many of us, however, “healthy” foods like hard-boiled eggs, bananas, and Greek yogurt are the gateway to inflammation, premature aging, digestive disorders, and chronic pain.
The good news is, you will finally learn exactly what causes you to gain weight and what causes you to lose it. It all starts with inflammation, so let’s take a closer look.
Inflammation is your body’s response to an infection or injury. When you get a cold, inflammation helps your body to fight off the rhino-virus that provoked it. If you sprain your ankle, inflammation helps your body to repair the injury and return to health.
As inflammation does its healing work, it brings with it a range of effects that are not always so pleasant: heat, redness, swelling, and pain. When you get a cold, for example, you often feel feverish (heat). Your nose turns red or maybe your whole body is flushed (redness). Your nasal passages swell (swelling). You might feel achy all over (pain). These are the side effects of your immune system working to heal your body.
Likewise, with a sprained ankle, you can feel the flesh around your ankle get warm. Your ankle turns red and swells up. It hurts. These are the side effects of immune-system chemicals as they heal and repair the injury. Inflammation can be a good thing—but its side effects are not always so great.
When inflammation subsides after the threat is over, its side effects go away. Your cold is over. Your sprain is healed. And look! The redness, swelling, heat, and pain are gone, too. That’s what’s known as acute inflammation—a short-term response that quickly goes away.
But what if inflammation becomes chronic, as when your immune system is continually reacting to a set of triggers that never really go away? Then you’ve got problems, because now those side effects become permanent and turn into a wide variety of symptoms:
• Brain fog
• Chronic pain
• Digestive issues such as constipation or IBS
• Fatigue
• Headache, migraine
• Hormonal imbalance
• Loss of sex drive
• Mood issues such as anxiety, depression, and irritability
• Skin conditions such as eczema and psoriasis
• Weight gain.
So how does inflammation become chronic? What kinds of triggers can keep provoking inflammation again and again and again—until, finally, it and its symptoms take up permanent residence in your body?
Two key triggers are reactive foods and the wrong kinds of exercise. When you keep eating foods your body can’t tolerate, or exercising in a way that doesn’t suit you, your body responds with inflammation, which, over time, becomes chronic. The weight comes on and stays on, your symptoms become “the new normal,” and you begin to feel as though your body were the enemy. It’s not—you just need to stop provoking that chronic inflammation.
Your gut is a huge factor in chronic inflammation. If your digestive tract is in poor shape—which can happen due to stress, lack of sleep, problematic food choices, and a host of other reasons—the tight junctions in your small intestine loosen up, allowing partially digested bits of food to leak through. This is known as intestinal permeability or leaky gut. Since most of your immune system is located just on the other side of your intestinal wall, it gets first look at this undigested food, and it does not like what it sees. Because your immune system knows only how to recognize the pure nutrients extracted from fully digested foods, all that partially digested food appears to be an invader.
When your immune system is under attack, it mobilizes its defenses: antibodies that will sound the alert anytime an invader appears. So when you put some milk in your coffee or take a bite out of your breakfast omelet, your immune system says, “I remember that partially digested milk! I remember that partially digested egg! Attack! Attack!” Milk, eggs, or whatever other food your immune system has tagged with antibodies is now considered armed and dangerous, and your immune system will respond with inflammation every time that food appears.
That’s how you get low-grade chronic inflammation—you trigger it every time you eat a food that your immune system has learned to mistrust. You gain weight and start to experience health issues. And you start to think your body is the enemy when it’s only doing its best to protect you.
The really bad news is that chronic inflammation also sets you up for some serious illness down the road. Heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune conditions, and even cancer can result. For both your weight and your health, you want to reduce chronic inflammation as far as possible.
To make matters worse, getting older means that your digestive system tends to lose a bit of resilience. You can have fewer digestive enzymes, and stomach acid and even saliva can decrease. You might have further compounded gut dysfunction by years of stress, missed sleep, and problematic food choices. Over time, as your gut function deteriorates, stress keeps building, and your inflammation mounts, you create a kind of perfect storm.
In my previous book, I talked about Jerry, a 25-year-old who had a mild sensitivity to wheat and tomato sauce. But he was young and his digestion was still operating at near-peak levels, so he never really noticed the beginning of digestive issues.
After ten years of enjoying pizza three nights a week, though, his poor immune system had had enough. And because he had lost some digestive enzymes, his body was having more trouble digesting these reactive foods. He had also lost some resilience in his microbiome, the community of gut flora that you need in order to digest your food, support your immune system, and keep your brain in peak condition. Stress, lack of sleep, disrupted thyroid function, and a whole host of other factors had put Jerry’s immune system through a lot of changes, so that what had once appeared to his immune system as a little threat now began to look like a big one. Instead of saying, “Oh, pizza, well, I guess I can handle it,” his immune system began to say, “Pizza, again? It’s too much! Send out the killer chemicals! Send out the inflammation! Let’s burn out this threat!”
In other words, when you don’t recognize that foods are triggering inflammation, you keep eating them—and your inflammation skyrockets. You gain a pound or two overnight. And the inflammatory symptoms here start spinning out of control.
Once you get into an inflammatory downward spiral, things tend to get even worse. In your mid-20s, you had a mild reaction to tomatoes and pizza dough. In your mid-30s, your reaction gets more severe, plus you’re also starting to react to eggplant, salmon, and walnuts. By the time you turn 40, your immune system is panicking when you introduce cauliflower and strawberries, and it’s not too thrilled with arugula, raspberries, or milk. Your seemingly healthy diet is packing on the pounds and triggering the symptoms. You feel like the only way you can lose weight is to eliminate any food that’s fun. Or else you just plain give up.
Now, here’s the good news: As soon as you reverse this vicious cycle, a whole lot of terrific things begin to happen.
• You strengthen digestion so that foods that used to be reactive stop being a problem.
• You lose weight and maintain your ideal weight eating normal foods that you love.
• By supporting optimal digestion, you also support optimal mood.
• Your overall health improves.
If I followed the calorie charts for my height, I’d be living on 1,100 calories a day. Instead, I consume more than 2,000, and I’m lean and energized. So let’s lose that calorie myth and focus on nutrition and what makes you feel good. A hundred calories of almonds would obviously react differently than a hundred calories of donuts, right?
When you do your three-day cleanse right at the beginning of the Plan, you’ll consume roughly 2,000 calories if you’re a woman and 2,800 if you’re a man—and you’ll probably lose at least 5 pounds. Your goal is to identify what causes inflammation. Reduce the inflammation, and the weight will melt away.
Inflammation and food reactions are so highly individual, it’s mind-boggling—but at this point, hopefully, this is making a lot of sense to you. For example, two common dietary triggers are beans and bell peppers, as I know all too well. If I take even a bite of hummus or eat a sliver of pepper, my sinuses clog and I gain a pound. But I have clients blithely eating both, as happy as can be.
Recently I was in Houston seeing clients, and I had dinner with Jackie, one of my staff. As you can imagine, when people go out with me they are on their “best behavior,” so Jackie ordered all of her friendly foods and we chose a nice bottle of wine. I heard a small sigh and asked her what was wrong. She looked up at me and said two words: “Fried calamari.”
“C’mon, Jackie, let’s order some,” I said. “It will be fun!” Her eyes opened wide in surprise, but she wasn’t complaining. It was a great meal, full of laughs, and the next morning I received a delighted email: Jackie was down a pound, and now she had a new dish and a new restaurant to put on her friendly list!
“Lyn-Genet, I just find myself craving sugar—and I know it’s bad for me. How do I make the cravings go away?”
“For me, it’s starches. Potatoes, pasta, beans, anything starchy—I just want more and more and more.”
One of the most wonderful things about discovering what works for your chemistry is the way it makes all your cravings go away. Many of my clients tell me they struggle with uncontrollable cravings, only to discover, after the cleanse, that they are totally craving-free. What’s going on?
When you have inflammation in your digestive tract, it can cause a rise in ghrelin, the hormone that regulates hunger. Ghrelin provokes you to think you’re hungry when you really don’t need any more food. Because hunger is meant to be a warning sign of starvation—that is, low blood sugar—excess ghrelin often causes you to crave foods that will quickly drive your blood sugar up: sugars and starches.
Ghrelin levels also rise in response to low levels of thyroid hormone, as well as lack of sleep. This makes sense, because we know that when your body is under stress—when it believes that it’s in danger of starving to death or dying of the cold—your thyroid production slows way down, trying to conserve energy. At the same time, you feel hungrier, which is your body’s way of trying to fatten you up. If you were trekking across the tundra or facing a long, cold winter, it would be useful to feel hungry as often as possible, so that you’d be ready to take advantage of any food source that came into your reach. So please, don’t be mad at your body—it’s only trying to save your life!
Here’s one more factor that creates cravings. Reactive foods create yeast, a type of intestinal fungus. Yeast just loves sugar, so when your intestinal yeast population starts to multiply in response to a reactive food, it creates in you intense cravings for sweets and starches to a sometimes overwhelming extent.
To make matters worse, excess exercise depresses your levels of leptin, the hormone that lets you know when you are full. Are you starting to see how right now you aren’t set up to win? I’m going to help you change all of that, and pronto!
So I want you to say to yourself, It’s not me. I’m not out of control. These cravings have just been my natural reaction to eating foods that were reactive for me. Maybe those monster workouts were causing monster cravings by suppressing leptin. Or maybe you are reactive to grilled salmon. But now that you understand the biology of your hunger and your appetite, you don’t have to worry that your cravings are about lack of willpower. They absolutely are not. I’ve worked with people who weighed 400 pounds, and I promise you, willpower wasn’t the issue: Biology was. Just knowing that should help you give yourself a break. Plus you will support your thyroid function, get the right exercise, and eat the right foods, so that neither thyroid nor inflammation will be disrupting your metabolism.
By the way, contrary to what you may have heard, small amounts of sugar are not the problem either. Just as likely, that turkey burger you were reactive to was what turned you into a cookie-eating fiend! Or asparagus, or bell peppers, or whatever your trigger foods are. As we’ve seen, inflammation is the real problem. So please don’t demonize any foods. Instead, learn how to analyze what does and doesn’t work for your body.
• The Cleanse (Days 1 to 3): You’ll start with a three-day food-based cleanse—three full meals plus a snack each day, using the foods that my research has found to be least reactive. This will bring your inflammation levels down quickly while giving your body a break from heavy digestion, allowing it to repair and restore. You’re likely to lose about 5 pounds if you’re a woman, and 7 to 10 pounds if you’re a man—but don’t worry if it’s more or less. Weight loss is coming, soon enough!
• Laying the Groundwork (Days 4 to 10): After the cleanse, you begin to build a solid foundation of foods that are friendly to your body. In this phase, most of the foods and types of exercise are likely to agree with you, so much so that people like to call this the honeymoon phase.
• On even-numbered days, you’ll test a new food. That is, you will include a new food in one of your meals and then weigh yourself the next day. If your weight drops, the food is friendly. If your weight goes up, the food is inflammatory for you. If your weight stays the same, the food is mildly reactive and will be cut for now, since it will interfere with your testing. After your 30 days, please feel free to enjoy this food on days you don’t test. So if one of your favorite foods is mildly reactive, don’t despair—you can still have it every so often, as long as you follow it with a low-inflammatory day. It’s only when you have inflammatory day after inflammatory day that you start to see health and weight issues. You’ll continue testing until you have 40 or 50 friendly foods that you can rotate to create a healthy food plan for you.
• On odd-numbered days, you’ll test a new type of exercise. Again, the next day you will weigh yourself and take your BBT. These measurements will let you know whether the exercise is friendly to your body or provokes weight stabilization or weight gain. Just as with foods, you’ll eventually build a battery of exercise types and amounts that will work for you.
• Step It Up (Days 11 to 20): Now you’ll be testing more reactive foods on your even-numbered days, and exercise that’s 20 percent more intense on your odd-numbered days. You’ll be losing weight most of the time as you learn more about what types of food and exercise are right for your body.
• Fine-Tuning (Days 21 to 30): In this phase, you pick which foods and exercise you want to test, continuing to learn what does and doesn’t work for you.
The goal, as you can see, is to make this not my plan, but your plan. Sounds good, yes? The Metabolism Plan is designed for you to lose about half a pound each day until you reach your set weight and feel terrific. If you lose less weight than that, if you gain weight, or if you have any negative response whatsoever, it’s for one of the following four reasons:
• You didn’t drink enough water, or you drank water after dinner (see here).
• You’ve had too much sodium (see here).
• You’ve eaten a food that is reactive for you.
• You exercised too much, or did the wrong type of exercise.
Every day, you’ll be hopping on the scale and taking your temperature, so you’ll have these objective measurements to tell you whether a food is reactive. If your BBT dips or your weight goes up, that food isn’t working for you. You might also develop a symptom—a headache, a drop in energy, a rush of anxiety, or perhaps even a stronger reaction. Your body has had a chance to heal during your three-day cleanse; it got used to not being assaulted by inflammatory foods. So when you introduce a trigger food that provokes an inflammatory reaction, you sometimes get a super-intense reaction as your body jumps in surprise. “What? I thought we were done with that, and now you’re bringing it back again. Noooo!!!!”
Whether your response is weight gain, an intense physiological response, or both, you’ll know that your body really doesn’t like this food, or at least, not right now. Honestly, this is good news: Now you know to stop eating that food. Even better, you know that this is part of the reason your weight and health have been thrown off track. Cut this food out of your life—at least for now—and watch your weight drop and your health bounce back.
A food reaction can last 72 hours. The good news is that once you cut that food out, have your friendly foods the next day, and take a probiotic (to restore gastrointestinal balance), you should rapidly heal, losing any weight you gained as a reaction. And that’s why we alternate: We test foods only every other day, and the same with exercise. We want to give your body a chance to get back to baseline.
What if you feel like you need an extra day or two when you have a severe reaction (like, say, 2 or more pounds of weight gain)? It’s okay: Just don’t test the food that was scheduled for that day; eat only friendly foods that you know will work for you. You can always come back to that day and test later.
People often ask me about taking the Antigen Leukocyte Antibody Test, better known as ALCAT, a common food allergy test. I always tell them that both ALCAT and the other food sensitivity tests available are inaccurate because so many variables can affect your testing. Here are just a few:
1. During times of seasonal allergies, or if you’re around pets to which you are allergic, you’re in a heightened histamine state. That means you will test allergic to many more foods than you otherwise would.
2. Times of hormonal fluctuations may influence how you do with your food tests. So if you start to notice you are testing reactive to all of your foods right before your cycle starts, stay with your friendly foods and friendly days. But you can still keep exercising. Luckily your body seems to do better with more exercise right before your cycle starts!
3. Heightened levels of cortisol will make you test sensitive to more foods. So if you have a fight with your spouse, or have a deadline at work, your blood work might be very inaccurate.
4. The “rotate or react” principle also affects your testing. If you ate spinach five days in a row before your test, guess who is going to test as allergic to spinach? This is one I see quite often!
5. You can even get different results if you take your blood test in the morning or in the afternoon!
One of the saddest things I see in my practice—and I see it all the time!—is people who think their bodies have turned against them. People are always telling me, “I gain weight if I just look at food.”
It’s easy to understand why you feel this way. You think your body has been betraying you. But now you know, whenever you gain weight in response to a healthy stimulus like food or exercise, that’s your body saying, “Please stop. This doesn’t work for us.”
If you think about it for a minute, that’s pretty amazing. All you have to do is listen to your body and it will guide you to the diet and exercise that will keep you at an ideal weight, feeling 110 percent and loving life.