What if I told you that you could have a million-dollar trainer, someone who would monitor you every day and come up with the perfect exercise designed exactly for your body? A trainer devoted exclusively to you, who is continually tweaking your plan to accommodate exactly where you are today? Would you listen to that trainer… or just follow your friends over to spin class?
Well, my dear friend, I am not that trainer—but you are. I’m going to show you how to design a training program that is perfect for you, and I’m going to show you how to keep it perfect for you for the rest of your life—a program that your body loves and that keeps your body strong and lean. Better yet, I’m going to show you how to test your exercise routines to see how they affect your thyroid, your metabolism, and your weight so that you will always be able to find out whether the exercise you’re doing is the exact right choice for your unique body. In other words, I’m going to show you how to take this data and create the best possible exercise program for your body.
I’m also going to clear up a lot of exercise myths so that you can find what truly works for you. Maybe you’ve been avoiding exercise because you just don’t have time or think that you can’t possibly do enough. No worries! You may find that your ideal exercise is as little as 6 to 8 minutes every other day!
Have you been dreaming of becoming ripped and lean but have been frustrated by weight gain, injuries, and fatigue? Those days are over. You’re going to find your own personal path to greater fitness, a path uniquely geared to your body’s chemistry. Are you already an athlete but want to get stronger and leaner? The answers all lie ahead.
I am going to help you achieve your dream body and best health ever—in a way that is probably pretty different from what you are doing now. That’s because this approach has you testing every single aspect of your exercise plan—which type of exercise you do, when, and for how long—so that you can always be certain that you are doing what is optimal for you. That’s what I mean by “million-dollar trainer”—and that’s what you are about to become.
Whether you’re an over-exerciser or a couch potato, you’ll probably be surprised to find out which types of exercise actually are good for you—and how little time you need to get terrific results. The key is to find the sweet spot—the program designed by you. In this chapter, you’re going to learn how to do just that.
But first I’d like to share with you two very different success stories. Come meet the woman who exercised too little… and the couple who exercised too much.
Maria: “I don’t have time to go to the gym!”
Maria came to me in tears. After more than three years of weight gain, exhaustion, and depression, she had been diagnosed as hypothyroid. Her symptoms had begun when she was promoted to her dream job, which had meant more responsibility and even less time for herself. She loved the work but felt torn about how to get everything done, especially since she had two kids with afterschool activities and a husband who worked late.
Maria knew that she should exercise, but her days were already packed to the gills. “I don’t have time to get to the gym and exercise an hour a day, five days a week,” she told me. “Some days it seems like I barely have time to shower! By the time weekends come along I’m exhausted and I want to spend time with my family. Plus, I feel selfish going to the gym when there are so many other things that need doing. I feel like such a failure!”
Sound familiar? So many people think it’s all or nothing, that if they aren’t pumping away in the gym for hours every week, they won’t get the benefits of exercise at all. So listen to me, and listen well: I want you to kick that thinking to the curb.
Exercising too intensely will actually make it harder for you to lose weight. As you’ll see in this chapter, when you stress your body with exercise that isn’t right for your unique chemistry and genetics, your body fights back. Your thyroid struggles, your metabolism slows to a crawl, and basically, nobody is happy.
On the other hand, doing the right exercise for your body is one of the best things you can do. The right types of exercise for you will boost your energy, help you lose weight, and make you fit and lean. Your thyroid will perk right up. Your metabolism will start humming at peak speed. You’ll feel clearheaded, happy, and ready to take on the world.
To get those fabulous results, you need to find which type of exercise, intensity, and duration work best for your chemistry. It might very well be less intense, quicker, and easier than you think: just 8 to 30 minutes a day, three or four days each week. Most people don’t need to exercise more than a total of two hours a week to achieve optimal health and weight. As it happened, that was true for Maria.
“Look, Maria,” I told her. “You don’t need to kill yourself to be in shape. I want you to go to bed ten minutes earlier so that the next morning, you can do four minutes of warmup and then six minutes of exercises or weight training. You don’t even need to buy weights—you can do body-weighted exercises right in your own bedroom. Your ideal time, to start with, is just two days during the week.”
Maria looked at me, almost too surprised to speak.
“On the weekends, if you want, you can go to the gym for your longer workout on Saturdays or Sundays,” I continued. “If you’re pressed for time, just do an exercise video at home. That will save you even more time. You are not a failure. You just needed the right information about exercise when life is stressful.”
Maria was still in shock, but she nodded happily and agreed. This small jump start—less than an hour a week—helped to boost Maria’s BBT and rev up her metabolism. She was able to lose 16 pounds in one month without ever feeling hungry, exhausted, or overwhelmed. Even better, she was happier, calmer, and more energetic.
Maria liked her new regimen so much, she even got her whole family on board. Her husband and two kids all started exercising at home, and together they worked their way up to 20 minutes, four days a week. I am so proud of her—what a victory!
Dave and Janet: “We exercise all the time. Why are we gaining weight?”
Dave and Janet were one of my favorite couples: motivated, fun-loving folks who adored the thrill of accomplishment and the camaraderie of their CrossFit community. When they first began CrossFit, those challenging workouts seemed like the answer to their prayers. They were having fun, feeling great, and losing weight.
Then, a few months in, each of them began to gain weight. They stopped feeling that wonderful burst of vital energy; instead, they felt fatigued. Each of them started getting injuries, too—a sprained ankle for Dave, an inflamed shoulder for Janet.
At first, they blamed their weight gain on the enforced rest periods from those injuries. But they began to notice other problems. Once vibrant and bubbly, they both began to struggle with anxiety and depression. Instead of getting pumped from exercise, they just felt depleted. They didn’t understand what was happening.
“Everyone else we know is doing great on CrossFit!” Dave would say.
“What’s wrong with us?” Janet would add.
“Maybe we’re not working hard enough?” Dave suggested.
So being the dedicated folks they were, they redoubled their efforts. Oops. More injuries and more weight gain, followed by still more fatigue and lethargy.
Then Janet’s hair started to fall out. Her doctor immediately ran a thyroid panel, which showed that Janet’s TSH had gone from a normal in-range number of 1.5 to a very out-of-range 4.8. Just in the year she had been doing CrossFit, she had developed full-blown hypothyroidism.
Janet urged Dave to get his blood work done, too. Lo and behold, both his testosterone and his T3 were at disastrous levels. No wonder he was gaining weight and feeling lousy! So both of them came to me, frustrated and confused.
“We know lots of people who do CrossFit,” Janet told me.
“Yeah, and everybody else is doing great! Why are we the only ones with health issues?” Dave demanded.
Turns out that CrossFit just wasn’t the exercise best suited for them: they were exercising too intensely and for too long. But when I told them to cut back, they fought me on it, as so many exercise lovers do.
“It worked so well at the beginning,” Janet insisted.
“How is exercising less going to help us lose weight?” Dave wanted to know.
I showed them the data gathered over thousands of patients. Reluctantly, they agreed to try the more varied and less demanding exercise plan that I designed for them—and guess what? Janet lost 10 pounds, and Dave lost 14 in their very first month on The Metabolism Plan. They were doing less exercise and different exercise than they had done before, plus avoiding their reactive foods (whey, turkey, and salmon for Dave; shrimp, spinach, and strawberries for Janet). Six months later, they had each balanced their hormones and were at goal weight, doing an exercise routine they loved.
The Metabolism Plan helped Dave and Janet find their balance, just as I am going to help you find yours. Remember the story of Goldilocks and the three bears? “Not too little and not too much” needs to be your mantra, too.
When you exercise too little, you’re likely to feel sluggish and out of sorts. You find yourself able to do less and less—even carrying your shopping bags to the car seems like an exertion. You sleep restlessly, your inflammation increases, and you tend to gain or retain weight.
When you exercise too much, you may feel fatigued and depleted. You find yourself suffering from mysterious symptoms—hormonal issues, lower sex drive, irritability. You might also face increased inflammation and excess weight because too much physical exertion can read like “Danger!” to your thyroid and immune system.
When you exercise appropriately, though, your stress levels are lower. You feel energized, vigorous, and calm. Your hormones are more balanced, and you lose weight or easily maintain a healthy weight. And for an extra bonus, you have more free time than when you were pushing yourself to overdo it. What you want is just enough physical stress to strengthen your muscles and challenge your body but not so much that you set off your body’s danger signals.
How do you find your ideal exercise balance? All you have to do is look at these key factors:
• When you exercise
• How long you exercise
• What kind of exercise you do
• What intensity you choose.
As with everything else, optimal timing can vary. For most people, though, exercise is better earlier in the day—before work or at lunch. Why? It’s all about the stress. Let’s look at two different scenarios so you can see what I mean.
For you, Mondays are a stress bomb, so you aren’t about to get up super-early for your workout. Instead, you sleep in a little so you are completely charged and ready to face the day. You do set aside 15 minutes, though, and your morning workout boosts serotonin, leaving you fueled and ready to go.
Monday stresses you out as usual, and when it’s over, all you want to do is take it easy. You come home, wind down, and enjoy a great dinner with a glass of wine. After dinner, you talk with friends or maybe spend time with your family, allowing your body to fully relax. You can sleep 15 minutes later tomorrow because you worked out today (you only exercise every other day, to give your body a chance to restore itself). The weekend comes along and if you have more time, you do a longer, more intense workout. Your body is humming along, you are lean and toned, and your thyroid is happy. All is good.
As usual, Monday was a stress bomb—in fact, today seemed a little worse than usual. By the end of the day, your annoying coworkers and your endless commute home have made you feel like a limp dishrag. Exercise to the rescue, right? You want that rush that makes you feel so good—the endorphins (natural painkillers) and serotonin that result from a good workout.
Of course, it’s the end of the day, and your body is longing to wind down and relax. (Remember how those cortisol levels drop gradually throughout the day?) But years of listening to the experts has your brain saying, “Spin class!” So you race to the gym to get there on time, replacing your body’s natural rhythms with an exercise frenzy. Oops! Sure, you get the endorphin rush from spinning, but guess who is more stressed-out the next day by those coworkers and that commute? You! Especially when you step on the scale and found out you gained a pound! You might think that after-work workout feels good, but your body knows better, and it’s telling you so every single day, every time you step on the scale.
There is a phenomenon well-known to stress researchers known as the negative feedback loop. When it comes to stress, it means the more stressed you are, the more stressed you become.
Let’s say you’re in a jumpy, anxious mood because your cat is sick, you’re rushing to the vet, and you have a major work meeting. You’re already pretty stressed, and when you get stuck in traffic on the way to work, you feel twice as anxious. If you’d been in a good mood, you might have just shaken your head and shrugged it off. But crazed and keyed up, you find yourself getting really angry. And the next time something upsetting happens—say, a coworker says something mildly annoying—you’re beyond angry. In other words, the more stressed-out you are, the more you add to your stress.
Now, here’s where exercise comes in, because exercise can either disrupt this feedback loop or make it worse. If you exercise before you feel super-stressed, you raise your levels of serotonin and decrease your levels of cortisol.
However, if you exercise while you’re super-stressed, or if you simply exercise too intensely, you push those cortisol levels up too high—so high, they tend to just stay elevated, undermining your sleep and setting you up for a stressful tomorrow where you are also starving all day. Instead of lowering your cortisol levels, exercise actually raises them, creating a bevy of other issues.
“But if I’ve had a long, rotten day, exercise feels great!” my clients tell me. I get it. Right after you finish your workout, your body is flooded with endorphins and serotonin. These natural feel-good hormones mask your stress and give you one terrific exercise high. Even better, the serotonin acts as a natural antidepressant.
So far, so good—but your cortisol levels are still way up there, at a time of day when they should naturally be dropping. By exercising so late in the day, you are going against the natural flow of your hormones. The endorphins and serotonin are like a drug masking your body’s true condition—which is stressed-out, flooded with cortisol, and clinging to excess fat for dear life.
Think of the way a terrific high is often followed by a hangover or a crash. That’s you, when you do too much exercise too late in the day. Of course, when you are younger, your body can adapt and repair much more quickly. Now that you’re older, your body is less resilient, while you, poor dear, have been beating yourself up for “your body not responding” instead of hearing the message that your body is trying so hard to send.
Now, you might be someone who actually can exercise later in the day, so never fear: You’ll get to test that, too. You can also try types of exercise that incorporate relaxation and meditation, such as tai chi and yoga.
For most people, working out in the morning or on your lunch hour is best: It fuels you with energy before the stress of the day has depleted you. But please, for the dear love of God, don’t compromise sleep so that you can wake up early to exercise, because that totally sets you up to fail. And believe me, few things are worse than killing yourself to get up at 5 a.m. for an early morning workout—and still gaining weight.
Have you ever weighed yourself at night and then weighed yourself in the morning? Isn’t it amazing that you can lose 2 or 3 pounds sleeping? That’s because your body burns the most fat when it’s repairing itself—which is what you do when you sleep.
So please do not skimp on sleep in order to work out: You’ll see a consistently lower BBT, which tells you that your thyroid is struggling. You’re setting yourself up for a lousy mood, a loss of energy, disrupted metabolism—and extra weight. Sleep is your secret weight-loss weapon—do not neglect it!
When I first told Janet and Dave that they were exercising too much, they had a hard time believing me. Like everyone else, they loved that exercise high.
But all their intense exercise was also pushing up their cortisol, affecting their hormones, and slowing their metabolism over time. And here’s what happens when you’ve got too much cortisol:
Excess cortisol=
fat storage + skewed hormones + weak adrenals +
malfunctioning thyroid + increased insulin output
Cortisol also causes blood sugar to spike, which can lead to a buildup of blood sugar in your bloodstream. That excess blood sugar in turn triggers a buildup of insulin, which puts you at risk of diabetes and makes it much harder to lose weight.
John first came to me after he was diagnosed with prediabetes at the age of 58. His fasting insulin levels were high—around 20—and his fasting blood sugars were also high, around 110. I like to see fasting insulin less than 6 and fasting blood sugar less than 90, so you can see how out of balance his numbers were. Despite the low-fat diet he had been following for years and the fact that he was exercising five times per week, John could not lose weight, and he could not get his sugar or insulin levels down.
Poor John literally had his metabolism working against him. His intense workouts were dramatically raising cortisol levels—when we tested them, he saw gains every time. This caused his insulin to spike, triggering weight gain.
John was also failing to give his body the low-inflammatory foods he needed. Instead, he loaded up on traditional diet foods like protein powders, egg whites, and spinach. These foods caused him inflammation, which meant that every time he ate he was asking his body to produce more and more insulin to help get this so-called healthy food into his cells. Insulin is also a growth hormone whose job is to pack on fat quickly and efficiently, so the more insulin John was producing, the more weight he was putting on. He was shocked to see his sugar levels rise when he ate these “perfect” foods. As soon as we got John started on The Metabolism Plan, his blood sugars stabilized, his next fasting insulin level dropped to 8 (a dramatic improvement!), he lost 10 pounds within the first three days, and he learned how to exercise in a way that didn’t boost his cortisol levels. Problem solved!
Excess insulin and cortisol are not the only problems with over-training. Too much exercise has been shown to decrease blood levels of several key biochemicals, described in the following list.
• L-glutamine: An amino acid that prevents muscle breakdown and improves metabolism. In other words, when over-exercise lowers your L-glutamine levels, you’ll find it harder both to build muscles and to lose weight.
• Dopamine: A hormone that helps you feel energized and thrilled, as when you ride a roller coaster or fall in love (see here). When your dopamine levels are low, you tend to feel listless, unfocused, and unmotivated, as though life has lost its savor.
• 5-HTP: The precursor to serotonin. While exercise can temporarily increase your serotonin levels—a powerful antidepressant—too much exercise can deplete the very chemical your body needs to make more serotonin. This is why, over time, too much exercise might sabotage your ability to get that exercise high, leaving you depressed and struggling with sleep problems rather than “high” and well rested.
As you can see, we’ve got a paradoxical effect going on here. In the short term, excess exercise can make you feel great. Over the long haul, however, too much exercise actually sabotages your mood, saps your energy levels, and undermines your body’s ability to repair itself. It’s similar to the way a quick burst of caffeine or sugar makes you feel energized and happy in the short term—but then, a few hours later, you’re crashing. And the more often you repeat those highs, the harder it is to get back to normal, let alone to achieve the 110 percent I want for you.
Exercising too intensely also undermines your hypothalamus and pituitary glands, which your thyroid depends on to function at its peak. So excess exercise compromises your thyroid function and depletes your levels of T3.
In addition, as we saw in Chapter 3, excess cortisol tends to deplete your progesterone and testosterone levels, creating estrogen dominance (true for both men and women!). That creates more thyroid dysfunction and still more weight gain on top of increased moodiness and carb cravings.
Studies show that exercising too intensely for more than half an hour increases hunger, so you often end up eating twice the amount of calories burned. Now, when you consider that your exercise may also slow down your metabolism, you can see how weight gain rather than weight loss is the end result of your workout.
For years, we’ve all been told that “cardio” is the golden key to weight loss. Cardio workouts include running, brisk walking, spinning, and aerobics—any vigorous exercise in which your heart rate stays up for extended periods without a break.
But is cardio good for weight loss? As you age, the answer is a great big not really: Too much cardio can affect your health, your metabolism, and your weight because of the way it creates oxidative stress.
Oxidative stress is a normal response to exercise in which your body produces free radicals: molecules that are missing an electron. Each free radical seeks to replace its missing electron by pulling it from another molecule. That molecule now has its own unpaired electron, so now it’s a free radical, and therefore it, too, seeks to pull an electron from another molecule… and on it goes. Pretty soon, you get a whole bunch of free radicals—and a lot of dysfunctional molecules that can’t operate properly because they’re each missing an electron.
A free radical’s favorite pastime is wreaking havoc in your cells, which is why oxidative stress causes your body to age. Over time, the damage created by oxidative stress increases your risk of heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, and autoimmune diseases.
Free radicals are not inherently bad. Ironically, the more free radicals you have, the more your body is triggered to produce and use antioxidants, which combat oxidative stress to make your cells healthy and strong. That’s why moderate exercise is actually considered an antioxidant: When you exercise in the right amounts, the stress you cause is the kind that ultimately makes you stronger.
But if you undergo more oxidative stress than your body can handle—more oxidative stress than your antioxidants can combat—then free radicals can overwhelm your cells and you have problems. Big problems, like chronic disease, premature aging, and weight gain.
So when I tell you that long, intense exercise—especially endurance training—can cause excessive oxidative stress, you can see immediately why too much exercise can make you sick, fat, and old before your time. In fact, endurance exercise can increase oxygen usage to 20 times its resting state, which greatly increases your body’s level of free radicals. If you don’t allow for adequate rest after oxidative stress, you also heighten inflammation, which, as you now know, causes you to gain weight and get sick. We are constantly told “faster, longer, and more intense” when it comes to exercise. But that approach is way less likely to work for us as we age.
Now, that being said, some people are blessed to be athletes. You’ve seen them—finishing their marathons looking like Greek gods. If you are one of those people, you can and probably should do more intense exercise than most. You’ll know this because you can eat a healthy, satisfying diet—not a starve-yourself low-cal regime—and continue to maintain a healthy weight, feeling energized and enjoying optimal health while you’re maintaining your intense workout routine. Your body knows best, and if your body wants lots of intense exercise, it will tell you!
Most of us, though, need far less exercise than we’ve been told—especially as we get older. You just need to exercise smarter. It’s more likely that the long, intense workouts your body loved when you were younger are now actually hurting you.
My goal is to have you active and happy and high functioning right up until your very last breath. I don’t buy into this nonsense that says you have to slow down as you get older, and I don’t want you to buy into it either. It’s just that things change as we age, so we need to find ways to support our body instead of fighting it.
One age-related change is that your body’s ability to recover from excess exercise decreases as you get older. As a result, the exercise that worked for you in your 20s might now appear to your body as excessive stress—plus your body is no longer as effective in keeping up with the repair. That’s why you have to find the intensity and duration of exercise that fits you now, keeping your current body in optimal shape. When you find your own personal bio-individual exercise, your metabolism zips up to peak speed, you can eat normally without gaining weight, and you generally feel terrific.
Don’t skip exercise altogether—it really is good for you! Not engaging in regular exercise will slow your thyroid function and deprive you of such health benefits as cardiovascular health and boosts of serotonin, not to mention a terrific natural sleep aid and antidepressant. You just need to find the exercise that works for you.
There’s only one way to be absolutely sure about which type of exercise is right for you, and that’s to test it. In the next 30 days you’re going to test your workout and keep testing it, so that you can be 100 percent sure that it’s exactly the type, length, and timing of exercise that is perfect for your body. The great news? What you are learning now is the same format you can use for the rest of your life to figure out what works best for you. So if you start The Metabolism Plan in your 20s, you will always know what to eat and how to exercise for now and for the next 70 years.
What tends to work for most people over the age of 35 is to alternate increased and decreased heart rate, an approach known as interval training. Rather than running, spinning, or stepping for an hour or more nonstop, you engage in a type of exercise that incorporates both “up” and “down” times, such as weight training, body-weighted movement (where you use your own body’s weight rather than a free weight or machine), cardio (in short intervals), and plyometrics, a type of exercise in which you get your muscles to exert maximum force in short bursts. A routine that includes stretching, tai chi, yoga, or Pilates—movement that supports core strength, flexibility, and balance—is also optimal.
More stressful types of exercises cause most people to gain weight or to have trouble losing, especially if they’re over 35. I’m talking about spinning, CrossFit, boot camp–style classes, marathons, and Bikram yoga. As Dave and Janet discovered, these types of workouts seem to tip the balance from the perfect amount of stress into too much stress for most bodies.
That being said, you are wonderfully unique! It may be that spinning and CrossFit totally rock your body. Remember: There is no perfect exercise, just what’s perfect for you. When you begin your 30 days, we’ll start you off with the least inflammatory types and times for exercise—the ones that tend to work for everybody. After that, feel free to experiment to find out whether the more intense types are right for you.
Even when you’ve found your perfect exercise, you might want to change things up. You’ve already heard our office’s favorite saying: “rotate or react.” Whenever you do something too often—whether it’s eating the same food every day or repeating the same workout for several months—you risk triggering a negative reaction. For food, that reaction is inflammation, symptoms, and weight gain. For exercise, it’s a plateau.
A plateau is when the exercise that used to work for you is no longer challenging your body. Feeling bored? Going through the motions and working out while answering your iPhone? That’s smells like a plateau—and it means less progress.
Suppose you’ve been doing weight training and you just aren’t seeing the results you think you should be. Try yoga for a change. If you’ve been doing yoga for years, you might do better with kettlebells and running.
You might also need to get creative about the way you vary your routines. If you’re used to running for 90 minutes at a time, you might taper down to 30 minutes and add in some body-weighted exercises and yoga. This type of variety will also help you prevent injury and create muscular balance. I spent years directing physical therapy clinics, teaching yoga in my health center, and teaching medical massage therapy, so I learned a lot about why people run into problems. The number one cause of injury? Muscular imbalance and overtraining the same muscle groups.
Your body needs change for it to respond. Here are some ways to switch things up and bust through a plateau.
• Rotate your exercise to a new type: Switch from Pilates to kettlebells, from running to tennis, from weight training to yoga. Maybe the type of training you’re doing now isn’t optimal for your body, or you just need a break.
• Change intensity: If you’re lifting weights, add or decrease weight. If you’re moving, move faster. If you’re working out in intervals, make the “active interval” a little longer, or shorter and more intense. Find some way to push yourself to switch it up.
• Change frequency: If you were doing 12 reps, bump it up to 15. If you’re doing 15 at a low weight, try 12 at a heavier weight. Increase or decrease sets and repetitions. If you were working out only two or three days a week, make it four. (However, do not exercise more than four days a week just yet; you can test that later. For now, please continue to alternate one vigorous day with at least one day of restoration.)
Because your body is in a constant state of flux and always responds best to new stimuli, you would ideally rotate your workouts every season. For example, in the spring, you might make your main activity running, then switch to swimming in the summer. In the fall, take up yoga, and in winter try weight training to prepare you for your spring runs. You’ll create muscular balance, avoid plateaus, and just plain have more fun. You’ll also lower your risk of repetitive stress injuries. So be ready to keep changing, and your body will thank you for it.
Well, yes… and no. If you live in a suburb and never walk any farther than to the car parked in your driveway, a moderately paced 20-minute walk is huge. Yes, that will be exercise, and very beneficial exercise, too, so start a walking club with your family or friends, or make this time a moving meditation for you to decompress.
But if you’re even a little bit fit, then no, walking may not count as effective exercise if it’s done for less than 20 to 30 minutes. And here’s the rub: Walking for more than 20 to 30 minutes might actually be perceived by your body as stress! I have actually seen clients gain a pound just from walking or doing a gentle hike for an hour! So once again, think twice about what you have been told is healthy and listen to the messages your body is giving you.
The other problem with walking is that it might not be challenging enough. Once you’re conditioned enough to walk briskly for 20 minutes, you’re probably getting only minor benefits. Sure you get some mild cardiovascular support, me time, and vitamin D, but I want you to get maximum payback for your time. For most people in moderately good condition, walking is not an optimal mode of weight loss.
Let’s be clear: I don’t want you to stop walking! On The Metabolism Plan, you’re going to work out every other day, and if you are new to walking, that will be your workout, even if you have to build up to two or three 10-minute walks each day, such as strolling from your car to the other end of the parking lot.
If you are conditioned, you can easily walk 20 minutes a day—but that won’t count as exercise, because your body won’t perceive it as exercise! I love when my clients take a walk outside at lunchtime. It gets you out of your everyday routine and you get a good healthy dose of vitamin D, all of which is terrific for your thyroid, hormones, and immune function.
Now, you might very well be one of those people who can walk more—what is true for most people may not be true for you. One of my favorite couples are professional dog walkers in Massachusetts. Jerri lost 50 pounds, and her husband, Jack, lost 100 just doing The Metabolism Plan and walking their dogs for the workout. So these are walking “rules” that you will modify to find what makes you happiest and healthiest.
However, if you are stalling in weight loss on the days you walk your dog, here’s a simple trick: Bring a Frisbee or a ball and run your dog, letting it fetch while you throw! That way you can keep your actual walking to 20 minutes total.
As with food testing, you’re relying on two simple tools: your scale and your thermometer.
Your thermometer will tell you in just two minutes whether your particular workout routine is boosting or depleting your thyroid function. Every morning for your 30 days, you will take your BBT. Check back to here in Chapter 2 for step-by-step instructions on how to do this. Your BBT will tell you how your thyroid is functioning and how sleep, stress, and exercise have affected it and your metabolism. When your BBT goes out of range, you know something didn’t work for your body. When it’s optimal, you’re right on track!
I know many of you out there hate the scale. But once you see how much it can enhance your weight loss and give you valuable information, you’re going to love it as much as I do. After all, you deserve to know how the foods you ate and the exercise you engaged in affect your weight—and without the scale, how are you going to find out? If thick-crust pizza doesn’t work for you, but thin-crust does, wouldn’t you want to know? That’s what the scale tells you. You’ll also like finding out which exercise your body loves so much that it responds with some extra weight loss.
When your scale goes down (or remains at your healthiest weight), you know that you can safely enjoy the foods and exercise of the previous day. Weight loss means that what you ate or how you exercised did not provoke an inflammatory response. Weight gain or weight stabilization (before you’ve reached your healthy weight) means that you’re off track, creating inflammation instead of healing it.
Scale + Thermometer = Success
If you lose a pound the day after you go for a 30-minute run and your BBT is in a functional zone, you have found your sweet spot. If you gain a pound when you do a 30-minute run and your BBT drops, you know you’ve gone too far. Either way, you’ve scored a win, because you’ve just gathered data on what your body wants and needs to achieve and maintain an ideal weight and metabolism.
Example 1: You weigh 170 pounds and your BBT is 96. You test a 30-minute run and the next day you weigh 169.1 pounds and your BBT is 96.8. Bravo, that’s a win!
Example 2: You weigh 170 pounds and your BBT is 96. You test a 30-minute run and the next day you weigh 170.8 and your BBT is 95.5. Your run hindered short-term weight loss and slowed your metabolism. That’s not why you exercise!
So for the next 30 days, you are going to track your response to exercise every single day and find what your body loves. The more data you accumulate, the more you’ll learn about your optimal exercise.
My client Jenny desperately wanted to lose the weight that had started piling on in her 30s. Like clockwork, she had put on 4 or 5 pounds every year, so by the time she came to me she was 48 pounds over her goal weight, with high blood pressure and higher stress levels.
I asked Jenny what she ate. “Oh, healthy foods only!” she assured me. There she was, eating oatmeal every morning and skipping a real lunch in favor of a green juice or a raw kale salad. Her dinners were just as “healthy”: turkey burgers, salmon, and quinoa.
These are all highly reactive foods, plus she was slowing her metabolism every time she skipped her lunch. Your body experiences a missed meal as starvation—time to slow down your metabolism! Topping it all off was Jenny’s 5:30 a.m. boot camp, which meant that she often lost sleep, given all the attendant stress on her thyroid and imbalance in her hunger and fullness hormones.
Then Jenny started the cleanse, which doesn’t allow you to work out for the first three days. Suddenly, for someone who couldn’t lose a pound, Jenny saw that the weight was flying off. She lost 5 pounds, and her BBT rose from 94 to 96! Better yet, she had more energy and was feeling less stressed.
On Day 5, you start to exercise, but I want you to start slowly so you can establish a baseline—the way your body reacts at the level of exercise that fits your current conditioning. Jenny was an intermediate exerciser, so her starting point was 12 minutes—much less than she was used to. Along with this less intense workout, Jenny was getting way more sleep than before. Lo and behold, her BBT was rising every day and her weight continued to drop. Jenny was finally supporting her thyroid and her body with the food and exercise that were right for her.
Exercising only every other day, Jenny said she had never felt better in her life. She was more patient at work and with her kids, and she felt great about her consistent weight loss of 0.5 pound a day and 0.8 pound on successful workout days. She loved her newfound vitality, which made her feel as though she had left behind her stressed-out, overscheduled life and was now allowing herself to have more “me” time and family time. After just 20 days of nonreactive foods, moderate exercise, and sufficient sleep, Jenny had lost 11.2 pounds and her BBT was in a functional zone of 97!
Day 21 is when you start to test more intense exercise, so Jenny decided to test her beloved 5:30 a.m. boot camp. The results couldn’t have been clearer. Jenny’s BBT dropped to 95.5, and she gained a pound her first day. Like most of us, Jenny had a hard time believing that something so supposedly healthy could actually slow your metabolism and cause you to gain weight. So she tested that class again, two more times. Both times, epic fail.
“How do you think the boot camp would affect me if I didn’t lose sleep?” Jenny asked me. So we tested it on the weekends, when she got to sleep in. The extra sleep kept her BBT from dropping as much, but she still couldn’t lose an ounce doing boot camp.
It turned out that Jenny’s body did better with barre, a set of ballet-like exercises that build strength and flexibility while using a bar attached to the wall. In that class, she discovered a community of people she liked, and she loved the exercise. The solution for Jenny was simple. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she did 12 to 20 minutes of weights and plyometrics, and then a nice long barre class on Saturdays. I just got a happy email from her: She’s lost 55 pounds in five months.
Here’s the lesson Jenny learned—and the most important thing for you to remember: Your body is perfect—and it talks to you every day. You should never be tired, you should never be stressed to the max, and there is no reason on earth you should be putting on weight from exercise. The Metabolism Plan gives you all the tools you need to understand what your body is saying daily. You will learn to turn off that brain in your cranium and start trusting the brain in your gut. A whole new world of weight loss, energy, and health will be your reward.