Let’s start talking about why you’re fat. Fat control has largely to do with hormones. I always knew that hormones played a large part in how we feel, but I never dreamed that they were so responsible for metabolizing fat and maintaining muscle. Take testosterone, for example. The hormone testosterone is the reason, ladies, that your husbands and boyfriends can eat whatever they want and not gain a pound, while you count calories and can’t lose a pound.
My extreme interest in hormones happened in my late thirties after I went to my doctor, complaining that I felt tired and didn’t have the energy for my usual exercise routine. He did my blood work and found that I was terribly low in progesterone. My blood sugar was also low. I learned that low blood sugar is a precursor to diabetes, which runs in my family, and I learned that low progesterone causes sleeplessness and fatigue.
None of this was acceptable to me, so I started to research natural ways to balance my blood sugar and my hormones. As I researched, I was astonished to find out how much cutting-edge data linked weight management to hormones! Out-of-whack hormones disturb your body chemistry and cause weight gain. When you control your hormones, you can control fat!
Hormones, of course, are powerful chemicals and a crucial part of your inner environment. They impact every area of your life—how you feel, how you act and react, and how you look. When hormones are nicely balanced, your health is great. You enjoy strength, energy, and beauty. But when hormones shift and fluctuate, things can get pretty ugly. Having hormone dysfunction feels like you are constantly fighting a battle and never winning the war. You have constant cravings for unhealthy food, you feel slightly lethargic and depressed, and you don’t have the energy for a real workout.
There are actually four hormones responsible for making you fat and three hormones responsible for making you thin. The secret is to have all seven in balance and operating as they should. That’s when you’ll truly lose weight, without a lot of painful sacrifices, and keep it off. I’m going to tell you what all these hormones are, how they work, and how lifestyle affects their balance, so that you can get thin and healthy. Here’s the deal.
One of the greatest get-thin hormones is human growth hormone (HGH). It’s a fat burner that works in the following manner: Normally, your body uses glucose (blood sugar) for energy before it taps into fat for energy. But HGH reprioritizes everything. It forces your body to draw energy from your fat reserves first. This turns you into a fat-burning machine, even during inactive periods like when you’re sleeping. With plenty of HGH in your system, you don’t have to diet all the time.
Another great benefit of HGH is that it helps your body to grow new muscle cells. Normally, you stop making muscle cells after your teen years. If you do resistance training, you’ll increase the size of the muscle cells you do have. The number of muscle cells never grows, however, unless there’s adequate HGH in your body. So HGH helps you get toned and sculpted by creating more muscle cells.
HGH also gives you more energy, a higher sex drive, and youthful skin and hair. HGH is truly a wonder hormone.
But here’s the challenge: HGH starts plummeting through our thirties and forties, making it harder to get toned and look lean. Luckily, diet and exercise actually boost HGH levels, allowing it to rejuvenate and beautify your body.
So how can you naturally raise your hormone levels? It’s not as hard as it may seem. Here’s how I did it.
When blood sugar is low, your body pumps out more HGH. The best way to capitalize on this situation is to keep your carbohydrate intake low in the evening. For dinner, have protein and some low-carb veggies, but no carbs like bread, pasta, rice, or potatoes. HGH will then accelerate fat loss by mildly increasing your metabolism and boosting muscle growth while you sleep.
And while I’m talking about sleep, you should know that sleep deprivation almost completely abolishes HGH production. Deep sleep is when the body produces HGH—so you’ve got to get a good night’s sleep every night. What I’ve found is that eating casein-rich foods like low-fat cottage cheese will help you sleep. Also, don’t drink caffeine products past three o’clock, and never sleep with your television on.
These include foods high in the B vitamins, like whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and proteins; the mineral zinc, found in lean proteins; and any protein-rich food. My nutrition program is packed with these nutrients, so you will automatically be eating HGH building blocks.
Many of our foods are loaded with pesticides and chemicals, which lower HGH. To avoid these body-killing substances, eat as many organic foods as you can. I’ll have more to say on this in chapter 6.
Intense workouts improve your body chemistry, including levels of HGH. Sprinting and weight training, both of which are intense training modes, have been shown to increase HGH release, improving your metabolism. The intensity of the training you’ll do on my program will help trigger greater HGH release.
But what about those over-the-counter supplements and pills promising to boost the production of growth hormone sold in health-food stores and over the Internet? There’s no evidence that pills work. Rejuvenation centers sell injectable HGH, but it is very costly and may have some dangerous side effects. So forget pills and injections. Rely on natural ways to increase HGH.
My favorite hormone is testosterone, made in the ovaries and adrenal glands. While mostly associated with men, testosterone is critically important for women. It builds muscle, burns fat, boosts energy, increases sex drive, strengthens bone, lifts depression, and increases optimistic thinking. In women who have normal to high testosterone levels, it produces assertiveness—which is why I know my body produces it in spades.
The aging process makes testosterone levels drop. So do lifestyle factors like diet, alcohol use, smoking, stress levels, and your overall state of health. But this doesn’t mean you’re helpless. You can make your body produce more testosterone in the following ways.
These include foods rich in beta-carotene (yellow and orange vegetables and green leafy veggies); foods high in B vitamins (found in a wide range of foods like beef, green leafy vegetables, and other veggies); and foods containing boron (fruits, nuts, and legumes). All of these foods cause your body to produce more testosterone. Other testosterone boosters are amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of cells, antibodies, muscle tissue, and enzymes. They’re found mostly in protein foods such as eggs, poultry, fish, and meats, as well as in certain dietary supplements.
A typical high-fat American diet alters testosterone levels. The journal Modern Medicine conducted a study looking into this. Eleven healthy men, ages twenty-three to thirty-five, who ate a daily, high-fat eight-hundred-calorie meal of a shake containing 57 percent fat, experienced a dramatic 30 percent drop in testosterone levels. Could the same effect occur in women? Medical researchers believe so, since testosterone production relies on the right balance of fat in the diet—not too high, not too low.
If you really want testosterone to make you thin, you do need some fat in your diet, even a little bit of saturated (animal) fat. Saturated fats are essential for keeping testosterone levels up, but they also get stored preferentially as body fat. To get around this and still obtain the testosterone-building benefits, limit your red meat intake to three servings per week and eat more poultry and fish. Eating more monosaturated fats (from nuts, olive oil, avocados) and polyunsaturated fats (fatty fish) is a good idea, too, because they’re burned for fuel, and they don’t make you fat (unless of course you overdose on them). The best testosterone diet is a healthy moderate-fat/high-protein/moderate-carb diet—which is how my nutrition program works. This type of diet creates a hormonal environment in the body that burns fat and puts on lean muscle.
How much caffeine and alcohol you consume affects your testosterone levels. Drinking more than two cups of coffee or four cans of caffeinated soda a day will make your testosterone levels drop. Ease back on alcohol, too. Frequent drinking blunts testosterone production.
The third fat-burning hormone you want to balance is progesterone. High levels of progesterone burn more calories—as much as one hundred to three hundred per day! Progesterone is a natural diuretic that reduces bloating. It also helps prevent uterine fibroids and cancer, improves libido, and boosts mental clarity.
Every month, after an egg is released, your body secretes progesterone. If you don’t get pregnant, progesterone levels plunge, triggering a slow metabolism and low blood sugar. When your blood sugar dips, you crave food—usually high-sugar or sweet food—so it’s no wonder you can’t lose weight! Low progesterone also causes insomnia, disrupted sleep, and daytime sleepiness. Now is the time to change your diet and include lots of progesterone-enhancing foods that will make you sleep better and metabolize fat. Balancing progesterone is key to avoiding weight gain and energy drains.
For optimal progesterone production, your body needs lots of B vitamins, in particular vitamin B6. It’s found in beans, meat, poultry, fish, and some fruits and vegetables, like bananas, avocados, spinach, and tomatoes. The other key nutrient in progesterone production is magnesium. Eat plenty of organic dark green leafy vegetables, almonds, eggs, meat, seeds, nuts, and beans. They are all good sources of magnesium, and they also keep your liver healthy. Poor liver function suppresses progesterone. Once you get started on my program, you’ll find that it works in harmony with the body’s metabolism and ability to make hormones, including progesterone, that regenerate the body.
Insulin is the hormone that, under normal conditions, turns food into energy. But if there’s too much insulin in your system, your body will store fat, and much of what you eat gets packed away as ugly pounds. And the bigger you get, the more insulin your body cranks out. It’s a vicious cycle. How does insulin get too high, anyway, and what can you do to keep it in line?
Insulin rises and falls according to what you eat, particularly carbs. All carbs, whether they’re from chocolate or whole-grain bread, break down in the body into glucose, or blood sugar, which is the fuel for your muscles and brain. Sugary carbs like cookies and some processed starches (such as pasta and white bread) are broken down into glucose rapidly; proteins and fats break down more gradually.
The arrival of glucose in the bloodstream signals the pancreas to make insulin. Sugary foods dump so much glucose into the blood so fast that the pancreas has to pump out extra insulin to drive glucose into cells. Blood sugar levels dip lower than they were before the sugar was eaten. This leads to hunger pangs and eating when we don’t actually need to. Once a hunger pang hits, it’s too late! Your insulin has already dropped so low that the next thing you put in your mouth will be effectively stored away as fat. Insulin spikes and dips make you fat.
Judith Rodin, a pioneering researcher in the psychological and physiological factors of obesity, did an experiment in which she had people drink sugar water to purposely spike their insulin levels. With high insulin, the volunteers actually ate five hundred calories more in one meal! Some studies show that even the sight of sugary, fatty foods can cause an insulin spike that starts a craving in your mind. So the saying “Just looking at those cupcakes makes me fat” is true!
If you eat processed and high-sugar foods (this means breads, too) long enough, your body can become less sensitive to insulin and require more of it just to get glucose escorted into cells. This situation is called insulin resistance. If you’re insulin-resistant, your body isn’t moving the food you eat into your muscles. About 25 percent of all adults are insulin-resistant. One in two people have it if they’re older than forty-five—and overweight.
Insulin resistance is nasty. It causes fatigue, mood swings, memory loss, and weight gain. It makes you sick, with terrible diseases like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, heart disease, and cancer.
Fortunately, you can eat your way out of insulin problems. If you add in just one right food like oatmeal, in place of one bad food like a bagel, your insulin levels will start to fall right way. There are other foods that, if eaten on the right schedule, will produce an even flow of glucose that will keep you satisfied. You won’t need superhuman willpower to lose fat, because your body won’t feel any cravings. Exercise drives insulin levels down, too. Once you start following my program, your insulin levels will normalize, and your body will stop storing fat.
Estrogen is a wonderful hormone. In the right amount, it makes conception and pregnancy possible. It’s also a natural mood lifter and skin toner.
Estrogen works in sync with progesterone, and both hormones need to be in balance. Progesterone is the estrogen police; it helps balance estrogen. In the right ratio, the two hormones help the body burn fat for energy, act as an antidepressant, assist metabolism, and promote sleep. When your body doesn’t have enough progesterone to keep the estrogen in check, you become estrogen-dominant. Unfortunately, in America, we become estrogen-dominant in another way: We are fed foods that cause the problem.
Estrogen dominance can wreak havoc. Too much estrogen in our bodies leads to weight gain, cellulite, and some female cancers. It also slows down your thyroid gland (which controls metabolism). Your metabolic rate drops like mad. There’s more: Estrogen causes water and salt to be retained in bodily tissues. This makes you look soft and spongy. This type of serious bloat not only makes you look bad, but also activates an enzyme that makes your body store fat. You can gain ten to fifty pounds of fat! A young woman can have the slow, screwed-up metabolism of a menopausal woman. Estrogen dominance can also cause anxiety, brain fog, low sex drive, and poor blood sugar control.
Environmental toxins, rampant stress, nutritional deficiencies, and the estrogens leaching into our food supply have turned America into an estrogen-dominant society. Here are a few things that can cause estrogen dominance:
* Processed foods or foods rich in sugar (this includes bread products such as crackers or bagels, too). Processed foods are practically devoid of fiber, and you need fiber in your diet. Fiber from natural foods like whole grains, fruits, and vegetables moves estrogen out of the body. Without enough dietary fiber, estrogen builds up and increases the hormonal burden on your system.
* Alcohol and caffeine. Having more than two cups of coffee per day increases estrogen. Alcohol impedes the liver’s ability to metabolize estrogen. When the liver fails to break down estrogen, it stays in the body and makes you fat.
* Estrogen compounds are fed to chickens and cattle to increase meat, egg, and dairy production. These estrogens can then get passed on to us when we eat meat, eggs, and poultry, or drink milk. Our bodies are becoming a stew of excessive estrogen stimulation, and it’s wrecking our health!
* Some plastics. Heating up plastics, either by microwaving foods in plastic containers or drinking hot beverages out of plastic cups, releases bisphenol A (BPA), an estrogen compound. BPA then leaches into the food, causing estrogen to be produced. So think twice before heating plastic containers in the microwave or drinking out of plastic cups. When buying bottled water, look for containers that have a number 7 in their recycling code; those don’t usually contain BPA.
Under normal conditions, hormones do their jobs properly. They’re disassembled by the body and removed from the bloodstream. Environmental estrogens that we ingest from the food supply or get from plastics, however, tend to stay in the body and remain active for much longer periods, where they promote estrogen dominance and make you gain weight. To stabilize your body’s levels of estrogen, you need to reduce its production and assist its breakdown and elimination—all of which you can do by undertaking a natural approach. Here are some suggestions.
Eliminate sugar and highly processed foods. Look for organic meat and dairy products that are certified free of hormones. Boost your intake of whole grains, plant-based proteins, good fats, colorful fruits and vegetables, green tea, and good sweeteners like Truvia, which is a stevia-based sweetener. Stevia is an herb that has been commercialized as a natural sweetener. It is approximately three hundred times sweeter than sugar and has a negligible effect on blood sugar levels.
Water (three liters daily) helps cleanse your liver and kidneys, allowing your body to excrete hormones efficiently. Avoid caffeinated beverages; while caffeine produces an initial lift, it also stimulates the adrenal glands to produce more cortisol (a stress hormone), worsening anxiety, fatigue, and other symptoms. As for alcohol, consuming too much can compromise the liver’s ability to metabolize estrogen, which can cause estrogen levels to rise. Minimize its use or avoid it altogether.
When women are under severe stress, they’re less likely to ovulate. If you don’t ovulate, you don’t produce progesterone during the second half of your cycle. Without enough progesterone to keep estrogen in check, the negative effects of estrogen can become more pronounced. Stress also raises levels of cortisol, which causes other hormones to get out of balance, and decreases testosterone. Starting a positive and life-changing new program can relieve stress and give you an attitude shift. Stress relief starts when you take control over your life!
Speaking of stress, if you stay stressed out, you’re working against your body’s natural desire to stay thin and healthy! Cortisol is made in the adrenal glands and is the hormone that helps regulate blood sugar, the movement of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats into and out of the cells, and muscle function.
A single bout of stress—say, you swerve to avoid a collision on the highway—causes your cortisol level to surge instantly, but it soon returns to normal. Cortisol is meant to help your body respond appropriately to these occasional short-lived alarms. Chronic stress, however, is an unnatural state for the body, and when it’s sustained or frequently repeated, cortisol levels get jammed in high gear.
When exposed to chronic stress, the body is bathed in a flood of cortisol, leading to higher insulin levels and an around-the-clock appetite, typically for sweets and fatty foods. Elevated cortisol stockpiles calories, storing them in fat cells in the tummy for future use. It also causes a drop in the brain chemical serotonin, leading to depression, irritability, and cravings.
Elevated cortisol levels can cause thinning skin, muscle wasting, memory loss, high blood pressure, dizziness, hot flashes, excessive facial hair, and other masculinizing tendencies. That’s not so hot, is it? I know it’s so hard to live stress-free, but you can change what you stress over. You may not be able to control what happens at work or who does what to you, but you do have control over how you respond. Take an active role in balancing your body, and stop freaking out about your weight and food all the time. A healthy response to stress will make you naturally feel less stressed out. A fit and healthy person can easily deal with spiked cortisol, but an unhealthy dieter will gain a slow metabolism.
The good news is you can keep all cortisol hell from breaking loose by eating regular, healthy meals. Foods that keep cortisol in check include casein-rich cottage cheese, green leafy vegetables, whole-grain breads, mushrooms, and fruits, especially berries. Exercise keeps cortisol from taking over your body.
Self-medicating with alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, sugar, and over-the-counter drugs to control stress is just masking your stress instead of managing it. Stop the use of these “pick-me-ups” and you’ll get a consistent feeling of well-being. One month into my program and you’ll be less dependent on these things. I have seen it time and again with all of my clients. Your body will naturally start rejecting the bad things you used to rely on. With better habits in place, you’ll be less thrown by cortisol—and you’ll start naturally losing weight.
The fat cells in your body produce a hormone called leptin. At adequate levels, leptin works as an appetite suppressant. In other words, it tells your brain when it’s time to stop shoving fries in your face. It also keeps your metabolism high and averts drops in testosterone.
But when levels are too low, leptin signals your body to store fat. So obviously, you want to keep levels of leptin high in your body, and there are ways to do that naturally.
Yes, it’s often greasy, but that’s not the only reason it can pack on pounds. According to a study in Obesity, people who eat lots of monosodium glutamate (MSG) are twice as likely to be overweight as those who rarely eat foods with the flavor enhancer. This is because MSG may lower levels of leptin. Next time you order at an Asian restaurant, have them hold the MSG. And check ingredients in foods: MSG is often listed as “hydrolyzed protein.”
Your body produces leptin while you sleep, so skimping on sleep can drastically lower levels.
It takes approximately twenty minutes for leptin to kick in, and you start feeling full. Eat part of your meal, stop, drink a glass of water, wait a few minutes, then continue eating the rest. This trick is especially helpful over the holidays or at restaurants, when there’s more food around to tempt you.
Seafood is known to raise leptin levels in the body, because of the omega-3 fatty acids it contains. Shoot for at least two to three fish meals a week. Not everyone likes fish, of course. An alternative is to supplement with omega-3s. Take one to three grams a day with food.
Being deficient in zinc results in less leptin. Women need at least nine milligrams daily of this energy-boosting mineral, the amount in most multivitamin-mineral tablets. Zinc-rich foods include poultry and seafood.
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The bottom line is that out-of-whack hormones make you fat and keep you fat. Manipulate your hormones and improve your body chemistry through the right foods and exercise, and expect to lose pounds. Once you begin my program, you’ll discover how easy it is to get your hormones under control and manage your weight. You’re the boss of your hormones.