Every mighty oak was once a nut that stood its ground.
Weight gain, bloating, and those stubborn fat deposits on your hips, thighs, and buttocks—the very thought rattles your senses, not to mention your self-esteem. It’s downright frustrating, to say the least. And believe me, you’re not alone. There are more than 100 million of us currently fighting the infamous battle of the bulge. For most of us, it’s a rigorous combat at best, trying one diet plan after another. Some regimens are too hard to follow, whereas others lack any real variety or satiety. In the end, we usually wind up back where we started—unhappy and overweight once again.
Over the years, I’ve had my own struggles with weight gain. Right from the start, I had to deal with a stacked deck, genetically speaking. Part of my body shape—the proverbial pear—I inherited from my mother and her side of the family, judging from the pictures of my maternal grandmother, aunts, and female cousins that graced our den wall when I was growing up. And like me, all the women on my mother’s side were always on a diet, trying to lose those infamous last 10 to 20 pounds that seemed to stockpile below the waist.
On my father’s side, my family history of diabetes didn’t help matters any. From as early as I can remember in both junior high and high school, I suffered from low blood sugar, or “reactive hypoglycemia.” I was always craving something sweet (such as cookies, candy, cake, or ice cream) to raise my blood sugar, which really piled on the pounds. I simply couldn’t find the time to eat on schedule. Back then (much like today), I was too busy being responsible and a caretaker for everyone else—being a high school correspondent for the Hartford Courant newspaper, serving as the president of the Service Club, and teaching religious school after regular school—that I ignored my own body. So it’s no wonder that I was always going up and down on the weight scale.
My use of food as an anesthetic to offset the stress of a competitive college environment during my freshman and sophomore years only compounded the matter. I would drift into one dorm for lunch and then into another one for yet another meal. In fact, men used to love to take me out because I didn’t drink but had a hearty appetite. The truth is that I could eat anyone under the table. In addition, my body never seemed to firm up the way some women’s do when they exercise. Moreover, I had to literally force myself to exercise anyway.
I spent my junior year abroad in London. There I started to frequent health food restaurants. Vegetarianism and drugless healing fascinated me. My whole life took an about-face once I began a program of cleansing and detoxification. (Which, by the way, helped me lose fat from those stubborn hips of mine rather effortlessly!) For the first time, I realized that whole foods, herbs, and dietary supplements could become a path not just to healing and wholeness but also to weight loss.
Back in the United States, after I graduated from college I decided to enroll in the New York Institute of Dietetics as part of the Dietetic Technician Program. Later, I received a master’s degree in nutrition education from Teachers College at Columbia University. Later on, I became a certified nutrition specialist (C.N.S.) with accreditation from the American College of Nutrition.
It was a classroom experience at Columbia, however, that foreshadowed the nature of my professional journey and eventual Fat Flush discovery. While I was a student there, I heard the “Lamppost Story,” which continues to this day to motivate me. It goes something like this:
A gentleman goes out for a walk on an extremely dark evening and arrives at his destination, only to find that he has lost his wallet along the way. He immediately retraces his steps and starts looking for the wallet under the lamppost, where there is light. But he is unable to find his wallet because he had really lost it in the dark, where the light didn’t reach. The moral of the story is that the answers are out there somewhere; you just have to look in the right places that have yet to come to light.
Inspired by this to search for answers beyond where the light was already shining, I was convinced that the real answers to weight gain, cellulite, and bloating were out there somewhere. I believed that we had yet to search in the right places, evidenced by the enormous amount of unsuccessful diet plans. Thus I embarked on a quest to find the missing links to weight loss. In my heart, I knew that the answer wouldn’t be like any other diet plan. It had to be a program that addressed the underlying sources of weight gain and also embodied sound nutritional guidelines.
Today, while many women in their thirties, forties, and fifties are concerned about their changing shape, I’ve been able to keep my body pretty much fat-resistant for nearly three decades now. And that’s despite my heredity. I found that once I had discovered an entirely new approach to managing my weight, it no longer mattered how the genetic cards were stacked.
That approach is my Fat Flush Plan—a program based on a unique diet model using healthful essential fats, balanced proteins, colorful carbohydrates, and a strict daily routine. It is designed to address and correct the most prevalent underlying causes of weight gain. These unseen causes have nothing to do with your genes. Instead, they reflect simple body chemistry imbalances that you probably never suspected. I call them the five hidden weight gain factors, which are the key to just about all of our overweight and obesity issues. You’ll find that most diet plans typically target only one or two of these factors, which may explain why they don’t work in the long term and cause recurring weight gain.
Ignored, overlooked, or simply not taken seriously enough, the five hidden weight gain factors include the following: an overworked liver, lack of fat-burning fats, too much insulin, the stress-fat cycle, and a unique take on “when fat is not fat.” These factors are caused by a stagnant lymph system, sneaky food allergies, birth control pills, hormone-replacement therapy, and medications. You will learn all about these problematic factors in the next chapter, along with the scientific developments behind each factor that have reached a critical stage only in the past decade.
The discovery of my Fat Flush Plan didn’t happen overnight. It progressed naturally out of every area of my life, from my personal weight control quest and working alongside my nutritional mentors to a wide variety of professional experiences spanning my entire career in counseling, consulting, and researching.
Early in my career, I had the privilege of working beside such nutritional pioneers as Hazel Parcells, Ph.D. and Nathan Pritikin. Their contributions helped me on my own weight control journey, which in turn enabled me to assist thousands of my own clients in their weight control efforts. In fact, when my first book, Beyond Pritikin, came out, my private practice in California grew, and soon people everywhere were resonating to my message that essential fats were absolutely necessary for rapid weight loss, longevity, and good health. For years I had a thriving practice that included sports figures, movie stars, fashion designers, producers, and members of the Joffrey Ballet. In this way, I was helping others who in turn were helping me fine-tune my program and stay on track myself as the messenger of a new weight loss approach.
Over twenty-five years ago, a health-conscious friend shared an ad with me about the Parcells School of Scientific Nutrition in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The ad promised “five days that would change your life.” Nothing could have been truer. After meeting Hazel Parcells, Ph.D., D.C., N.D., my life was changed forever. She inspired me to become a nutritionist with a foot in both clinical and holistic nutrition. Dr. Parcells was eighty-four years old when I met her—and lived to the incredible age of 106. A true pioneer in natural medicine, she was a woman ahead of her time.
Under Dr. Parcells’ masterful tutelage, I first became acquainted with several innovative concepts, many of which later became the foundation of my Fat Flush Plan. The first revelation was the surprising connection between weight loss and the liver. I recognized early on what researchers are only now beginning to understand—that not only is the liver the main organ for detoxifying pollutants and chemicals in the body, but this vital organ also is a hidden key to effortless weight loss.
Based on simple biochemistry and the charts from Gray’s Anatomy, I learned first hand that one of the best kept secrets to weight loss and lasting weight control is keeping the liver, the key organ for fat metabolism, in tip-top shape. For example, bile, which is synthesized and secreted by the liver and stored in the gallbladder, helps the liver break down fats. Bile cannot do its job, however, if it is lacking certain nutrients that make up the bile salts or if it is congested or thickened with chemicals, toxins, excess sex hormones, drugs, and/or heavy metals.
So I researched all the “liver loving” foods and nutrients that would enable the body to produce quality bile and aid in thinning it out. Since one of the primary ingredients of bile is lecithin—a highly effective emulsifier with a detergent-like ability to break up fats—I decided to experiment with adding lecithin-rich eggs to my daily diet. Soon, the addition of fresh lemon juice and water—a well-known bile thinner—followed suit twice a day. Not only did my own cholesterol come down (a good 20 points to be exact), but so did my weight.
Just to make sure I was onto something, I enrolled thirty of my clients in a six-week dietary exploration and instructed them to add at least two eggs daily to their current diet regimens and to add lemon juice and water twice a day—without changing anything else in terms of diet or exercise. Without exception, they all lost weight, especially around the waistline. In fact, one woman lost 21 pounds over the six-week period. I instructed the group to avoid caffeine and medications (including over-the-counter drugs) as much as possible because I suspected even then that these “drugs” were especially toxic to the liver.
Today, light is finally being shed on this vitally important organ. Many laboratories specializing in functional medicine testing offer a liver function test to determine how well the liver’s two distinct detoxification pathways, the cytochrome P-450 phase I and phase II detoxification enzymes, are working. An individual ingests caffeine, Tylenol, and aspirin, and then specimens of saliva and urine are taken and analyzed to assess how well the liver is breaking down these substances.
The liver’s two detoxification pathways are responsible for breaking down, eliminating, and neutralizing toxins. In this petrochemical world of ours, the sheer number of toxins we ingest from medications, drugs, pollutants, and pesticides can overwhelm the liver’s ability to break them down and deactivate them. In addition, the detoxification pathways can become drained of the antioxidants, enzymes, and other nutrients necessary for detoxification because of the overload. The resulting metabolic by-products of incomplete detoxification are often more poisonous to the body than the original toxins.
The April 2001 Consumer Reports on Health provided an extremely helpful list of medications and herbs that can harm the liver with long-term use. The list included common medications (such as ibuprofen); cholesterol-lowering drugs (such as Lipitor); antidiabetic drugs; triglyceride-lowering drugs; anticonvulsants; estrogens used to treat menopausal symptoms (such as Premarin and Ogen) and those used in birth control pills (such as Lo/Ovral and Triphasal); and the herbs chaparral, comfrey, and pennyroyal.
The bottom line is that with so many toxins being dumped into the bile, its storage, concentration, production, and ability to digest fats are seriously impaired.
Another valuable insight I learned from Dr. Parcells was that cellulite—that dimpled accumulation of stored fat on our thighs and buttocks—was more connected to a sluggish lymphatic system than to poor muscle tone or weakened connective tissues. The lymphatic system, a relatively unknown secondary circulatory system underneath the skin, rids the body of toxic wastes, bacteria, heavy metals, dead cells, trapped protein, and fat globules. In essence, the lymphatic system is the garbage disposal of the body.
These concepts were so innovative back then that Dr. Parcells was the only one talking about them. After her ideas on the liver and the value of cleansing began to take root, researchers (for example, Sandra Cabot, M.D. in Australia) and American doctors (for example, Leo Galland, Kenneth Bock, and Elson Haas) started to write about them. Parcells would have been proud to know that in 2001—nearly five years after her death—a well-respected cardiologist from Philadelphia, Gerald M. Lemole, M.D. came out with a book called The Healing Diet, which links lymphatic system health with overall wellness.
Thanks to Dr. Parcells, I was given a head start in learning about the importance of cleansing both the liver and the lymphatic system for effective weight loss and cellulite control.
Another major piece of the weight loss puzzle fell into place during my tenure as director of nutrition at the Pritikin Longevity Center in Santa Monica, California. In the early 1980s, Pritikin diet was widely credited with being the model for the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet prescription. At the center, as well as later in private practice, I found that many women following this type of program were complaining about distressful premenstrual syndrome (PMS) symptoms and other health ailments. I began to study their diet and health histories, hoping to find some underlying patterns.
For the most part, I found that they were loading up on unlimited fat-free complex carbohydrates such as pasta, bread, crackers, potatoes, corn, and beans. I discovered that the more they overate wheat-based carbohydrates (in particular, pasta, bread, cereal, and crackers), the more they craved them—and the more they seemed to become depressed. And these high amounts of grains were somehow contributing to their bloating—along with all that fat-free milk and yogurt they used with cereal. The unlimited use of fat-free but yeast-related seasonings such as soy sauce, tamari, tomato sauce, and oil-free vinegar dressings of every persuasion added insult to injury. Of course, the reason they were overusing these kinds of seasonings was that their zero-fat meals lacked any real flavor.
As it turned out, these same women were the ones complaining about retaining fluid, feeling tired and cold, and having allergies and recurring yeast infections, in addition to severe PMS. Therefore, I recommended a highly touted gamma-linolenic acid (GLA)–rich supplement known as evening primrose oil, used widely by European doctors for PMS-related problems. And this is when the unexpected happened. Besides eradicating their symptoms, these women also experienced a welcomed side benefit—weight loss!
The GLA fat-fighting connection. Although generations have used the evening primrose plant for its many medicinal and healing properties, the oil in the seeds—containing the powerful GLA—was making a splash in the weight loss arena. In fact, it was through research conducted by David Horrobin, M.D., at the University of Montreal, and M. A. Mir, M.D., a senior researcher and consultant physician at the Welsh National School of Medicine in Cardiff, Great Britain, that helped me realize how the right kind of fat stimulates the body’s metabolic ability to burn fat. Their work demonstrated that evening primrose oil was most effective for those who were overweight by at least 10 percent. The key to this calorie-burning mechanism appeared to be the way the GLA-rich evening primrose oil worked via the prostaglandin pathways, a network of hormones that control virtually all body functions at the cellular level.
The GLA found in evening primrose oil mobilizes the metabolically active fat known as brown adipose tissue (BAT). This special form of fat, if available in sufficient amounts, can burn off extra calories and boost energy. BAT is a special insulating kind of fat found deep within the body that surrounds your vital organs such as the kidneys, heart, and adrenal glands. It cushions your spinal column as well as the neck and major thoracic blood vessels.
The series I prostaglandins created from GLA are believed to regulate many aspects of metabolism. GLA-induced prostaglandins regulate BAT by acting as a catalyst to either turn it on to trigger calorie burning or turn it off to trigger calorie conservation. Prostaglandins are also connected to a metabolic process referred to as ATPase. ATPase is also known as the sodium pump, a biochemical process necessary to keep the right amount of potassium inside cell walls and too much sodium out. GLA-rich substances such as evening primrose oil, by means of prostaglandin activity, control the sodium pump, which in turn revs up metabolism.
Based on mounting evidence that essential fatty acids are important to overall health—from studies that started to appear in such prestigious medical journals as the New England Journal of Medicine in the mid-1980s—I published my first book, Beyond Pritikin. Released in 1988, the book became a best-seller. It featured a chapter entitled “The Two-Week Fat Flush” that, as I look back, was really the origin of today’s Fat Flush Plan. I inserted this program in my book as an antidote to the high-carbohydrate, high-grain-based, yeast-rich, fat-free diets of the era. It contained a one-day sample menu and touched on liver cleansing for more efficient fat metabolism. The diet featured the GLA supplements I had worked with in my private practice.
In 1996 I updated Beyond Pritikin and altered the Two-Week Fat Flush by replacing the safflower oil component with omega-3–rich flaxseed oil. Flaxseed oil works much like GLA but helps the body burn fat even more efficiently by increasing the production of a certain group of eicosanoids or prostaglandins.
When Beyond Pritikin came out, my private practice in California grew, and soon people everywhere were resonating to my message that essential fats were absolutely necessary for rapid weight loss, longevity, and good health.
A fat-free diet, low in proteins but high in pro-inflammatory, fast-acting or high glycemic carbohydrates (starches and simple sugars) keeps insulin levels elevated, which promotes fat accumulation. Since insulin is a fat storage hormone and excess fat is a strong producer of pro-inflammatory molecules, a vicious cycle is triggered. It is now believed that inflammation, like insulin, is one of the underlying factors of weight gain, loss of muscle mass and aging. Abnormal inflammation has been tied to a variety of diseases including heart disease, cancer and autoimmune challenges like Type 1 diabetes, systemic lupus, and multiple sclerosis.
Thankfully, insulin awareness has ushered in a brand new era of balanced nutrition and has legitimized the return of insulin-lowering fats and proteins to America’s dining tables. The Fat Flush formula of healthy fats, lean proteins, and slow-acting (low-glycemic) carbohydrates is right on the low-insulin track.
I learned about the remaining weight loss stumbling blocks through my most dependable sources—you (my readers) and clients. Time and time again I was finding that even when some of my clients were doing everything else right, they still couldn’t lose weight. Thanks to the nutritional assessment questionnaire and food diary record sheets I had every client fill out, a pattern began to emerge. I discovered that many of those who were resistant to weight loss had a history of long-term use of birth control pills, hormone replacement therapy (HRT), antidepressants, and other medications as well as hidden food allergies. In Chapter 2 you will learn that this kind of weight gain is really not fat per se but rather severely waterlogged tissues masquerading as fat.
In addition, I noted from my clients’ assessment forms that those who had the hardest time losing weight were also those who were the most stressed out. They were living on caffeine (from 2 to 4 cups daily), juggling home and career, definitely not getting enough rest (four to six hours daily), feeling “on edge” most of the time, and reporting an increase in food cravings and fat storage, particularly in the abdominal area. I suspected that the adrenal glands—our “fight or flight” glands that produce hormones in response to stress—were intimately connected to the stress-fat cycle. And I had a very strong hunch that I could disrupt this cycle with some simple changes in lifestyle habits.
So I honed the Fat Flush Plan to include stress-relieving protocols (such as exercise and journal keeping) that would zap the stress trigger and accelerate weight loss. Probably the most vigorous stress-busting dietary suggestion was to increase protein—at least 8 ounces or more of poultry, fish, or lean meat—because the body has higher protein needs when it is under stress. Just by adding another couple of ounces of protein to lunch and dinner, I had elated reports from clients who were dropping two dress sizes in two weeks—at last!
You may be asking, “What about other hidden weight gain factors like low thyroid or chronic dieting that throw the body into a metabolic slowdown?” I believe that these are also valid but secondary to the five hidden factors I have defined and outlined above.
In Chapter 2, I explain how hidden weight gain factors can sabotage your weight loss goals. It has been only in the last few years that my understanding of the scientific basis for the Fat Flush Plan has come together. For over a decade I have been collecting the latest studies, research, and books (which are referenced in the back of this book) that have helped to substantiate my Fat Flush discoveries.
Finally, there is an answer for someone like you, like me, like all of us.