In Part IV, you will gather the tools and knowledge you need to start your journey to health, step-by-step, week-by-week. If you follow the action steps, your health and the quality of your life will be radically transformed.
Unless your mother picked you up at the Sears appliance section, I doubt you came with an owner’s manual. We know more about how to keep our cars running for 200,000-plus miles than about how to keep our bodies, minds, and souls healthy for a lifespan of 120 years. Ancient cultural knowledge about how to create and maintain health is lost, schools don’t teach us, doctors and nutritionists don’t learn this in school, and policy makers rely on outdated or flawed science at best and industry influence at worst to guide us. Since you have only one body, I encourage you to learn about how it works and the basic ingredients for health and happiness. The six-week action plan will prepare you with the knowledge you need to safely venture into a supermarket without killing yourself and the tools and techniques to heal your body, mind, and spirit.
Each week you will focus on different aspects of health, such as food, fitness, and mental resilience, and learn how to seek support from friends, social groups, and online communities to supercharge your results. When you keep a journal of your insights, successes, progress, obstacles, food intake, sleep, and exercise, you will strengthen your capacity for creating high-level wellness and wholeness. The menu plan, shopping lists, recipes, snack ideas, and food survival pack included at the end of the book will give you the final tools you need to translate the program into action.
In these six weeks you will also learn how to personalize your prescription for health. Each of us has unique imbalances that have created our state of disease and symptoms. The future of health care is personalized medicine—the personalized prescription of diet, nutrients, lifestyle, and even medications. After testing more than 10,000 patients and gathering thousands of stories, I have also learned to see patterns that connect the dots between different symptoms and diseases and help identify the underlying causes of illness. Some people may have excess inflammation, others may have hormonal disruption or digestive imbalances, and still others may be toxic. You’ve already started the process of identifying your own imbalances by filling out the quizzes in Part II. These will help you personalize your plan, achieve rapid success, and help guide your medical care, if needed.
Now that you have completed the preparation steps, started your journal and tracking, created a support group, gotten tested, and know whether you need to be on the basic or the advanced plan, it’s time to get started with the program.
Before I dive into Week 1, I want to explain a little bit about how to use this part of the book.
In each of the next six chapters, you will find specific action steps to take each week. In Chapter 25 (see here), I have provided a summary of the entire program and checklists you can use to guide your progress. These checklists are also available in the online course at www.bloodsugarsolution.com.
You can find additional tools and learn more about our online community and access a weekly curriculum to support you while you are on the program at www.bloodsugarsolution.com.
Many people get overwhelmed with the amount of information they need to learn and the steps they need to take. It’s better to layer things in over time, and that’s how I have set up the program.
During each week, you will focus on one aspect of the program:
Week 1: Eat Your Medicine: Nutrition Basics
Week 2: Optimize Metabolism with Nutritional Supplements
Week 3: Relax Your Mind, Heal Your Body
Week 4: Fun, Smart Exercise
Week 5: Live Clean and Green
Week 6: Personalize the Program
By now, you should know which plan you need to be on. There are only two major differences between the basic plan and the advanced plan. They are:
A more restrictive diet for six weeks. If you qualify for the advanced plan or you have been diagnosed with diabetes, you will make all of the dietary changes in the basic plan and will avoid all grains, fruit, and starchy vegetables for six weeks. This will help reboot your metabolism and help your diabesity resolve faster.
A more comprehensive supplement plan. As you will learn in Week 2, supplements are extremely helpful in treating diabesity. On the basic plan there are supplements I recommend that everyone take for life. Those who qualify for the advanced plan should take a few additional supplements for a limited period of time.
Understand that many of the steps you are going to take are intended to be long-term changes. The six-week program should set the stage for a healthy life. It’s a complete overhaul in the way you eat and live, segmented into accessible weekly chunks. After the six weeks are over, you will simply keep doing most of what you have learned.
To help make these changes easier, you will find a week-by-week summary of the program and action checklist at the end of Chapter 25. This will be your daily reminder of exactly what you are supposed to do to succeed. You can also find a copy of this checklist you can print or use online at www.bloodsugarsolution.com.