When the program is over, you may want to go out and celebrate by indulging in your favorite foods—pizza, chocolate cupcakes, a beer, or a few glasses of chardonnay. This is a temptation you should resist. After being on a diet like this, overloading your system with bad foods can cause severe reactions. If you can’t resist temptation, take it slowly and choose what you want carefully. It might be one of the most profound (and painful) lessons you will ever get regarding the power of food.
In this chapter, I’ve outlined how you can modify the program to create a sustainable diet and lifestyle for the long term.
You should stick with all of the basic nutrition principles you learned in Chapter 19 for life. This means keeping sugar, flour, and processed foods to a minimum; including high-quality, whole-food carbs, protein, and fats at every meal; composing your meals according to the 50-25-25 principle (50 percent vegetables, 25 percent lean high-quality protein, and 25 percent whole grains); timing your meals in a way that makes sense for your biology by eating protein for breakfast and not eating 2–3 hours before bedtime; and limiting your intake of addictive substances such as caffeine and alcohol.
There are only two foods you need to consider reintegrating: gluten and dairy. You have two options.
You can stay off gluten and dairy for as long as you wish. Despite what Big Food may tell you, you don’t need either of these foods to stay healthy. If avoiding gluten and dairy feels good to you, keep them out of your diet or choose them as a small treat from time to time.
After you have reset your metabolism and established a pattern of eating and self-care that nourishes you, flexibility will become important. Moderation in all things is still great advice. Even if you choose to avoid gluten, dairy, or other foods long term, it’s likely there will be times in your life when you want to eat them or when eating them is unavoidable. Assuming they do not cause a life-threatening reaction for you, and you aren’t one of the rare people for whom they trigger a spiral of overeating, this is absolutely fine.
Your inner wisdom is the critical factor. Listen to your body. Staying in balance and finding a rhythm are the keys to a healthy metabolism and lifelong health.
Most people will likely want to try and reintegrate dairy and gluten into their diet, and I encourage you to at least test these foods to confirm whether or not they have been contributing to your symptoms. The key is to do this slowly and systematically:
Start with dairy.
Eat it at least 2–3 times a day for 3 days.
Track your reactions for at least 72 hours. (I’ll explain how in a moment.)
If you have a reaction, stop dairy immediately.
Wait 3 days.
Now try gluten. Follow the same process you did for dairy: Eat it 2–3 times a day for 3 days, track your reactions for at least 72 hours, and quit if you notice a reaction.
What kind of reactions should you expect? Everyone is different and many subtle reactions may occur, but here are some of the most common:
Reactions like these may happen immediately after you consume the food or may not crop up for 72 hours. If you don’t experience a reaction within 72 hours, you should be safe.
If you do experience a reaction, I recommend you eliminate the offending food from your diet for twelve weeks. For most, this is enough time for the inflammation in your system to cool down and your gut to heal. After that, it’s likely you will be able to consume the food again, but it’s prudent to keep it to a minimum (perhaps no more than once or twice a week at most) so that you don’t reinitiate the same cycle of illness.
If you still react after eliminating the food from your diet for twelve weeks, you should stay off that food for life, or see a physician, dietitian, or nutritionist skilled in managing food allergies.
Tracking your symptoms is relatively simple. Just use the food log below or download it at www.bloodsugarsolution.com.
| DATE | FOOD INTRODUCED | SYMPTOMS |
Remember, if you still test high on the Inflammation Quiz after twelve weeks on the program (six weeks of the basic plan and an additional six with the personalization steps integrated), it may mean you have sensitivities to more than just gluten and dairy. In this case, I recommend a more extensive elimination-reintroduction program like the one outlined in The UltraSimple Diet (www.bloodsugarsolution.com/ultrasimple-diet). In that book and the associated DVD home-study program, Kick-Start Your Metabolism in 7 Days: The UltraSimple Plan to Quickly and Safely Lose Up to 10 Pounds (www.bloodsugarsolution.com/ultrasimple-challenge), I provide a comprehensive set of guidelines for eliminating and reintegrating all the major food allergens so you can determine exactly which foods you are sensitive to.
I strongly encourage you to stay on the basic supplement plan for life. If we lived in a world free of toxins; ate only real, whole foods; had no chronic stress and relaxed as much as we needed to; got enough exercise; and had strong connections to our community, we wouldn’t need supplements. But we don’t live in that world anymore, and that’s why 99 percent of Americans are nutrient deficient. Stick to the supplement plan and you will provide your body with many of the raw materials it needs for long-term health.
If you are on the advanced plan, you will need to stay on the advanced supplement plan for at least a year. After one year you should repeat the lab tests you took before you started the program, repeat the self-assessment quiz, and evaluate your progress. If your numbers are in the ideal range and your symptoms are better, you can scale back to the basic supplement plan.
If you added supplements as part of the personalization steps in Chapter 24, continue taking these for 3–6 months and recheck your quiz scores. You may need those supplements long-term. However, if your quiz scores are no longer in the self-care or medical care category, you can stop taking them. If you are still having trouble, seek out the help of a functional medicine practitioner.
If you need to ask what to do about the relaxation techniques in this program, you probably haven’t been using them! Daily relaxation is critical for long-term health. Keep stress and its damaging effects at bay by continuing with the relaxation strategies you have incorporated into your life and adding new ones over time.
Exercise is another part of the program you will want to continue for life. In fact, over time you will probably want (and need) to amplify your exercise program. If you haven’t been moving your body, just 30 minutes of daily walking will make a big difference. However, as you start to lose weight and get in shape, you will need more exercise to maintain the gains you have made and improve your health.
Work on integrating interval and strength training into your exercise program (see Chapter 21). And definitely don’t forget to play—explore new and exciting ways to move your body. You may be one of those people who hates to exercise, but I feel certain you can find activities that are not only nourishing but fun!
Living clean and green is one of the best ways to protect your health, the health of our planet, and our children’s future. Follow the advice in Chapter 23, and integrate as many as you can over time.
After you have worked through the steps in Chapter 24 for an additional six to twelve weeks, retake the self-assessment for any of the steps in which you originally had an imbalance. Many of you may find that you no longer have imbalances and consequently don’t need to continue the suggestions in the self-care plan or medical care customizations. If that’s the case, you can choose to stop the personalization.
If you do still qualify for self-care or medical care, you should continue the steps you have been taking. You may also choose to seek the help of a functional or integrative medical practitioner to assist you in integrating additional treatments into your plan. See more information on additional tests and treatment plans in the online guide How to Get What You Need from Your Doctor (www.bloodsugarsolution.com).
Finding and working with a doctor is important during the program. You should monitor your lab tests every 2–3 months, repeating your abnormal lab tests. Eventually you can scale back this testing regimen to once every 6 months or once a year. With time, you will learn how your body works and how to work with it rather than against it, and you will need less and less medical supervision and care.
Let me state the obvious. Getting and staying healthy in our modern world is a heroic feat. It is a subversive and revolutionary act. We have to navigate dangerous food landscapes, resist carefully designed temptations at every turn, fight marketing that goes right after our primitive hard-wired survival impulses, and fend off food pushers, saboteurs, and a thousand distractions online, on television, and in the other media.
You need to cultivate your survival skills and a plan of attack against these obstacles to success. If you can identify and preempt these land mines, you will become less discouraged and have more dramatic results.
There are five reasons why the program might not work:
Often, people think they are eating a low-sugar, low-refined-flour, low-carbohydrate diet when in fact they aren’t. Things can sneak in, such as a little too much sugary fruit or a high-carbohydrate breakfast such as oatmeal. These foods may be thought of as healthy, but they can cause problems for many. Go on the advanced plan and see what happens. No grains, no fruit, no starchy veggies for six weeks.
Carefully monitoring and analyzing your diet is critical. Reading labels is essential. Even better—eat only fresh food without labels.
If you have never exercised, small amounts of exercise create large benefits at the initial stage of conditioning. However, as you progress and get healthier, you need a higher intensity of exercise to achieve the same benefit. For example, someone who is 300 pounds and has never taken a walk in his life can walk a block and get an extreme workout, whereas a marathon runner would need to run 10 miles at a 5-minute pace to get an equivalent workout.
As you get into shape, increase your exercise intensity and duration, and add interval training to continue your improvements in weight, blood sugar, and insulin. Chapter 22 guides you on how to do interval training. If you haven’t started strength training, start now—20 minutes, 2–3 times a week.
Eliminating gluten and dairy for six weeks is a key strategy in the foundation of The Blood Sugar Solution. However, sometimes people have other food allergies or sensitivities, and a more comprehensive elimination diet is needed. In my book The UltraSimple Diet, an elimination program is outlined to identify the degree to which food sensitivities or allergies may be driving inflammation.
For many people, an accumulation of toxins from substances such as petrochemicals and heavy metals cause problems. This could be due to overexposure, genetic predispositions that make it difficult to detoxify these chemicals, or both. If this is the case for you, you may need heavy metal detoxification protocols and saunas. It is then critical to boost detoxification through various supplements, including n-acetyl-cysteine, milk thistle, and vitamin C. This is part of the personalization steps in Chapter 24.
Note that heavy metal detoxification is a medical procedure that requires the guidance of an experienced medical professional.
The personalization steps outlined in Week 6 are essential for many people to fully heal. Because we don’t hear much about the need to focus on our specific biochemical and metabolic imbalances from our doctors or the media, many believe that this part of the program can safely be skipped. This is not the case.
The basic diet and lifestyle program outlined in The Blood Sugar Solution is enough to help 80 percent of the people suffering with diabesity. However, some need further intervention.
Make sure you carefully work through the quizzes and self-care steps in this book. If you do, and you still don’t see the results you hope for, it’s likely to be time to seek out the help of a practitioner trained in functional or integrative medicine. You may have deeper imbalances—such as bugs in your digestive tract, low thyroid function, or other imbalances that are driving your health problems. Treating these underlying conditions is critical for complete healing.
Now that you are on the road to health, I invite you to join a movement so we can create a healthier world together.