I never thought I could do it… go a week without coffee, without chocolate, without wine, without cheese, etc. But I knew I had to make a drastic change and needed a jump start. I was very overweight, high cholesterol, pre-diabetic, and miserable. This has been an amazing gift. I am not saying that I don’t still have thoughts about the above, but they don’t consume me and I feel like I finally have control. Prior to this detox, I spent every free thought beating myself up for my food choices and how I looked and felt. Now I am celebrating my accomplishments (down twelve pounds and in a normal fasting glucose range) and feel empowered. The biggest gift, though, is that I am finally out of the “food fog” that I have spent years in. I feel clear, awake, and alert. When I spend time with my children I feel present and engaged, which is a blessing for us all. This journey is just beginning and I have a long way to go and a lot to learn, but I have never been so excited and so overwhelmingly grateful.
—KELLY ARONSON
It’s time to take back control. No more blaming yourself. No more emotional wrestling or steeling yourself (fruitlessly) with willpower. You need to use science, not willpower. With this program, you’re going to discover the scientifically proven tools for detoxing your body and mind and free yourself—once and for all—from the grip of food addiction.
The key to detoxing is to not just stop all the addictive foods and substances all at once (which you do need to do), but to immediately replace them with specific hormone-balancing, brain-healing foods and lifestyle habits. This program detoxes more than just your body: We’re going to give you a chance to detox (and reboot) your entire life. We’re going to address all the root causes of weight gain, diabetes, and chronic disease, starting with the most powerful tool of all: your mind.
The biggest challenge you’re facing here is not your waistline or your weight. It’s not your belly. It’s your brain. Changing the way you think about food so you get your mind working with your body, not against it, is critical to weight loss and healing.
If you want to lose pounds, you need to first lose the ideas that keep you stuck in an endless cycle of yo-yo dieting. You need to let go of the beliefs and perspectives that sabotage your goal of permanent weight loss and vibrant health. Thinking the way you’ve always thought and doing things you’ve always done will only lead to more of the same. You need to be disruptive!
The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet is meant to be disruptive. Very disruptive. It will go against a lot of what you’ve been told. That’s because the vast majority of conventional nutritionists and doctors have it mostly wrong when it comes to weight loss. Let’s face it: If their advice were good and doable, we would all be thin and healthy by now. But as a general rule, it’s not. And the mainstream media messages often confuse things even more. So before you get started on this detox, I want to blow up some of the common myths that keep us fat and sick.
Take a class of sixth graders. Show them a picture of 1,000 calories of broccoli and 1,000 calories of soda. Ask them if they have the same effect on our bodies. Their unanimous response will be “NO!” We all intuitively know that equal caloric amounts of soda and broccoli can’t be the same nutritionally. But as Mark Twain said, “The problem with common sense is that it is not too common.”
I guess that is why the medical profession, nutritionists, our government, the food industry, and the media are all still actively promoting the outdated, scientifically disproven idea that all calories are created equal. Yes, that well-worn notion—that as long as you burn more calories than you consume, you will lose weight—is simply dead wrong.
Newton’s first law of thermodynamics states that the energy of an isolated system is constant. In other words, in a laboratory, or “isolated system,” 1,000 calories of broccoli and 1,000 calories of soda are, in fact, the same. I’m not saying Newton was wrong about that. It’s true that when burned in a laboratory setting, 1,000 calories of broccoli and 1,000 calories of soda would indeed release the same amount of energy.
But sorry, Mr. Newton; your law of thermodynamics doesn’t apply in living, breathing, digesting systems. When you eat food, the “isolated system” part of the equation goes out the window. The food interacts with your biology, a complex adaptive system that instantly transforms every bite.
To illustrate how this works, let’s follow 750 calories of soda and 750 calories of broccoli once they enter your body. First, soda: 750 calories is the amount in a Double Gulp from 7-Eleven, which is 100 percent sugar and contains 186 grams, or 46 teaspoons, of sugar. Many people actually do consume this amount of soda. They are considered the “heavy users.”
Your gut quickly absorbs the fiber-free sugars in the soda, fructose, and glucose. The glucose spikes your blood sugar, starting a domino effect of high insulin and a cascade of hormonal responses that kicks bad biochemistry into gear. The high insulin increases storage of belly fat, increases inflammation, raises triglycerides and lowers HDL, raises blood pressure, lowers testosterone in men, and contributes to infertility in women.
Your appetite is increased because of insulin’s effect on your brain chemistry. The insulin blocks your appetite-control hormone leptin. You become more leptin resistant, so the brain never gets the “I’m full” signal. Instead, it thinks you are starving. Your pleasure-based reward center is triggered, driving you to consume more sugar and fueling your addiction.
The fructose makes things worse. It goes right to your liver, where it starts manufacturing fat, which triggers more insulin resistance and causes chronically elevated blood insulin levels, driving your body to store everything you eat as dangerous belly fat. You also get a fatty liver, which generates more inflammation. Chronic inflammation causes more weight gain and diabesity. Anything that causes inflammation will worsen insulin resistance. Another problem with fructose is that it doesn’t send informational feedback to the brain, signaling that a load of calories just hit the body. Nor does it reduce ghrelin, the appetite hormone that is usually reduced when you eat real food.
Now you can see just how easily 750 calories of soda can create biochemical chaos. In addition, the soda contains no fiber, vitamins, minerals, or phytonutrients to help you process the calories you are consuming. These are “empty” calories devoid of any nutritional value. But they are “full” of trouble. Your body doesn’t register soda as food, so you eat more all day long. Plus, your taste buds get hijacked, so anything that is not super-sweet doesn’t taste very good to you.
Think I’m exaggerating? Cut out all sugar for a week, then have a cup of blueberries. Super-sweet. But eat those same blueberries after bingeing on soda and they will taste bland and boring.
Now let’s look at the 750 calories of broccoli. As with the soda, these calories are made up primarily (although not entirely) of carbohydrates—but let’s clarify just what that means, because the varying characteristics of carbs will factor significantly into the contrast I’m about to illustrate.
Carbohydrates are plant-based compounds comprised of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. They come in many varieties, but they are all technically sugars or starches, which convert to sugar in the body. The important difference is in how they affect your blood sugar. High-fiber, low-sugar carbohydrates such as broccoli are slowly digested and don’t lead to blood sugar and insulin spikes, while table sugar and bread are quickly digested carbs that spike your blood sugar. Therein lies the difference. Slow carbs like broccoli heal rather than harm.
Those 750 calories of broccoli make up 21 cups and contain 67 grams of fiber (the average American consumes 10 to 15 grams of fiber a day). Broccoli is 23 percent protein, 9 percent fat, and 68 percent carbohydrate, or 510 calories from carbs. The “sugar” in 21 cups of broccoli is the equivalent of only 1.5 teaspoons; the rest of the carbohydrates are the low-glycemic type found in all nonstarchy vegetables, which are very slowly absorbed.
Still, are the 750 calories in broccoli really the same as the 750 calories in soda? Kindergarten class response: “No way!” So why do we all think that’s true, and why has every major governmental and independent organization bought into this nonsense?
Let’s take a closer look at just how different these two sets of calories really are.
First, you wouldn’t be able to eat twenty-one cups of broccoli, because it wouldn’t fit in your stomach. But assuming you could, what would happen? They contain so much fiber that very few of the calories would actually get absorbed. Those that did would get absorbed very slowly. There’d be no blood sugar or insulin spike, no fatty liver, no hormonal chaos. Your stomach would distend (which it doesn’t with soda; bloat from carbonation doesn’t count!), sending signals to your brain that you were full. There would be no triggering of the addiction reward center in the brain. You’d also get many extra benefits that optimize metabolism, lower cholesterol, reduce inflammation, and boost detoxification. The phytonutrients in broccoli (glucosinolates) boost your liver’s ability to detoxify environmental chemicals, and the flavonoid kaempferol is a powerful anti-inflammatory. Broccoli also contains high levels of vitamin C and folate, which protect against cancer and heart disease. The glucosinolates and sulphorophanes in broccoli change the expression of your genes to help balance your sex hormones, reducing breast and other cancers.
What I’m trying to illustrate here (and this is probably the single most important idea in this book) is that all calories are NOT created equal. The same number of calories from different types of food can have very different biological effects.
Some calories are addictive, others healing, some fattening, some metabolism-boosting. That’s because, as you’ll read in “Myth #2” below, food doesn’t just contain calories, it contains information. Every bite of food you eat broadcasts a set of coded instructions to your body—instructions that can create either health or disease.
So what will it be, a Double Gulp or a big bunch of broccoli?
It’s easy to think your biology is a lottery. You got that fat gene, that diabetes gene. Not much you can do about it. Your parents are overweight, your grandparents were overweight, and diabetes runs in your family. Might as well throw in the towel.
The good news is that we have decoded the human genome. Scientists have scoured the genome in the hope of finding the magic key to obesity and diabetes. The bad news is that they didn’t find anything terribly helpful to the overweight among us.
There are thirty-two genes associated with obesity in the general population. Unfortunately, they account for only 9 percent of obesity cases. Even if you had all thirty-two obesity genes, you would put on only about twenty-two pounds of weight. Our genes only change 2 percent every 20,000 years. Since obesity (not just being overweight) has risen from 9 percent to 36 percent since 1960 and is projected to go to 50 percent by 2050 if current trends continue, something other than genetics has to be to blame.
In truth, it’s probably lots of things. Over the last 10,000 years, our food supply has changed dramatically, with sugar consumption going from twenty teaspoons a year to twenty-two teaspoons a day. Toxins (which we now know cause obesity and are thus called obesogens) have flooded the environment. Our gut flora became toxic because of our high-sugar, high-fat, and low-fiber diet, and this has triggered a huge rise in “micro-obesity”—weight gain due to inflammatory gut bacteria. Sleep debt (Americans sleep two hours less a night than they did a hundred years ago) and obesity-causing viruses have also been implicated. And then there is peer pressure: We imitate the behavior of people in our social network. Research shows we are more likely to be overweight if our friends are overweight than if our parents are overweight. The social threads that connect us may be more important than the genetic ones. There are a hundred reasons, but the least of them are genetics.
Yes, we are programmed to love sugar and fat. We are programmed to store belly fat in response to sugar so that we can survive the winter when food is scarce. Genes do play a role, but they are a minor contributor to the massive obesity and diabetes pandemic we are facing globally. China is a perfect example of the influence of the Western diet in the global marketplace. When I traveled throughout China thirty years ago, I saw one overweight woman, and she was riding a bicycle. Type 2 diabetes was almost unknown. Now China has the most diabetics in the world, and one in five Chinese over sixty has type 2 diabetes. The Pima Indians had no obesity, diabetes, or chronic disease a hundred years ago; now they are the second most obese group in the world (after the Samoans). Eighty percent have type 2 diabetes by the time they are thirty years old.
Perhaps the most important piece of news when it comes to genes and weight is this: You can put your genes on a diet and program them for weight loss and health. Yes, you heard that right. You can’t swap out the genes you have inherited, but you can literally reprogram your genes to help you get slim and healthy.
How? That’s easy. Through food.
As I mentioned before (and I will mention it again, because I consider this perhaps the single biggest medical discovery of this century), food contains not just calories or energy to fuel our cells; food contains information. It is the control mechanism that regulates almost every chemical reaction in our bodies by communicating instructions to our genes, telling them whether to gain or lose weight, and to turn on the disease-creating or health-promoting genes. This is the groundbreaking science of nutrigenomics.
With every bite of food you take, you are sending direct messages to your genes, which control the production of all proteins in your body. And the proteins (hormones, neurotransmitters, and all sorts of chemical messengers) are the very things that control your metabolism, appetite, and health.
When you think about it that way, suddenly choosing the right foods seems like a no-brainer! It all comes down to quality. Whole, real, and fresh: Those are the three key words you need to know when it comes to choosing foods to program your genes for weight loss and health. Everything else should be considered “not food.”
Think of yourself as a qualitarian. Your diet for the upcoming ten days (and hopefully forevermore) will be packed with real, high-quality, whole, fresh foods to put your genes on a diet and make the pounds disappear.
How long can you hold your breath underwater? If I tell you to use your willpower to hold your breath for fifteen minutes and that I will give you a million dollars if you do, there is still no way you can do this. We are programmed for certain needs: air, water, food, sleep, and sex. These things are essential to our survival. If you are addicted to sugar and I tell you to resist giving in to your cravings by using willpower, I might as well tell you to hold your breath for fifteen minutes. It won’t work.
No one wants to be overweight or suffer the emotional or physical consequences of diabetes or obesity. But willpower simply isn’t enough to overcome the cravings for chips, cookies, soda, and more. We’re up against powerful biochemical mechanisms created by food addiction. Willpower is useless when industrial junk food and sugar are in charge of your brain chemistry.
The very good news is that breaking these addictions is easier than you might think—if you know what to do. And it doesn’t take weeks or months. Simply following the exact instructions in the 10-Day Detox Diet will quickly reset your brain chemistry and give you back control over your eating behavior. You don’t have to struggle to let go of your cravings; your cravings will naturally let go of you.
Your body is an extraordinary instrument—a thing of wonder that when tuned to the right frequency plays the most beautiful songs of well-being, balance, health, and energy. The trick is to tune up your biology, tune up your hormones, and tune up your metabolism so everything plays in harmony. When that happens (and on this program, it will), you’ll find that your cravings disappear very quickly—generally within a day or two. It does take a little leap of faith, but please take that leap; your body knows what to do!
A research finding got big headlines recently. “New Study Finds That Overweight People Have Lower Death Rates Than Thin People.” Nonsense. This makes for sensational headlines, but looking at the real facts of this and other studies helps to clarify that being overweight negatively impacts your health and longevity in a number of ways.
The study analyzed 100 other studies encompassing 2.88 million people with over 270,000 deaths. Those who were overweight based on a BMI (body mass index) of 25 to 30 seemed to have a lower risk of death than those who were skinnier, with a body mass index of 18.5 to 25. However, those who were obese, with a BMI of more than 30, had a much higher risk of death. Is the take-home message that you should gain more weight to live longer? Hardly.
There are many problems with the study. It included very skinny people in the “normal weight” group, people who are often quite sick, like my sister, who recently died of cancer and was rail thin at her death. Chronically ill people, especially those with cancer, die very thin. In fact, the lowest risk of death was in the group with a BMI of 22 to 25.
Other factors also confuse this study. Body mass index doesn’t account for how much of your weight is from body fat or muscle mass. Shaquille O’Neal, one of the greatest basketball players in history, has a BMI of 35 (which is considered morbidly obese), but he is muscular, not fat. You can also be what I call a skinny-fat person, with a low body mass index but very little muscle; even though you are of normal weight, you are fat on the inside. If you have skinny arms and legs and a big belly, you may be of normal weight but still have a high risk of death.
The only way to correlate weight with mortality is to look at muscle and fat composition, as well as disease markers such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, insulin, inflammation, and other markers that show you how sick you are independent of weight.
This was also a global study, and it is well known that Asians and East Indians can have diabetes at much lower body weights. So while interesting, this study doesn’t prove anything significant, and it certainly doesn’t suggest that you can carry excess weight without also carrying increased risks of chronic disease and premature death.
There is also some research that says if you are overweight but fit, your risk of disease is lower. Certainly fitness at any weight reduces the risk of disease and death, but to promote the benefits of being fat and fit only suits the food industry. In fact, the Center for Consumer Freedom, a food and tobacco industry front group, published a white paper on the “obesity hoax.” The liberal media and the government, they say, are perpetrating a big hoax on Americans. We are not fat, they insist, and diabetes is not on the rise. Oh, please! If you believe that, just take a walk through your local mall.
The Center for Consumer Freedom is funded by Coca-Cola, Monsanto, Philip Morris Kraft (which changed its name to Altria to escape negative cigarette- and junk-food-related brand perceptions), and other food industry giants—though on their website they hide the sponsors because they fear attack by food activists, those militant, vegetable-eating terrorists. Oh my!
These are the same companies that espouse the wonders of pesticides and oppose bans on smoking in public places. The group defines its mission as fighting against “a growing cabal of food cops, health care enforcers, militant activists, meddling bureaucrats, and violent radicals who think they know what’s best for you, [who] are pushing against our basic freedoms.”
“Don’t believe your eyes,” implies the Center for Consumer Freedom. The Center maintains that contrary to all the observable data, we are not a fat nation. It’s just all those food fascists confusing us, including food and nutrition experts from Yale, Harvard, and similar second-rate institutions. What’s scariest is that this industry front group has more than 100,000 Facebook likes.
What’s the group’s advice? “Instead of focusing solely on food, focus on physical activity.” Really? Remember, you have to run for four miles every single day for one week to burn off just one supersize fast-food meal. But of course that doesn’t show up anywhere in the Center’s report.
My counsel is this: Don’t believe the sensational headline hype, and don’t take health advice from industry front groups. Do pay attention to the toll that excess weight is taking on your vitality. Because what a huge body of scientific literature really shows us is that obesity comes with a whole set of metabolic changes and imbalances that create a smoldering fire of pre-disease that often leads to full-blown disease.
There are a very few people who can be overweight and metabolically healthy, but they are anomalies. Most have dangerous inflamed belly fat, abnormal small cholesterol particles (the ones that cause heart attacks), high blood pressure, and high levels of insulin, causing both insulin and leptin resistance. Their sex hormones are messed up, causing sexual dysfunction in men, and infertility, hair loss on the head, facial hair, abnormal menstrual cycles, and acne in women. Their blood is inflamed and more likely to clot and cause heart attacks and strokes. Their risks of breast, colon, prostate, pancreatic, liver, and kidney cancer are increased. Their excess weight overloads their joints, causing arthritis and mobility issues. And many have depression, memory problems, and “pre-dementia,” all caused by hormones and biochemistry disrupted by belly fat. In fact, Alzheimer’s is now being called type 3 diabetes.
So no, it is not wise to kick back and think you are fine if you are a bit overweight. Get your biomarkers tested and really find out. The basic tests you need are listed here. Go to www.10daydetox.com/resources to learn more about these tests, which will help determine whether your weight is putting your health in jeopardy.
If you think you can exercise your way to weight loss, I am sorry to say you are in for a big disappointment. Do you treat yourself to a post-workout sugar-laden smoothie, muffin, or other “healthy” snack? Suck back some Gatorade to quench your thirst after your thirty minutes on the treadmill? While some after-sports snacks can help enhance repair and recovery, for most of us, unless you are an endurance athlete or run around like Kobe Bryant for forty-eight minutes on the basketball court at full speed, they are causing more harm than good. In fact, using exercise to lose weight without changing your diet is asking for failure. You can change your diet and lose weight, but if you exercise and keep your diet the same, you may gain some muscle, improve endurance, and be healthier overall, but you won’t shed many pounds.
Remember, if you consume one twenty-ounce soda, you have to walk four and a half miles to burn it off. If you consume one supersize fast-food meal, you have to run four miles a day for one whole week to burn it off. If you eat that every day, you have to run a marathon every single day to burn it off.
The simple fact is that you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet.
Having said that, I don’t want you to get the impression I don’t think exercise is important. It is an essential component of the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet. Exercise is critical, but not for the reasons you think. Here’s how exercise helps and why we need it:
It makes your cells and muscles more sensitive to insulin so you don’t need as much. Less insulin = less belly fat.
It reduces the stress hormone cortisol. Too much cortisol and you become insulin resistant and store belly fat. Too much cortisol also makes you crave sugar and carbs and seek comfort food.
If you do interval training (going fast and then slow, as with the wind sprints you did in high school), you can speed up your metabolism and burn more calories all day long, even while you sleep.
Strength training builds muscle, and muscle burns seven times as many calories as fat. Even if you are skinny, strength training is key because it prevents “skinny fat” syndrome.
Exercise improves memory, learning, and concentration.
Vigorous exercise is a better antidepressant than Prozac.
Exercise protects your heart and reduces your risk of heart attack and stroke.
Exercise reduces inflammation (the cause of almost every disease of aging).
Exercise boosts detoxification of environmental chemicals.
Exercise balances hormones and reduces breast and other common cancers.
Exercise improves sexual function.
Speaking of sex, there is one more little myth I need to blow up for you. Somewhere we all got the idea that sex was good exercise and that a bout of sexual activity burns 100 to 300 calories for each participant. That reminds me of a patient I saw when I was a resident. I asked her if she was sexually active. She said, “No, I usually just lie there.” But even if you don’t just lie there, a vigorous lovemaking episode usually lasts about six minutes (the average in America) and burns about twenty-one calories. If you just sat and watched TV, you would burn fourteen calories in the same time. So find other ways to exercise, or study tantric sex and strive to make love for an hour or more.
Just know that even then, you probably still can’t “love” your way to weight loss. You’ll have to get out of bed and start moving—and you’ll still need to change the way you eat.
A recent analysis of weight loss research by the New England Journal of Medicine, entitled Myths, Presumptions and Facts about Obesity, attempts to bust some of the myths about weight loss and explains why many common strategies fail. One of the wrongheaded ideas it addresses that has pervaded the weight loss world is this idea that you need to be “ready to change” in order to succeed.
While there is some truth to that (certainly, if you refuse to even try something new, you’re not going to get very far), based on my experience in treating tens of thousands of patients over the decades, I see it a little differently.
What I’ve seen over and over again is that once people embark on a program that actually works, they get immediate positive feedback that makes them inclined to continue. Even if they didn’t start out feeling particularly ready or committed to make lasting changes, those results inspire them to get ready—fast.
So even if you don’t feel inspired or excited or motivated to start taking care of yourself, do it anyway. You are just as likely to succeed as someone who is highly motivated. Simply give this program a few days and you’ll start seeing results that will not only increase your readiness to change, but will also deliver the change you’ve been hoping for.
This is another myth tackled in the New England Journal of Medicine analysis. We have been taught to make small changes in our diet and lifestyle to create the most success. If the small change is cutting out the daily sixty-four-ounce Double Gulp, then yes, that will make a difference. But most need to make big changes to see big results.
For example, most of us have learned that if we just cut our intake by 100 calories a day, or increase our exercise a little bit over the long haul, we will lose weight. We’re continually told that it’s all about the calories in, calories out. But as you saw earlier in the broccoli vs. soda comparison, biology and metabolism are far more complex than that.
Just going with the math, if you burned an extra 100 calories a day (walking one mile) or consumed 100 calories less per day over thirty-five days, you would lose a pound (3,500 calories = 1 pound). So, in theory, over five years you would lose fifty pounds. Yet studies show that in reality you’re more likely to lose only ten pounds in five years, not fifty. Why? Because of changes in your metabolism and caloric needs that occur as you lose weight. You’ll need to consume even fewer calories, or burn even more of them, just to keep losing at the same rate. For most people, this pace of progress is totally demotivating, which is why they generally abandon their small-scale diet and exercise attempts early on.
Bottom line: Big changes are needed to create big weight loss. That is why the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet creates big, high-impact changes right from the start. The program will jump-start the process and unhook you from the cycle of failure and frustration that comes from making small changes that lead to small or no results.
This is another wrongheaded idea that the New England Journal of Medicine’s report burst open. We have (incorrectly) learned that rapid weight loss always backfires. We have been taught that if you go for the quick fix, you won’t lose as much in the long run as if you take the slow, gradual approach. But that is not necessarily true. Studies show that if you drop weight quickly, you end up with more weight loss in the end. When I give my patients a big jump start with weight loss, they do better and lose more weight over the long run. They learn how to own their bodies and feel empowered. The studies back up the results I see with my patients.
The key is to use a healthy, sustainable strategy for weight loss that balances your hormones and brain chemistry and doesn’t put you in a starvation response. The truth is that you can and should kick-start significant weight loss with dramatic (but healthy) shifts in your diet. That is why the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet is so effective. It gives you fast, safe, powerful results that set you up for long-term, sustained weight loss when supported by the transition programs you’ll find in Part V of this book or the program outlined in The Blood Sugar Solution.