4
How the Program Works
Now that you know the science of why you’re doing this program, let’s jump in and get to the what, when, who, and how of the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
There are three phases of this program, and all are key to your success:
Phase 1, the Prep Phase, is detailed in Part III of this book. There you’ll find everything you need to get started and set yourself up for optimal success, beginning with your pantry and ending with your mind-set. Ideally, set aside two days for this phase before you begin the program, to physically and psychologically set the detox process in motion. During those two days, you’ll gather all the food and supplies you need. (Those of you who want to order your supplements through my website www.10daydetox.com/resources may want to do that a week before beginning the program, to make sure you have them on hand before you begin.) I’ll provide you with a clear checklist with everything you need to get and do during the Prep Phase.
Phase 2, the 10-Day Detox, is outlined for you in Part IV of this book. There you’ll find step-by-step directions on what to eat and when during each day of your detox. I’ll also give you everything you need to know to do the essential daily practices, including exercise, the UltraDetox Bath, journaling, and daily relaxation exercises (all of which are critical for healing!). Each of the ten days has a specific focus to help you remove the most common obstacles to weight loss success and provide the tool kit to get and stay healthy.
Phase 3, the Transition Phase, is featured in Part V. The Transition Phase gives you a road map for what to do after your 10-Day Detox, and how to transition to a long-term health and weight loss strategy based on my book The Blood Sugar Solution. I know you’ll want to continue feeling as great as you do immediately after the ten days!
WHAT YOU’LL EAT
This program isn’t about deprivation. It’s not about eating bland, boring food. That’s why the meal plan is filled with flavorful, easy-to-make recipes. Cooking gets a bad rap: It takes too much time… it’s inconvenient… it’s too difficult, or you don’t know how to cook. But the fact is, Americans spend more time watching cooking shows on television than actually cooking! We are raising a generation of Americans who don’t know their way around the kitchen, where 50 percent of meals are eaten outside the home, and ones eaten at home are usually reheated, factory-made science projects that resemble food but aren’t. And as you now know, this convenience is killing us.
You don’t have to become a master chef or spend all your time in the kitchen to eat healthfully, but you do need to learn some basic cooking skills. The truth is that if you can read, you can cook. Simply follow recipes step by step and you will usually end up with a great meal.
This is partly how I learned to cook. By simply following recipes for various kinds of dishes, you get a sense of what goes with what, how to use ingredients, and how to naturally flavor and spice foods. These days, I almost never need a cookbook because I’ve internalized all those principles and feel confident experimenting on my own. I want to help you achieve the same level of kitchen confidence.
Start by deciding to make cooking meals fun. Get family members on board and shop and cook together. Make a point of learning new skills and trying recipes together. Take time to enjoy and celebrate the food you’ve prepared by hand—as opposed to inhaling something straight from its packaging as you pull out of the fast-food drive-through lane.
Your health depends on cooking, and our national survival depends on health. My friend Pilar Gerasimo (the founding editor of Experience Life magazine) says that in a world as health-challenged as ours, “being healthy is a revolutionary act.” In part, she explains, this is because it requires all kinds of unconventional choices, a huge amount of conscious determination, and a willingness to learn new skills and strategies. I agree, and for all the same reasons, I also believe that cooking has become a revolutionary act. It’s something we must all learn—or relearn—in order to reclaim responsibility for our own well-being and the well-being of future generations.
Michael Pollan, in his book Cooked, concurs. He says, “The decline of everyday home cooking doesn’t only damage the health of our bodies and our land but also our families, our communities and our sense of how our eating connects us to the world.”
He tells us that the effects of not cooking are profound. We have outsourced our cooking to the food industry. When we rely on processed products for our sustenance, we become “consumers” instead of producers of food. We become dependent on corporations and reliant on toxic combinations of salt, sugar, and fat, chemicals that destroy our health, families, and communities. By contrast, getting our hands messy with real food reconnects us to the essential elements that make us human.
Cooking is a uniquely human activity. In fact, taking back our kitchens and embracing the act of cooking real food is probably the single most important thing that any one person can do to create a healthy, sustainable food system. It is also a magical alchemy that transforms individual ingredients into ambrosia and pleasure.
You can choose from two recipe plans during the 10-Day Detox: the Core Plan and the Adventure Plan. The goal of the Core Plan is to provide quick, simple, and tasty metabolism-boosting meals. The recipes in the Core Plan give you an easy way to succeed in the kitchen and will help convince you that eating well doesn’t have to be difficult or complicated. They will also show you that homemade food can delight not just your body, but also your mind and senses, leaving you energized and inspired.
Those of you who have more time to enjoy cooking can opt for the Adventure Plan. These recipes use a wider array of ingredients and allow you to take your exploration of flavors and combinations to a new level. Follow the Adventure Plan for more fun, extra weight loss, and extra health!
Feel free to mix and match between the two plans, as long as you stay within the menu plans listed for each individual day. In other words, if you want to do the Core Plan lunch and the Adventure Plan dinner from Day 3, that’s perfectly okay; just don’t mix and match the lunches and dinners from different days at random. The daily menus are carefully calibrated to make sure you get the right daily dose of nutrients—at the right times of day—to keep you satiated.
Lastly, if you are really pressed for time or don’t like either the Core Plan or Adventure Plan recipes for that day (though I encourage you to have an open mind and try them), you always have the option to prepare instead a meal consisting of a basic protein and a nonstarchy vegetable. In Chapter 20, you will find “Cooking the Basics,” which gives you super-simple methods for preparing these easy proteins and vegetables.
WHO YOU’LL HAVE ON YOUR SIDE
Knowing what to do is not difficult for most of us. A little knowledge, information, teaching, and instruction and we should all be on our way to health, happiness, fabulous well-being, and our ideal weight. Yet somehow it doesn’t work like that.
Despite our best intentions, despite knowing what to eat, and that we should exercise, sleep enough, and de-stress, most of us stumble along in old habits and patterns that keep us from being fully alive and healthy. There may be many deep psychological reasons for this. And after years of psychotherapy, and even abundant use of psychiatric medicine (now second only to cholesterol medication as the most frequently prescribed class of drugs), most of us still find changing our behavior the most difficult thing to do. But I have discovered a little secret that makes change easy and makes it stick.
For years I studied the intricate nature of our human biology, how to turn the dials on all our biological systems to reverse disease and create abundant good health, investigated the finer points of biochemistry and genetics, and yet none of it mattered if my patients couldn’t alter their behavior. Some of my patients, of course, had powerful internal motivation, but most needed support. I realized that we are social animals. Those around us, it seems—our families, our friends, our neighborhoods, our schoolmates, our communities, and our workplaces—determine our behavior. As I explained in Part I, the social threads that connect us might in the end be more important than genetics.
After this essential insight about how we change our behavior, I met pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church, in Orange County, California, and suggested that we create a healthy living program and deliver it through the thousands of small groups that already existed in his church. These small groups had been formed to help the people within his congregation support and encourage each other, so why not leverage them for physical as well as spiritual renewal and development?
Rick and I both believed that individuals tend to grow and learn better together, and that through sharing, collaboration, and mutual encouragement, they could more effectively express their best selves. So together with Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Daniel Amen, we launched the Daniel Plan on January 15, 2011. It was named after Daniel from the Bible, who resisted the king’s temptation of rich food and ate vegetables and water and was healthier for it.
Initially, we considered the Daniel Plan a social experiment to learn whether community support could be more effective than medication or conventional medical care in treating and reversing disease and creating health. But the results surpassed our wildest expectations.
In the first week, 15,000 people signed up. During the first year, they lost an estimated 250,000 pounds—the equivalent of ten tractor-trailer trucks loaded with soda. Those results impressed all of us. But here’s what we found really interesting: The research indicated that those who did the plan together lost twice as much weight as those who did it alone.
The group support was the lever that moved mountains—mountains of donuts, ribs, soda, and more! Beyond the incredible weight reductions, we also saw significant reductions in the participants’ doctor visits, hospitalizations, and need for medications.
In a survey taken ten months after the launch of the program, participants reported the following:
53 percent had increased energy.
34 percent reported better sleep.
27 percent saw an improvement in blood work.
20 percent saw an improvement in blood pressure.
11 percent cut down on their medications.
31 percent reported improvement in mood.
We didn’t treat disease. We didn’t create a weight loss program. We taught people self-care, and combining that with caring for each other, they created a miracle—something that health care or health care reform has not been able to achieve. People helped each other create health. We realized that the group was the medicine, that the community was the cure, and that most chronic illness—including obesity—was in fact a social disease that needed a social cure.
One of the most important elements of this program is tapping into the power of community. I want you to think about weight loss not as a solitary endeavor, but as a team sport.
When we launched the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet trial, we set up an online community where participants could post their experiences and questions. It was truly amazing to see the participants supporting each other in very personal and profound ways. They shared cooking tips, swapped strategies, lent support when someone was struggling, and cheered each other’s successes.
Clearly, social support makes a huge difference. That’s why, as part of your Prep Phase, I strongly encourage you to find a buddy, friend, partner, work friend, or faith-based community member to do this program with. Even better, find a group of six to eight people and do this together. You can form a private Facebook group, or meet in person at the beginning, middle, and end, or get together every night for fifteen minutes on Google Hangouts or Skype and check in with each other to share ideas, challenges, and encouragement.
On the 10-Day Detox Diet website (www.10daydetox.com/resources), you can get a full set of instructions and options for how to create and run a group, and community-building tools. You can even join the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet online course to get daily tools, resources, coaching, and interactive support from me and my nutrition and life coaches.
WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT
During the 10-Day Detox trial program, participants lost an average of 8 pounds and 3.4 percent of their body weight (these are the averages; some participants lost as much as 25 pounds!). They lost up to 10 inches around their waist, up to 11 inches around their hips, and their BMI dropped an average of 1.4 points. The average drop in fasting blood sugar was 18 points. The average blood pressure dropped 10 points. But more importantly, people felt better, and many chronic symptoms and conditions resolved.
We had the participants rate and track their overall symptoms, just as you did in the Toxicity Questionnaire here. In ten days, their overall score went down an average of 62 percent. No drug can come close to reducing all those symptoms in that short a time! This is why I say food is medicine and that what you put at the end of your fork is more powerful than anything you will ever find inside a prescription bottle.
TRACKING YOUR RESULTS
The key to believing is measuring your results. The proof is in the numbers! I’m simply going to ask you to track your results at the beginning, throughout, and at the end of the ten days, and you’ll see for yourself the miraculous changes in your own body.
During the Prep Phase, I will give you instructions for exactly what measurements to take. You want to get a baseline of all measurements for comparison.
Then, every morning throughout the program, I’ll remind you to take your measurements and stats and record them in your Detox Journal to track your progress. (See here for information about the Detox Journal, or you can go to www.10daydetox.com/resources to use our online tools for tracking all your scores, measurements, vital stats, and daily experiences and feelings through journaling.)
Each evening, you’ll record what you ate, how much exercise you did, the number of hours you slept, how many minutes that day you dedicated to the prescribed relaxation techniques. Research shows that people who write down what they do lose twice as much weight as those who don’t. Bottom line: Tracking what you’re doing creates results. And if you continue to track your results after the 10 Day Detox, you will enhance and extend your results.
TEST YOURSELF
While measuring your blood sugar is optional before, during, and after the 10-Day Detox, I highly recommend it. Many people think you have to be a diabetic to check your blood sugar. Not so. In fact, I think it is a simple, great way for everyone to see how their body responds to what they eat. It will give you immediate and direct feedback about how dramatically and quickly your body responds to the right information in diet and lifestyle.
Some of you may already have a glucose meter and know how to test your blood sugar. Others may want to get a meter at their local drugstore. The newer ones are easy to use, and you can always ask your pharmacist to show you how. I like the ACCU-CHEK Aviva Blood Glucose Meter with Strips, which includes a few test strips (you may need extra).
Here is the protocol I recommend for testing:
Measure your fasting blood sugar daily, first thing in the morning before breakfast. Ideally, your fasting blood sugar should be between 70 and 80 mg/dl.
Measure your blood sugar two hours after breakfast and two hours after dinner. Ideally, your two-hour sugars should never go over 120 mg/dl. If they go over 140 mg/dl, you have pre-diabetes. If they go over 200 mg/dl, you have type 2 diabetes. Technically, this is after a 75-gram glucose load, but if they go this high on the plan, you definitely have a problem. Pay attention to how they change depending on what you eat.
GET TESTED BY YOUR DOCTOR
Lastly, I strongly encourage you to consider getting basic lab tests done before and after the program. These would include:
Insulin response test, which is like a two-hour glucose tolerance test but measures insulin as well. It is done by measuring both insulin and glucose, fasting and one and two hours after a 75-gram glucose drink.
Hemoglobin A1c, which measures your average blood sugar over the past six weeks. Anything 5.5 percent or above is considered elevated; over 6.0 percent is diabetes.
NMR lipid (cholesterol) profile, which measures LDL, HDL, and triglycerides, and the particle number and particle size of each type of cholesterol and triglycerides. (This is a newer test, but I would demand it from your doctor, because the typical cholesterol tests done by most labs and doctors are out of date.) This particular test can only be obtained through LabCorp or LipoScience.
Lab tests can be done through your doctor, at most hospitals or laboratories, or ordered by you through personal testing companies such as SaveOnLabs (www.saveonlabs.com). For more information and detailed explanations for each of these tests, go to www.10daydetox.com/resources.
Part of what you’re doing over these ten days is becoming an active partner in your health and weight loss plan, and that includes having a full understanding of your numbers and following them over time. I believe everyone should become empowered to learn about their bodies, interpret their test results, and use that information to track their progress.
REMINDER: CHECK IN WITH YOUR DOCTOR
As I mentioned earlier, I have one strong caution to offer before you get started. The program works so well that your blood sugar and blood pressure can drop dramatically in just a day or two. If you are on medication or insulin, you must carefully monitor your blood pressure and blood sugar and reduce your dose of medication in partnership with your doctor to make sure you don’t get into trouble. Having your blood sugar or blood pressure run a little high for a week poses almost no danger (if your sugars are under 300 mg/dl and your blood pressure is under 150/100), but rapid drops in blood sugar or blood pressure can be life-threatening. So please be sure to talk with your health care provider before embarking on this journey.