Are you ready for a total body revolution?
Welcome to the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet!
In my book The Blood Sugar Solution, I shared my proven six-week plan for preventing, treating, and even reversing diabetes and pre-diabetes. Millions of people were amazed as they fixed their life-threatening blood sugar problems. At the same time, the program kicked their metabolism into high gear and they easily lost stubborn belly fat.
Now, for the first time, I have created a fast-track plan that will enable you to shed upwards of ten pounds and radically reboot your entire system in just ten short days. With the right combination of powerful foods and practices, we’re going to stop your fat-storage hormone in its tracks, cool off the inflammation that contributes to weight gain, and upgrade your detox pathways. You’ll lose weight with astonishing speed and ease—and keep it off using these lifelong tools and strategies for maximum success.
With the 10-Day Detox Diet, we’re going to get rid of more than just unwanted pounds. This is your chance to heal your body on every level. Yes, you will drop pounds, but you will also find that your energy, sleep, and mood improve, that chronic problems including joint pain, digestive problems, autoimmune disease, headaches, memory problems and brain fog, sinus and allergy issues, even acne, eczema, and psoriasis will get better or disappear entirely. Your sexual desire and function may even improve.
Why is that the case? Because what makes you sick also makes you fat, and what makes you fat makes you sick. Let me explain. Health is a state of balance, and disease is a state of imbalance. When you begin to put on weight, especially lethal belly fat, your biology shifts out of balance, veering into the unstable and unhealthy territory of disease—which in turn makes you fatter.
One point that a growing number of doctors like me agree upon is that the whole idea of “disease” itself is wrong. We recognize disease only when we reach a certain level of symptoms or results on our blood tests. For example, if your blood sugar is 98 mg/dl, it is normal, but if it is 101 mg/dl, you have pre-diabetes. If your blood sugar is 124 mg/dl, you have pre-diabetes, but if it is 127 mg/dl, you have type 2 diabetes. This is absurd.
Imbalance occurs along a continuum, and the farther along that continuum you are, the more problems you have. Many people have whole collections of symptoms, conditions, and diseases—obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, arthritis, depression, reflux, irritable bowel, autoimmune disease, asthma, and more.
I call myself a “wholistic” doctor, because I take care of patients with a “whole list” of symptoms. In treating such patients, I’ve often found that their health complaints are not really separate problems. They are all related and driven by a few common root causes: what they eat; how much they move, rest, connect; and how toxic they are.
What we have found in functional medicine is that everything is connected—this is called systems medicine. Your body is one integrated, interdependent system. That is why, when you get to the root cause or causes, so many often-related symptoms go away without having to be addressed individually. It is medicine by cause, not by symptom. It is medicine of your whole system, not by geography or where the symptoms are located in your body. By connecting the dots, we can find a clear path to health and wellness.
Here’s how this all ties in with weight: The factors that cause your symptoms are the very same factors that cause weight gain, pre-diabetes, and diabetes. Those factors include inflammation, hormonal imbalance, toxicity, and more. But remember, it’s all connected, so your excess weight problems very likely share many of the same root causes as your other health complaints. As you follow the program, you’ll come to understand how the ways you eat, move, relax, live, and think can quickly create either an environment of healing or an environment of toxicity within your body, and set the stage for weight gain or weight loss.
It comes down to this: If you’re toxic, it makes you sick and fat. That is why I want you to take the Toxicity Questionnaire below, both before beginning the 10-Day Detox Diet, and again after you’ve completed the ten days. It will give you a baseline for your existing symptoms, which are indications of being toxic and inflamed. But even more, it will help you connect the dots and see the interconnections in your body, and see for yourself how, after just ten days, you can enjoy such a dramatic reduction in symptoms and problems.
Those who did the 10-Day Detox Diet experienced a 62 percent reduction in their symptoms. Think about that: There is no drug on the planet that can reduce all these symptoms in just ten days! But if you treat your whole system, rather than individual symptoms, extraordinary healing and weight loss can occur.
For the “before” part of the questionnaire, rate each of the following symptoms based upon your health profile for the past thirty days. You’ll take this quiz again after your 10-Day Detox, but it’s especially important that you take the time to complete and score it now, before you embark on the program. Without that baseline score, ten days from now you may have a hard time believing just how different your “after” results really are.
0 = Never or almost never have the symptom
1 = Occasionally have it, effect is not severe
2 = Occasionally have it, effect is severe
3 = Frequently have it, effect is not severe
4 = Frequently have it, effect is severe
_____ Nausea or vomiting
_____ Diarrhea
_____ Constipation
_____ Bloated feeling
_____ Belching, or passing gas
_____ Heartburn
_____ Intestinal, stomach pain
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Itchy ears
_____ Earaches, ear infections
_____ Drainage from ear
_____ Ringing in ears, hearing loss
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Mood swings
_____ Anxiety, fear, or nervousness
_____ Anger, irritability, or aggressiveness
_____ Depression
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Fatigue, sluggishness
_____ Apathy, lethargy
_____ Hyperactivity
_____ Restlessness
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Watery or itchy eyes
_____ Swollen, reddened, or sticky eyelids
_____ Bags or dark circles under eyes
_____ Blurred or tunnel vision (does not include near- or farsightedness)
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Headaches
_____ Faintness
_____ Dizziness
_____ Insomnia
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Irregular or skipped heartbeat
_____ Rapid or pounding heartbeat
_____ Chest pain
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Pain or aches in joints
_____ Arthritis
_____ Stiffness or limitation of movement
_____ Pain or aches in muscles
_____ Feeling of weakness or tiredness
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Chest congestion
_____ Asthma, bronchitis
_____ Shortness of breath
_____ Difficulty breathing
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Poor memory
_____ Confusion, poor comprehension
_____ Poor concentration
_____ Poor physical coordination
_____ Difficulty in making decisions
_____ Stuttering or stammering
_____ Slurred speech
_____ Learning disabilities
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Chronic coughing
_____ Gagging, frequent need to clear throat
_____ Sore throat, hoarseness, loss of voice
_____ Swollen or discolored tongue, gums, or lips
_____ Canker sores
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Stuffy nose
_____ Sinus problems
_____ Hay fever
_____ Excessive mucus formation
_____ Sneezing attacks
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Acne
_____ Hives, rashes, or dry skin
_____ Hair loss
_____ Flushing or hot flushes
_____ Excessive sweating
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Binge eating/drinking
_____ Craving certain foods
_____ Excessive weight
_____ Compulsive eating
_____ Water retention
_____ Underweight
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
_____ Frequent illness
_____ Frequent or urgent urination
_____ Genital itch or discharge
Total before ___________
Total after ___________
GRAND TOTAL BEFORE _______________
GRAND TOTAL AFTER _______________
If you are overweight, there’s a very good chance that you’re a food addict. But let me stop right there and tell you that I’m not blaming you. You are not gluttonous, nor weak-willed, nor any other self-recriminating belief you may have about yourself and your relationship to food. Your hormones, taste buds, and brain chemistry have been hijacked by the food industry. Not metaphorically, but biologically. You are hooked—a junkie mainlining some of the worst, deadliest drugs on the planet: sugar and anything that turns to sugar in your body. That’s why you’re here to detox.
The $1-trillion industrial food system is the biggest drug dealer around, responsible for contributing to tens of millions of deaths every year and siphoning trillions of dollars from our global economy through the loss of human and natural capital. I realize this sounds extreme and overstated, but hear me out. Once you understand the forces at play in food addiction, you will never think the same way again about Snapple, Diet Coke, and processed snacks, cookies, and cake.
We need to acknowledge our addiction, face it, and address it head-on, both as individuals and as a society. We need a big solution that reaches deep into what is offered in our supermarkets, restaurants, schools, and workplaces. We need a solution that addresses the policy roots in agriculture, food marketing, dietary recommendations, and the way doctors are trained to diagnose and treat patients.
But first, you need to take back your own health. And I’m here to help you do exactly that.
In order to break free from these addictive substances and reprogram your biology, you need to detox from the druglike foods and beverages you’ve been hooked on. We now know—because it has been scientifically proven—that sugar is more powerfully addictive than alcohol, cocaine, or even heroin (and if you’re thinking about going for diet soda instead, take note: Artificial sweeteners may be more addictive than regular sugar). When we treat alcoholics or cocaine addicts, we don’t say “Practice moderation” and advise them to cut down to just one drink or one line of cocaine a day. We know they must clear the brain and body of these powerful drugs completely, ideally through a well-designed program that supports the detox process.
That’s precisely what we’re going to do here. In just ten days, you’ll have a whole new level of clarity, both physically and mentally. You’ll know with certainty that you can regain control, feel good, and change your life forever.
But what if you’re trying this diet just to lose some weight and make good on your New Year’s resolution? That’s fine. We all want to look good! The magic in the 10-Day Detox Diet is that you’ll end up not just looking fantastic, but feeling fantastic, too—quite possibly better than you ever imagined.
Just to be clear, though, the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet is not a magic cure or a gimmicky weight loss scheme. It is a comprehensive, science-based approach to ending food addiction and creating rapid, safe weight loss and long-term optimal health. It is for anyone who wants to experience what true wellness feels like, and for most people, that realization is just ten days away.
Again, I realize that you may not believe all this is possible. And you don’t have to. All you have to do is give it a try and see for yourself how quickly the body heals and sheds pounds when it is getting what it really needs.
Most of my patients say, “Dr. Hyman, I didn’t know I was feeling so bad until I started feeling so good.” After doing the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet, you’ll likely be saying the same thing.