Sexy Forever: How to Fight Fat After Forty (17 page)

Most people with heartburn produce too little hydrochloric acid, yet the usual remedy is to take an antacid, which removes acid—exactly the opposite of what your stomach wants! So throw away those little cherry-flavored over-the-counter antacids or prescription acid blockers. They are doing you harm. Your stomach actually needs hydrochloric acid to help nourish your body! Without enough HCL, you may not be able to sufficiently break down proteins. This can lead to bloating, gas, and, you guessed it, more heartburn. Low HCL production can also result in problems with bacterial infections or parasites.

Your body once made sufficient and in some cases abundant HCL. Aging can knock out most of the HCL in your digestive system. This decline begins around age forty, and from then on, many people suffer the effects of low stomach acid. Because of powerful advertising, they feel that the remedy is to pop down those cherry-flavored antacids like candy, but that only covers up symptoms and doesn’t fix the basic problem. Once your body is no longer making sufficient HCL the only way to restore it is through supplementation. Supplemental HCL is available in tablet form. Supplementation will keep you feeling good. And best of all it will be one of the crucial steps in eliminating bloating. Yay! As Dr. Wright and Dr. Lenard say in their book
Why Stomach Acid Is Good for You
, “We should always try to copy nature!”

Low stomach acid leads to weight gain because your food is not digesting properly, which creates toxins that then get stored (you guessed it again) in the fat. More toxins, more fat. Without HCL you will become bloated, constipated, and unable to extract nutrients from your food. If you go to your regular doctor he may prescribe Nexium or Prilosec for your heartburn and acid reflux, which again is a bandage and will never heal you. In addition, you are also adding to your toxic burden. Instead, natural hydrochloric acid is available in tablet form at your local health
food store and will replace the missing component, allowing you to properly digest your food, while eliminating acid reflux. Chronic, persistent acid reflux—even if the amount of acid made by the stomach is actually too low—can lead to esophageal cancer, so take it seriously.

Hydrochloric acid is crucial for my personal gut health, so I take three capsules with every meal. Radiation (which I had for my cancer) knocked out my body’s ability to manufacture HCL
for life
. The type of HCL I take is called betaine HCL.

The properly functioning stomach secretes at least five important substances: mucus, hydrochloric acid, a digestive enzyme called pepsin, an acid-regulating hormone called gastrin, and gastric lipase, which assists in the digestion of fat. Here’s why you need to understand this mechanism. Mucus coats the cells lining the stomach to protect them from the HCL. This mucus can be damaged by dehydration, overconsumption of food or aspirin, or by the bacterium
Helicobacter pylori
(
H. pylori
).

Many people are walking around with
H. pylori
without realizing it, yet the symptoms of bloating and discomfort persist, regardless of how well they eat. Unchecked,
H. pylori
can lead to damage of the mucosal lining, and this damage can often lead to gastritis, which is an irritation of the stomach lining. It can even lead to a stomach ulcer.
H. pylori
is a bad bacterium that produces substances that are harmful to the body. It irritates the lining of the intestines (causing gas) and can be absorbed into the bloodstream (causing disease). It cannot be prevented from entering the body, but if the number of good bacteria stays high, then the
H. pylori
will be kept to a minimum. Another example of bad bacteria is
salmonella
. Both
H. pylori
and salmonella can lead to serious disease, a kind of poisoning of the body. It’s important to rule out both of them and other bad bacteria through proper testing. In with the good bacteria, out with the bad. Your body and health will thank you for it.

We already discussed how important good nutrition is. If your body is not able to extract nutrients via your GI tract, you will get increasingly unhealthy regardless of how well you eat. If you are nutritionally void because of poor food choices, coupled with a diet that is heavy in chemicals, you will gradually feel worse. Plus you’ll get fatter and fatter, and eventually you will get sick. Are you getting the connection? More toxins require more fat for storage. I will say this over and over: it’s the toxic buildup that is keeping you fat.

GET HEALTHY, STAY SEXY

In summary, if you have problems with your digestive health, you must first heal your gut in order to lose weight and get healthy:

• Take a blood test for food sensitivities and food allergies. Also ask for a celiac disease screening panel that contains deamidated gliadin IgA, tissue transglutaminase IgA, and serum IgA.
      You can obtain a convenient walk-in test for food intolerances/allergies by logging on to
  SuzanneSomers.com
  and clicking on Life Extension.
  
• Eliminate toxic chemicals from your life as best you can.
  
• Take supplements to heal the GI tract: glutamine, deglycyrrhinated licorice (DGL), aloe vera, plantain, marshmallow, gammalipoic acid.
  
• For leaky gut, see a qualified doctor for a list of supplements, and ask about IV glutathione and vitamin C.
  
• Consider wearing LifeWave glutathione patches to detoxify.
  
• Balance your enzymes.
  
• If needed, replace missing hydrochloric acid with each meal.
  
• Take N-acetyl-glucosamine (NAG) if you have
  H. pylori
  bacteria.
  
• Consume at least 35 grams of fiber daily to alleviate constipation and keep the GI tract healthy.
  
• Take probiotics. Look for a capsule that has 80 billion bifidobacteria and lactobacilli.
  
• Supplement daily with cod liver oil or good-quality omega-3 oil, and always use good-quality oils in your cooking.
  

These changes will have a dramatic effect on your health, and the stubborn weight that just won’t seem to go away will begin to melt off, provided you are following the Sexy Forever plan. Real food, real weight loss, and real health. What more could you want?

Following all of these steps is important. Just watching what you eat is, sad to say, no longer enough. As I have said and will say over and over, the planet has changed, and either you accept it and make adjustments or you go the way of others you see around you and become overweight and sick. Make the decision to win this war of toxins versus our bodies. It
is
possible.

From middle age on there is nothing more vital to your health and weight control than to build lean muscle mass, and the only way that happens is with weight training and exercise. Exercise brings remarkable benefits. And although it is not essential for weight loss, the increased calorie burn from muscle makes you lose weight faster than you would otherwise.

The reason most people tend to gain a few pounds each year after age thirty is that unless we take specific steps to stop lean muscle mass from declining, it will slide, leaving you with less calorie-burning muscle and more fat. Then you are in a vicious cycle: less lean muscle causes you to burn fewer calories, and if you continue eating badly, you will continue to gain weight. Unless you exercise to maintain or increase your lean muscle, you will gain weight every year.

Exercise builds more than muscle; it builds health. Sitting around and watching TV instead of getting up and getting some exercise sets up a chain reaction for deterioration and poor health. A sedentary lifestyle reduces your ability to take in and use oxygen. If you take in less oxygen, you get less oxygen in your blood. Less oxygen in your blood means less oxygen in the cells, which means less energy and vitality in your life. A sedentary
lifestyle also reduces cardiac output, meaning less blood is pumped by your heart and so less oxygen and nutrients are carried to your brain and organs. More oxygen in your blood means that your muscles get what they need to function efficiently and avoid lactic acid buildup. When you avoid lactic acid buildup, you experience less tiredness and fatigue, which results in feeling healthier and stronger. Things like cellulite, increased body fat, the gradual decrease of lean muscle mass, less energy, and more tiredness have absolutely nothing to do with the natural process of getting older. These aren’t symptoms of aging—they are symptoms of a body not working as well as it once did, primarily because the system has been dragged down due to a lack of important nutrients and regular exposure to toxins. It all works together.