The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body's Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast (49 page)

Most of us go through life unconscious of how much we eat, how much we sleep, how much we relax, even how much money we spend. But in order to transform your habits, you first need to be aware of what they look like so you know what needs to change. You may be drinking six Diet Cokes a day and not even realizing it!

When I have patients track their diet and blood sugar, blood pressure, weight, waist, and hip size, suddenly they can understand how quickly and dramatically their health can be affected by whatever they eat—even by something as simple as a bowl of cereal.

Not long ago, I spent time with the Abbot of Menri at his Tibetan monastery in northern India. He thought he was eating a good, healthy breakfast every day. It was the traditional Tibetan breakfast called
tsampa,
eaten by yak herders for centuries, which consists of roasted barley with yak cheese and salty tea. There was only one problem: The abbot wasn’t herding yaks at 15,000 feet, but rather herding monks into the meditation hall. I convinced him to let his assistant test his blood sugar two hours after eating that meal, and it spiked up to 350 mg/dl
(normal is less than 100 mg/dl). At first he blamed the machine, certain it was broken! I assured him it wasn’t; to prove it, I checked my blood sugar and that of another monk having breakfast with us, and both were normal. It was one thing for me to tell the abbot that this breakfast wasn’t good for him, but another for him to see it with his own eyes. He immediately changed his breakfast to one that would balance his blood sugar. And now his hemoglobin A1c, or average blood sugar, went from over 8.0 to under 6.0 and he lost thirty pounds.

Those who track their thoughts, emotions, and experiences have real proof of the changes that are possible. It might seem annoying at the beginning to measure yourself, write down your numbers, track your labs, what you are eating, how much you move and exercise, how much you sleep or relax, but the science shows that this dramatically magnifies your success. Think about it this way: If you lost twenty pounds without tracking, you could lose forty pounds just by measuring and recording your results. The simple act of becoming conscious and noticing shifts behavior and habits.

We only have two more days to go on the program, and I want to give you some lasting strategies for practicing awareness so that you can keep making progress even after you’ve completed the formal part of this detox plan.

  Record the following in your Detox Journal each day (or begin a new Transition Journal once the ten days are over). Be as specific as possible:

Weight

Hips

Thighs

Blood sugar

Blood pressure