The Fast Metabolism Diet (4 page)

This manipulation is what I learned about when I studied animal science. The animal science industry uses this knowledge of energy, storage, and structure to create livestock that is ideally proportioned for use as food, to the tune of billions of dollars of profit.

The metabolism can also get you into trouble because you can inadvertently manipulate it to create a body you
don’t want.
Dieting, nutrient-void foods, and living with too much stress slow down your metabolism when it should be sped up. When you gain weight, feel blah, even get sick with a chronic disease, those are all coping mechanisms your body creates in response to your actions or environment, like the frogs that grow three legs in polluted swamps. Your butt or your belly could be protruding because of the very environmental, emotional, and biochemical ecosystem in which it is dwelling.

One reason chronic dieting slows down your metabolism is that extreme dieting feels like
starvation to your body. Starvation stresses the adrenal glands, which in turn induce a string of chemical reactions in your body that suppress normal production of the
thyroid hormones that promote fat burning (T3), in favor of more production of a different thyroid hormone that encourages fat storage (
reverse T3, or RT3). This is an oversimplification, but in essence, this fat-storage hormone, RT3, blocks the hormone receptor sites throughout your body, especially in your belly,
thighs, and butt, like a goalie defending a goal against the ball. The fat-burning hormone (T3) can’t get in there and burn that fat for fuel.

RT3 is a necessary hormone. Without it, we would all have to eat every two hours or we would die. This hormone gets secreted to tell your body not to burn those 500 calories from breakfast or dinner too quickly. It tells your body: “Careful, that might be all you’re going to get,” or “Don’t burn off that whole dinner, you might not get anything else to sustain you until 2:00
P.M.
tomorrow!” It’s as if someone told you that you had 4 cups of rice and 2 cups of beans to live on for the next month. You’d be darn sure to ration that food so you could survive. You wouldn’t want to eat it all the first day. That’s what RT3 “sees” when you get too stressed and you don’t eat enough: 4 cups of rice and 2 cups of beans.

When your body produces too much RT3, it begins to store fat instead of burn it, even when you have plenty of fat already onboard. As I said above, RT3 acts like a goalie in front of the T3 receptor sites, blocking the ball (T3). Your brain, however, detects the presence of plenty of thyroid hormones, no matter what kind are circulating, so it steps down thyroid hormone production across the board. Your metabolism slows down in response, and then you begin to store
everything
you eat as fat, even healthful foods.

The only way to reverse this process is to jump-start your metabolism again, and the best way to get started is to ditch old, mistaken beliefs about food that are literally weighing you down.

First, let’s knock down some of the metabolic myths that are standing in your way, then in the next chapter we’ll discuss the five major weight-loss players that we’ll fine-tune with the Fast Metabolism Diet before we get to the yummy stuff … the food!

One of the biggest misconceptions I hear from my clients is that if they could eat less, then they’d lose weight. In reality, it’s exactly the opposite. I can’t tell you how many of my overweight clients come to me and tell me that they eat literally no more than 1,200 to 1,400 calories per day.
Often they also exercise five to seven days a week. Yet they still aren’t losing weight. They say things like, “I
swear
this is all I
eat!” and “I
promise
I’m not cheating!,” as if I’m going to send them to the principal’s office for food-diary forgery.

I believe them. Why? Because eating less actually makes the situation worse! When your metabolism is too slow, you’ll
store
lettuce
as fat, and you certainly won’t burn any fat. I was explaining to a client the other day that because of the way her body’s hormone system was responding, even the carbs found in the beautiful organic mixed greens she was eating were being used as a vehicle to store fat. Shocking and unfair, isn’t it? Even the healthiest of foods can do this if your metabolic system needs repair.

This client thought she was doing the right thing by eating so much lettuce, but she’d become so carb-resistant because of years of dieting (as well as the use of diet products, extreme
stress, irregular eating, and what I deemed to be an excessive exercise program) that any carbohydrates that found their way into her system, including those in that lettuce, were being converted into sugars and stored as fat instead of being metabolized. Yikes!

I also have clients who
skip breakfast, don’t eat until 2:00 in the afternoon, then consume 4,500 calories between 2:00 and bedtime. Their bodies have gone into starvation mode by the
time they get around to eating. They eat so much because their bodies are panicking and they can’t stop themselves. Their bodies are pissed off at them for depriving them of food for so long; they’re lucky if it only takes 4,500 calories to calm their bodies again. Why are their bodies reacting so violently by triggering such aggressive eating? When you don’t eat until the afternoon, you are asking your body to wake up, get out of bed, shower, get dressed, think, drive, work all day, and sometimes even exercise—all on zero fuel. Talk about cruel.

Guess what else happens when you don’t provide your body fuel from food? There’s a reason you don’t just drop dead when you don’t eat. Your body finds food despite you—it finds it in your muscle tissue. It has been proven that a body in starvation mode will first access muscle for fuel, and not fat. So if you do not feed your body, it will “eat” your muscles for the essential fuels it needs to continue life. That’s kind of disgusting and more than a little disconcerting to know how key lean muscle is to burning fat,
as well as to keep you structurally fit and able to move with ease and energy through each day.

Is all that really worth skipping a meal for? And do you really want to fear eating even lettuce—or worse, living only on it—for the rest of your life?

Historically, dieting is about refraining, by limiting portions, forbidding specific types of foods, and reducing or changing the times of eating. Most of my obese clients who are victims of extreme dieting never get to
enjoy their food. They eat bland foods and repeat a lot of the same boring meals; often these are (in the case of so-called diet foods) devoid of the nutrients that boost the feel-good hormones in your body that keep you satisfied and vitalized. Not only do they end up hungry, but they’re also bored and depressed. Dieting can be such an isolating experience.

Life just isn’t as much fun without delicious food. Eating that way is
restrictive, it is dull, and it certainly isn’t effective, because your natural food-sensing system gets all messed up. So another thing the Fast Metabolism Diet is going to do is to encourage you to use all of your senses in a positive way, to help stimulate your metabolism again and be social and create a community around your new way of eating.
Pleasure is powerful and stimulates the secretion of
endorphins, reduces stress hormones, increases the metabolism—and it helps fat burn!

To me, the idea of subsisting on poached chicken breasts and steamed vegetables, and
getting fatter anyway,
sounds like torture. If I’m going to go down in a gut-busting blaze of glory, it’s going to be with a cheesecake in one hand and ice cream in the other! And you can have cheesecake and ice cream—
if
you stoke your metabolism, getting it burning fast and hot.

When you don’t
eat enough, your body makes conserving your fat stores a special priority, and it creates more fat from whatever you feed it by secreting special, emergency-only starvation
hormones that block fat burning (that pesky
RT3). When you eat a lot of nutrient-dense food in the right way, your body relaxes, recognizes the emergency has passed, and starts burning that fat for fuel again—even the cheesecake.

So you have two choices. One, you could just never stop dieting. Eat 1,200 measly calories a day, and cancel your barbecue plans
for the rest of your life!
Because if you ever go off that diet, all hell will break loose. Bam, you’re fat again. Just like that. I’ve seen it over and over. Most of my obese clients have lost large amounts of weight in the past, often many times. Or, two, you can repair your metabolism and live the fast metabolism lifestyle.

In other words, starving (dieting) is bad and e
ating is good.
You remember eating, right? Eating healthy food without guilt? Ring any bells? It’s the most important thing I want you to remember. Now say it with me:
Eating is good.

Eating. Is. Good.

If you’re a dieter who has been starving yourself for years, you may still be reeling from the notion that eating is good … but I’ve got another doozy for you.

Calories are a lie.

Here’s the response I usually get to that one: “How can you be a nutritionist and not believe in calories?”

Actually, I’ve probably been in business for as long as I have precisely because
I
don’t
believe in this old weight-loss equation. When my clients hear that I don’t believe in calories, at first they react with disbelief, but soon I begin to win them over. When they realize that calories aren’t actually to blame for their problems, that they don’t have to count them anymore (since they aren’t real), it’s like they’ve been let out of jail. What
chronic dieter wouldn’t love to live in a world where calories didn’t exist? You
do
live in that world. You might think I’m crazy, and you might even get mad at me for saying it (you wouldn’t be the first one), but it’s absolutely true. I’ll believe that Santa and the Easter Bunny regularly go jogging together in the off season before I’ll believe that a chicken breast or a brownie or a tuna salad sandwich has, say, 200 calories. That’s like saying that a bodybuilder and my 92-year-old grandma are going to expend the same amount of energy lifting a 40-pound dumbbell.