The Fast Metabolism Diet (6 page)

When you eat real food, it is full of nutrients and fiber. Everything in it can be used for some form of good by the body. Chemicals don’t have to be filtered out, preservatives don’t block nutrient absorption, and additives don’t create some bizarre science experiment inside of your body.

I am a nutritionist. All day long I get questions, phone calls, texts, and e-mails asking me if it’s okay to eat this or that. Honestly, I say yes to almost anything that is real food. But as your nutritionist you will never hear me encourage you to eat obesogens.

Let’s keep it real and fix your metabolism.

A
lot of my training has been in the holistic health world, and many of my colleagues like to talk about the mind-
body-spirit connection. They say that without incorporating mind, body, and spirit, you can’t be whole. That’s all well and good, I suppose, and I agree with it in theory, but I’m also not exactly sure what it means. How do you do it?

As an aggie (my agricultural training rears its head again), I’ve formulated my own version of this concept. Instead of mind-body-spirit, I like brain-flesh-hormones. It’s not as pretty. It’s definitely geekier. But to me, it makes more sense.

First, the brain, or mind, is essential for wellness. How do you think about food? How do you decide to create a healthy relationship with food? What choices do you make, consciously, in your life about your health? How do you manage stress? As we discussed in the last chapter, you have to have your head screwed on straight if you are going to change your life, your relationship to food, and your health paradigm.

Flesh is next. You need a strong structure to thrive—dense bones, strong muscles, clean blood, and supple skin. You have to act to preserve and maximize your physical body if you want to feel healthy and strong, as well as burn, build, or store energy according to your actual physical needs—the needs of the flesh.

Finally, hormones are like spirit—you can’t see them, but they have a dramatic effect on everything you do, everything you feel, everything you
are. The secretion of hormones is what causes everything in your body to be set into motion. They cause your heart to beat and dictate the storage and release of energy in the body. And the proper balance of hormones plays a huge roll in having a fast metabolism.

Another unique thing about the hormones is the way they react to your environment or outside world. For example, if you meet a handsome man or a beautiful woman, your heart may go pitterpat, or if you come across a scary man or an irate woman, your heart may race and feel as if it is in your throat. Those are all hormone interactions that signal a perceived idea to the brain and cause a physiological, or body, reaction. We want to control some of the hormone interactions that are affecting your weight and health, so that your body is working at its optimal.

In order to have wellness, you need all three—brain, flesh, and hormones—to be working in perfect harmony.

In the last chapter, we talked about changing your mindset, and rethinking your approach to food and dieting. Now let’s look at the other parts—the flesh and the hormones. You know what you think, but you don’t necessarily know how your liver works, what your thyroid is doing, or whether your hormones are balanced. But you should.

Your body is like a house—a temple, as they say—and you should know what’s going on inside this most precious structure, especially in terms of how it relates to what you can actually do to improve your health and achieve a fast metabolism. Let’s begin with the five major players.

It’s time to get a little more specific about what’s really going on inside of your body when you have a slow metabolism. Don’t worry; I’m not going to attempt to give you an anatomy class. There are huge textbooks to cover that subject. However, throughout this book I will say things like, “This is
liver food” or “We are doing this to support the adrenals” or “Think of all the T3 sites getting excited as you eat this.” And I want you to know what I’m talking about. I’m going to ask you to hang in there while I reveal a little bit of my science-nerd side.

I want you to understand what your body is doing so together we can fix what’s not working for you—and for it. Stay with me all the way, be an active participant in this process, and when you’re done with this chapter and this book, you’re going to understand your body a lot better. You’ll also have all the tools you need to create the healthy, sleek, optimally functioning body that nature intended for you.

Your liver is vital and essential to keeping you and all your bodily systems up and running. Over 600 known metabolic functions happen via the liver, and virtually every nutrient, every hormone, every chemical must be bio-transformed, or made active, by the liver. It’s your workhorse, and without it, you’d buy the farm.

Your liver creates bile, a nasty-sounding but powerful solution that breaks down fats (and the nitrites and nitrates in your deli meats and bacon). Hormones get secreted from glands all over your body, but it is your liver that breaks down the hormones and makes them biologically active so they can go to work for you. It flips the light switch once you’ve put in the bulb.

Your liver influences your electrolyte balance, swelling and inflammation, dehydration, bloating, and water weight. It also acts like a filter for the blood that travels through the digestive tract. It converts B vitamins into coenzymes, and metabolizes nutrients such as proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.

Your liver also manufactures
carnitine, which takes fat and escorts it to the mitochondria—your body’s little power centers or fat converters. The amount of carnitine in your system dictates how much fat can be delivered and incinerated.
This simple relationship between the liver and the mitochondria can influence up to 90 percent of your fat
burn, dictating your metabolic rate.
The faster and more efficiently you produce carnitine in your liver, the faster and more efficient your metabolism is.

The food you eat must feed your liver rather than tax it. If you don’t feed your liver appropriately and frequently to stimulate it to its most efficient functioning, everything else will get disrupted. Because the liver is so closely linked with metabolism, it is one of the most crucial organs we’ll be nurturing with the Fast Metabolism Diet.

Your adrenals are small glands that lie on top of your kidneys in your lower back, and they secrete hormones that regulate your body’s response to
stress of all types: physical, emotional, environmental, and mental. Your adrenals are responsible for the hormones that allow your body to adapt either functionally or dysfunctionally to changing situations. These hormones determine how you access fuel in your body and what you do with the fuel or food you consume. Do you store it as fat? Or do you burn it as energy?

Let’s say you have to pull an all-nighter, getting changes on your book back to an editor. Do you continue to feed yourself every three hours, fueling your body, your hormones, and your brain, or do you stop eating at 6
P.M.
? That’s what you would normally do, even though you aren’t sleeping. Answer: When you are awake and working, you have to keep eating. Otherwise, you leave your body without fuel, and then it thinks you are starving and before you know it, your metabolism is slowing down.

Some of the metabolism-specific hormones the adrenals release include
cortisol, adrenaline,
aldosterone, and
epinephrine. These are released in response to stress and/or
pleasure. The stressors could be as major as a car accident or as minor as missing a meal. The adrenals respond to the acute stress of a disaster just as they respond to the chronic stress of a bad relationship, an unpleasant work environment, or a taxing family situation.

The secretion of these stress hormones regulates the release of
glucose or sugar from the muscle and liver cells, to either stimulate or slow down your body’s metabolic rate. That means this process is nutrient-dependent, or dependent on the food you do or don’t eat. When you experience stress, the surge of hormones you experience will be influenced by what you’ve just been eating. If you nourish your body during times of stress with the right foods, you will not store fat as much as you burn it.

To put it more simply, stress pulls nutrients from the body from places where you can’t afford to lose them (like muscle). If you are eating a healthy, nutrient-rich diet, your body won’t have to resort to this. You’ll be able to handle the stress. If, however, you aren’t eating enough, or enough of the right food, your metabolism will slow down, due to a complex chain of chemical reactions. If you are eating the right food at the right time, you will feed your adrenals so they can survive the stress without resorting to a slowed metabolism.

Adrenal exhaustion can occur when a body has been under significant stress for a long period of time. This occurs because the body has been chronically secreting stress hormones that are meant to be preserved for quick crisis situations. You know that surging feeling you get when you are startled or scared? That’s a hormone surge. I like to think of those fight-and-flight hormones as sacred. They should be saved for a true emergency, but many of us live and survive on the energy from these hormones, day in and day out. That is not the way our bodies are meant to work! When stress hormones constantly surge, the body is constantly in a state of crisis. One of the things that occurs in this situation is that the hormones slow the burning of fuel because the body sees no end to the exhausting demand. Adrenal exhaustion is a problem I’m seeing more and more often in my clinic. Exacerbating this situation is decreasing food quality and increasing environmental chemicals. That’s why it’s so important to feed yourself clean (i.e., organic whole) food as much as you can. Your adrenals will thank you.

Preserve your adrenals! Soothe them with this diet and stress management.