The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body's Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast (6 page)

The evidence for biological addiction is overwhelming. You may be saying, “No, not me… I can control my eating. I can handle having some sugar or cookies. It really isn’t affecting my life that much.”

This is called denial. Food addiction affects more than just a few of the massively obese. It affects nearly all those who are overweight or have struggled to control their eating behavior, cravings, and appetite. The diagnostic criteria for substance abuse in the DSM-V (the psychiatry handbook) match exactly the behavioral characteristics of food addiction, including:

1. Tolerance, the need for increasing amounts of the substance to feel anything (needing more and more to feel good).
   
2. Withdrawal symptoms from not having the substance.
   
3. Ingesting larger amounts or over a longer period than intended (bingeing).
   
4. Persistent desire and unsuccessful attempts to cut down (guilt and shame).
   
5. Spending a great deal of time to obtain the substance, use the substance, and recover from its effects.
   
6. Reducing or abandoning significant social, work, or recreational activities.
   
7. Continuing to use despite awareness of persistent physical or psychological problems that result.
   

Is there a way out of food addiction? A way to free yourself from the control that processed food and sugar have over your behavior and well-being?

Yes. If we can agree that there is biological addiction, then the only solution is to detox to break the cycle. Try asking a cocaine or heroin addict to “cut down.” Forget it. I wish it weren’t so, but I am simply the messenger for the science of food addiction. This is why I decided to write this book: to give people powerful tools to painlessly detox from sugar and processed food and reset, reboot, and restore their body to health.

It’s time to take back control. No more blaming yourself. No more emotional wrestling or steeling yourself (fruitlessly) with willpower. You need to use science, not willpower. With this program, you’re going to discover the scientifically proven tools for detoxing your body and mind and free yourself—once and for all—from the grip of food addiction.

The key to detoxing is to not just stop all the addictive foods and substances all at once (which you do need to do), but to immediately
replace them with specific hormone-balancing, brain-healing foods and lifestyle habits. This program detoxes more than just your body: We’re going to give you a chance to detox (and reboot) your entire life. We’re going to address all the root causes of weight gain, diabetes, and chronic disease, starting with the most powerful tool of all: your mind.

The biggest challenge you’re facing here is not your waistline or your weight. It’s not your belly. It’s your brain. Changing the way you think about food so you get your mind working with your body, not against it, is critical to weight loss and healing.

If you want to lose pounds, you need to first lose the ideas that keep you stuck in an endless cycle of yo-yo dieting. You need to let go of the beliefs and perspectives that sabotage your goal of permanent weight loss and vibrant health. Thinking the way you’ve always thought and doing things you’ve always done will only lead to more of the same. You need to be disruptive!

The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet
is meant to be disruptive. Very disruptive. It will go against a lot of what you’ve been told. That’s because the vast majority of conventional nutritionists and doctors have it mostly wrong when it comes to weight loss. Let’s face it: If their advice were good and doable, we would all be thin and healthy by now. But as a general rule, it’s not. And the mainstream media messages often confuse things even more. So before you get started on this detox, I want to blow up some of the common myths that keep us fat and sick.

Take a class of sixth graders. Show them a picture of 1,000 calories of broccoli and 1,000 calories of soda. Ask them if they have the same effect on our bodies. Their unanimous response will be “NO!” We all
intuitively know that equal caloric amounts of soda and broccoli can’t be the same nutritionally. But as Mark Twain said, “The problem with common sense is that it is not too common.”

I guess that is why the medical profession, nutritionists, our government, the food industry, and the media are all still actively promoting the outdated, scientifically disproven idea that all calories are created equal. Yes, that well-worn notion—that as long as you burn more calories than you consume, you will lose weight—is simply dead wrong.

Newton’s first law of thermodynamics states that the energy of an isolated system is constant. In other words, in a laboratory, or “isolated system,” 1,000 calories of broccoli and 1,000 calories of soda are, in fact, the same. I’m not saying Newton was wrong about that. It’s true that when burned in a laboratory setting, 1,000 calories of broccoli and 1,000 calories of soda would indeed release the same amount of energy.

But sorry, Mr. Newton; your law of thermodynamics doesn’t apply in living, breathing, digesting systems. When you eat food, the “isolated system” part of the equation goes out the window. The food interacts with your biology, a complex adaptive system that instantly transforms every bite.

To illustrate how this works, let’s follow 750 calories of soda and 750 calories of broccoli once they enter your body. First, soda: 750 calories is the amount in a Double Gulp from 7-Eleven, which is 100 percent sugar and contains 186 grams, or 46 teaspoons, of sugar. Many people actually do consume this amount of soda. They are considered the “heavy users.”

Your gut quickly absorbs the fiber-free sugars in the soda, fructose, and glucose. The glucose spikes your blood sugar, starting a domino effect of high insulin and a cascade of hormonal responses that kicks bad biochemistry into gear. The high insulin increases storage of belly fat, increases inflammation, raises triglycerides and lowers HDL, raises blood pressure, lowers testosterone in men, and contributes to infertility in women.

Your appetite is increased because of insulin’s effect on your brain
chemistry. The insulin blocks your appetite-control hormone leptin. You become more leptin resistant, so the brain never gets the “I’m full” signal. Instead, it thinks you are starving. Your pleasure-based reward center is triggered, driving you to consume more sugar and fueling your addiction.

The fructose makes things worse. It goes right to your liver, where it starts manufacturing fat, which triggers more insulin resistance and causes chronically elevated blood insulin levels, driving your body to store everything you eat as dangerous belly fat. You also get a fatty liver, which generates more inflammation. Chronic inflammation causes more weight gain and diabesity. Anything that causes inflammation will worsen insulin resistance. Another problem with fructose is that it doesn’t send informational feedback to the brain, signaling that a load of calories just hit the body. Nor does it reduce ghrelin, the appetite hormone that is usually reduced when you eat real food.

Now you can see just how easily 750 calories of soda can create biochemical chaos. In addition, the soda contains no fiber, vitamins, minerals, or phytonutrients to help you process the calories you are consuming. These are “empty” calories devoid of any nutritional value. But they are “full” of trouble. Your body doesn’t register soda as food, so you eat more all day long. Plus, your taste buds get hijacked, so anything that is not super-sweet doesn’t taste very good to you.

Think I’m exaggerating? Cut out all sugar for a week, then have a cup of blueberries. Super-sweet. But eat those same blueberries after bingeing on soda and they will taste bland and boring.

Now let’s look at the 750 calories of broccoli. As with the soda, these calories are made up primarily (although not entirely) of carbohydrates—but let’s clarify just what that means, because the varying characteristics of carbs will factor significantly into the contrast I’m about to illustrate.

Carbohydrates are plant-based compounds comprised of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. They come in many varieties, but they are all technically sugars or starches, which convert to sugar in the body. The important difference is in how they affect your blood sugar. High-fiber,
low-sugar carbohydrates such as broccoli are slowly digested and don’t lead to blood sugar and insulin spikes, while table sugar and bread are quickly digested carbs that spike your blood sugar. Therein lies the difference. Slow carbs like broccoli heal rather than harm.

Those 750 calories of broccoli make up 21 cups and contain 67 grams of fiber (the average American consumes 10 to 15 grams of fiber a day). Broccoli is 23 percent protein, 9 percent fat, and 68 percent carbohydrate, or 510 calories from carbs. The “sugar” in 21 cups of broccoli is the equivalent of only 1.5 teaspoons; the rest of the carbohydrates are the low-glycemic type found in all nonstarchy vegetables, which are very slowly absorbed.

Still, are the 750 calories in broccoli really the same as the 750 calories in soda? Kindergarten class response: “No way!” So why do we all think that’s true, and why has every major governmental and independent organization bought into this nonsense?

Let’s take a closer look at just how different these two sets of calories really are.

First, you wouldn’t be able to eat twenty-one cups of broccoli, because it wouldn’t fit in your stomach. But assuming you could, what would happen? They contain so much fiber that very few of the calories would actually get absorbed. Those that did would get absorbed very slowly. There’d be no blood sugar or insulin spike, no fatty liver, no hormonal chaos. Your stomach would distend (which it doesn’t with soda; bloat from carbonation doesn’t count!), sending signals to your brain that you were full. There would be no triggering of the addiction reward center in the brain. You’d also get many extra benefits that optimize metabolism, lower cholesterol, reduce inflammation, and boost detoxification. The phytonutrients in broccoli (glucosinolates) boost your liver’s ability to detoxify environmental chemicals, and the flavonoid kaempferol is a powerful anti-inflammatory. Broccoli also contains high levels of vitamin C and folate, which protect against cancer and heart disease. The glucosinolates and sulphorophanes in broccoli
change the expression of your genes to help balance your sex hormones, reducing breast and other cancers.

What I’m trying to illustrate here (and this is probably the single most important idea in this book) is that
all calories are NOT created equal.
The same number of calories from different types of food can have very different biological effects.

Some calories are addictive, others healing, some fattening, some metabolism-boosting. That’s because, as you’ll read in “Myth #2” below, food doesn’t just contain calories, it contains information. Every bite of food you eat broadcasts a set of coded instructions to your body—instructions that can create either health or disease.

So what will it be, a Double Gulp or a big bunch of broccoli?

It’s easy to think your biology is a lottery. You got that fat gene, that diabetes gene. Not much you can do about it. Your parents are overweight, your grandparents were overweight, and diabetes runs in your family. Might as well throw in the towel.

The good news is that we have decoded the human genome. Scientists have scoured the genome in the hope of finding the magic key to obesity and diabetes. The bad news is that they didn’t find anything terribly helpful to the overweight among us.

There are thirty-two genes associated with obesity in the general
population. Unfortunately, they account for only 9 percent of obesity cases. Even if you had all thirty-two obesity genes, you would put on only about twenty-two pounds of weight. Our genes only change 2 percent every 20,000 years. Since obesity (not just being overweight) has risen from 9 percent to 36 percent since 1960 and is projected to go to 50 percent by 2050 if current trends continue, something other than genetics has to be to blame.

In truth, it’s probably lots of things. Over the last 10,000 years, our food supply has changed dramatically, with sugar consumption going from twenty teaspoons a year to twenty-two teaspoons a day. Toxins (which we now know cause obesity and are thus called
obesogens
) have flooded the environment. Our gut flora became toxic because of our high-sugar, high-fat, and low-fiber diet, and this has triggered a huge rise in “micro-obesity”—weight gain due to inflammatory gut bacteria. Sleep debt (Americans sleep two hours less a night than they did a hundred years ago) and obesity-causing viruses have also been implicated. And then there is peer pressure: We imitate the behavior of people in our social network. Research shows we are more likely to be overweight if our friends are overweight than if our parents are overweight. The social threads that connect us may be more important than the genetic ones. There are a hundred reasons, but the least of them are genetics.

Yes, we are programmed to love sugar and fat. We are programmed to store belly fat in response to sugar so that we can survive the winter when food is scarce. Genes do play a role, but they are a minor contributor to the massive obesity and diabetes pandemic we are facing globally. China is a perfect example of the influence of the Western diet in the global marketplace. When I traveled throughout China thirty years ago, I saw one overweight woman, and she was riding a bicycle. Type 2 diabetes was almost unknown. Now China has the most diabetics in the world, and one in five Chinese over sixty has type 2 diabetes. The Pima Indians had no obesity, diabetes, or chronic disease a hundred
years ago; now they are the second most obese group in the world (after the Samoans). Eighty percent have type 2 diabetes by the time they are thirty years old.

Perhaps the most important piece of news when it comes to genes and weight is this:
You can put your genes on a diet and program them for weight loss and health.
Yes, you heard that right. You can’t swap out the genes you have inherited, but you can literally
reprogram
your genes to help you get slim and healthy.

How? That’s easy. Through food.

As I mentioned before (and I will mention it again, because I consider this perhaps the single biggest medical discovery of this century), food contains not just calories or energy to fuel our cells;
food contains information.
It is the control mechanism that regulates almost every chemical reaction in our bodies by communicating instructions to our genes, telling them whether to gain or lose weight, and to turn on the disease-creating or health-promoting genes. This is the groundbreaking science of
nutrigenomics
.

With every bite of food you take, you are sending direct messages to your genes, which control the production of all proteins in your body. And the proteins (hormones, neurotransmitters, and all sorts of chemical messengers) are the very things that control your metabolism, appetite, and health.

When you think about it that way, suddenly choosing the right foods seems like a no-brainer! It all comes down to quality.
Whole, real, and fresh:
Those are the three key words you need to know when it comes to choosing foods to program your genes for weight loss and health. Everything else should be considered “not food.”

Think of yourself as a
qualitarian.
Your diet for the upcoming ten days (and hopefully forevermore) will be packed with real, high-quality, whole, fresh foods to put your genes on a diet and make the pounds disappear.