The Doctor's Diet: Dr. Travis Stork's STAT Program to Help You Lose Weight & Restore Your Health (43 page)

This menu is designed in a traditional breakfast-lunch-dinner style, with soups and salads at lunch and main-dish entrées at dinner. But if you’d like to switch it up, go right ahead—lunch and dinner on the RESTORE Plan use the same Meal Plan Equations.

G:
Whole-Grain Flex-Time Food (2 daily)

F:
Healthy Fat Flex-Time Food (2 daily)

V:
High-Density Vegetable Flex-Time Food (1 daily)

W
eight loss is a major goal of The Doctor’s Diet, because excess weight is a major health problem that can deal you a one-way ticket for a trip to the emergency room. But now that you’ve been following my eating plan for a few weeks, not only should you be losing weight, but you are likely to be experiencing some of the other great health benefits that can come your way when you eat right, exercise, and shed pounds.

That’s right, everyone—it’s payoff time!

You’ve been putting in the effort to follow my super-healthy eating plan. Now it’s time for me to tell you about all of the many health payoffs that have already started in your body or that await you as you continue to follow The Doctor’s Diet.

I want you to savor the payoffs of excellent health, because they really can change your life forever.

In this part of the book, I explain
how
all the smart choices you are making with The Doctor’s Diet all work together to help you feel better, stronger, sexier, and healthier. I also give you a bunch of tips on ways to multiply the great benefits that your healthier diet is delivering.

I’m proud of you for getting this far. Even if you haven’t started following The Doctor’s Diet yet, I’m jazzed that you’re reading about it—and maybe this section of the book will motivate you to get started! Either way, you’ve taken big steps toward lowering your weight and boosting your health.

Following The Doctor’s Diet will deliver a bounty of health benefits to just about every part of your body. It really is amazing how your cells, tissues, and organs react to healthy living and weight loss—these are truly some of the best things you can do for yourself.

But there’s more. Much more! Once the fantastic health benefits of following The Doctor’s Diet begin to kick in, you’re likely to start feeling younger, stronger, and sexier than you have in years. One of the best payoffs of weight loss is that you feel just plain better in so many different ways.

When your body is weighed down by extra pounds, it suffers in so many ways. But when you shed that excess fat and weight, your body responds quickly and dramatically. Risk factors fall, health problems become less serious, stressed organs are revitalized, and your body starts functioning better and better.

When you start losing weight, you’ll begin to feel better. You’ll notice that your clothes fit better, you’ll feel less flab around your middle, and you’ll smile more when you catch a glance of yourself in the mirror. You’ll have more energy to play with your kids or grandkids, and you’ll feel less worn out and beat down at the end of the day.

And once people start noticing how much better you look? Well, I don’t have to tell you how great that feels.

Just as weight loss makes you feel lighter and freer, your body without all that extra fat seems to relish its ability to perform in the ways in which it was designed to perform.

Let me give you an example. Your lungs’ job is, very simply, to take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide. This happens automatically, and without fanfare, hundreds of times per hour and thousands of times per day. But if you have excess fat, especially around the rib cage, abdomen, neck, and chest, your airways and lungs have less room for air. Fat prevents the diaphragm from descending fully and the lungs from filling to capacity. This means your lungs and the pulmonary muscles around them have to work extra hard just to get you the oxygen you need.

Adding to this extra workload is the fact that every fat cell in your body uses oxygen—remember, fat cells are metabolically active, so part of
the oxygen your lungs pull from every breath goes to your fat cells.

When you lose weight and fat, your lungs have less work to do—not only because there’s more space for your chest to expand, but because you don’t have as many fat cells making demands on your oxygen supplies. As weight goes down, so too do the risks and/or severity of lung conditions and diseases such as shortness of breath, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and obstructive sleep apnea. Without all that extra fat, your lungs have more freedom to do the work they were created to do.