The Doctor's Diet: Dr. Travis Stork's STAT Program to Help You Lose Weight & Restore Your Health (44 page)

Similar reactions occur throughout the body when weight goes down. Here are some other ways your body benefits from following The Doctor’s Diet:

When you start shedding pounds, your joints will thank you because you’ll be protecting yourself from arthritis.

Having excess fat not only raises your risk of developing arthritis, it can make it worse if you already have it. Among normal-weight people, 20 percent have arthritis, but that number shoots up to 33 percent for people who are obese.

People with osteoarthritis, which is the most common kind of arthritis, experience pain when cartilage in joints breaks down. Cartilage damage occurs for a few reasons, some of which (age and heredity) you can’t control. But it’s also caused by the amount of stress placed on joints. The more weight you’re carrying around, the more strain on your joints, and the more likely it is for cartilage to wear down.

The knees and hips are most affected because they bear so much weight when you move around. The knees, for example, support four pounds of weight and pressure for every pound of body weight you carry. So if you’re 50 pounds overweight, that’s an extra 200 pounds of force your knees must support with every step you take.

But even joints that don’t support large amounts of weight are affected by body fat. That’s because it raises inflammation. As we discussed earlier, being overweight or obese can raise systemic inflammation, which can cause damage throughout the body. The joints are especially susceptible to inflammation, which contributes further to the risk of arthritis.

When you lose weight and cool down systemic inflammation, you protect yourself from arthritis in the hands, wrists, and other non-weight-bearing joints as well as the knees and hips. Having less fat not only takes physical pressure off your joints, but it lowers the joint-destroying inflammation going on within your entire body.

Rheumatoid arthritis, which is an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks its own joint tissue, may also be affected by weight. Fat cells produce chemicals called cytokines that inflame joints and may worsen rheumatoid arthritis; having less body fat and less inflammation means fewer joint-damaging cytokines and other troublesome chemicals floating around in the blood. Some studies have found that obesity raises the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis by as much as 25 percent.

Finally, there’s gout, which is a kind of painful inflammatory arthritis caused by a buildup of uric acid crystals in the joints—most often in the joint of the big toe. As the number of overweight people and obesity rates have gone up, so has the incidence of gout. People who are obese are 10 times more likely to get gout than those who are normal weight.

Uric acid forms when your body digests protein and some other kinds of food. It’s your kidneys’ job to dispose of uric acid in the urine, but kidneys don’t always work as well as they should in people who are overweight or obese. If uric acid doesn’t get dumped into urine by the kidneys, it can accumulate elsewhere in the body, causing gout.

As with other types of arthritis, gout responds well to weight loss. Losing even a small percentage of your body weight lowers uric acid levels and helps the kidneys function better.

Not surprisingly, people who lose weight report having better sex lives. There are a few reasons for this. For one thing, diabetes and uncontrolled blood sugar can reduce circulation to the genitals, leading to erectile dysfunction and problems with arousal and orgasm. Vaginal lubrication may be lower in women with excess weight. And for both men and women, weight can negatively impact self-image and feelings of sexiness. Weight loss helps address all of these issues.

Weight plays a part in fertility, too. Studies suggest that excess weight contributes to about one-quarter of all cases of female infertility. (The jury is still out on whether weight impacts a man’s sperm count and sperm health, although if I had to bet on it, I’d say it does.) Researchers don’t know exactly how weight lowers fertility, but when you consider the exquisite interplay of hormones required to produce a pregnancy, it seems likely that hormone imbalances triggered by excess fat cells could very well play a part. Extra weight can interfere with successful ovulation, and inflammation may add to the problem as well.

Once they’re pregnant, obese women are also more likely to experience pregnancy complications such as miscarriage, gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, and problems with delivery.

Losing extra weight before you try to get pregnant not only boosts your chances of conceiving, but it raises the likelihood of having a problem-free pregnancy and a healthy, normal-weight baby.

Research is linking excess weight with memory loss, Alzheimer’s disease, and other kinds of dementia. In fact, studies basically show that the more you weigh, the less-well your memory works. Being overweight raises the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 42 percent. Losing weight can help reduce that risk.

Scientists don’t know for sure how weight and memory are connected, but here’s what they do know. Having diabetes, high blood sugar, or high insulin can put the blood vessels in the brain at risk. Damaged blood vessels do a poor job of bringing oxygen to cells that need it. Healthy brain cells contribute to good memory, and without enough oxygen, brain cells suffer.

Like the rest of your body, your brain likes to have a steady supply of nicely oxygenated blood circulating through it at a healthy rate. You can help foster good circulation by—you guessed it—eating right, losing weight, and exercising.

Systemic inflammation also can harm the brain. As you know, inflammation levels can go up in overweight and obese people because fat cells produce pro-inflammatory chemicals.

Once you start dropping pounds and boosting your health with The Doctor’s Diet, you’ll begin to discover a new you. An improved you. A stronger you. A sexier you. We only have one chance to ride the merry-go-round of life—why not make ourselves the best we can be so we can enjoy the ride?

Next on our list of amazing weight-loss payoffs is a change in blood sugar that could potentially save your life. You’ll definitely want to read about that!

You’re following The Doctor’s Diet because you want results, right? And you probably love the idea of
fast
results. Hey, who wouldn’t? Well, I can’t promise you that you’ll lose all your excess weight instantly with my eating plan and Food Prescriptions, but I can tell you that there’s one measure of optimal health that you can literally change in minutes.

I’m not kidding. In just 15 to 30 minutes after starting The Doctor’s Diet—the time it takes for your first meal to start digesting—your blood sugar can begin to improve. As you stick with my eating plan and start to lose excess weight, your blood sugar levels can get better and better. And as blood sugar levels come down on a regular, long-term basis, so too do the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, and other blood sugar–related diseases.

When I talk about the amazing payoffs of following my eating plan, I talk about blood sugar control for two reasons. The first is that it’s one of the most serious diet-related emergencies we face.

If you want to stay out of the emergency room—if you want to radically change your chances of dying of a diet-related chronic disease—getting blood sugar in control is one of the best places to begin.

But the second is way more exciting than the first one: the blood sugar emergency is one of the most potentially reversible problems out there. Yes, it literally is possible to start addressing your high blood sugar problems in as little as 15 minutes.

Blood sugar is one of our biggest weight-related health challenges. But, amazingly, it is also one of our most solvable. Controlling blood sugar is a health payoff that truly is within reach.

When I talk to people about diabetes, I’m amazed sometimes at how little they know about how amazingly destructive this disease can be. Maybe that’s because it’s so associated with the phrase “blood sugar,” and we don’t automatically comprehend that something as seemingly benign
as sugar can have such deadly power. But if you were to spend a few hours in a hospital with some patients who have experienced the disastrous complications of diabetes, you would see how catastrophic a disease it can be.

I don’t want to scare you, and I don’t like the idea of using scare tactics to get you to pay attention to your blood sugar. But when blood sugar levels are too high for too long and diabetes progresses, the complications can be very debilitating.

One major complication is blindness. Uncontrolled blood sugar can be so damaging to the eyes that diabetes is the leading cause of blindness among adults in the United States.

Another complication is amputation of limbs. We think of limb amputation as being something that happens to soldiers on battlefields—but diabetes causes far more limb amputations than wars. I can’t tell you how sad it is to see someone you love lose a limb because of a diabetes-related infection or complication.

And of course, there’s kidney failure and heart disease. If you have diabetes, you’re very likely to get some kind of heart disease—in fact, 65 percent of people with diabetes actually die from heart disease or stroke. Believe me, I see this in the emergency room—when a heart attack victim is wheeled into the ER, there’s a pretty good chance that person has—or had, in the case of those who don’t make it—diabetes.

Enough of the doom and gloom—I don’t want to bum you out here. I want to celebrate the fact that by following The Doctor’s Diet, you’re taking steps away from the ER. Remember what I told you in the beginning of the chapter: within as little as 15 minutes of starting my eating plan, you’re on your way to better blood sugar control. Nice!

Listen, I know that blood sugar may not be high on your list of favorite things to think about. But it really is important to understand how blood sugar works. Once you understand it, you can take steps to keep it under control, and that’s important, because the number of people with out-of-control blood sugar in the United States is growing at a staggering rate.

Stick with me for this quick explanation of blood sugar. Just as our cars need fuel to keep moving, so do our bodies. For us, food is fuel—it delivers the energy we need to stay alive, and it gives our cells, tissues, and organs the power they need to perform the jobs they’re designed to do. Without the energy we get from food, our hearts can’t beat, our kidneys can’t filter impurities from our blood, our immune system can’t protect us from disease—you get the idea.

Cells and organs can’t use food in the form in which we eat it. Our bodies need to process our food into a type of fuel that can enter our cells and energize them. This fuel is called blood glucose, or blood sugar. When you eat food, your body immediately begins to digest it, or pull it apart into components that can be used by your body. Carbohydrates (sugars and starches) in food are broken down into glucose, which is a very simple kind of sugar that can enter your bloodstream and travel to where it is needed to provide energy.

Glucose needs help getting into your cells—it can’t gain entry without the help of insulin, a hormone produced by your pancreas. Think of insulin as a bouncer at a hot nightclub: glucose can’t get into cells unless insulin, the cellular bouncer, pulls back the cell’s velvet rope and allows the glucose to join the party.