WWhhyy CCaann’’tt II LLoossee WWeeiigghhtt?? · Conquer your weight loss problems forever...

Conquer your weight loss problems forever

WWhhyy CCaann’’tt II

LLoossee

WWeeiigghhtt??

The real reasons diets fail and what to do about it

Insider secrets to successful weight loss

Jackie Bushell www.gooddietgoodhealth.com

Why Can’t I Lose Weight? The real reasons diets fail and what to do about it

© Copyright Jackie Bushell 2

CCoonntteennttss

Introduction 7

Weight loss secret #1: Famine syndrome and the set

point 10

Survival mechanisms and weight loss – a problematic combination .... 10

Famine syndrome – the eat less, burn less trap ...................................... 10

The set point – your body’s defence against weight change ................. 12

Work with your survival mechanisms, not against them ........................ 12

Are you consuming enough calories to lose weight? ............................. 14

Are you getting the calorie advantage? .................................................... 14

Weight loss secret #2: The blood sugar/insulin

connection 15

Our energy storage mechanism – good for Paleolithic Man, bad for 21st Century Man ................................................................................................ 15

Insulin imbalance, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes ..................... 16

Carbohydrates, calories and weight loss diets ........................................ 17

Calories do count – but carbs count more ............................................... 19

Weight loss secret #3: Metabolic rate 20

Why low calorie diets cannot work long term .......................................... 20

Avoiding the depressed metabolic rate trap ............................................ 21

Strategies for burning fat and building muscle ....................................... 24

The HCG Diet - a new old diet .................................................................... 25

Other ways of boosting metabolism ......................................................... 26

Managing plateaus ..................................................................................... 27

Track fat not weight .................................................................................... 28

Weight loss secret #4: Stress 30

The biochemistry of stress ........................................................................ 30

Stress and the connection with weight gain ............................................ 30

The symptoms of adrenal fatigue .............................................................. 31

Cortisol testing ........................................................................................... 32

Tests to do at home for adrenal fatigue .................................................... 33



Weight loss secret #5: Food allergies/sensitivities 34

What are food allergies or sensitivities .................................................... 34

The symptoms ............................................................................................ 35

Masking and allergic addiction.................................................................. 35

Top food sensitivity suspects – the foods we like and eat most............ 36

How food sensitivities can sabotage your diet ........................................ 37

Food cravings ............................................................................................. 37

Diagnosing and eradicating food sensitivities......................................... 38

Weight loss secret #6: Candida/yeast overgrowth 39

What is candida/yeast overgrowth? .......................................................... 39

Is your gut leaky? ....................................................................................... 40

How yeast overgrowth can sabotage your diet........................................ 41

Could yeast overgrowth be your problem? .............................................. 42

Diagnosing and eradicating yeast overgrowth ........................................ 42

Weight loss secret #7: Fluid retention 44

Your ‘fat’ might be fluid .............................................................................. 44

Is toxic build-up your problem? ................................................................ 45

Are your diuretics having the opposite effect?........................................ 45

Histamine release – the allergy/sensitivity connection ........................... 45

How a congested lymphatic system can cause fluid retention .............. 46

Is your fluid retention caused by too much salt or sugar? ..................... 46

The role of protein deficiency in fluid retention ....................................... 46

Micronutrients and fluid balance ............................................................... 47

Are your medicines causing you to retain fluid? ..................................... 47

Weight loss secret #8: Malnutrition 49

How vitamin, mineral and enzyme deficiencies sabotage your diet ...... 49

Low stomach acid ....................................................................................... 53

How a low fat diet could be preventing your weight loss ....................... 53

Fats – the good and the bad for health and weight loss ......................... 55

Trans fats – the real villains ....................................................................... 58

Weight loss secret #9: Toxic overload and

overburdened elimination systems 59

Where toxins come from and how we deal with them ............................. 59

The effect of additives and chemical residues on elimination ............... 60

How safe are synthetic ingredients? ........................................................ 60

Acid/alkali balance – a potential diet saboteur ........................................ 61

Dehydration and its effects ........................................................................ 62

The dangers of constipation ...................................................................... 62



How detoxing can aid your weight loss .................................................... 63

Weight loss secret #10: Genetic inheritance 64

The evolution of Man and his diet ............................................................. 64

Blood type – mirror to Man’s evolutionary diet........................................ 65

Lectins – your hidden danger foods ......................................................... 66

Metabolic typing – find the diet that best suits your metabolism .......... 66

Weight loss secret #11: Exercise 68

The real reason why exercise is important .............................................. 68

Which type of exercise is best? ................................................................ 69

Weight loss secret #12: Hormonal imbalance 72

Could an underactive thyroid be your problem? ..................................... 73

Leptin and adiponectin .............................................................................. 83

Lipoprotein lipase, hormone-sensitive lipase and glycerol .................... 85

Approaching menopause may affect your ability to lose weight ........... 86

Metabolic disrupters ................................................................................... 87

Xenoestrogens ............................................................................................ 88

Weight loss secret #13: Prescription medicines 90

Strategies for minimising the effect of medicines on your weight ......... 90

Weight loss secret #14: ‘Compulsive’ eating and

cravings 91

You’re not to blame .................................................................................... 91

Understand the real causes of your ‘compulsive’ eating ........................ 91

Weight loss secret #15: Diet politics 94

Old beliefs die hard .................................................................................... 94

Conservatism, bureaucracy and vested interests ................................... 94

Get properly informed on the real facts about diets ................................ 96



Conclusion 97

Your personal action plan for weight loss success100

Appendix 1: Thermogenic and stimulant fat burning

supplements 109

Appendix 2: Further information and bibliography 112

Recommended websites .......................................................................... 112

Recommended books .............................................................................. 113

References ................................................................................................ 115

Bibliography .............................................................................................. 121

Appendix 3: About the author 130

Further resources 132

Nutrition/diet/health .................................................................................. 132

Weight loss problems .............................................................................. 132

Special/allergy diets ................................................................................. 132

Low carb/low GI/low GL diets .................................................................. 133

HCG Diet ...................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.133

Version 11, August 2017



The information in this book is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. It is intended to enhance your understanding of the possible factors which may make it difficult to achieve weight loss and to maintain your new weight on a permanent basis. It is recommended that you check with your family physician before embarking on any significant change in diet or exercise. This is particularly important if you have a medical condition of any kind or are taking any prescribed medicines. The author accepts no liability for readers who choose not to obtain their own professional medical advice.

Finding the professional help you need

It is important to keep in mind that up until now, basic medical training has not covered areas such as nutritional deficiencies, food sensitivities and yeast overgrowth, and postgraduate courses recognized by the mainstream medical establishment are only now being established to teach this unjustly neglected area of medicine. Your family physician is therefore unlikely to have the specialized knowledge required to diagnose and treat these problems, and may be reluctant or may simply lack the information or time resources to refer you to an appropriate specialist. Regulatory constraints may also prevent your physician from referring you. This is particularly likely where diagnostic and treatment methods are too new to have gone through the many years of population studies and clinical trials that are required before they are approved for general use within mainstream medicine. The adverse effect of low calorie dieting on metabolism and long term weight control is similarly an issue which is only just starting to gain recognition outside specialized areas of research. You may therefore need to undertake your own research to find a physician able to help you in these areas.

Copyright

This ebook is protected by copyright law. It is illegal to re-sell, auction, share, or give away this ebook. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner. © Copyright 2017 Jackie Bushell



IInnttrroodduuccttiioonn

OK, so you’ve decided to go on a diet. How do you choose which of the many diets to follow? Is the type of diet important, or do you just choose one that best matches the foods you like to eat, the one your friends are doing or the latest ‘miracle diet’ in the diet magazines? Is the type of food allowed important, or does it not matter as long as the overall diet is low calorie? Or maybe you’re already on a diet. Perhaps you’ve succeeded in losing some weight, but then come to an invisible barrier which you don’t seem to be able to get past. It’s the dreaded plateau, or stall. You’re doing everything right according to the diet plan, but nothing is happening. You feel there must be an answer out there somewhere, but where to look? You might even be a seasoned yo-yo dieter who’s tried every diet that’s going over the years but never succeeded in keeping the weight off permanently. The weight always comes back eventually, and more. You despair of ever being able to achieve your dream of a constant, healthy weight and just one size of clothes in your wardrobe. Whichever the position, this book will provide you with answers. If you want to give yourself the best chance of succeeding on your diet – on any diet, in fact – there are some critical factors you need to know about. Unfortunately you are unlikely to find them in diet leaflets, diet magazine articles or even in full-length diet books. Firstly, they involve scientific concepts which take more than a little time to explain and understand. Secondly, these factors are not widely understood even within the medical world. And thirdly, if these factors were common knowledge, many popular diets would be dead in the water, and the vested interests of the billion dollar diet food and slimming club industry would go down with them! The only way you will know about these weight loss ‘secrets’ is if you have read a very large number of diet books and books and articles about the wider aspects of nutrition and how the body works like I have. But that takes a lot of time – time you probably don’t have. It also takes a lot of patience and dedication to sort the wood out from the trees. Trying to decide which theories have real substance and which ideas are simply theories with no consensus or scientific backing is a time-consuming job because not all sources explain these scientific concepts in an easy to understand way, and they don’t all agree with one another, either. This book has done all this work for you. So why did I let myself in for all the work involved in putting this book together? Well, if there’s one thing I hate, it’s seeing people try diets and not succeed. Sometimes it’s because they just don’t bother to understand the diet properly or to follow the instructions. That’s a shame, because the chosen diet then gets an undeserved reputation for ‘not working’. More often, though, people work really hard to do their diet properly, but the weight just refuses to come off. ‘You must be eating more than you



think’, they get told. Now, that makes me really angry. These people deserve to be rewarded for all their hard work. Instead, they are made to feel a cheat and a failure. Lack of confidence and low self-esteem quickly follow. But they haven’t failed. It is the diet that has failed them. I personally know what it’s like to follow the instructions to the letter, and not get the promised results. I wasted many years of my life trying to lose weight and failing. That is, until I got properly informed on the subject. I started to read everything I could find about nutrition and diets and the biochemistry of how they work. Now, let’s get something straight about the information sources I use. I don’t mean the unenlightened, low calorie/low fat diet information parroted out by the mainstream medical profession or the ‘healthy eating’ leaflets that you find in supermarkets and such places. What I mean is books, papers and articles by doctors, nutritionists, dieticians, researchers, exercise physiologists and others who have taken a special interest in learning the truth of how the body handles food and how it interacts with its present-day environment. People who have looked beyond the nutritional dogma of the last fifty years and recognized that weight gain is not a simple matter of overeating which can be remedied by reducing calorie and fat intake. Let’s just go back a little in time here to illustrate our point. Some centuries ago, it was commonly believed that the Earth was the centre of the universe and other bodies orbited around it. Anyone who dared to go against this widely-accepted belief was practically burned at the stake. It took many decades of irrefutable scientific evidence to persuade people to believe that the Earth and other planets orbited around the Sun. That same process is now happening with dieting and nutrition. For decades, mainstream medicine and government health departments in the western world have promoted a belief that eating too many calories, particularly from fatty foods, is the reason, and the only reason, that people get fat. But during this time, the incidence of overweight, obesity and related diseases such as diabetes has skyrocketed. Surely this makes you wonder whether the advice was right? Independent studies would have helped to show the advice for the fallacy that it is. But the world of dieting is inextricably entwined with the food industry, whose motivation is to sell more products, and the pharmaceutical industry, whose motivation is to sell more drugs. In this environment, how could someone protest “but the food we are eating is making us ill”, or “if we got our diet right, we would make ourselves well again and not need drugs”? The food and pharmaceutical industries would suppress that pretty quickly. So why does the mainstream medical profession appear to take no interest in the mounting evidence that nutritional, dietary and environmental causes are at the root of many of the ills that afflict us today, obesity included? Well, the motivations of the medical profession are more complex, but conservatism, a ‘not invented here’ philosophy, and a tradition of not disagreeing with one’s teachers may all play their part. Other factors may include an overworked physician’s understandable reliance on drug company representatives for information on new research, and the provision of supplies of ‘healthy eating’ patient leaflets by impartial-sounding organizations which are in fact



sponsored by drug companies, food manufacturers and the agricultural industry. All this explains why the secrets to weight loss that I am going to share with you are very unlikely to be found in a mainstream physician’s consulting room. So if we cannot look to the mainstream medical profession, government health departments, food suppliers and pharmaceutical companies to change the present situation, who can we look to? The only possible answer is people like you and me, supported by an enlightened breed of physicians, nutritionists, dieticians, exercise physiologists and researchers. Such people have helped to shape a new area of medicine, some calling it nutritional and environmental medicine, others calling it clinical ecology, holistic, naturopathic or even functional medicine. Many of these individuals were and are very eminent experts in their field. Hitherto either ignored or ridiculed by the mainstream medical establishment as ineffectual, misguided or plain dangerous, the evidence that they were right after all is fast becoming incontrovertible. It is now clear that the business of losing weight is a much more complex process than was formerly thought. There are still gaps in the jigsaw, but many important pieces have already been discovered. You are going to learn about many of them in this book. They give us significant insights into the science of dieting and the factors that can sabotage our chances of success. This book brings together evidence from over 160 books and countless websites and scientific papers. The majority of the authors were or are practising physicians and nutritionists. Spurred on by real-life successes with their patients, they are helping to piece together a new understanding about what makes people fat and what prevents them from losing excess weight once they have it. Some of what I am going to tell you may surprise you, and you may wonder why you’ve never heard it before. I simply urge you to keep an open mind as I gradually piece together the jigsaw of nutritional insights which are going to help you. The secrets I will reveal will not only help you lose weight. They will also help you improve your overall health and avoid or control other diet- and lifestyle-related modern diseases, such as diabetes, arthritis, migraine, digestive complaints, allergies, hay fever, eczema, asthma, chronic fatigue, depression, cancer and heart disease. In the chapters that follow, I provide you with the knowledge you need to give yourself the very best chance of achieving success with your weight loss efforts. Some of the information I’m going to share with you gets a bit technical, and much of it may be unfamiliar to you. But I’m assuming you’re reading this because you want to find out the root cause of why you can’t lose weight and to take responsibility for safeguarding your own future health. So I would ask you to persevere. For ease of reference I have grouped the information in this book into fifteen main topics. These are the main reasons why you may be experiencing difficulty losing weight. At the end of this book, you will find a summarised list of all the do’s and don’ts gathered from each chapter which you can use as a checklist to form the basis of your own personal fifteen-step action plan for weight loss success.

So let’s get started by looking at how your body’s survival mechanisms play a vital role in dictating whether or not you lose weight when you diet.



WWeeiigghhtt lloossss sseeccrreett ##11::

FFaammiinnee ssyynnddrroommee aanndd tthhee sseett ppooiinntt

In this chapter: Survival mechanisms and weight loss – a problematic combination Famine syndrome – the eat less, burn less trap The set point – your body’s defence against weight change Work with your survival mechanisms, not against them Are you consuming enough calories to lose weight?

Survival mechanisms and weight loss – a problematic combination

Your body has to have a self-preservation system. If it didn’t, you would die the minute there was a lack of food, or water, or any of the nutrients needed in order to keep you alive and healthy. Similarly, your body must have a way of calling on extra resources when you are faced by a physical threat. Unfortunately, these survival mechanisms can all too often hinder weight loss or even lead to weight gain. In this chapter we learn about famine syndrome and the set point. In the chapters that follow we will talk about other survival mechanisms which can affect weight loss such as our energy storage system, our ‘fight and flight’ stress reactions and the regulation of our metabolic rate.

Famine syndrome – the eat less, burn less trap

Famine syndrome refers to the way in which your body is designed to protect itself when food is scarce. If you reduce calories significantly, as in a traditional low calorie/low fat weight loss diet, your body interprets this as a threat to your survival. You may well lose some weight at first, but pretty soon your body starts to burn fuel more efficiently in an attempt to survive the anticipated famine. The more times it experiences this situation, the better it gets at operating efficiently. If you have been on more than one diet, you have probably seen this principle at work – it gets harder to lose weight with each successive diet, and you can reduce calories to a painfully low level and still not lose weight. We will see more about how this works later. So how do you know whether you are taking in sufficient calories to prevent your body from going into starvation mode? Well, the traditional low calorie/low fat diet of 1000 to 1200 calories a day for a woman (more for a man) definitely puts you at risk of going into starvation mode unless you are a very small and inactive person. This low level of calorie intake makes your ‘calorie deficit’ too large. (‘Calorie deficit’ means the difference between the number of calories you need to maintain your weight and the



number of calories you actually take in. It should only be a few hundred calories per day to avoid starvation mode.) Mary Shomon provides a quick and easy method for calculating how many calories you should be taking in on your diet without making your calorie deficit too large on her website at http://thyroid.about.com/cs/dietweightloss/a/eatingenough.htm:

Current weight, in pounds

Divide by 2.2 to convert to kilos

Multiply by 30 to get total calories per day for maintaining current weight,

or by 25 to get total calories per day for losing weight

Mary is particularly interested in thyroid problems (read more about this later), and explains that people with an underactive thyroid are particularly susceptible to the famine syndrome/set point trap. If you have an underactive thyroid, she suggests you need to subtract a further 200 calories as follows:

Current weight, in pounds

Divide by 2.2 to convert to kilos

Multiply by 30 to get total calories per day for maintaining current weight,

or by 25 to get total calories per day for losing weight

[Subtract 200 from each of the previous totals to take the underactive thyroid into account]

Total calories per day for maintaining current weight

Total calories per day for losing weight

However, it is important to note that calculating calorie requirements in this way only gives us a general idea of what we need. Using a calorie deficit to calculate the weight loss that will result just does not compute. Organising a calorie deficit of so much a day doesn't mean that when these deficits add up to 3,500 calories, which is often quoted as equal to one pound of fat, you'll necessarily actually lose one pound. Unfortunately many sources of diet advice erroneously believe that how much and when you lose can be calculated in this way. They fail to appreciate the involvement of the body's energy and fat storage regulation mechanisms, many of which we discuss in this book. 'Saving' 3,500 calories (or any other specific number) just does not and cannot produce a specific fat loss. Obesity researcher Zoe Harcombe explains in fascinating detail in her book "The Obesity Epidemic" why the 'calorie-is-a-calorie' and the '3,500 calories equals one pound of fat' theories are wrong. Skipping meals, especially breakfast can also encourage your body to go into starvation mode. Studies have shown that people who ate breakfast lost weight more successfully than those who did not have a morning meal, despite both groups consuming the same overall diet.

http://thyroid.about.com/cs/dietweightloss/a/eatingenough.htm



The set point – your body’s defence against weight change

The ‘set point’ refers to your body’s mechanism for keeping itself at a constant weight despite the inevitable day to day variations in activity and food intake. Your body sees the weight you have been at for the past few months as the ‘normal’ weight, and uses all means at its disposal to keep you there. When you decrease calories, levels of hormones (chemical messengers) such as leptin, ghrelin, CCK (cholecystokinin), PYY (peptide YY), gastric inhibitory polypeptide, glucagon-like peptide 1, amylin and pancreatic polypeptide change. These tell your brain to make you feel more hungry and cause your body to hold on even harder to its fat stores, just in case the food is not forthcoming. The significance of these hormones, particularly when you are trying to maintain your weight loss after a diet, is only just now becoming recognized. A 2011 study in the New England Journal of Medicine by Priya Sumithran et al found that levels of these hormones do not revert to their pre-weight loss levels even after one year.

Work with your survival mechanisms, not against them

Let’s just go back for a moment to first principles. Aren’t calories what matter? In order to lose weight, don’t you have to be burning up more calories than you are taking in? Well, yes … So you have to ‘create a calorie deficit’? Well, yes … But if you reduce calories, you’re in danger of making your body go into starvation mode, whereupon you eat even fewer calories but you still don’t lose weight? Well, yes – afraid so! That’s where so many diets have gone wrong in the past. They have failed to recognize this critical point. Reducing calories in an attempt to lose weight works against your body’s most fundamental instincts. Losing weight permanently is certainly not the simple matter of eating less that people thought it was. The drastic calorie restriction of many traditional low calorie and low fat diets is doomed to failure in the long term. The simplistic ‘calorie theory’ (eat so many fewer calories and lose so-and-so amount of weight; eat so many more calories and gain so-and-so amount of weight) is now fast losing credibility as understanding grows of the way our inbuilt survival mechanisms work. Dieting today requires a much ‘smarter’ approach. The most straightforward approach is probably to calculate your calorie needs for maintaining weight, as we showed earlier, and then pitch your dieting calorie allowance at a few hundred calories less. Just enough to create a small calorie deficit, but not drastic enough to trigger starvation mode. Keeping the calorie deficit small may not however be enough on its own. Your body soon adapts to the new circumstances. Some nutritionists and fitness experts recommend a calorie-cycling technique to help prevent this adaptation. For instance, try consuming the minimum calorie requirement for your weight for three days. Then, on the fourth day, increase the calories by an additional 400. (Just remember that these must come from good sources of protein,



carbohydrates and fats – natural, unprocessed and whole foods only). The theory behind this is that any more than three days and your body will start to adapt to the lower level of intake. For many people, the level of carbohydrate in their diet also makes a great difference to whether they can lose weight or not. This relates to another survival mechanism, our energy storage system, which we talk about in detail in the next chapter. So are there any ways of overriding our ‘famine syndrome’ and ‘set point’ survival mechanisms? Well, the possibility of manipulating the hormones concerned has aroused great interest in recent years. For instance, take leptin. Released by your fat cells, one of its main jobs is to tell your brain how much fat is stored in your body and how much you’re eating. Higher levels of stored body fat result in more leptin. If on the other hand you burn more calories than you consume (in other words, you are in a potential weight loss situation), your leptin levels will drop. This makes you hungry, in the hope that you’ll eat and thereby stop asking your body to shed weight. When leptin was discovered, there were high hopes that, when administered to overweight or dieting people, it would correct a supposed lack of the hormone or trick the body into thinking it was not losing weight. Unfortunately, it turns out that trying to raise your leptin levels artificially is unlikely to be the magic answer. Firstly, leptin can only be given by injection because the hormone would be broken down by your stomach juices if you took it in pill form. Secondly, there is a phenomenon called leptin resistance which means that although a person may have plenty of leptin, the message may not be able to get through properly. Furthermore, the more of the hormone that is made available, the more blunted the body’s response to it becomes, making the resistance problem even worse. Nevertheless, there are some studies which suggest that it may be possible to manipulate leptin levels in a way which helps weight loss. For instance, Dr Kent Holtorf of Holtorf Medical Group Centers for Hormone Imbalance, Hypothyroidism and Fatigue talks about two new medications called Byetta (exenatide) and Symlin (pramlintide) that decrease leptin resistance. Initially developed for type 2 diabetics, these medications are showing promise for non-diabetics as well. Dr Holtorf reports that they can produce dramatic weight loss when given in conjunction with other metabolic treatments. As Dr Holtorf explains, many people with leptin resistance also have thyroid issues and these must be resolved as well. We discuss metabolic rate and thyroid hormone in more detail later. Recent research also suggests that the the secretion of leptin can be stimulated by the administration of a hormone called HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadotrophin). So far it is not understood exactly how these two protein hormones interact. However, it is already apparent that leptin exerts an effect on insulin too, and there are signs that HCG may reduce both insulin and leptin resistance. So it seems likely that leptin, HCG and insulin are all involved in the process that determines when and how the body stores and burns fat. There was in fact a very successful weight loss diet which was based on the administration of HCG in the mid 1900s. Although its popularity waned for various reasons, the HCG Diet has started to attract serious interest again and we will discuss this in more detail later.



Are you consuming enough calories to lose weight?

So if you have stopped losing weight on your diet, one of the first things you should consider is whether you are consuming enough calories – don’t automatically reduce them further! Restricting calories to the traditional ‘dieting’ level of 1000 to 1200 a day for a woman or 1500 to 1800 for a man may well trigger the famine syndrome trap. Of course, it is important that the calories you consume should all come from healthy, nutrient-rich foods. Eating more processed, sugar- or trans fat-laden foods will not help, as we will see later.

Are you getting the calorie advantage?

Many experts believe that low carb diets are the best diets for avoiding the famine syndrome trap. This is because, besides minimising insulin levels (high insulin levels encourage fat storage and prevent its release, as we will see in the next chapter), they allow weight loss at a higher calorie intake than low calorie/low fat diets. This is due to the high protein content of low carb diets and is sometimes referred to as the ‘calorie advantage’ or ‘metabolic advantage’. That a calorie advantage can exist is not universally accepted, because the concept of being able to lose weight on a higher level of calories when these come from protein rather than carbohydrate foods does not fit with the idea that ‘all calories are equal’. Detractors of the calorie advantage say that it defies the Laws of Thermodynamics because energy cannot ‘just disappear’. (The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed but can only change from one form to another). However, low carb diets are high in protein, and protein takes more energy to metabolize than either carbohydrates or fat, because longer and more complex biochemical reactions are required in order to break the protein down into energy that the body can use. According to Dr Michael Eades, author of "Protein Power" and other low carb diet-related books and a very highly respected source of information on the intricacies of low carb science, this has already been taken into account in the setting of the caloric content of protein as 4 calories per gram. But, and this is the crucial bit, there is a further increase in inefficiency which has not been dealt with in the setting of the caloric content. This is when protein has to be converted to glucose because the carb content of the diet is not sufficient to meet the body's glucose requirements. These additional biochemical reactions cause further 'waste' heat, explaining any so-called ‘missing’ calories and satisfying the First Law of Thermodynamics. This ‘wasting’ of calories is also predicted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that in any reaction that is irreversible there is a loss or dissipation of energy in that reaction. So it seems you can get away with eating more calories, if you swap carbohydrates for protein. According to Dr Eades, it may amount to 300 calories per day at best. The difference is not vast, but it’s still a useful amount.

In the next chapter, we look at our energy storage mechanism – another survival mechanism that affects our ability to lose weight.




TThhee bblloooodd ssuuggaarr//iinnssuulliinn ccoonnnneeccttiioonn

In this chapter: Our energy storage mechanism – good for Paleolithic Man, bad for 21st Century Man Insulin imbalance, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes Carbohydrates, calories and weight loss diets Calories do count – but carbs count more

Our energy storage mechanism – good for Paleolithic Man, bad for 21st Century Man

Think back to our earliest ancestors in Paleolithic times – they never knew when they were going to get their next meal, or drink. Their bodies had to have a way of storing energy, sometimes for considerable periods of time. They did this by putting on fat, which their bodies would be able to break back down into fuel when food would inevitably become scarce at some future point in time. People who were able to do this lived through times of famine. Those who could not, died. It was a case of the survival of the fittest, and in this case, ‘fittest’ meant those who stored energy most easily and used their fuel most efficiently. In this way, evolution favoured those with the ‘thrifty gene’. Genetically we have changed little from our early ancestors and we still retain this storage mechanism today. Controlled by the hormone insulin, our energy storage mechanism ensures that when we take in more food than we immediately need, we can store it for later in the form of fat. In brief and very simplified terms, what happens when we eat carbohydrate foods is as follows: our digestive system converts the food into glucose, a form of sugar. This glucose is absorbed into our bloodstream. In response, our pancreas releases insulin, which transports the glucose into our cells. This is then either burned for energy or, in the event of there being an excess, transformed into stored energy. The problem is, what we eat today is very different to what our ancestors ate. We eat far more high carbohydrate foods such as wheat, corn, rice and sugar. (Carbohydrates are the main foods which trigger insulin to be released; protein foods, such as meat and fish, cause only a very small amount to be released, and fats do not trigger insulin release at all). Moreover, most of the carbohydrates we eat are the highly concentrated sort, such as white flour, polished rice and pure, processed sugar. They trigger far higher releases of insulin than carbohydrate foods in their raw or unprocessed states such as the vegetables and fruits our ancestors would have eaten.



Unfortunately our bodies have not had time to evolve to cope with this change in diet. That would take many thousands or even millions of years. We may not live like cavemen any longer, but we still have their bodies. Of course, we are talking here in general terms about the population on average. When we come down to the level of individual people, there are huge variations in how our metabolisms respond to carbohydrates in the diet. Some people appear to have no trouble with them whilst others are extremely carbohydrate sensitive. Experts believe that up to about sixty per cent of western populations are unable to handle the carbohydrate-dense diet that we have become accustomed to eating. If you are reading this book it is likely that you are in the carbohydrate sensitive category.

Insulin imbalance, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes

An important indicator of trouble ahead is the rising proportion of the population that is carbohydrate sensitive in this way. The last fifty years have seen a change in our way of eating which has been far more sudden than ever before in evolutionary terms. Some people have no immediately apparent ill-effects from the carbohydrate-dense, highly refined foods that we eat so much of now. But it is becoming clear that years of eating such foods is causing permanent impairment of the blood sugar/insulin control mechanism in many people. The evidence for this is the increase in obesity and type 2 diabetes, which together are now being referred to as an epidemic by concerned governments all over the western world. (Type 2 diabetes is the end-stage in the disease process that starts with an impaired blood sugar/insulin control mechanism. Formerly called ‘maturity onset diabetes’, it is now being seen for the first time in children, some of them very young). Here’s a little more detailed explanation of the relationship between type 2 diabetes and obesity: The development of type 2 diabetes starts with a diet high in refined carbohydrates – like the one most often eaten today in the western world. These carbohydrate-dense foods are broken down by digestion into glucose, which quickly enters the bloodstream and raises the blood sugar to an abnormally high level. The amount of glucose in the blood has to be kept within very strict limits, and blood sugar regulation is one of insulin’s roles. Insulin signals to the cells to absorb any surplus blood sugar, thereby removing it from the bloodstream. However, the constant requirement for large amounts of insulin can, in time, make the cells become resistant to this signal. At this point in time a condition called insulin resistance has developed. If the situation doesn’t change (for instance, a reduction of refined carbohydrates in the diet), the pancreas eventually gets worn out. At this stage, a small amount of insulin may still be produced, but it is not enough to keep the blood sugar level within its correct range. Full blown type 2 diabetes has developed. Now, one of the reasons why type 2 diabetes is so closely related to obesity is because it disrupts fat metabolism. The cells are not receiving the signal to absorb the surplus glucose, so the liver has to convert it to fat for storage instead. This is ironic, for the



individual may well be gaining weight, while all the time the cells are being starved of energy-giving glucose. Type 2 diabetes is often seen as the consequence of obesity, and it is true that losing excess weight is sometimes all that is needed to control it. But many experts in the world of nutrition believe that this is too simplistic a view of what is going on. To them, it is clear that the obesity is the result of the body’s response to a level of carbohydrates in the diet it cannot handle. The obesity is simply the first outward sign of what is already going wrong with the body’s biochemistry. To put it another way, diabetes (or at least, its precursor insulin resistance) is the cause of the obesity. The obesity doesn’t cause the diabetes – it’s a symptom. What all this means is that our blood sugar/insulin control system struggles to cope with a diet so different from the one it was designed to handle. The high levels of insulin that are triggered by our diet rich in refined carbohydrates ensure that surplus energy is constantly being sent to our fat stores, even though there is no likelihood of our needing it. At the same time, our fat stores are being given the message that any attempt to release fat (in other words, by dieting) must be resisted.

Carbohydrates, calories and weight loss diets

So, if you’re on a traditional low calorie/low fat diet and not losing weight, it may be that you are one of the many who cannot handle carbohydrates in any significant quantity. These traditional methods of losing weight focus on calorie intake alone, and fail to take account of the blood sugar/insulin connection. They are founded on the premise that a calorie has the same effect on the body, no matter whether it comes from carbohydrate, protein or fat. In contrast, low carb diets and their close relations low glycemic index diets recognize that the way the body works is not so simplistic. Hormones are also involved, and keeping insulin under control is a crucial factor for successful weight loss for many people. (Low carb diets focus on the total amount of carbohydrate intake as a way of minimising insulin release. Low glycemic index diets restrict carbohydrate intake according to the glycemic index – a measure of the relative rise in blood sugar and therefore insulin caused by particular foods). If you’re already on a low carb diet but not losing weight, it may be that your individual tolerance for carbohydrates is lower than your current diet allows for. Every individual has their own level of tolerance. It is important to understand that some people are unable to handle even the so-called ‘healthy’ carbohydrates (carbohydrate foods which have not had all the fibre and original nutrients processed out of them, such as wholemeal bread, wholemeal pasta, brown rice and other whole grains, whole fruits, legumes etc). The best low carb diets (such as the Atkins Diet) take this individual variation into account. They are designed to find the dieter’s critical level of carbohydrate by starting low and gradually increasing the level until weight loss stops.



A word about low GI diets A word of warning about low glycemic index (low GI) diets, which have been seen (unjustifiably) by some as a ‘healthier’ version of a low carb diet: choosing a low GI rather than a low carb diet may effectively sabotage your weight loss efforts, if you have a particularly low tolerance to carbohydrates. Although low GI diets restrict ‘bad’ carbs and encourage ‘good’ carbs, much as low carb diets do, they are not designed to find the dieter’s critical level of carbohydrate. They allow a much higher level of carbohydrate from the outset. This level is too high for many people. A low GI diet is hardly ‘healthier’ for such individuals if it prevents them from losing their excess weight by keeping their insulin levels high!

A word about fructose While we are talking about the pitfalls of low GI diets, we should also keep in mind that researchers have now found a serious problem with the belief that fructose, sometimes called ‘fruit sugar’, is fully acceptable on a low GI diet (and diabetic diets too for that matter). Because it is a form of sugar that is processed in the liver, does not require insulin to process it and has a comparatively low GI, it was previously thought to be good news for anyone trying to control their blood sugar. Now researchers have discovered that the liver can only process a small amount of fructose into the kind of sugar that the body can use. It quickly becomes overloaded and is forced to make fats from the fructose instead, filling the bloodstream with triglycerides and stimulating a molecule called activated glycerol which is responsible for fat deposition. The more of this molecule that is available, the more fat is deposited. Far from being the dieter’s or diabetic’s friend, it seems that fructose is one of his worst carbohydrate choices. Fructose produces many other adverse effects as well. Here are just a few:

Fructose depletes the liver cells of phosphates and produces waste products in the form of uric acid. This blocks an enzyme that makes nitric oxide, the body’s natural blood pressure regulator. High blood pressure is the likely result.

The elevated uric acid levels that too much fructose can cause can also lead to gout.

High fructose intake can lead to insulin resistance, and thence to type to diabetes.

The metabolism of fructose is very similar to the metabolism of ethanol (the

intoxicating substance in alcoholic drinks) and fructose in fact causes most of the same toxic effects to the liver that excess alcohol does.

Fructose does not stimulate a rise in leptin, which is the hormone that tells your body

you have had enough to eat.

Fructose does not suppress ghrelin, the hormone that makes you feel hungry. A little fructose eaten in the foods which naturally contain it such as fresh fruits and vegetables is not a problem. However, fructose is added to most processed foods and is present in great quantities in many soft drinks and sodas. All this can add up to a



daily dose of fructose that is far in excess of what your liver can handle. Agave syrup, which has been heavily marketed as a healthier form of sugar, is almost all fructose. Even so-called ‘healthy’ fruit juices, especially those containing fruit juice concentrates, can deliver a significant overdose of fructose.

Calories do count – but carbs count more

Another word of warning: some people have got the idea that if you’re on a low carb diet, calories don’t matter. Well, that’s not strictly true. Calories do matter. To lose weight on a low carb diet, you still need to create a calorie deficit, as we discussed before. Even Dr Atkins did not say calories don’t count. What he said was that carbs count more than calories. Many low carbers find they do not need to count calories because the act of restricting high-carb foods brings the calories within the range necessary for losing weight. Now, it’s important to understand that this is not the same thing as saying that the only reason low carb diets work is because they reduce calories. This is not true. Clinical studies have proved that people on low carb diets can eat more calories and lose the same or more weight than if they were on a low calorie/low fat diet containing the same number of calories. The reason may well be the ‘calorie advantage’ conferred by swapping carbohydrates for protein that we discussed in the last chapter. Studies have also proved that low carb diets take account of other problems that can prevent weight loss on low calorie diets, such as high insulin levels. So if you are not losing weight on a low carb diet, then one of the things you should check is whether you are regularly creating a calorie deficit or not. (Of course, you must be sure not to create such a large calorie deficit that your body goes into starvation mode, as we explained earlier).

In the next chapter, we learn more about the importance of metabolic rate and what happens to it when we go on a diet.




MMeettaabboolliicc rraattee

In this chapter: Why low calorie diets cannot work long term Avoiding the depressed metabolic rate trap Strategies for burning fat and building muscle The HCG Diet Other ways of boosting metabolism Managing plateaus Track fat not weight

Why low calorie diets cannot work long term

As we saw earlier in the section on famine syndrome, a drastic reduction in calories makes your body think famine is imminent. It starts to burn fuel more efficiently, and the more times you go on a diet, the better it gets at doing this. In other words, diets are almost guaranteed to depress your metabolic rate. It is thought that severely reduced calorie diets may depress metabolic rate by up to forty-five per cent. Many dieters end up eating next to nothing in their efforts to lose further weight, or even just to maintain the weight they initially managed to lose. Significant restriction in calories is obviously very difficult to sustain (not to mention harmful for health in the long run, since it is impossible to obtain all the vitamins and minerals you need from your diet when calories are that low). However, there is something else that is even more important from a weight loss point of view. When calories are drastically reduced, it is very difficult to keep protein intake up to an adequate level. This is especially the case where the diet is also low in fat, as protein foods are the ones most likely to contain fat. Unlike other elements in the diet, we don’t make or store protein, so we have to take a certain amount in on a daily basis. So what happens when we are on a diet that is low in protein but high in carbohydrates (which is generally the case when we follow a low calorie, low fat diet)? As we explained previously, when carbohydrates are high, blood sugar and insulin are high. And when insulin is high, another hormone called glucagon is low. Insulin ensures that the blood sugar does not go too high, and sends excess energy to our fat stores. Glucagon does the opposite. It triggers the release of stored energy when our blood sugar goes too low. So if insulin is the fat storing hormone, then glucagon is the fat burning hormone. Now, suppose we have an energy deficit (fewer calories coming in than we need to maintain our body systems and go about our daily activities). This is of course what we are aiming for on a diet. But insulin is high (because we said that in this



case our diet was high in carbohydrates). So glucagon must be low. This means that our body cannot make up the energy deficit by breaking down our fat stores. The only alternative is for our body to get the energy from protein. But if the protein we are taking in is not enough to satisfy our energy demands, the only option is for our body to get it by breaking down our lean body mass. Quite apart from the fact that losing lean body mass is undesirable from a general health point of view, it also has an extremely undesirable effect on our body composition, and this has a knock-on effect on our metabolic rate. (By body composition, we mean the ratio of fat to lean body mass. Lean body mass is made up of muscle, our organs, collagen, bones and water – what we need to make our bodies work. Fatty tissue is what’s left, and although we need a certain amount of it, too much is very unhealthy). So what is this knock-on effect on our metabolic rate? Well, as we mention later in the chapter on exercise, muscle uses up more energy than fatty tissue. So if you reduce the amount of muscle tissue, your body needs less energy to maintain itself and provide energy for your daily activities. That means that your REE (resting energy expenditure) or, as it is also called, RMR (resting metabolic rate) is reduced. Or in other words, your metabolic rate goes down, meaning that you need fewer calories than before. But there’s worse to come. What happens if you relax your diet, and weight creeps back on? If you’re eating carbohydrates, then insulin will be high, sending the excess energy to your fat stores. So eventually you start to diet again. If it’s another low calorie/low fat diet (that is, high in carbohydrates and probably low in protein), then high levels of insulin/low levels of glucagon will still prevent the release of fat from your fat stores, and any weight you lose represents the loss of even more of your lean body tissue. Yes, you’ve lost weight, but you’ve now got an even higher percentage of body fat! Your metabolism is now further depressed. And that’s not all. According to exercise physiologist Lyle McDonald, the reduction in body mass also causes complex changes in leptin, thyroid, insulin and nervous system output. Losing weight is certainly not the simple matter of reducing calories that we have been taught for so long. Luckily, mainstream medicine is now beginning to recognize this, and hopefully we will see more and more research into the complex mechanisms of losing weight over the next few years.

Avoiding the depressed metabolic rate trap

As we have seen, the problem with diets is that they can so easily trigger a vicious circle of restrict calories – depress metabolic rate – restrict calories further. Taking supplements that are claimed to boost the metabolism is one way to attempt to combat this, and we discuss these later. However, the most effective way to protect your metabolic rate is to ensure that the weight you lose is actually fat and not muscle. But how do we do this? When the scales tell us that we have lost weight, we don’t generally think about what that loss consists of. It doesn’t occur to us that we could be losing lean muscle tissue as well as fat, or worse, losing lean muscle tissue instead of fat. Professional bodybuilders on the other hand have long been very aware of body composition. Success for them is



all about shedding surplus fat and building muscle. It is critical for them to be able to alter their body composition, and their methods of doing this are therefore very useful for dieters who need to avoid the trap of depressing their metabolic rate. (By the way, following the general principles that bodybuilders use will not result in a bodybuilder’s physique – it’s a question of degree and bodybuilders have to exercise very hard indeed and take great care of what they eat in order to get their rippling muscles). So what can we learn from the bodybuilding world about losing fat and building muscle to avoid the depressed metabolic rate trap? Well, all the following bodybuilders’ methods and tips are just as relevant to dieters as they are to bodybuilders.

Knowing your body fat percentage is probably much more important than worrying about exactly how much you weigh. Weighing yourself doesn’t tell you whether you’ve lost fat or lean muscle tissue.

Knowing your BMI (body mass index) is a little better than just relying on your weight.

(Your BMI is calculated by dividing your weight in kilograms by your height in metres squared, or by multiplying your weight in pounds by 700 and dividing by your height in inches squared.) But it is still not as good as knowing your body composition. Although it is claimed that BMI correlates highly with body composition, it is still possible for someone whose weight is ‘right’ for their height (ie with a ‘healthy’ BMI) to have a dangerously high body fat percentage, or for someone who is superfit with very little body fat to appear overweight (ie to have an ‘unhealthy’ BMI).

Tracking your body fat percentage as well as weight is important. If you are losing

lean body mass instead of fat on your diet, you need to know about it and take immediate action to avoid depressing your metabolism and making long term weight loss virtually impossible.

A bodybuilder’s pre-competition diet is likely to be low or reduced carb, rich in

nutrients and low in processed foods. Bodybuilders are also likely to divide their day’s food into five or six smaller meals and snacks, rather than two or three large meals and nothing in between. Each meal or snack will contain some protein. The meals will probably be taken at regular times throughout the day rather than erratically. This ensures that the diet is high enough in protein to be protein sparing (the term used to describe a diet which protects the lean body tissue from being broken down). How much protein? Research into levels of protein for muscle building indicates a daily amount somewhere between 0.8 and 1.4 grams per pound of bodyweight. Note that this is significantly higher than Government healthy eating guidelines, which focus on the minimum protein requirement for health. Such a low carb/high protein regime also keeps the various hormones at optimum levels for fat burning and muscle building. Remember: carbohydrates cause high insulin levels and promote fat storing. Fats have little direct effect on either insulin or glucagon. Proteins on the other hand trigger a small and equal release of both insulin and the fat burning hormone glucagon, which is ideal. Bodybuilders also believe that the high protein level in a low or reduced carb diet gives a ‘calorie advantage’, as it is more ‘thermogenic’ than carbs or fat (20 to 30 per



cent of the calorific value of a protein food is used up in metabolizing it, whilst the figure is 5 to 10 per cent for carbohydrates, and only 0 to 3 per cent for fats).

To lose body fat, a calorie deficit must be created. But there are two ways of doing

this: exercising more or eating less. Bodybuilders have learned that it is less damaging to their metabolic rate to focus on the exercise side of the equation rather than reduce calories drastically. Traditional weight loss diets, which almost invariably focus on the calorie restriction and fail to recognize the effect on metabolic rate, are doomed to failure in the long term.

A very important part of a bodybuilder’s life is obviously exercise. This is crucial to

dieters as well, because exercise helps protect and even boost the metabolism in two ways. Firstly, it uses up energy. This helps you to create the calorie deficit you need for weight loss without cutting calories to such a low level that your body goes into starvation mode. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, exercise helps build muscle, thereby boosting the metabolism. We talk about exercise in more detail later.

The body adapts to any exercise program very quickly. To avoid this, bodybuilders

change their program every four to twelve weeks – or any time they hit a plateau (or stall, as they are sometimes called). Changes can be new exercises, different intensity, changes in duration or frequency, different time of day etc.

Bodybuilders are more likely to increase their calories temporarily than decrease

them if they hit a plateau. This sends a signal to the body that it is not starving and that it is OK to keep burning calories. We talk more about managing plateaus later.

Some bodybuilders vary their calorie and carbohydrate levels on a regular basis to

help keep them from going into starvation mode. This is referred to as ‘cycling’ or ‘zig-zagging’. One method is to have three days of calorie deficit and low in carbohydrate, followed by one day with calories at your weight maintenance level and a higher level of carbs. Another is to follow the three ‘low’ days with two or even three ‘high’ days. On the calorie deficit/low carb days, body fat is lost rapidly, but you raise your calories and carbs again before your body can adapt and decrease your metabolic rate. The level of carbs, whether on the low or high days, will depend on how carbohydrate sensitive you are.

If you want to build muscle, it is necessary to be in calorie surplus. If you want to

lose fat, you must be in a calorie deficit. So it is difficult to do both at the same time. Since bodybuilders want to do both, they use calorie/carbohydrate cycling methods to allow both to happen over the course of time – but in alternate bursts. Some use a three to four day low carb/low calorie diet phase alternating with a similar length of time in slight calorie surplus when they eat more carbs and train hard. In the calorie surplus/carbs/hard training phase they gain both muscle and fat. In the calorie deficit/low carb/training phase they take the fat off while keeping the muscle. Other bodybuilders favour a pattern of longer cycles such as six to eight weeks for this purpose. It’s important to note that insulin is needed for transporting the amino acids from



protein into the muscles. So a certain level of insulin-triggering carbohydrates may be needed to supplement the very small insulin effect of protein for muscle building purposes.

Bodybuilders usually aim to lose weight at one or one and a half pounds per week.

This is because their experience is that the more slowly they lose, the easier it is to maintain the lean muscle and keep the fat from coming back. Their trainers and exercise physiologists have observed over the years that a goal of more than two pounds of weight loss per week is counterproductive, as they have found that people rarely if ever lose 100 per cent fat at a rate of weight loss above this level.

There may however be one exception to the ‘faster weight loss brings a higher proportion of lean muscle loss’ concept. This is the HCG Diet that we mentioned earlier and which we will discuss in more detail later.

Strategies for burning fat and building muscle

So what is the best diet for burning fat and building muscle? Award-winning health writer Leslie Kenton’s view, as she explained in her book ‘The X Factor Diet’, is that a ketogenic or near ketogenic diet is best. Carbohydrates are then low enough to prevent the fat storage/fat guarding effect of high insulin levels. (Body builders and athletes are very familiar with the term ‘ketogenic’, but you may also recognize it as a low carb diet such as the Atkins Diet or Protein Power. All ketogenic means is that substances called ketones are being produced as a result of stored fat being broken down for energy). One thing to keep in mind is what Dr Gilbert Forbes reported in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. He found that people with more body fat also tend to have more muscle. He also found that if you take two people, one with high levels of body fat and one with low levels, a greater proportion of the total weight lost in the person with more body fat would come from fat rather than lean body tissue. The significance of this is that the higher your initial body fat content, the greater the calorie deficit you can sustain without worrying about losing muscle instead of fat. But diet is not the only important thing if you want to lose fat rather than lean body mass. More and more evidence points to the fact that exercise is critical – and that it needs to be a particular kind of exercise. Leslie Kenton’s views in ‘The X Factor Diet’ on exercise also accord with those of the bodybuilders. She explains how coupling a low carb/high protein diet with resistance exercise is even better for your metabolism. This is because you are not just protecting muscle from being lost, you are building more muscle. We talk in detail about the right and wrong kinds of exercise for building muscle later. A study published by researchers at the University of Illinois in the US in 2005 supports Leslie’s view. The study was entitled ‘Dietary Protein and Exercise Have Additive Effects on Body Composition during Weight Loss in Adult Women’ and authors DK Layman, E Evans, JI Baum, J Seyler, DJ Erickson and RA Boileau concluded that ‘This study demonstrated that a diet with higher protein and reduced carbohydrates combined with exercise additively improved body composition during weight loss…’.



However, Leslie wrote the ‘The X Factor Diet’ way back in 2002 and since then she became aware of and did a very great deal of her own research into the HCG Diet. This diet still focuses on the benefits of a low carb/high protein eating plan on a long term basis but makes use of the fat-mobilising properties of HCG to make initial dieting more effective and to tackle the issues of the set point and the depression of the metabolism that dieting usually causes. If the claims made for this diet are justified (and Leslie is certainly convinced, as she has brought out her own version of the HCG Diet), then this represents a very significant step forward in our understanding of what is the best diet for burning fat.

The HCG Diet - a new old diet

The HCG Diet is a weight loss diet originally developed in the 1950s by English endocrinologist Dr ATW Simeons. Dr Simeons discovered that giving his patients a hormone called HCG (human chorionic gonadotrophin) in conjunction with a very low calorie diet (VLCD) enabled them to lose fat at an extremely rapid rate without suffering the weakness, hunger, sagging skin and stubborn fat deposits that they experienced with other diets. He believed that this was due to HCG’s ability to mobilise fat preferentially from fat stores that VLCDs or other diets alone can only access as a very last resort. He believed that his method overcame the problem of the extra-rapid post-diet weight gain as the body attempts to get back to its former weight, or set point, as quickly as possible, and allowed the dieter to stabilise at their new weight without having to restrict calorie intake to a very low level, overcoming the depressed metabolism problem. The theory behind the HCG Diet is not something that can be explained in a few words, and Dr Simeons himself did not pretend to understand it fully. He just knew it worked, believed he had discovered some of the mechanisms behind it and tried through his many years of research to fill in the missing pieces of his outline structure for the fat-regulating activities of the body. Although the HCG Diet includes a period of very low calorie eating, this by no means constitutes the entire diet, and the diet overall is very much based on low carb/high protein principles. On it you focus on using the VLCD, with the help of the HCG, to lose fat very fast in a very restricted period of time. You then return to a low carb/sufficient protein regime with normal calorie intake in order to stabilise at the new weight. If more fat needs to be shed you then repeat the cycle after a set period. At first glance, the HCG Diet might seem to be directly in contradiction of the warning not to drop calories too low lest your body should go into starvation mode and your metabolic rate should become depressed. However it is suggested that while on the VLCD, your body does not actually perceive this as a shortage of food because the HCG releases stored fat of a type not normally accessible, making up the calories to a normal intake. Some people find it helpful to think of this as ‘feeding the body internally’. On the HCG Diet the average weight loss for females is between 18 and 24 pounds in 32 days, while males lose between 24 and 28 pounds in 32 days. This rate of loss is far



higher than most diets and is claimed to be virtually all fat, unlike other VLCDs where significant amounts of lean muscle are lost. Those who find it hardest to lose weight such as people with underactive thyroids and long-term yo-yo dieters in particular are finding the HCG Diet extremely effective. This seems logical, since chronic restriction of calories makes these groups likely to go into starvation mode very quickly, making short, sharp shocks a better bet than long drawn-out moderately reduced calorie diets. These groups are also the ones most likely to have issues with blood sugar, insulin and other hormones which prevent the mobilisation of fat from their long term fat stores, an issue which is directly addressed by the administration of HCG during the fat loss phase of the diet. As already mentioned, writer Leslie Kenton is just one of the diet and health experts who are entirely convinced of the benefits of the HCG Diet. She has spent many years researching the use of HCG to aid fat loss and launched her own version of Dr Simeons’ protocol in 2011 called ‘Cura Romana’ (the Roman Cure). This was the name by which Dr Simeons’ diet was often known in Europe. Today there are countless purveyors of ‘the hCG Diet’ and the actual HCG itself across the world. Unfortunately many of these are peddling adaptations of Dr Simeons’ protocol made by individuals lacking scientific, medical or other relevant knowledge, making claims that as yet have not been scientifically proven and selling HCG of dubious quality and authenticity. In years to come, once more clinical trials have been done, the HCG Diet may well prove to be a massive step forward in the way in which we approach weight loss problems. However, it is also very demanding of time and effort in learning how to do it, planning it and implementing it. It requires real dedication to keep to the diet when unplanned social events, domestic emergencies and work deadlines threaten to derail it. In this respect, it is certainly not suitable for everyone. If you are considering following this diet it is crucial therefore to identify a source of accurate information about it which includes the practical considerations of following it. More information can be found in The Easy Guide to the HCG Diet at www.hcgdietiseasy.com and you can read about my own highly successful experience with the HCG Diet at www.lowcarbiseasy.com/mystory.htm.

Other ways of boosting metabolism

So we have seen how losing weight is not a simple matter of cutting calories, and how cutting calories too drastically can have a nasty boomerang effect of making your body use its fuel more efficiently. We have discussed how the body’s hormonal response to fats, carbohydrates and protein is quite different, and how low carb/high protein diets recognize this. We have seen that doing muscle-building exercise is important because it helps prevent a depressed metabolic rate. We now understand how important it is to maintain metabolic rate if we are to stand any chance of dieting down to our goal weight and maintaining the weight loss long term. But is there anything else, besides low carb/high protein diets, calorie/carbohydrate cycling, the right kind of exercise and possibly HCG that can help to protect or boost metabolic rate?

http://www.hcgdietiseasy.com/

http://www.lowcarbiseasy.com/mystory.htm



Dehydration is believed to depress metabolic rate. When you are dehydrated, body temperature drops slightly and causes fat storage as a way to help raise or maintain the temperature. Make sure you drink enough liquids (at least 8 glasses a day) to avoid this.

It is also important to get optimal levels of nutrients from your diet, particularly vitamin

C and the B vitamins (critical for an efficient metabolism), magnesium, and calcium (thought to serve as a ‘switch’ to tell your body’s cells to burn fat faster).

One way of helping to overcome a depressed metabolic rate may be to take ‘fat

burners’. Nutrients such as flaxseed oil, GLA (gamma linoleic acid), L-Carnitine, chromium picolinate, lipoic acid, COQ10 and the fat breakdown enzyme lipase are often cited as natural fat burners.

Thermogenic or stimulant metabolic enhancers or fat burners are also widely

available online. But do they really work? Are they safe? We discuss these in Appendix 1.

Managing plateaus

Plateaus are just another manifestation of your body’s survival mechanisms. However, they are particularly dispiriting and demotivating when they happen midway through a period of successful weight loss. The weight loss suddenly stops, but you don’t understand why. Everything you’ve previously been taught tells you that you must be cheating. Your diet was working before, so if it’s not now, then it must be your fault. But you’re sure you haven’t changed your diet, or cheated. So what action would you have taken before you read this book? Probably, you would have re-examined your daily intake to discover where extra carbs or calories could be creeping in. Or you might have simply decided to cut your intake anyway, on the basis that less must be better. By now, though, you are probably thinking that less is not the answer! Certainly, there are many theories about how best to get past a plateau. Most of them involve changing an aspect of your diet and/or exercise regime to ‘shock’ your body back into metabolic shape. Gary Heavin, founder of a weight loss and fitness program for women which has enjoyed phenomenal popularity both in America and Europe, takes this thinking a stage further. In his book ‘Curves – Permanent Results Without Dieting’ he explains how dieters who reach a plateau need a ‘metabolic tune-up’. Hitting a plateau means that your body has decided that the food shortage is permanent, and ‘famine syndrome’ has well and truly kicked in. While you’ve been losing weight, you’ve been living on stored energy. Your fat stores have become depleted, and your body has responded by trying to protect you from starvation. His contention is that you must get control over your starvation hormones and raise your metabolism before you can start to lose weight again. So how do you do this? Well, as far as Gary is concerned, the answer is simple. You eat more, not less. You ‘overfeed’ your body until it has become accustomed to the higher intake and your metabolism is restored to its previous level. This doesn’t mean you eat anything and everything. You must still only eat healthy food, but you increase your calories to between 2500 and 3000 per day. As soon as you have gained three to



five pounds above your plateau weight, you cut your intake sharply to your calorie deficit level – but for no longer than 72 hours. According to Gary, this time limit is critical because it avoids the stimulation of those starvation hormones. As you continue overfeeding and cutting back in this way, the periods of cutback become further apart as your body adjusts to the higher intake. Once you can eat at the 2500 to 3000 calorie level for three to four weeks at a time without gaining weight, you know you have raised your metabolism sufficiently to restart your diet. This process might take one to three months. People who have more than 50 pounds to lose may have to go through this ‘metabolic tune-up’ several times. Of course, when you hit a plateau you may also have to check out some of the other reasons for not losing weight that we set out in this book. For instance, you might have developed a sluggish thyroid, yeast overgrowth, food sensitivities or nutrient deficiencies. Your body isn’t static – it’s constantly changing and rebuilding itself. Just because you had normal thyroid blood results or tested negative for nutrient deficiencies or food sensitivities six months ago, it doesn’t follow that things are the same now. This is particularly true if you have been on a restricted calorie, monotonous or junk food diet, gone through a period of high stress, have had multiple courses of antibiotics or if your body is going through a time of major hormonal change.

Track fat not weight

Here we give you some information on body fat measuring equipment, since we are sure that, having read about how important it is to track body fat as well as your weight, you’ll want to know how to do it. You can either get body fat measurements done at a gym, or you can get yourself set up at home. There are three methods which it is possible to do at home: skinfold testing, for which you will need special callipers; body fat scales; and body fat hand gripper machines. All three methods are considered to be reasonably accurate. Body fat scales and body fat hand gripper machines work by bio-electric impedance analysis. This tests the electrical conductivity of your tissues. Lean body mass is highly conductive because of its high water content. Fat is less conductive on account of its low water content. Because the test is based on your water status, results can fluctuate depending on how well hydrated you are. So taking measurements at the same time of day is important to get consistent results, and you should bear in mind the possibility of inaccurate results if you have been drinking alcohol or caffeine, doing exercise or sweating heavily. You should also bear in mind that you may get a misleading result if, say, you measure after several days on a high carb diet and then re-measure after several days on a low carb diet. This is because the machines count both glycogen and water as lean tissue. (Glycogen is a form of energy stored in the liver and muscles which your body can access at short notice, with minimal effort. Your body can have only a limited amount. In comparison, fat is a long term form of energy storage.) On the high carb diet, your glycogen stores will be full, and your associated fluid levels will be high. But when you re-measure after a few days on a low carb regime, your glycogen stores and associated



water will be depleted, and the machine will ‘think’ you have lost lean tissue (and therefore gained fat).

Next we discuss another of our survival mechanisms which can affect weight – our ‘fight or flight’ stress reactions.




SSttrreessss

In this chapter: The biochemistry of stress Stress and the connection with weight gain The symptoms of adrenal fatigue Cortisol testing

The biochemistry of stress

Your biochemical reaction to stress is another survival mechanism that involves the blood sugar/insulin control system. When you are stressed, your adrenal gland secretes the stress hormone cortisol. Your appetite is also increased, and rises in blood sugar and insulin levels are triggered. This is all part of our ‘fight or flight’ response. It’s how our bodies ensured that we had plenty of energy available to fight off or flee the enemy in the days of our ancestors. Nowadays, a high-stress episode (whether physical or emotional) is hardly ever followed by the physical exertion of ‘fight or flight’. But if the stressful event is quickly resolved, the cortisol is reabsorbed, particularly if it is helped by the increased circulation produced by a pounding heart.

Stress and the connection with weight gain

However, some experts believe that where the stress is constant, weight gain can result. In this case, the body is continually in a state of excess cortisol production. This stimulates glucose production, leading to chronically elevated blood sugar. This in turn causes an increase in circulating insulin, which readily stores the excess glucose as body fat. As we saw earlier, increased insulin is also likely to lead to insulin resistance and finally to type 2 diabetes. The adrenal glands can eventually become fatigued as a result of constantly being required to produce cortisol. They start to dysfunction and this can affect not only the production of cortisol itself, but also the production and balancing of other hormones that can also affect our weight, such as DHEA, estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. Adrenal fatigue will almost inevitably have a knock-on effect on other glands too, such as the thyroid. In fact, the workings of the thyroid and the adrenals go hand-in-hand and many people with continuing symptoms of low thyroid such as weight gain or difficulty losing weight in fact have low adrenal function as well. This frequently goes



unrecognised, yet it is crucial to identify and resolve the adrenal problem, as no amount of thyroid treatment will work if the adrenals are not in a fit state to support it. We discuss later the importance of a well-functioning thyroid to a healthy metabolism and a healthy weight. Stress also reduces the amount of hydrochloric acid produced in the stomach. Calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium and many other nutrients cannot be absorbed unless they are mixed with hydrochloric acid. We will see later how deficiencies in these minerals can affect our ability to lose weight. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies are in themselves a significant stress to the body. In times of stress, our adrenal glands work overtime to produce more adrenal hormones such as aldosterone. Aldosterone’s job is to regulate our fluid levels by telling the kidneys to retain sodium and water when the levels of these are getting low. If there is an excess of aldosterone, then greater than normal quantities of sodium and water are retained. A reasonable amount of stress in our lives is normal, and even good for us. But if you are feeling stressed on a constant basis, then this may be a factor in preventing you from losing weight. If this is the case, take action to remove the source of the stress, and/or practise stress reduction techniques, such as yoga, tai chi, meditation, breathing exercises, anger management therapy, therapeutic massage or even just listening to calming music. These activities can help quieten down your body’s response to stressors. Ensuring you get regular exercise (just a daily brisk walk even) will also help to make you more stress resistant. Chronic sleep deprivation also increases stress. The shorter the time you are sleeping, the more cortisol you release, which stimulates hunger. Insufficient sleep is also thought to reduce your ability to metabolize carbohydrates, leading to higher insulin levels and greater fat storage. Too little sleep also decreases leptin levels, which can cause carbohydrate craving. Sleep quality as well as quantity is important. Non-restful sleep is associated with significant reductions in HGH (human growth hormone), which we discuss in Weight Loss Secret # 11. So make sure you get enough – between seven and nine hours each night for most people. However, stress does not only come from our emotions, such as financial worries, relationship problems, bereavement, illness of loved ones, personality conflicts, pressurized jobs, unemployment or the generally hectic pace of our lives. Any kind of physical situation that causes the body to take some form of action to keep its equilibrium acts as a stressor. For instances, infections, extremes of heat or cold, over-exercising, undiagnosed food sensitivities, severe calorie restriction, skipping meals and even yo-yo dieting are stressors to the body.

The symptoms of adrenal fatigue

The signs and symptoms of adrenal fatigue are many and diverse, and in many cases overlap with those of low or underactive thyroid. Here is a list of the most common, although not all will be found in the same individual:



Non-refreshing sleep Feeling overwhelmed by stressors Feeling most energetic in the late evening Irritable bowel, diarrhoea Cold and heat sensitivity Cold extremities Cold sweats Dark rings under the eyes Loss of body hair Salt and sweet craving Hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar) Fainting Repeated infections and slow recovery Breathlessness Asthma Muscle weakness Fatigue

Back and loin pain; aches and pains in muscles and joints

Poor tolerance of exercise Palpitations Weight loss Depression and anxiety Memory loss and confusion Difficulty concentrating Food and environmental allergies Consistent low blood pressure Hissing in ears Autoimmune disease Internal shivering Waking at night with breathlessness,

anxiety, sense of doom, hypoglycaemia

Cortisol testing

Before you rush off to get your cortisol levels tested, though, do be aware that physicians and endocrinologists in mainstream medicine are generally only able to order a blood test called the ‘Synacthen test’ to check on cortisol levels. Unfortunately this only checks the cortisol level at a single point in time. It will identify cases where cortisol is dangerously low (Addison’s Disease) or too high (Cushings’ Disease) but it does not recognise cases where adrenal function is impaired and requires support rather than emergency action. To test for adrenal impairment, you need an ‘adrenal stress index’ or ‘ASI’ test which measures cortisol levels at multiple points throughout the day. It may seem confusing to be talking about high cortisol levels being the problem for weight loss on the one hand, and about getting tests for ‘low adrenal reserve’ or ‘adrenal insufficiency’ on the other hand. However it all makes sense when we understand that years of frequent calls on your body’s cortisol production machinery may eventually start to wear it out. The normal daily pattern of cortisol may become disrupted, with levels too high at times and too low at others and this may go on for some time until the levels become too low all the time. Single point tests such as the Synacthen test are unlikely to pick up any problem until the cortisol has reached the permanently low levels of Addison’s Disease, but impaired adrenals can still be impacting on your thyroid function, your ability to lose weight and many other aspects of your health in the meantime. ASI tests are increasingly available from independent labs but you usually need a health practitioner’s signature on the request form. The tests are usually done by testing the saliva rather than the blood. As mentioned previously, these tests are not yet generally recognised within mainstream medicine, so you would need to go through a ‘holistic naturopath’, nutritional medicine or other ‘complementary medicine’ practitioner who specializes in ‘adrenal insufficiency’, ‘low adrenal reserve’ or ‘adrenal fatigue’.



Tests to do at home for adrenal fatigue

There are also some tests you can do fairly easily at home to get an idea of whether you may have a problem with your adrenals, as follows:

The orthostatic hypotension test If you have your own blood pressure monitor, try taking your blood pressure after lying down for five minutes, then taking it again after standing up. Compare the systolic pressures (the top number). If your adrenals are in good shape, the systolic number should rise on standing by between 6 and 10 mm/Hg. This is because epinephrine (adrenaline) is normally secreted to increase your blood pressure to help prevent gravity from pulling blood away from your brain. If the systolic number stays the same this suggests your adrenal function may be reduced and if it goes down, this suggests that your adrenal function is poor.

The paradoxical pupillary reflex test Stand in front of a mirror in a dark room, shine a flashlight or torch into one eye at a 45 degree angle from the side and observe your pupil. In the dark, your pupil should be fully open but when you shine the light, it should constrict. If it stays constricted for at least 20 seconds, this suggests healthy adrenals. If it pulses after 10 seconds, adrenal function may be reduced, and if it pulses in 5 to 10 seconds this suggests your adrenal function is poor. Wait 30 seconds in the dark before repeating with the other eye. Be aware though that there are other possible causes for a positive result on this test.

Now that we have talked about the ways in which our survival mechanisms can sabotage our attempts to lose weight, we look at the role of food allergies or sensitivities in hindering weight loss, an important but largely unrecognized factor.




FFoooodd aalllleerrggiieess//sseennssiittiivviittiieess

In this chapter: What are food allergies or sensitivities The symptoms Masking and allergic addiction Top food sensitivity suspects – the foods we like and eat most How food sensitivities can sabotage your diet Food cravings Diagnosing and eradicating food sensitivities

What are food allergies or sensitivities

Experts believe that the majority of the population has food allergies or sensitivities to one or more foods. Not all of these allergies produce symptoms serious enough to lead the sufferer to go looking for the cause. Others do, but sufferers unfortunately never get the chance to find and treat the root cause, due to widespread ignorance in the mainstream medical profession of the principles of food allergy/sensitivity. The type of food allergy we are talking about here is not the life-threatening ‘anaphylactic shock after eating a peanut’ type. This kind of allergy provokes an immediate and often severe reaction from your immune system. (Your immune system is a kind of chemical defence system in your blood which exists to protect you from illnesses and other ‘foreign’ molecules that could present a threat to you.) The ‘collapse after eating a peanut’ type of reaction is a so-called fixed allergy, meaning that you always react to that food, no matter how frequently or infrequently you are exposed to it. Sometimes this type of allergy is also referred to as ‘classical allergy’ because it was the first type of allergy to be recognized. The type of allergy of interest to us here is called cyclic allergy. It’s a different type of reaction to a fixed allergy, and it involves a different part of the immune system. (If you want to get technical, allergies cause your immune system to produce antibodies or immunoglobulins. There are various types of immunoglobulin in the group. The one that triggers the immediate allergic response in the Type 1 peanut allergy described above is termed IgE, but the one that is involved with Type 3 or cyclic allergies is a different one – IgG). Cyclic allergies generally begin as a result of over-exposure to a chemical or food. It is thought that if you continually ingest a particular food, this depletes the stores of the digestive enzymes in your gut and liver which are necessary for the proper digestion of



that particular food. This causes half-digested food to be absorbed into your blood. Your immune system sees this as a foreign body, and an allergic reaction is the result. In a similar way, frequent ingestion of manmade chemicals wears out your liver’s capacity to break down and excrete the toxins these chemicals represent. Production of an allergic reaction varies with frequency of exposure and amount ingested. Because this cyclic type of food allergy has different symptoms and is caused by different parts of the immune system, some experts call it sensitivity or intolerance to try to distinguish it from the ‘classical’ type of allergy. For clarity, we refer to it here as sensitivity. As we have seen, classical food allergy and food sensitivity involve different members of the immunoglobulin family. The tests used to diagnose what are traditionally thought of as allergies only look for IgE, so food sensitivity does not show up in tests designed for this fixed and immediate type of allergy. For this reason, the existence of food sensitivity is not universally recognized by the mainstream medical profession. However, awareness is increasing and this is likely to gather pace now that medical schools are starting to offer courses in this comparatively new branch of medicine. So far, it does not even have a universally agreed name, but nutritional medicine and clinical ecology are commonly used terms.

The symptoms

Food sensitivity reactions can vary widely, from rashes to depression, aggressive behaviour, hyperactivity, fatigue, inability to concentrate, bloating, headaches, irritable bowel syndrome and a multitude of other chronic health issues – including weight problems. This wide variation in symptoms makes food sensitivity very difficult to diagnose, as does the fact that symptom onset can be delayed up to a couple of days. This delay is especially likely in the case of sensitivity to wheat and other grains.

Masking and allergic addiction

To further complicate identification of food sensitivities, a process called ‘masking’ is often involved. This means that a reaction can be hidden by frequent ingestion of the offending food (the ‘allergen’). Each ‘dose’ acts like a pick-me-up, and the individual rarely gets to experience the full reaction. This can set up what has been described as an allergic addiction. Think of an alcoholic, or someone addicted to any other drug – when the effects of the first dose start to wear off, they crave their next ‘fix’, and feel better again as soon as they have had it. Unfortunately, with food sensitivities as with alcoholism or drug abuse, the ‘fixes’ eventually become less effective. The individual feels more and more generally unwell as the bodily systems become worn out with the constant stress of coping with the allergen or the toxic effects of the drug. Food sensitivities are often ‘unmasked’ by accident when people start a restrictive diet. For instance, wheat, corn (maize) and other grains are common food sensitivity culprits. Since these foods are often excluded in the initial stages of low carb diets, low carb diets



are particularly likely to expose these sensitivities. On starting their diet, low carb dieters often experience symptoms such as muscle aches, headaches, depression and fatigue or just generally feel unwell. They often do not realise that these are simply withdrawal symptoms – without knowing it, they are going ‘cold turkey’. The withdrawal symptoms pass in a few days, however, after which the individual will often feel better and more energetic than before. The feelings of unwellness are not the diet’s ‘fault’ – it is just that excluding certain foods may well have exposed a previously unrecognized food sensitivity.

Top food sensitivity suspects – the foods we like and eat most

One of the most interesting aspects of food sensitivity is that the foods we eat the most often (and like the best) are the ones we are most likely to be sensitive to. (This is related to the allergic addiction mentioned earlier.) Foods which are most often the culprits (in countries where these are staple foods) are: wheat, corn (maize), milk, eggs and soya. If you don’t feel you eat these foods that frequently, just look at the following menus to see how easy it is to eat wheat at every single meal: Breakfast Cereal (wheat-based) followed by sausages, egg and bacon

(wheat in the sausages)

Mid-morning snack A biscuit/cookie or chocolate candy bar (both likely to contain wheat)

Lunch Chicken and salad wrap (wheat in the wrap) plus a mug of soup (soup thickened with wheatflour)

Afternoon snack Crackers and cream cheese (wheat in the crackers)

Dinner Lasagna for dinner (wheat in the pasta, in the white sauce and possibly the meat sauce too)

Dessert Apple pie (wheat in the pastry)

Another experiment to do, if foods are shop-bought rather than home made, is to look at the labels. You may be surprised at just how many of the shop-bought versions of these foods contain corn (cornstarch, maize starch, corn syrup etc) and milk (lactose, casein, whey etc) as well as wheat (often just listed as ‘flour’). It is important to understand that food sensitivities are specific to the individual. Wheat is certainly the top offender, but not all people with food sensitivities have a problem with wheat. Note that wheat sensitivity as described here is not the same as coeliac disease. People who have coeliac disease are unable to tolerate gluten, which is the protein found in wheat and certain other grains such as rye and barley. The gluten damages the lining of the small intestine in these people. This prevents the nutrients in their food being absorbed properly and the only way to remain well is to eliminate the gluten completely from their diet.



How food sensitivities can sabotage your diet

The immune system response that the offending food causes has many effects in the body. The main one is to cause inflammation and water retention. Some experts have described overweight people who have food sensitivities as ‘waterlogged’. Some maintain that what most people assume are rolls of fat are in fact tissues largely made up of cells swollen with water. It is possible to lose seven pounds or more in weight fast and permanently, if you eliminate foods you are sensitive to. We talk more about the histamine release that causes this water retention later in the chapter about fluid retention. Another way in which food sensitivities can affect your weight is by making you more resistant to insulin. Patrick Holford, internationally known nutritionist and founder of the Institute for Optimum Nutrition in London, explains the connection in ‘Hidden Food Allergies’. What happens is that your body releases lots of immune system messenger cells called cytokines to deal with the allergy, and cytokines amongst other things blunt your response to insulin, causing your pancreas to pour out more and more of the hormone. This increases fat storage on the one hand and prevents release of the stored fat when you diet on the other hand. The immune system reaction also leaves toxic debris in your bloodstream, which must be dealt with by your liver. Eventually, your liver’s detoxification capacity can become overloaded, and your body dumps the toxins in your fat cells – the least harmful place. This makes your fat cells slower to metabolize fat, and more likely to retain it, thwarting your diet.

Food cravings

Food sensitivities can also jeopardise your weight loss attempts by giving you cravings for the offending food. As we explained earlier in the section on allergic addiction, the ‘masking’ effect of a food sensitivity can suppress the symptom, making the individual feel better. Unfortunately, the effect does not last long, and all too soon the individual starts to get more cravings for the food. Because eating the food once again gives the individual a pick-up, it rarely occurs to him or her that the food may actually be causing harm. And even if the individual does realise that a food may be having an unwanted effect, the thought of eliminating that food from the diet seems impossible while in this addicted state. How many people have you heard say ‘Oh, but I could never give up my bread/potatoes etc’? It is only when a person with an allergic addiction has eliminated the food entirely from the diet for a period of time that the cravings subside. Up to that point, declining to eat that food at any given point in time is truly an unequal fight against a biochemical imperative. Only when the allergic addiction has been broken does refusing the food become a simple matter of willpower, in the way that a non-addicted person would experience the decision of whether or not to eat the food. An interesting point is that some food sensitivity experts believe that failure to overcome an addiction to alcoholic drink may be the manifestation of a food sensitivity. If a food to



which the alcoholic is allergic-addicted happens also to be an ingredient of his favourite alcoholic drink, then continually eating that food may in fact be continuing to fuel his alcoholic addiction. An example is whisky, which is made from barley, corn or wheat grains. As we have seen, these are common allergens and likely to be eaten frequently in the diet as bread or other bakery products. It is easy therefore to see how a food sensitivity (or two, as if you have one, you are very likely to have others) can lead you to take in excess calories or carbohydrates, or to start a diet only to give it up after a short time. If you feel you really can’t give up a specific food, such as bread, or potatoes, then it is fairly likely that you have an allergic addiction to it!

Diagnosing and eradicating food sensitivities

So if you struggle to lose weight despite a low food intake, or suffer from ‘compulsive’ eating fuelled by food cravings (we discuss ‘compulsive’ eating in more detail later) then food sensitivities could be something to investigate. In the absence of awareness and proper diagnostic services within mainstream medicine, consulting your family physician is unlikely to be helpful. You have two options, therefore – to go to a private specialist, or to ‘do it yourself’. Either way, beware! There are many less-than-qualified practitioners out there, just as there are many so-called allergy testing services, not all of them effective. Whether you decide to consult an expert, go direct to a testing service, or identify your problem foods by following an ‘elimination and challenge’ diet without expert help, do as much homework as you can beforehand. At the very least, aim to read one or two books on the subject of food allergies/sensitivities. There are plenty of standard reference books for those who welcome scientific detail, but many of the renowned experts in the field have also produced less technical and very readable books written for a lay audience. Examples are ‘Eat Fat and Grow Slim’, ‘Not all in the Mind’ by Dr Richard Mackarness and ‘Hidden Food Allergies – Is What You Eat Making You Ill?’ by Patrick Holford and Dr James Braly.

In the next chapter, we talk about another problem which is closely connected with food sensitivities and difficulty in losing weight – candida or yeast overgrowth in the gut.




CCaannddiiddaa//yyeeaasstt oovveerrggrroowwtthh

In this chapter: What is candida/yeast overgrowth Is your gut leaky? How yeast overgrowth can sabotage your diet Could yeast overgrowth be your problem? Diagnosing and eradicating yeast overgrowth

What is candida/yeast overgrowth?

To understand what candida/yeast overgrowth is all about, we first need to understand a little about what goes on in our digestive system or ‘gut’. We usually take the gut for granted, not realising just how complex an organ it is, and just how essential a healthy gut is to our overall health. The aspect that we are concerned with here is the gut’s ecological balance, or flora. Although we may not realise it, our gut normally contains billions of micro-organisms, mostly bacteria, which have evolved and adapted to live in our gut. The number of different bacterial species involved is estimated as up to 400, and can amount to 4 pounds / 2 kg in weight. Generally, the relationship is a symbiotic one, meaning that we benefit from these micro-organisms and they benefit from us in return. We provide our gut flora with a home, and our beneficial gut flora perform useful services for us. These include:

Helping to digest lactose (the sugar in milk) Reducing blood cholesterol levels Enhancing macrophage activity (boosting our immune system) Reducing levels of and deactivating potential cancer-causing chemicals Enhancing peristalsis (the natural squeezing action of the gut) Enhancing the digestion and reabsorption of nutrients Balancing estrogen levels and enhancing calcium uptake Protecting against food poisoning Protecting against allergies Manufacturing some vitamins Converting around 20% of thyroid gland output to the active form of the hormone

Some micro-organisms, however, such as the yeast candida, are potentially harmful. Most people have some candida in their gut without trouble, but sometimes the candida can become more numerous than usual and cause problems. This is particularly likely



to happen if you have had multiple or long courses of antibiotics, as antibiotics are not very discriminating – they wipe out the ‘good’ bugs along with the ‘bad’ bugs. This leaves the way wide open for the ‘bad’ bugs to proliferate and eventually to gain the upper hand. Eating a poor diet with lots of sugar and refined carbohydrates can also contribute to overgrowth of candida and other yeasts, by providing them with copious quantities of the sugars that they particularly thrive on. The contraceptive pill, HRT (hormone replacement therapy) and long term use of steroids are other widely accepted risk factors, as they alter the level of acidity required for bacteria to flourish, leaving the way free for the yeasts to proliferate. Chemicals such as aspartame (the artificial sweetener in NutraSweet) and monosodium glutamate or MSG (a taste enhancer found in most savoury processed foods) are also believed to contribute to an imbalance of gut flora, by killing friendly organisms.

Is your gut leaky?

As candida expert Leon Chaitow explains in his book ‘Candida Albicans – Could Yeast Be Your Problem’, yeast overgrowth can also cause a condition called ‘leaky gut syndrome’. Usually, candida exists in its yeast-like form (like a microscopic mushroom). In this form, it is a non-invasive, sugar-fermenting organism and an important part of the very fine balance of micro-organisms that exists for our health. However, when it is able to multiply freely in the gut, it changes into its mycelial fungal form. This pathogenic (disease causing) form produces rhizoids (like small ‘roots’) which penetrate the gut wall. This makes the gut wall permeable. The consequence of this is that large food molecules are able to pass into the bloodstream that would not usually be able to get through the gut wall. The body sees these incompletely digested dietary proteins as invaders, and the immune system produces antibodies to attack them, causing inflammation and other food sensitivity symptoms. Leaky gut syndrome is now believed to be a major factor in a wide variety of disease conditions ranging from auto-immune diseases to chemical and food sensitivities, irritable bowel and digestive disorders. As New York physician Dr Sherry Rogers says, “it can lead to the development of any number of symptoms and diseases. Unfortunately it is rarely looked for.” In an article for the Townsend Letter for Doctors in 1995, Dr Rogers gave a list of the damage that can result from the inflammation caused by leaky gut syndrome. It is easy to see how this can have multiple and wide-ranging effects on the whole body, including your ability to lose weight:

The gut does not properly absorb nutrients, leading to fatigue and bloating The absorption of large food particles creates new food sensitivities and new

symptoms with potential new targets for the storage of antigen antibody complexes such as in the lungs (asthma) or the joints (arthritis).

Damage to the proteins whose job it is to carry minerals across the gut wall, causing potentially, multiple nutrient deficiencies

Damage to or breaching of the gut wall’s detoxification capability, leading to new chemical sensitivities and potential overload of the liver.



Interference to the gut’s protective coating of immunoglobulins, resulting in decreased defence against bacteria, protozoa, viruses and yeasts.

Spread of infection due to the ‘escape’ of bacteria and yeast from the intestine. Formation of auto-antibodies due to leaking of body tissue look-alike antigens: with

the possibility that rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis etc have their genesis this way.

It should be said that candida or yeast overgrowth may not be the only cause of gut inflammation. Irritation of the stomach and/or the intestine is a standard effect of NSAIDs, or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. They include aspirin and ibuprofen-based products. Used as pain relievers for back pain, osteo and rheumatoid arthritis, migraine, gout, menstrual cramps and other common problems, these frequently used drugs relieve the symptoms of inflammation elsewhere in the body, but directly contribute to leaky gut syndrome. By inhibiting the production of chemical messengers called prostaglandins, they succeed in relieving the pain, but affect the gastrointestinal mucus at the same time, which leads to acid and enzymatic attacks on the gut wall, causing inflammation.

How yeast overgrowth can sabotage your diet

So we have seen how the yeasts normally resident in our gut can get out of control and cause problems. Here are some of the ways in which yeast overgrowth can directly sabotage your diet:

Less vitamin synthesis and nutrient absorption due to reduction in numbers of good bacteria. As we will see in more detail in the chapter on malnutrition, a poor nutritional status may hinder weight loss.

The yeast can secrete the powerful toxins ethanol and acetaldehyde into the

surrounding tissues and ultimately the bloodstream. These toxins add to your toxic load which may also play a part in hindering weight loss, as we will see in the chapter on toxic overload.

These two toxins can also alter the ability of the cells to function properly. For

example, glucose may have difficulty passing through the cells, so that insulin cannot do its job properly; thyroid hormones may have similar difficulty, causing the metabolism to slow down; and enzymes which help break down sugar stores may be inactivated or destroyed, causing abnormally high or low blood sugar levels. (We will learn more later about thyroid hormones and enzymes).

Food sensitivities can result from the yeast making your gut leaky. Over-exposure

over time to the toxic waste products of the yeast, particularly acetaldehyde, can also produce food sensitivities. We discussed earlier how there is often a relationship between food sensitivities and difficulty in losing weight.



Could yeast overgrowth be your problem?

The possible symptoms of yeast overgrowth are many and varied. You may not get all of them, but the more you get, the more likely it would be worthwhile to get tested. There are many websites online where you can take symptom and medical history questionnaires to get a preliminary impression of whether yeast overgrowth could be an issue for you. Besides difficulty in losing weight, possible symptoms include continuing occurrences of the following (not an exhaustive list):

Blurred vision Conjunctivitis Hayfever Nasal congestion Sinusitis Headaches Muscle aches Painful joints Chemical sensitivity Bloating Constipation Diarrhea Heartburn Indigestion Irritable bowel

syndrome Dizziness

Rectal itching Bladder infections Cystitis Fluid retention Infertility Oral thrush Athlete’s foot Jock itch Fungal infection of the

nails Dandruff Seborrheic dermatitis Impetigo Psoriasis Dry skin Eczema

Acne Excessive perspiration Urticaria (hives) Menstrual cramps and

irregularities Attention deficit disorder Drowsiness Chonic fatigue Hyperactivity Inability to concentrate Poor memory Anxiety Depression Moodswings Irritability and

nervousness

Naturopathic practitioner Martin Budd has many years of experience treating people for yeast overgrowth, and he finds that hypothyroidism (which we discuss later in the section on hormonal imbalance) frequently co-exists with it. In fact, he believes that a mutual aggravation is often established between the two conditions, making it essential to treat both disorders simultaneously to achieve the maximum benefit.

Diagnosing and eradicating yeast overgrowth

Diagnosing and eradicating a candida or yeast overgrowth problem can be tricky and should preferably be done under the supervision of a medical practitioner with experience in this area. Unfortunately, mainstream medicine does not yet accept that intestinal yeast overgrowth can be a problem, so you will most probably need to look for a practitioner in the private sector. If you do not know anyone who can recommend a suitably qualified professional, it’s probably best to start by searching online for national practitioner organizations. These usually provide lists of accredited practitioners. As there is no single universally used name for physicians who specialize in this area of healthcare, you may need to try various search phrases. The most commonly used names include: nutritional medicine, orthomolecular medicine, clinical ecology, allergy and environmental medicine, allergy clinic. We list some resources in Appendix 2.



An important step towards controlling candida or other yeasts is to follow a sugar free, refined carbohydrate free and yeast free diet. There are specific ‘candida’ diets designed to help, but low carb diets are also a very good place to start – low carb diets are generally free of the sugar and refined carbs that are banned on a candida diet, and they can very easily be made fruit free and yeast free too, which are the other requirements of most candida diets. Eating natural, ‘bio-live’ yoghurt regularly can also help to keep your gut healthy by supplying plenty of the ‘good’ micro-organisms. (Make sure the yoghurt specifies that it contains live organisms – often lactobacillus, acidophilus and bifidobacterium.) Probiotic supplements are also available in tablet and capsule form. (Probiotic simply means a product containing helpful bacteria that assist in balancing the levels of micro-organisms that are found in the gut.) Tablets and capsules tend to supply micro-organisms in the large numbers that you would need if your gut flora were severely out of balance – around 4 to 8 billion organisms per dose. Beware of the cheaper products, though. These often contain significantly fewer organisms than they claim, or a less than acceptable proportion of organisms that are actually viable (live).

In the next chapter we look at how fluid retention can affect your weight and what causes it.




FFlluuiidd rreetteennttiioonn

In this chapter: Your ‘fat’ might be fluid Is toxic build-up your problem? Are your diuretics having the opposite effect? Histamine release – the allergy/sensitivity connection How a congested lymphatic system can cause fluid retention Is your fluid retention caused by too much salt or sugar? The role of protein deficiency in fluid retention Micronutrients and fluid balance Are your medicines causing you to retain fluid?

Your ‘fat’ might be fluid

Weight loss diets are mostly based on the assumption that all our excess weight is fat. However, for many people a significant amount of excess weight can be water. Our bodies consist of 50 to 60 per cent water. This water is in our blood, it is an important constituent of our organs and muscles, and it is found both inside our cells and in the spaces in between. It is also a constituent of our glycogen stores, which are easy-access reserves of energy stored in the liver and muscles. The body can store about half a day’s supply of glycogen. However, if we bring about an energy deficit by going on a diet, our body uses this intermediate store for energy, converting the glycogen back to glucose and eliminating the water that is left over through our kidneys. This release of water from the glycogen stores is what is responsible for the sometimes spectacular ‘weight loss’ seen in the first few days of a diet – and for an immediate regaining of ‘weight’ as soon as we go off the diet and restock our glycogen stores. But this water is not what we mean when we talk about fluid retention. The excess water weight that we are talking about here relates to water retained in the body over and above the amounts in our glycogen stores. It is when water is excess in this way that we call it fluid retention. Nutritional health expert, author and founder of the British Association for Nutritional Therapy Linda Lazarides explains in her book ‘The Waterfall Diet’ that the severe form of fluid retention known as oedema is easily identified by swollen feet and ankles, or pressing your shinbone with your finger to see if it leaves a dent. But in the absence of any particular medical symptoms, mild fluid retention would probably go unrecognized. This is because almost all the body’s tissues have plenty of capacity to hold a little more



water without appearing abnormal. This milder fluid retention can amount to as much as 20 pounds or 9 kg of body weight. A sure sign that you have fluid retention is rapid weight fluctuations. If you suddenly weigh several pounds more or less than you did a day ago, then that is almost certainly due to fluid – only water can cause such a rapid change in your weight. As Linda explains, fluid retention has many causes, but assuming you have no specific medical condition that is causing it, possible reasons can include:

Toxins Diuretics Histamine release (we saw earlier how this can be caused by food sensitivities) Obstruction of the lymphatic system Salt- and sugar-related fluid retention Protein deficiency Micronutrient deficiencies Medicines

Let’s look at these causes now in more detail.

Is toxic build-up your problem?

As we explain more fully later, it is very difficult to live in today’s environment without taking in potentially harmful chemicals (toxins). If your body is finding it hard to cope with the level of toxins, it may retain fluid just to dilute them. Restricting liquids will make your wastes even more concentrated, so this is definitely not the way to deal with fluid retention caused by toxic build-up. Instead, make sure you drink lots of water – at least 5 to 6 pints a day is what’s needed, and more on a hot day or if you have been sweating heavily due to exercise. Don’t wait to feel thirsty, because if you do, you are already dehydrated. Drink your water on its own, or mixed with fresh fruit juice, or as weak fruit or herbal tea.

Are your diuretics having the opposite effect?

Don’t drink tea, coffee and alcohol, which have a diuretic effect (they stimulate the body to excrete fluid more rapidly). Leave diuretic medicines, ‘water tablets’ and herbal products well alone, too. Although diuretics sound like a good idea, in the long term they can actually encourage fluid retention as the body always tries to compensate.

Histamine release – the allergy/sensitivity connection

Histamine is a chemical released by immune system cells called mast cells as part of the body’s defence against potential invaders. Histamine is the chemical that causes the tissue swelling at the site of an insect bite, or the bronchial constriction of an asthma attack. It can also be released if you eat a food to which you are allergic/sensitive.



Dilating your blood capillaries makes them become leaky. More fluid can then pass into the surrounding tissues in order that more invader-repelling white blood cells can be carried to the site of the actual or perceived invasion. If you have allergies/sensitivities to foods you eat several times a day, then this process may take place regularly, and the tissues may not have a chance to release the extra fluid in between.

How a congested lymphatic system can cause fluid retention

The lymphatic system filters out germs and toxins, helps support the immune system and distributes nutrients and fluids around the body. It consists of a network of vessels a bit like blood vessels but without the pumping mechanism that the blood system has (ie the heart). Instead, the lymphatic system relies upon movement of the body – being squeezed by muscles – to move the lymph fluid around. When the lymphatic system is congested, it is hampered in its job of collecting excess fluid from your tissue spaces and returning it to your bloodstream. Sitting or lying motionless for long periods (such as at your office desk, in front of your television, on a long flight or in bed) can have a significant adverse effect on the free flow of lymph, causing fluid build-up. The best way to combat this is to take regular exercise, especially of the upper body, for instance arm swinging and head-rolling. Even just moving your foot a little while you are watching the television can help the lymphatic vessels in your leg to drain excess fluid away. The second most effective way of improving the flow of lymph is massage, but it needs to be gentle as the lymph vessels can be damaged if the massage is too vigorous.

Is your fluid retention caused by too much salt or sugar?

Most people know that consuming too much sodium makes you thirsty. Excess sodium forces your body to crave more and more fluid and it will retain this fluid until it can excrete the excess. But sodium doesn’t just come as the salt that we use in cooking, or the salt that we sprinkle on our food at the table. It is contained in food additives such as the taste enhancer monosodium glutamate, which is found in most savoury processed foods. Sugar, however, is not something most people associate with fluid retention. But according to Linda Lazarides, researchers have found that the high insulin levels stimulated by sugar consumption cause the kidneys to retain sodium. And as we have already said, sodium retention leads to fluid retention.

The role of protein deficiency in fluid retention

Your body uses the amino acids contained in protein foods to make albumin. The job of albumin is to circulate in your blood and attract water from your tissues into the



capillaries (small blood vessels). It also prevents water from leaking from your capillaries back into your tissues. So an adequate intake of protein is important for ensuring that your body has enough albumin for anti-fluid retention purposes.

Micronutrients and fluid balance

Good fluid balance depends on adequate amounts of micronutrients, which is a collective name for the vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids and other substances that your body needs to function well. As we will read in the next chapter, micronutrient deficiencies are very common, even in people who believe they eat a healthy diet. Micronutrients that have been found to cause fluid retention when they are in short supply in the body include:

Vitamin B6 Deficiency is particularly likely in those taking anti-TB (tuberculosis) medications, in those who drink a lot of alcohol and in those who take the contraceptive pill. Pregnancy, heart failure and exposure to radiation are also recognized as leading to higher requirements for vitamin B6. A deficiency in this vitamin can also prevent your red blood cells from absorbing magnesium.

Magnesium Several hundred enzyme reactions in the body depend on magnesium, and deficiency in this mineral is very common. Most people eat a diet low in magnesium-rich foods such as wholemeal bread, oatmeal, nuts, sesame seeds and dark green leafy vegetables. Magnesium can also be depleted by coffee and the contraceptive pill, but one of the biggest drains on magnesium is stress. The hormones that are triggered by stress such as adrenaline and cortisol lower magnesium levels. The stress we are talking about here is not only emotional stress – anything that stresses the body, such as vigorous exercise, extremes of temperature, pain, excitement or even asthma attacks can increase your need for magnesium.

Potassium Potassium works very closely with magnesium in your cells, in fact so closely that physicians have found they cannot improve low potassium levels in their heart patients unless they first correct any magnesium deficiency. So if you are retaining fluid because you are losing too much potassium, if may be due to an underlying magnesium deficiency.

Are your medicines causing you to retain fluid?

According to Linda Lazarides, fluid retention can result from a large number of prescription medicines, particularly:

Female hormones such as estrogens and progestogens in the contraceptive pill and HRT (hormone replacement therapy),

Painkillers of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory type (NSAIDs) such as aspirin and ibuprofen



Corticosteroids such as prednisolone Blood pressure medications such as propanolol (beta blockers), captopril (ACE

inhibitors), clonidine (central alpha stimulants), minoxidil (vasodilators), nifedipine (calcium channel blockers), frusemide (loop diuretics), thiazide diuretics and potassium-sparing diuretics

Tricyclic antidepressants Cephalosporin and co-trimoxazole antibiotics Acyclovir antivirals

If you think any of these drugs might be causing fluid retention, Linda advises that nutritional and herbal therapy may offer alternatives. However, it is important that you do not stop taking these drugs before discussing it with your medical practitioner, and that you get professional advice on the alternative therapies.

Next we look at how malnutrition could be a factor preventing you from losing weight.




MMaallnnuuttrriittiioonn

Yes, you heard it right! It seems hard to believe that an overweight person is malnourished. But many people in the Western world, despite getting more than enough to eat calorie-wise, are malnourished. (People who are starving, by comparison, are undernourished). The point is, having the right nutritional status is an important pre-requisite for your body to allow shedding of weight. As part of your survival mechanism, your body may interpret an inadequate nutritional status as a reason for conserving itself, rather than letting you reduce it.

In this chapter: How vitamin, mineral and enzyme deficiencies can sabotage your diet Low stomach acid How a low fat diet could be preventing your weight loss Fats – the good and the bad for health and weight loss Trans fats – the real villains

How vitamin, mineral and enzyme deficiencies sabotage your diet

Most people know that vitamins are necessary for good health. But how many know that minerals are just as important? Minerals form the basis of our cells, and for cell reactions to work properly, all of the necessary vitamins and minerals have to be present together and in the correct concentrations. In the 60s, Professor Linus Pauling, winner of two Nobel prizes, realised the importance of minerals. He summarised his research findings as follows: ‘You can trace every sickness, every disease and every ailment to a mineral deficiency.’ In fact, the job of vitamins is simply to control the absorption of minerals – so without minerals, vitamins have no job to do. But that’s not the whole story. There is a further group of substances we need called enzymes. Enzymes are protein substances that cause chemical transformations. Without the action of enzymes, very little would happen to our metabolism. We would simply consist of a mass of inert chemicals. Enzymes are usually classified into three types: metabolic enzymes, digestive enzymes and food enzymes. The first two types we make ourselves, but the third type comes from our food. Found in natural, unprocessed foods, enzymes help release the vitamins



and minerals they contain, so that they can be absorbed through the gut walls into the blood and then into the cells. So, as we can see, a less than adequate supply of vitamins, minerals or enzymes will lead to an impaired nutritional status. Our body is likely to interpret this as a situation where weight should be conserved, not shed! Not to mention that the missing nutrients may be the very ones that are required for the complex biochemical processes that must occur for stored fat to be metabolized and released for energy. If these are missing, our fat stores may stay put however hard we try to create a calorie deficit. And as we also saw in an earlier chapter, depletion of our enzyme stores is thought to be a significant factor in the development of food sensitivities, which can also affect our ability to lose weight. Unfortunately, getting the right vitamins, minerals and food enzymes is not easy. For instance, food enzymes are destroyed by heat. If we cook all our food, the digestive enzymes we make ourselves must do all the work to ensure that the minerals and vitamins we take in can be used by the body. We can also become deficient in digestive enzymes as a result of the ageing process. This can deplete our reserve pool of metabolic enzymes and divert them from their other roles. What about vitamins and minerals? Don’t we get enough of these if we eat healthily? We often hear that ‘you get all the vitamins you need from a healthy balanced diet’, but very few specialists in nutritional and environmental medicine believe this. Patrick Holford is an internationally known nutritionist, author of over 20 health books, and founder of the Institute for Optimum Nutrition in London. As Patrick says, ‘You simply can’t guarantee that the nutrients you need are in your food’. Why is this the case? Surely a carrot is a carrot, and an apple is an apple? Well, yes they are, but today’s carrots and apples are very different in nutrient content from the ones our ancestors, or even just our grandparents ate. It’s all down to modern intensive farming methods, which deplete the soil of nutrients. Shockingly, the declining nutrient content of our food is not new news. As long ago as 1977, a US Department of Agriculture Report stated: ‘… a varied diet will not provide all the essential trace elements…’. More recently in 1992, a report from the First Rio Earth Summit documented ‘continuing major declines in the mineral values in farm and range soils, throughout the world’. In 1995, a national survey among children in the UK conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture, Farming & Fisheries showed deficient intakes of a whole range of essential nutrients, with 89% deficient in zinc, 57% in iron, 46% in iodine, 35% in magnesium, 34% in vitamin C and 24% in calcium. Farmers do of course add fertilisers to the soil to improve soil fertility. But the chemical fertilisers they use only include potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen. These are the chemicals needed to ensure that the crops produce the maximum harvest for the farmer. Unfortunately, this leaves out all the essential and trace minerals which humans need but which are not essential for crop growth.



Even organic farming may not be able to replace one hundred per cent of the depleted minerals. So fruits, vegetables or other raw foodstuffs today may look much like the versions eaten by our forebears, but they are significantly inferior in nutrient content. Adding to the soil depletion problem, pesticides and herbicides are used in quantity to ensure that the all-powerful supermarket chain buyers will not encounter a solitary bug or weed when they inspect the crop. Unfortunately, pesticides and herbicides interfere with a plant’s ability to absorb the few nutrients that now exist in the soil, by killing beneficial soil micro-organisms. Eating organically produced food is a way of at least improving our chances of eating foods with a reasonable nutrient content, as well as avoiding the chemical residues. We should also bear in mind that prescribed medications often create vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Diuretics can cause potassium to be lost in the urine. Antacids prevent the absorption of vitamins A and B Complex. Antibiotics can cause the depletion of vitamin K, iron, calcium and magnesium. The contraceptive pill uses up vitamins B12, B6, C, folic acid and zinc. So, to help ensure that our nutrient status is not a barrier to weight loss, we have two options. The first is that we can all take vitamin and mineral and, possibly dietary enzyme supplements. (Our generally poor absorption of nutrients from supplements, and the very large number of pills and capsules we would have to take to cover all the essential elements are further issues too complex to cover here). The second, and better option is to do all we can to improve the nutrient content of our diet. We can do this in three ways:

By eating organic produce By choosing fresh and home-made foods over processed, shop-bought ingredients

and ready-meals By including lots of enzyme-rich ‘living foods’ such as fresh raw fruits and vegetables,

raw seeds, sprouted seeds and seaweeds in our diet. Find out more about living foods from ‘Living Food For Health’ by well-known nutritionist and broadcaster Dr Gillian McKeith.

Which, then, are the most important vitamins and minerals for weight loss? This topic is too complex to deal with in detail in this book, but the following is a guide to the nutrients which are believed to be particularly important.

Magnesium Our early ancestors are estimated to have taken in four to seven times as much magnesium as we get in the average Western diet. Food processing, non-organic agricultural methods and long term food storage are known to affect the amount of this mineral in our soils and in our food. As a result, magnesium deficiency is widespread. And yet, magnesium has already been identified as a required factor for more than three hundred enzymatic (biochemical) reactions which take place in our bodies. Without enough magnesium, most if not all of the body’s delicate systems are likely to be off balance, or even unable to function.



One of the problems that magnesium helps to counter is insulin resistance, which is becoming well recognized as a major cause of overweight.

Calcium Calcium is an essential nutrient that plays many roles in your body, but it has recently emerged as a key player in weight loss. The beneficial effect of calcium on fat loss appears to relate to correcting a deficiency. Once your calcium intake has reached an optimal level (around 1000 to 1300 mg per day), there is no evidence to suggest that extra calcium over and above this amount is of any benefit. It is also important to remember that the effect does not apply if you are consuming more calories than you burn. The effect also appears to be greater when some (but not necessarily all) of the calcium in your diet is derived from dairy products, rather than food supplements.

Chromium Chromium is also vital for maintaining insulin sensitivity. Together with the B vitamin nicotinic acid (niacin) and tryptophan or other amino acid, it constitutes the glucose tolerance factor (GTF chromium). It decreases insulin resistance and drives circulating glucose into the tissues. Deficiency in chromium is common, and supplementing with it has been found in studies to help the body release fat stores. Chromium also promotes the uptake of amino acids, which are formed when we digest protein foods. This helps to protect and increase lean body mass. As we saw earlier, this is very important for preventing the depression of our metabolic rate, which can sabotage long term weight loss.

Carnitine Carnitine is involved in the burning of fat in muscle cells. Its role is to pick up stored fats and carry them to the mitochondria (fuel burning factories in the cells). In the form of L-carnitine, it is frequently used in weight loss supplements, although there is no universal agreement that it is actually effective in this way. Carnitine is made in the body from the amino acids lysine and methionine, which are likely to be deficient in diets low in animal protein. The conversion to carnitine is also dependent upon vitamin C being available.

Lecithin, choline and inositol These nutrients are called lipotropics. They assist the liver in handling fat. They help to burn fats and generally improve fat metabolism.

Iron Both an overload and a deficiency of iron can cause problems for weight loss. Iron overload is more common than generally thought. It can arise because we have the ability to store iron, but no automatic way of eliminating it when we get too much. It is suggested that this relates back to our early ancestors. They had plenty of easily absorbable iron in their diets, but they did not get overloaded with it because they all had parasites, which were a constant drain on their blood and consequently, their iron stores. Today, we do not generally have parasites to do this job for us, and the excess iron can accumulate in the tissues and organs. If this occurs in the thyroid gland, this may affect weight loss by interfering with the functioning of the thyroid cells. Similarly, excess iron



stored in the pancreas can affect weight loss by causing problems for the insulin-secreting cells that are located there. On the other hand, too little iron can also affect weight loss via the thyroid route. At levels of storage iron (ferritin) below 70, conversion of the inactive thyroid hormone T4 to its active form T3 is significantly reduced and the metabolism boosting properties of the thyroid hormone are blocked. We will see more about thyroid hormones later in chapter 12.

Low stomach acid

We must of course remember that we may not be deficient in certain nutrients simply because our food is deficient in them. It may be that our digestive system is unable to digest or absorb specific nutrients, or even a whole range of nutrients. The problem may alternatively be further along in the chain of events that gets all the correct nutrients to where they are needed in the cells. One example of this would be achlorhydria, which means a lack of sufficient acid in the stomach to digest food and extract the necessary nutrients. Achlorhydria is very common, and becomes more so with age. The main visible symptoms are indigestion, belching and acid reflux or heartburn but the conventional medical establishment usually believes these symptoms are caused by too much rather than too little stomach acid. The symptoms are then treated with drugs that suppress acid production, such as omeprazole, lansoprazole, cimetidine and ranitidine. These drugs may stop the symptoms in the short term but they make the underlying problem of failing digestion worse. If this is an issue for you, then getting it sorted out is a critical step in preparing your body for weight loss (and is critical for your long term health in general). A hydrochloric acid supplement, usually in the form of betaine hydrochloride may be useful but it would be best to visit a holistic or naturopathic nutritional therapist or medical practitioner who is familiar with diagnosing and treating low stomach acid. When talking about nutrition, it is easy to focus on vitamins, minerals and enzymes. However, these are not the only nutrients we must have in our diet. We must also take in a certain amount of fat, and it is important that it is the right kind of fat, as we will see in the following section.

How a low fat diet could be preventing your weight loss

Over the past decades the focus has been on keeping fat intake low both for general health and for weight loss. During this time the prevailing belief has been that raised cholesterol causes heart disease, and that it is saturated fats (those contained in animal fats, eggs, butter, cream and cheese for instance) which are responsible for the raised cholesterol. Other fats (monounsaturated fats such as those in olives, sesame seeds, almonds, peanuts and avocados) and polyunsaturated fats (vegetable oils such as corn, safflower, soy and sunflower) were thought to be less unhealthy as long as you kept them as low as possible. A diet low in total fat was believed to be the only healthy way



to eat, and reducing fat to the lowest level possible was seen as the only logical way to lose weight. It is only now becoming apparent just how wrong this thinking was. Increased scientific understanding has shown that cholesterol does not cause heart disease and that not all saturated fats are ‘bad’ fats. It is also becoming accepted that low fat diets do not guarantee weight loss. Originally, making a diet low in fat was seen as an easy way to reduce calories, because fats contain 9 calories per gram, whilst carbohydrates and proteins contain only 4 calories per gram. Unfortunately, this was misunderstood by the general public, and the myth built up that fat on the body comes from fat in the diet. Many people did not (and still do not) realise that carbohydrates also end up as fat, to be stored in the fat cells, if food intake exceeds requirements. As respected researcher Dr Walter Willett at the Harvard School of Public Health in the US wrote, “Diets high in fat do not appear to be the primary cause of the high prevalence of excess body fat in our society and reductions in fat will not be a solution.” What is less well known is that many experts now believe that low fat diets can actively prevent weight loss, mostly by causing a deficiency in the class of EFAs (essential fatty acids) that are called omega-3. We talk more about these later. So gradually, the myths about fat and low fat diets are being uncovered. As they do so, the initial paranoia about the alleged dangerous levels of fat in low carb/high protein diets is beginning to subside. Indeed, many voices are saying that low carb diets are healthier than the low fat/high carb diet that is currently promoted as healthy eating. As Sylvan Lee Weinberg, MD writes in the March 2004 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, so-called healthy low fat/high carb diets may play an “unintended role in the current epidemics of obesity, lipid abnormalities, type II diabetes, and metabolic syndromes.” His paper in that issue concludes: “This diet can no longer be defended by appeal to the authority of prestigious medical organizations or by rejecting clinical experience and a growing medical literature suggesting that the much-maligned low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet may have a salutary effect on the epidemics in question.” So, in an almost complete reversal of thinking, we are now beginning to understand that an adequate intake of fat is essential for health in general and also for successful weight loss. But we are also starting to understand that it is the kind of fat that matters – and that the old idea of dividing fats into saturated, mono- and polyunsaturated for the purposes of deciding whether they are good or bad for us was a gross oversimplification. Many of the issues surrounding the complex matter of fats are explained in detail by world-renowned researcher on fats Dr Mary Enig in her book ‘Eat Fat, Lose Fat’. Dr Enig explains how the ‘lipid hypothesis’ – the theory that saturated fats and cholesterol in our food raise cholesterol levels in the blood, leading to heart disease – first came to the fore. Despite a lack of good scientific evidence to support it, the lipid hypothesis steadfastly refused to die, and the suggestion is put forward that it was kept alive by the pharmaceutical and food industries, who could see rich pickings from selling cholesterol-



lowering drugs and using inexpensive (polyunsaturated) vegetable oils in processed foods rather than the more expensive (saturated) animal fats and virgin coconut oil.

Fats – the good and the bad for health and weight loss

So we now understand that we need to discriminate between ‘good’ fats and ‘bad’ fats. But identifying which fats we should eat and which fats we should avoid is a very complex issue. For instance, in the case of some fats, it is the proportions in which we eat them which dictate whether they are good or bad for us – our bodies need to be supplied with certain fats in delicately balanced proportions. In other cases, it is not that the fat in question is inherently bad for us. Some fats only become dangerous as a result of the high temperature and chemical processing that they undergo before they appear on our supermarket shelves. Which, then, are the bad and which are the good fats, and which fats are particularly important in terms of weight loss? As mentioned before, so many factors are involved that it is difficult to explain in a concise and black-and-white way. Additionally, it is still very much an evolving subject – much has been discovered about the role of fats in our health, but much remains to be fully understood. Researchers do not all agree with one another, but the general consensus seems to be as follows:

Some fats, such as the EFAs (essential fatty acids) are not only good for us – they are absolutely essential for our health. But we cannot manufacture EFAs ourselves; we have to obtain them from our food.

The most important EFAs are: omega-3 (alpha-linolenic acid), omega-6 (linoleic acid)

and omega-9 (gamma linolenic acid). We need them in exactly the right ratio, but unfortunately our modern processed diets give us many times too many omega-6s in comparison to omega-3s.

Deficiency in omega-3s is therefore very common. They are particularly important

for the brain, and they can also reduce the risk of arthritis, heart disease and certain cancers. They are also important for weight loss. One of the roles of omega-3s is to increase the activity of enzymes that burn fat, while reducing the activity of enzymes that store fat. In fact, internationally acclaimed clinical nutritionist Dr Gillian McKeith tells us in her book ‘Living Food for Health’ “It will be very difficult to lose any excess weight if you are omega-3 deficient.”

Nuts, seeds and vegetable oils provide varying proportions of omega fatty acids.

The best sources of omega-3s are oily fish (such as mackerel, salmon, tuna, herring and sardines) and flax seeds (linseeds). Something that most people are unaware of is that flax seeds contain over twice the amount of omega-3s than fish, as Dr McKeith remarks in ‘Living Food for Health’. Other sources of omega-3s are soya beans and walnuts. Pumpkin, sunflower, sesame and safflower seeds or oils have a higher ratio of omega-6s. Evening primrose oil and borage (starflower) oil contain only omega-6s. Blackcurrant seed oil contains both omega-3s and omega-6s. Hemp seeds provide all three fatty acids in a near perfect ratio – a ‘superfood’ according to Dr McKeith.



Dr Udo Erasmus, renowned expert and researcher on fats, believes that EFAs are critical for good thyroid function (which is important for losing weight, as we will see in the chapter on hormonal imbalance). This is because EFAs are required for the healthy structure of cell membranes, because they increase energy levels in the cells, and because the omega-3s in particular may improve the efficiency of the hormones on the receptor sites. (Receptors are like locks on the entrance to each cell, which are opened by hormone ‘keys’ which have the corresponding shape). In other words, proper levels of EFAs might make the thyroid hormone receptors work better, so that a smaller quantity of thyroid hormone can accomplish the mission.

Dr Erasmus also points to the role that EFAs play in preventing and reducing

inflammation. They make hormone-like eicosanoids that regulate immune and inflammatory responses. Omega-3s in particular have anti-inflammatory effects that can slow autoimmune damage. We have already seen in the chapter about food allergies/sensitivities how problems with your immune system can affect your ability to lose weight.

Examples of ‘good’ fats Polyunsaturated fats of the omega-3 family (sardines, salmon, mackerel, herring,

tuna, fish oils, game animals, flax/linseed oil) Monounsaturated fats (olives, olive oil, avocados, tree nuts and their oils) Saturated fats from quality sources such as meat, poultry, dairy and eggs produced

from free range, grass-fed (as opposed to grain-fed) animals and birds MCFAs (medium chain fatty acids) or MCTs (medium chain triglycerides) such as

those in virgin (unprocessed) coconut oil – see more about MCFAs later.

Examples of ‘bad’ fats Processed polyunsaturated fats such as bottled vegetable oils, corn oil, soy oil, other

cheap cooking oils, margarine, vegetable shortening Saturated fats from poor quality sources such as meat and dairy animals which have

been ‘fattened’ with grain-based feed and hormones Trans fats (we discuss these in detail in the next section).

Fats to select for specific cooking purposes Since we know that heating fats can turn them from good fats into bad fats, it is important to select fats appropriate for the purpose in cooking, as below:

For cooking or pan frying: butter, ghee (clarified butter), virgin olive, sesame and coconut oils, lard and fat that occurs in natural meats and poultry (fat from grain-fed animals is not as healthy as that of free-range animals)

For baking: almond and canola oils, butter, ghee and lard For salads: avocado, almond, canola, hazelnut, macadamia nut, olive, sesame,

walnut and flax seed oils. There is a final point to keep in mind about fats. That is that even the good fats may not be that good, depending on their origin through the food chain. As we will see in the next chapter, we are constantly being exposed to toxins. Our bodies may store these toxins in our fat cells as the safest way to protect our vital organs from their effects. But this does not only happen in humans – it happens in the animals, birds and fish we eat



as well. Since most of these are fed on weedkiller-sprayed crops, fattened up with the help of hormones and protected from disease with liberal use of antibiotics, there are very likely to be traces of these toxins in their fat cells too. So although meat and poultry are not as unhealthy as once feared simply on account of the amount of saturated fat they contain, the quality of that fat may be a concern in terms of its likely burden of chemical residues. Obviously, much of this problem can be avoided by eating organically farmed meat, poultry and fish. (Vegetarianism is not necessarily the answer, as contamination by weedkillers and other chemicals is just as likely in the foods eaten by vegetarians).

MCFAs (medium chain fatty acids) There is much interest in the potential of coconut oil to aid weight loss by boosting the metabolism. According to world-renowned biochemist and expert on fats Dr Mary Enig in her book ‘Eat Fat Lose Fat’, this is due to the presence in coconut oil of a very high proportion of a particular fatty acid called lauric acid – almost 50 per cent. Lauric acid belongs to a category of oils called MCFAs (medium chain fatty acids).or MCTs (medium chain triglycerides) These MCFAs are found predominantly in the tropical oils - coconut, palm and palm kernel oils. MCFAs are special in that they are directly oxidized (burned up and used for energy) by the liver. So your body uses them immediately to make energy rather than storing them in your fat cells as happens with the other types of fatty acids. This makes them less likely to contribute to fat storage than LCFAs (long chain fatty acids), which are contained in the polyunsaturated vegetable oils. This fact is well known in the animal feed business. When animals are fed vegetable oils, they fatten up much more successfully than if they are fed MCFAs. 1998, researchers at McGill University in the USA discovered that MCFAs differ from other fatty acids in another way, too. When MCFAs are metabolized, more energy is used up than the amount of energy they provide. They found that the most rapidly oxidized fatty acid is lauric acid. A study in Japan, reported in the ‘Journal of Nutritional Science Vitaminology’ in 2002, confirmed that consuming MCFAs caused greater thermogenesis (raising the body temperature, thus boosting metabolic rate) than other types of fatty acids. For these and other reasons, Dr Enig advocates adding about three tablespoons of coconut oil daily to the diet, along with foods and/or supplements rich in vitamins A and D and the mineral calcium, as the mainstay of her program for weight loss through long term health improvement. It should be noted that it is virgin, unprocessed coconut oil that we are talking about here, not the hydrogenated type that used to be (and probably still is) found in mass-produced bakery products and many other processed foods. Most dietary guidelines state that coconut oil is bad for you because it is a saturated fat, but this is because the original tests were performed on the hydrogenated version, not on virgin oil. We will see in the next section why hydrogenated oils are unhealthy. So, it is now evident that simply eating a low fat diet does not produce weight loss. The way the body works is much more complex, and this is now beginning to be more widely



accepted. In fact, a low fat diet is more likely to hinder weight loss, by bringing about a deficiency in omega-3s. Of course, high fat diets can also result in an omega-3 deficiency, if they include too many omega-6s or junk fats. So it is important to get the right fats, and in the right ratios in order to be healthy and to stand the best chance of losing weight successfully. As it happens, there may be a certain amount of truth in the belief that fat can make you fat, but not in the way that was originally thought – it concerns the type and quality of the fat and has nothing to do with its high calorie content or ability to ‘move straight from your mouth to your hips’ as was formerly supposed. The fat we are talking about here is a very special kind of fat called trans fat, which we will discuss in the next section.

Trans fats – the real villains

Having said that saturated fats are not the villain we thought they were, there is one type of saturated fat that is really extremely bad for us – trans fat. Trans fats are man-made foods. They are manufactured fats, produced by chemically altering liquid vegetable oils to create a solid fat that lowers the cost and extends the shelf life of foods made with it. They are currently found in margarines, fried foods, virtually all baked goods and many vegetable oils in many countries. Also known as trans-fatty acids, they often appear on food labels as hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. For many years, we ate margarine because we were told it was better for us than butter, which is high in saturated fat. Now we know that not all saturated fats are bad for us, but that the margarines were full of trans fats, which are certainly bad for us. The trouble with trans fats is that they are stiff. As a result, they make our cell membranes stiff too, restricting the necessary movement of the protein structures and hindering their proper function. This is believed to have numerous adverse effects on the workings of our cells, organs and hormones. Trans fats have now been definitely linked to a growing number of degenerative diseases, including heart disease. In fact, trans fats are now considered so dangerous that many countries including the USA, Canada and Denmark have started to ban them from all foods. What is less well known is that researchers believe trans fats also have a specific role in making us fat. They are thought to do this by blocking the uptake of ‘good’ fats such as omega-3 or omega-6. The ‘good’ fats are believed to improve the efficiency of thyroid hormones and insulin on the receptor sites. So even though we might eat these good fats regularly, we might not get the benefit of them if we continue to eat trans fats as well. The result is not only to make us gain weight easily, but also to prevent our fat stores from being broken down for energy when we go on a diet.

Now that we have talked about the nutrients that we need for a healthy body, we discuss what happens when our digestive systems are exposed to chemicals for which we have no use and which are in fact potentially harmful – toxins.




TTooxxiicc oovveerrllooaadd aanndd oovveerrbbuurrddeenneedd

eelliimmiinnaattiioonn ssyysstteemmss

In this chapter: Where toxins come from and how we deal with them The effect of additives and chemical residues on elimination How safe are synthetic ingredients? Acid/alkali balance – a potential diet saboteur Dehydration and its effects The dangers of constipation How detoxing can aid your weight loss

Where toxins come from and how we deal with them

Toxins (poisons) are in our environment (air, water, soil and food) all the time. They come from industry and modern methods of farming. They come from the scientific technology which brings us a constant stream of manmade materials like plastics. They even come from the pharmaceutical drugs which are intended to cure us. We cannot avoid all potential toxins, of course, and the burden of dealing with them falls on our systems of elimination. As we go about our daily lives, our bodies are constantly working to ensure that the toxins we take in do not cause damage. Our liver plays a crucial part in protecting us from these toxins. One of its most important roles is to break toxins down in a way which then allows them to be excreted through our kidneys. However, the kidneys can only excrete chemicals which dissolve in water, and some toxic substances such as pesticides dissolve only in fat. In this case, the liver has to do extra work to break the substances down into different chemicals which do dissolve in water. But the ability of people’s livers to do this can vary 60-fold. Where these chemicals cannot be properly broken down by the liver, the body stores them where they can do the least harm – in its fat cells. So it follows that some people will accumulate far more toxins in their body fat than others. Now, when we go on a weight loss diet, what we are actually doing is trying to get our bodies to reduce the size of our fat cells by using up this stored energy. Unfortunately the burning up of this energy also releases the toxins into the bloodstream and the organs of elimination. If we have a high ‘toxic load’, our bodies may be reluctant to let us shed weight as part of our natural defence mechanism. In the following sections we will see how the way we live today makes it difficult for us not to have a high toxic load.



In addition to our liver and kidneys, our digestive system (gut), lungs, skin and the lymphatic system also form part of our elimination systems. When trying to lose weight it is important to help the elimination systems work as efficiently as possible. As we have seen, the body likes to store many of the toxins we ingest in our daily lives out of harm’s way in our fat stores. Therefore, if we are to lose weight successfully, our elimination systems need to be in top condition, to cope with the extra work that comes their way when the toxins are released on breakdown of the fat stores.

The effect of additives and chemical residues on elimination

Anyone who eats mass-produced processed foods today ingests a frightening array of additives which manufacturers add to their products to enhance colour, texture and taste and increase keeping qualities. These usually have to be listed on food packaging. What we won’t see on the label, unfortunately, is the residues from chemicals used while raising or storing the plants, seeds, fruits or animals our food comes from. Whether in residues from pesticides or herbicides, antibiotics or hormones, our food is liberally contaminated with these and there is little or no control over the levels. We do not know whether ingesting these chemicals will cause serious lasting effects. But we can be sure that they put unnecessary strain on our organs of elimination which, in turn, can impede our attempts to lose weight. We should keep in mind that eating and drinking are not the only ways in which we ingest manmade chemicals. Chemicals are constantly entering our bodies through our lungs and skin. It is important to recognize too that it is not necessarily outside air pollution that is the biggest problem. Studies have shown that the concentration of chemical contaminants is 400 times greater in the home than outside it. This is due to the huge range of chemicals given off by the artefacts of modern living, such as synthetic fabrics, curtains, floor coverings, plastic furniture, cleaning materials, aerosol sprays, air fresheners, perfumes, deodorants and other personal care items. It is estimated that there are now over 70,000 chemicals in our environment, with another 1,000 to 2,000 being added each year. When we think that serious chemical production only began in the nineteenth century, and that in 1890 the average town-dwelling human could be expected to come into contact with only about 150 chemicals, we can well understand how this sudden increase in evolutionary terms may be adversely affecting our body’s systems.

How safe are synthetic ingredients?

Colloquially dubbed ‘frankenfoods’, foods which are made from ingredients invented by food technologists in laboratories are big business. These non-natural ingredients are found everywhere in processed foods of all types, but they are particularly likely to be



found in diet foods. This is because synthetic ingredients are often used in an attempt to produce a low carb, low calorie or low fat version of the regular product. Synthetic ingredients have not been around for long enough for us to know whether they present a problem for our health. But many people avoid them, reasoning that as our bodies were not designed to handle foods that do not exist in nature, we will stress our bodies by eating them.

Acid/alkali balance – a potential diet saboteur

An important factor in ensuring our elimination systems work at their best is our acid/alkali balance or pH. The body works best at a pH of 7.46, with 7.49 being extremely alkaline and pH 7.40 being extremely acidic. Very small changes in pH make a significant difference to our health. Note that the natural acidity of a food is different from what we are talking about here – the ability of the food to become ‘acid-forming’. When a food is metabolized (burnt to produce energy), what is left is a mineral ash. When this ash is rich in calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium, it is ‘alkali-forming’. When it contains large amounts of chlorine, phosphorus and sulphur it becomes ‘acid-forming’. High protein foods and some grains, wheat in particular, leave an acidic residue when they are metabolized, so it is very common for people to be too acidic. The following lists show which foods belong to which category:

Alkaline ash-forming foods All fruit except cranberries, plums and prunes Milk Egg white Molasses Some nuts (almonds and brazils) All vegetables, including green beans, peas and potatoes Sea vegetables Fungi (mushrooms) Sprouted seeds and pulses (legumes) Kidney beans, adzuki beans, soybeans Tofu Millet Tamari, miso and salt Coffee



Acid ash-forming foods All grains (such as wheat, rye , barley, oats, rice, corn) Buckwheat Olives Groundnuts, fava beans, lentils, garbanzo beans Cranberries, plums, prunes Alcohol All meat All fish and shellfish Eggs (whole or yolks) Sugar (refined) and honey Walnuts

Neutral foods Yoghurt Butter and margarine Seeds (sesame, pumpkin, linseed or flax seed and sunflower) Some cheeses Tea

Dehydration and its effects

Many people are chronically dehydrated, and this coupled with an acidic system can seriously prejudice the efficiency of our elimination systems. It is essential for the efficient functioning of our bodies that we keep ourselves properly hydrated. Waiting to feel thirsty before having a drink is not a good idea, as our sense of thirst is not particularly strong. If we get as far as feeling thirsty, we are already dehydrated. It is also easy to mistake feelings of thirst for hunger. Drinking plenty of plain water is the best way to avoid dehydration – at least eight glasses per day. Very obese people need proportionately more.

The dangers of constipation

Constipation also contributes to the overburdening of our elimination systems. Where harmful waste products remain in the gut for longer than the optimal time for digestion, levels of toxins can rise in the blood. This creates even more work for the kidneys. Allergens also spend more time in contact with your gut lining, where they can cause irritation and inflammation. So take action if you are prone to constipation. Keeping well hydrated is an important item on the list. So is ensuring that you include plenty of vegetables, salads and fruits in your diet. If you eat bread, pasta, pastry, rice and other foods made from grains, swap white, highly refined versions for brown, wholegrain versions which contain more fibre or ‘roughage’. If you need extra fibre, try a good fibre supplement such as psyllium husks. Note that added fibre such as wheat bran, oatbran, rice bran or soya bran can have the opposite



effect to that intended in some people, particularly if they have an allergy/sensitivity to these foods.

How detoxing can aid your weight loss

As we saw in the previous section, in today’s environment our bodies bear a huge burden of toxic chemicals which must be put out of harm’s way or broken down into more manageable chemicals which can then be excreted. It is obviously better to avoid taking in toxins as much as possible in the first place, but undergoing a ‘detox’ programme is one way to help our bodies get rid of a build-up of toxins. ‘Detox’ diets aim to reduce the amount of toxins you take in and encourage your body to eliminate old toxins. This generally means following as natural a diet as possible for a period of time to reduce the load on the organs of elimination, drinking plenty of pure water and supplementing with micronutrients to help support the process. It also involves cutting out toxic substances such as nicotine, caffeine and alcohol. Certain supplements and herbs that specifically aid liver function and help detoxification may also be used. UK television personality Carol Vorderman in her book ‘Detox for Life’ explains how undergoing a detox program of this sort resulted in her going down two dress sizes – without dieting. To summarise, then, here’s how we can help our elimination systems do their work and ensure that they are not a barrier to weight loss:

Help your body maintain its alkaline status by including good quantities of alkaline residue-producing foods and reducing the acid-forming ones.

Keep your body properly hydrated at all times. Take action if you are prone to constipation. Detox from time to time, or better still, reduce your intake of toxins in the first place.

In the next chapter we learn about more ways in which genetic inheritance can make you less able to tolerate certain foods than the next person. It seems to be very much the case that ‘one man’s meat is another man’s poison’.




GGeenneettiicc iinnhheerriittaannccee

In this chapter: The evolution of Man and his diet Blood type – mirror to Man’s evolutionary diet Lectins – your hidden danger foods Metabolic typing – find the diet that best suits your metabolism

The evolution of Man and his diet

When Man first evolved (in Africa, possibly 500,000 years ago), there was only one metabolic type – that of the Hunter Gatherer. This was reflected in the fact that there was only one blood type, as well – type O. These early ancestors of ours ate animal meat, grubs and wild plants. First they ate scraps left behind by predatory animals, then they learned to use tools to hunt for animals themselves. Their digestive and immune systems were designed to handle the environment in which they found themselves and since everybody lived in a similar climate with similar food sources they shared very similar physiology, including their blood type. Once our ancestors became skilled at hunting, they had reached the top of the food chain. With no natural predators (apart from themselves), the population exploded. Soon they had exhausted the supplies of game within their hunting range, competing for food became an issue and by 30,000 BC bands of hunters had begun to migrate. A shift in the trade winds changed the African Sahara from good hunting land into a desert, which caused further migration. As previously frozen areas in the north became warmer, so some of our ancestors were able to move into them. By 20,000 BC, the Hunter Gatherers had moved fully into Europe and Asia. They had soon hunted down the large game to the point where they had to find other sources of food. The diet changed to an omnivorous one – a mixed diet of grubs and small animals, nuts, roots and berries. Where bands had reached coastlines, lakes and rivers, fish became part of the diet. By 10,000 BC, humans had settled in every main land mass with the exception of Antarctica. With the increase in population, genetic variation was able to accelerate, and the move to different climates and different diets caused, via the process of natural selection, the development of populations with different physiological characteristics. For instance, the humans who had migrated to colder, more northern areas developed lighter coloured skin, because lighter skin was better able to metabolize Vitamin D in the shorter hours of sunlight. Similarly, the different diets and environmental conditions caused differences



to appear in the digestive and immune systems of the various populations. As part of this same process of genetic variation and natural selection, new blood types began to develop.

Blood type – mirror to Man’s evolutionary diet

The appearance of these new blood types coincided with critical points of human development. First blood type A appeared, in Asia or the Middle East, between 25,000 and 15,000 BC. As our ancestors moved to a more settled way of life, they were able to cultivate grains and keep livestock. This major change in diet and environment caused natural selection to favour genetic mutations in the digestive tracts and immune systems of this population which made them better able to tolerate and absorb cultivated grains and other agricultural products. The appearance of blood type A was part of this genetic development. Blood type B appeared sometime between 10,000 and 15,000 BC in the Himalayas. It may have developed initially as a response to the climatic changes experienced by early humans who moved from the hot savannahs of eastern Africa to the cold of the Himalayas. This blood type was soon characteristic of the steppe dwellers who lived in the Eurasian plains. Blood type AB did not appear until 500 BC to 900 AD, when populations with Type A and Type B blood came into contact and intermingled. So each new blood type was an evolutionary response to a major dietary or environmental change experienced by our ancestors. The significance of this is that looking at our blood types today gives us an indication of the type of diet to which we as individuals are genetically and metabolically best suited. If we are blood type O, the oldest and also most common type, it is logical that a Hunter Gatherer type diet (meat, fish, vegetables and fruit, but no grains, pulses or dairy) is the one to which we are best adapted. From similar analysis of the diets of the various populations, it can be seen that individuals with blood type A tend to have digestive and immune systems which are better adapted to grains and vegetarianism. Meanwhile type B thrives on Hunter Gatherer foods as well as grains, pulses, vegetables and fruits, and, unlike types O and A, handles dairy foods well. Type AB, the most recent type, is adapted to a mixed diet. We should however keep in mind that there is great variation within these metabolic ‘types’. Just because someone has inherited a Hunter Gatherer type metabolism it does not mean that they cannot tolerate grains, pulses or dairy at all. It just means that on average, Hunter Gatherer types do better on a diet based on meat, fish, vegetables and fruit. But there will always be people at the extreme ends of the scale. For instance, some people may feel and be very much better on this sort of diet than on a diet based on grains, pulses and dairy, whilst for other Hunter Gatherer types it will not make such a difference.



Lectins – your hidden danger foods

Dr Peter J D’Adamo goes even further with blood type analysis in his book ‘Eat Right for your Type’ in terms of identifying foods which are likely to cause problems for our digestive and/or immune systems. He explains that each person has antibodies to antigens in their blood (a substance perceived by the immune system as an invader needing to be neutralised). The type of antigen varies depending on blood type. (Antigens are in fact the chemical markers used to distinguish the blood type). Now, some foods contain a class of chemicals called lectins. Specific lectins can interact with the antigens of specific blood types. When you eat a food containing lectins that are incompatible with your blood type antigen, the lectin makes cells in the target organ clump together. They are then targeted for destruction by your immune system, because it sees them as invaders. According to Dr D’Adamo, this can have various effects in your body, such as interfere with your digestion, trigger inflammation, slow down the rate of metabolism, interfere with insulin production and upset hormonal balance such as thyroid levels. Examples of the specific lectin-containing foods that are incompatible with each blood type are too numerous to list here but can be found in Dr D’Adamo’s book, as can more detailed information on the overall diets to which each blood type is best suited.

Metabolic typing – find the diet that best suits your metabolism

From the preceding sections we can see the potential for our weight loss efforts to be hindered in two ways:

Eating a diet which our individual genetic inheritance means we are not set up to handle

Eating foods containing those lectins which react unfavourably with our blood type. The concept of eating right for your type, or ‘metabolic typing’, is not new. Ayurvedic medicine (the 5,000 year old East Indian system of medicine) recognized its importance. Treatment involved identifying one’s metabolic type before it addressed the symptom or disease being complained of. Similarly, Chinese traditional medicine, ancient Egyptian medicine and Greek medicine from the time of Hippocrates all recognized that people have differing metabolic types. Sadly, this understanding seems to have been largely forgotten in modern Western medicine, where the ‘one type fits all’ concept of treatment rules. Happily, the importance of metabolic typing is starting to become recognized once again. Dr D’Adamo has been far from alone in his research into the topic. Many other medical researchers have produced papers explaining the importance of this concept during the last century, and their writings are now beginning to arouse a lot of interest. Further information can be found on the website of Dr Joseph Mercola.



In the next chapter we discuss exercise. It is often promoted as the magic answer, the missing link in the weight loss puzzle, and especially as the cause of much of the childhood obesity that exists today. But many say that this is what the food industry wants you to think. Perish the thought that overweight might have more to do with the food we eat, or that we might start eating less of the foods full of refined flour and sugar, trans fats, artificial additives and other toxic chemicals from which the food industry makes most of its profits!




EExxeerrcciissee

In this chapter: The real reason why exercise is important Which type of exercise is best?

Did you know that exercise can halt your weight loss! But here we are only talking about an apparent halt in weight loss. What happens is that, if you start doing more exercise of the strength or weight training kind, you will be replacing fat with muscle. Since muscle is denser than fat, it weighs more volume for volume. So the scales may show no weight loss for a while – although you will probably see an improvement if you check with a tape measure (or with a body fat monitor). So don’t abandon your diet because you think it’s not working, when in actual fact, you’re improving your muscle/fat ratio!

The real reason why exercise is important

Exercise is often promoted as the magic answer, the missing link in the weight loss puzzle. But how effective is exercise really in helping you to lose weight? Have you tried lots of strenuous exercise, only to find that it seems to make little difference? Have you ever calculated exactly how many hours of jogging it would take to work off the calories in one small dietary indiscretion, and decided it wasn’t worth it – or had the treat anyway, in the full knowledge that you wouldn’t be doing the 10 mile run afterwards? The trouble is, we’ve got so used to thinking about exercise in terms of how many calories we can burn off playing squash for an hour or walking the dog for half an hour, we’ve missed the really important point altogether. As we saw earlier, the big problem with diets is their tendency to depress metabolic rate. Your body reacts to a period of significant calorie restriction by burning its fuel more efficiently, and the more times you go on a diet, the better it gets at doing this. Your metabolic rate can end up forty-five per cent slower than it was when you started. You will need less food just to maintain the new weight, and losing any further weight will become even harder. So how can exercise help, other than just by using up a few more calories? Well, we saw how critical it is to burn stored fat rather than breaking down lean muscle tissue when we go on a diet. If the weight you lose is muscle and not fat, then your body needs less energy to maintain itself and provide energy for your daily activities, and your metabolic rate drops. It is therefore important to protect as much muscle tissue from being lost as possible, and we have seen that eating enough protein is critical to ensure



that your body does not raid your muscle tissue for your energy needs. But what if we can actually enhance our metabolic rate by building more muscle? If we build more muscle, doesn’t that mean we get a double bonus, because the muscle will use up more energy than the fat it replaces? This is exactly where exercise comes in – but it has to be the right sort.

Which type of exercise is best?

Resistance exercise and aerobic cardiovascular exercise The type of exercise that builds muscle is resistance exercise (weight or strength training). The other type of exercise is called cardiovascular or aerobic exercise (the kind that makes you breathless such as running or cycling). The exact effects of the different types of exercise continue to be hotly debated, but there is general agreement that resistance exercise is much more important in helping long term weight loss, because it increases your REE (resting energy expenditure) or basal metabolic rate. At this point perhaps I should explain a little about the terms used in relation to metabolic rate. You may come across various terms in books or online, and wonder whether they all mean the same thing or not. In actual fact, basal metabolic rate is technically not exactly the same as REE (resting energy expenditure) or RMR (resting metabolic rate). However, REE (or RMR) is what most people mean when they refer to basal metabolic rate. They are close enough for practical purposes. To get back to exercise, there is no doubt that the aerobic sort is very beneficial. In particular, it gives your heart and lungs a good workout. It also helps burn surplus calories, and some experts believe the calorie-burning effects can last for some hours after the exercise session has finished. But it does not have the muscle-building, basal metabolism-boosting effect that resistance exercise offers. (Having said that, a very specific form of cardiovascular exercise that triggers release of HGH (human growth hormone) may play a part in the building of muscle. We talk more about this later.) You do not necessarily have to lift free weights and get a body rippling with muscles as a result to get the metabolism-boosting effect of resistance exercise. Gentle exercise such as circuit training using hydraulic push/pull machines which produces toned rather than rippling muscles will also do the trick, according to Gary Heavin, founder of Curves. A half-hour circuit training programme specially designed for women, Curves started in the US and has now expanded into many countries of the world due to its popularity and success in helping people lose weight or girth by increasing lean body tissue and decreasing fat. A study carried out by Richard B Kreider, PhD, FACSM at Baylor University in the US concluded that dieters using the Curves circuit training programme in conjunction with a low carb/high protein diet raised their REE significantly, in some cases by as much as 400 calories a day. The high protein/low carb diet element is important because it ensures that hormone levels are optimally balanced. This not only protects against muscle loss but encourages muscle building while losing (ie burning) fat.



On a conventional high carb/low protein/low fat diet, the hormone balance is different, resulting in less fat burning and more loss of lean muscle tissue. This decreases the REE and makes it even easier to regain weight while eating fewer calories.

Anaerobic cardiovascular exercise The specific form of cardiovascular exercise mentioned earlier is a type of extremely intense interval training which triggers the production of HGH, or human growth hormone. HGH promotes and increases the building of new protein tissue. Recent research also suggests it has a role in the metabolism of body fat and its conversion to energy. Dr Joseph Mercola’s Peak 8 training is an example of this very specific type of cardiovascular exercise. It involves warming up for three minutes, exercising extremely fast and hard (so that you feel you cannot possibly go on for another second) for 30 seconds, then continuing exercising at base level for 90 seconds to recover. This cycle is then repeated 7 more times. By the end of the second high intensity round you should be finding it hard to breathe and talk, and by the second or third round you should be starting to sweat profusely (unless a thyroid problem prevents you from sweating much anyway). Here is how it works: There are three different types of muscle fibers, and they are not all worked by the same type of exercise. The three types are: slow twitch, fast twitch (five times faster than the slow fibers) and super-fast twitch (ten times faster than the slow fibers). HGH (human growth hormone is triggered by working the super-fast twitch fibers, and this helps promote the formation of muscle and burning of fat. Your heart uses two totally different processes, the aerobic process and the anaerobic process. Key to the Peak 8 technique is to raise your heart rate up to its anaerobic threshold, which works the super-fast fibers, which then triggers production of HGH. Traditionally performed aerobic cardiovascular exercise, and strength or resistance training only work the slow fibers. Power training, or plyometrics (a type of exercise designed to produce fast, powerful movements) engages the fast fibers, but still does not affect HGH production to any great degree. It is only the third type, the super-fast fibers, that have any major impact on HGH production. Dr Mercola believes that using Peak 8 or similar high-intensity short-burst training can achieve more in 20 minutes two or at most three times a week than traditional cardiovascular training can achieve in hour-long sessions performed five times a week. To learn more about Peak 8 exercise, visit http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2010/11/13/phil-campbell-on-peak-8-exercises.aspx. So the bottom line about exercise is that your body benefits from aerobic exercise in various ways, but you may be better off harnessing the HGH-related benefits of

http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2010/11/13/phil-campbell-on-peak-8-exercises.aspx

http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2010/11/13/phil-campbell-on-peak-8-exercises.aspx



anaerobic cardiovascular exercise instead, coupled with resistance exercise. Here’s a recommendation for what to do if you are not already exercising:

Do resistance exercise for thirty minutes three or four times a week to build more fat-burning muscle and raise your basal metabolic rate.

Free weights, weight machines, hydraulic machines and even rubber bands or tubing

can all help to build muscle. If you don’t have access to any special equipment, remember that gravity resistance counts as well. This means exercises that use the resistance of your own body weight against gravity to increase strength. Examples include push-ups, lunges, squats and sit-ups.

Do aerobic exercise in sessions of at least twenty minutes three times a week for

effective fat burning. (Slow losers may need a longer duration). Beyond sixty minutes and you would probably be better off increasing the intensity or frequency. Or, alternatively:

Use Peak 8 or similar high intensity short-burst techniques to maximise the efficiency

of your cardiovascular workouts, reducing the time spent to a minimum while at the same time triggering HGH to aid muscle building.

Any exercise is of course good for helping to dissipate the ‘flight’ or ‘flight’ hormones in your bloodstream when you are stressed. And stress hormones, as we have already seen, may interfere with weight loss in lots of ways. So going for a run, a swim or a vigorous session in the gym is a good idea when you start feeling the ‘blood boiling’ in your veins!

Next we have a look at why losing weight may be virtually impossible for you, whatever you try, if you have underlying hormonal or ‘glandular’ imbalances.




HHoorrmmoonnaall iimmbbaallaannccee

In this chapter: Could an underactive thyroid be your problem? Leptin and adiponectin Lipoprotein lipase and glycerol Approaching menopause may affect your ability to lose weight Metabolic disrupters Xenoestrogens

There are many hormonal reasons why you might have difficulty in losing weight. It used to be thought that hormonal or ‘glandular’ problems were in most cases just an excuse used by failed dieters to justify their continued obesity. However, this attitude is now changing as the role of various hormones in weight control is becoming better understood. We have already seen how a malfunctioning blood sugar/insulin control system hinders weight loss. Nutritionist Denise Mortimore explains in her book ‘The Complete Illustrated Guide to Vitamins and Minerals’ how this imbalance is now believed to be caused by too many carbohydrates in the diet: “Recent research has shown that the popular emphasis on high carbohydrate diets may put abnormal stress on the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas causing it to regularly secrete too much insulin, lowering blood sugar and causing fatigue. Continued high insulin output can lead to a condition called ‘insulin resistance’, where body cells no longer respond to insulin.” Gary Taubes, prize-winning science writer and obesity researcher, agrees with all this in his book ‘Why We Get Fat And What To Do About It’. However he goes much further in blaming carbohydrates and the insulin-related issues they cause and says “By avoiding the fattening carbohydrates, you remove the force that diverts calories into your fat cells.” He also points out that insulin is one hormone that we can consciously control just by choosing our food carefully. But he also acknowledges that multiple hormones and enzymes are involved in how our bodies regulate the amount of fat we store, and that lowering our insulin levels will not necessarily undo the effects of the other hormones. So what are these other hormones? Well, it is now evident that there are very many hormones (and enzymes too) which are involved in fat regulation. It is unlikely that scientists have discovered them all yet. We certainly do not fully understand how they all interact. In the following sections we discuss the role of just some of the hormones besides insulin that play a part in weight problems. First of all we look at thyroid hormone.



Could an underactive thyroid be your problem?

Hypothyroidism (underactive thyroid) is a deficiency in the functioning of the thyroid gland, which is situated in the front of your neck. The hormones (chemical messengers) that the thyroid produces affect a great number of your body processes and the thyroid gland in turn controls the functions of other glands. The entire endocrine system is a complex interaction of all these glands and their hormones. When the thyroid is underactive, the whole body is thrown off balance. So a well-functioning thyroid is critical to your health and wellbeing. Hypothyroidism is not a rare condition. Official estimates of hypothyroidism in Western populations vary from two to seven per cent, and an increasing rate of incidence is starting to attract the attention of researchers, clinicians and government health departments. In fact, some experts believe hypothyroidism is significantly under-diagnosed. UK-based thyroid specialist and patient support group medical advisor Dr Barry Durrant-Peatfield believes that the true percentage of people developing a degree of hypothyroidism by the time of midlife is probably as high as thirty per cent. Although thyroid health is vital to both men and women, women have a greater tendency to suffer from thyroid problems, especially underactive thyroid. The reasons are unknown. However, it is thought that it may be due to the interplay between the thyroid hormones and the reproductive hormones estrogen and progesterone. Evidence of this is that many women first experience underactive thyroid problems at times of hormonal upheaval such as adolescence, pregnancy and menopause. Some authorities maintain that hypothyroidism is an issue for up to 20 per cent of women in menopause.

Weight control and hypothyroidism One of the functions of the thyroid gland is the regulation of metabolic rate. Put more simply, it controls the way you burn food for energy. An underactive thyroid can therefore play a very significant part in weight problems. Indeed, as Dr Durrant-Peatfield explains in his book ‘Your Thyroid and How To Keep It Healthy’, “An underactive thyroid can produce many different symptoms, but very nearly the most common one is weight gain.” As Dr Durrant-Peatfield further observes: “Weight gain is a feature of hypothyroid illness that causes endless physical and emotional stress and applies to many more people than the medical profession realizes. Without ensuring proper thyroid function, we stand no chance of losing weight, unless somebody shuts us up in a box for a couple of months.” Dr Sanford Siegal, a thyroid specialist who practises in Florida, USA, agrees with Dr Durrant-Peatfield that hypothyroidism is at the root of many more cases of difficulty in losing weight than is generally thought. He explains why this is so in his book ‘Is Your Thyroid Making You Fat?’ Mary Shomon, thyroid patient advocate and author of various books on managing thyroid conditions, agrees: “If you have undiagnosed hypothyroidism, or your condition is



not adequately treated, there is very little you can do to improve your metabolic rate, and therefore lose weight successfully.” Indeed, it is now understood that dieting often causes some degree of hypothyroidism. When the body senses excessive calorie restriction (or exercise), survival mechanisms come into play to protect the body from the ‘famine’. One of the main ways it does this is by down-regulating thyroid function. Instead of the body converting the storage thyroid hormone (thyroxine, or T4) into the active thyroid hormone (triiodothyronine or T3), it converts it into an inactive form called reverse T3 or rT3. This causes the metabolic rate to drop and it may not even return to normal after normal eating or exercise has been resumed unless action is taken to deal with the buildup of rT3. A study published in the American Journal of Physiology, Endocrinology and Metabolism found that just 25 days of dieting reduced T4 to T3 conversion by 50%. Dr Holtorf of the Holtorf Medical Group Centers for Hormone Imbalance, Hypothyroidism and Fatigue consistently finds a reduced basal metabolic rate amongst chronic dieters, many such individuals having a 20 to 40 per cent lower metabolism than expected for their body mass index. This equates to 500 to 1000 fewer calories per day to just maintain weight let alone lose it. Dr Holtorf’s view is that it is very important to determine the extent that a suppressed metabolism is contributing to the inability to lose weight. Unfortunately this kind of thyroid problem cannot be detected by the standard tests for hypothyroidism that are usually offered by mainstream medicine, so it is necessary to seek out physicians such as Drs Durrant-Peatfield, Siegal and Holtorf who have specialized in this area.

Hypothyroid symptoms So how do you tell if you might have an underactive thyroid? Lack of energy, weight gain, dry, pale skin, feeling cold and depression are the symptoms that are most well known. But, as we saw earlier, your thyroid affects very many of your fundamental body processes, and for this reason, it can cause an extremely wide variety of symptoms and signs. However, patients don’t usually suffer from all of them, and in fact, often only show three or so. Many of the symptoms of hypothyroidism are also symptoms of other conditions. It is thought that hypothyroidism is a frequently missed diagnosis, because practitioners are unaware that it is so common and are therefore not on the look-out for it. For this reason, people who complain of putting on weight unexpectedly or being unable to lose weight despite a modest calorie intake are almost automatically assumed to be overeating and told to reduce calorie intake. Unfortunately, this can make their problem even worse, as it signals their body to go into ‘famine syndrome’, which we discussed earlier in Weight Loss Secret #1. Another example of hypothyroidism being a missed diagnosis is depression. Dr Durrant-Peatfield is far from alone in his contention that depression is very often due to undiagnosed hypothyroidism: “Any patient suffering from depression should be routinely assessed for hypothyroidism. There should be no exceptions; half to one third will be found to be hypothyroid, and as a result of treatment, their depression will begin to lift in weeks.” How many people are led to believe that their weight problem is due to ‘comfort



eating’ because they are depressed and sent for psychiatric counseling, when in actual fact they just need their thyroid fixed? Yet another example of hypothyroidism as a missed diagnosis is high cholesterol. Studies show that more than 10 per cent of people with high cholesterol have hypothyroidism, but unfortunately most people with high cholesterol are not tested for hypothyroidism. How many people are scared to go on a high protein/low carb diet rich in ‘good’ fats which could help them lose weight, because they think it will make their high cholesterol worse, when in actual fact the problem is undiagnosed hypothyroidism? Here is a non-exhaustive list of the signs and symptoms that should alert you to the fact that hypothyroidism could be involved, if you are having trouble losing weight despite a modest calorie intake:

Fatigue, lack of energy Dry, rough skin Brittle nails Boils and spots Eczema and psoriasis Pale complexion, blueish lips Puffy face and eyelids Loss of outer third of eyebrows Coarse, brittle hair Slow growing hair/hair loss Often cold and wearing extra clothes Low temperature below 97.6°F/36.5°C Slow pulse (under 65 bpm) Little or no perspiration on heavy exertion Constipation and haemorrhoids Muscle weakness Muscle and joint pain and stiffness Gallstones Candida (yeast overgrowth) Goitre (enlarged thyroid gland) Slow Achilles reflex Thick or scalloped tongue

Hoarse voice Slow speech Visual disturbances Ankle swelling Shooting pains in hands and feet Carpal tunnel syndrome Painful, irregular periods Impotence Low fertility and miscarriages Loss of libido Breathlessness Halitosis Deafness and tinnitus (ringing in the

ears) Bladder irritation and frequency Palpitations Anxiety and panic attacks ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity

Disorder) Depression Poor memory Poor concentration and slow thinking

The trouble with thyroid tests We have seen that hypothyroidism is often missed as a possible diagnosis for the symptoms the patient is complaining of. Even if the practitioner agrees to send the patient for thyroid tests, these may fail to pick up some cases of hypothyroidism. This is because the current ‘normal’ ranges for thyroid test results are quite wide, and thought by many thyroid experts to be wrong. As a result, many people complaining of hypothyroid symptoms whose test results fall at the boundaries of the ‘normal’ range are referred to as having ‘subclinical’ hypothyroidism, and may not be given treatment. A pioneer in the field of thyroid illness was Broda Barnes, MD, PhD, who dedicated 50 years to researching, teaching and treating thyroid and related endocrine dysfunctions in the US and other countries. During his many years of research and practice, he



observed that “The development and use of thyroid function blood tests left many patients with clinical symptoms of hypothyroidism undiagnosed and untreated”. Unfortunately, this still remains true. One of the teachings Dr Barnes is best remembered for is the basal temperature test. He taught that an average underarm temperature upon waking (for menstruating females on the second to fifth days of the cycle) of less than 97.6°F or 36.5°C is indicative of underactive thyroid. Dr Barnes’ discoveries have gone largely unrecognized by mainstream medicine, although many practitioners who specialize in thyroid problems in private practice still follow this and his other teachings today. Sanford Siegal, DO, MD, a US physician who has specialized in treating hypothyroidism for many years, suggests that about 10 per cent of the population is hypothyroid but that maybe only half test positive with the blood tests that are currently used. His experience with patients who test negative but have clinical symptoms of hypothyroidism is that there is often marked improvement when thyroid supplementation is given. His experience of many thousands of patients has led him to believe that around a quarter of those who have difficulty in losing weight fall into this category and benefit from thyroid treatment. Dr Patrick Kingsley is a practitioner in nutritional and environmental medicine based in the UK. He agrees with Dr Siegal’s view that current blood tests may not show up a thyroid problem. As he says in his book ‘The Nutron Diet’, “…the medical profession will say that if the thyroid gland is not putting out a normal amount of hormone it will show in a blood test. This is factually correct. But it doesn’t take account of the fact that, while the thyroid is producing the required amount of hormone, there can be something wrong with the utilisation of it by the cells. This can be shown by taking temperatures regularly. A normal body temperature is 37°C; if someone is consistently 36°C and below during the daytime, there’s likely to be something wrong with their thyroid mechanisms. People may also fail to lose weight if they have a problem with their adrenal glands, which means they have a sluggish metabolism and don’t burn up their food intake properly.” So what is the test at the centre of this controversy? It’s the TSH. This test measures the amount of Thyroid Stimulating Hormone your pituitary gland releases. If it is high, it means your thyroid hormone production is low and the pituitary is sending repeated chemical signals to try to get your thyroid to produce more thyroxine. So a high TSH means you are low thyroid. In the TSH test, the upper limit of ‘normal’ may be given as anything from 3 µU/ml to 6 µU/ml depending on which country you live in and which lab has done the test. The problem is that many patients still have symptoms at these levels of TSH. However, things are improving, albeit slowly. For instance, in the USA the upper limit for a ‘normal’ result was lowered from 6.0 to 3.0 in 2003. Disappointingly, some labs and physicians have remained unaware of the change, and other countries including the UK have not made any change to their reference ranges yet. However, Dr Barry Durrant-Peatfield, in common with many other thyroid experts, regards even the revised limit in the US for ‘normal’ TSH levels of 3.0 µU/ml (micro units per milliliter) as too high. His experience with patients has led him to believe that a level



of 2.0 µU/ml should arouse suspicion, and anything over 2.5 should be diagnostic and therefore treated as hypothyroidism. So if you are having difficulty in losing weight, and have not been tested for underactive thyroid, ask your physician to test you. Be aware of the issues surrounding current methods of testing and make sure you get copies of the actual test results. You can then compare your results with the reference ranges used by those thyroid specialists who believe the current ‘normal’ ranges are too wide. This way, you can assure yourself that your thyroid really is not the problem. Similarly, if you have been tested in the past and told the results were normal, ask for the actual values. If the TSH was above 2.5 µU/ml, bring the new ranges to your physician’s attention and ask for a trial of thyroid hormone replacement.

Thyroid treatment controversy It is not only the blood tests used for diagnosing hypothyroidism that arouse controversy. There is a growing swell of opinion amongst hypothyroids that their condition has not been taken seriously by the medical profession. This focuses on two aspects of treatment: attitude towards ‘residual symptoms’ and availability of medication options. ‘Residual symptoms’ is a term used to refer to symptoms of hypothyroidism which fail to clear up once thyroid medication is started. Many practitioners dismiss ‘residual symptoms’ as something that should be expected by hypothyroids. However, a growing band of ‘alternative’ thyroid specialists with a nutritional and holistic focus maintain that hypothyroids can and should expect 100 per cent relief from their symptoms once they are on the medication and dosage that is right for them. And this brings us to the second aspect - medication options. Currently, the usual treatment consists of replacement of thyroxine (called T4 for short), which is only one of the four hormones (T1, T2, T3 and T4) that a healthy thyroid secretes. The ‘alternative’ thyroid experts have long believed that these other hormones are important, and that many hypothyroid patients fail to achieve 100 per cent improvement without them. But it is very difficult, if not impossible, to find mainstream medical practitioners who are aware of alternatives to T4 alone and permitted to prescribe them. The reasons for this are a mixture of historical practice, mainstream physicians’ reliance on the drug companies who make the synthetic T4 preparations for information about treatment options, and a lack of research interest in the subject. We will see more about alternative treatment options later. There is also a third area of controversy, which relates mainly to dosage. Unfortunately, it tends to be the ‘alternative’ thyroid specialists working outside mainstream medicine who are prepared to look beyond the blood tests and treat the patient according to clinical symptoms. Family physicians and endocrinologists working within mainstream medicine largely continue to be constrained in their prescribing by blood test results and the official reference ranges for ‘normal’. Some are reluctant to prescribe replacement T4 when there are clinical symptoms of hypothyroidism unless the TSH is higher than 5 µU/ml.



Even if replacement therapy is begun, all is not necessarily plain sailing. Some hypothyroid patients fail to improve until their TSH falls to 0.3 or lower, but most mainstream practitioners are very reluctant to let it drop to even to that level. A TSH of this level is usually referred to as ‘suppressed’ and many practitioners believe that such suppression of the patient’s own thyroid output risks osteoporosis (loss of bone density) and heart problems such as atrial fibrillation. A fully suppressed TSH, where the TSH is undetectable, is generally only used in those patients who have had thyroid cancer, in whom it is believed to reduce the risk of recurrence. However, many ‘alternative’ thyroid specialists maintain that these claims of osteoporosis and atrial fibrillation are myths based on faulty or unsupported science. Dr John C. Lowe, a consultant in metabolic health based in Colorado, USA has written an excellent article explaining these issues. This is available at http://www.drlowe.com/frf/t4replacement/critique1.htm. An interesting point about dosage to keep in mind is that some thyroid specialists suggest that the smaller dosages of thyroid hormones (say 75 to 100 mcg of T4) can make patients’ symptoms worse rather than better. This is due to the complex feedback loops that govern the workings of your thyroid. At the lower doses, it can happen that your thyroid medication is enough to suppress your own thyroxine production but not enough to supply you with sufficient replacement hormone. In other words, you have ended up worse off than before. So if you are given a trial of thyroid replacement, and feel worse as a result, it does not necessarily prove that your symptoms are not due to your thyroid. Word is starting to spread amongst thyroid patients that a better quality of life is possible, and patients are starting to become indignant and vociferous in their demands for better diagnosis and better treatment. An indication of this is the recent proliferation of thyroid patients’ websites, providing information about alternative treatments and helping fellow patients to locate physicians experienced in using them. The campaigning nature of these websites can often be seen in their names, such as ‘Stop the Thyroid Madness’ (http://www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/) and ‘Thyroid Patient Advocacy’ (http://www.tpa-uk.org.uk/index.htm).

Thyroid medications So what are the usual thyroid medications, and what are the other options that the ‘alternative’ thyroid specialists prescribe? When treated by mainstream practitioners, most patients are prescribed just a synthetic version of thyroxine (T4). Brand and generic names include Eltroxin, Synthroid, Levothroid, Levoxyl, T4, levothyroxine sodium, L-thyroxine and thyroxine. A very few mainstream physicians are prepared to try synthetic T3 hormone (Triiodothyronine, Cytomel, Liothyronine) in conjunction with synthetic T4 where the T4 treatment alone fails to clear up symptoms such as difficulty in losing weight. However even the T4/T3 combination still does not provide all the thyroid hormones that a healthy thyroid produces. Take T2 for example. Very little was known about this hormone until recently, and as a result, it was considered to be of little consequence. Nevertheless, recent research indicates that it could be very important for helping weight

http://www.drlowe.com/frf/t4replacement/critique1.htm

http://www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/

http://www.tpa-uk.org.uk/index.htm



loss, because it enhances the breakdown of body fat without breaking down muscle tissue as well. We saw how important this is in Weight Loss Secret #3. We can expect to hear more about T2 in the future. So for this and other reasons, ‘alternative’ practitioners often favor the use of natural desiccated thyroid extract. Made from pigs, it is not a perfect match for human thyroid. But at least it contains all four thyroid hormones, in more or less the right ratios. Brand and generic names of natural thyroid preparations include Armour, Thyroid USP, desiccated thyroid, Westhroid and Nature-Throid Thyroid. These preparations are reported by many patients and their clinicians to be more effective at improving symptoms, including weight problems, than the synthetic hormones currently available. Therefore if you have already been tested and are being treated for thyroid deficiency, make sure your treatment is optimized. Be aware that the medications and dosages which are generally prescribed are not always the most effective for the individual. If you are having trouble losing weight it may be time to review whether your dosage of thyroid medication is high enough, or whether you would do better with different medication altogether. Try asking your physician to consider a higher dose of T4, and / or a trial of T3 in conjunction with the T4, or better still, a trial of the natural desiccated product which contains all the thyroid hormones. Another point to keep in mind if you are already being prescribed thyroid supplementation is that your requirements can change over time. Very often, a maintenance dose is arrived at a few months after diagnosis purely on the basis of blood test results, and the patient is then sent away to take that dose evermore. As long as the periodic blood tests come back ‘normal’, the dosage is unlikely to be adjusted. But as we have seen earlier, the ‘normal’ range for TSH, which is often the only test that is taken into account, is very wide. Your thyroid status could worsen substantially before the TSH went out of range and prompted your physician to increase your dosage. Although there are various reasons why an individual’s thyroid function and response to thyroid supplementation might fluctuate, these are poorly reflected in most treatment regimes. In contrast, Dr Durrant-Peatfield advises his patients that supplementation needs can vary even just with the seasons of the year. He also believes in letting patients adjust their own dosages according to how they feel, supported by self-monitoring of indicators such as pulse rate and basal temperature.

Hypothyroidism and diet There are two aspects of diet to consider as far as hypothyroidism is concerned. The first is the type of diet that is best for hypothyroids who find it difficult to lose weight on conventional low calorie/low fat diets. The second is the foods and chemicals which should be treated with caution because they can have an adverse effect on thyroid function.

The best diet for supporting the thyroid

In terms of calorie intake, people with underactive thyroids are at a disadvantage compared to those who have a normally functioning thyroid. Although difficulty in maintaining a healthy weight with a ‘normal’ calorie intake should ease with treatment, it is by no means clear that treatment is adequate to produce this in all cases. We saw



earlier in Weight Loss Secret #1 Mary Shomon’s suggestions regarding the calculation of calorie intakes for maintaining and losing weight if you are hypothyroid. As far as the best diet for hypothyroids is concerned, many thyroid experts (those ‘alternative’ practitioners at least, who are not bound by the official high carb/low fat healthy eating advice) feel that high protein/low carb is best. One such is Dr Durrant-Peatfield, who advises that a diet low in refined carbohydrates is important for hypothyroids. As he says, “Some people can deal with carbohydrates better than others. This concept of carbohydrate sensitivity may be new to you and, sadly, to many physicians. You may not be able to deal with more than a small, or modest, amount of glucose surge - from refined carbohydrate - without it turning into fat. The solution may be not dieting in the traditional sense at all, with calorie restriction, but with carbohydrate restriction.” Nutritional expert, researcher and author Dr Udo Erasmus agrees with the high protein/low carb concept. He believes that hypothyroids who want to lose weight should switch from grains and starches to green vegetables as their primary source of carbohydrates. His advice is that green vegetables plus ‘good’ fats and proteins should form the basis of the diet. Dr Erasmus also feels that an optimal intake of omega-3 fats is particularly important for hypothyroids, as there is evidence that they improve the efficiency of the thyroid hormones on the receptor sites. Although thyroid resistance is not a commonly recognized condition, his view is that it exists, just as insulin resistance does. In insulin resistance, there may be plenty of insulin in the bloodstream, but it cannot get into the cells where it is needed. So the pancreas pumps out more and more hormone, until eventually it becomes worn out and type 2 diabetes results. In just the same way, if thyroid hormone is not able to ‘latch’ onto the thyroid receptors to gain access to the cells, the thyroid gland pumps out more. But this only serves to further blunt the receptors, causing thyroid resistance. Eventually, the thyroid becomes worn out, and hypothyroidism results. Coconut oil and cod-liver oil may also assist weight loss by supporting thyroid function and boosting the metabolism. In ‘Eat Fat Lose Fat’, world-renowned biochemist and expert on fats Dr Mary Enig advocates adding both of these oils to the diet. As we saw earlier when we talked about fats, coconut oil contains a high proportion of MCFAs (medium chain fatty acids). The cod-liver oil is used in conjunction with the coconut oil to supply the high levels of vitamin A that a properly functioning thyroid needs. According to Dr Enig, many dieters report that they are able to reduce or even eliminate their thyroid medications when they add coconut oil to their diet. Ample supplies of nutrients such as vitamins A, B6, C, B12 and E, the minerals iodine, zinc, manganese, selenium, chromium, iron and copper and the amino acid tyrosine are also important for the thyroid. It is the complex interaction between all these nutrients which enables the thyroid gland to make thyroxine. If one of these nutrients is absent, no thyroxine is produced. Some experts maintain that a vitamin B6 deficiency, caused by eating too much white bread and products containing white sugar (which depletes our stores of B6), can over time single-handedly cause an underactive thyroid.



If the diet is high in protein, it is also important to ensure that it is rich enough in vitamins B6 and B3, as large quantities of these are needed to metabolize protein.

Foods and chemicals that can cause thyroid problems

According to Denise Mortimore in her book ‘The Complete Illustrated Guide to Vitamins and Minerals’ there are various foods which should be avoided by hypothyroids. These foods are called goitrogens – they block utilization of iodine by the thyroid gland. They include turnips, cabbage, kale, broccoli, mustard, cassava root, soybean, maize, bamboo shoots, sweet potato, peanuts, pine nuts, lima beans and millet. Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, swede (rutabaga), radishes, spinach, rape seed (canola) oil, strawberries, apricots, cherries, peaches, pears, almonds and walnuts are also said to be goitrogenic. However, experts generally agree that cooking these foods inactivates the goitrogen, so if you are hypothyroid, you only need to avoid eating them raw, or in large quantities, if they affect you. It is also important to keep the risks in perspective. Many of these foods are healthy, low carb foods and it is probably far better to concentrate on reducing your exposure to chemicals such as fluoride and perchlorate (see more about this later) and avoid insulin-triggering high carb foods than to eat moderate amounts of these valuable nutrient-rich foods. Soya can also be a problem for hypothyroids. All soy foods, including tofu, soya milk, soy protein isolate and protein bars made from soy protein contain isoflavones. Isoflavones are a type of phytoestrogen, which is an estrogen-like substance made by some plants including soya. These isoflavones were found by Drs Dan Sheehan and Daniel Doerge at the National Center for Toxicological Research in the US to inhibit the synthesis of thyroid hormone. Soy is a hidden ingredient in many processed foods. Menopausal women in particular tend to rely on it for the various beneficial properties claimed for it. Furthermore, Drs Sheehan and Doerge found that dieters consuming a lot of soy often reported initial weight loss, but then experienced weight gain along with an increase in other hypothyroid symptoms. They explain this as an initial period of harder work by the thyroid gland to counteract the effects of the isoflavones, after which the thyroid becomes exhausted and hypothyroidism results. Promoters of soy products often point to the Asian diet as containing a lot of soy. However, according to Dr Mary Enig in ‘Eat Fat Lose Fat’ the average intake is only two tablespoons per day in Japan and two teaspoons per day in China – and thyroid problems are widespread in both countries. Soy protein isolate, the major ingredient in soy-containing processed foods, also contains phytic acid which blocks mineral absorption and enzyme inhibitors. Because of this, long term use can lead to deficiencies in vitamins D, E, K and B12 and various minerals. As we have already seen, less than optimal nutritional status can also affect your ability to lose weight. So if you consume soy foods and have an underactive thyroid, or think you might have, then it may be a good idea to review your intake of this ingredient. Some sources recommend restricting intake (of the isoflavones, not of the whole product) to 40 mg per



day. This recommendation is based on the daily intake of phytoestrogens in a traditional Japanese diet. Dr Doerge does not believe that all-out restriction of soy is necessary. In Dr Richard and Karilee Shames’ book ‘Thyroid Power’ he is quoted as saying “I don’t think you can get into trouble [with your thyroid] if you eat a few soy foods within the bounds of a balanced diet. I see substantial risk from taking soy supplements or eating huge amounts of soy foods for their putative disease-preventing value.” The Shames recommend that thyroid sufferers limit their intake to one serving of soy each day, which they count as four ounces of tofu, eight ounces of soy milk or two teaspoons of soy sauce or miso. Their view is that the warning to limit intake is largely for the benefit of people who have substituted soy for animal products and rely solely on vegetarian sources for their protein. Lack of iodine-containing foods is also a cause of hypothyroidism, and there are regions of many countries where iodine-deficient soil makes this a serious issue. Many countries have a national salt iodization program to combat the problem, but ironically this may be having the opposite effect in some cases. The trouble is that too much iodine is just as harmful to the thyroid as too little. According to the Shames, people who consume a lot of fast food, canned or prepackaged foods or eat in restaurants regularly could easily be consuming between 8 and 10 grams of iodized salt per day. This would provide more than four times the recommended daily allowance of iodine. It is suggested that this could be a contributing factor to the increasing rate of hypothyroidism in Western populations, and in turn, to the increasing rates of obesity. We should bear in mind that it is not only food which may have an effect on our thyroid function. The chemical fluoride is also a goitrogen. In fact, it used to be used to ‘knock out’ the thyroid glands of those who were suffering from hyperthyroidism, or an overactive thyroid. Yet fluoride is an ingredient of most toothpastes and even more worryingly, in many areas of the world it is added to the water we drink, cook with and bathe in. There are various lobby groups active today in protesting against the mass fluoridisation of water supplies on account of the risk to our thyroid and other aspects of our health. Tea is also high in fluoride, not only on account of the water it is made with, but because the tea plant grows best in fluoride-rich soils. If hypothyroidism might be an issue for you, then avoiding sources of fluoride would be a prudent step. The chemical perchlorate, a byproduct of rocket fuel and firework production, has also been implicated in damaging the thyroid. It has entered the water and food supply in various areas of the US, apparently via fertilizers contaminated with it. Studies are being carried out to find out what the ‘safe’ levels of this chemical are in water and food. If perchlorate contamination is an issue where you live, it may be prudent to install a water filter (a reverse osmosis filter is currently the only sort that will filter out perchlorate).

Further information on hypothyroidism There are various online information and support sites for hypothyroid people. These have been set up by hypothyroids who have themselves struggled to find the most effective treatment, especially for weight-related aspects of the condition. The best sites



to start with are probably Mary Shomon’s site at www.thyroid-info.com and in the UK, Thyroid Patient Advocacy at www.tpa-uk.org.uk/. At Mary Shomon’s pages on the About website at http://thyroid.about.com/od/takeathyroidquiz/index.htm there is also a quiz you can take to see whether you have enough risks and symptoms to make it worthwhile to ask for your thyroid function to be checked. However, we must keep in mind that hypothyroidism, if present, is very likely not the only hormonal factor making weight loss difficult. In Weight Loss Secret #2 we saw how important the role of insulin is in controlling our blood sugar and fat storage mechanisms, and how this contributes to weight loss problems when it is out of balance. Now it is becoming evident that a whole host of other hormones and enzymes such as leptin, adiponectin, glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, lipoprotein lipase (LPL), human growth hormone (HGH)) and human chorionic gonadotrophin (HCG) play a central role in our weight control mechanisms. We still do not fully understand how they all work and interact but it seems that leptin in particular may be even more important than was thought. Not discovered until 1994, leptin works with insulin to control the burning or storing of fat or sugar. Whereas insulin does this mostly at the individual cell level, leptin does this for the body as a whole. Leptin communicates with the brain about how much energy is stored in the form of fat throughout the body. So leptin is the way your fat stores speak to your brain to let your brain know how much energy is available and what to do with it - conserve it or burn it.

Leptin and adiponectin

Leptin is secreted by your fat cells and, when working as it should, it tells you to stop eating when you have eaten enough. It also helps you to burn fat by stimulating the breakdown of stored triglycerides in your fat cells. Overweight people usually have high levels of leptin but its message fails to be heard by the body. Dr Ron Rosedale, an internationally renowned expert in nutritional and metabolic medicine and a leading authority on leptin, believes that leptin may even supersede insulin in importance as new research is revealing that glucose and therefore insulin levels may be largely determined by leptin. He also reports that leptin resistance plays significant roles in heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, thyroid function, the adrenal stress response including cortisol levels, reproductive disorders and the rate of aging. Adiponectin, another hormone secreted by your fat cells, promotes sensitivity to insulin, increases glucose tolerance and performs complementary actions to leptin. Larger fat cells produce less adiponectin, so levels of this hormone are lower in overweight people. Dr Kent Holtorf runs Holtorf Medical Group in California and specializes in complex endocrine dysfunction. His long history of working with patients who find it difficult or near impossible to lose weight has brought him to understand just how closely linked these and other hormones and enzymes are with weight loss problems. He agrees that there are many factors involved in an inability to lose weight, but has found that in

http://www.thyroid-info.com/

http://www.tpa-uk.org.uk/

http://thyroid.about.com/od/takeathyroidquiz/index.htm



almost all cases his patients have demonstrable metabolic and endocrinological dysfunctions that are major contributors to their weight loss issues. Dr Holtorf’s view is that leptin resistance is a significant problem for most of his patients. Leptin is secreted by fat cells and the more fat an individual carries, the higher the leptin levels. What should happen is that the increased leptin should feed back to the hypothalamus area of the brain that there is adequate stored fat. It should also stimulate TRH (thyroid releasing hormone) to increase TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) which in turn should have the effect of increasing thyroid production. This should stimulate fat burning rather than fat storing. Unfortunately, what actually happens for many overweight people is that the leptin fails to get its message heard by the hypothalamus. Levels are too high, producing leptin resistance, in the same way that too much circulating insulin produces insulin resistance. The result is that the hypothalamus thinks there is not enough stored fat and activates survival mechanisms to increase the fat stores. The ways in which it does this include reducing TSH, suppressing the conversion of T4 to T3 by increasing reverse T3, increasing appetite, increasing insulin resistance and inhibiting lipolysis (the breakdown of fat). Dr Holtorf considers that leptin levels above 10 should be treated. Treatment focuses on treating the leptin resistance. He says that when leptin is elevated, levels of thyroid hormone in the tissues are usually too low (although this will not be shown by the TSH test). He has found that almost all diabetics are leptin resistant, which has been shown to reduce their T4 to T3 conversion by as much as 50%. Patients with leptin resistance generally have resting metabolic rates that are consistently below normal. Often they may be burning 500 to 600 calories fewer each day than someone with equal body mass. Dr Holtorf treats the thyroid deficiency with T3 or T4/T3 combination medications such as natural desiccated thyroid. He makes the point that reverse T3 is usually considered to be just an inactive form of T3, but that studies show that in actual fact it has a very strong antithyroid effect. He considers that reverse T3 needs treatment above around 250 pg/ml, finding that it inversely correlates with resting metabolic rate. The higher the reverse T3, the lower the metabolism, and the more ineffective T4-only preparations are in treating it. Interestingly, although he says that chronic dieting or significant weight loss causes on average a 25% lower metabolism whatever the method of dieting, he believes that low carb diets suppress thyroid function and increase reverse T3 more than comparable calorie reductions with a higher proportion of carbohydrates. So it is in his view something to be aware of when patients have used low carb diets, and any reverse T3 issues must be addressed. Other weight loss treatments used by Dr Holtorf include Symlin (pramlintide) which delays the release of glucose into the bloodstream after eating and suppresses secretion of glucagon, which triggers the release of glucose from the liver, and/or Byetta (exenatide) which helps insulin work more effectively and delays stomach emptying. He has also found that a combination of the antidepressant Wellbutrin (buproprion) with LDN (low-dose naltrexone) is showing good results, and his experience is that HCG (human chorionic gonadotrophin) is also effective for many people.



Dr Joseph Mercola advises that the best way of helping promote your sensitivity to leptin and to support optimal levels of adiponectin and the glycerol we talk about next is to avoid processed foods, sugars, grains, fruit juices and high fructose corn syrup (in other words, a low carb way of eating), and to supplement with high quality omega-3 fats. Dr Ron Rosedale likewise believes that a low carb way of eating is best for the purposes of healthy levels of leptin.

Lipoprotein lipase, hormone-sensitive lipase and glycerol

Lipoprotein lipase (LPL) is an enzyme that helps insulin do its job. LPL sticks out from cell membranes and pulls fats out of the bloodstream into the cells. When LPL is on a muscle cell, it directs the fat into the muscle cell, which is then used as fuel. When it is on a fat cell, it directs the fat into the fat cell, which gets bigger because the incoming fat is simply stored. In order to allow the fat to enter the cells, LPL breaks it down into fatty acids, which are then small enough to flow inside. Once inside a fat cell, the fatty acids are made into triglycerides, or “esterified” by binding three fatty acids together with glycerol. Now too large to flow through the cell membranes, this is how the body makes sure they stay in the fat stores. The triglycerides are now stuck in the fat cell until they get disassembled or fall apart and can flow back into the circulation. As a result, anything that promotes the flow of fatty acids into the fat cells makes you fatter and anything that breaks down the triglycerides so that fatty acids can get out of the fat cells makes you leaner. Lots of hormones and enzymes play a part in this process, but insulin is by far the most important one. It is insulin that activates the activity of LPL on the fat cells. The more insulin secreted, the more active the LPL on the fat cells, and the more fat is taken from the blood and stored in the fat cells. At the same time, insulin suppresses LPL activity on the muscle cells and instructs the cells of the body to burn blood sugar rather than stored fat. There is another enzyme that is influenced by insulin called hormone-sensitive lipase (HSL). HSL works inside the fat cells to break down triglycerides into fatty acids, which can then exit from the fat cells into the bloodstream. The more active HSL is, the more fat comes out of storage to be burned as fuel. But insulin suppresses HSL, effectively trapping the fat in the fat cells. It only takes a little elevation of insulin to do this. Women are particularly at the mercy of their hormones when it comes to weight control, and this can become more of a problem around the time of menopause, when hormone levels can fluctuate wildly. In the next section we learn how this can affect weight.



Approaching menopause may affect your ability to lose weight

Perimenopause (the years leading up to the menopause) is characterised by fluctuating hormones which can play havoc with weight control. Perimenopause starts around the age of 45 for many women, although it can start as early as 35 or as late as 50. It is common to find that weight management methods that worked for years suddenly become ineffective at this time. The stress of fluctuating hormones can cause the oversecretion of cortisol and insulin, resulting in weight gain, especially around the middle. During this period, women often produce more insulin, which blunts the insulin receptor cells and causes even more insulin to be produced in a vicious circle of insulin resistance. As traditional low calorie/low fat/high carb diets fail to recognize the relationship between high insulin levels and weight gain, it follows that such diets may be particularly counterproductive at this time of life. Try a low carb, low GI (glycemic index) or low GL (glycemic load) diet instead. These are the only diets that recognize the insulin factor and improve the underlying problem of insulin resistance. The shifting hormone levels can also cause estrogen to rise and fall, making you susceptible to fluid retention. High estrogen levels can easily be responsible for up to five pounds of water weight. Jean Perry Spodnik and Barbara Gibbons in their book ‘The Breakthrough Metabolism Diet for Women Over 35’ say that reducing sodium (salt) in the diet or taking diuretics (water tablets) cannot help this kind of fluid retention. Their view is that a high protein/low carb diet is the only way to shed the excess water. At menopause, estrogen production diminishes and your body is even more likely to hold onto its fat stores at this time. For it is your fat stores, together with your skin and other organs, that will provide an ongoing supply of estrogen once the ovaries have ceased to play their part. If your body is struggling to maintain its hormonal balance, then your fat becomes more valuable and your body will do all it can to keep it. Gary Taubes in ‘Why We Get Fat” also explains how the activity of the enzyme lipoprotein lipase (LPL) that we talked earlier changes after menopause, influenced by falling levels of estrogen. Estrogen suppresses the activity of LPL on fat cells, so the less estrogen, the more LPL and the more fat being pulled into the fat cells. It is also the case that at this time, LPL activity in women’s abdominal fat catches up with that of men, resulting in more fat deposition in the abdominal area. Imbalances of progesterone and estrogen can also slow down your digestion and make fat storage more efficient. Other hormones such as melatonin (which controls your sleep-wake cycle) and DHEA (a precursor to the sex hormones) are all inter-related and can also interfere with weight loss. A point to keep in mind: it is easy to view imbalance of hormones such as estrogen, progesterone and testosterone in isolation as a ‘menopausal problem’. But your body cannot balance these ‘minor’ hormones unless its ‘major’ hormones such as insulin and cortisol are balanced first. Your hormones, together with your fat cells, constitute a



body-wide biofeedback system which controls your metabolism, heat regulation, digestion, appetite and detoxification. It is hardly surprising that the hormonal upheaval represented by menopause can disturb the balance of this system and produce a wide range of problems, including weight gain. It therefore follows that just taking supplements randomly targeted at one or two specific hormones is unlikely to be effective and may even leave you less balanced than you were before. But this is not a subject for do-it-yourself treatment. Proper testing is important, and expert interpretation of the tests is also important. Helping you to balance your hormones is a job for a naturopathically-oriented nutritional therapist or physician who specializes in this area. So, we have seen that hormone levels can have a significant effect on our weight. We have seen that choosing the right diet and ensuring we have an optimal nutritional status can help to redress hormonal imbalances. But how many of us realise that specific foods may be sabotaging these efforts, because they contain additives which can literally take control of our endocrine (hormone) systems? In the next section we discuss the common additives to processed foods and drinks which have been dubbed ‘metabolic disrupters’.

Metabolic disrupters

Some of the chemicals that we ingest are believed by many researchers to have an adverse effect on our endocrine (hormone) systems. Examples of these are monosodium glutamate (MSG) and aspartame. MSG is a common food additive. It is often listed as a flavoring but it does not have any flavour as such. Termed a taste enhancer by the food industry, it is effectively a drug which fools the taste buds into thinking that the food to which it has been added has a salty or savoury taste. MSG is well accepted by the food industry as causing adverse effects (such as numbness, weakness and palpitations) in some people (‘Chinese Restaurant Syndrome’). Aspartame is an artificial sweetener found in many food and drink products, especially those aimed at the weight loss market. There have been many claims by individuals of adverse effects such as vision problems, headaches, dizziness, depression, anxiety, irritability and memory loss but there is less if any acceptance by the food industry that these effects occur in significant numbers of people. The chemicals which cause these problems are glutamate (in MSG) and aspartate (in aspartame). They add to the toxic load which, as we have already seen, may of itself affect your ability to lose weight. However, there are less well recognized but far more serious concerns about these chemicals. These relate to the fact that they are ‘excitotoxins’ (substances which destroy certain types of nerve cells). Glutamates can exert a direct effect on our neuroendocrine systems, in other words, disrupt our metabolism. This is far more worrying than the generally transitory effects of ‘Chinese Restaurant Syndrome’ and could be an even more important factor in preventing weight loss.



The avoidance of MSG and aspartame is therefore important for general health reasons, but it becomes doubly important if you are having trouble in losing weight. The more reputable low carb diets, which are rooted in the science of healthy nutrition, advise that foods containing these additives should be avoided in any case. Unfortunately, other diets ignore their potential to affect your metabolism and thus sabotage your efforts to lose weight. By reading food and drink labels, it is reasonably easy to identify those containing aspartame (brand name NutraSweet). It is much more difficult to identify MSG on food labels, as it is contained in most savoury processed foods and food manufacturers do their best to disguise it. The following is a good guide:

MSG may be listed on labels as hydrolyzed vegetable protein, vegetable protein, textured protein, hydrolyzed plant protein, soy protein extract, caseinate, yeast extract and natural flavouring.

Ingredients on labels that almost always contain MSG include glutamate, calcium

caseinate, autolyzed yeast and gelatin.

Ingredients and foods that are very likely to contain MSG include flavours and flavourings, bouillon, stock cubes, seasonings, pectin, natural flavouring, malt extract, corn starch, soy protein isolate, maltodextrin, citric acid, soy sauce, soy protein, stock, barley malt, salad dressings, cheese, ice cream, beverages, frozen meals, reduced fat milk, biscuits, confectionery, packaged soups, chewing gum and even vitamin enriched foods, medications and supplements (particularly minerals).

Xenoestrogens

Xenoestrogens are manmade chemicals we take in from our food or environment that have an effect in the body similar to estrogen, a hormone we produce naturally. They are found in our water supply, as a result of the widespread use of the contraceptive pill and hormone replacement therapy. They are not filtered out by water treatment plants. Xenoestrogens can be found in our food too – in meat and milk, for instance, where hormones were used to fatten the animal up and make it retain water, or make it produce more milk. Perhaps even more worryingly, it seems that it is not only chemicals which we can readily identify as hormones that have these estrogenic properties. Many other types of chemicals have turned out to be xenoestrogens. Examples include dioxins, herbicides, fungicides, cadmium, lead, mercury and nonylphenol. As individuals we may expose ourselves to these chemicals in everyday products such as plastics, gas, oil, soaps, textiles, pesticides and bleached paper products including disposable nappies. But they can also reach us in a way we cannot control as individuals. They may be released into the environment from sources such as waste incinerators, diesel and leaded fuel emissions and wood burning. We may inhale the particles, or they may fall on pasture and enter our food chain. It is practically impossible to avoid intake of these foreign compounds.



Unfortunately, xenoestrogens can mimic the effects of our natural estrogen, resulting in an estrogen/progesterone imbalance. They can also cause problems by blocking the uptake of our natural estrogen at the estrogen receptor sites on our cells. Where there is too much estrogen and not enough progesterone to counteract its more undesirable effects, this is often referred to as ‘estrogen dominance’ or ‘unopposed estrogen’. This can cause weight problems by increasing fluid retention and interfering with blood sugar control. A build-up of estrogen can also block thyroid hormone uptake, causing hypothyroidism. As we have seen, the increasing incidence of hypothyroidism is seen by some experts as an important factor in the rise of obesity. So what can we do to avoid these xenoestrogens? The most important do’s and don’ts are thought to be:

Avoid food and drink which has been in contact with hot plastics. For example, use glass or ceramic receptacles in the microwave, using a dish or plate rather than plastic film as a cover.

Use glass or ceramic receptacles rather than plastics for storing food. Don’t drink from plastic bottles. Buy meat, fruit and vegetables produced organically, ie grown without pesticides,

herbicides, synthetic fertilizer or hormones. Avoiding choosing the contraceptive pill over other methods of contraception. Favour natural progesterone over the synthetic hormones in HRT (hormone

replacement therapy). Choose laundry, dish washing and personal care products with fewer chemicals,

especially parabens. Use natural methods of pest control in the garden, not pesticides.

To most of us, it seems logical that artificial additives in food and the manmade chemicals that surround us in our environment may not be particularly healthy. But how many of us have considered that many prescription medicines are also artificial, manmade chemicals which our bodies may find it difficult to deal with? We tend to focus on the advantages of our medicines, and ignore the downsides that most medicines have, unless they give us serious side-effects. Certainly, many of us don’t give a thought to whether it is our prescription medicines that are contributing to our weight problem. There’s more about this in the next chapter.




PPrreessccrriippttiioonn mmeeddiicciinneess

In this chapter: Strategies for minimising the effect of medicines on your weight

Many prescription medicines can interfere with weight loss, including antidepressants, the contraceptive pill and HRT (hormone replacement therapy). Other common culprits are lithium, antidiabetes drugs, beta blockers, sedatives, tranquilizers and the steroids often prescribed for arthritis, autoimmune disorders and other inflammatory conditions.

Strategies for minimising the effect of medicines on your weight

If prescription medicines are causing weight problems, try asking your physician about alternative brands which may not have this side-effect, or about reducing the dose. Better still, investigate whether there are other ways to treat you. In certain conditions, changing your diet or taking a herbal remedy can be just as effective as a prescription medicine, yet the mainstream medical establishment is very often unaware of such alternatives. Do not of course just stop taking your prescribed medicines without getting professional advice. Of course, it may also be the case that your medicines hamper your weight loss simply because they contain fillers, sweeteners and casings made of ingredients such as cornstarch, yeast and / or sucrose (sugar), which may interfere with low carb and allergy diets. The same applies to many vitamin and mineral supplements. If you think the non-active ingredients of your medicine might be the problem, try asking your physician whether there is a different brand that does not contain these ingredients. With vitamin and mineral supplements, it is usually possible to find brands free of corn, yeast and sugar at the more specialized supplement suppliers, but you must expect to pay more. (Paying more for quality products may be better value in the long run. The more expensive suppliers may well be using forms of the various vitamins and minerals which are more absorbable by the body than the ones used by the cheap suppliers).

In the next chapter we will see how blaming ‘compulsive’ eating on emotional or psychological issues can ensure that many people never get to identify the real cause of their weight problem and thus never find the solution.




‘‘CCoommppuullssiivvee’’ eeaattiinngg aanndd ccrraavviinnggss

In this chapter: You’re not to blame Understand the real causes of your ‘compulsive’ eating

By ‘compulsive’ eating, we mean eating beyond normal quantities, often without real hunger. Where an obese person eats in this ‘compulsive’ way, society typically views the person as greedy, weak-willed and personally to blame for their obesity. This is wrong. An individual in this situation is not to blame. It is almost impossible for the individual to stop the ‘compulsive’ eating until the cause is dealt with, because the chemical messages that his brain is receiving to eat that way are so compelling. And the obesity is simply the outward manifestation of the inability of the individual’s metabolism to handle the way of eating that society is telling him to eat.

You’re not to blame

So if any blame is to be laid, it is at the door of our society, at the way we now eat, led by a food industry that cares only about profits, not health. Unfortunately, it suits the food industry, and sadly, society at large, to view obese people as underdogs who are to blame for their situation and who should be made to feel guilty. The whole diet foods industry feeds upon the readiness of obese people to believe it is their fault, and the readiness of the rest of society to view the obese as worthless people who deserve to be fat and unsuccessful. The truth is that the body is a very complex organism and there is no one single reason why people become fat, yet for years we have been led to believe that weight loss is a simple matter of reducing calories. Don’t believe it! Fat is the outward manifestation of malfunctions happening deep inside the cells of your body. How much control do you have over what happens in your cells? Up until now, at least, very little!

Understand the real causes of your ‘compulsive’ eating

What you need to know is that your ‘compulsive’ eating has biochemical triggers. If you carry on believing what many others want you to believe, and blame it on psychological triggers, then you will never find the real cause, and you will never find the solution, either!



For instance, one reason for ‘compulsive’ eating is a poor nutritional status. When the body is deficient in vitamins or minerals, making you feel hungry or unsatisfied is its way of getting you to eat more, with the hope that this time you’ll take in the elements it lacks. According to Julia Ross, author of ‘The Diet Cure’, lack of protein can also cause ‘compulsive’ eating and cravings. She explains that we need the amino acids that we can only get from protein to make the four brain chemicals, or neurotransmitters, that create our moods:

Dopamine or norepinephrine, which gives us energy and mental focus GABA (gamma amino butyric acid, which is our natural sedative Endorphin, our natural painkiller Serotonin, which stabilizes mood and promotes sleep

If we have enough of these chemicals, our emotions are stable. But if they are depleted, or out of balance, then we experience false moods which can be just as distressing as those triggered by real life events. In response, we may turn to certain foods such as refined sugars and flours which can have a substitute drug-like effect in many people, producing feelings of calm or energy. Unfortunately, the body’s need for the missing brain chemicals is so strong that we can soon become physically addicted to these substitutes – willpower no longer comes into it. Regular intake of refined sugars and flours, as well as alcohol or drugs and some medications can themselves inhibit the production of our own brain chemicals. The drug-like chemicals that carbohydrates such as sugar and flour contain latch onto the empty places where our natural brain chemicals should be plugged in. Our brain senses that these receptors are already occupied, so it further reduces the amounts of neurotransmitters it produces, and a vicious circle is soon established. But at Julia’s clinic compulsive overeaters are treated with amino acid therapy to rapidly feed the addicted brain exactly the type of protein it needs to fill up naturally its empty mood-chemical sites. With this method, ninety per cent of people are freed from their food cravings within forty-eight hours. Food sensitivities can also have an addictive effect, leading to ‘compulsive’ eating and cravings, as we saw earlier. We saw, too, how adrenal fatigue is associated with constantly high levels of cortisol, which can lead to cravings and binge eating. Other hormones which can be involved in food cravings include:

Melatonin: this hormone regulates your day/night rhythm and your hunger time clock. Sleep deprivation can unbalance melatonin production, which in turn influences the production of leptin and ghrelin. These are the hormones that signal to your body that you are hungry or have eaten enough.

Estrogen/progesterone: an imbalance of these two hormones can cause cravings,

and this is frequently the cause of a premenstrual pattern of bingeing.



Serotonin: our feel-good hormone, we feel sad or depressed when it is low. Weak digestion and hormonal imbalance can lead to low levels of this hormone. Sugars and simple carbohydrates release a short burst of serotonin, but the feel-good effect is short-lived, and we soon crave a further ‘fix’ of sugar or other carbohydrate-containing food if serotonin is lacking.

So if you are a ‘compulsive’ eater, don’t fall into the trap of taking all the blame yourself for your overeating. And don’t allow yourself to be bullied into believing your overeating is caused by ‘emotional issues’. Your overeating is almost certainly biochemical in nature, and you may have little direct control over this. And, above all, you are not to blame for being fat. Does every thin person eat and drink in a perfectly healthy way? No, of course they don’t. The only difference between a thin person who can get away with eating a lot and an obese ‘compulsive’ eater is that the evidence of a thin person’s dietary indiscretions is not clearly on view for everyone to see! Do thin people who eat bad diets feel guilty? Do other thin people look upon them with disgust when they eat more than a lettuce leaf? No, of course they don’t! Up until now there was very little you could do to escape from your ‘compulsive’ eating problem and the metabolic cards that your genes have dealt you. However, a new era is dawning. The false dietary beliefs of the last fifty years are at last being challenged and, already, in some cases, overturned. Science is at last starting to recognize obesity as the very complex topic that it is, and to put research effort into it like any other disease. Improved understanding of the importance of good nutrition and how diets work (or don’t work) is coming along which will throw new light on these issues and bring hope to those who have been sidelined by medical science for so long. With the information in this book, you have enough to get you started on your search for the real, biochemical causes of your ‘compulsive’ eating. So stop believing the fault lies with you, and get out there to find the real culprit, because that way lies the solution!

In this section, we have discussed how what ‘society’ thinks about obese people and why they are overweight can effectively prevent them from finding the true, physical, cause of their problem. In the next chapter, we learn how the politics of medical science and the slow pace of change in medicine and government ensures that only the determined few who question established beliefs and seek out their own information will find permanent solutions to their weight problems.




DDiieett ppoolliittiiccss

Yes, even diet politics could be sabotaging your chances of dieting success! Take the low carb versus low calorie/low fat diet debate, for instance. Low carb diets came into fashion in the late 1990s and have revolutionised the dieting world. Used to good effect by many millions of people, they are effective because they deal with the root cause of most people’s overweight problems – overproduction of insulin in response to a diet high in carbohydrates.

In this chapter: Old beliefs die hard Conservatism, bureaucracy and vested interests Get properly informed on the real facts about diets

Old beliefs die hard

Unfortunately, the mainstream medical world and government health departments have not yet reacted to the advances that have been made in recent years in understanding the science of low carb dieting. More and more clinical studies are presenting evidence that low carb diets are more effective for many people than low calorie/low fat diets. At the same time, new research on fats is proving right those who for the last fifty years have been saying that fat is not the dietary villain it was made out to be. But the mantra that low calorie/low fat diets are the only safe and effective route to health and weight loss has been repeated so often that it still persists despite its basis in shaky and in some cases, now discredited science. In the face of growing evidence, entrenched beliefs are starting to change. But the process is very slow. Low carb diets continue to be misunderstood, misrepresented and even ridiculed by the mainstream medical world and in the media. Why should this be? If science is showing us that the root causes of the current obesity, diabetes and heart disease epidemics are not what we formerly thought, why aren’t the medical world and governments rushing to change the treatments they offer and the healthy eating advice they promote? Could the answer to this question lie in conservatism, bureaucracy and vested interests?

Conservatism, bureaucracy and vested interests

The first issue to recognize is that new scientific concepts are involved which take more than a little time to explain and understand. Medical professionals are busy people and have little time to devote to new topics. The general conservatism of the medical world,



a ‘not invented here’ philosophy, and a tradition of not disagreeing with one’s teachers may all play their part in the slow recognition of the new ideas. The position is not helped by the fact that, up until now, basic medical training has not covered areas such as nutrition, and postgraduate courses recognized by the mainstream medical establishment are only now being established to teach this unjustly neglected area of medicine. The spread of information about the new ideas is also inhibited by factors such as:

the average overworked physician’s understandable reliance on drug company representatives for information on new research

the underfunding of state health services. This results in reliance on commercial organizations with a vested interest in the status quo of healthy eating guidance for the provision of healthy eating information. (The impartial-sounding organizations that provide supplies of healthy eating leaflets for physicians’ waiting rooms are often in fact sponsored by commercial drug companies, food manufacturers and the agricultural industry).

The slow pace of change in health policy at governmental level also plays its part. New diagnostic and treatment methods are required to go through many years of population studies and clinical trials before they are approved for general use within mainstream medicine. However, state funding for such studies is limited and the research done by the commercial drug companies focuses, not unsurprisingly, on areas of research that will make them money. In other words, in the current environment little research is done that is not targeted at identifying block-busting drugs that can make the pharmaceutical companies money. Researching unpatentable diet and lifestyle solutions which address the root cause of illnesses is not economically viable for the pharmaceutical industry. Added to that, both the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries have a vested interest in the status quo of the current high carb/fat phobic healthy eating guidelines. Since they have an extremely powerful voice with government, this no doubt also serves to put a brake on major governmental policy change in the area of healthy eating guidance. While official healthy eating advice continues unchanged, the food manufacturing industry finds itself in a difficult place. Low carb diets do not comply with the healthy eating advice currently promoted by most government health departments. The industry is therefore torn between satisfying the demands of the emerging low carb foods market and being seen to support official government medical advice. Physicians also find themselves in a difficult place. Those who have developed a real interest in the new area of nutritional and environmental medicine have been forced to move outside mainstream medicine in order to practise in this specialism. Those who have stayed within mainstream medicine are tied by regulatory and budgetary constraints which effectively prevent them from discovering and applying the new ideas. Many are the stories of physicians who are themselves or have family members on low carb diets, but do not dare to put their patients on them, for fear of official consequences.



This issue is very well illustrated by the advent of low GI (Glycemic Index) and low GL (Glycemic Load) diets. A predictable follow-on from the low carb revolution, they are essentially another way of looking at low or lower carb diets. But they have been taken up with alacrity by food manufacturers, supermarkets, medical practitioners and the media in a way that low carb diets never were. This is because they have a critical advantage over low carb diets: their restriction of fat intake, and inclusion of carbohydrates such as grains allows them to comply with the current official healthy eating guidelines. They can therefore be portrayed as ‘the healthy version of low carb’ (even though concerns about the alleged dangers of low carb diets have been shown to be unfounded). What this all means to you is that you may have been dissuaded from switching from a traditional low calorie/low fat but high carb diet to a low carb diet because of misinformation about what you eat and scientifically unsupportable claims about the alleged dangers of this way of eating. Or you may be persuaded to try a low GI diet when you are more suited to a low carb diet because of the distorted and sometimes downright untrue claims being made by some of the low GI diet authors while trying to distance themselves from the ‘unhealthy’ low carb diet camp.

Get properly informed on the real facts about diets

If this could be relevant for you, get the real facts on the pros and cons of low calorie/low fat diets versus low carb diets, and low carb diets versus low GI and low GL diets from an impartial source. Just don’t let the vested interests of the agricultural, food and pharmaceutical industries, the slow pace of change in the medical world and government health departments or the self interest of diet authors sabotage your chances of weight loss success!

So now we know that weight loss is not the simple matter of cutting calories that we have been told for the last fifty years. We have discussed many new ideas and discoveries which seem to fly in the face of what we have been told for so long. We have talked about the reasons why the ‘experts’ have ignored or refused to believe some of these ideas and discoveries, and how this is now changing. We have had to get used to scientific terms and areas of biochemistry which are unfamiliar for many of us. But if you have got this far, you’ve done the hard bit: you’ve successfully reached the end of the explanations, and you have gained a much better idea of the reasons why you may find it difficult to lose weight. Now it’s time to summarise all we’ve learned, before we go on to review what you need to do to overcome these weight loss saboteurs and achieve the healthy and permanent weight loss of your dreams.



CCoonncclluussiioonn

To recap a little, then, we have seen that losing weight is not as simple as just reducing calories, or any other specific component of the diet, such as fat or carbohydrate. Many factors have to be right to create the environment in which your body will allow you to lose weight. We’ve explained some of the most important ones, but everyone is biochemically unique, and unfortunately, the only way to know which factors will work for you is to try them and see. It may take just one of these factors to tip the balance for you, or you may have to take action on all of them before you notice a difference. There may be other factors which research has not identified yet. The important thing is that you now understand that problems in succeeding on weight loss diets – on any weight loss diet – are almost certainly not your fault. Going on a reputable low carb diet, if you are not already following one, is a recommended first step, because this will deal with a number of important potential factors in one hit. If you are not comfortable with a low carb diet, then a low GI, or better still, a low GL diet is also a good option, although it does not score so well on eliminating food sensitivity problems. After that, it’s up to you to work out which factors to try next. To give yourself the very best chance of succeeding with your weight loss aims (and to have the healthiest possible life), you may wish to work through them all. Don’t feel that you have to do everything all at once. Getting your body ‘fit for weight loss’ is about making your body healthy in general, and that takes time and patience. Getting healthy is not about quick fixes, and nor is successful weight loss. The weight you want to lose is your fat stores, not your lean muscle tissue, and any truly excess fluid, not the water tied up in your glycogen stores. Making sure you lose the right kind of weight and in the right way is key to ensuring that when the weight comes off, it stays off. Remember that your body’s systems don’t work in isolation – they are all connected. So just correcting one or two things may not produce a noticeable difference in your ability to lose weight. But even if you have to persevere a bit further down the list before seeing visible results on the weight loss front, you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you have significantly improved your long term health by taking the recommended actions. In order to lose weight successfully and permanently, you need to make lifestyle changes which are good for your overall health – there is nothing in this book which compromises this fundamental principle of making your body healthier. If many of the weight loss saboteurs I have outlined in this book are new to you, then you may well be feeling a little overwhelmed right now. There’s so much to understand, and so many new ideas to get used to. It would be natural to feel that it is all ‘just too difficult’. You might be forgiven for deciding at this point just to stick with what you know.



It’s also hard to break out of the mould and go against the messages you are constantly receiving about healthy eating and weight loss from food industry advertising and the information promoted by the mainstream medical establishment. Wouldn’t it be easier just to go back to your old, ‘tried and tested’ ways? The trouble is, they don’t work! That’s why you’re reading this book! Do you really want to repeat the usual pattern? The one where you follow a low calorie and probably low fat diet, enjoy a certain amount of success, then hit a brick wall as you walk right into the depressed metabolism trap. Next comes some weight gain as the discouragement inevitably sends you off the diet. After that you tell yourself once again that it was your fault that you failed, and start yet another low calorie diet, assuring yourself that it will work this time – you just need to do it strictly enough. Sounds familiar? And anyway, shouldn’t you continue to do what the food industry and mainstream medical establishment are telling you to do, because they know best? Well, we’ve already discussed how that’s sadly not necessarily the case. In the end, it’s up to you to take responsibility for your own health, and to refuse to follow popular thinking if you think it might be wrong. In this book, I don’t ask you to believe anything I say just because I say it. There are plenty of medical professionals such as physicians, nutritionists and dieticians experienced in the field of nutritional and environmental medicine, endocrinologists, exercise physiologists, researchers and many others out there, all saying the same kind of thing I am saying in this book. You can read more about what all these experts say and the science behind it in their books, websites and scientific papers. What’s for sure is that, if you had the time and inclination, you could spend years like I have, discovering the sources of this information, reading lengthy books and wading through often detailed biochemistry. Working out how it all fits together also takes time and patience, as each source focuses on their chosen aspect of the complex workings of the human body. This can make it seem as though there are many conflicting theories (and they can’t all be right, can they?) but closer study shows that they are often all pointing in the same direction. They are just different ways of looking at the same physiological process, perhaps at a deeper, molecular level, or at an earlier or later stage in a particular biochemical process. You could also spend time as I have, working out which sources are supported by up to date research and which ‘experts’ are simply trotting out what they (and we) have been told over the last fifty years, seemingly oblivious to other, newer ideas. So what I hope to have achieved with this book is to bring together all of the most important knowledge and new ideas related specifically to weight loss problems, screening out the many ideas that are unsupported by science. An important aim was to present the information in a reasonably concise and easily understandable way. You may decide that you are happy with the level of detail in this book – or you may wish to read further about some of the topics. I’ve listed my main sources in the last chapter should you wish to do this. I also wanted to make it easy to translate the principles explained in this book into practice, so I have drawn together all the main suggestions and summarised them in an Action Plan for Weight Loss Success.



With this book, I hope I have provided you with the foundation of the knowledge you need to achieve a healthy body and with it, a healthy weight. Discovering this information was a real revelation to me, a life-changing revelation that has given me something the mainstream medical world has not been able to give me – control over my weight. I sincerely hope that, in passing on this information to you, I am giving you the chance to benefit from what I have spent so much of my life trying to find out. However, everything now depends on what you do with this information. It’s up to you to make it work for you, too! So why not start on your journey to better health and weight loss by checking off the factors you think you have already got under control? What’s left can then form the basis of your own personal action plan for weight loss success.



YYoouurr ppeerrssoonnaall aaccttiioonn ppllaann ffoorr

wweeiigghhtt lloossss ssuucccceessss

Rule 1: Work with rather than against your body’s natural instincts

Don’t drop your calories so low that ‘famine syndrome’ kicks in and lowers your metabolic rate (unless you are doing this for a very restricted period as part of the HCG Diet).

Lose weight gradually in order to overcome the barrier of the ‘set point’ (unless you

are following the very specific protocol of the HCG Diet).

Experiment with consuming more calories, not less (but ensure they are from natural, unprocessed, nutrient-rich wholefoods only).

Try carb and/or calorie-cycling to ‘outsmart’ the body’s survival mechanisms if you

have stopped losing weight (but ensure the extra carbs and calories all come from healthy, nutritious foods).

If carb and/or calorie-cycling is not sufficient to outsmart your survival mechanisms,

consider following the HCG Diet.

Eat breakfast, don’t skip it, or your body will start thinking there’s a famine (unless you are doing this for a very restricted period as part of the HCG Diet).

Eat more frequently than just three meals – spread your intake over five or six meals

or snacks to keep insulin levels stable.

Consider a low carb diet if you are not following one already, to take advantage of the higher calorie intake and the suppression of hunger signals that it allows. If this does not work either, consider the HCG Diet.

Remove sources of stress wherever you can.

Improve your body’s ability to deal with unavoidable stress, by taking regular

exercise, getting enough sleep and eating a nutritious diet.

Practise stress reduction techniques such as yoga, tai chi, meditation, breathing exercises, anger management therapy, therapeutic massage or listening to calming music.



Rule 2: Get your blood sugar/insulin balance under control

If your traditional low fat/low calorie diet isn’t working, it’s likely that blood sugar/insulin control is an issue for you – get the books, learn about low carb and low GI/low GL diets and try one out!

If you decide to do a low GI or low GL diet, keep in mind that it may not work for you

if you have a very low tolerance to carbohydrates – a low carb diet may be better for you.

Remember that, if you are on a low carb, low GI or low GL diet, you still need to

create a calorie deficit. Carbs matter more than calories, but calories do still matter!

Don’t be fooled into thinking fruit and fruit juices can be eaten with impunity - limit your fructose consumption

Rule 3: Protect and enhance your metabolic rate

Ensure you eat enough protein when dieting to prevent the loss of lean tissue which often occurs – between 0.8 and 1.4 grams of pure protein per pound of bodyweight.

Avoid refined carbohydrates when dieting, as they will trigger insulin and encourage

fat storage rather than fat burning, depressing your metabolism.

Fight plateaus by eating more, not less. You need to raise your metabolism before you can start losing weight again, not depress it further.

If eating more fails to break your stall, consider a ‘metabolic tune-up’, or try out the

HCG Diet.

Track your body fat ratio rather than your weight to ensure it’s fat and not lean tissue you’re losing.

Couple your diet with resistance exercise to encourage muscle building and boost

metabolism.

Do regular aerobic cardiovascular exercise, or better still, anaerobic high intensity short-burst cardiovascular exercise such as Peak 8, to help burn more calories and get the muscle building and fat loss promoting benefits of increased HGH (human growth hormone) production.

Keep yourself well hydrated at all times to boost metabolism.

Eat regularly and frequently to keep your metabolic rate up.



Ensure you are getting plenty of the nutrients that are particularly important for an

efficient metabolism such as vitamins B and C and calcium.

Drink green tea for its ability to increase metabolic rate.

Try coconut oil for its ability to increase thermogenesis and support the thyroid.

Consider trying other ‘fat burning’ supplements to increase metabolic rate but research their safety and efficacy thoroughly first with multiple sources that you trust – not just the supplier.

Rule 4: Be aware of the potential for food sensitivities and candida/yeast overgrowth to derail your diet

A diet of whatever type may fail to work if it includes foods to which you are sensitive. A low carb diet (pick a reputable one, such as the Atkins Diet) is a good choice, not least because it excludes many of the most likely food sensitivity culprits such as wheat and corn (maize).

Avoid creating new food allergies/sensitivities by eating as varied a diet as possible,

and especially by avoiding using the same foods or ingredients at every meal.

Yeast overgrowth may also prevent you losing weight on your diet. A low carb diet (pick a reputable one, such as the Atkins Diet) is a good choice, not least because it excludes most of the foods banned on an anti-candida diet.

If you feel terrible during the first days of your diet, persevere. It may well be

withdrawal symptoms (in the case of food allergies/sensitivities) or ‘die back’ (of the yeasts in yeast overgrowth) and will pass. See it as a good sign – you are purging yourself of something that your body cannot handle.

If you think food allergies/sensitivities could be a possibility for you, read one or two

of the standard reference books first. Then consider carefully whether to go direct to a food allergy testing service (these can vary from good to useless), follow an ‘elimination and challenge’ diet by yourself or enlist the help of a professional from the outset. (We recommend the latter approach).

To get a rough indication of whether candida or yeast overgrowth could be an issue

for you, go to one of the many sites where you can fill in a ‘candida questionnaire’. If the result is positive, read at least one of the standard reference books. Then consider carefully whether to try an ‘anti-candida’ diet and treatment regime by yourself or enlist the help of a professional from the outset. (We recommend the latter approach).

If you are at risk for candida or yeast overgrowth, avoid refined sugars which fuel it

and eat natural, ‘live’ yoghurt regularly to keep your gut supplied with plenty of the



beneficial micro-organisms. Take probiotic supplements containing around 4 to 8 billion organisms per dose if your gut flora is severely out of balance.

Minimise use of aspirin and ibuprofen-based painkillers. They can cause gut

inflammation and directly contribute to leaky gut syndrome, which in turn can lead to problems with losing weight.

Rule 5: Deal with excess fluid masquerading as fat

Reduce your intake of toxins by avoiding processed foods, buying organic and minimising the chemicals that you use in everyday activities such as personal care, washing, cleaning and gardening.

Drink plenty of water to help your body dilute and flush out toxins – at least eight

glasses a day.

Don’t drink tea, coffee and alcohol.

Unless you have been prescribed them by your medical practitioner, leave diuretics well alone, as they can encourage fluid retention in the long term.

Check out the possibility of food allergies/sensitivities, which may be causing fluid

retention.

Support your lymphatic system. You don’t necessarily have to get lymph drainage massage to do this – just keep moving!

Avoid excess sodium in your diet (remember it’s not just the salt you add in cooking

or at the table, sodium is contained in raising agents and the monosodium glutamate and other additives found in most processed foods too).

Avoid high levels of sugar and other refined carbohydrates, as the high insulin levels

they stimulate can cause fluid retention.

Ensure that you have an adequate intake of protein.

Ensure you have no micronutrient deficiencies, particularly vitamin B6 and magnesium.

Your medications could be causing fluid retention – discuss alternatives with your

physician and consider whether there are any natural, non-drug alternatives you can try.



Rule 6: Ensure your nutritional and hormonal status will ‘allow’ your body to shed weight

Ensure you have an optimal nutritional status. Take a good multivitamin and mineral supplement as ‘insurance’ if you’re not sure.

In particular, ensure you are getting enough magnesium, calcium, vitamins A and D,

chromium, carnitine, lecithin, choline and inositol.

Don’t take iron with your supplements unless you know you are anaemic, and be aware of the possibility of iron overload – and that it could be affecting your thyroid or insulin-secreting cells. But also be aware that if you are hypothyroid, your levels of ferritin (storage iron) need to be at least 70 for your thyroid supplementation to work.

Keep in mind that indigestion and acid reflux are commonly misdiagnosed as high

stomach acid, when in actual fact the problem is low stomach acid. Stomach acid which is too low will prevent you from absorbing the nutrients you need, whether they come from food or supplements.

Eat fewer refined carbs, which often use up more nutrients in digestion than they

provide.

Make sure you eat lots of vegetables, salads, seeds, nuts, fruits and legumes (eat the last two sparingly in accordance with your daily allowance if you are on a low carb diet).

Cook your vegetables lightly and with as little water as possible, in order to preserve

the nutrients.

Use your vegetable water for sauces, soups or just drink it – don’t throw it away!

Eat raw salads and vegetables, sprouted beans and seeds for their live enzymes and other nutrients wherever possible.

Take an interest in where your foods come from and their likely nutrient levels. Buy

organic, or even better, grow your own.

Promote your sensitivity to leptin and support optimal levels of adiponectin and glycerol by avoiding processed foods, sugars, grains, fruit juices and high fructose corn syrup, and supplement with high quality omega-3 fats.

Rule 7: Improve your ability to shed fat by eliminating intake of bad fats and increasing good fats

Be savvy about fats – don’t make the mistake of thinking that low fat equals good health or weight loss. Know the good fats from the bad ones.



Ensure you get enough omega-3 fats and try to reduce intake of omega-6 fats. If you don’t regularly eat foods that contain omega-3s, such as oily fish, seeds and nuts, then take a good fish oil or flax oil supplement.

Know which fats to use for cooking and which fats must only be used unheated.

Examine food labels and reject any product containing trans fats (may also appear

as ‘hydrogenated vegetable oils’ or ‘partially hydrogenated vegetable oils’).

Try substituting good quality virgin coconut oil for some of the other fats in your diet – about 3 tablespoons a day.

Rule 8: Reduce the ‘toxic load’ that may be holding up your weight loss and support your elimination systems

Choose fresh and home-made foods over processed, shop-bought ingredients and ready-meals.

Keep well hydrated – drink at least 8 large glasses of water a day.

Eat ‘clean’. Avoid manmade foods such as trans fats and foods likely to contain

chemical additives and residues.

Reject foods and drinks containing monosodium glutamate (MSG) and aspartame (NutraSweet).

Reduce your intake of environmental toxins by minimising the chemicals that you use

in everyday activities such as personal care, washing, cleaning and gardening.

Don’t smoke or spend time in places where you cannot avoid inhaling second-hand smoke.

Rule 9: Ensure your systems of elimination are healthy enough to handle fat breakdown

Keep your system alkaline by eating more vegetables and fruits and reducing or avoiding grains, wheat in particular.

Don’t get dehydrated – drink eight glasses of water a day as a minimum, more if you

are very overweight.

Take action if you suffer from constipation.



Follow a ‘detox’ program from time to time, or better still, reduce your intake of toxins in the first place.

Rule 10: Eat the way to which your genetic inheritance makes you best suited

Check that your basic diet (meat based, vegetarian, etc) is compatible with your genetic inheritance, as evidenced by your blood type or other population factors.

Avoid frequent eating of foods containing lectins which are incompatible with your

blood type.

Recognize that if your genetic inheritance and/or former eating patterns have made you very carbohydrate sensitive, reducing carbs (such as a low carb, low GI or low GL diet) is your route to improved health and weight loss.

Rule 11: Use exercise to help maintain your metabolic rate while you lose weight

Chart progress with a tape measure (or body fat monitor) as well as measuring weight, to check whether an apparent weight loss stall could actually be due to replacing fat with muscle.

Do resistance exercise for thirty minutes three or four times a week to build more fat-

burning muscle and raise your metabolic rate.

Do aerobic cardiovascular exercise, or better still, anaerobic high intensity short-burst exercise such as Peak 8, for twenty minutes three times a week, to help burn more calories and get the muscle building and fat loss promoting benefits of increased HGH (human growth hormone) production.

Rule 12: Correct any hormonal imbalances that could be hindering weight loss

Consider whether the level of carbohydrates in your diet is so high that it could be causing blood sugar/insulin imbalance – try a low carb, low GI or low GL diet.

Get checked out for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.

Get checked out for hypothyroidism. If you don’t want to ask your physician in the

first instance, take the quiz at Mary Shomon’s pages on the About website at http://thyroid.about.com/od/takeathyroidquiz/index.htm.

http://thyroid.about.com/od/takeathyroidquiz/index.htm



If you have already been diagnosed as hypothyroid, ensure you are not being undertreated – get savvy on issues such as thyroid tests, optimal dosage and prescription of T3 and natural thyroid.

If you are hypothyroid, know which foods contain thyroid-suppressing substances,

cook them rather than eating them raw and avoid excessive quantities.

Support your thyroid with foods such as coconut and cod-liver oils and plenty of omega-3 fats.

If you are hypothyroid, consider a high protein/low carb diet if you are not already

following one, switching from grains and starches to green vegetables as your primary source of carbs. If a low carb diet is not working for you, try the HCG Diet.

If you are hypothyroid, ensure that your diet provides a wide range of vitamins and

minerals that are important for your thyroid, or take supplements.

If you are hypothyroid, avoid excessive intake of soya foods and don’t take supplements of soya isoflavones.

If you are hypothyroid, check that your consumption of iodized salt in processed

foods doesn’t take you beyond the recommended intake of iodine.

If you are hypothyroid, switch to fluoride-free toothpaste and avoid fluoride-rich tea.

Consider whether you might have adrenal fatigue if you have been through a long period of emotional or physical stress, especially if you have long-standing hypothyroidism. Bear in mind that for testing and treatment for adrenal fatigue you will need to consult a naturopathically-oriented or holistic physician or nutritional therapist who has specific experience with this problem, as it is not recognized by mainstream medicine.

Consider getting a reverse osmosis water filter if perchlorate contamination is a

problem in your neighbourhood.

If you are approaching menopause, recognize the weight loss hindering effects of the hormonal imbalances that can occur at this time. Try a low carb, low GI or low GL diet if you are not already following one. If a low carb diet is not working for you, try the HCG Diet.

Reduce or preferably eliminate your intake of MSG and aspartame in food and drink

to minimise the risk of disruption to your endocrine (hormone) systems.

Avoid xenoestrogens in your diet wherever possible to avoid the problems caused by estrogen dominance.



Rule 13: Minimise the adverse effect that prescription medicines can have on weight loss

Try to get off prescription medicines wherever possible, taking natural remedies instead.

Look for alternative brands of prescription medicines and vitamin and mineral

supplements which do not contain cornstarch, yeast, sucrose or other fillers and flavourings/colourings if these are a problem for you.

Rule 14: Identify the real causes of your compulsive eating

Refuse to be bullied into thinking you have an ‘emotional’ problem with eating when in actual fact it’s a biochemical, metabolic issue. If you treat the wrong cause, you won’t solve the problem!

Deal with any micronutrient deficiencies that may be causing you to eat

compulsively.

Ensure you eat enough protein to enable your brain to make all its mood-enhancing chemicals and consider amino acid therapy if you need a stronger approach.

Ask your physician to test you for low thyroid levels rather than just prescribe you

some antidepressants, if depression seems to be a factor in your eating patterns.

Get tested for food sensitivities and/or candida (go to a reputable practitioner).

Rule 15: Choose the right diet for you

Recognize that there is no single ‘right’ diet for everyone – we are all biochemically unique.

Don’t fall victim to diet politics. Get the real facts about all the diets and choose the

right one for you, not the one the diet industry, media or government health department wants you to follow!



AAppppeennddiixx 11::

TThheerrmmooggeenniicc aanndd ssttiimmuullaanntt ffaatt

bbuurrnniinngg ssuupppplleemmeennttss

One way of overcoming a depressed metabolic rate may be to take thermogenic or stimulant metabolic enhancers or ‘fat burner’ supplements. But do they really work? Are they safe? Here we summarise some of the latest online information about supplements whose metabolism-boosting properties are claimed to be supported by reputable scientific evidence. You are advised to find out as much as you can from sources you trust to assure yourself of their efficacy and safety if you wish to try them. We do not in any way recommend that you take any of these products or compounds, particularly the stimulant ones, such as guarana and ephedra.

Citrus aurantium Also known as bitter orange, its active ingredient is synephrine (related to ephedra, an amphetamine-like chemical, but without the side effects). Citrus aurantium has been used in Traditional Chinese Medicine for thousands of years to improve overall health. Research at McGill University says that it stimulates certain receptors that help to break down fat, causing an increase in metabolic rate.

CLA CLA (conjugated linoleic acid) is believed to work by blocking fat uptake and increasing the speed of fat burning. Studies by Ola Gudmundsen of Scandinavian Clinical Research and Thom Erling, PhD reported that CLA significantly reduced body fat percentage. CLA is also believed to lower leptin and insulin resistance, reduce inflammatory signals from the fat cells, decrease abdominal fat, enhance muscle growth and lower cholesterol and triglycerides. The patented form of CLA called Tonalin is the most reliable.

Coconut oil Coconut oil contains a high proportion of lauric acid, which is a medium chain fatty acid or triglyceride (referred to as MCFA or MCT for short). Coconut oil has been found in studies to have a thermogenic effect, and to help a sluggish thyroid. One of the main reasons for the interest in MCFAs as a weight loss aid is the fact that they are water-soluble. This means they can be burned without the help of carnitine. They are also less likely to be stored as fat. Further, they contain fewer calories – 8 per gram compared with over 9 for other types of fatty acids. However, it is suggested that for weight loss, the MCFAs should replace some of the existing fats in the diet rather than be added to them.



Coleus forskohlii An ancient Ayurvedic plant, its active ingredient is forskolin. It is thought to have two benefits: stimulating fat burning enzymes and increasing thyroid hormone production. It bypasses the adrenergic receptors, thereby avoiding the side effects that ephedrine is known to cause. Dr Richard Kreider at Baylor University in the USA has reported that initial studies indicate coleus looks promising as a metabolic rate booster.

Ephedra Also called ma huang, ephedra is an ancient Chinese herbal form of the powerful stimulant ephedrine. Numerous studies have shown it to be effective in suppressing appetite and acting as a thermogenic (raising the body’s core temperature) and burning fat. However, it is also notorious for its negative side effects which relate to increased stimulation of adrenergic receptors (speeding up heart rate, raising blood pressure, anxiety, stroke, seizures and even death). All warnings should be read carefully before taking this stimulant.

Green tea Derived from the camellia sinensis plant, green tea contains caffeine and catechin polyphenols. Both of these substances have been documented to increase resting metabolic rate. A study in Geneva concluded that green tea may be useful for increasing metabolic rate.

Guarana A herb containing guaranine (similar to caffeine) which has been used for centuries by indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforest to reduce hunger, relieve fatigue and treat obesity. It stimulates the adrenal glands to release epinephrine, norepinephrine (adrenaline) and dopamine, which in turn enhance thermogenesis (increased ability to burn excess calories through raising the core temperature). A study by Dr Torben Andersen at Charlottenlund Medical Centre in Denmark produced positive results.

Hydroxycitric acid (HCA) Found in the rind of the brindleberry fruit (garcinia cambogia), HCA is claimed to inhibit the production of fats from dietary carbohydrates. When carbohydrates are broken down into glucose, some is used for energy and the rest is stored as glycogen in the muscles and liver. Once the glycogen stores are full, an enzyme turns any excess glucose molecules into cholesterol and fat. HCA appears to inhibit this last stage. HCA is also thought to be the active ingredient in the juice and rind of grapefruit and possibly other citrus fruits, which have similar effects to the brindleberry.

Yerba mate A member of the holly family, it contains many vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. The most important chemical is the stimulant mateine, a xanthine alkaloid. Caffeine is another example of a xanthine alkaloid, but mateine appears not to have the addictive properties or the side effects of the other stimulants. Yerba mate is believed to increase energy and fat burning and an initial study by Dr Torben Andersen at Charlottenlund Medical Centre in Denmark found positive results.



7-Keto™ A patented supplement, this powerful micronutrient is claimed to represent a breakthrough in safe fat loss without the ‘buzz’ and side effects of stimulants. Discovered by Dr Henry Lardy, many researchers consider it to be the most potent thermogenic enhancer available. Its mode of action is quite different to the other fat burners. It works by increasing levels of the thyroid hormone T3 (triiodothyronine) to raise the metabolic rate. Studies have reported very favourable results.

Irvingia gabonensis An extract made from a West African herb, it is claimed to improve sensitivity to leptin which helps your body to ‘hear’ the signals that you have eaten enough, reduce the activity of glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase which may help reduce the conversion of carbohydrates into fat, support healthy adiponectin levels and help maintain insulin sensitivity.

Fucoxanthin Fucoxanthin is obtained from brown seaweed, a type of kelp. A natural carotenoid, it is thought to increase your metabolism without stimulating your central nervous system. How it works is not fully understood, but it appears to involve a protein called UCP1 that increases the rate at which belly fat is burned. It is also a powerful antioxidant.

Acetyl L-carnitine Acetyl-L-carnitine is believed to help reduce leptin resistance, help the hypothalamus stimulate secretion of HGH during sleep, and promote higher levels of fat burning by delivering more fat into the ‘powerhouses’ of the cells, the mitochondria.

Alpha-lipoic acid A powerful antioxidant, alpha-lipoic acid helps stimulate production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which produces cellular energy. It may also help to reduce insulin resistance and control blood sugar.

Milk thistle A fat-burning herb that helps support the liver, it is a common ingredient in detoxification and weight loss formulas.

Resveratrol An antioxidant-rich polyphenol derived from red wine, grape skin or Japanese Knotweed, resveratrol is believed to decrease fat generation and reduce the viability of developing fat cells before they ever have the chance to mature, through down-regulation of key enzymes and transcription factors in fat cells, and by altering genes responsible for regulating the mitochondria, or cellular powerhouses. However be very careful in your choice of a resveratrol supplement. Most contain a significant amount of Emodin, which is a laxative that commonly causes stomach cramps. Look for a brand which says it contains 95% or more trans-resveratrol or resveratrol, as any less means it will contain more Emodin. The only way to be completely sure is to obtain a resveratrol supplement which is made only from grapes, in which case there will be no Emodin content.




FFuurrtthheerr iinnffoorrmmaattiioonn aanndd

bbiibblliiooggrraapphhyy

In this appendix: Recommended websites Recommended books Further resources References Bibliography

Recommended websites

Mary Shomon’s article "Are you eating enough carbohydrates to lose weight with hypothyroidism https://www.verywell.com/thyroid-diet-eating-enough-weight-3231590 Mary Shomon’s thyroid support website www.thyroid-info.com Mary Shomon’s thyroid disease basics https://www.verywell.com/thyroid-basics-4014597 Thyroid Patient Advocacy website (UK) www.tpauk.com/ Stop the Thyroid Madness www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/ Dr Kent Holtorf’s website http://www.holtorfmed.com/weight-loss.html National Academy of Hypothyroidism http://nahypothyroidism.org/ Dr Mike Eades’ blog http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/ Dr Barry Groves’ website and article ‘Do calories really count?’ www.second-opinions.co.uk/do-calories-really-count.html

https://www.verywell.com/thyroid-diet-eating-enough-weight-3231590

http://www.thyroid-info.com/

https://www.verywell.com/thyroid-basics-4014597

http://www.tpauk.com/

http://www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/

http://www.holtorfmed.com/weight-loss.html

http://nahypothyroidism.org/

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/

http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/do-calories-really-count.html



The Environmental Illness Resource Web pages on food allergy/sensitivity (there are also pages on candida and leaky gut) www.ei-resource.org/allergies.asp Dr Joseph Mercola’s website www.mercola.com Dr John Briffa’s website www.drbriffa.com Dr Ron Rosedale’s website www.drrosedale.com Lyle McDonald’s website www.bodyrecomposition.com The Weston A. Price Foundation website http://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics The real facts on low calorie/low carb/low GI diets www.lowcarbiseasy.com/aboutlowcarb.htm

Recommended books

All of the following books are available from www.lowcarbiseasy.com/books.htm

The Diet Delusion (‘Good Calories, Bad Calories’ in the US) by Gary Taubes

Why We Get Fat, by Gary Taubes

The Obesity Epidemic, by Zoe Harcombe

Eat Fat, Lose Fat, by Dr Mary Enig and Sally Fallon

The Illustrated Book of Nutritional Healing, by Denise Mortimore

Hidden Food Allergies – Is What You Eat Making You Ill? by Patrick Holford and Dr James Braly

Eat Fat and Grow Slim, by Dr Richard Mackarness

Not all in the Mind, by Dr Richard Mackarness

Candida Albicans – Could Yeast Be Your Problem, by Leon Chaitow

The Waterfall Diet, by Linda Lazarides

http://www.ei-resource.org/allergies.asp

http://www.mercola.com/

http://www.drbriffa.com/

http://www.drrosedale.com/

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/

http://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics

http://www.lowcarbiseasy.com/aboutlowcarb.htm

http://www.lowcarbiseasy.com/books.htm



Detox for Life, by Carol Vorderman

The Nutron Diet, by Dr Patrick Kingsley

Life Without Bread, by Dr Christian Allen and Dr Wolfgang Lutz

The Protein Power Lifeplan, by Drs Michael and Mary Eades

Living the Low Carb Life, by Jonny Bowden

Dr Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, by Dr Robert C Atkins

Atkins for Life, by Dr Robert C Atkins

The New High Protein Diet, by Dr Charles Clark

Eat Fat, Get Thin, by Barry Groves

Trick and Treat, by Barry Groves

Evolving Health - the origins of illness, by Noel Boaz

Eat Right for Your Type, by Peter D’Adamo

Nutritional medicine practitioners

Finding a reputable and knowledgeable practitioner to help with problems such as food sensitivities, yeast overgrowth, nutritional deficiencies, thyroid problems, adrenal fatigue, hormonal imbalance and difficulty in losing weight can be tricky but an internet search should in most cases lead to a national organization which provides lists of accredited individuals. Try search terms such as nutritional medicine, clinical ecology, orthomolecular medicine, allergy medicine, naturopathic physician and nutritional therapist. Some national organizations are included below. British Society for Ecological Medicine www.ecomed.org.uk/ American Academy of Environmental Medicine www.aaem.com/ Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine www.acnem.org/ The British Association for Applied Nutrition and Nutritional Therapy (BANT) http://www.bant.org.uk/ Allergy Medical UK http://allergymedicaluk.com/

http://www.ecomed.org.uk/

http://www.aaem.com/

http://www.acnem.org/

http://www.bant.org.uk/

http://allergymedicaluk.com/



References

The effect of dieting on metabolic rate and the set point van Dale D, Saris WH, ten Hoor F. Weight maintenance and resting metabolic rate 18-40 months after a diet/exercise treatment. Int J Obes. 1990 Apr;14(4):347-59. Hall KD. Body fat and fat-free mass inter-relationships: Forbes’s theory revisited. The British Journal of Nutrition. 2007:1–5. MacLean PS, Higgins JA, Johnson GC, Fleming-Elder BK, Donahoo WT, Melanson EL, Hill JO. Enhanced metabolic efficiency contributes to weight regain after weight loss in obesity-prone rats. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol. 2004 Dec;287(6):R1306-15. Epub 2004 Aug 26. Movahedi A. Examining effectiveness of Ahmadreza Movahedi’s metabolic theory and model for weight control. Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2004;13(Suppl):S145. Tremblay A. Dietary fat and body weight set point. Nutr Rev. 2004 Jul;62(7 Pt 2):S75-7. Weinsier RL, Nagy TR, Hunter GR, Darnell BE, Hensrud DD, Weiss HL. Do adaptive changes in metabolic rate favor weight regain in weight-reduced individuals? An examination of the set-point theory. Am J Clin Nutr. 2000 Nov;72(5):1088-94.

Leptin, ghrelin, adiponectin and HGH Christiansen T, Paulsen SK, Bruun JM, Ploug T, Pedersen SB, and Richelsen B. Diet-Induced Weight Loss and Exercise Alone and in Combination Enhance the Expression of Adiponectin Receptors in Adipose Tissue and Skeletal Muscle, but Only Diet-Induced Weight Loss Enhanced Circulating Adiponectin. JCEM 2010 95: 911-919; doi:10.1210/jc.2008-2505 Crujeiras AB, Goyenechea E, Abete I, Lage M, Carreira MC, Martínez JA and Casanueva FF. Weight Regain after a Diet-Induced Loss Is Predicted by Higher Baseline Leptin and Lower Ghrelin Plasma Levels. JCEM 2010 95: 5037-5044; doi:10.1210/jc.2009-2566 Diz-Chaves Y. Ghrelin, appetite regulation, and food reward: interaction with chronic stress. Int J Pept. 2011;2011:898450. Epub 2011 Sep 21. PubMed PMID: 21949667; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3178114. Forbes S, Bui S, Robinson BR, Hochgeschwender U, Brennan MB. Integrated control of appetite and fat metabolism by the leptin-proopiomelanocortin pathway. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2001 Mar 27;98(7):4233-7. Epub 2001 Mar 20 Pijl H, Langendonk JG, Burggraaf J, Frölich M, Cohen AF, Veldhuis JD and Meinders AE. Altered Neuroregulation of GH Secretion in Viscerally Obese Premenopausal Women. JCEM 2001 86: 5509-5515; doi:10.1210/jc.86.11.5509



Leidy HJ, Gardner JK, Frye BR, Snook ML, Schuchert MK, Richard EL, Williams NI. Circulating ghrelin is sensitive to changes in body weight during a diet and exercise program in normal-weight young women. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2004 Jun;89(6):2659-64. Rosenbaum M, Goldsmith R, Bloomfield D, Magnano A, Weimer L, Heymsfield S, Gallagher D, Mayer L, Murphy E, and Leibel RL. Low-dose leptin reverses skeletal muscle, autonomic, and neuroendocrine adaptations to maintenance of reduced weight. Clin Invest. 2005 December 1; 115(12): 3579–3586. doi: 10.1172/JCI25977. Jéquier E. Leptin signaling, adiposity, and energy balance. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2002 Jun;967:379-88. Review. PubMed PMID: 12079865. Rosenbaum M, Murphy EM, Heymsfield SB, Matthews DE, & Leibel RL. Low dose leptin administration reverses effects of sustained weight-reduction on energy expenditure and circulating concentrations of thyroid hormones. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2002 87, 2391-2394 Sumithran P, Prendergast LA, Delbridge E, Purcell K, Shulkes A, Kriketos A and Proietto J. Long-Term Persistence of Hormonal Adaptations to Weight Loss. N Engl J Med 2011; 365:1597-1604October 27, 2011 Wadden TA, Considine RV, Foster GD, Anderson DA, Sarwer DB and Caro JS. Short- and Long-Term Changes in Serum Leptin in Dieting Obese Women: Effects of Caloric Restriction and Weight Loss. JCEM 1998 83: 214-218; doi:10.1210/jc.83.1.214 Weigle DS, Cummings DE, Newby PD, Breen PA, Frayo RS, Matthys CC, Callahan HS and Purnell JQ. Roles of Leptin and Ghrelin in the Loss of Body Weight Caused by a Low Fat, High Carbohydrate Diet. JCEM 2003 88: 1577-1586; doi:10.1210/jc.2002-021262

Weight loss and fructose Lustig, RH: YouTube presentation “Sugar: The bitter truth”; at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Weight loss, thyroid and metabolic rate Celi FS, Zemskova M, Linderman JD, Smith S, Drinkard B, Sachdev V, Skarulis MC, Kozlosky M, Csako G, Costello R and Pucino F. Metabolic Effects of Liothyronine Therapy in Hypothyroidism: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Crossover Trial of Liothyronine Versus Levothyroxine. JCEM 2011 96: 3466-3474; doi:10.1210/jc.2011-1329 Kiortsis DN, Durack I, Turpin G. Effects of a low-calorie diet on resting metabolic rate and serum tri-iodothyronine levels in obese children. Eur J Pediatr. 1999 Jun;158(6):446-50. Kok P, Roelfsema F, Langendonk JG, Frölich M, Burggraaf J, Meinders AE and Pijl H. High Circulating Thyrotropin Levels in Obese Women Are Reduced after Body Weight

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM



Loss Induced by Caloric Restriction. JCEM 2005 90: 4659-4663; doi:10.1210/jc.2005-0920 Maglich JM, Watson J, McMillen PJ, Goodwin B, Willson TM, Moore JT. The nuclear receptor CAR is a regulator of thyroid hormone metabolism during caloric restriction. J Biol Chem. 2004 May 7;279(19):19832-8. Epub 2004 Mar 5. Pelletier C, Doucet E, Imbeault P, & Tremblay A. Associations between weight loss-induced changes in plasma organochlorine concentrations, serum T(3) concentration, and resting metabolic rate. Toxicological Sciences, 2002 67, 46-51 Rosenbaum M, Hirsch J, Murphy E, Leibel RL. Effects of changes in body weight on carbohydrate metabolism, catecholamine excretion, and thyroid function. Am J Clin Nutr. 2000 Jun;71(6):1421-32. Rosenbaum M, Murphy EM, Heymsfield SB, Matthews DE, & Leibel RL (2002). Low dose leptin administration reverses effects of sustained weight-reduction on energy expenditure and circulating concentrations of thyroid hormones. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 87, 2391-2394

High protein/low carb diets/low GI/GL diets vs traditional high carb/low fat diets Abete I, Parra D, Martinez JA. Energy-restricted diets based on a distinct food selection affecting the glycemic index induce different weight loss and oxidative response. Clin Nutr. 2008 Aug;27(4):545-51. Epub 2008 Mar 4. PubMed PMID: 18308431. Agnew B. Rethinking Atkins. New research suggests that the famous low-carb diet may be safe - at least in the short term. Diabetes Forecast. 2004 Apr;57(4):64-6, 68-70. Erlanson-Albertsson C, Mei J. The effect of low carbohydrate on energy metabolism. Int J Obes (Lond). 2005 Sep;29 Suppl 2:S26-30. Johnston, CS, Day, CS, & Swan, PD. Postprandial thermogenesis is increased 100% on a high-protein, low-fat diet versus a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet in healthy, young women. Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 2002 21, 55-61 Layman DK, Baum J. Dietary Protein Impact on Glycemic Control during Weight Loss. J. Nutr, 2004 Apr:134:968S-973S. Raatz SK, Torkelson CJ, Redmon JB, Reck KP, Kwong CA, Swanson JE, Liu C, Thomas W, Bantle JP. Reduced glycemic index and glycemic load diets do not increase the effects of energy restriction on weight loss and insulin sensitivity in obese men and women. J Nutr. 2005 Oct;135(10):2387-91. Stern L, Iqbal N, Seshadri P, Chicano KL, Daily DA, McGrory J, Williams M, Gracely EJ, Samaha FF. The effects of low-carbohydrate versus conventional weight loss diets in severely obese adults: one-year follow-up of a randomized trial. Ann Intern Med. 2004 May 18;140(10):778-85.



Volek JS, Forsythe CE. The case for not restricting saturated fat on a low carbohydrate diet. Nutr Metab (Lond). 2005 Aug 31;2:21.

The HCG Diet Belluscio DO, Ripamonte LE. Utility of an oral formulation of hCG for obesity treatment: A Double-Blind study. http://www.indexmedico.com/obesity/hcg.htm Belluscio DO. The hCG Obesity and Research Clinic in Argentina has been using a sublingual formula with over 8,000 patients. http://www.hcgobesity.org/slideshow.htm Heymsfield SB, Harp JB, Reitman ML, Beetsch JW, Schoeller DA, Erondu N, et al. Why do obese patients not lose more weight when treated with low-calorie diets? A mechanistic perspective. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2007;85:346–354. Tomer Y, Huber GK, and Davies TF. Human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) interacts directly with recombinant human TSH receptors. JCEM 1992 74: 1477-9; doi:10.1210/jc.74.6.1477

Resistance exercise, protein, body fat content and metabolic rate Ballor, DL, Katch, VL, Becque, MD, & Marks, CR. Resistance weight training during caloric restriction enhances lean body weight maintenance. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1988 47, 19-25. Bryner RW, Ullrich IH, Sauers J, Donley D, Hornsby G, Kolar M, Yeater R. Effects of resistance vs. aerobic training combined with an 800 calorie liquid diet on lean body mass and resting metabolic rate. J Am Coll Nutr. 1999 Apr;18(2):115-21. Burleson MA Jr, O’Bryant HS, Stone MH, Collins MA, & Triplett-McBride T. Effect of weight training exercise and treadmill exercise on post-exercise oxygen consumption. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 1998 30, 518-522. Connolly J, Romano T, Patruno M. Selections from current literature: effects of dieting and exercise on resting metabolic rate and implications for weight management. Fam Pract. 1999 Apr;16(2):196-201. Forbes GB. Body fat content influences the body composition response to nutrition and exercise. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2000 904, 359-365. Kraemer WJ, Volek JS, Clark KL, Gordon SE, Puhl SM, Koziris LP, McBride JM, Triplett-McBride NT, Putukian M, Newton RU, Hakkinen K, Bush JA, Sebastianelli. Influence of exercise training on physiological and performance changes with weight loss in men. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 1999 Sep;31(9):1320-9. Layman DK, Evans E, Baum JI, Seyler J, Erickson DJ, Boileau RA. Dietary protein and exercise have additive effects on body composition during weight loss in adult women. J Nutr. 2005 Aug;135(8):1903-10. McCargar LJ. Can Diet and Exercise Really Change Metabolism? Medscape Womens Health. 1996 Aug;1(8):5.

http://www.indexmedico.com/obesity/hcg.htm

http://www.hcgobesity.org/slideshow.htm



Metabolic enhancers Boschmann M, Steiniger J, Hille U, Tank J, Adams F, Sharma AM, Klaus S, Luft FC, Jordan J. Water-induced thermogenesis. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2003 Dec;88(12):6015-9. Boozer CN, Nasser JA, Heymsfield SB, Wang V, Chen G, Solomon JL. An herbal supplement containing Ma Huang-Guarana for weight loss: a randomized, double-blind trial. Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. 2001 Mar;25(3):316-24. Greenway FL, De Jonge L, Blanchard D, Frisard M, Smith SR. Effect of a dietary herbal supplement containing caffeine and ephedra on weight, metabolic rate, and body composition. Obes Res. 2004 Jul;12(7):1152-7. Preuss HG, Garis RI, Bramble JD, Bagchi D, Bagchi M, Rao CV, Satyanarayana S. Efficacy of a novel calcium/potassium salt of hydroxycitric acid in weight control. Int J Clin Pharmacol Res. 2005;25(3):133-44. Zenk JL, Leikam SA, Kassen LJ, Kuskowski MA. Effect of lean system 7 on metabolic rate and body composition. Nutrition. 2005 Feb;21(2):179-85.

The role of nutrition in obesity Bach AC, Ingenbleek Y, & Frey A. The usefulness of dietary medium-chain triglycerides in body weight control: fact or fancy? Journal of Lipid Research, 1996 37, 708-726. Bray GA, Lovejoy JC, Smith SR, DeLany JP, Lefevre M, Hwang D, Ryan DH, York DA. The influence of different fats and fatty acids on obesity, insulin resistance and inflammation. J Nutr. 2002 Sep;132(9):2488-91. Cunnane SC, McAdoo KR, & Horrobin DF. N-3 essential fatty acids decrease weight gain in genetically obese mice. British Journal of Nutrition, 1986 56, 87-95. Heaney RP, Davies KM, & Barger-Lux MJ. Calcium and weight: clinical studies. Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 2002 21, 152S-155S. Krotkiewski M. Value of VLCD supplementation with medium chain triglycerides. Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. 2001 Sep;25(9):1393-400. Lefevre M, Lovejoy JC, Smith SR, Delany JP, Champagne C, Most MM, Denkins Y, de Jonge L, Rood J, Bray GA. Comparison of the acute response to meals enriched with cis- or trans-fatty acids on glucose and lipids in overweight individuals with differing FABP2 genotypes. Metabolism. 2005 Dec;54(12):1652-8. Papamandjaris AA, MacDougall DE, Jones PJ. Medium chain fatty acid metabolism and energy expenditure: obesity treatment implications. Life Sci. 1998; 62(14):1203-15. Rosenbaum M, Murphy, EM, Heymsfield SB, Matthews DE, & Leibel RL. Low dose leptin administration reverses effects of sustained weight-reduction on energy



expenditure and circulating concentrations of thyroid hormones. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2002 87, 2391-2394. St-Onge MP, & Jones PJ. Physiological effects of medium-chain triglycerides: potential agents in the prevention of obesity. Journal of Nutrition, 2002 132, 329-332. White MD, Papamandjaris AA, Jones PJ. Enhanced postprandial energy expenditure with medium-chain fatty acid feeding is attenuated after 14 d in premenopausal women. Am J Clin Nutri. 1999 May; 69(5):883-9.

The dietary fat and heart disease myth Ascherio A, Willett WC. New directions in dietary studies of coronary heart disease. J Nutr. 1995 Mar;125(3 Suppl):647S-655S. Ravnskov U. A hypothesis out-of-date - the diet-heart idea. J Clin Epidemiol. 2002 Nov;55(11):1057-63. Taubes G. The soft science of dietary fat. Nutrition Science 2001; 291: 2536–45. Volek JS, Forsythe CE. The case for not restricting saturated fat on a low carbohydrate diet. Nutr Metab (Lond). 2005 Aug 31;2:21. Weinberg SL (2004). The diet-heart hypothesis: a critique. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 43, 731-733.

Diagnosis and treatment of hypothyroidism Basier VW, Hertoghe J, Eeekhaut W. Thyroid Insufficiency. Is TSH the Only Diagnostic Tool? J Nutr Environ Med 2000;10,105-113. Brajkovich IE, Mashiter K, Joplin GF, Cassar J. Serum T4, T3, and TSH levels in primary hypothyroidism during replacement therapy with thyroxine. Metabolism. 1983 Aug;32(8):745-7. Bunevicius R, Kazanavicius G, Zalinkevicius R, Prange AJ Jr. Effects of Thyroxine as Compared with Thyroxine plus Triiodothyronine in Patients with Hypothyroidism. N Engl J Med. 1999;340(6):424-429. Dickey RA, Wartofsky L, Feld S. Optimal thyrotropin level: normal ranges and reference intervals are not equivalent. Thyroid. 2005 Sep;15(9):1035-9. Durrant-Peatfield D. Aspects Of A Common Missed Diagnosis. Journal of Nutrition and Environmental Medicine. 6: 4 Dec 1996 Hak AE, Pols HAP, Visser TJ, Drexhage HA, Hofman A, Witteman JCM. Subclinical Hypothyroidism Is an Independent Risk Factor for Atherosclerosis and Myocardial Infarction in Elderly Women: The Rotterdam Study. 15 February 2000 | Volume 132 Issue 4 | Pages 270-278 Kim B. Thyroid hormone as a determinant of energy expenditure and the basal



metabolic rate. Thyroid. 2008 Feb;18(2):141-4. Review. PubMed PMID: 18279014. Lowe JC. Thyroid Hormone Replacement Therapies: Ineffective and Harmful for Many Hypothyroid Patients. Thyroid Science 1(1):C1-21, 2006 http://www.drlowe.com/frf/t4replacement/critique1.htm Najarian T, Rowsemitt CN. Hypothyroidism, Particularly Associated with Weight Loss: Evaluation and Treatment based on Symptoms and Thyroid Hormone Levels. Thyroid Science 6(6):CR1-7, 2011. www.ThyroidScience.com Rowsemitt CN, Najarian T. TSH is Not the Answer: Rationale for a New Paradigm to Evaluate and Treat Hypothyroidism, Particularly Associated with Weight Loss. Thyroid Science 6(4):H1-16, 2011. www.ThyroidScience.com Walsh JP, Stuckey BG. What is the optimal treatment for hypothyroidism? Med J Aust. 2001 Feb 5;174(3):141-3. Wartofsky L, Dickey RA. The evidence for a narrower thyrotropin reference range is compelling. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2005 Sep;90(9):5483-8.

Thyroid suppression therapy Fujiyama K, Kiriyama T, Ito M, Kimura H, Ashizawa K, Tsuruta M, Nagayama Y, Villadolid MC, Yokoyama N, Nagataki S. Suppressive doses of thyroxine do not accelerate age-related bone loss in late postmenopausal women. Thyroid. 1995 Feb;5(1):13-7. Grant DJ, McMurdo ME, Mole PA, Paterson CR, Davies RR. Suppressed TSH levels secondary to thyroxine replacement therapy are not associated with osteoporosis. Clin Endocrinol (Oxf). 1993 Nov;39(5):529-33. Shapiro LE, Sievert R, Ong L, Ocampo EL, Chance RA, Lee M, Nanna M, Ferrick K, Surks MI. Minimal Cardiac Effects in Asymptomatic Athyreotic Patients Chronically Treated with Thyrotropin-Suppressive Doses of L-Thyroxine. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism Vol. 82, No. 8 2592-2595.

Bibliography

Dr Arthur Agatston, The South Beach Diet, ISBN 0755311299, Headline Book Publishing, 2003 Dr Christian B Allan & Dr Wolfgang Lutz, Life without Bread – how a low-carbohydrate diet can save your life, ISBN 0658001701, McGraw-Hill, 2000 Phillip Alexander, It Could Be Allergy And It Can Be Cured, ISBN 064618119X, Ethicare Pty Ltd, 1994 Nancy Appleton, Lick the Sugar Habit, ISBN 0895296950, Avery Publishing Group, 1996

http://www.drlowe.com/frf/t4replacement/critique1.htm

http://www.thyroidscience.com/

http://www.thyroidscience.com/



Dr Robert Atkins, Dr Atkins’ Super-Energy Diet, ISBN 0553103504, Bantam, 1978 Dr Robert Atkins, Dr Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, ISBN 006001203X, HarperCollins, 2002 Dr Robert Atkins, Atkins Made Easy – The First Two Weeks, ISBN 0007181337, Thorsons, 2004 Dr Robert Atkins, Dr Atkins’ Vita-Nutrient Solution, ISBN 0743429974, Pocket Books, 2002 Dr Robert Atkins, Atkins Diabetes Revolution, ISBN 0007164823, Thorsons, 2004 Dr Robert Atkins, Atkins For Life, ISBN 1405021101, MacMillan, 2003 Dr Robert Atkins, Dr Atkins’ Age-Defying Diet Revolution, ISBN 0091825474, Vermilion, 2000 Ray Audette, Neanderthin – eat like a caveman to achieve a lean, strong, healthy body, ISBN 0312975910, St Martin’s Press, 2000 Anita Bean, Carol Vorderman’s Detox For Life, ISBN 0753506610, Virgin Books, 2005 Ken Blanchard MD, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Hypothyroidism, ISBN 0446690619, Warner Wellness, 2004 Joanna Blythman, The Food We Eat, ISBN 0718139127, Penguin Books, 1996 Noel Boaz, Evolving Health – The origins of illness and how the modern world is making us sick ISBN 0471352616, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, New York 2002 Jonny Bowden, Living the Low Carb Life, ISBN 1402713983, Sterling Publishing, 2004 Janie A Bowthorpe, Stop The Thyroid Madness, ISBN 9780615144313, Laughing Grape Publishing, 2008 Janie A Bowthorpe, Stop The Thyroid Madness, Revised Edition, ISBN 9780615477121, Laughing Grape Publishing, 2011 William Breckon, You are what you eat ISBN 0563109947, British Broadcasting Corporation, 1980 Dr Sarah Brewer and Michelle Berriedale-Johnson, IBS and Food Intolerance, Thorsons, 2004 Dr John Briffa, BodyWise – 10 steps to permanent weight loss and well-being, ISBN 1903116015, CMA Books, 2000



Dr John Briffa, The True You Diet, ISBN 9781401915438, Hay House UK Ltd, 2007 Dr John Briffa, Waist Disposal, ISBN 9781747501157, Hay House UK Ltd, 2010 Professor Jonathon Brostoff and Linda Gamlin, Complete Guide to Food Allergy and Intolerance, ISBN 1856054357, Blitz Editions, 1998 Martin Budd, Why can’t I lose weight?, ISBN 0007120656, Thorsons, 2002 Martin Budd, Low Blood Sugar, ISBN 0722531192, Thorsons, 1997 Brian A Fox & Alan G Cameron, Food Science, Nutrition and Health, ISBN 0340496754, Edward Arnold, 1991 Leon Chaitow, Candida Albicans – could yeast be your problem? ISBN 0722524528, Thorsons, 1991 Leon Chaitow, The Stone Age Diet, The Natural Way to Eat, ISBN 0356123286, Macdonald Optima, 1987 Leon Chaitow, Candida Albicans, ISBN 0722533438, Thorsons, 1996 Dr Charles Clark, The new high protein diet ISBN 1844137236, Vermillion, 2004 Oliver Cowmeadow, An introduction to macrobiotics ISBN 072251414X, Thorsons, 1987 William G Crook, MD, The Yeast Connection, ISBN 0394747003, Vintage Books, 1986 William G Crook, MD, Detecting Your Hidden Allergies, ISBN 0933478151, Professional Books, 1988 Christine P Dancey & Susan Backhouse, IBS – a complete guide to relief from Irritable Bowel Syndrome ISBN 1854879103, Robinson Publishing, 1997 Dr Peter J D’Adamo, Eat Right for Your Type, ISBN 071267716X, Random House, 2001 Charles Darwin, The origin of species ISBN 1853267805, Wordsworth Editions, 1998 Dr Stephen Davies & Dr Alan Stewart, Nutritional medicine – the drug free guide to better family health ISBN 0330288334, Pan Books, 1987 Adelle Davis, Let’s eat right to keep fit ISBN 0046410236, Unwin Books, 1975 Adelle Davis, Let’s get well ISBN 0046120297, Unwin Books, 1983 Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, Fit For Life, ISBN 0553173553, Transworld Publishers Ltd, 1989



James E Down, MD, The Vitamin D Cure, ISBN 9780470565551, John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2008 Dr Barry Durrant-Peatfield, Your Thyroid and how to keep it healthy, ISBN 190514010X, Hammersmith Press Ltd, 2006 Dr Michael R Eades & Dr Mary Dan Eades, The Protein Power LifePlan, ISBN 0446525766, Warner Books, 2000 Liz Earle, Food allergies ISBN 0752216759, Boxtree, 1995 John Emsley and Peter Fell, Was it Something You Ate? ISBN 0198504438, OUP, 1999 Dr Mary Enig and Sally Fallon, Eat fat lose fat ISBN 1594630054, Hudson Street Press, 2005 Drew Fobbester, Never Say Diet, ISBN 0572031319, Arcturus Publishing Ltd, 2005 Alec Forbes, The Bristol Diet, ISBN 0712603263, Century Publishing Co Ltd, 1984 Robert Forman, How to Control Your Allergies, ISBN 0915962292, Larchmont Books, 1979 Burton Goldberg, Weight Loss, ISBN 188729919X, AlternativeMedicine.com Inc, 2000 Rick Gallop, The GI Diet – the glycemic index, ISBN 0753507757, Virgin Books, 2002 Azmina Govindji & Nina Puddefoot, The GI Point Diet, ISBN 0091900093, Vermilion, 2004 Doris Grant & Jean Joyce, Food Combining for Health, ISBN 0722525060, Thorsons, 1991 Rita Greer, Allergic to food? – a self help guide, ISBN 0460024124, Dent Paperbacks, 1985 Dr Barry Groves, Eat Fat, Get Thin, ISBN 0091825938, Vermilion, 2000 Dr Barry Groves, Natural Health and Weight Loss, ISBN 9781905140152, Hammersmith Press Ltd, 2007 Dr Barry Groves, Trick and Treat, ISBN 9781905140220, Hammersmith Press Ltd, 2008 Dr Elson M Haas, The False Fat Diet, ISBN 055381348X, Bantam Books, 2001



Zoe Harcombe, The Obesity Epidemic, ISBN 9781907797002, Columbus Publishing Ltd, 2010 Sari Harrar, The Sugar Solution, ISBN 1579549128, Rodale Inc, 2004 Antony J Haynes, The Insulin Factor, ISBN 9780007163779, Thorsons, 2004 Tish Hayton, The Food Addict’s Diet, ISBN 0747234760, Headline Book Publishing plc, 1991 Gary Heavin & Carol Colman, Curves – Permanent Results Without Permanent Dieting, ISBN 1844134415, Century Books, 2004 Dr Rachael Heller and Dr Richard F Heller, The carbohydrate addict’s diet – the lifelong solution to yo-yo dieting, ISBN 0451173392, Signet, 1993 Dr Richard Heller and Dr Rachael Heller, The Carbohydrate Addict’s Lifespan Program, ISBN 0452278384, Penguin Books Ltd, 1998 Patrick Holford, The 30 Day Fat Burner Diet, ISBN 0749919205, Judy Piatkus (Publishers) Ltd, 1999 Patrick Holford, The Low-GL Diet, ISBN 0749925434, Piatkus Books Limited, 2005 Patrick Holford & Dr James Braly Hidden Food Allergies – Is What You Eat Making You Ill?, ISBN 0749926023, Piatkus Books Limited, 2005 Alan Howard, The Cambridge Diet – how to lose weight safely on 360 calories a day, ISBN 0552127973, Corgi Books, 1986 Gill Jacobs, Yeast and your health, ISBN 0356186857, Optima Books, 1993 Gudrun Jonsson, Gut Reaction, ISBN 0091816785, Vermilion, 1999 Ted Kaptchuk, Chinese Medicine, ISBN 0091532310, Rider & Co, 1986 Dr Malcolm Kendrick, The Great Cholesterol Con, ISBN 9781844543601, John Blake Publishing Ltd, 2007 Leslie Kenton, Lean revolution – eat more to shed fat the energy way ISBN 0091784158, Ebury Press, 1994 Leslie Kenton, The New Biogenic Diet, ISBN 0091784441, Vermilion, 1995 Leslie Kenton, Passage to Power, ISBN 009180955, Vermilion, 1996 Leslie Kenton, Ten Steps to a Natural Menopause, ISBN 0 091825466, Vermilion, 1999



Leslie Kenton, The X Factor Diet, ISBN 0091887755, Vermilion, 2005 Leslie Kenton, The Cura Romana Weightloss Plan, ISBN 9780593066737, Bantam Press, 2011 Dr Patrick Kingsley & Ian Stoakes, The Nutron Diet ISBN 0140244492, Penguin Books, 1994 Harold J Kristal & James M Haig, The Nutrition Solution, ISBN 9781556434372, North Atlantic Books, 2002 Linda Lazarides, The Waterfall Diet, ISBN 074992155 2, Judy Piatkus (Publishers) Ltd, 2000 Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins, Book Club Associates, 1977 Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered, ISBN 0316902985, Little, Brown and Company (UK) Limited, 1992 John R Lee MD with Virginia Hopkins, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause, ISBN 0446671444, Warner Books, 1996 John R Lee MD with Virginia Hopkins, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause, Revised & Updated, ISBN 0446614955, Warner Books, 2004 Dr Anthony Leeds, Prof Jennie Brand Miller, Kaye Foster-Powell & Dr Stephen Colagiuri, The GI Factor, ISBN 0340696222, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996 Alan Scott Levin MD and Merla Zellerbach, The Allergy Relief Programme, ISBN 0946551154, Gateway Books, 1985 Derek Llewellyn-Jones, Everybody – the healthy eating handbook, ISBN 0192861557, Oxford University Press, 1993 Dr Richard Mackarness, Eat Fat Grow Slim ISBN 0006338089, HarperCollins 1985 Dr Richard Mackarness, Chemical victims ISBN: 0330259377, Pan Books 1980 Dr Richard Mackarness, Not all in the mind ISBN: 0330245929, Pan Books 1982 Dr John Mansfield, Arthritis – Allergy, nutrition and the environment ISBN 0722519036, HarperCollins 1995 Dr Gillian McKeith, You Are What You Eat, ISBN 0718147650, Penguin Books, 2004 Dr Gillian McKeith, Living Food for Health – Twelve natural superfoods to transform your health, ISBN 0749920742, Judy Piatkus, 2003 Dr Joseph Mercola, The No-Grain Diet ISBN 0340832347, Hodder & Stoughton, 2004



Michel Montignac, Eat Yourself Slim, ISBN 0968402909, Vitality & Nutrition Publishing, 1999 Michel Montignac, The Montignac Method Just for Women, ISBN 2910907007, Artulen UK, 1995 Denise Mortimore, Illustrated Elements of Nutritional Healing, ISBN 0 00 713688 9, Thorsons, 2003 Dr Keith Mumby, The Allergy Handbook, ISBN 0722516576, Thorsons, 1988 Fred Pescatore MD, The Hamptons Diet, ISBN 0471478121, John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2004 Magnus Pyke, Success in Nutrition, ISBN 0719531985, John Murray (Publishers) Ltd, 1979 Adele Puhn, The 5-day miracle diet, ISBN 0091815033, Random House, 1997 Theron G Randolph, Ralph W Moss, Allergies – Your Hidden Enemy ISBN 0722509812, HarperCollins 1984 John Ratcliffe, GI Feel Good: Health & Weight Loss, ISBN 1741218993, Hinkler Books, 2005 Dr Uffe Ravnskov, The Cholesterol Myths – exposing the fallacy that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, ISBN 0967089700, NewTrends Publishing, 2002 Steven Rose, The Chemistry of Life, ISBN 9780140207903, Penguin Books Ltd, 1985 Julia Ross, The Diet Cure ISBN 0718143973, Michael Joseph, 2000 Alan Rubin MD and Dr Sarah Brewer, Thyroid for Dummies, ISBN 9780470031728, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2007 Dr Marie Savard with Carol Sveg, Apples and Pears, ISBN 0091906466, Vermilion, 2005 Antoinette Savill and Dr Dawn Hamilton, Lose wheat lose weight ISBN 0007106459, Thorsons, 2001 Dr Reg Saynor and Dr Frank Ryan, The Eskimo Diet, ISBN 0852238096, Ebury Press, 1990 Christopher Scarfe, How to improve your digestion and absorption ISBN 1870976037, ION Press, 1989



Dr Barry Sears, The Zone – a dietary roadmap, ISBN 0060987162, Reagan Books, 1995 Dr Barry Sears, The 7-day Zone Diet, ISBN 9780007151127, ReganBooks, 2000 Dr Barry Sears, The Top 100 Zone Foods, ISBN 0060394196, ReganBooks, 2001 Richard L Shames MD and Karilee Halo Shames, Thyroid Power - 10 Steps to Total Health, ISBN 13978060082222, Collins Wellness, 2005 Dr Caroline Shreeve, Fat Burner Foods, ISBN 0600612872, Hamlyn, 2005 Sanford Siegal, DO, MD, Is Your Thyroid Making You Fat, ISBN 0 446677108, Warner Books, 2001 Mary J Shomon, Living Well with Hypothyroidism, ISBN 0060740957, HarperResource, 2005 Mary J Shomon, The Thyroid Diet, ISBN 9780007211838, HarperThorsons, 2005 Dr Gordon RB Skinner, Diagnosis and Management of Hypothyroidism, ISBN 0954774515, Louise Lorne, 2003 Jean Perry Spodnik and Barbara Gibbons, The 35-Plus Diet for Women, ISBN 028528321, Souvenir Press Ltd, 1988 Maryon Stewart, Beat the Menopause without HRT, ISBN 9780747278405, BCA, 1995 Dr Herman Tarnower & Samm Sinclair Baker, The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, ISBN 0553172034, Bantam Books, 1990 Gary Taubes, The Diet Delusion, ISBN 13579108642, Vermilion, 2008 Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat, ISBN 9780307272706, Alfred A Knopf, 2011 Jacob Teitelbaum MD, From Fatigued to Fantastic!, ISBN 0895298961, Avery Publishing Group, 1996 Peter & Donna Thomson, Complete Food Combining – all you need to know about the Hay Diet, ISBN 0747522685, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1996 Dr John Parks Trowbridge and Morton Walker, The yeast syndrome ISBN 0553262696, Bantam Books, 1989 Anita Bean, Carol Vorderman’s Detox for Life, ISBN 0753506610, Virgin Books Ltd, 2001



Jan de Vries. Hidden Dangers in What We Eat and Drink. ISBN 1840185163, Mainstream Publishing (Edinburgh) Ltd, 2003 Caroline Walker & Geoffrey Cannon, The food scandal ISBN 0712609067, Century Publishing, 1984 Dr Stephen Wangen, Healthier without Wheat, ISBN 9780976853794, Innate Health Publishing, 2009 Debra Waterhouse, Outsmarting the Female Fat Cell, ISBN 0340588136, Hodder & Stoughton, 1993 Dr George Watson, Nutrition and Your Mind, ISBN 0340199237, Coronet Books, 1976 Dr Andrew Weil, Eating well for optimum health – how good food can help you reduce the risk of disease ISBN 0751531162, Warner Books, 2001 Richard Weinstein, DC, The Stress Effect, ISBN 1583331816, Avery, 2004 Drs Eric Westman, Stephen Phinney and Jeff Volek, New Atkins New You, ISBN 9780091935573, Vermilion, 2010 Eric P Widmaier, Why geese don’t get obese (and we do), ISBN 0716736497, Freeman, 2000 Dr Roger Williams, Nutrition Against Disease, Bantam Books, 1973 James L Wilson, ND, DC, Adrenal Fatigue, ISBN 1890572152, Smart Publications, 2001 Elizabeth Workman, SRD, Dr John Hunter and Dr Virginia Alun Jones, The Allergy Diet, ISBN 0906348706, Martin Dunitz Ltd, 1984 Dr John Yudkin, This slimming business Macgibbon & Key, 1958 Sam Ziff, The toxic time bomb – is mercury in your fillings affecting your health ISBN 0722512325, Aurora Press, 1985




AAbboouutt tthhee aauutthhoorr

Weight control has been a problem for me from as far back as I can remember, and I’m no stranger to diets – you name them, I’ve tried them over the years! When I started looking for information on why I couldn’t lose weight on even the strictest low calorie diets, I knew I would not find the answers in the low calorie/low fat focused information parroted out by the mainstream medical profession or the ‘healthy eating’ leaflets that you find in supermarkets and doctors’ surgeries. I knew that there must be more to successful dieting than calorie counting, and that until I found out more about how the body responds to weight loss attempts at hormonal and biochemical level, I would not be able to lose

my surplus weight. So I started reading books and scientific papers by doctors, nutritionists, dieticians, researchers, exercise physiologists and others who have taken a special interest in learning the truth about how the body handles food and its present-day environment. In the course of my search, I found nuggets of information and ideas here and there, which sent me off to search for the detailed science behind the claims. The first revelation was that many people are unable to handle a diet high in carbohydrates, even the so-called ‘good’ carbohydrates like whole grains and fruits. I had long suspected that this was one of my problems, so I embarked upon a low carb diet. I chose the Atkins Diet, because it recognizes that everyone has their own individual level of tolerance to carbohydrates, and it is designed to help you find this level. It also teaches you the importance of good nutrition and, contrary to popular belief, encourages you to eat lots of healthy salads and vegetables and to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fats. Not only did I lose a large amount of weight on this diet, but I felt better than I had done for many years. So I became a committed low carber, not just for the weight control but also because I knew it was the most healthy diet for me in terms of my long term health. All was well for a couple of years, until I started to gain weight again. This sent me back to my research. I knew there had to be a good reason for the weight gain, and that simply ‘cutting back’ was unlikely to reverse it. It took me a long time to find what I was looking for and to piece it all together, but what I found was momentous. I finally had the knowledge to tackle the underlying causes of my new weight gain. And at last I fully understood how wrong the official healthy eating and weight loss advice is. Focusing on calorie counting, reducing fat and the all-calories-are-equal theory, this advice ignores

Jackie Bushell



the reality of how the body responds differently to different food groups. It ignores how we are all individuals biochemically and that there is no one type of diet that is best for everyone. It also ignores many other aspects of health and nutrition which can affect our ability to lose weight. We have quite simply been following incorrect and incomplete advice. Yo-yo dieters like me have not failed on our diets, it’s our diets that have failed us. When I realized this, I got angry. Angry that so many of us have been made to feel failures, when it was the advice we were given that was at fault. Angry that, although some of this information comes from very recent research, other aspects have been known about for some time, but haven’t percolated through to the mainstream medical profession. Angry that the few researchers, nutritionists and other medical professionals who have been prepared to speak out on this subject have generally been ignored or ridiculed by the medical profession. Angry that problems with losing weight have all too often been blamed on ‘cheating’ and ‘emotional overeating’, blinding us to the fact that they are in reality biochemical problems that deserve proper research and effective treatment like any other disease. The dieting population, and in particular, those of us who have special difficulty in losing weight, have quite simply been short changed. That’s why I knew I had to write this book. I have spent thirty years trying to find solutions for my personal weight loss problems, and although I can’t turn the clock back on my own missed years, the low self esteem, the depression and even the desperation of not knowing what to try next, I want to help others avoid going through this same ordeal.



FFuurrtthheerr rreessoouurrcceess

Nutrition/diet/health

What are you looking for? How we can help …

News, information and tips about nutrition, diet and health

The Good Diet Good Health newsletters, articles and blog at http://www.gooddietgoodhealth.com

Weight loss problems


Finding it difficult to lose weight, whichever diet you are following (this ebook)

There are other mechanisms at work which can prevent you from losing weight, no matter which diet you try. These are explained in Why Can't I Lose Weight – The Real Reasons Diets Fail And What To Do About It, at http://www.dietplateau.com Comes with:

Health-Savvy Supermarket Shopping Guide to Fat Burner Supplements

Special/allergy diets


Quick and easy recipes for Stone Age style allergy, exclusion, elimination, rotation and other special diets

The Stone Age Diet is Easy Cookbook at http://www.specialdietsareeasy.com Comes with:

Foods Containing Common Allergens Substitutes for Common Allergenic Foods Vitamins and Minerals and the Foods Which

Contain Them

http://www.gooddietgoodhealth.com/

http://www.dietplateau.com/

http://www.specialdietsareeasy.com/



Low carb/low GI/low GL diets

The following tools to help you achieve successful weight loss are all available from http://www.lowcarbiseasy.com.


Why you should consider a low carb or low GI diet

Why You Should Consider a Low Carb or Low GI Diet at http://www.lowcarbiseasy.com/whylowcarb.htm

How to do a low carb, low GI or low GL diet

The Easy Guide to Low Carb, Low GI and Low GL Diets at http://www.lowcarbiseasy.com/easyguide.htm

How to do the Atkins Diet Atkins Diet Plan

Finding low carb and low GI / GL recipes

The Low Carb is Easy Cookbook at http://www.lowcarbiseasy.com/cookbook.htm. All recipes in the Cookbook are suitable for Atkins, low carb, low GI and low GL diets. Comes with:

Easy Guide to Low Carb, Low GI and Low GL Diets

GI & GL Handy Reference Tables 14-Day Atkins & Low Carb / GI Menu Plan 21-Day Low GI & GL Menu Plan

http://www.lowcarbiseasy.com/

http://www.lowcarbiseasy.com/whylowcarb.htm

http://www.lowcarbiseasy.com/easyguide.htm

http://www.lowcarbiseasy.com/cookbook.htm

Date post:	06-Oct-2020
Category:	Documents
Upload:	others
View:	1 times
Download:	0 times

WWhhyy CCaann’’tt II LLoossee WWeeiigghhtt?? · Conquer your weight loss problems forever...

Documents