The Fast Metabolism Diet (10 page)
Read The Fast Metabolism Diet Online
Authors: Haylie Pomroy
Three hours later, you’ll have a snack that consists of fruit. You might choose mangos or pineapples, tangerines or watermelon or strawberries.
Three hours later, lunch consists of a grain, a protein, a vegetable, and a fruit, all from your Phase 1 grocery list. You might choose a
Chicken and Broccoli Bowl
, or
Turkey, White Bean, and Kale Soup
, or turkey bacon with lettuce and tomato on sprouted-grain bread, along with peaches or grilled pineapples or a baked apple. And remember to use your leftovers. If you’re on your second day of Phase 1, you can eat leftovers from dinner the night before.
For your afternoon snack, you get to have more fruit—maybe throw a tangerine or an apple in your bag, or slice and enjoy a juicy pear.
For dinner, you’ll have a grain, a vegetable, and a protein. Maybe you’ll enjoy filet mignon with broccoli and brown rice pasta, or turkey chili, or chicken and wild rice. Mmm, just telling you about it is making me hungry!
So for the next two days, we are reteaching your body how to turn the food you eat into energy rather than storing it as fat. You’ve been storing fat where you don’t want to be storing fat, and we’ll take care of that very soon, but this first step is to get your body to start actually burning the food you are actually consuming.
And that’s Phase 1! It’s only two days, and it’s going to feel great. Just remember: fruit and grains, lean protein, and almost no fat. Those are the keys. Got it? Great!
Let’s move on to Phase 2.
YOUR
POCKET GUIDE
THE BASICS
This is the very high-protein, high-vegetable, low-carbohydrate, and low-fat phase.
High in
foods that support liver function (so it can help cells release fat) such as:
| Leafy greens | Onions |
| Broccoli | Garlic |
| Cabbage | Lemons |
High in lean proteins such as:
| Lean beef | Lean pork |
| Buffalo/bison | Tuna |
| White-meat chicken and turkey | Turkey bacon |
| Low-fat fish, like cod, flounder, and halibut | Nitrate-free jerky |
Rich in
alkalizing
green,
low-glycemic vegetables such as:
| Kale | All kinds of lettuce |
| Mustard greens | Arugula |
| Collard greens | Watercress |
| Swiss chard |
High in
carnitine-producing
foods such as:
| Beef | Cod |
| White-meat chicken | Asparagus |
No fruit or grains
Low in fat
HOW TO EAT
If you started Phase 1 on Monday, then
Phase 2 will always be on Wednesday and Thursday. From the Master Food List for this phase, you will eat:
• 3 high-protein, low-carb, low-fat
meals
• 2 protein snacks
See the complete food list at the end of this chapter.
Your day will look like this:
| BREAKFAST | SNACK | LUNCH | SNACK | DINNER |
| Protein | Protein | Protein | Protein | Protein |
| Veggie | | Veggie | | Veggie |
PHASE 2
EXERCISE
Do at least one day of
strength training
(weight lifting) during Phase 2. Focus on lifting heavy weights with low reps. Lifting weights during Phase 2 will seriously increase your metabolic power, so go for it! If you aren’t sure how to do it safely, see if someone at your local gym can guide you through the free weights, or take a class that uses weights, like Body Pump.
Phase 2 features foods that are completely different from the foods you ate during Phase 1—foods that push your metabolism to lay down muscle and scavenge fats. They are loaded with lean proteins that the body converts to
amino acids that can be easily converted into muscle. The proteins mixed with the targeted vegetables make it virtually impossible to store any of the consumed foods as fat, and because you have just come off of Phase 1, where the adrenals have been soothed and the cortisol levels seduced into submission, your body is primed to release fat cells from the hips, butt, belly, and thighs. The amino acids are also the perfect food to stimulate the liver and vitalize the fat-shuttling mechanism in your body that begins to increase your metabolic rate. Not only are you burning your food for fuel but you are also beginning to burn your fat for fuel, so be diligent with
your foods and pump that iron—your purposeful eating is beginning to take effect.
This phase is about an intensive altering of the body’s structure converting stored fat to fuel to be transformed into
muscle. It is so focused and intense that we only do it for two days. It is all about the muscle, and remember, muscle ravages calories (potential energy), so the more muscle you have, the more fat you’ll burn. Sustaining and maintaining muscle takes energy, the constant contraction and relaxation of each and every muscle in your body requires fuel. The more muscle, the more fat you burn. On the contrary, have you ever seen your fat do anything but hang around on your belly?
The more muscle you build on the Fast Metabolism Diet, the more food you can consume down the road, and the higher your body will set its metabolic rate. The result of this high-protein, low-carb, low-fat phase is to rev up muscle and release stored fat. In Phase 1, you encouraged your body to calm down and actually start digesting the food you are eating rather than storing it. Now, you’ll be eating specifically to absorb protein and release fat.
The foods in
Phase 2,
Unlock
, allow for the mobilization of stored energy in the form of fat, so that you can actually burn it as fuel. The lean protein and large amount of vegetables in Phase 2 are the keys to this release. They “unlock” the stored fat, releasing it into the bloodstream. This preps your body for Phase 3, when it will actually focus on stimulating hormone production to burn quickly through all of the newly released fat. But you can’t burn your fat cells until you unlock them for burning.
Are you seeing how this all begins to fit together? In Phase 1, you corrected the most urgent problem—encouraging your body to unwind and relax so it can start burning the food you eat again. Now, you’re unlocking the fat. Finally, you’ll burn it—but not until it’s ready. Phase 2 gets that fat where it needs to be, so it is accessible as fuel.
To do this, you’ll get to enjoy pork tenderloin and halibut, egg-white omelets and tuna, steaks and chicken, and all the green veggies you love, like broccoli and spinach, asparagus and mushrooms, celery and fennel and kale. And I’m not talking a half cup of this or that. I’m talking major vegetables. I’m talking 4 cups of broccoli, a mound of asparagus, a great
big fistful of spinach. Go to town on those vegetables because they unlock the magical process of turning protein into beautiful
muscle.
Focusing on lean protein and low-glycemic vegetables during
Phase 2 promotes the retention and development of muscle, while we release body weight, primarily in the form of fat. Remember what I told you about how your body bypasses your fat and cannibalizes its own muscle for energy when you aren’t providing it with enough nutrients? Phase 2 makes sure that doesn’t happen anymore.
This phase is very low-glycemic. That means it doesn’t contain
foods that elevate your blood sugar very much. After all those yummy fruits and grains during the two Phase 1 days, now you’re going in the opposite direction. The next two days are all about lean proteins like white-meat chicken and turkey, white fish and lean cuts of beef, lean pork, game meats like venison and elk, and egg whites. You’re also going to get serious with low-glycemic,
alkalizing vegetables—mostly the green ones, like cabbage and cucumbers, broccoli and kale, lettuce and spinach, and other nonstarchy vegetables like mushrooms, red bell peppers, and onions.
Muscle is built from
amino acids, which come from the breakdown of consumed protein. A nice, steady stream of easily digestible (meaning low-fat) protein will keep building muscle. This is so crucial in Phase 2.
The more muscle mass you have, the faster your metabolism will be. It’s a simple equation: less muscle equals a slower metabolism. That’s why we flood the body with proteins during Phase 2, and that’s also why we push the carbohydrates so low. We want to encourage muscle building and fat
burning, rather than burning sugar from carbohydrates, as we did in Phase 1. Remember: we want to confuse it to lose it!
Phase 2 also stimulates the
liver in a different way, replenishing it with the nutrients and alkalizing effects of
green vegetables. In Phase 2, we focus on amino acids, and specifically, on how they promote healthy liver function. The high-protein,
low-glycemic foods in Phase 2 are liver foods. Your liver is responsible for over 600 metabolic functions, including converting every nutrient you consume into a bioactive form so it is available for your body to use. The liver is what stimulates your body to release fat cells from storage. It’s essential to this process, so don’t deviate from the Phase 2 food lists and maps! They are specifically designed to stimulate the
liver by breaking down the proteins into
amino acids and converting them into liver-supporting compounds like
carnitine.
Earlier we briefly discussed carnitine. It is one of those powerhouse metabolism-stimulating nutrients that help the body release stored fat into the bloodstream so it can be metabolized for energy. It’s the shuttle, or transport, compound that releases fat cells to be delivered directly to the fat-furnace mitochondria in the cells. Eighty to 90 percent of your metabolism action happens right there, in this teeny part of your cell. Eating the foods that stimulate this conversion from protein to amino acids to carnitine gives us ready access to those fat furnaces. When we get the fat to the furnace, it can burn.
Phase 2 foods stimulate the
gallbladder, the guy that breaks down fats, and the
pancreas, the guy that breaks down proteins (it also produces the
insulin that regulates blood sugars so he was nurtured a lot in Phase 1). Phase 2 is also priming both these essential organs to produce the specific
digestive enzymes they’re going to need in Phase 3 for fat metabolism. See how this is a major metabolic workout and why all of this cross-training of your metabolism is going to allow you to use food to make you lose weight?
Phase 2 also floods the body with
vitamin C, which tonifies and strengthens the
adrenal glands that you just nourished in Phase 1. The stronger your adrenal glands, the less reactive they’ll be in times of stress. Phase 2 helps stress-proof your body, strengthening your core physically, hormonally, and emotionally.
In addition, the bitter
green vegetables you’ll be eating provide a lot of nutrients for the
thyroid, such as
taurine and
iodine, to facilitate the proper thyroid hormone production that we will be counting on for Phase 3. Also, because you are still minimizing fat intake, your body will continue foraging for body fat to burn.
During this phase, your body lays down the most amount of muscle mass, built with the high protein you’re eating. But the high protein you’re eating isn’t the only thermogenic body builder—so are the
alkalizing green vegetables you’ll be eating so much of these two days.
Why are
alkalizing vegetables so crucial? Because for healthy functioning, your body must maintain a certain
pH level. That means the amount of
acid in your bloodstream has to be kept within a certain range for life to continue and for your body to function well. This pH can be affected by what you eat. Some foods, like meat, tend to stimulate acid production, because it takes more acid to break down and digest meat. Diets that focus on large amounts of meat without the addition of a lot of alkalizing vegetables can cause the body to become too acidic, putting it into a state of
keto-acidosis. During this state, you might hyper-mobilize fat, but at great expense. Many people dieting this way become carb resistant and prone to aggressive weight gain once they deviate from this way of eating. It is also hard on the kidneys, increases stress hormones, and increases systemic
inflammation. Doing a high-protein diet without all the veggies also slows down your metabolism horrifically, putting you into an even worse state than you were to begin with. As soon as you go off this pure-protein diet, you’ll gain 40 pounds. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. If you’ve been on a diet like this, your metabolism is likely to require some serious repair. If you were ever a body builder in a past life, you also understand the muscle-related dangers of the body from becoming too acidic—they get
lactic acid buildup and they can’t lay down muscle efficiently.
The magic of
Phase 2 is that it combines high protein with a huge amount of
green vegetables, and green veggies are alkalizing. The large volume of vegetables during Phase 2 is crucial in preventing the body from going into this unwanted state of acidity. These veggies also stimulate digestive enzymes that increase the rate of
fat burn, like kindling for your fire. Most vegetables are alkalizing, but low-glycemic green vegetables tend to be the most alkalizing of all. That’s why certain diets that promote green juices and green smoothies often advertise themselves as alkaline diets.
Green vegetables do wonderful things for you when you are upping your ingestion of meat protein, so shovel ’em in to keep your body’s pH in check and everything running smoothly. Think of it this way: the protein is the log and the green vegetables are the kindling. It’s hard to light a log, but add kindling and you’ll have a crackling fire in no time. Put protein and alkalizing green vegetables together and your metabolism will ignite.
