The Hormone Reset Diet (10 page)

A red flush or frequent blushing on your face (or a diagnosis of rosacea), triggered by heat, skin products, red wine, spicy foods, or dairy?

Gallbladder problems (or removal)?

• If you have five or more of these symptoms,
you are very likely estrogen dominant (a state when you have too much estrogen compared with its counterhormone, progesterone). Estrogen is most likely keeping you from getting lean. I urge you to address this hormone imbalance by following the instructions in this chapter, since estrogen dominance puts you at significant risk for weight gain, breast cancer, prediabetes, and diabetes. Women at the greatest risk are between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, when the ovaries make less progesterone, allowing estrogen to dominate. (Men can develop estrogen dominance too, as they age, which leads to fatty deposits on the breasts, hips, and love handles.) I recommend asking your doctor for a test of your estrogen and progesterone levels (see the Test Yourself section, page 72).

•
If you have fewer than five of these symptoms or are unsure,
perform this reset, whether you’re a meat eater or not, so we can determine if you are estrogen dominant.

When I completed my medical training, no one talked about estrogen dominance. They weren’t ignoring it; I simply don’t think anyone knew anything about it. I was taught to prescribe birth control pills for women with ill-defined hormone problems up until age fifty, and hormone replacement therapy after that. I knew that birth control pills balanced out women who had too much estrogen, so the term “estrogen dominance” had a context in my mind. But as I learned more about the particular issues women face—difficulty losing weight, breast tenderness, ovarian cysts, premenstrual syndrome, endometrial polyps, fibroids, endometriosis—I realized that estrogen dominance was the elephant in the room that most of modern medicine was not addressing, and meat consumption plays a key role. With this chapter, my hope is to right this wrong.

Even though I’m a medical doctor, I didn’t know I had estrogen dominance until my midthirties, when I couldn’t lose the baby fat. To get back to my pre-pregnancy weight, I became increasingly desperate and decided to try eating only raw food for ninety days. Although I had more energy eating this way, I felt like a slave to the endless preparation it took to make my meals. Not to mention that it cramped my social life: I was the weird guest at the dinner party who couldn’t eat anything the hostess offered and pulled out my own little glass containers of organic vegetables from my purse. To add insult to injury, I didn’t even lose weight!

After three months of eating raw, I decided to change course and shifted to being a vegan—no animal products, not even eggs. I probably didn’t get enough protein because my energy soon plummeted, and I felt even worse than when I had a newborn and was a sleepless zombie. It turned out that my iron was low, so I couldn’t get oxygen to my brain or muscles. Although I didn’t lose weight eating vegan, I did have some significant changes to my body: the fat from my breasts had mysteriously moved to my waist. Not exactly the change I had hoped might happen!

At the same time I was struggling with my resistance to weight loss, I noticed that many of my patients had similar challenges. They told me South Beach didn’t work anymore. They were tired of Atkins and all that meat. Like me, they felt stuck. They would start a new diet on a Monday with great intentions, and by Wednesday, they went to bed lost, angry, and frustrated that they couldn’t muster the willpower to restrict the calories or the carbs.

Since veganism wasn’t working for me, I had the idea to start adding fish and crustaceans, and within a matter of days, I lost 5 pounds. I knew I was onto something, and I presumed seafood offered a better type of protein or fat for me. Then I added anti-inflammatory meat, like wild game (elk, moose, and wild bison), pastured eggs,
bone broths, and grass-fed beef. My iron normalized, and I wasn’t as tired. I stopped eating conventional meat at restaurants, which often cook foods in industrial seed oils—a deadly, inflammatory combination. Industrial seed oils are linked to higher rates of inflammation and problems with insulin and leptin—and they flip the hormone metabolic switch to make you fat.

I was making progress, but it wasn’t until I passed on the alcohol for three weeks and started eating a pound of vegetables per day that my estrogen got back to its rightful place. I lost 25 pounds and became lean and energized.

I’ve been where you might be: hopeless and perhaps somewhat despondent about looking plump and middle-aged well before your time. By taking control of your meat and alcohol consumption in the first three-day reset, you can have similar results. In this chapter, we’ll focus on how going meatless jump-starts a series of beneficial events in your body that triggers your estrogen system to reboot. If you’re like the majority of overweight women that I’ve counseled with excess estrogen, the weight falls away. Addressing your estrogen overload by abstaining from eating meat is the first step toward fixing your broken metabolism.

The connection between meat and estrogen is profound. When you eat conventionally raised red meat, estrogen overload is more likely. When you go meatless, your estrogen decreases. Not surprisingly, vegetarians have the edge here. That could be due to the hormones in the meat, the type of bacteria cultivated in the guts of people who eat a lot of meat,
³
or a combination of factors. We do know that a meat-based diet is linked to higher body mass index and that too much of the wrong type of saturated fat raises estrogen.

Fiber is shown to help you lose weight, feel full, and stabilize your
blood sugar, yet meat eaters consume half as much fiber as vegetarians.
⁴
On average, omnivores eat 12 grams of fiber each day, and vegetarians consume 26 grams per day. Vegetarians poop more volume and excrete three times the amount of estrogen as meat eaters, thereby preventing estrogen overload. In fact, estrogen levels in the blood of vegetarians are 15 to 20 percent lower than those of omnivores.
⁵

Higher estrogen in women arises from greater lifetime estrogen exposure and recirculation in the gut and blood, like bad karma. I’m here as your coach to flip your “switch” on estrogen, which allows you to reduce the estrogen pollution in your body and hopefully prevent the risk of estrogen-dominant conditions such as diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and certain forms of breast, ovarian, and endometrial cancer. Scientists know that estrogen dominance is a common root cause of these conditions, especially when a woman menstruates early, becomes obese, has never borne a child, or enters menopause at a later age. The reasons to go meatless are evident. When you reverse your estrogen dominance, you clear the path toward a healthy weight.

If you’re not yet convinced of the connection between modern meat and excess estrogen, come with me on a quick trip through your digestion of a freshly grilled hamburger from your neighbor’s barbecue so you may grasp how meat disrupts your body.

As you smell the aroma of the burgers cooking on the grill, you may be unaware that they were previously part of cows raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and fed grain, typically genetically modified corn rather than grass, and highly stressed.

Your neighbor asks if you want the burger on a bun. You decline (and pat yourself on the back because you like to wrap your burger in lettuce and save the carbs). As a plate is passed to you with the burger
and a single leaf of lettuce, you add ketchup and a little pickle relish. You eye the burger with anticipation, and you don’t think about how the standard practice for cattle is to treat them prophylactically with antibiotics and dewormers, thereby breeding bacterial and parasite resistance and leading to the rise of superbugs, which can trigger hard-to-treat infections and foodborne illnesses. The practice began with poultry in the 1940s, when farmers found that antibiotics fattened chickens. In the United States, 70 percent of antibiotics are currently used for livestock, mostly for “growth promotion.” Rates of superbug contamination are alarming: the Environmental Working Group determined that 55 percent of beef, 69 percent of pork, and 81 percent of turkey meat contains superbugs.
⁶

Your first bite of the burger may taste juicy and satisfying, but it’s a false satiety because lurking in the meat are several problems, including the following:

•
Steroid hormones.
On average, six steroid hormones are pumped into feedlot cattle in order to fatten them up so there’s more income per animal. As you chew the burger, you’re consuming the same growth hormones, and they’ll fatten you up too.

•
Persistent organic pollutants (POPs).
These are synthetic chemicals that may act as xenoestrogens (or fake estrogens) in the body and raise your level of endogenous estrogen, resulting in estrogen dominance. Examples are polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins.
⁷
Additionally, several have been shown to open up the gut barrier—causing leaky gut and inflammation, and shifting the microbiome in the wrong direction—and may contribute to breast cancer.

•
Poor nutrient density.
Grain-fed meat is lower in vitamins A, B, C, and E; conjugated linoleic acid (found to hasten fat burning); and beneficial omega-3s; plus it’s higher in omega-6 fatty acids compared with meat from pastured or wild animals. In comparisons of omega-3 levels in grass-fed versus grain-fed
meat,
grass-fed meat contained up to ten times more omega-3.
What’s important is your overall ratio of omega-6 to omega-3; that is, too much omega-6 compared with omega-3 leads to inflammation and more fat storage. Grain-fed beef shows a ratio of eight to one, whereas grass-fed beef averages two to one. (CAFO-raised chicken is even more problematic with a ratio of nineteen to one, whereas pastured chicken has a ratio of approximately eleven to one.)
⁸

•
Genetically modified grains.
Often GM corn is used to feed animals, and consuming those animals may also cause leaky gut and hormone disruption.

As if that list weren’t scary enough, when you eat fat from conventional animal meat, these toxins enter your gut and are sent to the liver. Your liver doesn’t know what to do with them, so they’re sent to the fat stores, accumulating and magnifying in quantity over time. It’s like the dresser in your spare bedroom: you put things in the drawers that you don’t need. Your body does this to protect your organs from toxic overload, but the strategy backfires when you accumulate too much. Just as the dresser drawers may overflow and become hard to close, your fat tissue eventually starts to release more toxins into your bloodstream, which is tied to obesity, insulin resistance, and breast cancer. As your tissue releases toxins, your body gets the message to store even more fat—and because fat cells produce estrogen, your estrogen burden climbs higher still. Ultimately, estrogen dominance causes overweight women to store more fat instead of burning it and changes the microbiome to pull more energy out of food for storage, not fuel.

Back to that ketchup and lone lettuce leaf on your plate: most people who consume a typical Western diet high in meat don’t eat enough vegetables (ketchup doesn’t count!), which are rich in fiber and micronutrients—and both counter the estrogen pollution of dirty meat and protect you from bioaccumulation and biomagnification.
In other words, too much conventional meat and too little fiber from vegetables combine as a double whammy that makes you fat, toxic, and resistant to weight loss. Instead of one lettuce leaf, you need to consume one pound of vegetables each day.

Halfway through the burger, you pause to praise your neighbor on the yummy barbecue, and he offers you a glass of chardonnay or a mojito. Sadly, alcohol makes the whole excess estrogen problem worse. Oblivious, you toast your neighbor and wash down your next bite of burger. You tell yourself, “Okay, just one glass, since I had two glasses every night this past week.” Boom! You just upped your risk of breast cancer.