The Hormone Reset Diet (17 page)

High reverse T3 (RT3)? (This is a thyroid hormone, increased in leptin resistance, which blocks thyroid function.)

High triglycerides, or you know them to be greater than 100 mg/dL?

• If you have five or more of these symptoms,
you are
very likely
leptin resistant, and I urge you to address this hormone
imbalance in this reset, since it puts you at significant risk for overeating, obesity, prediabetes, and diabetes. If leptin is the culprit, we’ll lower it by cutting back on fructose in this chapter, and you’ll lose weight.

•
If you have four or fewer of these symptoms or are unsure,
I recommend restricting fructose as described in this chapter and noticing the effect on your mood and weight.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, compared with the 1950s, we eat 30 pounds more fruit annually.
⁷
Furthermore, the fruit has been bred by corporate farming to contain increasing amounts of fructose. Today, 200 calories of raw apple contain 25 grams of fructose—far more than the trace amount my great-grandmother consumed in an apple a hundred years ago.
⁸
Are we simply eating too much freaky fruit?

Ultimately, when you overconsume the wrong carbs, fructose can further impair your biochemistry. In fact, it’s worse for your health than other sugars. In this chapter, you’ll discover the powerful connection between fructose and leptin resistance, which dulls your appetite, regulates your hunger, and determines (together with insulin) how fast you burn fat.

When you overeat fructose, your leptin levels rise excessively—not only do you get fat but you feel ravenous too. My great-grandmother and her peers consumed about 15 grams of fructose per day in wild fruit, packaged in sufficient fiber, which created a serene, well-organized water park. Now the national average intake of fructose is more than triple that amount, and it’s higher in adolescents.
⁹
Our DNA is not designed to handle these excessive amounts, so the extra fructose makes the kids go bonkers and misbehave, leptin levels rise, and mayhem erupts in the water park and on your bathroom scale. The truth is that fructose is not just a guilty pleasure; it’s a public health menace that’s making and keeping you fat. That’s why eliminating fructose can lead to transformative changes in a very short time.

Getting confused about the kinds of sugars? The following figure is a quick sugar guide, which is also summarized here. Note that the shared suffix of “-ose” means “sugar” or “carbohydrate.”

•
Glucose
is found in sap and fruit, and it doesn’t taste that sweet, so it’s attached to fructose before being added to food as a sweetener.

•
Fructose,
or fruit sugar, is about twice as sweet as glucose. On its own, it causes malabsorption in many people, so it’s attached to glucose when used as a sweetener for food and drinks.

•
Sucrose
is white table sugar. It contains one molecule of fructose connected to one molecule of glucose.

When you’re healthy, with an ideal body mass index and normal fat composition, leptin is nature’s appetite suppressant. When you’ve had enough to eat, leptin signals your brain to stop eating. I think of leptin as the hormone that says, “Enough. You’re satisfied.”

Unfortunately, when you are overweight (that is, your body mass index is greater than 25, which is the ratio of your weight to your height), your fat cells produce excess leptin. Your receptors for leptin can’t keep up with the feedback loop or restore stability (known as homeostasis). You’d think more leptin would quell your appetite; in fact, the opposite happens. In the life-is-not-fair department, when your brain gets bombarded with leptin signals from too many fat cells, it shuts down from being overwhelmed. The result: leptin levels keep rising, receptors stop functioning—so your body doesn’t get the leptin signal, and you don’t feel full; you keep eating the wrong foods in an addictive pattern, and you keep gaining weight. Your body becomes leptin resistant—just as you can become insulin resistant. Cells in your liver, pancreas, fat, and brain are numb to the normal signals from the hormone. While your body is trying valiantly to make the necessary physiological corrections, you keep stuffing the wrong food into your mouth, hoping that it all will work itself out.

It’s true: nearly all women who are overweight are stuck in a false state of perceived starvation, driven by leptin resistance. Even normal-weight women can have a problem with leptin, a problem known as being “skinny fat.”

In my practice, I found that many of my patients were leptin resistant. They had a “hunger hormone” problem, not a problem of willpower. Leptin resistance is at the heart of carbohydrate cravings, increased hunger, and overeating—and paradoxically it results in your brain thinking that you’re starving. It’s like a broken thermostat. Your system keeps sensing the room is cold, even when it’s hot. When it’s functioning optimally, leptin can be a dieter’s best friend
because it normalizes appetite and reverses fat storage. But when it’s not, it can become your worst enemy.

Leptin is the gatekeeper of your fat. Made in your fat cells, leptin regulates your feeling of satiety and your lean body mass. When you eat, leptin is produced in and released from your fat cells and then travels in the blood to your brain, where under normal circumstances it tells your hypothalamus (the part of your brain in charge of appetite) that you’re full and can stop eating. But when your metabolism is broken and leptin isn’t working properly, the wires between the gut and the brain are crossed. If you are overweight, rather than responding to higher levels of leptin by having your brain say “Enough,” you find that the feeling of satiety doesn’t happen. The best way to bring your leptin under control, so that it regulates appetite and fat storage the way nature intended, is to cut back on fructose and eat more clean proteins—and the benefit is that you burn more fat and feel full when consuming appropriate food quantities.

“Leptin” comes from the Greek word
leptos,
which means “thin,” but when you’re leptin resistant, the opposite happens: you become fatter. Leptin is insulin’s sibling, and the two hormones work in tandem. You healed your insulin in the Sugar Free reset and now we’ll heal your leptin in this reset.

When I was a little girl and sick with a cold, I’d go to my grandmother’s home while my mom worked. She let me watch her soap operas with her while she made orange juice from a can and poured me glass after glass, telling me it would give me vitamin C and help
me feel better. As an adult, I learned that vegetables are a far better source of vitamin C and that two glasses of orange juice deliver about 20 grams of fructose. Perhaps it’s the synthetic version of fructose that has ruined the ability of your body to process fructose. Until we fix your broken metabolism, we need to limit how much fructose you are consuming, because the dose makes the poison.

In order to make your leptin work properly, your body needs to move it around freely. However, when your triglycerides are high, they block the leptin message in the brain. It’s like loud music. Triglycerides keep your brain from being wise about food; the music is blaring. The only way to let the leptin move freely around your body is to lower your triglycerides, ideally to less than 50 mg/dL. However, a good start is first lowering them to less than 100 mg/dL.

Additionally, leptin resistance affects your immune and reproductive systems. When your immunity suffers, chronic inflammation develops. Leptin is a major player in the low-grade inflammation that won’t turn off in people who are overweight or obese. Leptin resistance also impairs fertility and weakens your bones.

A leptin imbalance can cause joint pain and damage because too much leptin accelerates the breakdown of cartilage in your joints. The level of leptin in your blood corresponds to the level in your joints: the more leptin, the more potential joint damage.

The link between fructose, insulin resistance, leptin resistance, and liver problems is strong, but we are early in our understanding of why. While we still need randomized trials to show that fructose is the cause, evidence is mounting that you should stay away from liquid sugar, including juice, as well as any source of fructose that is not high in fiber. That means avoiding soda (even diet soda), sports drinks, bread, cereal, energy bars, flavored yogurt, and condiments.

Here are other factors that cause and/or worsen leptin resistance:

•
Too much fructose.
Eating excess fructose (over 20 grams per day) puts you at greater risk of leptin resistance because fructose is metabolized by the liver, an important regulator of your appetite and weight.
¹⁰
I’ll teach you which foods contain fructose, and during this reset, you will stop eating them.

•
Bad circadian rhythm.
Leptin may get out of balance when you disrupt your delicate but incredibly important circadian rhythm by becoming addicted to caffeine, alcohol, or sugar. Eliminating these substances allows your body to get back to its natural rhythm.

•
Sleep debt.
Your leptin is also affected when you build up a sleep debt, the cumulative effect of not getting enough sleep.
¹¹
Studies show a link between weight gain, lack of sleep, and insulin resistance.
¹²
Furthermore, sleep debt leads to dietary indiscretion and weight gain in women because you’re too tired to make wise food choices.
¹³
In other words, get that solid seven to nine hours that your body really needs. Regardless of your ability to seemingly function on less sleep, odds are that you need it: only 3 percent of the population has a gene allowing them to function well on less sleep. Get over being a type A woman, says Arianna Huffington, cofounder of
The Huffington Post,
in a 2011 TED talk. After fainting from exhaustion and breaking her cheekbone, she has become an evangelist for getting a good night’s sleep. Turn off the television, take a warm bath, read a relaxing book, and make a commitment to going to bed earlier.

When you lose weight, insulin resistance and leptin resistance can resolve. But you may continue to stay sensitive to these important metabolic hormones even if you regain weight.
¹⁴
That’s why resetting your hormones using the seventy-two-hour method is such a critical piece of your weight-loss strategy.