The Hormone Diet: A 3-Step Program to Help You Lose Weight, Gain Strength, and Live Younger Longer - Hardcover

Turner, Natasha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1605294020 ISBN 13: 9781605294025

Verlag: RODALE PR, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Many of us experience signs and symptoms of hormonal imbalance every day. Do you have trouble dragging yourself out of bed in the morning? Ever have an uncontrollable sugar craving at 3 p.m.? Chronic headaches? Lack of energy? Do you get stressed just sitting in your office? Our bodies are wired to send us signals when something isn't right, but often we're too busy to hear them. Compounding the problem is a lack of understanding about the consequences if these symptoms are left unaddressed. Without hormonal balances, we are more likely to succumb to many diseases and illnesses.

The Hormone Diet lays out a foolproof plan to balance your life, one hormone at a time. But it is more than just a diet book. Along with advice for weight loss, Dr. Natasha Turner provided recommendations for anti-inflammatory detox, nutritional supplements, exercise, sleep, stress management, toxin-free skin care, and natural hormone replacement combined with a diet plan—all incorporated into a 3-step wellness program focused on the essentials of hormone balance for lasting health.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

NATASHA TURNER, ND, is a leading naturopathic doctor and the founder of Clear Medicine, a Canada-based wellness clinic that provides integrated health care. She lives in Toronto with her husband.

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CHAPTER 1

THE NEW FORMULA FOR FAT LOSS

Here's what you can expect to learn in this chapter:

. How to set the stage for successful fat loss . The facts about hormones . Why dieting can cause hormonal havoc . How hormones boost metabolic rate and fat burning . How inflammation causes obesity and hormonal imbalance . How to control appetite with the help of hormones . How hormones affect sexual appetite . The road to safe weight loss

For decades, an endless stream of well-marketed diets and new-fangled exercise programs have been promising an easy path to a leaner, trimmer you. Every year, it seems, we are enticed to drop all "bad carbs" or to purchase the latest piece of home gym equipment and good health and happiness will surely be ours. But the rules of fat loss have changed from what we once thought them to be. No longer can we rely on diet alone to shed unwanted weight. Nor can we simply exercise the £ds away. Certainly, poor eating habits and lack of physical activity are two of the biggies when it comes to explaining escalating obesity rates. But they are by no means the only culprits.

Today's headlines read like a laundry list of previously overlooked factors that can impede successful weight loss--from lack of sleep and excess stress to the chemicals in our soaps. With so many lifestyle influences to consider, all the calorie-cutting and exercise in the world, in isolation, will not provide the golden key to achieving the lasting change we desire.

Until now, the prevailing approach to conquering obesity has been like putting a broken arm in a sling without first resetting the bone. Yes, weight loss happens when we burn more calories--via exercise and basic life functions such as breathing and digesting--than we take in. But there's another absolutely critical, routinely ignored variable that must be integrated into this equation: our hormones. These wondrous, unseen chemicals are produced by our bodies to manage everything from breathing to digestion to sexual responses and more. At the same time, our hormones are influenced by a myriad of factors, including exercise, diet, sleep, stress, and even the seemingly innocuous, everyday chemicals in cosmetics.

What Are Hormones?

What are you thinking right now? Do you feel happy or anxious? What did you eat for your last meal? Is it noisy where you are? How deeply or quickly are you breathing? Did you exercise today? How many cups of coffee have you had? Do you like the person beside you at the moment? Have you enjoyed sex lately?

The answer to every one of these questions has an impact on your hormones. As your five senses delicately interact with and respond to your environment, your nervous system is continuously communicating with your endocrine system--a series of glands and tissues constantly at work manufacturing, delivering, and processing a wide assortment of hormones to maintain body balance. Even the emotions you experience have the potential to influence your hormones--and vice versa.

Hormones are essentially tiny chemical messengers that spark communication processes throughout your body. They play an enormous role in influencing almost every aspect of your well-being, including your thoughts and feelings. Whether you feel the need to sleep, warm up, cool down, eat jelly beans, grab a coffee, or have a quickie, your desires and actions can be traced back to your hormonal activity.

Hormones also directly affect your appearance. Besides body composition, the look and feel of your skin and hair are influenced by hormones. If you want to look fresher, stimulate your metabolism, lose fat, feel calmer, sleep better, get stronger, feel sexier, and focus better, gaining control over your hormonal balance is truly the key.

Since hormones control our appetites and stimulate metabolism, achieving and maintaining hormonal balance plays an essential role in achieving lasting fat loss. Yes, diet and exercise are important, but so are sleeping well, reducing toxin exposure, maintaining healthy liver function, optimizing digestion, limiting stress, and conquering inflammation. All of these factors can influence our hormonal activity--and weight-loss success-- in truly dramatic ways.

Our hormones dictate where we store fat and how we will lose it. Research from the Journal of the American Medical Association(April 2007) suggests our hormones also determine our success with different diets. Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital Boston, found that people who rapidly secreted large amounts of the hormone insulin in response to consumption of sugar or carbohydrates tended to achieve better weight-loss results on a low-glycemic diet that restricted starches and sugars than they did on a low-fat diet. He also discovered that they carried more weight around the waist (the so-called apple shape) compared with those who secreted less insulin and tended to store their excess fat around their hips (the pear shape).

THE ENDOCRINE SYSTEM

While the nervous system coordinates rapid responses to outside stimuli, the endocrine system controls slower, longer-lasting responses to your environment. The link between these two systems is the hypothalamus, a small, almond-sized gland located in the brain.

Functioning as an endocrine gland, the hypothalamus secretes hormones that stimulate the pituitary gland to release other hormones into the bloodstream. The pituitary is often referred to as the "master gland," since its hormones act on the thyroid, ovaries, testes, and adrenal glands to regulate growth, reproduction, nutrient absorption, and metabolism.

Each of these glands responds to instructions from the pituitary and secretes hormones specific to its unique function in the body. The ovaries and testes, for instance, secrete the sex hormones estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. The adrenal glands release the stress hormone cortisol and antistress hormone DHEA. The thyroid releases thyroid hormones to manage your metabolic rate.

Many more hormones are produced without the direction of the pituitary gland by other tissues and glands of the endocrine system, including the pancreas, thymus gland, digestive tract, fat cells, adrenal glands, pineal gland, and the brain. Moreover, hormonal messages from other sources are relayed back to the hypothalamus to alter our behavior or actions. The hormone leptin is a good example of this type of hormonal control. This substance travels from fat cells through the bloodstream to the hypothalamus to regulate appetite.

Most bodily tissues are targets for one or more hormones released from the pituitary gland. According to Mary Dallman, a professor of physiology at the University of California who studies the effects of stress on appetite and obesity, two predominant endocrine hormones, cortisol and insulin, heavily influence caloric intake by acting on the brain. The stress hormone cortisol, in particular, activates a strong response in the brain to match our perceived stress with a desire to eat comfort foods--the tasty treats we associate with pleasant experiences, often from childhood. Unfortunately, consuming comfort foods, which are typically high in carbohydrates and fat, can cause a resulting spike in our insulin level, leading to the accumulation of belly fat.

Working together, the endocrine, nervous, and digestive systems can either help or hamper your weight-loss and wellness goals. Once you understand these complex systems and get them communicating optimally with one another, you will be well on your way to hormonal bliss and lifelong health.

The pear-shaped subjects fared equally well on both types of eating programs, but they tended to gain back over half the weight they lost on the low-fat diet after the study was completed. The apple-shaped people...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: RODALE PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1605294020
• ISBN 13: 9781605294025
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 471
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar