Living Low Carb (47 page)
Authors: Jonny Bowden
The adrenal glands are responsible for the secretion of two critical hormones:
cortisol
and
adrenaline
. These are also known as
stress hormones
—they are involved in the “fight or flight” response. Cortisol is a major hormone. It keeps your blood pressure from dropping too low, and you need it in every cell of your body—without it, you would die. Adrenaline is another major hormone; it keeps your heart beating. Adrenaline is the primitive hormone that saved our butts from being eaten when confronted with a saber-toothed tiger on the savanna. That’s why cortisol and adrenaline are called the “fight or flight” hormones—in response to stress (like a lifethreatening emergency), they prepare you for either picking up a club to fight off that saber-toothed tiger or running like hell for the nearest tree.
These hormones served our Paleolithic ancestors well as a kind of “turbo” system for emergency response. The problem is that our current lifestyle causes them to charge around our systems far more than is strictly necessary. They are our constant companions. Our poor overworked adrenals respond to daily stresses and secrete them when we’re stuck in traffic, when we have a report due, when we get into a fight with the hotel clerk, when the telemarketer interrupts our dinner, and when we have a fight with our boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/son/daughter/boss. And just like our poor pancreas can eventually “burn out” from the constant demand put on it to produce enough insulin to deal with a chronically high-carbohydrate diet, so can our poor adrenals eventually reach a similarly exhausted state. This is what Schwarzbein and others call
adrenal burnout
. It is hardly uncommon.
So if we’re interested only in weight loss, why should we care about our adrenals?
Well, first off, the adrenal hormone cortisol, like all hormones in the body, sends a message. Several, actually. One is to break down muscle for fuel. If you break down muscle, you do two things: you lower your metabolic rate (since muscle is where the fat and calories are burned), and you reduce the number of muscle cells that are able to accept sugar, leading to more sugar being stored as fat and eventually more insulin resistance. Cortisol also sends a message to the brain to “refuel” for an emergency, leading almost inevitably to stress eating.
Since cortisol is involved in breaking down the bodily proteins—both functional and structural—eventually, if levels of cortisol remain high, the body will do something to protect itself against breaking down too much. Can you guess what hormone it sends in as a reinforcement? Insulin. Too much cortisol eventually triggers insulin, the storage hormone, to counter the catabolic (breaking-down) processes in an attempt to rebuild the ship.
If this happens frequently enough, you will eventually have high levels of insulin and will become insulin-resistant. Remember that adrenaline helps your body
use up
your biochemicals; insulin helps your body
rebuild them
—including the fat stores! Hence, chronically high cortisol can wind up being a cause of insulin resistance.
It gets worse. Chronic oversecretion of the stress hormone cortisol will cause you to use up serotonin. Less serotonin almost always goes hand in hand with cravings, especially for sugar and carbohydrate. Those cravings, a kind of biochemical “mandate,” can be irresistible even for people with amazing willpower. Give in to the cravings—as most people will—and the cycle continues. You use up serotonin any time your cortisol and adrenaline levels get too high—when you don’t sleep, when you are stressed, and when you overuse stimulants (including refined sugar, nicotine, and caffeine). This is one reason why stress management figures so prominently in the Schwarzbein program.
In the Schwarzbein Principle, you first determine which of four metabolic categories you fit into:
1. insulin-sensitive with healthy adrenals
2. insulin-sensitive with burned-out adrenals
3. insulin-resistant with healthy adrenals
4. insulin-resistant with burned-out adrenals
These four categories represent varying degrees of metabolic damage and require very different eating plans for healing. The underlying thinking here is that you
must
heal your metabolism before you can begin to lose weight. The program consists of five elements:
1. nutrition
2. stress management
3. cross-training exercise (usually of a low intensity level)
4. eliminating stimulants and drugs
5. hormone replacement therapy, if needed
All five elements don’t have to be done at once. The transition into metabolic health is gradual and gentle and takes place in stages.
You first determine your protein needs, using a very simple formula. Those with healthy adrenals do not have to monitor protein; they can “listen to their bodies,” though guidelines are given for those who want them. The formula and guidelines give
minimum
protein needs and should be divided among the three meals (and usually two snacks) that you will eat every day. You can eat more protein if you want, but not less. Then you determine your carbohydrate allowance, which is also divided into three meals and two snacks. You do not count calories, and you do not measure or count fat.
Carbohydrate allowances range from a low of 15 grams per meal and 7½ grams per snack (60 grams per day), to a high of 45 grams per meal and 20 grams per snack (175 grams per day), though the high end of the range is only for the rare person who is insulin-sensitive with healthy adrenals and is very, very active. There are meal plans given for 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, and 40 grams of carbs per meal. There are vegetarian versions of all meal plans, and there are even low-saturated-fat versions of most of the meal plans for those very special cases where saturated fat has to be limited (Schwarzbein does not normally limit saturated fat).
Carbs—though much more limited than in standard diets—are not eliminated and, in Schwarzbein’s view, are essential to the success of the program. The reason is this: if you eat too many carbs (and too much food), your insulin levels will rise too high and you will become insulin-resistant if you aren’t already; if you already are, too many carbs will certainly make matters worse. But if you don’t eat
enough
carbs, you will raise adrenaline and cortisol too high, using up your precious biochemicals and eventually becoming insulin-resistant anyway.
The Schwarzbein Principle as a Lifestyle: Who It Works for, Who Should Look Elsewhere
People who flock from all over the country to Diana Schwarzbein’s practice in Santa Barbara, California, are frequently people at the end of their rope—they have tried every diet, damaged their metabolisms, and turned their hormonal balance on its ear. She has an amazing success rate, but you clearly have to be patient. This is not a diet for weight loss; it is a program for metabolic healing, and in many cases you have to be prepared to actually gain weight before you begin to lose. In addition, the careful computing of grams of carbohydrate per meal and snack doesn’t appeal to everyone. If you’re willing to be patient and are looking at the long-term picture, you’ve probably come to the right place. If you need more immediate results, if you’re concerned only with weight loss, if you can’t deal with counting carbs, or if you don’t feel you’ve damaged your metabolism all that much, this might not be the best place to start.
JONNY’S LOWDOWN
You simply cannot say enough good things about Diana Schwarzbein. She truly is a giant in the field and one of the most knowledgeable cutting-edge endocrinologists in the country. Interestingly, many of the people I interviewed for this book started with more basic plans like Atkins and then, when they got closer to maintenance, moved to the Schwarzbein Principle. As an overall plan for health, this is five-star material. But as a weight-loss diet—which it was never intended to be—it may not be the ideal entry-level plan, as it requires a good deal of patience and a lot of commitment.
WHAT IT IS IN A NUTSHELL
“Unleash Your Thin” is a complete program in a box, consisting of 2 hours of DVDs, 6 CDs, a full 166 page manual, a 300 plus page workbook plus a full six week menu plan and recipes. The plan is unique in that, in addition to a terrific eating plan, it attacks the psychological underpinnings of cravings, binges, failures, and plateaus and gives you real-world tools for dealing with them in a positive way.
About the “Unleash Your Thin” Program
Unleash Your Thin is an updated, expanded, and improved version of the highly successful “Diet Boot Camp” program. UYT is a two-pronged approach to weight loss, and in this regard, different from virtually every other program I’ve reviewed. According to the authors, two major issues derail most weight loss efforts, and the Unleash Your Thin program addresses both equally.
The first cause of weight gain is hormonal. It works like this: foods you eat trigger specific hormones and enzymes in the body, which are either favorable to fat loss or favorable to fat gain. Although calories do matter, they are not the whole picture, as calories from sugar, for example, affect the hormonal environment very differently than, say, calories from fat.
The main player in this hormonal environment—at least from a weight loss point of view—is insulin. Insulin, also known as “the hunger hormone,” and, more insidiously, as “the fat-storing” hormone—is released by the body as soon as your blood sugar goes up, which it does every time you eat. Insulin’s purpose is to escort excess sugar into the muscle cells where it can be “burned” for energy. Unfortunately, for many people (at the very least 25% of the population and probably much more) the system doesn’t work very well. For these folks, blood sugar goes up, insulin goes up, but the muscle cells aren’t having any of it. They basically shut their doors (a condition known as “insulin resistance”) which results in a number of things happening, none of them good (at least not if you’re trying to stay trim).
Creating a hormonal environment where insulin never gets high enough to create the ideal environment for fat storage is the first goal of the Unleash Your Thin Program. If you’ve read this far in the book, you undoubtedly understand that the type of food that raises insulin the most is carbohydrates. Unleash Your Thin wisely keeps carbohydrates at a fairly low level for two weeks, allowing your “fat burning switch” to stay permanently in the “on” position.
But that’s just the first promise of the program.
According to the manual, the major obstacle to weight loss isn’t just the hormonal environment. No, the major obstacle to weight loss is poor mental conditioning—our inability to resist addictive foods that make us fat, sick and tired. The manual and DVD go into great detail about exactly why this is so, and much of the information will make you piping hot mad. Food companies scientifically engineer their “food products” with just the right combinations of tastes that light up our craving buttons. Sugar, salt, and fat are added and layered in precise proportions to create a massive, toxic food environment which taunts us with the mocking slogan, “Betcha can’t eat just one!” The Unleash Your Thin program is predicated on the idea that unless you can master these cravings, the best information about what to eat won’t help you.
If the first premise of the program is to eat in a way that turns “on” your fat-burning switch, the second, equally important premise of the program is that you have to reprogram your “behavioral control switch,” the one that gets literally disabled in the presence of craving-producing foods.