The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body's Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast

In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

For my children, Rachel and Misha

Janet, a forty-eight-year-old woman, came to see me after struggling half her life with her weight and health. She was always busy taking care of things, but never herself. Janet had gained 100 pounds since high school and, despite trying many diets and working with different nutritionists over the years, she could not get ahold of her eating habits. Instead, they had control over her. Her father had type 2 diabetes, and she had experienced gestational diabetes during her pregnancies, so she knew she was at risk for the disease. Highly intelligent and successful in every area of her life, Janet was failing miserably in her health. She knew she needed to do something about it—and fast.

Janet ate well… or so she thought. For breakfast, she would have whole-wheat toast and coffee with fat-free milk, unknowingly starting her day with two of the foods that can cause the most inflammation—gluten and dairy. At lunch, she would eat whatever her office staff ordered in: Thai, Chinese, “healthy stuff” like rice and noodles (just sugar in a different form). In the afternoon she would crave sugar, and because her workplace was full of candy and junk food, she would eat it—usually steadily throughout the afternoon. Dinners were generally good, she thought, with fish, broccoli, corn, and potatoes. Unfortunately, the “large” fish she was choosing, such as tuna and swordfish, were loaded with mercury, which creates toxicity and inflammation in the body, leading to more weight gain. She enjoyed a few glasses of wine with dinner because she’d heard wine was good for you. After
dinner, she craved sweets and, like many people, went after cake and cookies with seemingly no “off” switch. She then felt guilty and berated herself for “ruining” her diet with junk and sweets. As hard as she tried to will herself to stop, she couldn’t. She was a prisoner of food addiction.

Janet worked out for forty minutes about four days a week on the elliptical machine and did strength training twice a week. This was good, but I was worried about her. Her lab tests showed a terrible cholesterol profile, with high triglycerides, low HDL (good cholesterol), and high LDL (bad cholesterol); a blood sugar of 107 fasting (pre-diabetes); and a high level of blood inflammation with a C-reactive protein of 8.8 (normal is less than 1).

All this did not bode well for her. With further testing, we found she had super-high insulin levels. A normal fasting level is 5 to 10; hers was 27. After a sugar drink, a normal level is 20 to 30; hers was 231! Here was the key component of Janet’s weight struggles:
Insulin makes you hungry and makes you store belly fat.
Janet’s body was suffering not because of too much food or too little exercise, but because what she was eating and how she was living were disrupting her insulin levels. Her hormones were running the show.

We ran the test that measures average blood sugar over six weeks, called hemoglobin A1c, and it turned out she was a type 2 diabetic and didn’t know it (anything over 5.9 is diabetes, and over 5.5 is considered at-risk; Janet’s score was 6.5). Plus, her blood mercury was very high at 23 (normal is less than 3) because of all the large fish she was eating.

We put her on the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet, and after the first few days, her cravings disappeared and her weight started dropping off. In just ten days she lost eleven pounds. We got her off the big fish and onto eating small fish; got her off the processed bread, noodles, and rice and onto whole, real, fresh food; and got her doing a bit more self-nurturing. To her surprise, the powerful drive to consume sugar vanished, and she could easily walk right past the treats in her office that used to call out to her. Her evenings were now about relaxing and enjoying time with her family, rather than snacking and guilt.

After three months on the detox, she had lost a total of forty-four pounds (and was still dropping). Her test scores normalized, showing a normal hemoglobin A1c (5.3). No more diabetes. Her inflammation and cholesterol levels also came down without any medication. The numbers on the scale continued to go down as her health soared.

Janet tells me that she uses the tools she learned on the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet to listen to her body and give it—and herself—the care she needs. Her cravings are a thing of the past. Though still surprised she was able to do it so easily, Janet finally feels at peace with her relationship with food and her now-healthy body.

I want to invite you to take a journey with me toward health, but first let me tell you why.

I have an extraordinary job. I have the privilege of caring for people, of being of service every day, of using my mind, experience, and knowledge to guide my patients toward greater well-being. Medical science has advanced faster than medical practice, which is often twenty to thirty years out of date. Yet there is a movement to change that. As the chairman of the board of directors of the Institute for Functional Medicine, I am part of the transformation of medical education and practice that will change our notions and treatment of disease completely. In fact, most medicine of the future will not be about directly treating illness. Instead, it will be about creating health. Disease simply goes away as a side effect of creating health.

And here’s another side effect:
automatic weight loss.
In fact, I never tell my patients to lose weight. I simply help them restore health, and the magic of biology does the rest. Your goal in picking up this book may be to lose weight; my goal is to get you healthy. Either way, we both win.

I treat patients one by one in my office, and in a year can see only so many people, yet millions and millions suffer needlessly, which is why I teach, write books, and speak around the world. I want to provide a clear solution for people to practice self-care. I want to teach the simple
principles and lay out the “goof-proof” steps to optimal health and sustainable weight loss.

The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet
is a chance to engage in a transformative experience that will show you the power you have to feel better—not in weeks or months, but
now
. This is a ten-day reboot for your entire system. It will reset your biology and metabolism, enabling you to reverse chronic symptoms and effortlessly break free of your cravings and lose weight. This is a way to quickly and profoundly change your life just by changing a few basic things: what you eat, how you move, how you rest, how you recharge, and how you connect.

Most doctors (and a great many other people) don’t believe that you can achieve the radical health and weight transformation you’re seeking in just the span of a few days. But I do. That is why I created a trial program of the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet in early 2013. I wanted to prove to people just how quickly and easily they could lose the weight that plagued them and how close they really were to feeling better than they had in years.

Over six hundred people in our online community signed up for the program. My goal was to help them experience firsthand the restorative magic of their own biology, and to reconnect with their natural state of vitality. It’s one thing to hear in the abstract that something like this is possible, and another to see and feel the results for yourself. I understood that, at first, many would be skeptical, so I made them a bold promise
: Just give me ten days and your life will never be the same.

Not only did the trial participants lose dramatic amounts of weight (4,089 pounds total) and inches off their waists, but their average blood sugar dropped twenty points and their blood pressure went down almost ten points. Their brain fog evaporated and chronic symptoms disappeared. Many wrote in to tell me they looked and felt better than they ever could have imagined (you’ll hear much more from these participants throughout the book). Best of all, they emerged from the prison of addiction without cravings, reclaiming control of their appetite, mood, and brain chemistry. And this all happened in just the first ten days!

If these six hundred people could have these kinds of results, you can, too. I will make you the same promise I made them, with the same goal of allowing you to witness your body’s own amazing healing potential. If you follow the program, you’ll experience for yourself just how easy and attainable this really is. Stick with it for ten days, and I’m guessing you will want to incorporate many components of the program in your life for the longer term. And that’s fine, because really, this is a road map for life, for whenever you want to find your way back to your natural state of health, energy, and well-being.

Naturally, my hope is that you continue to progress on this path. But if
The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet
does nothing else but show you that you CAN change your life… that you CAN eat in a way that creates effortless appetite control and curbs cravings… that you CAN lose weight and keep it off… that you CAN get your diabetes and blood pressure under control, then I’ve done what I set out to do.

Are you ready for a total body revolution?

Welcome to the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet!

In my book
The Blood Sugar Solution,
I shared my proven six-week plan for preventing, treating, and even reversing diabetes and pre-diabetes. Millions of people were amazed as they fixed their life-threatening blood sugar problems. At the same time, the program kicked their metabolism into high gear and they easily lost stubborn belly fat.

Now, for the first time, I have created a fast-track plan that will enable you to shed upwards of ten pounds and radically reboot your entire system
in just ten short days.
With the right combination of powerful foods and practices, we’re going to stop your fat-storage hormone in its tracks, cool off the inflammation that contributes to weight gain, and upgrade your detox pathways. You’ll lose weight with astonishing speed and ease—and keep it off using these lifelong tools and strategies for maximum success.

With the 10-Day Detox Diet, we’re going to get rid of more than just unwanted pounds. This is your chance to heal your body
on every level
. Yes, you will drop pounds, but you will also find that your energy, sleep, and mood improve, that chronic problems including joint pain, digestive problems, autoimmune disease, headaches, memory problems and brain fog, sinus and allergy issues, even acne, eczema, and psoriasis will get better or disappear entirely. Your sexual desire and function may even improve.

Why is that the case? Because
what makes you sick also makes you fat, and what makes you fat makes you sick.
Let me explain. Health is a state of balance, and disease is a state of imbalance. When
you begin to put on weight, especially lethal belly fat, your biology shifts out of balance, veering into the unstable and unhealthy territory of disease—which in turn makes you fatter.

One point that a growing number of doctors like me agree upon is that the whole idea of “disease” itself is wrong. We recognize disease only when we reach a certain level of symptoms or results on our blood tests. For example, if your blood sugar is 98 mg/dl, it is normal, but if it is 101 mg/dl, you have pre-diabetes. If your blood sugar is 124 mg/dl, you have pre-diabetes, but if it is 127 mg/dl, you have type 2 diabetes. This is absurd.

Imbalance occurs along a continuum, and the farther along that continuum you are, the more problems you have. Many people have whole collections of symptoms, conditions, and diseases—obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, arthritis, depression, reflux, irritable bowel, autoimmune disease, asthma, and more.

I call myself a “wholistic” doctor, because I take care of patients with a “whole list” of symptoms. In treating such patients, I’ve often found that their health complaints are not really separate problems. They are all related and driven by a few common root causes: what they eat; how much they move, rest, connect; and how toxic they are.

What we have found in functional medicine is that everything is connected—this is called
systems medicine
. Your body is one integrated, interdependent system. That is why, when you get to the root cause or causes, so many often-related symptoms go away without having to be addressed individually. It is medicine by cause, not by symptom. It is medicine of your whole system, not by geography or where the symptoms are located in your body. By connecting the dots, we can find a clear path to health and wellness.

Here’s how this all ties in with weight: The factors that cause your symptoms are the very same factors that cause weight gain, pre-diabetes, and diabetes. Those factors include inflammation, hormonal imbalance, toxicity, and more. But remember, it’s all connected, so your excess weight problems very likely share many of the same root causes as your
other health complaints. As you follow the program, you’ll come to understand how the ways you eat, move, relax, live, and think can quickly create either an environment of healing or an environment of toxicity within your body, and set the stage for weight gain or weight loss.

It comes down to this: If you’re toxic, it makes you sick and fat. That is why I want you to take the Toxicity Questionnaire below, both before beginning the 10-Day Detox Diet, and again after you’ve completed the ten days. It will give you a baseline for your existing symptoms, which are indications of being toxic and inflamed. But even more, it will help you connect the dots and see the interconnections in your body, and see for yourself how, after just ten days, you can enjoy such a dramatic reduction in symptoms and problems.

Those who did the 10-Day Detox Diet experienced a 62 percent reduction in their symptoms. Think about that: There is no drug on the planet that can reduce all these symptoms in just ten days! But if you treat your whole system, rather than individual symptoms, extraordinary healing and weight loss can occur.