The Doctor's Diet: Dr. Travis Stork's STAT Program to Help You Lose Weight & Restore Your Health (47 page)

The writing is on the wall: if you’re overweight, if you have prediabetes, or if you have other risk factors for diabetes, you can start making changes immediately that will help get your blood sugar in balance and lower your risk of developing diabetes.

Even if you have type 2 diabetes already, the changes I’m suggesting in The Doctor’s Diet make a difference and can help prevent diabetes-related complications. In some cases, it can lower the amount of medication needed to help keep diabetes in control—if not eliminate your need for medicine altogether.

What it all comes down to is this: you have the power to make life-saving choices that will improve your blood sugar and protect you from diabetes. Even small changes can make a big difference. Diabetes doesn’t have to control your life and destiny.

Plus, there’s more: lowering blood sugar and diabetes risk also helps lower heart disease risk. That’s your next big weight-loss payoff.

If you’re like most people, you don’t appreciate the work your heart does for you. Your heart works constantly, never taking a break for a nap, or a day off, or a vacation in Cancun. Every day it pumps about 100,000 times. Try squeezing your hand 100,000 times (or even 100 times!) and you’ll start to respect the amount of work your heart does every minute of every day.

It’s amazing. Using about the amount of pressure it would take you to squeeze a tennis ball, the muscles in the heart push your entire blood volume—about six quarts total—throughout your body three times every minute. In the course of an average lifetime, the heart beats about 2.5 billion times. I get tired just thinking about that!

We talk about our hearts breaking when a romance falls apart, but the fact is, your heart is one tough cookie. It started pumping blood about three or four weeks after you were conceived, and it’s kept on ticking without a break ever since.

Considering the heart’s role in human life, you’d think we would love it like crazy. You’d think we would all be doing our very best to take care of it—eat foods that help it stay healthy, do activities that help it stay strong, avoid habits that can harm its muscles and blood vessels. But, amazingly, most of us take our hearts for granted, making a lifetime of choices that not only fail to nurture hearts, but actually harm them.

And that breaks my heart, because heart disease is more than a statistic in my world. It’s the harsh reality of having to say good-bye way too early after the death of a loved one.

Many of us don’t truly appreciate and value our heart health until it’s gone. I’ve seen this happen countless times in the emergency room. Patients—very often people who are overweight or obese—are rushed in with heart attacks, heart failure, cardiac arrest, you name it. Gasping for breath, clutching at their chests, they regret not taking better care of themselves. As the ER team tries to save them, patients bargain with God, promising that if they pull through, they’ll join a gym, lose 50 pounds, and never smoke another cigarette or eat another bacon cheeseburger.

The fortunate patients survive, and the smart ones among them keep the promises they made while they fought for their life in the ER. They make a commitment to do everything they can to love their hearts and make them as healthy as possible.

I want you to make that commitment now, when you’re reading a book rather than lying on a gurney in the ER begging your Maker to give you another chance. If you’re overweight or obese, the writing is on the wall: there’s a decent chance you’ll end up in the ER fighting for your life if you don’t put a new lifestyle plan in place now. Believe me—it’s a heck of a lot better to make this decision now than when you’re in the ER having your heart shocked back to life (if you’re lucky) with a defibrillator.

By jumping right on to The Doctor’s Diet, you’ve done the right thing. As the pounds fall off, you’ll be lowering your chances of ending up in the ER with a fatal heart attack.

Lucky for us, our hearts tend to be pretty responsive when we start to take better care of them. Not all heart disease is reversible, of course. But many kinds are. And many risk factors can be reduced.

In a lot of cases, making lifestyle changes like the ones in The Doctor’s Diet—improving your diet, losing weight, being active, getting blood sugar under control—can boost heart health. Simple changes truly can slow down, stop, or even reverse the course of some types of heart
disease. Often, smart lifestyle choices actually do more for our hearts than the powerful medicines prescribed by cardiologists.

Whether you’ve got a diagnosed heart condition, you have risk factors for heart disease, or you’ve got a perfectly healthy heart that you’d like to keep that way, the lifestyle choices in The Doctor’s Diet are just what the cardiologist ordered. (Of course, always check with your own doctor before you make any drastic changes to your daily regimen.)

As soon as you start following my program, your heart will feel the love. Almost instantly, changes will begin to occur in your body that will cut your risk of developing heart disease. Even minor improvements in your health can have a major impact on your heart, starting with four big benefits I describe below.

When it comes to your heart, a little care goes a very long way. So get ready to start showing the love that amazing little muscle in your chest deserves.

You probably know that having high blood pressure isn’t good for your heart and blood vessels. But you may not know why, so I’ll walk you through it.

Let’s start with a definition: Blood pressure is the force your blood exerts as it pushes against the walls of your blood vessels. When your heart beats, it creates pressure that’s needed to push blood through the many blood vessels (arteries, veins, and capillaries) throughout your body. The pressure actually consists of two forces:

The top number:
The first force happens when blood pumps out of the heart and into the arteries. This is called the systolic force, and it’s measured with the top number in a blood pressure reading.

The bottom number:
The second happens during the very brief rest between heartbeats. This is called the diastolic force, and it’s measured as the bottom number in a blood pressure reading.

Healthy blood vessels can handle normal amounts of blood
pressure—that’s what they’re designed to do. The walls of healthy blood vessels are flexible and muscular. They stretch like elastic when blood pushes against them.

Problems start when arteries begin to harden and blood pressure goes up, as it does when you gain excess weight, eat a poor diet, don’t exercise, smoke, drink too much alcohol, or experience high levels of chronic stress. Genetics also play a part in whether you develop high blood pressure, which is also called hypertension.

One thing high pressure can do is cause microscopic tears in blood vessel walls. As these tears heal, thick scar tissue appears. This is called vascular scarring. Areas with vascular scarring attract plaque and other blood by-products, just as a branch that drops into a stream can collect leaves and other debris. When plaque gloms onto blood vessel walls, blood has less space to flow through.

Vascular scarring also raises the chances of blood clots forming in places where they shouldn’t. These clots can cause strokes or heart attacks.

As plaque builds up and arteries get blocked, the heart has to work harder to push blood through narrow blood vessels. This can tax the heart because it’s being asked to work harder than it is supposed to work. When vessels are blocked, the heart must exert more and more pressure to get blood where it needs to go, which raises blood pressure even more, not to mention the incredible strain it places on your heart.

Also when blood pressure is too high, weaker blood vessels can be stretched too far. This can create weak patches that are susceptible to rupturing, or breaking open. Ruptured blood vessels can cause hemorrhagic strokes and other catastrophes.

Once you start losing weight, there’s a good chance you’ll start to see your blood pressure go down. Even a small amount of weight loss can lower blood pressure. In fact, studies of overweight and obese middle-aged men and women with prehypertension (their blood pressure was elevated, but not high enough to be diagnosed as “high”) have found that losing as little as 10 pounds lowered the participants’ risk of developing high blood pressure by as much as 42 percent.

Exercise makes a big difference, too—I’ve seen patients start to whittle down their blood pressure simply by adding an enjoyable half hour a day of walking to their daily routines.

As with so many other weight-related health emergencies, some very small changes can make a big difference.

Heart disease can occur when blood vessels get clogged with cholesterol, which prevents oxygen-rich blood from getting to the heart. By following The Doctor’s Diet, you’re taking steps toward getting your cholesterol levels in order and unclogging blood vessels.

Cholesterol is a soft, waxy, fatty substance found in your blood and in all of your body’s cells. Your body uses cholesterol to do some really important jobs, such as building cell walls, manufacturing certain hormones, and synthesizing vitamin D.

There are actually two classes of cholesterol: the good and the bad.

The “bad” cholesterol is low-density lipoprotein (LDL). LDL is the kind of cholesterol that gets lodged in blood vessels.

The “good” cholesterol is high-density lipoprotein (HDL). HDL actually helps clear cholesterol from the blood. Think of HDL as the sponge that runs through your blood sopping up “bad” cholesterol and carrying it to the liver for disposal.

Triglycerides are another kind of fat in the blood—they’re not cholesterol, but they cause a similar kind of trouble as LDL, so they’re usually thought of as being members of the cholesterol family. Together,
cholesterol and triglycerides are referred to as blood lipids.