The Hormone Reset Diet by Sara Gottfried Page A

any weight back on after [my first time], and I am sure I will continue to lose pounds because I now have much better eating habits and understanding [of] what foods the body needs to be healthy. To me, as a breast cancer survivor, I feel like I have the world by the tail and that I have a great many happy and healthy years ahead.”
—Judith
    “I’m pretty darn proud of having gone off the sugar and caffeine early and sticking with it! (Not to mention my pride in staying on the wagon since Day 1!) I am going to take the money I save from buying cocktails and buy myself something pretty when I hit my goal.”
—Jeanine
Final Word
    Recent research shows that an important way to reverse estrogen dominance in women is to connect with others. Closeness with a husband, partner, or girlfriend has been shown to raise progesterone levels in women, which ameliorates estrogen dominance. This makes sense to me, because I know that one of the best ways for stressed women to shift to a more proactive, energized, and buoyant mind-set is to connect with others, particularly women. This discovery explains why women “tend and befriend” as an effective way to cope with stress.
    Care for yourself by making sure you take time out of your busy schedule to connect with your family and friends. This kind of attention will pay dividends to your well-being. You are worth it.

CHAPTER 4
Sugar Free
    INSULIN RESET: Days 4 to 6
    W e all know the problem with sugar. It’s addictive. It’s bad for your teeth. It makes you lethargic, cranky, and enslaved. It feeds the bacteria in your gut that make you hang on to fat, which then makes you gain even more fat. But you might not understand that sugar is the main reason you can’t fit into the form-fitting dress you wore a few years ago. It’s not that you are eating too many calories and not exercising enough. It is far more likely that you can’t zip the dress because you have insulin resistance, where your cells become numb to insulin. Why does this matter? Because insulin can control whether a calorie makes you fat. It’s another important example of how hormones dictate what your body does with food. Current science suggests that a calorie of carbohydrate is more fattening than a calorie of protein or fat because of the effect on insulin. Too many of the wrong carbs cause insulin resistance. In fact, the solution to lasting weight loss is to maintain normal insulin levels.
    Got your attention? Let me explain. Insulin is a hormone in charge of how you derive energy from the foods you eat. Your body runs on glucose, and insulin is one of the master switches. When serving you properly, insulin takes the glucose from the occasional cupcake youeat and stores it in the cells of the liver and muscles as glycogen—a storage form of glucose that can be broken down readily when you need fuel. You are filling up your tank with the gas it needs to run, and sometimes an aggregate of several thousand glucose molecules are kept in the glycogen storage space, like stacking Legos, depending on your fitness. But the catch is that you can only store a small amount of glycogen at any given time. When you eat a cupcake or two every day, there may not be room left in your tank to store the glucose as glycogen. Then insulin turns devious, transforming from a fat-
burning
hormone into a fat-
storage
hormone once the glycogen storage tank is full. Day in and day out, you are stuck converting carbohydrates into fat instead of using it for the fuel you desperately need, and storing the fat in your liver, waistline, and other organs. That’s why so many women find themselves in a frustrating cycle of being 10 to 40 pounds (or more) overweight, lacking in energy, unable to zip the hot dress, and feeling hopeless.
    Is insulin the reason you, like millions of other women, can’t lose weight? Together we will figure it out. But I’m here to tell you that sometimes weight loss is a simple matter of resetting your