Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
We are all so different. If Danna burns more calories than she eats, she sheds fat and her weight goes down. Not so for Robyn. Like many (perhaps most) women over forty-five, she is highly sensitive to grains. But unlike many women, Robyn is not insulin resistant, so she can eat a normal amount of carbohydrates and still lose weight. She just can’t include many grains or legumes because her body hates them and revolts by triggering digestive symptoms, water retention, mental fogginess, and weight gain.
In contrast to both of us, our friend Janice can barely look at a starchy carbohydrate without gaining weight. She is highly insulin resistant. More on that to come, but it means that her muscle cells don’t allow insulin to transport carbohydrates (converted into glucose) to be stored (as glycogen) for future energy. Because survival requires that glucose not accumulate in the blood, it gets diverted to Janice’s fat cells, which happily convert it to more fat. Even when she eats what she considers normal amounts of grains and other starches, such as potatoes, Janice gains weight.
Counting calories does not work for Janice. Fortunately, the Eat, Live, Thrive Diet does.
Like the three of us, you are unique. So, what are your dietary stumbling blocks? Those can be difficult to figure out on your own. The ELT Diet can help you discover the foods holding you back from reaching your goals.
The Reality of Weight Gain After Forty-Five
Women over forty-five are often faced with these issues when it comes to weight loss:
~ a lower carbohydrate threshold, which declines steadily with age
~ insulin resistance, which increases over time and promotes diabetes
~ unknown food sensitivities
~ hormonal imbalance
~ slower metabolism due to muscle atrophy
After the age of thirty, as women, we lose the ability to utilize and burn carbohydrates as well as we did when we were younger. The decline is slow and insidious and can go unnoticed into our forties and perhaps fifties, but it is happening. Foods that we once could eat are now causing undue inflammation in our bodies and disrupting our digestion, joint health, and metabolism.
God has provided us with a sophisticated healing system. Focus on the building blocks of what he has provided, such as sound nutrition, exercise, sleep, attitude, and prayer.
—Dr. Mark Stengler, ND
All the while, as we are edging toward menopause—or in the midst of it or past it—our hormones are being greatly influenced by many of the grains and processed foods we eat, making it more difficult to maintain any level of hormone balance even if we are using the latest and greatest bioidentical hormones and supplements.
That’s the reality. What can we do about it?
The ABCs of the ELT Diet
If you want to be lean and healthy, look younger than the years on your birth certificate, and have energy to embrace life fully, you must nourish your body with real food. Our diet plan will help you not only burn fat and drop pounds but also rev up your energy. It also provides a nutritional foundation to slow down and perhaps even reverse some of the aging process.
Our ELT Diet and Lifestyle Plan is designed to:
~ Activate your metabolism and promote steady weight loss
~ Balance your blood sugar and cravings
~ Cleanse your body of toxins and decrease inflammation
Our eating plan is especially effective for mature (ageless!) women who’ve experienced continued difficulty losing weight on portion or calorie-controlled diets. It is strategically designed to promote a robust metabolism, which enhances fat-burning capability no matter one’s age. Our participants are amazed at how much they can eat on our diet and still get excellent and steady results.
Step-by-Step Guidance
In the ELT Diet and Lifestyle Plan, we will guide you through three progressive phases, culminating in a realistic and enjoyable lifestyle eating plan that will serve you well for the rest of your life.
We’ll show you how to use the first two phases to reboot your lifestyle when you veer a bit off track. (Let’s be honest—who doesn’t? Our strategies help you address that reality so you can keep moving forward.)
We will teach you how to make your body shift from being predominantly a carbohydrate or sugar burner to a metabolically agile burner of all fuels, including fat.
We’ll introduce you to the power of intermittent fasting and all its benefits and our kinder and gentler version called the Eat, Live, Thrive Eating Cycle. While short-term fasting is optional, we know from our own personal experiences and from the testimonies of many of our clients that it can be a game changer. And the benefits go far beyond weight loss to include brain health, higher energy, and disease prevention.
And just as important, we’ll teach you how to design a lasting lifestyle eating plan that will be your foundation for life. Yes, there’s room for a few empty calories. No, you won’t follow your ideal plan perfectly every day. But you will discover the best plan for you and know that if you practice it moderately well most days, your body will reward you with great results!
Although our diet was designed specifically for women, it works great for men as well. We’ve been pleased to learn that many husbands and boyfriends are so impressed with their wives’ and girlfriends’ weight loss and health improvement that they decided to participate with them on the diet. They love the recipes and healthy substitutions we recommend to replace the foods that are troublesome. But beware: men lose weight faster than women, so don’t let that discourage you!
Figuring Out Good and Bad Foods
After years of coaching women, we have seen the greatest breakthroughs when specific troublesome foods are eliminated for a period of time and then reintroduced strategically based on the body’s response. Most women have no idea that they have sensitivity to certain foods because they’ve not identified a direct correlation between the food and its negative effect on their bodies.
It has been documented that more than 20 percent of people in industrialized countries have food intolerances that disrupt their health and contribute to weight-loss challenges. Additionally, it is estimated that approximately 65 percent of adults have some level of lactose intolerance as well. It is impossible to know how many undocumented sensitivities exist considering the steadily increasing number of individuals struggling with leaky gut and other digestive issues. And quite frankly, most of us are simply consuming too many processed foods and realizing the effects of all the additives and preservatives.
Some women don’t remember what it’s like to feel great. They have no clue that removing certain foods and adding others can help them look and feel years younger. Just imagine turning back your biological clock by simply eating the right foods for you. It is not only possible but also relatively easy to discover how to do just that using the personalized approach we teach in this book.
An Almost-New Body Every Eight Years
God designed our bodies with perfect blueprints that tell them what to do with the fuel we give them. They know how to build new blood cells, skin, muscle, bone, and so on. In fact, our bodies are constantly regenerating. We slough off dead skin cells hourly and replace them with new ones. We regenerate red blood cells within 120 days. We even build an entirely new skeletal system over time.
Unbelievably, the majority of living cells in your body today will not be present in your body eight years from today!
Just as you cannot build a brick house out of straw, you cannot build a healthy body out of chocolate chip cookies and potato chips. The quality of the skin, bones, muscles, and cells of your body depend on the quality of the building materials you choose to supply, meal after meal! You truly are (and will be) what you eat.
We hope that fact motivates you to see each food you put in your body for what it is and choose wisely based on what you learn as you experience the ELT Diet.
Beyond Gluten Sensitivity
Many have jumped on the gluten-free bandwagon, and for good reason. It is estimated that much of the Western world is showing signs of being highly sensitive to an overabundance of processed wheat products. These include commercially made breads, pastas, crackers, packaged sauces, salad dressings, and, of course, desserts.
Many of the most well-respected health experts believe there are no significant nutritional benefits found in commercially made products and that everyone would be better served by removing these products from their diets. Patti Milligan, the ELT Diet’s functional nutrition advisor and a registered dietician with a master’s degree in nutritional biochemistry and exercise science, agrees. She believes that the quality of mainstream wheat products in the US is troublesome for everyone—not just those with actual sensitivity to wheat—because conventional wheat is washed in chlorine. Additionally, many packaged wheat products use additives and preservatives that wreak havoc on our bodies.
Unfortunately, the solution is not just to go gluten free. Many people make the shift and end up eating excessive amounts of corn- or rice-based products, which also creates a high carbohydrate load and other challenges for their bodies. Additionally, food sensitivities go far beyond gluten. Many of our clients are flabbergasted to realize that some of the “healthful” foods they’ve been eating are problems for them.
Even when true sensitivity is not an issue, sugar addiction, carbohydrate overload, and toxic buildup (from all the commercially processed foods) can send our bodies on a downward health spiral. The strategic elimination of food culprits and plans to test each to determine our reactions are key factors in discovering the ideal diet suited to our bodies.
In the Western world, we eat the quantity of carbohydrates as if we’re training for a marathon, but we never run the marathon!
—Patti Milligan
Therefore, if you have cut calories and still not lost weight, reduced all fat and gotten fatter, exercised your tail off and the fat hasn’t budged, watched the fat around your middle increase over the past decade, gained and lost and gained and lost, then it’s time to turn your attention to the type and quality of foods you eat regularly. Also, it is very likely you’re exceeding your carbohydrate threshold and converting those calories quickly to stored fat.
Insulin Resistance and Beyond
Excessive carbohydrate intake and insufficient carbohydrate metabolism (in other words, insulin resistance) is at the root of many women’s weight issues. Patti Milligan believes the average woman consumes about 300 to 350 grams of total carbohydrate per day. That amounts to almost 1,400 calories in carbohydrates alone, which is about 82 percent of a woman’s total caloric needs for one day.
Insulin resistance (IR), also known as metabolic syndrome, can range from minimal to extreme. It is a progressive disease if not treated with proper diet modifications. It has become synonymous with prediabetes. IR puts you at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes, and it triples your risk for heart disease. Losing weight becomes almost impossible unless you change your diet consistently.
An individual is considered to have insulin resistance (IR) if he or she has three or more of the following markers:
~ blood pressure ≥ 130/85 mm Hg or use of medication for hypertension
~ fasting glucose ≥ 100 mg/dL or use of medication for high blood glucose
~ HDL cholesterol ≤ 50 mg/dL
~ triglycerides ≥ 150 mg/dL
~ waist circumference ≥ 35 inches
Your body must maintain a very narrow blood-sugar (glucose) range at all times. Blood-sugar spikes occur when you consume more carbohydrates than necessary to meet immediate energy requirements. When this happens, the excess glucose produced must be promptly transported and stored elsewhere. That is the job of insulin. It converts that excess into either glycogen (an energy source stored in the muscles or liver) or fat. Fat becomes the primary storage if glycogen stores are full and/or you are insulin resistant.
IR is caused when muscle, liver, and fat cells do not respond effectively to insulin. Research reveals that this problem increases as we age and is closely related to lifestyle habits. The most important of these habits is the quality of our nutrition. That means we can have control over this ever-increasing metabolic syndrome by changing our diets.
At least 50 percent of Americans have some form of insulin resistance, according to Dr. Robert Lustig, professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. That percentage is even higher in adults older than forty-five. “In contrast to popular false beliefs, weight loss and health should not be a constant battle uphill through calorie restriction, which simply doesn’t work,” says Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt in an article on his blog. He then goes on to quote Dr. Lustig:
Following current dietary advice is counterintuitive to achieving a healthy weight.
The reason is the myth of energy balance. If you believe this, then you believe that obesity is a physics problem; too much energy in, too little energy out. Energy balance assumes that all calories are equal, no matter where they come from. Rather, obesity is about energy deposition into fat tissue. Obesity is a biochemistry problem, and where those nutrients came from determine where they go in the body. It’s called nutritional biochemistry and it shows that all calories are not created equal.
Even for women who are not truly insulin resistant, excessive carbohydrates can create a roller-coaster effect as blood sugar levels peak and then fall throughout the day. Thus, cravings increase, energy decreases, and immunity declines.
Milligan also alerts us to the important role that a sedentary lifestyle plays in insulin resistance. Just increasing movement to three ten-minute spurts of intentional activity within your day can improve the sensitivity of insulin to your cells significantly because it stokes your metabolic furnace. In chapter 12, we’ll share the importance of leading an active lifestyle and tips to easily improve your fitness.
Now let’s take a look at an overview of the three key phases of the ELT Diet and Lifestyle Plan.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Eat, Live, Thrive Diet"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Danna Demetre.
Excerpted by permission of The Crown Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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