The Schwarzbein Principle, Program: Losing Weight the Healthy Way

by Diana Schwarzbein MD

Overview

In The Schwarzbein Principle, which has sold more than 250,000 copies, Dr. Diana Schwarzbein laid out her revolutionary secret to long-term health and weight control: balance your metabolism to re-energize your immune system. Her optimal health program included steps to:

• Balance a low-carb/low-fat diet
• Reduce stress through calming exercises
• Taper off chemical dependency to tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine
• Eliminate cardio exercise in favor of resistance training and stretching

Now, for the first time, Dr. Schwarzbein gives readers what they have been asking for: week-by-week steps they can use to implement this system into their lives. The pay-off for making the switch? A renewed metabolic system that creates long-term health, vitality, energy, slower aging, and the ideal body. While other diet programs promise little more than a temporary crash weight loss regimen, Dr. Schwarzbein’s plan offers something much better: a permanent body change and an end to yo-yo dieting.

"For any of you who have read any of my books on Somersizing, you know what an important role Dr. Schwarzbein plays in my life. She is an awesome doctor."
Suzanne Somers, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Sexy Years
"Don’t count calories. Fix your metabolism instead."
Fortune Small Business

Key Features

• Thousands of followers of The Schwarzbein Principle have been asking for this book—the perfect complement to her breakthrough program.
• A perfect model for today that incorporates both the low-carb and low-fat approaches.
• The anti-aging component is a hot-button for the baby boomer generation.
• The workbook format offers questions and fill-in spaces that make it user friendly.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780757395024
Publisher:	Health Communications, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/01/2010
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Diana Schwarzbein, M.D., is a leading authority on metabolic healing. She founded The Endocrinology Institute of Santa Barbara where she sub-specializes in metabolism, diabetes, osteoporosis, menopause and thyroid conditions. Along with Nancy Deville, she coauthored The Schwarbein Principle. With Deville and Evelyn Jacob Jaffe, she coauthored The Schwarzbein Principle Cookbook and The Schwarzbein Principle Vegetarian Cookbook.

Read an Excerpt

The Schwarzbein Principle

You need to be healthy to lose weight, not lose weight to be healthy. That is the core tenet of my unique weight loss approach. To explain how important this concept is to your life, I will be brutally honest: If you are following one of the popular diets, whether it is low carb, low-fat, food combining or limited calories, it is killing you. Diets that are designed to get you to lose weight first break down every component of your body. This causes destruction of your metabolic system, and ages everything from your brain cells to your organs to the skin on your face.

If you are doing cardiovascular exercise along with your diet—such as running, aerobics, kick boxing, or spinning—you're killing yourself even faster.

Popular diets and high impact exercise programs emphasize ways to use up more energy and chemicals than you rebuild. This will cause you to lose weight for a short period of time, but most of the weight loss is due to breaking down cell structure, organ tissue, muscle and bone tissue along with fat loss. In essence, you are overstressing and starving your body, forcing it to consume itself to keep you functioning.

Although you initially lost weight on the scale, you will soon find yourself at a plateau where your body is no longer able to respond to the abuse. It is at this point that your weight will not budge, even if you starve yourself more or exercise harder! Worse yet, by continuing to abuse yourself in the long-term, your body will hit the wall resulting in accelerated aging, degenerative diseases, and more severe symptoms than you had before. This is why so many popular diets end with the unsuspecting victim—for lack of a better term—being heavier and less healthy than they were when they started.

There is a solution to this problem. You can lose weight and still have a long, healthy, and disease-free life. The key is to embrace the concept that health is more important than weight and to understand that once you are healthy, you can and will lose weight. Even better, once you are healthy you'll keep that weight off for the rest of your life.

My approach to health is based on metabolic regeneration, the ability to rebuild and repair. Under the right set of conditions, you possess the ability to repair and heal yourself, whether that healing involves weight issues, degenerative diseases, or chemical imbalances in your body. But if you are not regenerating, you will not have the chemicals that you need to achieve your daily activities or stay healthy. The key to health is therefore to build up your body, not to tear it down.
This is why my health program is different from all the other lifestyle programs being promoted these days. My wellness program focuses on curing all the degenerative diseases of aging, not just obesity. This idea is summarized in The Schwarzbein Principle.

The Schwarzbein Principle means that you have more control over your own health and aging than you were led to believe. It is meant to empower you with the knowledge necessary to make the changes to your daily habits that will help determine your own destiny. It does this by reinforcing the concept that your body is connected through chemical reactions and by explaining that what you do on a day-to-day basis will influence how long and how well you live your life.

The Schwarzbein Principle Program

The Schwarzbein Principle Program works by preventing further damage to your metabolism and helping to heal damage that has already occurred. Years of bad habits—like over-exercising and eating the wrong way—can lead to excess weight, illness, disease, or simple lack of energy. The good news is that if you take action and change your daily habits, you will be able to reverse or prevent further damage to your body and slow down the aging process.
The Schwarzbein Principle Program is a way of life, not a short-term plan, and if followed properly it will lead to better health, more vitality, and your ideal body composition. Here are the five steps of my program, which we'll talk more about in later chapters:

• Healthy Nutrition. There is no calorie-counting or meal skipping on the Schwarzbein Principle Program. I encourage you to eat as much as you need up to five times a day. The only stipulation is to eat a 'square' meal every time. The Schwarzbein Square, that is—a balance of quality carbohydrates, protein, healthy fat, and nonstarchy vegetables.
• Stress Management. Seven hours of uninterrupted sleep is mandatory on the Schwarzbein Program, as is downtime during the day. I'll show you simple techniques to create both a great nights sleep and daily relaxation.
• Tapering off Toxic Chemicals. Substances such as refined sugars, alcohol, nicotine, artificial sugars, caffeine and many over-the-counter and prescription drugs have no place in the human body, but some of them are a valuable aid while you transition to a healthy lifestyle. I'll show you how to taper off of toxic chemicals so that you won't ever miss them.
• Cross-Training. Moderate exercise is good for you; too much exercise destroys you. Whether you're killing yourself on the couch or on the treadmill, I'll give you a simple routine that will energize and revitalize your body.
• Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). Not everyone needs HRT, but if your body isn't producing enough of a particular hormone, you will never balance your metabolism and you will never be truly healthy. I'll show you how to take HRT the right way.

¬2004. All rights reserved. Reprinted from The Schwarzbein Principle, The Program: Losing Weight the Healthy Way by Diana Schwarzbein, M.D. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher. Publisher: Health Communications, Inc., 3201 SW 15th Street, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442.

Preface

Introduction

Are you looking for a health program that does not require you to starve yourself or exercise all day long to get results? Are you so confused by all the diets out there that you don't know what to believe anymore? Are you at the point in your life that you understand that anything worthwhile takes time and patience to accomplish? Did my first two books leave you wanting a daily, step-by-step planner? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you have picked up the right book.

Welcome to the Schwarzbein Principle, a program designed to help you achieve long lasting healthy results. This five-step program prevents damage to your metabolism or helps to heal it if it has already occurred. I promise that if you adopt the SPP as a way of life, you will be healthier, happier and able to achieve your ideal body composition (a balanced amount of lean body tissue and a normal amount of protective fat). Furthermore, once you have healed your metabolism, you will never have to do it again.

Interested? Read on.

Two of the most important principles of my program are that you need to eat well to build well and you need to be healthy to lose weight, not lose weight to be healthy. If you under eat, eat incorrectly or over-exercise, you will never be healthy because you will be using up your body chemicals faster than you can rebuild them. Whenever you use up more than you rebuild, you are aging faster than normal. To slow down the aging process and keep yourself healthier, you will be required to eat more often and exercise less often but more efficiently when following my program. By doing so, you enable your body to rebuild and repair itself which means that you have a healthy metabolism that is primed to help you burn off fat weight without breaking down lean body tissue (muscle and bones).

Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, I want you to know that there is plenty of science to back this up.

Damaging Your Metabolism

How does one damage their metabolism? Unfortunately, by following programs that incorporate under eating, eliminating food groups, over-exercising, low fat or low carbohydrate meal plans and/or fasting (to name a few bad habits) in order to be "thin" and "healthy". These habits cause changes to your physiology that signal your body to break down. The normal process of aging is already due to your body losing its ability to rebuild as well as when you were younger; therefore, any habit that causes you to break down more quickly accelerates aging.

This is how after years of hard work and deprivation trying to do the "right thing", people become out of shape and sicker than they have ever been. They usually get very frustrated and worn out, too. And worse for some, their fat deposition that used to be evenly distributed all over their body returns and localizes more around their midsection or belly area. They end up with a metabolism so damaged that it no longer responds to under eating and/or over-exercising and a body that is aging at a faster rate than it's supposed to. Has this already happened to you? If so, do not despair. As distressing as all this may be, it is never too late to recognize your past mistakes so that you can make the necessary changes to your nutrition and lifestyle habits to improve your health today.

For those of you who are in the early process of damaging your metabolism it will be harder to understand what I am writing, but think about the following: You are not damaged until you are damaged. You become damaged by using up and breaking down more than rebuilding your body chemicals and cells. When you are using yourself up, you release energy and other "feel good" chemicals; therefore, the process of breaking down makes you feel more alive. Since it initially feels good doing something that is harmful, you will never think about needing to change your habits. Although you are doing the wrong things, you will still feel as if you are healthy.

As an example, you can be following the latest popular craze of not eating enough carbohydrates and you can experience "benefits" such as weight loss, more energy, better mood, and lower cholesterol levels. Why is this so terrible? Because it is a short-term fix that will cause damage to your metabolism. By not eating enough carbohydrates, you signal your body to use rather than rebuild. Think of it as your body eating itself up. If you did this on a consistent basis, you would age faster and die younger. Trust me on the physiology.

The SPP is a Health Program

If what I am writing is true why isn't my program as popular as the Atkins diet? Because I will not, and do not, promote the SPP as a simple weight loss program. It is a health program. It is hard to compete with all the popular diets promising quick weight loss and ever lasting health when my program is offering you ever lasting health first and fat weight loss second-and sometimes a distant second.

Furthermore, for some of you who have already damaged your metabolism, healing can involve weight gain. And just like breaking down feels good, healing sometimes feels bad. Try selling that on national TV-a program that could initially cause weight gain and often makes you feel poorly during the process of healing. Now you can see why my program currently does not have such widespread appeal. Or why some think my program is crazy. But think about it objectively. My program involves eating balanced meals, managing stress, sleeping through the night, tapering off of toxic chemicals and balancing your body's natural hormones. What part of this sounds crazy to you?

My program does not tell you what you want to hear. It does not promise falsely that those of you who have damaged your metabolism will feel better instantly or lose fat weight instantaneously. I will not lie to you. And besides, you already know there are no easy answers. If there were a magic pill, you would be taking it already, and I would be prescribing it for you. And if all those years of dieting and over-exercising worked, you wouldn't have picked up this book. You and I both know that it takes time to heal. The good news is that you can still heal by stopping the bad habits that caused you to damage your body in the first place. My program teaches you how.

The Schwarzbein Principle Program Is A Process

My program is a process. That is why the five steps have to be followed in a specific order. If you attempt to improve all your habits at the same time, you will rebuild too quickly. You will not be able to handle the symptoms as your body withdrawals from its addiction to the breaking down process, and you will always fail this program. It is also why there is a self-medicating phase within the healing phase of the transition. Self-medicating is the process of continuing a bad habit while you improve other habits, thus allowing yourself to feel better as your body begins to repair itself. Self-medicating helps by slowing down the overall rebuilding process because it allows you to continue to break down and use your chemicals to feel better. For some of you who have damaged your metabolism quite severely self-medicating will be the one thing that will make it possible for you to continue eating well.

What my program ultimately promises is that when you have healed your metabolism, you will be free of destructive habits, feel better than you have in years and have the chance to burn off all your excess fat weight.

Informed Choices

You have been lied to. Many of you out there are trusting that you are getting the correct information to make an intelligent decision on your health choices. But you are not. When you have knowledge that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, as I do, you feel obligated to share it. Once it is out there for you to read and evaluate, my job is finished. If you choose to follow a program knowing that you are harming yourself, that is up to you. I believe in the freedom of informed choice.

But why does history keep repeating itself? Why are we seeing the pendulum swing again from a low carbohydrate, high protein/fat diet plan to a high carbohydrate, low protein/fat diet plan and now once again back to a low carbohydrate, high protein/fat diet plan? We have already tried all these ways of eating and if they had worked why would we have changed? The truth is that they don't work. People have become ill and fat from both these ways of eating before. Why won't people adopt a more balanced way of eating as promoted in the SPP? The answer is the lure of fast initial results. Later, when the program stops working, most individuals turn the blame back onto themselves. I could have followed the program better, they think. Or it must have been the few times I cheated that made the whole program not work for me. This is human nature, and I have heard these same rationalizations from many of my patients when I asked them why they kept up this way of popular eating when it obviously did not work.

It is time for a paradigm shift away from thinking that being thin or losing weight will make you healthy to understanding that being healthy will help you stay thin or lose your fat weight. My program is here to help you change your way of thinking.

Helping Thousands to Heal

Why should you believe me? After all you have probably heard about the other programs by other MDs, PhDs and dietitians. What makes my program right? Who am I and what do I know that they don't know?

My quest for the truth regarding health started after I became serious ill at age 17 from years of poor eating habits. Because I was not being helped by conventional wisdom, I started my own research into nutrition and health. Suffice it to say that I had to heal myself from my past habits, and I only succeeded after I got rid of the false notions that it didn't matter what I ate as long as I was thin. Once I was able to overcome this incorrect way of thinking, I was able to obtain optimum health and my ideal body composition.

But the story only begins there. I became so interested in health and nutrition that I decided to go to medical school and become a doctor. After four years of medical school, I spent five more years in postgraduate training and became an endocrinologist. Endocrinology is a specialty of internal medicine that deals with the hormones systems of the body. I learned that it is the hormones that control what the body does and that hormones are affected by daily nutrition and lifestyle habits. Once I understood this, everything else fell into place.

I started seeing patients and heard countless stories of poor lifestyle habits such as skipping meals, eliminating food groups, not getting enough sleep and overexercising. With my background in endocrinology, I was able to understand that all of these poor nutrition and lifestyle habits would cause hormonal imbalances that would lead to chronic illness and/or weight issues. I created my five-step program and began my clinical research with patients who had type II diabetes.

I learned a lot of lessons. The most important one is that it takes a long time to damage your metabolism; therefore, you cannot expect that it will heal overnight. I also learned that no one can be healed by habits that are designed to obtain immediate results in how they feel or by quick changes in their weight, blood pressure or blood sugar and cholesterol levels. I also found out something about myself. I didn't want to be the type of doctor that treated symptoms with drugs. I wanted to be the physician who taught people how the body worked so that they could be in control of their own health by choosing to make the necessary changes to their daily nutrition and lifestyle habits.

I admit that I made some mistakes along the way because I initially did look for quick fix lifestyle changes. But it did not take a long time before I figured out, by seeing what happened to my patients, that quick fixes aren't sustainable.

From the extensive knowledge I gained with my patients with Type II diabetes, it was an easy progression to treating patients with adrenal gland burnout. To this day, I continue to work with patients who have damaged their metabolism by the same poor nutrition and lifestyle habits that you are probably doing right now, and I have yet to meet anyone who has chronically dieted or overexercised and remained healthy. I don't believe it is possible. In the last 13 years, I have helped thousands of patients turn their health around and experience better health than ever before.

If You Still Don't Believe Me Just Ask Around

If you still are not convinced, I advise you to speak to sick or overweight family members and friends. Ask them about their past nutrition and lifestyle habits. I promise that just as I have, you will hear stories of chronic dieting or over-exercising. You will hear many tales of how people tried to follow calorie in and calorie out programs but were unable to keep up with these programs and ended up "falling off" their diet and gaining all the weight back plus more. Or worse, how while on these programs and following them exactly, they did not get any results. How it used to "work" when they would diet and exercise more but now they feel hopeless because no matter what they do nothing works!

You will hear women say, "When I look at my pictures from junior high or high school, I wonder why I thought I was so fat. I would give anything to look like that now! Why did I ever start dieting? It was the worst thing I have done to myself."

Or you will hear about those who ended up with depression, asthma, PMS, infertility, or bone loss. because they bought into the low-fat movement or followed a vegetarian diet (done incorrectly) all believing this was good for their health.

What I guarantee you won't hear from them are stories of eating balanced meals, managing stress well, sleeping through the night and avoiding toxic chemicals such as alcohol, diet sodas and sugary foods. Nor will you hear about moderate exercise programs and hormone replacement therapy (HRT). You won't hear these stories because people following a healthy lifestyle designed to balance all the hormones of the body are healthy.

You Can Make a Difference

If you are someone who has damaged their metabolism through poor nutrition and lifestyle habits, please join me. You know you are not overweight or ill because you are genetically inferior or have no will power. You should not be ashamed of how this has happened to you. You need to be part of the grass roots movement that empowers all of us to stop following popular diets and start learning about balance in our lives. There are millions of you out there that know this and yet your voices are not being heard. Join me now in dispelling this counter productive myth that you need to be thin to be healthy. Many lives are being adversely affected.

I invite you now to become part of The Schwarzbein Principle Program and to incorporate the five steps you will be learning about in this book into you life. I know that I can help change your life and health but you are the one that will be doing all the work by making the necessary changes in your daily habits. I look forward to working with you towards a common goal of health, wellbeing and ideal body composition.

It is time to get started!