What if I told you that exercise is important for your overall health, but it is not necessary to jumpstart your metabolism into fat burning mode? Rather, the key to feeling better and achieving permanent fat loss and subsequent weight control can be found simply in what you are eating and how you are eating it. We now know it’s not about calories. It’s about hormones! If you’ve exercised yourself to exhaustion and bounced from diet to diet with no permanent results, you will be relieved to know it may not be your fault! You may not believe me, but here’s the rest of the story.
Science is now showing us that it’s not a diet high in fat that is the problem and it’s not lack of exercise. You can’t exercise your way out of a bad diet! Actually, dieting and exercise done improperly can slow down your metabolism. Also, studies indicate that sugar is not only the leading cause of type-2 diabetes in most of the population but also cardiovascular disease and high cholesterol. Sugar causes inflammation and lowers our pH making our systems more acid. It’s toxic and addicting. As a holistic practitioner, and through my own experience with a history of autoimmune disease, this has been a part of my understanding for years.
Sugar’s connection with weight gain is very simple. Sugar causes our bodies to produce a spike in insulin. Insulin converts sugars to fat. When there is too much sugar to be utilized, that sugar is converted to fat and then stored. These fat cells then release the hormone leptin into our body. Leptin signals the brain that you have adequate fat stores. High insulin levels and chronic inflammation blind the leptin receptors in the brain making it deduce that you have no fat stores and are starving. Acting accordingly, you are directed to continue to burn sugar, save fat, be hungry and feel like doing nothing to expend energy. Your body will fight to keep the fat and add more! You cannot “willpower” your way out of this sad situation. The good news is that you can “Reboot” your metabolism.
What exactly does rebooting your metabolism mean? Well, it starts with two weeks of cutting out processed sugars, high sugar foods, and foods that are high in carbohydrate content. Even the healthy ones! This includes starchy foods and foods that very often trigger inflammation such as corn, wheat, rice, and white potatoes. It also includes healthy sweeteners such as honey and maple syrup and fruits except for berries and granny smith apples, which are significantly lower in sugar and higher in fiber than all other fruits.
Fiber and healthy fats help to modulate blood sugar, so it is important that you get enough of both of these throughout the day during the reboot process.
In a reboot, you do not skip meals, you do not count or limit calories, and you do not limit fat or consume low-fat products. Remember, low-fat products often contain sugar and chemicals to try and improve the flavor of the product once the fat is removed.
Anything you sweeten must be done so with plant-based sweeteners that are organic. Plant based sweeteners do not trigger a spike in blood sugar, ensuring your body doesn’t store more fat.
The Metabolic Reboot lifestyle change offers you the best of the anti-inflammatory diet, Atkins diet, low-glycemic index diet, ketogenic diet, and Mediterranean diet, but without the major long term restrictions that keep people from succeeding in making a lifestyle change permanent. And the Reboot is not a diet; if it has the word die in it, don’t do it!
The typical American diet, which tends to be too high in processed sugar and carbohydrates, and too low in fiber and healthy fats, triggers inflammation in our bodies. This inflammation and what scientists now term, leptin resistance, is the cause of chronic weight gain and obesity.
There are many aspects that need to be addressed when helping an individual regain their health. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be a complicated process. Anyone can restore their health by giving their cells the tools and nutrition they need. A healthy cell environment, leads to healthy cell function. Just like any living organism, an unhealthy environment will degrade the health of the organism unless it is strong enough to overcome environmental effects until the environment improves.
Some of the things that benefit an individual’s overall health and may occur during a properly executed metabolic reboot are stabilization of blood sugar, healing of the gut, balancing of pH, improvement of metabolism, and balancing of hormones. All of these can be achieved through nutritional changes and may lead to improvement in immune function and a reduction of inflammation in the body. These are the two key factors that play a major role in our state of health because inflammation triggers degenerative disease as well as pain. Immune function, when compromised, affects our body’s ability to overcome disease.
If you lose weight and don’t reset your metabolism first, your body will fight to bring the weight back on because you will still be leptin resistant. This is why dieting doesn’t work and rebooting does. The reboot literally helps to re-set the brain’s sensitivity to leptin, and leptin tells your body you are full and can stop eating.
A full Reboot program lasts 4 weeks, meeting once a week to get educated on holistic approaches to health and weight loss, reading of labels, the truth about sugars and fats, recipes, and supplements to enhance the effects of the reboot.
Anyone seeking to naturally reduce inflammation, improve their immune function, and restore their metabolism to fat burning mode would benefit from rebooting. If you have issues with your digestive function, gall bladder and/or liver function, a visit with a holistic practitioner is advised before you start rebooting.
Feel free to contact me with questions and to see if a Metabolic Reboot is right for you!
Yours in Wellness,
Amber