The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet: The 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula That Resets Your Metabolism To Lose Up to 5 Pounds a Week (10 page)

But when you inject an obese db/db mouse with leptin, it doesn’t improve. It already has high circulating leptin, since its considerable fat stores are secreting it, but there is no receptor to accept it. This gives us important insights into the power of leptin and its receptors in the hypothalamus. How do you restore healthy leptin communication so that your body actually knows when you have enough energy and can stop eating?

The answer is simple in theory but perhaps tougher in practice. Much as with insulin resistance, the key is reducing inflammation in the body and avoiding the foods that cause leptin communication to fail in the first place (fructose, MSG, etc.). The good news is that you can tackle both issues with one approach—get rid of man-made junk foods! A simple rule of thumb is to avoid any food advertised on TV or in a magazine. Most often these are packaged foods from big food companies, loaded with the very chemicals that disrupt your brain and the hormones we’ve been discussing in this chapter. Don’t be fooled by their deceptive health claims and marketing gimmicks.

In addition to losing body fat and reducing inflammation, you can restore your leptin function by undergoing periods of lower and then
higher
caloric consumption. This is one more reason for the strategic 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula in the All-Day Fat-Burning Diet, and specifically, the 1-Day Feast.

THE BRAIN HEALTH AND FAT CONNECTION

Your brain controls everything in your body. It’s that simple. It’s your body’s command central, regulating everything you consciously and unconsciously do. That’s why you don’t need to think about breathing, keeping your heart pumping, or ensuring that your blood sugar is balanced. Your brain takes care of all that for you. Even conscious activities like lifting your fork or getting up off the couch begin with an impulse from your brain.

As you’ve seen, much of your ability to lose weight and keep it off is strongly influenced by the health of your brain and its ability to communicate properly with the rest of your body. Its goal is to keep everything inside you in homeostasis (balance). To do that, it must receive the required feedback from various hormones and chemical messengers. If it doesn’t, breakdowns occur. To successfully lose weight and keep it off, you cannot overlook the role your brain plays in hunger, mood, cravings, energy, and motivation.

For instance, dopamine is perhaps the most important neurohormone related to your ability to burn fat. It allows us to experience pleasure. We’ve seen that, without it, animals lack the motivation to do anything. But, as with every hormone in your body, balance is key. Dopamine helps to control energy, and deficiencies can lead to fatigue and carb and sugar cravings. Thus, those with low dopamine function frequently crave sugar and caffeine because of the brain stimulation these “drugs” provide. Unfortunately, the stimulation is short lived, leading to repeated cravings and overindulgence. Over time, continued reliance on these stimulants causes dopamine signaling to weaken, which leads to a vicious cycle of uncontrollable cravings.

Serotonin is a brain neurotransmitter linked to feelings of relaxation and well-being. Ninety percent of all the serotonin in the body is
actually
found in the gut, where its main job is to control gut movement. In the brain, it’s one of the body’s appetite suppressants and helps to curb cravings. It makes you feel satisfied even if your stomach is not full. As a result, you eat less and lose weight.

People with very low serotonin levels often have difficulty tasting and may pile more salt on their food. And since our bodies make serotonin only after we eat sweet or starchy carbohydrates, those with low levels often feel unsatisfied if starch is not part of the meal and struggle to follow a low-carbohydrate diet. Continued low serotonin can lead to depression, weight gain, and insatiable cravings for carbs.

Have you ever devoured the bread they give you while you’re waiting for the main course in a restaurant? I know I have. By the time the main course comes around, your appetite has been downsized. This blunting of appetite happens not solely because you’ve eaten 100 calories’ worth of bread. It is primarily due to the fact that increased serotonin release put a brake on your appetite—just one more reason why the right carbs are necessary for fat loss. Successful weight loss depends on serotonin to help control food intake.

In
Chapter 5
, I’ll show you some powerful ways to reinvigorate your serotonin levels without taking medications or devouring the wrong carbs, which you’ll only regret minutes later. But keep in mind that carbohydrates are an integral part of the All-Day Fat-Burning Diet. The key is to eat the right ones at the right times. I’ll show you how to do all that in Part II of this book.

As you can see by now, most of what drives us to take action comes from the brain, from command central and all of the hormones that communicate with it every second of every day. And these delicate hormone levels are easily offset by stress, the wrong exercise, emotional trauma, caffeine, sugar, and poor food choices. This leads to cravings and behavior that oftentimes leads us to question whether we have someone else living inside us. We just don’t feel right when our brain chemistry is off. We feel like we’ve lost control.

The real long-lasting solution to reclaiming control of your body and your health is improving the quality of your diet, eating the right foods at the right times, exercising more intelligently, and allowing
your
body to properly rest and recover. The result will be a natural correction that rectifies the hormonal imbalances inside your body that are ultimately the real reason you’re holding on to fat. Once your metabolism has been reset, your body will operate as it was meant to and you’ll transition into burning fat nonstop. This is my hope for you.

Now that you understand all the obstacles that have been getting in your way, it’s time to put the All-Day Fat-Burning Diet to work in your life.

Part
II

6 Steps to Reset Your Metabolism

CHAPTER
3

STEP 1: SET YOURSELF UP FOR SUCCESS

L
et’s be brutally honest with each other: You don’t really want to do any of this, right?

I don’t imagine that you particularly want to exercise, and it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that you’d rather not follow a meal plan. In fact, I’m guessing if you had to choose between reading this book and curling up to watch a movie with a big tub of hot, buttered popcorn, you’d choose the latter. Don’t worry, I’m not offended. I understand. We humans don’t like change, especially any that might be considered “self-improvement.” It’s daunting and disruptive, a Herculean effort of willpower that you’d rather not deal with. There’s a reason you’ve settled into the limiting habits you have now—they were your way of coping with all the stressors that triggered your weight gain in the first place.

If you need proof that positive change is often a lost cause, look no further than your New Year’s resolutions. Most of us believe that when the clock strikes 12:00 on December 31, a magical motivational switch will flip in our brains, allowing us to finally lose weight, get
organized,
or save more money.
This year,
we say,
everything is going to be different.
The stats tell a very different story, and a depressing one at that—45 percent of people set a New Year’s resolution, but only 8 percent of them actually achieve success. Despite our lip service to change, most of us don’t go much further than halfheartedly mentioning our resolutions to a friend or writing them down, if we do that much. By the time March rolls around, we’re right back where we started, if not worse.

None of this is surprising. It’s a hard truth about who we are as humans, and it’s the very reason the diet industry exists. I want you to know that improving your life doesn’t have to feel like such an impossible mission. More than that, I want you to succeed. I’d like to believe this will be the last “diet” book you’ll ever read, but I’m not arrogant enough to be entirely convinced. I am 100 percent certain that I can share some important concepts that will make achieving the change you want a much easier task. It comes down to this: Successful change is all about your mind-set.

In 2002, John Norcross, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, found that readiness to change, or how prepared a person is to enter the action stage of behavior change, is the single best predictor of success in keeping New Year’s resolutions. I’m going to double down on that and say it’s your best predictor of success at any time, in any aspect of your life. In my experience, it’s really all that matters. That’s why I no longer bother trying to convince, debate with, or motivate others to change (including my own family members). I only want to help those who are motivated to become better versions of themselves. Since you’re reading this book, I believe that includes you!

In his research on New Year’s resolutions, Dr. Norcross also found that “resolvers” reported higher rates of success than “nonresolvers.” At 6 months, 46 percent of the resolvers were continuously successful, compared to 4 percent of the nonresolvers. This goes to show that the simple act of setting an intention or goal is a big step toward achieving it. As the old adage holds, “All change begins within”; now we have proof. In this chapter, we’re going to hardwire your brain to supercharge your success.

STEP
1: GET CRYSTAL CLEAR

Before a ship leaves its port, the captain must know where it’s going. Planes don’t leave the gate until the pilots have a crystal-clear flight plan. Do you have a flight plan for your life? Do you know your destination(s)?

If you want amazing results, you have to envision your ideal future. What do you want to achieve? Do you want to lose 10 pounds or 100 pounds? Do you want to reduce your body fat by 5 percent or maybe look like you did 10 years ago? Whatever you want, you need crystal clarity in order to make significant change happen in your life. If your goal is murky, like a pool of dirty water, you’ll have a very tough time achieving it.

Let me share two examples from my own life to illustrate the importance of clarity: When I was about 10 years old, I realized I was a really good soccer player. I also loved performing in front of others. That’s when I decided that playing pro soccer was definitely something I wanted to do with my life. For as long as I can remember, I would imagine seeing myself playing in front of tens of thousands of people in the best stadiums around the world. For years, I was very clear about what I wanted. That clear vision gave me the drive to train as hard as I did and continually improve myself. Ten years later, I was playing professionally. There were many ups and downs along the way, but I always believed that I could do it. My belief and determination made my vision become a reality.

When I was 26, I was in sore need of a car. I was building a roster of clients all over town, but I was taking the bus and subway to see them. My first step out of this rut was to create a vision board on which I posted the exact car that I really wanted, along with other experiences I wanted in my life. I then took a picture of my collage and used it as the wallpaper on my laptop.

A few months later, I was visiting my mom and she noticed the big image of the car taking up most of my computer screen. When she asked what it was, I told her that I’d created this vision collage to constantly remind me what I wanted in my life. She understood clearly
what
I was trying to accomplish, and being the great mom that she is, asked if I had taken the car for a test spin. For some reason, I hadn’t even thought of that. Thirty minutes later, we pulled up to the dealership. As I stepped onto the lot, a most welcome surprise greeted me: The exact car that had been plastered on my computer’s screen was sitting right in front of me! And I mean the exact same car—same year, make, color, rims, everything! It was crazy! Naturally, I took it for a test drive and was blown away. It was so powerful—a little too powerful, actually—so I ended up getting one model down, which was more suitable for my needs.

None of that would have happened had I not been crystal clear about what I wanted. The same goes for you. You need to be 100 percent crystal clear about what you want. What does it look and feel like? What will your daily life be like when it’s yours? Get deeply connected to your end result. This same clear intention-setting process has also allowed me to live in the exact house that both my wife and I envisioned for our family for years. Two years before writing my previous book, I created a vision of becoming a #1
New York Times
best-selling author. I even took an actual
New York Times
bestseller list and put my name and book title at #1. When my previous book,
The All-Day Energy Diet,
was released, it hit #2 on the
New York Times
bestseller list. Pretty darn close, if you ask me.

I don’t share this stuff to brag but to illustrate that stuff doesn’t just fall into your lap. You need to work damn hard for it. More importantly, you need to know exactly what you’re working toward. You need to have a destination. And if that goal is emotionally compelling to you (which it absolutely must be), you will be motivated to take massive action to attain it.