The Plan

CHAPTER ONE

What's Going Wrong?

Carolyn, forty-four, came to me in a state of desperation. She'd tried every diet, cleanse, and pill to lose the twenty pounds that had slowly but steadily crept on over the past few years, with no results. She ate well and exercised four times a week but still felt sluggish and depressed most of the time. She'd been to the top doctors, diet gurus, boot camps, and more, searching for solutions, but everyone gave her conflicting advice, which confused her even further. By the time she called me, she was living on Zoloft, caffeine, and 800 calories a day, but the heaviness in her mind and around her waistline wasn't budging.

Jonathan, fifty-one, was aggravated. He couldn't lose the forty pounds that plagued him, even though he stuck to "perfect" diet foods like oatmeal, salads, and grilled salmon. Even more upsetting to Jonathan was the gout and high cholesterol that he couldn't seem to get under control. He was doing everything "right," but nothing was working.

Thirty-eight-year-old Jessica's experience was not as severe but was just as frustrating. "I never know what size I'm going to be on any given day," she sighed. "One day my jeans fit completely fine, and the next I can't even zip them because I'm so bloated. I can go for days with my stomach distended and I have no idea why, and then out of nowhere it's flat again. I feel like I have no control over my own body."

I've worked with thousands of clients like Carolyn, Jonathan, and Jessica: women and men who don't know what to eat anymore because it seems like everything makes them gain weight; who have conflated every diet plan they've ever tried and are down to only five foods in their rotation; who feel tired, depressed, or bloated, or suffer from IBS, chronic pain, constipation, eczema, and other maladies that are making them miserable.

These are smart, health-savvy people we're talking about. They've tried everything that should work, with no results. Eating clean, exercise, even extreme cleanses or detox diets that might have sloughed off the pounds in the past suddenly aren't making a bit of difference. The less things make sense, the more people come to distrust their bodies. And frankly, that's a bad place to be.

It's time to cut through all the diet hype and solve this perplexing mystery once and for all. We're going to get to the bottom of what's actually causing your weight gain and other painful or even debilitating symptoms. I promise, your body isn't betraying you, even though it feels that way. And food isn't the enemy. Absolutely not! Good food can nourish us physically and emotionally, just like diets can starve our bodies and spirits. No, neither your body nor food is the enemy here. Misinformation is. What's going wrong, very simply, is that we have the wrong information about what it really takes to lose weight.

Here are the "basics" that most of us have been taught to believe:

But what if you're doing everything "right" and still gaining weight or dealing with persistent health issues? Why are we gaining weight from seemingly healthy foods like turkey and asparagus—and why are our health issues cropping up when we do? There's more to the story here, my dear friends, and I'm here to tell you what it is.

The Insidious Offender: Inflammation

The hidden culprit behind all of this is inflammation. The idea that low-grade inflammation is behind nearly every disease and ailment has moved to the front burner within the medical community over the past decades. Countless studies have linked chronic low-grade inflammation to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, IBS, Crohn's, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), infertility, premature aging, and obesity. Medical journals publish article after article about the dangerous effects of chronic inflammation, and now the mainstream media has caught on. In 2004, Time magazine ran a cover story labeling inflammation "The Silent Killer." Bestselling authors and health gurus Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Mark Hyman have written books about the connection between inflammation, aging, health, and weight loss. Allure, Harper's Bazaar, and Vogue magazines have all run articles about how inflammation attacks the body from a cosmetic and health perspective.

In its primary function, inflammation is a good thing. It's the body's immunologic response to an injury or illness that allows us to fight off infection. We want our inflammatory response to kick in when we injure ourselves, to speed the healing process and help protect our tissues. The problems occur when the inflammation doesn't subside and becomes chronic in our system. When the body is rife with inflammatory chemicals, our latent health issues get triggered, we age prematurely, and yes—we gain weight.

Most doctors shrug their shoulders at this, but the foods you choose can actually hasten or reverse the inflammatory process. We all have certain foods that are inflammatory for us. These foods might be healthy in a vacuum, but when combined with our body's unique chemistry, they can be quite toxic. When we eat one of these trigger foods, our bodies, being the brilliant machines they are, sense that something toxic has been introduced into our system. The body goes on high alert, thinking it is under attack, and it floods the tissues with water, trying to keep that toxic substance (and the hormones and chemicals it has released) away from the brain and other vital tissues—enter swelling, rashes, itching, and tissue damage. As the body continues to divert all its energy to the problem, other body systems start to slow down as a result, including digestion, circulation, and cognitive function (hello, weight gain, joint pain, depression…). In addition, 60 to 70 percent of your immune system is located in your gut-associated lymphatic tissue (known as GALT), so when you impair digestion, guess what happens to your health response? Until your body is able to excrete the perceived toxin, it's in your system doing its dirty work. This reaction to food can easily last 72 hours.

Weight gain is nothing more than your body's chemical reaction to certain foods. You eat something that is reactive for you, an inflammatory response is triggered, your digestion is impaired, and suddenly you're up a pound or two. The mistake would be in stopping there and saying that salmon or popcorn or whatever else causes weight gain. It's never the food itself that causes weight gain. It's the chemical response it triggers in your body that makes the number on the scale tick upward and awakens latent health issues.

Whenever you see a pound or more of weight gain, you'll see a corresponding health response—even if you're not consciously aware of it as a problem. I always have clients fill out an intake questionnaire about their goals and any health issues they have, and about 60 percent of them say they have no health issues. But then they start going through The Plan and suddenly realize that those under-eye bags are gone, they're sleeping through the night, or they can walk up two flights of stairs without their knees aching. Those symptoms that they always thought were "normal" are actually anything but.

And it's not just physical symptoms we're talking about. So many of us lead stressful lives, and we beat ourselves up for not being in better control of our emotions. But food has a great deal to do with that, too. Reactive foods can cause depression and poor stress responses and affect cognitive function. Most people don't even see it, like my client Angela, age forty-one, who was a stressed-out mom of two young kids. She beat herself up a lot for having such a short fuse with them, but she didn't realize that it was specific foods that were making her react. We started to identify her trigger foods, and sure enough, she came to see that within ten minutes of consuming one of these foods, she'd be screaming at her kids. And then her weight would be up the next day as well. Anytime you're not operating at your best—whether it's mentally, physically, or emotionally—there's an underlying reason for it, and very often it's a reactive food.

Remove reactive foods and a wonderful thing happens. My client Jack, fifty-four, asked me on Day Six of The Plan, "Is it just my imagination, or am I actually thinking more clearly than I have in years?" The answer was no; it wasn't his imagination at all. That's why we see people respond so quickly to their "trigger" foods, and why, once we get those foods out of their system and their diet, they see such rapid weight loss and such a dramatic decrease in symptomology. They look and feel better than they ever have. Douse the flames of inflammation and your body does what it was physiologically designed to do, which is achieve homeostasis.

The secret to unlocking the mystery of your unique chemistry is discovering the specific trigger foods that are setting off an inflammatory response. Identifying and eliminating those foods is the answer to losing weight, looking younger, and feeling your best. This is what The Plan is all about.

Trigger Foods

The most frustrating part of this is that you've probably been eating the very foods that are setting the whole inflammatory process ablaze in your body—without knowing it. I always say it's not the chocolate, or cheese, or wine, or even the cake and cookies that are making you overweight and sick. But it very well might be one of your go-to "healthy" foods that is.

Donna was in her early fifties and had very bad eczema. She was single and living in Los Angeles—just about the last place you'd want to have a visible skin condition. She had twelve to fifteen pounds she wanted to lose, but the eczema was what brought her to me. Eczema is an inflammatory condition, so I knew The Plan would help us uncover what was igniting it.

Donna followed the first three days of The Plan, which is a cleanse that incorporates only the most universally nonreactive foods. On the cleanse, people generally see a weight loss of anywhere from four to six pounds and a dramatic decrease in symptomology, and Donna was no exception. On Day Four she woke up five pounds lighter, but even more importantly, the eczema was gone. Completely. She was thrilled!

On Day Four, we plugged in one of her favorite snacks: raw almonds. What could be healthier, right? Well, about eight almonds and as many minutes later, Donna pulled her car off to the side of the road to text me: "My mouth is on FIRE!" Aha! From there it was no big surprise to see that she gained a pound and a half and all of her eczema returned by the next morning. Donna had been eating raw almonds instead of chocolate as a treat all along, never realizing that this "virtuous" snack was actually the source of her problems.

Chances are you've been eating one or more of your specific trigger foods for years, mistaking it for something healthy. But one of the fundamental and life-changing truths you'll learn from The Plan is this: There is no such thing as healthy. There is only what works for your body. Every person's chemistry is unique. What might set off an inflammatory response in your system and cause weight gain might be perfectly fine for someone else, and vice versa.

A lot of people call me the contrarian because I'm not touting the merits of "healthy" foods like salmon, or oatmeal, or asparagus. Don't get me wrong; I have nothing against these foods, if they work for you. But those are the key words right there: if they work for you. In the abstract, these foods might be considered healthy, or even superfoods, but for 85 percent of my clients over the age of thirty-five, they lead to weight gain and health issues (The Plan is geared toward people over the age of thirty-five or people with weakened digestion. As you'll read about shortly, unless a person has a chronic illness, foods will not generate the same amount of reactive response in those under thirty-five because we lose digestive enzymes as we age).

Common wisdom in the dieting world has taught us to believe that some foods—usually the fun ones—are universally bad. So, if you're like most of the men and women I've worked with who are desperate to lose weight and improve their health, you start cutting those out. But they're usually not the problem. If they were, then you wouldn't be faced with the all-too-common mystery of eating "healthy" or drastically reducing calories and still gaining weight. How many times have you ordered plain grilled fish at a restaurant and thought, "Wow, I'm being so good," not knowing that every time you ate it you were gaining a pound? How many times have you opted for multigrain bread, not realizing that the corn or oats were causing your weight gain and health issues? At the same time, how often do you deprive yourself of the foods you love when in fact they might be better for you than Brussels sprouts or asparagus?

Believe me, I know what you're thinking. How can white bread be better for you than multigrain? Or potato chips better than bananas? It comes back to that fundamental truth that there is no such thing as universally healthy. We've all heard stories about people who lived well into their nineties eating steak, white bread, and butter. Clearly these foods are friendly for their chemistry. I wouldn't dare tell these people they have to switch to broccoli, it could kill them!