The Fast Metabolism Diet (3 page)

And they do change for the better. And the patients keep coming. As my career progressed, business was great, but the more word spread, the more clients wanted to see me personally. My practice has always been very one-on-one. Clients come to see me weekly or every other week, and as they progress, I continue to tailor their programs to their needs. But with the client load I had, this kind of personal service was becoming increasingly difficult.

I began to have clients flying out from hundreds, even thousands, of miles away to see me, or flying me out to their homes to help them. I often went to their doctor’s appointments with them and I even cooked with them in their kitchens (in fact, I still do that for some clients). I love that personal contact, but I began to regret that there weren’t more Haylies to go around.

I couldn’t be everywhere at once, and the people who desperately wanted to work with me couldn’t always get to me. I realized I needed to find a way to be there for them even when I couldn’t physically be there for them. I needed to craft a system for fast, effective, meaningful, and permanent weight loss that I could send out into the world. So I took the concepts and techniques I used with my individual clients and developed them into this book. I did it so that anyone, anywhere, could follow the diet, and it would work. Quickly. Dramatically.

But there is one catch to this whole “jaw-dropping weight-loss” business: You’re going to have to do what I say. You’re mine now for the next four weeks, and you have to be willing to accept that. If you really want to lose weight, you have to let me be in charge. You have to commit.

Food can do a lot for you. But it must take a different place in your life for the next few weeks than it probably has up until now. Food is going to wear a different hat. It is your tool, not your entertainment source. It’s definitely not your enemy. It is your servant and you are its master. You are going to put it to work for you, and make it work hard. In 28 days, you’ll feel a profound difference.

I’ve been told I can be intense. Bossy, even. However, I’m not being firm with you to amuse myself. I won’t be one of those people who encourage you to change your life with vague inspirational guidelines. I will show you
exactly how to do it.
This is a book of action, not theory. Fortunately, it isn’t hard. The plan feeds you, both physically and emotionally. It gives you energy, gets you lots of compliments, and most importantly, can change your health.

I can be tough when it comes to the plan, but it is tough love. I care about you. I care about your life and I care about your health. I’m here to help you. Committing to Fast Metabolism doesn’t require counting calories, fat grams, or anything else. You want to lose weight, not do math,
right? All you have to do is eat food—good food, delicious, real food—in the specific order and way that I tell you to eat it. Give me four weeks and I’ll set your metabolism on fire.

Just in case you are still wondering whether you should go out on the proverbial limb and throw all your trust into my system, let me assure you: I get it. I know what it’s like to be overweight and tired, frustrated and cynical, ready to give up. I’ve been there, personally. I also know what it’s like to battle emotions and try to soothe them with food. I know what it’s like to go through a divorce, to be a single mom. I know what it’s like to try to lose weight under extreme stress; to be sick, to be confused, to feel lost.

But I also know what it’s like to get better, lose weight, heal, feel hope, and find my way. I’ve traveled down that road. And I’ve done my homework. I’m obsessed with information, and when my clients want to know
why,
I want to know why, too. I’ve spent years reading endocrinology books, attending advanced medical seminars, learning about hormones and immunology, food allergies, and herbal medicine. If a client wants to know what water to drink, I attend a seminar on water so I can give him, or her, the right answer. I’ve cultivated a whole network of specialists to support my practice, people from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, the Holtdorf Clinic, Children’s Hospital, the Mayo Clinic, even clinics in Germany and Mexico. I’m not just telling you what I do, though. I’m telling you what science says is
true,
so that it can help you.

A close friend once asked me why I stretch myself so far outside my industry. I joked that I finally found a vocation that allowed me to indulge my neurotic obsession to find out “why.” In reality, I do it for
you
. I care about your results. That’s the bottom line. I care a lot. I care with passion about all my clients and making sure change happens for them. I want every one of my clients, including you, to be happy and healthy and whole.

So you see, I wrote this book for you. My readers are my clients, too, and what I want more than anything else is to help you effect real, meaningful change in your life. With this book, I want you to become a student
of your own metabolism. I want you to understand the health implications of what you’re doing as you bring back balance to your body chemistry and increase your internal rate of burn. Foods do different things in the body. Certain foods build muscle; others contribute to fat storage or increase blood sugar. Some provide quick energy. The Fast Metabolism Diet manipulates and enhances your metabolism with specific functional foods combined in different phases to evoke precise physiological changes in your body.

During each phase of the Fast Metabolism Diet, you will notice that you will actually
feel
these changes in your body. By its end, you will understand in a very real and tangible way how your body reacts to foods and how your metabolism can be nurtured instead of bogged down.

This is a diet full of pleasure, not denial. I am going to send you in a new direction, to revitalize your burnt-out metabolism, enjoy food again, rather than fear it or deny it or portion it out on tiny little plates. With the Fast Metabolism Diet, unpleasant diet side effects simply aren’t necessary. No starving allowed! You will shake up your metabolism in just the right way to increase your lean muscle-to-fat ratio while enjoying improved health, more energy, and creating a love affair with food.

That is the Fast Metabolism Diet.

So stick with me and enjoy yourself, your food, and your newly emerging body. This is going to be exciting for both of us. Follow the rules and feel the flames of your metabolism rising. You won’t be the first. Celebrities trust the diet. Athletes trust it. Rock stars trust it. People with chronic illnesses trust it. Perhaps most important, doctors trust it. You can trust it, too.

So, welcome to my office. Have a seat. I am your nutritionist now and in four short weeks I will be seeing a lot less of you.

W
e are asking more of our bodies than at any other time in the history of civilization. We ask them to live on food that is of a much lower quality than ever, thanks to all the chemical additives, preservatives, and processing. We pump ourselves full of sugar and artificial sweeteners, hormone-riddled dairy products, and foods like wheat and corn and soy that are so genetically modified, it’s a wonder we can even digest them. We live in a world with depleted soil, polluted air, and water teeming with environmental chemicals. We eat and drink from plastic containers that leach even more chemicals into our foods and drinks. And, we live with great amounts of often crushing, overwhelming stress.

Given all this, no wonder you don’t feel great. You’re tired all the time, you get sick too often, or you’ve gained a few extra pounds (or a few dozen extra pounds). Every day, I see clients who need to make a change in their lives. Some are sick; others are not sick yet, but are headed in that direction. They all need to lose some weight so their bodies can function better. And they need to change now. It’s urgent. They feel as if they are wasting precious time—precious days and hours and minutes when they … when
you …
could feel vibrant and healthy, energetic, strong, and alive.

You want to stop worrying about food and fat and what the scale says to you in the morning. Maybe you’ve lost a lot of weight in the past—40, 50, 100 pounds or more—but it’s creeping back and you’re panicking. Maybe
you’re just so tired of dieting that you’re hoping, beyond hope, that there might actually be a better way—a way that would allow you to
eat
again.

I’m sorry that nobody ever
properly
explained to you how your body really works when it comes to food, and how your body chemistry, not you, is to blame. I’m sorry that
stress has tipped you into a cycle you feel you can’t escape, and you are angry or depressed or even scared about your health and the shape of your body. I’m going to show you another way. The foods you eat and the lifestyle you choose should create energy and strength for you, not
fatigue, obesity, sickness, desperation, or self-loathing. Yet once you’ve slowed down your metabolism, study after study has demonstrated that the metabolic rate does not easily return to normal, even after resuming a normal diet. When you starve yourself, your body adjusts to subsist on a smaller number of calories by slowing down your metabolism. That means that whenever you go off your diet, you’re likely to gain weight with a vengeance. Your body is just trying to save you from future famine.

When you are under tremendous stress, your body excretes crisis hormones signaling it to store fat and burn muscle. When you are overloaded with chemicals, pesticides, and pollutants, the body creates new fat cells to house these
toxins, so you don’t become poisoned and sick. And when you consume food that is devoid of nutrients or contains artificial dyes, flavorings, and sweeteners, the body does its best to survive these foreign substances by slowing down the metabolism and minimizing the damage to the body’s system as a whole. The very world we live in puts us all at risk for a slow metabolism.

We’re about to change all that. It’s time to move beyond blame and regret and self-loathing, and into the future. This is the paradigm shift your body needs, and it will create a new, healthier version of you. The new you views food as a tool to repair damage and restore health. The new you
loves
fruits and grains and protein and healthy fats. The new you knows how the body reacts to specific foods and strategic eating, and the new you has all of the resources to get the weight off and keep it off for good.

We are going to find the new you, and we’re going to do it
now
. It’s going to take a little work, but it’s nothing you can’t do. I’m not going to ask you to starve yourself
ever again.
That’s likely what got you into this mess in the first place. So let’s draw a line in the sand. No more business-as-usual.
If food has been your enemy in the past, that’s all over. Now, we’re stepping into your future, where food is your medicine. Even if you’re 10 to 20 pounds overweight, you need this medicine. You need to learn how to
Unwind
stress,
Unlock
fat, and
Unleash
your metabolism.

You wouldn’t try to repair a TV or a car without understanding how either is made or functions, and the same should hold true for the amazing biological masterpiece that is you. So first up, let’s discuss what metabolism is and does. Then we’ll look at some common misconceptions about food and weight loss that may have held you back in the past.

This book is all about repairing the metabolism—but what
is
the metabolism, exactly? Metabolism is a
process,
not an object. Specifically, the metabolic process consists of chemical reactions that occur in the cells of all living organisms to sustain life. It’s the change or transformation of food into either heat and fuel or substance (muscle, fat, blood, bone). At any given moment, your metabolism is either burning, storing, or building.

You have a metabolism because you are alive, and life requires energy. We all need energy to survive—to breathe, move, think, and react—and the only way to acquire this energy is from the consumption and metabolism, or transformation, of food. Profound! We need fuel, and we need substance. A healthy metabolism and a functional metabolism allow us to have just the perfect amount of energy available, an appropriate amount of reserve energy stored and ready for use, and a strong and stable structure (the body).

Before we jump into the nuts and bolts of the Fast Metabolism Diet, let’s consider why your metabolism may have slowed down in the first place, and why weight loss hasn’t come easy for you.

Remember, your metabolism is your body’s system for dealing with the energy you take in through food. The metabolism shuttles that energy
into different directions according to what you
eat and what you do. The beauty of your metabolism is that it can be manipulated, because how you eat and move and live affects how much of your food is stored as fat, how much is used as energy, and how much is devoted to building the structure that is your body.