The Virgin Diet: The US Bestseller. JJ Virgin
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Virgin Diet: The US Bestseller - JJ Virgin страница 9
Название: The Virgin Diet: The US Bestseller
Автор: JJ Virgin
Издательство: HarperCollins
isbn: 9780007479511
isbn:
Fat releases inflammatory chemicals called cytokines.
So all that extra fat you might be carrying around is not benign, like a backpack. It’s more like carrying a bomb in your backpack. It’s why I want you to lose fat quickly and lower inflammation quickly by pulling the 7 high-FI foods from your diet.
Following the Virgin Diet will also help you overcome insulin resistance. As part of the programme, you’ll eat every 4 to 6 hours and stick to moderate portion sizes of clean, lean protein; healthy fats; high-fibre, low-glycaemic carbs; and non-starchy vegetables. (I go into more detail about the programme in Chapter 8.) This is the fastest way I know to get your blood sugar levels balanced and your insulin working efficiently once more.
Inflammation doesn’t only create insulin resistance. It also creates leptin resistance, which makes it even harder for you to lose weight.
Leptin is a hormone that responds to how much you’ve eaten and signals the brain that you’ve had enough (satiety is the technical term). Leptin also helps burn fat by cueing your metabolism to run faster when you have extra fat to burn and slowing down your metabolism when your body needs to hold onto fat. You can see how our ancestors might have needed this hormone to help adjust their metabolisms depending on whether food was plentiful or scarce.
When leptin is working well, you eat until you don’t need any more food and then you stop. When your system is leptin-resistant, you have a lot of leptin circulating in your blood, but your brain can’t ‘hear’ it. You end up with too much leptin in your blood and not enough in your brain. That’s the situation for the vast majority of overweight people. As a result, they experience increased hunger, food cravings and weight gain. Even though they’re overweight, their bodies believe they’re hungry and go into a state of fat storage.
If you want to lose that extra weight, you have to heal the leptin resistance. Healing inflammation will go a long way towards getting your leptin working properly again. And pulling the high-FI foods is key.
If you want to lose that extra weight, you have to heal the leptin resistance.
Meanwhile, if you keep eating high-FI foods, you continue to feed the problem. You might think you are making healthy choices with your nonfat yoghurt, omega-3–rich eggs and low-fat soy milk, but every bite of high-FI food is potentially triggering an immune response that could flood your body with inflammatory chemicals and start the whole cycle over again. So basically, any time you eat a problem food, you’re setting yourself up for weight gain.
Any time you eat a problem food, you’re setting yourself up for weight gain.
All of the top 7 high-FI foods are potential sources of inflammation, which is why it’s so important to pull them from your diet. Once you do so, your inflammation will disappear, your symptoms will disappear – and those extra pounds will disappear, too.
There is another factor that might be making you fat and old before your time: poor digestion. When digestion works well, it is a beautiful thing, but when it’s out of whack, it can be a huge contributor to weight gain.
Bacteria, also known as flora or gut flora, is crucial to good digestion. Believe it or not, we have more than 500 species of different bacteria in our gastrointestinal tract. In fact, we have more bacteria than we have cells. Most of that bacteria is good for us; it helps break down food, absorb nutrients and keep our immune systems primed. Some of that bacteria is bad – the kind that attacks our cells or produces toxins.
The key thing with gut bacteria is making sure that we have the ideal amount of good bacteria that we need. So, focus on promoting the good bacteria that will help support your gut immune system and keep the bad bacteria at bay.
How do you do that? First, protect your good bacteria. You might want to take probiotics, which are supplements that support bacterial growth. If you take antibiotics, which kill a lot of good bacteria while they’re gunning for the bad, upgrade probiotics from ‘good idea’ to ‘absolutely essential’. You always want to follow any antibiotic treatment with a round of probiotics.
You can further support your good bacteria with prebiotics, which is soluble fibre that feeds your gut flora (for example, garlic, onions, asparagus and dandelion greens), and with fermented foods, such as pickled ginger, kimchee and sauerkraut. We also need good gut bacteria to make vitamin K, which is important for immune function.
There is yet another piece to the inflammation–immune system puzzle: eating high-FI foods can contribute to a condition known as leaky gut syndrome.
Leaky gut is pretty much what it sounds like. The cells of your intestinal lining (your gut) are supposed to be pressed up tightly against one another, creating tight junctions. These junctions keep partially digested food securely inside your intestines, where it belongs.
Sometimes, though, your intestinal lining is compromised, allowing particles of partly digested food to leak out into your bloodstream. Other problematic stuff can get out, too, including microbes, waste and toxins.
When these substances enter your bloodstream, your body treats them as foreign invaders and responds accordingly. Your immune system releases a cascade of inflammatory chemicals designed to neutralize the threat, which can also wreak havoc on your intestinal lining. As a result, you have a much harder time absorbing nutrients, which might even cause you to eat more – and gain weight.
Eventually, the poorly digested food combines with IgG antibodies to form large bodies known as immune complexes. These circulate through the bloodstream until they are deposited in various tissues, where СКАЧАТЬ