Turbo Metabolism. Pankaj Vij

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       CHAPTER THREE

       The Nuts and Bolts of Getting Started

       If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

      — TONY ROBBINS

       To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

      — OSCAR WILDE

      If you are still reading this book, the rest of my job is going to be easy. Once the “why” becomes clear, explaining what to do is straightforward.

      One of the best urological surgeons in the country once told me, “I don’t do anything special, I just cut and stitch all day — the magic of healing is in the body itself.”

      In fact, it takes a lot of effort to overwhelm the healing system of the body. Still, we’ve found the perfect recipe for disaster in our modern disease-promoting lifestyle of caloric excess, which originated with toxic substances mislabeled as food and has been coupled with unmanaged stress and a lack of physical activity and sleep.

      When you put the right fuel in your body, health and healing happen almost automatically. You are “designed” to move naturally. You do not need to do anything drastic. My program simply asks you to eat, move, and live in the unique way that you are designed to do. Everything else will take care of itself because the wisdom of healing is within.

      The reason you need to get started right now is that the sooner you follow the right path, the easier it will be to heal. The further you go the wrong way, the greater the effort required to correct course.

      Eating for health — rather than eating for entertainment — should be a conscious commitment.

      Taking responsibility and affirming our control and autonomy, which is what we do when we consciously decide to nurture and nourish ourselves, are as applicable here as in other aspects of our life.

      When we have been addicted to an unhealthy lifestyle, it takes time and effort to break the addiction. In fact, it can take up to forty-five days to take an idea from cognition (understanding) to emotional buy-in and finally to actual behavior change.¹

      The goal is to live in sync with our natural rhythms in an effortless way. This can happen as we move to convert our surroundings and routine so that healthy habits become our default. Think about a child learning to tie his or her shoelaces: The process goes from not knowing how to do it, to learning the steps, to practicing the steps, to finally being able to do it reflexively, without even thinking about it.

      And here is the good news: The rewards — of more energy, vitality, and zest for life — are almost immediate. Although a complete transformation takes months, within a week or two, the taste buds start to adjust and the body starts to respond in such a way that you will not want to regress to previous unhealthy habits. The compliments you will get from friends, family, and coworkers will be a bonus.

      Establishing Test Baselines

      As you begin your journey to turbocharge your metabolism, it is important to track your metabolic numbers from the beginning so that you have a basis for comparison on later tests.

      The first tests to start with are a fasting lipid panel — which includes total cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL (healthy) cholesterol, and LDL (bad) cholesterol — plus fasting blood glucose and HbA1c. The goal is to get total cholesterol around 150 mg/dL, triglycerides as close to 75 mg/dL as possible, HDL above 50 mg/dL, and LDL below 100 mg/dL (see table 3.1). Your fasting blood-glucose goal is to get under 75 mg/dL, and the HbA1c goal is under 5 percent (an ideal HbA1c is 4.8 percent). These tests are available and typically covered by most health-care insurance programs.

Table 3.1. Basic fasting lipid panel test with optimum levels