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
Remember, these numbers are indirect markers of how well you have hit the state of Turbo Metabolism, where your body has all the energy it needs to do everything you ask it to do! As a Turbo Metabolism champion, you will most likely enjoy life to the fullest with all the great experiences, learning opportunities, and adventures that you deserve to have!
Supplementary tests may also be important in achieving Turbo Metabolism, depending on your specific health situation: high-sensitivity CRP (or cardio CRP), liver enzyme (ALT), thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), and vitamin D. See table 3.2 for the ideal ranges for each, and consult with your physician about adding these baseline tests.
Table 3.2. Supplementary baseline tests
Preparing for Your Journey
Here are some tips to help you launch your journey to Turbo Metabolism. These actions prepare you mentally to succeed:
• Make a list of your personal goals by filling out the sheet “Ten Reasons Why I Want to Achieve Turbo Metabolism” in appendix 2.
• Announce your plan to several friends and family members, which will help create personal and social accountability.
• Ask a friend or partner specifically to support and encourage you. Even better: Ask the person to embark on this journey with you.
• Take nude photographs of yourself, front and side pose. Use these for a visual comparison as you make progress toward your goal (but keep them in a secure place and away from social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!).
• If you are diabetic, commit to testing your blood sugar levels after fasting, before meals, and sixty minutes after each meal. This is the only way you can gauge your own unique response to different foods.
• Make a list of nonfood-related activities that bring you pleasure, such as music, movies, comedy, being outdoors, getting a massage, or getting a manicure or pedicure.
Next, here are the first five action steps to take. The first three are described more fully in the rest of this chapter:
1. Take out the trash.
2. Shop for health.
3. Hack your bad habits.
4. Start a daily food log, listing the foods you eat each day.
5. Start an exercise log, listing your physical activities each day (see chapter 6).
Taking Out the Trash
This crucial step requires going through your kitchen pantry, refrigerator, and snack drawers looking for items that feed disease. As you find them, throw them in the garbage bin. Here is a list of items that belong in the trash:
• White sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and sugar substitutes (look for hidden sugars ending in “-ose” in ketchup, flavorings, and even bread)
• All boxed, packaged snacks and convenience foods (anything you’d call “junk food”)
• Candy in solid or liquid form; that is, soda and juice, including diet drinks
• White flour — white bread, pasta, cookies, cake, bagels, muffins, and desserts
• Dairy — milk, creamers, cheese, and butter
• Alcohol — including wine and beer
• White rice and white potatoes
• Processed meats (bacon, sausage, salami, and deli meat), red meat (such as feedlot beef), and pork
• Trans fats and processed industrial oils like soybean oil, palm oil, and canola oil, which is made from GMO rapeseeds
As I’ve said, white sugar, candy, soda, juice, and white flour are on the trash list because these foods spike glucose, which leads to chronic insulin elevation, and chronic insulin elevation is a direct contributor to insulin resistance.
Please keep in mind that not all carbs are the enemy. Neither are all fats. When we start thinking about food quality, the breakdown of protein, carbs, and fats and even the calorie counts become irrelevant. Real food has a profound energy effect on the body that has to be experienced. It cannot be quantified in these oversimplified ways.
Here are some further explanations of this list.
Why Are Sugar Substitutes So Bad?
First, all synthetic sugar substitutes are nutritionally bankrupt. Second, they create cravings for energy-dense foods because the sweet taste perception is associated with the appetite regulators in the brain anticipating new calories.2 The reward centers in our brain are strongly wired to seek out sugar as an energy source. Third, several commonly used sugar substitutes, such as saccharine and acesulfame, have been shown to produce cancer in animal studies.3 Aspartame, a common sugar substitute in diet soda, is metabolized to formaldehyde — a potent brain poison. Fourth, sugar substitutes have a harmful effect on the gut microbiome (healthy bacteria in the colon; see chapter 10). You have about a hundred trillion friendly gut bacteria to feed and “care for”: your inner garden. If you poison them, harmful bacteria can take over and control your food choices, increase cravings for the wrong foods, and increase the energy absorbed from food, thereby having a profound influence on health outcomes. Other than pure stevia leaf (an herbal product used as a sugar substitute for centuries in South America), on which the jury is still out, you should steer away from artificial sweeteners.
Why Is Dairy on the Trash List?
Cow’s milk has the insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), which promotes rapid growth and can cause you to gain weight quickly. IGF-1 has also been associated with cancer-cell growth.4 In addition, cow’s milk is loaded with cow antigens (proteins that activate the immune system, resulting in inflammation), which may not be compatible with the human body. In addition, a main ingredient of cow’s milk is lactose — a sugar that will definitely spike your blood glucose very quickly.
Modern dairy farm cows are typically kept pregnant year-round and milked twice a day. They are given artificial hormones to keep them in this condition and antibiotics to keep them from getting sick from their udders becoming infected.
The argument that drinking more milk provides calcium that will prevent osteoporosis is simply not valid. Osteoporosis is not a milk-deficiency