Total Health Breakthroughs: Alternative Solutions for Mind, Body, and Spirit

Did it ever occur to you that the reason you can’t lose weight may be due to the fact that you are eating foods that you’re allergic to? This is a revelation to many people who have struggled unsuccessfully for years to get rid of unwanted pounds.

The prevalence of food allergies is on the rise in both children and adults.^1-2 Allergies can be responsible for a number of health issues including irritable bowel type symptoms³ and migraines.⁴ Very few people are aware however, that immune responses to foods can go on to create a number of metabolic disruptions that can contribute to weight gain.

At LMI where we counsel people to lose weight using our Metabolic Code Diet (MCD) eating program, we see this all the time. We had one patient in our diet group who had tried a very low carb diet in the past, and lost no weight. The reason? She was sensitive to dairy and didn’t know it. On her previous diet, she was eating a lot of cheese. On the MCD, which is a lower carb, low allergen eating plan, she cut out the cow’s milk cheeses and dairy products, ate according to our meal recommendations, and the weight started coming off.

Would you buy a product that had a 95% failure rate?

Not one of us would buy a car or a computer that was known to fail 95% of the time. So why then do so many of us pay enormous amounts of money and give hours of our time to diets with a 95% failure rate??

Part 1 of a 2 Part Series

In a world where the numbers of overweight and obese people only continue to climb, many people are desperate for any help they can get with weight loss. Sure, most people can lose weight following a low carb, or conversely, a low calorie, low fat diet — for a little while anyway. But long-term compliance continues to elude many people. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could eat all the carbs or all the fat you wanted and not gain weight?

If you are having difficulty losing weight even after dieting and exercising more, you are not alone. Over the years, I have helped probably thousands of people with the same problem, but I am finding this scenario to be much more common now than in the past. What I want you to know is that when you’ve tried everything and weight loss or lowering of blood sugar or lipids seems impossible, it could be that environmental toxins are disrupting your body.

Some pesticides, for instance, have been linked with suboptimal thyroid function and others to insulin resistance (IR). Certain pesticides that haven’t even been used for years, like DDT, are still a problem because they are so persistent in the environment, and from there can get into our bodies.

Researchers call these substances persistent organic pollutants (POPs). The insecticide, dieldrin, is an example. This organochlorine pesticide was used on cotton and corn from the 1950s until 1970. And although its use was banned on crops in 1974, it was still used for termite control until it was finally banned by the EPA completely in 1987. Because it is tightly bound to soil and it evaporates very slowly, dieldrin persists in the environment even though it’s no longer used.¹

So how does dieldrin affect us today? Plants absorb it from the soil, and water runoff carries the soil with the chemical into water supplies. When we eat plants grown in soil still contaminated with dieldrin, it enters our bodies. We can also get it from the flesh of animals eating contaminated plants or fish living in contaminated waters.¹

After being consumed, dieldrin is then stored in our body fat. And here’s the problem: dieldrin may be linked to disruption in the thyroid hormones, T4 and TSH. One study found that women with significantly high dieldrin in their blood had decreased T4 levels and increased TSH.

In past articles, I have written about high-intensity interval training and its benefits in prolonging the after-burn effect. This is the ability of the body to increase metabolic disturbances hours after your workout sessions. But in this article, I want to take a step back and make exercise recommendations for people that are overweight and can’t handle the stress and anaerobic activity volume that comes with high-intensity metabolic training programs.

Are vegetarian diets the best way to lower all disease risks and maintain a low body weight?

I want to have an in-your-face, heart-to-heart, conversation with you. If I can get my point across then you will make some significant progress on your journey to complete weight loss. If I fail at this then you might just stay fat for the rest of your life.

Here are some hard facts about people who are consistently overweight. Are they true about 100% of overweight people? Of course not. Are they true about you? Probably.

If you decide that you are an exception to my rule you will be just like most people who are overweight and have a hard time losing it. They imagine that the rules do not apply to them. So they get to stay fat. You get to decide for yourself. Are you one of us (consistently weight-challenged persons) or not? Take a chance and join in. You only have fat to lose.

Here are some tough facts about many overweight persons.

Look, let’s get real. Some foods make it really difficult to lose weight. They create their own self-sustaining cravings (”Betcha can’t eat just one!”) and play havoc with your blood sugar and, ultimately, your waistline.

But some foods do just the opposite.

Paris Hilton is an extremely important figure in American culture; her significance is related to soulfulness and soul is connected to weight loss

Anyone who’s ever lost weight knows that the biggest challenge is often keeping it off once you’ve lost it! Much research has been devoted to identifying the habits of successful people in the weight loss game. A new study from the Centers for Disease Control adds to this literature. It turns out that following a few very simple rules vastly increases your chance of keeping weight off once you’ve lost it.