Copyright 2006 Mark Hyman MD
What’s the greatest threat facing our civilization? (No, it’s
not the Islamic jihad.) It’s obesity. Due to its attendant
health and economic costs, scientists predict that obesity alone
will topple economic and social structures, induce a wide range
of dire diseases, and drastically cut short Americans’ life
spans.
These are more than another set of statistics — they predict
things that can and will affect you, your family, your health,
and your pocketbook. If you are among the two thirds of adult
Americans struggling to escape escalating weight gain, (or even
if you’re teetering on the edge with ten persistent pounds you
can’t seem to lose), as a physician, I recommend that you take
action to lose weight and protect your future health.
And I have good news for you. I’ve developed a simple plan to
help you lose weight automatically based on a new scientific
breakthrough.
Despite the abysmal failure of conventional medical approaches,
this plan is different because it’s based on recent,
groundbreaking scientific research, research that I predict will
totally revolutionize weight loss and change the landscape of
medicine as we know it.
Many of the answers to our weight and health problems are buried
in thousands of research papers. With the aid of a number of
very brilliant thinkers and scientists, I’ve gathered and
synthesized the greatest advances in medical science over the
last 20 years — advances that usually take decades to get
incorporated into medical practice. Translated into a simple
program that has brought easy, sustainable weight loss to
thousands of people, you can access them today.
In the recent past, many pundits theorized that society-wide
weight gain was due to our genes. In a sense, they were right,
but genes only tell half the story. We share the same genes as
our hunter- gatherer forebears who foraged in the woods and
hunted wild game 20,000 years ago. What’s changed is the
environment within which our genes operate.
Up until modern times, man’s natural environment supplied the
foods we were genetically programmed to eat. But with the advent
of industrialized agriculture and food production, we began
eating mass-produced and processed foods that genetically
program us to add pounds.
Here’s how:
Food is information — not just calories — and food information
speaks to our genes, turning some genes ON and other genes OFF.
That’s why it’s genes, not calories, that count.
Until recently, scientists believed that the critical mechanism
for weight loss was caloric intake and expenditure — you eat
little and exercise hard to lose each pound. But that’s hard to
do and harder to maintain, recent scientific studies reveal (and
no doubt not surprising to anyone who has tried repeatedly and
unsuccessfully to lose weight).
Using the caloric mechanism for weight loss is a bit like
manually cranking a lever to open your garage door inch-by-inch
and then having to hold the door open. Wouldn’t you rather push
the button that activates the circuitry to open your garage door
automatically?
To do that for weight loss, you have to access the master
biological mechanisms controlling weight loss and weight gain.
Using those mechanisms opens the door to automatic weight loss.
The recent scientific discoveries I’ve assembled decode the
instruction manual of our basic biology. At last, we can control
the master mechanisms: our genes themselves.
The new genetic science (called Functional Medicine) teaches
that our genes interact intimately with our environment. Every
bite of food we eat, every thought we think, every stress we
experience, or toxin we inhale carries a specific message to our
genes, turning them on (or off), and telling them how to behave.
As a result, our genes are programmed moment-by-moment to
actively create either weight loss or weight gain. Scientists
have tracked exactly how all the different foods trigger the
messages sent to your genes. With that knowledge, you can give
your body the foods that work in your favor — and avoid ones
that don’t.
For instance, for decades, people were warned to avoid fats at
all costs, but now we know that the type of fat you eat is more
important than the amount of fat you eat. The new science traces
the biological impact of good fats, like the omega-3 fatty acids
(contained in fish, fish oils, certain nuts and many other
foods) and bad fats like the trans-fats contained in many
processed foods.
What researchers found is that good fats turn on your body’s fat
burning genes and bad fats turn off the fat burning genes. When
you consume EPA or DHA, both omega-3 fatty acids, they access a
metabolic gateway called the PPAR receptor, to activate genes
that increase your metabolism, help you burn fat, and assist you
in processing bodily glucose more effectively so that foods
won’t get stored as fat.
It’s as if the EPA and DHA opens up an extra lane on your
hormonal superhighway, making for a smooth and easy route
towards slimness and health. That’s why, for automatic weight
loss, I recommend adding EPA and DHA (both found in fish oil) to
your diet, beginning today. On the other hand, unhealthy
transfats (such as found in many processed and fast foods) act
as a metabolic roadblock to weight loss, and if you eat them,
you may find yourself crawling along at a snail’s pace, going
nowhere.
These are just two of the hundreds of ways that you’ll learn to
awaken the fat-burning code hidden in your DNA. In my new book,
UltraMetabolism, due out in March, 2006, you’ll discover a wide
range of foods that tell your genes to shed pounds, while
learning to avoid the many other foods that tell your genes to
pack on the pounds. Eating the foods right for your genes allows
you to literally program your body to lose weight automatically,
even as you sleep!
And that is the key: be simply learning to eat the foods that
ignite your body’s fat burning engines, and avoiding the foods
that snuff out these engines, you finally begin the process of
working WITH your body, instead of against it — something that
all fad diets fail to do, which is why they all fail in the
long-run.
But, because UltraMetabolism teaches a simple plan to harness
your body’s own powerful fat burning forces — ones that have
evolved over millions of years — you are actually programming
your body to lose weight, automatically.
Why struggle and suffer with ineffective diets when you can
actually teach your body to be slim and healthy? With the simple
two-step plan I’ve developed, you can program your body to lose
weight automatically. In the first step, you eliminate all of
the bad foods that slow your metabolism, make you feel lethargic
and lead to disease; in the second step, you add the good foods
that crank up your metabolism, boost your energy and revitalize
your health.
Twenty-first century weight loss is easier than you’ve ever
dreamed. And it’s something that I am confident about since I’ve
treated over 2,000 patients, many of whom have experienced the
very same automatic weight loss that I’ve described here.
My message to you is simple: If you want to fit into your jeans,
you have to learn to fit into your genes!