Healthy Eating: body’s five major liver- adrenals- thyroid - pituitary- body substance
I want you to understand what your body is doing so together we can fix what’s not working for you—and for it. Stay with me all the way, be an active participant in this process, and when you’re done with this chapter and this book, you’re going to understand your body a lot better. You’ll also have all the tools you need to create the healthy, sleek, optimally functioning body that nature intended for you.
YOUR LIVER
Your liver is vital and essential to keeping you and all your bodily systems up and running. Over 600 known metabolic functions happen via the liver, and virtually every nutrient, every hormone, every chemical must be bio-transformed, or made active, by the liver. It’s your workhorse, and without it, you’d buy the farm.
Your liver creates bile, a nasty-sounding but powerful solution that breaks down fats (and the nitrites and nitrates in your deli meats and bacon). Hormones get secreted from glands all over your body, but it is your liver that breaks down the hormones and makes them biologically active so they can go to work for you. It flips the light switch once you’ve put in the bulb.
Your liver influences your electrolyte balance, swelling and inflammation, dehydration, bloating, and water weight. It also acts like a filter for the blood that travels through the digestive tract. It converts B vitamins into coenzymes, and metabolizes nutrients such as proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.
Your liver also manufactures carnitine, which takes fat and escorts it to the mitochondria—your body’s little power centers or fat converters. The amount of carnitine in your system dictates how much fat can be delivered and incinerated. This simple relationship between the liver and the mitochondria can influence up to 90 percent of your fat burn, dictating your metabolic rate. The faster and more efficiently you produce carnitine in your liver, the faster and more efficient your metabolism is:
The food you eat must feed your liver rather than tax it. If you don’t feed your liver appropriately and frequently to stimulate it to its most efficient functioning, everything else will get disrupted. Because the liver is so closely linked with metabolism, it is one of the most crucial organs we’ll be nurturing with the Fast Metabolism Diet.
YOUR ADRENALS
Your adrenals are small glands that lie on top of your kidneys in your lower back, and they secrete hormones that regulate your body’s response to stress of all types: physical, emotional, environmental, and mental. Your adrenals are responsible for the hormones that allow your body to adapt either functionally or dysfunctionally to changing situations. These hormones determine how you access fuel in your body and what you do with the fuel or food you consume. Do you store it as fat? Or do you burn it as energy?
Let’s say you have to pull an all-nighter, getting changes on your book back to an editor. Do you continue to feed yourself every three hours, fueling your body, your hormones, and your brain, or do you stop eating at 6 P.M.? That’s what you would normally do, even
though you aren’t sleeping. Answer: When you are awake and working, you have to keep eating. Otherwise, you leave your body without fuel, and then it thinks you are starving and before you know it, your metabolism is slowing down
Some of the metabolism-specific hormones the adrenals release include cortisol, adrenaline, aldosterone, and epinephrine. These are released in response to stress and/or pleasure. The stressors could be as major as a car accident or as minor as missing a meal. The adrenals respond to the acute stress of a disaster just as they respond to the chronic stress of a bad relationship, an unpleasant work environment, or a taxing family situation.
The secretion of these stress hormones regulates the release of glucose or sugar from the muscle and liver cells, to either stimulate or slow down your body’s metabolic rate. That means this process is nutrient-dependent, or dependent on the food you do or don’t eat. When you experience stress, the surge of hormones you experience will be influenced by what you’ve just been eating. If you nourish your body during times of stress with the right foods, you will not store fat as much as you burn it.
To put it more simply, stress pulls nutrients from the body from places where you can’t afford to lose them (like muscle). If you are eating a healthy, nutrient-rich diet, your body won’t have to resort to this. You’ll be able to handle the stress. If, however, you aren’t eating enough, or enough of the right food, your metabolism will slow down, due to a complex chain of chemical reactions. If you are eating the right food at the right time, you will feed your adrenals so they can survive the stress without resorting to a slowed metabolism.
Adrenal exhaustion can occur when a body has been under significant stress for a long period of time. This occurs because the body has been chronically secreting stress hormones that are meant to be preserved for quick crisis situations. You know that surging feeling you get when you are startled or scared? That’s a hormone surge. I like to think of those fight-and-flight hormones as sacred. They should be saved for a true emergency, but many of us live and survive on the energy from these hormones, day in and day out. That is not the way our bodies are meant to work! When stress hormones constantly surge, the body is constantly in a state of crisis. One of the things that occurs in this situation is that the hormones slow the burning of fuel because the body sees no end to the exhausting demand. Adrenal exhaustion is a problem I’m seeing more and more often in my clinic. Exacerbating this situation is decreasing food quality and increasing environmental chemicals. That’s why it’s so important to feed yourself clean (i.e., organic whole) food as much as you can. Your adrenals will thank you
Preserve your adrenals! Soothe them with this diet and stress management.
YOUR THYROID
The thyroid is a metabolic superstar! It is a butterfly-shaped gland located at the center of the throat, and although I know I’m mixing my metaphors here, I think of it as your body’s furnace. The pituitary gland in the brain (which will be discussed more thoroughly in the next section) is like the thermostat, and the hypothalamus in the brain is like the guy controlling the thermostat. But the thyroid is the furnace and the hormones it produces, like T3 and T4, are the heat. When it gets too hot, its thermostat has to be turned down, and when too cold, its thermostat gets cranked up. If any of these three mechanisms isn’t working just right, then the body’s temperature—a direct reflection of metabolism, or the rate at which the body is burning energy—will be off. The house will be too hot or too cold
The thyroid performs many metabolic tasks via many functions in the body, including the extraction of iodine from food to produce the thyroid hormones T3 and T4. The T3 and T4 travel through the bloodstream and influence the metabolism through the conversion of oxygen and calories to energy. This is huge! This is what you want—an efficient furnace fueled by food and heating your house so it’s toasty and comfortable. T3, in particular, is the superhero of a fast metabolism. T3 possesses approximately four times the metabolic hormone strength of T4
But the thyroid has a dark side—a hormone called Reverse T3 (RT3). I introduced you to RT3 in the last chapter, but I want to bring it up again because it’s so important in the process of metabolism repair. RT3 is sort of like that dysfunctional family member who shows up at Thanksgiving but doesn’t behave and inevitably ruins everybody’s dinner. It’s a misshaped thyroid hormone that isn’t very efficient in stimulating the metabolism, and in fact, it blocks healthy T3 functioning. RT3 doesn’t mean to mess things up for you and your plans for those skinny jeans. It’s actually a smart response to prevent starvation. The problem is, when you diet, you know you aren’t really starving (even though on some diets it might seem that way), but your body doesn’t have the 411.
In situations when you are experiencing chronic stress, certain disease processes, or nutritional deprivation, RT3 heeds your body’s “Red Alert!” This signals the RT3 to bind to the T3 receptor sites and run interference so T3 can’t do its job. RT3 throws a big bucket of water on your metabolic fire, in a panicked effort to save your fat stores so you don’t die from what surely must be a catastrophic event or famine. The result is that your body quits burning and starts storing. Sometimes there are serious problems with the body’s thermostat, such as Hashimoto’s disease, Graves’ disease, or a body that is producing thyroid peroxidase (attacking its own thyroid). These thyroid-based diseases are often undiagnosed and can play a very large role in an extremely slow metabolism.
The Fast Metabolism Diet is designed to nurture and coax the right hormone production from your thyroid. But because things can go wrong with the thyroid, I strongly believe it is important to look at the blood chemistry of the thyroid to be sure it’s functioning properly. A lot of women’s health books talk about the thyroid because hypothyroidism is an often undiagnosed condition that can cause a slow metabolism, weight gain, hair loss, brittle nails, constipation, headaches, and fatigue. I always recommend my clients get thyroid tested (I’ll talk about which tests at the end of this chapter).
YOUR PITUITARY
I briefly mentioned the pituitary in the previous section, but let’s give it some love. I think of the pituitary gland as the body’s thermostat. It secretes hormones that regulate or adjust the actions of many other hormones in your body.
For example, the pituitary stimulates the thyroid to secrete its hormones with thyroid-stimulating hormone, or TSH. If the TSH level is high, that means the thyroid is requiring a lot of motivation or pushing to get its job done (hypothyroid). Imagine the pituitary yelling at the thyroid: Get going, you slacker! Move it or lose it!
If the TSH is normal, all the pituitary has to do is speak in a normal voice: Keep up the good work. If the TSH is very low, then the thyroid gland may be overactive (hyperthyroid), and the pituitary may only whisper. Of course, as I’ve explained earlier, if the thyroid is producing a lot of fat-storing RT3, the pituitary may perceive this as plenty of thyroid hormone, and may only whisper when it should be yelling. For this reason, a normal thyroid test isn’t necessarily indicative of optimal thyroid function, as it won’t separate out the RT3 from the furnace-stoking T3.
The pituitary also regulates sex hormone production, such as estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and DHEA. The regulation of each of these, as well as the adrenal hormones, is crucial to the health of the body and speed of the metabolism. So the pituitary is not only the furnace’s thermostat but also the control center for the huge ecosystem called your hormones
YOUR BODY SUBSTANCE
The final key player that directly influences the metabolism is your body substance—how I refer to the fat, bone, connective tissue, and muscle in your body. The body stores the majority of your reserve fuel in either muscle or fat. Because muscle is constantly contracting, relaxing, beating, pushing, and pulling, it takes a lot of fuel to create and maintain it. This is why they say muscle consumes more calories, or energy, than fat. Fat just sits there. Have you ever seen it do anything besides flop over your waistband or jiggle around on your thighs? Fat really doesn’t do much but hold on to fuel, and therefore it takes very little fuel or calories to maintain it. (And remember, if you don’t eat or provide outside fuel, the body will actually break down muscle and store some of that fuel as even more fat)!
There are two basic types of fat in the body: white fat and brown fat. For decades scientists believed that brown fat was only present and important in infants and small children, to help keep them warm and maintain their body temperatures. It is now believed that even though it exists in very small amounts in adults, brown fat plays a crucial role in the regulation of blood sugars and the metabolism.