The Total Fat Cure: Solving the Fat Trap

(1225–1274)

FOREWORD

If you Google weight loss books, you have in excess of 208,000,000 results. This indicates the amount of literature published. Most books these days either rehash the same storyline from a flavor-of-the-month celebrity, or otherwise advocate a new approach that may work in the short term but ultimately may put the body into a degenerative state, e.g. protein-based diets that promote body acidity and lead to all sorts of problems.

So I first heard about osteopath/homeopath Mr. Laurens Maas about five years ago from a set of husband-and-wife patients who have since become good friends. The husband was suffering from Parkinson’s and had been to Laurens for advice, guidance, and successful treatment. He has recovered substantially and leads a good life now. What particularly struck me was that here was a highly qualified complementary practitioner conducting wide-ranging established, analytical medical tests before using his broad knowledge to advise and treat his patients.

It is indeed rare these days to find practitioners using conventional medical tests, hormone levels, etc., as a basis for their approach/treatment. All too often well-meaning complementary practitioners (from many fields) recommend vitamins, minerals, and based on nothing but their own judgment. This is not the case with Mr. Laurens Maas, with his extensive training in functional medicine.

In this book, as a true holistic physician, Laurens Maas continues his scientific approach, focusing on weight loss, starting with conventional medical tests and then applying his very broad thinking and knowledge to providing the solution. He has found a combination of general lifestyle changes, low-dose bioidentical hormone therapy, recognized supplements, and two not-so-well-known herbs that form an effective weight-loss program. The theory behind this is easily and clearly explained step-by-step so that the reader can understand and go on to apply and use this knowledge.

It’s not just about taking supplements, though. Just as important are the reduction of stress and the fitness of the mind and body. Here Laurens Maas once again has several chapters explaining different approaches and methods to gently ease you into a whole new experience.

In summary, this is not just about a new exercise or diet program but is a fully scientific and comprehensive fat-loss book covering the many different aspects that need to be addressed to achieve permanent weight loss healthily.

The successful reader will not only achieve weight loss but will undoubtedly have a whole new approach to and appreciation of life.

—Dr. Robert Hempleman, BDS (London), LDSRCS (UK) Holistic Dental Practitioner

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my wife, Cathie, and my three children, Phoenix, Phoebe, and Cosmo; I am blessed to be with you all.

Many thanks to Dr. Dicken Weatherby, ND; Dr. Dan Kalish, DC; Dr. Patrick Hanaway, MD, head of Genova Labs; Dr. Bruce Shelton, MD, DiHom; Dr. Joseph Mercola, DO; Steve Denk at BioMedX Chicago; Dr. Richard Bandler and John La Valle for the knowledge and guidance they shared with me and imparted so willingly to make humanity healthier on many levels. I have found all of them to be a constant source of inspiration. They have all influenced my medical philosophy positively. Thank you to Genova Labs USA for allowing me to use some of their hormone graphs.

Also a thank you to Dr. Robert Hempleman for writing the foreword to the book. We think clearly along the same lines, as he was witness to a close friend and patient’s recovery using the same methods outlined in this book and my others. Biological dentistry holds hands with Functional Diagnostic Medicine in the key principles.

Thank you also to a multitude of my diabetic, overweight, and obese patients who helped me uncover, through careful observation and testing, how to really get humans to lose weight. Thank you for trusting me with my requests for good hormone testing, stool analysis, and patient application of the natural hormones to get the body that became slimmer and slimmer each week, each month, and each year. Thank you for allowing me to monitor your progress and for sharing your experiences with me. Without you I would not be the physician I am today.

I also have enormous gratitude to a dear patient and friend. I would like to thank Sarah-Jayne Vieira for all her professionalism, as she provided enormous support in the final push to get the book complete with updated images and final edits. A very grateful thank you.

—Laurens, 2014

INTRODUCTION

The Fat Trap—Stress, How It Makes Humans Hungry, Tired, and Fat

Most people never think that their stress levels could be making them hungry, tired, fat, and overweight. It’s a relatively new theory about stress, weight gain, and obesity¹ in mammals, and yet time after time, over twenty years in practice, when I see my human patients correct their stress levels, balance their hormones, start to sleep well (eight hours), eat a good diet, and have regular moderate exercise, they all lose weight and create a self-healing response within the body.

Modern fast, processed food is stressful, devoid of essential vitamins and antioxidants, and is a form of undernutrition² that causes metabolic pressure on many hormone systems through deficiency, which in turn compensate by making us store more fat in the future. Certain processed Frankenfoods are programmed to make us hungry and fat (to make more sales). The processed-food industry creates meals that make you hungrier³. Hunger creates stress, sleep issues, and further hunger, and thus more sales eventually. Fast-food manufacturers and processed-food corporations want to make millions of sales, so what better than to make a food that is addictive and makes the consumer want more because the actual food creates hunger. Crazy weight gain is the result. It’s a program within the food.

The difficulty for all overweight and obese people, and what they don’t realize, yet feel regularly, is that their own brains send excessive hunger signals to their stomachs, making them want to eat a lot of the time. This is the Fat Trap. Cheap carbs are stressful, and they give people a sugar high that makes them hungry and causes them to eat more of the same addictive, stress-inducing foods.

During stress and anxiety, there are eight hormones within our bodies that can go out of balance. The more stressed a person is, the greater the amount of damage to the hormone systems of the body that regulate body fat, which I have seen in clinical practice and is backed by a lot of references. Unfortunately a lot of MDs don’t get taught Functional Medicine, and as such they usually see weight gain as a result of too many carbs and not enough exercise. It’s a very old-fashioned view.

The secret to satisfying weight loss, which I see in my overweight patients, is to figure how many of the actual eight hormones are out of balance and to return them back to optimal levels using the techniques and lifestyle suggestions outlined in this book. Once that happens, the metabolism switches back on, the weight comes off, and health returns to your body and mind, as it’s a twofold journey.

The two slimming hormones that would normally be able to stop the massive hunger response (leptin and adiponectin) have been damaged through chronic stress and inflammation⁴. For example, even if the stress was as simple as eating processed/fast food regularly, that cheap, nasty food is actually stressful because it is genetically modified object GMO, likely to contain synthetic hormone–laced products, and has inadequate minerals. Or the stress event could have been a really bad physically damaging injury from the past—being shot, car accident, nasty divorce, or even mental stress from studying for a PhD! Overwhelming stress hurts our hormones and our metabolism.

Most people these days, when they think of weight loss and burning fat, they automatically think dieting, extreme exercise and food deprivation, and the amount or lack of willpower to achieve their desired goals. Food deprivation and intense exercise, by the way, is stressful, so that approach is doomed to cause more weight gain if the person is already burnt-out. We need to eat to create energy, and that comes from choosing good quality foods, minerals and balanced hormones.

However, I am here to tell you in this introduction that people who are naturally slim and muscular, who have abundant energy and are happy, don’t really ever think about dieting and extreme exercise. They just have a good lifestyle and great hormone levels that keep them in a state of balance. They can build fat and break it down just as fast. Their systems of appetite control—that is, the communication between their brains and their adrenal and thyroid glands and between the quantity of fat reserves and their stomach—remain balanced even if they eat fat, sugar, and carbs. So what throws off the balance of fat-burning and fat-building hormones?

In simple words, it is stress and strain of modern life. Really simple, but in actuality the pressure affects many hormones negatively and the stress can come from many levels, and it results in an insatiable hunger, a gnawing inside. That hunger reflex is what causes the programmed self-sabotage while on a low-carb diet. Almost every weight-loss diet is doomed to fail through self-sabotage. It’s the hunger signal, created by a warped brain influenced by Frankenfoods, emotional stress, or even parasite and allergy stressors.

The Fat Trap Triangle—Stress, Hunger, and Fat.

Stress Exists on Many Levels

Stress is such a general term, and most of the time it’s not actually understood or treated properly. Most people suffer from emotional stress (e.g., anger, frustration, despair, watching horror movies), dietary stress (e.g., food allergies, food poisoning, mercury in fish/ dental fillings), and pain and hidden sources of inflammation (e.g., radiation, parasites, and pharmaceuticals).

Stressful lifestyles can create abnormal hunger signals, and these could come from skipping or delaying meals too often, chronic parasites, heavy metals and radiation, and cheap processed foods. Divorce can be stressful and makes those involved fatter because of the intense emotional stress. High-ranking politicians slowly become fatter over their careers. Physical trauma to the body can also cause weight gain weeks or months later. Being mauled by an animal is stressfull, and therefore being mauled internally by a silent parasite infection is even more stressful because one can’t run away from the parasite if it’s inside you. Parasites can cause weight gain.

All these different types of stress can trigger your body to go into fat-storage mode, mainly through the mechanism of the eight key hormones. There is a connection between emotional glands in our brain (hypothalamus and pituitary) and our adrenal stress and thyroid glands. This connection is called the HPAT axis—the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal-Thyroid axis—a neuroendocrine connection that marries the emotions of the brain with the adrenal and thyroid glands and wake/sleep cycles.

When stressed, cortisol—a hormone that’s needed to deal with any stress—causes the blood sugar to rise, which in turn creates inflammation that then blocks our ability to burn fat⁵ via a distorted HPAT axis⁶. When a person is stressed, the body thinks it is going to run out of food. This is an ancestral response, because the first stressors programmed into us in early human life were from emotional separation, starvation and physical pain and injury.

Fat is the body’s security blanket against starvation stress, but when people experience negative emotions,⁷ trauma, parasites, and allergies, they will gain weight eventually because cortisol creates sugar swings. The delicate connection between the brain and the glands of the body somehow short-circuits, a progressive stress burnout that stimulates fat cells to increase in size, fueling the process with further daily hunger signals.

The world is full of sorrow and pain; the sad reality is that stress affects us on several levels in a modern society. These levels include psychological and emotional issues as well as dietary stress and pain/hidden inflammation stress⁸.

The importance for you as the reader is to understand that the HPAT axis gets damaged through emotional, dietary, and pain stress and trauma. The good news is that this delicate connection can be repaired through a good, wholesome low-stress lifestyle that rebuilds the adrenals and their connectivity to the HPAT axis; regular sleep, regular balanced meals, and good emotions all play their part in repairing this connection.

Doctors often prescribe sleeping pills, cholesterol drugs, tranquilizers, painkillers, heart medications, and headache tablets, but