The Adrenal Reset Diet by Alan Christianson, NMD - Excerpt
The Adrenal Reset Diet by Alan Christianson, NMD - Excerpt
The Adrenal Reset Diet by Alan Christianson, NMD - Excerpt
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PRAISE FOR
THE ADRENAL RESET DIET
“Adrenal burnout isn’t your fault in our fast-faster society, yet its
ramifications can stall fat loss and create weight loss resistance. In The
Adrenal Reset Diet, Dr. Alan Christianson provides practical, easy-to-
implement strategies to reset your adrenals, lose fat fast, and restore
optimal health.”
—JJ Virgin, New York Times bestselling author
of The Virgin Diet, JJVirgin.com
“Dr. Alan Christianson finally proves that weight gain is not your fault.
The key to getting lean is to reset your inner clock, not to struggle and
starve. His diet gives you the definitive formula to lose weight and
thrive.”
—Sara Gottfried, MD, New York Times bestselling author
of The Hormone Cure, SaraGottfriedMD.com
“In The Adrenal Reset Diet, Dr. Alan Christianson sheds new light on
weight loss by teaching you how you can use carbohydrate and protein
cycling along with resistant starch to balance your hormone levels and
decrease your blood sugar and insulin levels. A m
ust-read for anyone who
lives in our modern s tressed-out world.”
—Jayson and Mira Calton, authors of Naked Calories
and Rich Food, Poor Food, CaltonNutrition.com
“The adrenal glands are central to so much of what’s going on with our
health today. The great news is that we can fix dysfunction of our adrenal
glands with diet. The revolutionary part of Dr. Christianson’s new book
is using a diet to repair the adrenals to help with weight loss. He has
proven his method with a scientific study of his patients, which makes
his new diet that much more likely to work for you!”
—Jennifer Landa, MD, author of The Sex Drive Solution for Women, creator
of the Three Weeks to Endless Energy program, DrJenniferLanda.com
“Everyone is doing too much and ultimately they pay the physical price.
Dr. Alan Christianson has formulated an e asy-to-follow dietary solution
to help reset the overworked adrenals and create lasting fat loss. Thumbs
up! for this great approach!”
—Marcelle Pick, OB/GYN, NP, owner of Women to Women, author of
The Core Balance Diet and Is It Me or My Adrenals?, MarcellePick.com
“If you’ve ever unsuccessfully tried to lose weight, or you’ve tried diets that
haven’t worked, or you’ve been confused by experts offering conflicting
advice, or you simply don’t think any new weight loss solution will work
for you . . . then you must read this book. In The Adrenal Reset Diet, Dr.
Alan Christianson explains how our adrenal glands control a switch
that causes us to burn fat and feel energized . . . or . . . store fat and feel
tired. The secret to weight loss is in our adrenal glands. After decades of
research and over 75,000 patient-care visits, Dr. Alan shows you that no
matter how long you’ve struggled with your weight, and no matter how
“The Adrenal Reset Diet eloquently shows us that being overweight is not
simply a matter of eating less and moving more. Nor is it due to zero
willpower! As a nutritionist who works with anxious women, many of
whom are stress eaters with burned-out adrenals, I know this book will
be a valuable resource for me and my clients.”
—Trudy Scott, CN, author of The Antianxiety Food
Solution, AntianxietyFoodSolution.com
“If you feel tired all the time, can’t seem to lose those extra pounds around
the waist, have trouble sleeping, and are overwhelmed with stress, Dr.
Alan Christianson’s new book, The Adrenal Reset Diet, will explain in
detail the root cause of your symptoms AND provide very simple but
profound strategies to restore your energy and vitality! This is a must-
read on how to thrive in the modern world!”
—Dr. Susanne Bennett, author of The 7-Day Allergy Makeover,
host of The Wellness for Life radio show, and creator of the
Heal Your Gut, Heal Your Life program, DrSusanne.com
“In The Adrenal Reset Diet, Dr. Alan Christianson clarifies the true
cause of the obesity epidemic and provides a brilliant plan to shift from
stressed and overweight to trim and thriving. If you are stressed and
can’t lose weight, you must read this book.”
—Steven Masley, MD, FAHA, FACN, FAAFP, CNS,
bestselling author of The 30-Day Heart Tune-Up, HeartTuneUp.com
the
adrenal
reset
diet
ALAN CHRISTIANSON, NMD
photo shoot. By the time I hit the kitchen with my mouth water-
ing, he had a two-hour hike planned for us, and had packed filtered
water, trekking poles, and a nutrient-dense lunch. I eyed him a lit-
tle skeptically as he described the various hiking options: we could
hike for four hours and go straight to the airport afterward, or take
a more leisurely two-hour hike and have time for lunch. I chose the
latter. Alan took me on a favorite hike in the McDowell Mountains.
I mention the visit because it demonstrates Dr. C’s searing wis-
dom and how he walks the talk. Alan puts it all together in a way
that’s incredibly valuable for people who seek to lose weight and feel
better fast.
Kindly allow me to unpack the various pieces of the puzzle that
he believes contribute to our adrenal health—and natural weight
maintenance:
Sara Gottfried, MD
Berkeley, California
For years, you have been trying to improve your health. Despite
your best efforts, your body does not cooperate. You have tried so
many diet and exercise regimens, yet none has helped. Experts
offer advice, but it is often contradictory. Some say you need to eat
less sugar. Others say that the problem is you spend too much time
indoors being sedentary. Many blame the illness on an indulgent
personality.
By the way, the year is 1879 and you are suffering from tuberculosis.
As if the physical suffering from this illness were not enough,
you have also suffered from guilt, thinking it was your fault. You
were told you would get better if only you tried harder and stopped
being lazy. You were told to think “better” thoughts, avoid certain
foods, and do specific exercises. When you did not recover, instead
of doubting the advice being handed out by the medical community,
you found it easier to believe that you hadn’t tried hard enough.
hungrier. Sugar and bread were not too hard to give up—but only as
long as I gave them up completely. My parents ordered me protein
powders from a mail-order supplement company, and I used them
for breakfast. Breathing exercises I learned from yoga seemed to
make these changes easier to stick with.
Over the next year, the weight came off. Not only was I able to
play sports but I also became one of the better athletes in our school.
I was able to enjoy how great it felt to live fully and experience good
health; several years later, a house fire taught me how easy it could
be to lose that good feeling.
My family was fine, but we lost our pets and all of our possessions.
To help us get back on our feet, I spent every moment I was not in
school working at a restaurant. My stress levels were high, I had
constant access to unhealthy food, and my exercise regime stopped.
Soon, I was 30 pounds above target and completely out of shape.
Teenage angst led my next attempts at dieting, this time to be-
come too extreme. I ate fewer foods and a lot less of them. Imag-
ine living on a few servings of raw vegetables while being in school,
working, and running 6 to 10 miles outdoors in the northern Min-
nesota winter.
I lost weight, but I soon found myself both unhealthy and de-
pressed. Books came to my rescue again. One of the most memo-
rable was the first edition of the Textbook of Natural Medicine by
Michael Murray, ND. (Little did I know then that many years later
Dr. Murray would become a personal friend and ask me to help au-
thor portions of the ninth edition of that same book.)
Dr. Murray’s book taught me that I needed a more balanced
diet, with more calories, adequate protein, healthy fats, and more
mineral-rich foods. As a result, not only did my health flourish, but
I also reconnected with my earlier interest in medicine. My life’s
focus shifted away from my personal needs; I wanted to deepen my
understanding of nutrition and use it to help others the same way it
had helped me. Finding a medical school whose curriculum focused
on nutrition was a dream come true. My interest in the interplay of
hormones and obesity emerged while I was working with a memo-
rable young woman during my internship.
• Circadian rhythms are fixed; this helps you sleep better and
allows your liver to help control your weight.
a
global obesity c
risis—the stats
the
calorie theory: no longer in
Let’s start with the calorie model for weight gain. It certainly is ap-
pealing in its simplicity: people gain weight because they eat more
calories than they burn. Although the calorie model does reflect
what happens to healthy people in controlled settings, it does not
explain what happens when bodies are stressed and move into sur-
vival mode. During most of our past, stress came from immediate
danger, such as predators trying to eat us or us having too little of
our own food. Our genes adapted to stress by causing us to store
food as fat rather than to burn it as fuel.
Even if it were true that heavier people just ate more than others
do, this does not explain why, in the last few decades, people are
suddenly seeming to eat more than ever. At best, the calorie model
describes the situation; it does not explain the root cause. It’s just
like saying “People in the Third World earn less” describes the situ-
ation, but does not explain world poverty.
babies
do not need willpower
genes
vs. jeans
surprising
causes of weight gain
If the global weight explosion is not caused by too many calories, lack
of personal responsibility, or bad genes, then what is the cause? To
answer that question we need to think about what else has changed
during this same time period. Many researchers have wrestled
with these questions, and some common answers have emerged. To
begin, within the last few decades our world has gotten more toxic,
a lot noisier, and much faster paced. Our food has more sugar, less
fiber, and many more chemicals. We spend less time in sunlight and
we sleep less. We take more medications, feel less certain of our fi-
nancial futures, and have fewer friends.
Although experts debate which of these culprits is the most im-
portant, they strongly agree that global weight gain is brought about
by some combination of these changes. Because any one of these
causes has such strong evidence linking it to obesity, researchers
have become individually fixated on one cause or another.
When I dug into this problem, in my work as a doctor, I realized
that the answer to the obesity epidemic would have to encompass all
of the possible triggers. (To simplify, these triggers can be thought of
as processed foods, pollutants, and the pressures of life.) There had
to be one thing they all had in common. I also realized that, even
though there may not be a single cause, there still could be a single
way by which different causes trigger weight gain.
a
unifying theory of obesity
What was the single thread running through all these factors? It
started to become clear one day when I was studying how obesity is
tied to adrenal hormones. It turns out that adrenal hormones con-
trol a switch that sends calories to your belly fat or to your mus-
cles. In layperson’s terms, when the switch is set to “fat,” calories
go to your fat cells, making them larger. This is not good. When
the switch is set to “energy,” calories go to your muscles, where they
make energy. This is good. But why would our adrenal glands signal
to our bodies to make our bellies fat?
They do it to protect us. When we are in danger, our muscles need
to be able to burn large amounts of energy quickly, so we can run
away or fight. Our muscles are unable to burn energy when they are
storing energy, so your calories are sent away from them. Since these
calories have to go somewhere, and since in our past “danger” often
meant food shortages, our visceral fat (what we call belly fat, but is
actually fat deposition around our organs) takes in these calories and
stores them. This is survival mode, and it causes weight gain because
our calories are taken from our muscles and placed in our fat cells.
survival
mode is more than “stress”
lesson our genes learned during the last 200,000 years was that bad
things do not happen during times of plenty. Stress usually meant
danger, famine, or both. Our ancestors who stored fat during times
of crisis survived better than those who did not. This means they
were able to live and have babies, and share their gene pool with
their descendants, us.
When we are under a constant state of adrenal stress, our bodies
prepare for famine by burning fewer calories and storing fat around
our organs—that visceral fat that was mention a little earlier in this
chapter. Think of visceral fat as cash under the mattress. It is the
quickest, most accessible fuel resource your body can have for a cri-
sis. The fat on the hips, thighs, and under the skin is subcutaneous
fat. It’s more like savings bonds: a safe source of fuel, but we can’t
get to it very easily.
When a person is in survival mode, he or she will gain more vis-
ceral fat than an unstressed person eating the same number of calo-
ries. However, stress does not cause us to store more of the harmless
subcutaneous fat below our skin, just the dangerous visceral fat
around our organs. This is because our bodies rely on visceral fat as
fuel during times of crisis. Not only that, the extra stress hormones
prevent the body’s organs from effectively using energy in the mus-
cles or brain, leading to fatigue and depression.6
What about those people who lose their appetite when stressed?
PROCESSED PRESSURES
PROBLEMS FOOD POLLUTANTS OF LIFE
It is true that not everyone gains pounds when under major stress,
but those who do not gain scale weight still typically experience a
loss of muscle mass and an increase in body fat.
If being in survival mode leads to weight gain, what triggers this
reaction and what can you do about it? The known triggers come in
three main categories: dietary, mental, and physical. Table 1.1 shows
the three factors that lead to weight gain.
trigger
#1: processed food
fructose
The modern diet differs in many ways from diets of the past. Of all
the differences, the most significant may be the rate at which mod-
ern foods are absorbed. After chewing in the mouth and swallow-
ing, food moves to our stomach, where acids digest it into smaller
parts. This can be thought of as breaking rocks into dirt. Then, the
small intestine carries the nutrients along until they are absorbed
into the bloodstream. With whole foods, this absorption might take
six to eight hours. But today’s processed foods are often high in
fructose, and fructose can be absorbed in as little as sixty to ninety
minutes. The problem with fast absorption is that your body has to
do a hormonal juggling act to manage your blood sugar levels. This
pushes you into survival mode.
Fructose has several direct effects on belly fat, as well. When
your fat is exposed to fructose, it causes your adrenals to make more
stress hormones.7 The adrenal glands make a strong stress hormone
called cortisol and a weak stress hormone called cortisone. Fructose
literally causes your fat to take the weak stress hormone and make it
into the stronger one.8 Finally, the fructose leaves your blood sugar
so unstable that you end up making extra cortisol for hours in an
attempt to fix the situation.9
toxic proteins
Foods today contain higher amounts of toxic proteins, which can
trigger survival mode. Because of this, the rates of dangerous aller-
gies to foods like peanuts or shellfish have gone up many-fold during
the last few decades. Most experts believe that food allergies are
more common today because our foods are higher in chemicals and
are different in many ways from how they were in the past.
An increase can also be seen in milder food reactions; these are
often less obvious than allergies, what we call intolerances. Celiac
disease is an example of a delayed food intolerance. They are most
common in regard to wheat, dairy, and eggs. These foods contain
large amounts of complex proteins that can be hard to digest, and
reactions to these foods can cause many ongoing symptoms and can
directly contribute to weight gain.
The protein in dairy is called casein, while wheat contains gluten
and eggs contain albumin. The problem with these proteins is that
they can trigger immune reactions, even when they do not cause
obvious immediate symptoms, like pain or bloating.10, 11
A food allergy or intolerance presents a situation in which your
immune cells attack something they deem to be dangerous. Even
if those cells are wrong, the attack process increases inflammation
dramatically, signaling your body to go into survival mode, and the
fuel switch to go to “fat” mode.12, 13
your stress load, you become even more vulnerable to their effects.
This sets in play a vicious cycle of food reactions causing stress, and
stress making food reactions worse, until your body goes into sur-
vival mode and you gain weight.15 Other problems that result from
these reactions include gas and bloating, joint pain, and skin rashes.
The Adrenal Reset Diet focuses on high-quality nontoxic proteins
from vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, seafood, poultry, and lean meat.
trigger
#2: environmental pollutants
a chemical soup
Sometimes pregnant women notice that their babies kick and move
the most when poor mom is trying to get some sleep. It may seem
odd, but your liver is also most active at night. The body’s ability to
detoxify depends on the cycle that our liver goes through each day.
So, the liver does its best work cleaning out your body during your
deep sleep. This is also when your liver is able to convert your food
into energy for your muscles. When the body is full of pollutants,
though, your liver never gets to rest and it ends up sending both
calories and toxins to your belly fat instead.
How much are we exposed to environmental pollutants? Since
1900, over 3 million synthetic chemicals have been released into the
world. Each day we eat and breathe in thousands of them without
knowing it. This toxic exposure is now regarded as one of the more
significant factors in the modern obesity epidemic. Many of these
chemicals are formally categorized as obesogens, meaning that they
are known to cause obesity, even in those who are not overeating.
plastic by-products
One substance that is shown to cause weight gain is a plastic
by-product called Bisphenol A (BPA). BPA is present in many of
our foods, as well as in our air and water. It enters our food as a
by-product of packaging and as a contaminant from ground water.
In a UK study from 2012, fat samples were taken from a group of
seventeen people who had abdominal surgeries, and they were an-
alyzed for levels of BPA. Significant levels were found to be present
in every person studied; the more BPA was present, the more the
participant’s fat cells showed signs of fast growth. Although this
was worse with higher amounts of BPA, even those with the lowest
measurable amounts had unusual fat-cell growth. The conclusion
was that their fat cells were changing the weaker stress hormones
into stronger stress hormones.16
Along with making fat cells more aggressive, common toxic sub-
stances have been shown to raise the severity of our response to
everyday stressors. Environmental lead has been causing human
suffering from the earliest days of metal production to the present
day. Most of our current exposure to lead is leftover remnants from
lead-fortified gasoline and lead-based paint. A study from 2007
showed that those with the highest amounts of lead in their bod-
ies produced the highest amounts of cortisol in response to routine
stressors.17
light pollution
Environmental pollutants hurt cortisol cycles, which in addition to
leading to fat deposition also disrupt sleep patterns. Sleep is likewise
strained as a result of light pollution—the combination of exposure
to artificial light and the lack of exposure to sunlight. Our ability to
control our weight depends on deep sleep, which is directed by cues
from the sun. Each new study strengthens the evidence for the con-
nection between weight and sleep. In the last five years alone, over
270 research projects have evaluated how sleep affects body weight.
Some of the newer results are giving us clues as to how exactly sleep
regulates fat deposits. Once again, the adrenal glands are central to
the story.
In a state of healthy sleep, the cortisol levels are reduced to their
lowest levels of the day. This break from cortisol allows calories to
be made into energy for our muscles. If cortisol is not able to shut
down all the way, those same calories end up creating fat; and along
with the fat being over-fed, the muscle tissue gets starved. This is
the dilemma of adrenal dysfunction: too much fuel is present in the
form of fat, but too little fuel is available to the muscles in the form
of glycogen. This starts the vicious cycle of weight gain and fatigue,
and it moves the body from thriving to just surviving.
Sleep is critical to so many of our body’s functions, but is also an
explanation for why many diets just can’t work. It’s clear that if your
sleep is disrupted, your waistline will pay for it. But how does this
happen? First, it is good to realize that sleep happens only when cor-
tisol levels are low. Throughout the day, healthy people make a burst
of cortisol to wake up and then it shuts off when they go to sleep.
If your blood sugar level gets too low, your body will have to make
more cortisol to raise it. If someone develops low blood sugar later
in the day, he or she can end up with elevated nighttime cortisol lev-
els and poor sleep quality. This is a problem with low-carbohydrate
diets. In one such study, a group of healthy, lean men with no sleep
problems were put on low-carbohydrate diets and their sleep quality
was closely monitored. In as little as 48 hours, the time it took for
them to fall asleep, how deeply they stayed asleep, and how much
quality REM sleep they had decreased.18
The Adrenal Reset Diet is the first diet that carefully times car-
bohydrate consumption to ensure quality sleep and low nighttime
cortisol levels.
trigger
#3: the pressures
of modern life
Life today brings with it change and uncertainty. Even though our
lives are rarely in danger, our days are filled with constant low-level
stressors that take the form of text messages, emails, deadlines, and
distractions. We also face more frequent major stressors like job
relocations and frequent separations from our extended families.
Some estimates show that the pressures of modern life may have
risen by as much as 30 percent just since the 1980s.19
Pressure is real and we all feel it, but can it directly cause weight
gain? This was the question asked in a study of 54,000 women who
were tracked over fifteen years. At several points during the study,
the researchers measured the participants’ body weight and used
questionnaires to determine their total stress load. The data con-
sistently showed that those with the highest stress loads gained the
most weight.20
A related study has proven that pressure changes our appetite. In
a group of women aged 40 to early 50s, stress levels were compared
to food choices. Specifically, the women were asked to prepare a
presentation for a job interview while a panel of “judges” observed.
In the first stage of the experiment, the women were given a paper
and pen, and were told that they would have five minutes to pre-
pare notes for the presentation. The notes were taken away, and the
“judges” watched the presentations without any signs of approval,
like smiles or nods. Then, the participants were asked to do hard
mental arithmetic while the judges scolded them for working too
slowly. When the experiment was over, the participants were first
tested for their cortisol levels and then invited to a buffet, not know-
ing that what they ate was being monitored. Those with the greatest
cortisol disruption were the ones who ate the most chocolate cake
and the least amount of vegetables.21
Another study proved the same phenomenon in a group of 333
high school students in Korea. The students were given question-
naires to determine how much pressure they felt in school, and then
they were ranked into low-, medium-, and high-pressure groups.
Those who felt under more pressure consistently ate larger meals
and more frequently ate high-sugar foods, such as sodas, pastries,
candies, chocolates, breads, and sweetened milk.22
Some have linked obesity to the addictive nature of today’s foods
and their high levels of sugar, fat, and salt. Although toxic food is
definitely a factor in weight gain, brain scientists have shown that
we are susceptible to food-based addictions only when we are in a
higher state of pressure.23
the
adrenal reset diet:
a patient-tested remedy
PROCESSED PRESSURES
PROBLEMS FOOD POLLUTANTS OF LIFE