CHAPTER ONE How Did We Get Here? We are asking more of our bodies than at any other time in the history of civilization. We ask them to live on food that is of a much lower quality than ever, thanks to all the chemical additives, preservatives, and processing. We pump ourselves full of sugar and artificial sweeteners, hormone-riddled dairy products, and foods like wheat and corn and soy that are so genetically modified, it''s a wonder we can even digest them. We live in a world with depleted soil, polluted air, and water teeming with environmental chemicals. We eat and drink from plastic containers that leach even more chemicals into our foods and drinks. And, we live with great amounts of often crushing, overwhelming stress. Given all this, no wonder you don''t feel great. You''re tired all the time, you get sick too often, or you''ve gained a few extra pounds (or a few dozen extra pounds).

Every day, I see clients who need to make a change in their lives. Some are sick; others are not sick yet, but are headed in that direction. They all need to lose some weight so their bodies can function better. And they need to change now. It''s urgent. They feel as if they are wasting precious time--precious days and hours and minutes when they.when you.could feel vibrant and healthy, energetic, strong, and alive.

You want to stop worrying about food and fat and what the scale says to you in the morning. Maybe you''ve lost a lot of weight in the past--40, 50, 100 pounds or more--but it''s creeping back and you''re panicking. Maybe you''re just so tired of dieting that you''re hoping, beyond hope, that there might actually be a better way--a way that would allow you to eat again. I''m sorry that nobody ever properly explained to you how your body really works when it comes to food, and how your body chemistry, not you, is to blame. I''m sorry that stress has tipped you into a cycle you feel you can''t escape, and you are angry or depressed or even scared about your health and the shape of your body. I''m going to show you another way. The foods you eat and the lifestyle you choose should create energy and strength for you, not fatigue, obesity, sickness, desperation, or self-loathing. Yet once you''ve slowed down your metabolism, study after study has demonstrated that the metabolic rate does not easily return to normal, even after resuming a normal diet.

When you starve yourself, your body adjusts to subsist on a smaller number of calories by slowing down your metabolism. That means that whenever you go off your diet, you''re likely to gain weight with a vengeance. Your body is just trying to save you from future famine. When you are under tremendous stress, your body excretes crisis hormones signaling it to store fat and burn muscle. When you are overloaded with chemicals, pesticides, and pollutants, the body creates new fat cells to house these toxins, so you don''t become poisoned and sick. And when you consume food that is devoid of nutrients or contains artificial dyes, flavorings, and sweeteners, the body does its best to survive these foreign substances by slowing down the metabolism and minimizing the damage to the body''s system as a whole. The very world we live in puts us all at risk for a slow metabolism. We''re about to change all that.

It''s time to move beyond blame and regret and self-loathing, and into the future. This is the paradigm shift your body needs, and it will create a new, healthier version of you. The new you views food as a tool to repair damage and restore health. The new you loves fruits and grains and protein and healthy fats. The new you knows how the body reacts to specific foods and strategic eating, and the new you has all of the resources to get the weight off and keep it off for good. We are going to find the new you, and we''re going to do it now. It''s going to take a little work, but it''s nothing you can''t do. I''m not going to ask you to starve yourself ever again.

That''s likely what got you into this mess in the first place. So let''s draw a line in the sand. No more business-as-usual. If food has been your enemy in the past, that''s all over. Now, we''re stepping into your future, where food is your medicine. Even if you''re 10 to 20 pounds overweight, you need this medicine. You need to learn how to Unwind stress, Unlock fat, and Unleash your metabolism. You wouldn''t try to repair a TV or a car without understanding how either is made or functions, and the same should hold true for the amazing biological masterpiece that is you.

So first up, let''s discuss what metabolism is and does. Then we''ll look at some common misconceptions about food and weight loss that may have held you back in the past. WHAT IS METABOLISM? This book is all about repairing the metabolism--but what is the metabolism, exactly? Metabolism is a process, not an object. Specifically, the metabolic process consists of chemical reactions that occur in the cells of all living organisms to sustain life. It''s the change or transformation of food into either heat and fuel or substance (muscle, fat, blood, bone). At any given moment, your metabolism is either burning, storing, or building. You have a metabolism because you are alive, and life requires energy. We all need energy to survive--to breathe, move, think, and react--and the only way to acquire this energy is from the consumption and metabolism, or transformation, of food.

Profound! We need fuel, and we need substance. A healthy metabolism and a functional metabolism allow us to have just the perfect amount of energy available, an appropriate amount of reserve energy stored and ready for use, and a strong and stable structure (the body). YOUR INNER BONFIRE Before we jump into the nuts and bolts of the Fast Metabolism Diet, let''s consider why your metabolism may have slowed down in the first place, and why weight loss hasn''t come easy for you. Remember, your metabolism is your body''s system for dealing with the energy you take in through food. The metabolism shuttles that energy into different directions according to what you eat and what you do. The beauty of your metabolism is that it can be manipulated, because how you eat and move and live affects how much of your food is stored as fat, how much is used as energy, and how much is devoted to building the structure that is your body. This manipulation is what I learned about when I studied animal science. The animal science industry uses this knowledge of energy, storage, and structure to create livestock that is ideally proportioned for use as food, to the tune of billions of dollars of profit.

The metabolism can also get you into trouble because you can inadvertently manipulate it to create a body you don''t want. Dieting, nutrient--void foods, and living with too much stress slow down your metabolism when it should be sped up. When you gain weight, feel blah, even get sick with a chronic disease, those are all coping mechanisms your body creates in response to your actions or environment, like the frogs that grow three legs in polluted swamps. Your butt or your belly could be protruding because of the very environmental, emotional, and biochemical ecosystem in which it is dwelling. FAST METABOLISM FACT Your metabolism reflects what you do by creating a body that can survive the conditions it is subjected to. THE SECRETS OF T3 AND RT3 One reason chronic dieting slows down your metabolism is that extreme dieting feels like starvation to your body. Starvation stresses the adrenal glands, which in turn induce a string of chemical reactions in your body that suppress normal production of the thyroid hormones that promote fat burning (T3), in favor of more production of a different thyroid hormone that encourages fat storage (reverse T3, or RT3). This is an oversimplification, but in essence, this fat-storage hormone, RT3, blocks the hormone receptor sites throughout your body, especially in your belly, thighs, and butt, like a goalie defending a goal against the ball.

The fat-burning hormone (T3) can''t get in there and burn that fat for fuel. RT3 is a necessary hormone. Without it, we would all have to eat every two hours or we would die. This hormone gets secreted to tell your body not to burn those 500 calories from breakfast or dinner too quickly. It tells your body: "Careful, that might be all you''re going to get," or "Don''t burn off that whole dinner, you might not get anything else to sustain you until 2:00 P.M. tomorrow!" It''s as if someone told you that you had 4 cups of rice and 2 cups of beans to live on for the next month. You''d be darn sure to ration that food so you could survive.

You wouldn''t want to eat it all the first day. That''s what RT3 "sees" when you get too stressed and you don''t eat enough: 4 cups of rice and 2 cups of beans. When your body produces too much RT3, it begins to store fat instead of burn it, even when you have plenty of fat already onboard. As I said above, RT3 acts like a goalie in front of the T3 receptor sites, blocking the ball (T3). Your brain, however, detects the presence of plenty of thyroid hormones, no matter what kind are circulating, so it steps down thyroid hormone production across the board. Your metabolism slows down in response, and then you begin to store everything you eat as fat, even healthful foods. The only way to reverse this process is to jump-start your metabolism again, and the best way to get started is to ditch old, mistaken beliefs about food that are literally weighing you down. First, let''s knock down some of the metabolic myths that are stan.