Barrett Ellen - The 28 days lighter diet: your monthly plan to lose weight, end PMS, and achieve physical and emotional wellness

Your Monthly Plan to Lose Weight,

End PMS, and Achieve Physical and Emotional Wellness

Ellen Barrett and Kate Hanley

Guilford, Connecticut

An imprint of Globe Pequot Press

Copyright 2014 by Ellen Barrett and Kate Hanley

skirt! is an attitude... spirited, independent, outspoken, serious, playful and irreverent, sometimes controversial, always passionate.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, PO Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

skirt! is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

skirt! is a registered trademark of Morris Publishing Group, LLC, and is used with express permission.

Photos by Arthur Cohen

Text design: Sheryl Kober

Layout: Mary Ballachino

Project editor: Ellen Urban

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN 978-1-4930-0420-1

The health information expressed in this book is based solely on the personal experience of the authors and is not intended as a medical manual. The information should not be used for diagnosis or treatment, or as a substitute for professional medical care.

To all women,

may you harness the power within, and teach your daughters and granddaughters

to do the same.

Contents

Introduction

This is the book we wanted to find already written for us in the library, but alas, it did not exist. As health and wellness coaches, we have sensed loneliness and confusion in almost all of our hundreds of female clients with regard to authentic reproductive wellness and lasting weight loss. We set out to find answersthrough ob/gyns, midwives, naturopaths, chiropractors, traditional Chinese medicine, yoga, hard science, and folk medicine. This book is our way of eradicating the loneliness and confusion that comes from feeling like the only one in the world who snaps at your kids or wants to hide under the covers when youre premenstrual, or from wondering why you can follow the latest diet or exercise plan and only feel wiped out and incompetent when the weight doesnt budge, or comes off only to reappear next month. Our message is simple: Wake up to the gift inside you .

As women, we have an omnipresent GPS-like system wired into our beings that offers daily mental, physical, and spiritual guidance. Its called the menstrual cycle, and it affects us all month long, not just during the few days of actual menstruation. Yet, all fitness and diet programs ignore it, as our culture pretty much pretends it isnt there. This infuriates us! We have both learned through our own experiences and studies that when you work with, instead of against, your cycle, you find your way to total feminine wellness, and you do it without prescriptions, depriving yourself of delicious food, or killing yourself at the gym.

Ellens Story

I was an athlete, playing competitive tennis throughout high school and college. In fact, I got my first period at a tennis tournament. I was one of the millions of women duped into thinking I was doing my whole body right by running five miles on the first day of my period. In my fifteen years as a serious athlete, I never once had a coach ask me about my cycle. Looking back now, I find that odd, for my cycle profoundly affected my tennis game. When I was on my period, I was sluggish and self-conscious. Surely my coaches could tell, right?

After graduation I entered the fitness biz, and continued to ignore Aunt Flo. This is when my body started to really scream. In addition to the two days of debilitating (hunched-over) cramps each month (which I thought were normal), I experienced nausea, night sweats, and an extremely heavy flow. I sought help from my gynecologist, and I recall her quickly walking over to her desk and jotting down a prescription for painkillerswhich I never filledwithout once looking me in the eye. She shooed me out the door and was off to the next patient in room number three. That same scenario played out again and again at every yearly checkup until I was thirty-two years old.

As I look back, I see how my body took me down. Instead of listening to it, I was defying it month after month with tampons, tennis matches, Jane Fonda aerobics, and a standard American diet (SAD). In my mid-twenties, my body stopped me in my tracks with premenstrual syndrome (PMS) so debilitating that I literally couldnt get out of bed. I called in sick for the first time in my entire life and told my boss I had the flu.

Only when I wanted to start a family did I realize the truth: Ive been disrespectful to my feminine nature. I thought I was one of the millions of nonsmoking, nondrinking women who did everything right, yet I struggled with infertility. Clearly, my body was not a temple! I looked fit on the outside, but inside something was awry, as it took us almost three years to conceive.

Luckily, through a more moderate exercise regime, stress management, and a whole-food diet, my plight proved reversible. While charting the ebb and flow of my energy levels, I began meditating, discovered traditional Chinese medicine, and replaced excessive workouts with long walks in the woods. I also allowed myself quiet time without guilt. Now ladies, heres the miraculous partnot only did I stay slim with much less effort, but I also regained my reproductive wellness and naturally conceived my son at age thirty-seven. This may sound corny, but today I feel Im growing better, wiser, softer, and happier. Plus, Im not freaked out about getting older. The 28 Days Lighter Diet program put my body, mind, and spirit on the right path.

Kates Story

I got my period for the first time when I was twelve years old. A child of divorced parents, I was visiting my dad for a few weeks when it arrived. I was too embarrassed to tell him about it, so I made do with wadding up toilet paper to serve as makeshift pads until it passed. Not wanting to be uncool, I went right to tampons for my next cycle, and thought it was fabulous that I could wear one tampon the whole day at school and not change it until I got home, so I wouldnt have to carry one in my bag and risk a boy discovering it.

The next decade and a half, I kept on pretty much pretending my period didnt exist. I was enamored of any activity that came my waysoftball, soccer, jogging, tennis lessons, bike riding, aerobics, Nautilus machines. I loved them all, because they were the only way to combat my junk food diet and still stay trim (or so I thought). I found a couple Midols and a tampon could carry me through those early period days quite nicely. Funny how I thought that the distended abdomen, wacked-out digestion, sore boobs, and sullenness I experienced the week before each period were normal.