My amazing children, Brooke, Blake, and Chloe, for their respect and genuine enthusiasm. Thank you, Brooke, for your meticulous early edits; Blake for your inspiring artistic contributions; and Chloe for your intuitive opinions of the market. The late Elena Lyons, my mom, for aligning the stars for me. I feel her influence every day.
I would like to thank my patients. Your trust and hard work allowed me to develop The Brown Fat Revolution nutrition and fitness programs to help each of you look your absolute best.
Eileen Cope, you are amazing! Without you, this book would not have happened. Thank you for two years of working it out with me and then brilliantly framing the concepts to produce The Brown Fat Revolution. Your ability to connect the right people at the right time is simply magical.
Kathy Huck for your masterful editing and enthusiastic interest in The Brown Fat Revolution . No one could have organized the principles better than you.
Sally Richardson at St. Martins Press for seeing the importance of Brown Fat from the start. Your acknowledgment of my ideas was a major turning point in this project.
George Witte at St. Martins for the opportunity to do this book.
John J. Murphy, Ann Day, and Tara Cibelli at St. Martins for making this experience an exciting one.
Karen Moline for your brilliant words. Your ability to connect to my thoughts and put them on paper was phenomenal. The passion you bring to your work is exhilarating. I look forward to our future collaborations.
Robert Gottlieb for recognizing the importance of brown fat from the very beginning and bringing me on board at Trident Media.
Maggie Robinson for your fresh approach to eating.
Cathy Cash for connecting me to Robert and Eileen.
Kathy Roberts, my assistant, for everything.
Rick Carbone for convincing me that it was okay to take time out for my own body.
Ken Wallach for your brilliant training and fitness ideas.
Christopher (Topher) Tornow for your personal training.
Alyse Diamond at St. Martins Press.
Alexandra for being so courteous and always making contact with Eileen so effortless.
Deborah Feingold for your artistry. You turned a tedious experience into fun.
Sara Branch, copy editor, for your meticulous attention to detail.
Dr. Bill Little for your incredible work on volume and the devolving face. Your words caused my epiphany on aging and fat distribution.
The olympic level surgical team: Dr. Robert Ljungquist, Dr. John Mc-Carthy, Paula Martinka, R.N., and Pat Cobb, R.N. Thanks for making my Thursdays so efficient and for listening to my incessant discussion of brown and yellow fat.
Nancy Hancock for your long friendship and respect. They mean a great deal tome.
Ivyeyesediting.com for the incredible assistance with the first proposal.
Dolores Guarino, R.N., for eighteen years of incredible support. It is not forgotten.
THE BROWN FAT REVOLUTION SKIN CARE: YES, ITS ALL ABOUT THE FAT!
Your skin is the biggest organ in your body, and its health is a direct reflection of your well-being. So you really do need to think of your skin as an organ thats as essential as your heart, lungs, or stomach.
But many of my patients as well as many other consumers instead treat their skin like the side of a house thats been painted without any underlying primer. Leave it exposed to the elements, and the damage will inevitably show up much more quickly. No skin-care regimenand no makeup, no matter how beautifulwill make your skin look great if you dont take care of your underlying health first!
There are, unfortunately, inevitable changes to skin as you age, and those changes differ for everyone, due to many factors (genetics, oil content, smoking, sun exposure, stress, etc.), so theres no one-size-fits-all product or regimen that will work for all women. Maintaining your skin is a lifelong process; you must address what happens inside your body, such as hydration, hormonal balance, stress, bad eating habits that cause nutrients to be directed away from optimal skin restoration and repair, and the processing of toxins like alcohol or nicotine. Take care of yourself and itll show. Dont take care of yourself and itll show, toobut not in the way you want.
Everyones skin is unique, because everyone is unique. Your skin is also unique at different times of the month, different times of your life, and in different environments. It reflects everything thats going on in your body and with your emotions, and will therefore be constantly in flux.
Dont allow yourself to get stuck in a skin-care rut the way so many women find themselves in a makeup rut. They use the same old thing because they know how to use it. Its comfortable. Its easy. But its not working. And why should it, really, if theyre still using the same products they first tried when theywere in college, and now theyre in their forties? Their lives have changed in the ensuing decadesand so has their skin.
Understanding your skin and having the best skin care possible will help enhance the visible effects once you have good brown fat back in your face.
BROWN FAT MEANS GOOD SKIN
My skin-care premise is simple: As your Eating and Exercise Plans transform your body while you get rid of old, wobbly yellow fat and make vast improvements in the consistency and distribution of your new, healthy brown fat, your skin is automatically going to plump up and look better. Young, dense brown fat fills out and supports your skin, adding the three-dimensional volume as well as the luster of youth to your face.
Obviously, the younger you are when you start replacing old yellow fat with new brown fat, the more quickly youll get the volume back in your face. The sooner you do it, the less your skin falls, so its easier to restore its original shape.
The word I like to use is patina. For me, the best kind of skin patina is not flawless and wrinkle-free, but a surface that insinuates freshness and health. Ideally, what you want is skin with a glow to it. This means it has optimal hydration, an even tone (without blotchiness), a smooth texture (without large pores or acne), and a supportive understructure provided by good brown fat.
Even with a regular regimen of effective skin-care products, though, without a solid underpinning of good brown fat, trying to improve your skin is like trying to iron corduroyit isnt going to happen.
SKIN FABRICS
As described in chapter 1, the skin on your face is placed atop several distinct pockets of fat. This skin is also made up of different fabricson the same areas: your forehead, eye area, cheeks, and nose and central face.
Clearly, these fabrics are not identical. But Ill bet you treat them as if they were. And if you do, it might explain why youre unhappy with your current skin-care regimen.
When a plastic surgeon or dermatologist analyzes your face, he or she should approach each of the four areas differently. The thickness of your forehead is not the same as the thinness of your eyelids, for instance, and your cheeks have many more oil glands and a different thickness than your lips or chin.
In addition, the muscle action determining how these four fabrics move andage is not the same, either. How you kiss with, move, or purse your lips is not how you frown with your forehead or squint with your eyes when youve forgotten your sunglasses.
An easy way to think about your facial skin fabrics is by comparing them to the clothes you need to iron on laundry day. Some fabrics, like linen, need and can tolerate high heat; others, like silk, will burn in an instant with the wrong setting. So when I perform a laser treatment on a patient, if I didnt turn down the setting when I got near the eyelids, my patient would be in serious trouble. But if I didnt turn up the setting when working on the forehead or around the mouth, the laser would barely be effective.