Natasha Turner - The Supercharged Hormone Diet: A 30-Day Accelerated Plan to Lose Weight, Restore Metabolism and Feel Younger Longer

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

MARK TWAIN

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Imagine exercising daily, counting calories and excluding food groups only to have your belly fat or love handles grow bigger and bigger. The more you strive to meet your goal, the farther you are from achieving it. Its the always shocking, incredibly frustrating, unsuccessful dieting phenomenon. And it happened to me.

At the time, I was a student and I assumed that the diet and exercise program I was following wasnt strict enough, long enough, or strenuous enough. Naturally I decided that I simply needed to do them bothharder. So, in desperation I added more cardio sessions and further reduced my food intake. The result? I gained another five pounds on top of the 20 I had already piled on. How could this be?

Lets recall my equation for fat loss from The Hormone Diet:

Lasting fat loss = hormonal balance + (calories in calories burned)

My intense efforts failed because they only served to make my hormonal imbalance, the true underlying cause of my weight gain, worse. Unbeknownst to me, I had a deficiency of thyroid hormone going on in the background. The imbalance only grew worse because the physical stress associated with excessive caloric restriction and over-exercising actually increased the negative impact on my thyroid hormone deficiency and further slowed my metabolism. After this, three things quickly became very clear to me. First; weight loss is by no means only about calories in versus calories outhormonal balance needed to be added to the equation. Second; hormones are very powerful substances that influence many aspects of our health and wellbeing. And third; the level of one hormone impacts another, which established the need to think big picture when it comes to weight loss.

So, if we now know this as the new formula for fat loss, then surely we need to start thinking about all the factors that upset our hormonal balance and, therefore, ultimately make us fat. But Ill tell you a secret before we get into a discussion of the eight most common fat-packing hormonal imbalances and the reasons why we are fat. This program fixes them all.

After the release of my first book, The Hormone Diet, I received hundreds of emails from people around the globe expressing exuberant relief that they finally found some answers. Many felt as if the book had been written directly for them, and they had at last discovered a solution to their nagging symptoms and hormonal hurdles. People were no longer sweeping their issues under the carpet, making excuses or hitting a wall with no discernable answers. It was exactly why I wrote the book in the first placeto create a practical guidebook that explains the cause, the effect and the solution, so patients can make informed decisions about their own healthone step at a time. But a lot of readers also requested my three-step wellness plan to be more simply laid out. They wanted a more direct pathway to successful solutionswithout the science. And so herein lays The Supercharged Hormone Diet 30-Day Plan. I want better health to be accessible to everyone, and this plan is so clear anyone can do it.

The pace of life just seems to get more and more hectic. Between work, family and other obligations, were all finding ourselves stretchedand stressed. Unfortunately, this busy lifestyle often leads us to place our health at the bottom of the priority list. Without realizing it, we find ourselves beholden to a host of poor habitseating on the run, skipping workouts, grabbing too few hours of sleep and dismissing everyday symptoms that are often flags for something more serious. Habits that leave us carrying excess pounds, looking drained and feeling, well, just plain bad. Often we respond by seeking a quick fix to lose weight. But when our bodies are so out of balance, long-term weight loss is next to impossible. This book is about all the aspects of your lifestyle that come together to makeor breakyour weight-loss success. Its about taking the time and some simple steps to make yourself, your health and your overall wellbeing a top priority again.

Think about what drew you to this book in the first place. Do you have trouble dragging yourself out of bed in the morning? Do you experience uncontrollable sugar cravings at 3 p.m.? Nagging PMS every month? Interrupted sleep patterns? Do you get stressed out just sitting in your office? Do you have difficulty coping with every task? Bloating after meals? Skin that has lost its luster or tone? Belly fat that just wont go away? The list can go on and on, and I am willing to bet that many of you experience some of these frustrations every day. Believe it or not, these arent just factors that make you feel bad. They may be impacting your ability to lose weight!

Unfortunately, many of us are too embarrassed or too used to the symptoms to even think about discussing or addressing them. Both women and men have spent too long believing that their hormonal symptoms are a liability or are psychosomatic and can simply be ignored. Yet hormones are powerful chemical messengers in our bodythey control everything from our reproductive functions to our mood, sleep, appearance and almost every other aspect of daily life. The very same hormones that are behind a whole host of health concerns (such as the ones listed above) are also influencing your ability to control your appetite, shed body fat and gain lean muscle. They dictate how successful we will be with a given weight-loss program; whether we will be able to drop unwanted pounds or continue on the diet merry-go-round to no avail. So many of us believe we can get healthy by losing weight. But, it was my goal to teach you in The Hormone Diet, that we must be healthy in order to lose weight.