The Coconut Diet: The Secret Ingredient for Effortless Weight Loss

3 By how many pounds are you over weight?

4 Give yourself 1 point for every time you’ve gone on a diet.

Total part 2

Total part 1 and 2

Interpreting the results

Part 1: The maximum possible score is 20. The higher your score, the greater the likelihood that you will benefit from the lifestyle changes outlined in this book.

Part 2: There is no maximum score. If you recorded a 10 in answer to the first question, you are by definition insulin resistant. If you scored the first question as 0 but your total in part 2 is 15 or more, you have reason to be concerned.

A total for both parts of 35 or more tells you it’s time to take action.

This test is taken from Blood Sugar Blues, Miryam Ehrlich Williamson.15

How to Improve Insulin Sensitivity

Insulin sensitivity can be restored to a healthful state, which not only results in weight loss, but also in improved health. The right diet like the Coconut Diet is key to improving insulin sensitivity. There’s no magic bullet involved—it’s good choices made daily that will make all the difference. Here’s what you can do:

Avoid sweets and other simple carbohydrates (refined grains and starches); this is one of the most important steps you can take.

Avoid artificial sweeteners and nicotine as they cause an increase in insulin. A diet soda or artificial sweetener in your coffee, even though it has no calories, sends confusing signals to your body. Though these artificial sweeteners do not cause blood sugar levels to rise, they can cause insulin levels to increase, which can lead to low blood sugar, weakness, hunger, and ultimately insulin resistance.16 (#litres_trial_promo) You may think that you are serving your weight loss goals by choosing artificial, non-calorie sweeteners, but in fact, you can be setting yourself up for a life-long struggle with weight management due to insulin resistance and an increased appetite caused by the artificial sweeteners.

Cut back on coffee. Drinking just two cups of coffee per day has been shown to increase levels of the stress hormone Cortisol. When this hormone is elevated, it can have adverse effects on the immune system, brain cells, sugar metabolism (which includes setting you up for insulin resistance), and weight gain. Coffee drinking has been reported to cause increased body fat, often around the mid-section, due to insulin and Cortisol elevation. (Stress also causes Cortisol to go up.) Research is unclear about why coffee affects weight gain, but clinical studies do show that when coffee intake is reduced, body fat goes down.17 (#litres_trial_promo) If you just can’t give up that cup of Java, make sure you have no more than one cup a day. The rest of the day, I recommend that you drink tea, either herbal or green tea, water, sparkling mineral water, and some fresh vegetable juice.

Green tea helps you lose weight. When tea has been substituted for coffee, especially green tea, it had the opposite effect—it helped people lose weight.18 (#litres_trial_promo) Avoid green tea (and all other sources of caffeine) if you are hypothyroid, have adrenal stress, or are hypoglycemic; green tea does contain caffeine, which should be omitted until these conditions are corrected.

Increase your intake of essential fatty acids. You can increase cell receptor activity by increasing the fluidity of cell membranes. Omega-3 fatty acids, especially docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) actually make cell membranes more fluid. Essential fatty acids also help to lower levels of “stress chemicals” such as Cortisol and norepinephrine. This may account, in part, for one weight loss study’s success with omega-3S, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, that showed the best weight loss results, along with reduction of glucose and insulin, in the group that ate one meal of fish each day.19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Learn stress reduction techniques and how to manage stress effectively. This can definitely help improve insulin resistance. High levels of stress activate the “fight or flight” response, which stimulates the production of epinephrine. Epinephrine causes the liver and muscles to convert glucose from its reserved state as glycogen to its active sugar form. Insulin rises to control glucose and increased insulin levels signal fat storage. This is one reason why some stressed individuals cannot lose weight regardless of how strict they are with their food choices. Relaxation techniques such as massage, hydrotherapy, aromatherapy, and prayer can improve insulin sensitivity and fat loss.20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Six Steps to Improving Blood Sugar Balance and Insulin Sensitivity

1 Follow the Coconut Diet. The meal plans and recipes in this book are designed to help you improve your blood sugar balance and improve insulin sensitivity.

2 Eat only healthy fats and oils. Healthful oils help promote insulin sensitivity. This is one more reason we recommend only virgin coconut oil, extra virgin olive oil, and essential fatty acids (the omega-3s), which are found in coldwater fish such as salmon and sardines, fish oils such as cod liver oil (rich in EPA and DHA), flaxseeds, and evening primrose oil or blackcurrant oil.

3 Eat only complex carbohydrates; avoid simple carbs. Vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and fruit are rich in fiber; they release their sugars more slowly into the bloodstream. Simple carbohydrates such as sugar, refined flour products, and starches like white potatoes and white rice, break down rapidly into glucose and cause blood sugar to rise. They should be avoided as part of a healthy lifestyle.

4 Eat a moderate amount of lean protein. Protein stimulates the release of glucagon, a hormone that mobilizes fat stores into energy, and it plays an important part in blood sugar stability. Choose naturally raised, organically fed animal products. Such animals yield healthier, leaner proteins. But eat protein moderately. Over consumption of protein can cause an increase in uric acid and taxes the kidneys.

5 Exercise on a regular basis. Aerobic exercise and strength training help increase insulin sensitivity. See pg (#litres_trial_promo). for exercise recommendations.

6 Drink green or herbal tea, avoid coffee, and drink at least 8 glasses of water each day.

Now that you know which carbs are good and which ones are bad, you can make wise choices the rest of your life that will encourage healthy blood sugar balance. In the next chapter, you’ll learn the truth about fats and oils. If you were surprised by some of the information in this chapter, I think you’ll be amazed at how misinformed our culture has been about fats. Saturated fats have gotten a bad rap for no good reason. And, a lot of misinformation about these fats has been popularized in mainstream media. Chapter Three presents the lowdown on fats and oils. It is quite possible that your entire manner of preparing food will never be the same after you finish this section. Best of all, you’ll discover which fats make you fat and which ones help you trim your waistline in The Big Fat Misconception.

chapter 3

the big fat misconception (#ulink_394ba253-373a-5454-8a4e-837101d22cb9)

For decades we have been told to cut back on the fats in our diet if we want to maintain a healthy weight and prevent heart disease. Marketers of low-fat foods have championed this concept. But according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) statistics, the results have not been what we were promised. In 1999-2000, an estimated 30 percent of U.S. adults aged 20 years and older—that’s nearly 59 million people—were obese, defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more, and 64 percent of U.S. adults aged 20 years and older were either overweight or obese, defined as having a BMI of 25 or more.

(The BMI is a measuring system that determines obesity based on body-fat content rather than weight.) That accounts for almost two thirds of our adult population being classified as overweight. And heart disease is still the number one killer in the West.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson said, “We’ve seen virtually a doubling in the number of obese persons over the past two decades and this has profound health implications. Obesity increases a person’s risk for a number of serious conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and some types of cancer.”

Obviously, low-fat diets have not helped us lose weight. Isn’t it time to “stop the insanity” about fat. Fat is not the substance making most of us overweight. Not that overeating certain fats wouldn’t put weight on, but the major culprit for most people is refined carbohydrates—foods like sugar, potato chips, soda pop, pasta, pizza, breads, and other products made with refined grains. These types of foods are without doubt the major reason we are fat. And it’s no wonder! They are a big part of the typical Western diet.

We’ve been told for years that we should avoid fat as much as possible. Some people have been on a torturous low-fat regimen, trying to avoid all fat in their diet. Now we are learning about the dangers of low-fat diets. Health professionals have had a chance to observe the results of years of eating low-fat and no-fat diets—results that have been very detrimental to our health. We need good fats, especially the essential fatty acids, to stay healthy. And we need a certain amount of fat in our diet to prevent overeating.

We are also learning that the saturated fat scare has turned out to be—a “big fat lie!” Gary Taub wrote a startling article in the New York Times in 2002 titled “What If it Were All a Big Fat Lie!” In it he stated:

The cause of obesity [is] precisely those refined carbohydrates at the base of the famous Food Guide Pyramid—the pasta, rice and bread—that we are told should be the staple of our healthy, low-fat diet, and then add on the sugar or corn syrup in the soft drinks, fruit juices, and sports drinks that we have taken to consuming in quantity if for no other reason than that they are fat free and so appear intrinsically healthy. While the low-fat-is-good-heatth dogma represents reality as we have come to know it, and the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in research trying to prove its worth, the low-carbohydrate message has been relegated to the realm of unscientific fantasy.

Over the past five years, however, there has been a subtle shift in the scientific consensus. Now a small but growing minority of establishment researchers have come to take seriously what the low-carb-diet doctors have been saying all along. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, may be the most visible proponent of testing this heretic hypothesis. Willett is the de facto spokesman of the longest-running, most comprehensive diet and health studies ever performed, which have already cost upward of $100 million and include data on nearly 300,000 individuals. “Those data,” says Willett, “clearly contradict the low-fat-is-good-health message and the idea that all fat is bad for you; the exclusive focus on adverse effects of fat may have contributed to the obesity epidemic.”

Fats that Heal

Fats have always been a part of human nutrition, until the late twentieth century that is, and they were even recommended in days of yore for treating serious medical conditions.

Rex Russell, M.D. writes: “It was 1944, and World War II was roaring. A young mother was wasting away with an infection diagnosed as tuberculosis. Antibiotics were unavailable. Her doctor prescribed (1) isolation, (2) bed rest, (3) exercise (eventually) and (4) a diet high in fat. Surprising, but true! High-fat diets were often the recommended protocol by the medical profession during those years. Before you scoff, you might want to know that this lady recovered. She is my mother, and she has stayed on this diet through the years. Presently she is enjoying her greatgrandchildren.”

While the experts claimed, “fats are good,” prior to World War II, we have heard just the opposite in recent years. What actually constituted a “high-fat” diet prior to the late 1940s was mostly butter, cream, eggs, nuts, seeds, lard, and beef tallow. Just mentioning some of these fats make many people gasp today, but they made up the typical diet of yesteryear. Margarines, which were introduced in the 1860s, were butter substitutes made with animal fats such as lard and beef tallow or the saturated vegetable oils from coconut oil and palm oils, eventually with yellow dye added to make them look like butter.

Today, saturated fats are considered by many people to be the worst fats one can consume. However, drastically reducing saturated fats from the modern diet has not solved our health problems. Statistics show that obesity rates are at an all-time high as is heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and stroke. The low-fat advice is losing credibility. And, surprisingly, people on a high-fat diet using coconut oil are discovering that many of their ailments as well as excess weight are disappearing.

I’ve been taking about 1 to 2 tablespoons of virgin coconut oil per day for about 4 months now. I definitely notice a difference in my energy. It’s steady through the day—no longer have the surges of ups and downs, especially that sleepy feeling after a meal.

Marty

I am 52 years old and I am keeping up with my visiting grandsons (6 and 8 years old) as if I am 30 something. I have lost 10 pounds in about five weeks and have 10 more to go. My dry eyes are gone along with the aches and pains of arthritis, Sjogren’s, osteoporosis, and fibromyalgia. I feel like the combination of my good diet, the virgin coconut oil, and exercise is the key to my success.

Sharon

About Fats and Oils

Fats and oils are technically known as “lipids.” If a lipid is liquid at room temperature, it is called oil. If it is solid, it is called fat. Fats can be found in many food sources in nature: meat (such as tallow and lard), fish (fish oil), vegetables and fruits (olive, avocado, and coconut oil), nuts, seeds, and legumes (walnut, sesame seed, peanut, grape seed, and soybean oil), and whole grains (wheat, rice, rye). Grains must contain all of their components, which we call whole grains, to benefit from all the oils present. A diet rich in natural foods will be a high-fat diet. It is virtually impossible to eliminate fats from our food unless we refine them. Fats are an essential part of life. Without them, we could not survive.

Four vitamins—A, D, E, and K—are fat-soluble vitamins, meaning they are soluble in fat and fat transports them in our body. When fat is removed from a food, many of the fat-soluble vitamins and other compounds are also removed and the carrier of fat-soluble vitamins is unavailable.

Fat also gives rich flavor to food. It adds satiety to a meal—a feeling of having had enough to eat. Fat-free and low-fat foods are one of the reasons some people over-eat carbohydrates, which really packs on the pounds. These people just don’t feel like they’ve had enough to eat many times, even when the volume has been more than ample.

One very good reason to add coconut oil to your diet for weight loss is that it satisfies hunger better than any other fat, as well as most other types of food. For this reason, many people say they feel full eating less food at a meal and can go for longer periods of time without getting hungry. This helps prevent unnecessary snacking.

I am marveling over and over about how this coconut oil is working! By the time I finished my first quart of virgin coconut oil, I could tell my hypoglycemic hunger cravings were subsiding, and my taste for coffee and chocolate was changing. I feel like a “born-again believer.”