Highly Recommended: Master Your Metabolism: The 3 Diet Secrets to Naturally Balancing Your Hormones for a Hot and Healthy Body! by Jillian Michaels

Are your hormones victims of processed foods and other chemicals?  Do you want to become healthier and/or lose weight?  Are you on estrogen overload from the processed foods you eat?  Men and women, you may be surprised.  I was!  (Processed foods could account for much of why Viagra and other similar meds are needed.)

If you want answers to these questions and many more, I highly recommend reading Master Your Metabolism: The 3 Diet Secrets to Naturally Balancing Your Hormones for a Hot and Healthy Body! by Jillian Michaels, trainer on The Biggest Loser, because she gets to the bottom of many of the health problems in this country, including obesity.  Your hormones are under assault by processed foods, plastics, and other chemicals in the environment.

What she says about weight loss and how to go about it works great for me, although I independently came to this conclusion for myself after reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals in 2009 and doing my own additional research.  (I only heard of Jillian Michaels at the beginning of February 2010 and read her book in the middle of February.)

Michaels opens the book in Chapter 1 with “Let Me Guess — Is This What’s Happening to You?: How I Came to Realize My Hormones Were Totally Screwed Up.”  Chances are your hormones are “screwed up” too, even if you are of a healthy weight.

In the first three chapters of Part One: This Is Your Metabolism on Hormones, she gives her own compelling account of being depressed and 175 pounds at the age of twelve and of losing weight.  However, she tells why she had trouble keeping it off and why.  In the fourth chapter, Michaels talks about how the “diet” works, although, just to be clear, this really isn’t a diet.  It’s a life-long plan to healthy living.

In Part Two: The Master Plan, Michaels describes her three diet secrets:

• REMOVE anti-nutrients from your diet
• RESTORE foods that speak directly to fat-burning genes
• REBALANCE energy and your hormones for effortless weight loss

The REMOVE chapter talks about eliminating the antinutrients that trigger your fat-storing hormones.  In the RESTORE chapter, Michaels presents a list of foods which she calls Power Nutrients.  The REBALANCE chapter talks about adjusting the timing, quantity, and combinations of foods for maxiumum metabolic impact.

I can personally vouch for the fact that if you remove anti-nutrients from your diet, you can lose weight just be getting rid of the nasty processed foods that are screwing up your hormones.  Read my review “Highly Recommended: The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan” along with my article “Are Corn and Other Food Additives Causing Weight and Other Health Problems?”

In Part Three: The Master Tools, Michaels presents master lifestyle strategies, meal plans and recipes, master remedies for the most common hormonal disorders, insight into using this program for the rest of your life, and a master shopping list.

Michaels’ book was a great follow-up book to The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.  While “Omnivore” goes into the dangers of processed foods, especially corn products, and touches on the soy additives, that book doesn’t explain the hormonal dangers of these products, unlike Michaels’ book. Master Your Metabolism: The 3 Diet Secrets to Naturally Balancing Your Hormones for a Hot and Healthy Body! identifies certain soy products, like soy milk and soy food additives (in copious processed products), as creating high estrogen levels in men and women.  While estrogen exists in both men and women, an overabundance creates health problems.  This information really opened my eyes to the dangers of certain processed soy products.  (This does not include tofu and certain other soy products.)

Soy and corn are not the only culprits that screw up metabolism.  She also talks about other chemicals that influence  hormone balance — insulin, thyroid, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, cortisol, epinephrine, leptin, ghrelin, etc.  They have an effect on weight loss.

This is the first book I’ve read that takes a holistic approach to healthier living, not just the foods you eat, but also in the use of the chemicals in your environment, such as cleaning products.

The book is well-written, and Michaels gives a wealth of science behind almost all of her advice, which I really appreciated.  (She has a long list of references at the end.)  I’m under the firm belief that in order to maximize one’s efforts to become healthy and/or lose weight one must understand how his or her own body works and why certain foods and chemicals disrupt the body’s normal workings.  You must understand how to recognize the “poison fruit” in order to avoid it or at least understand the possible consequences if you don’t avoid it.

This book is definitely one that I want to have on my shelf for future reference because I’m looking for ways, not just to lose weight, but to become healthier, too.

Rating: ♥♥♥♥♥ (5 out of 5)