It’s designed to be a detoxification for 21 days, so this is short term. It’s designed to get you back into conversation with your body so that you can create a clean slate.

Sara Gottfried

Categorized in : Health

The number one way you know [if you have a hormone imbalance] is that you’re gaining weight because 99 percent of weight gain is hormonal, and a lot of people don’t connect the dots. They don’t realize that their problems with energy, with feeling fatigued maybe even depressed or moody is related to their hormones.

I think it’s much better to do the foundational work to change the way you eat, move, think and supplement before you resort to prescription medication.

What you want to do in this reset is get off of sugar and get off of the sugar substitutes-- the artificial sweeteners.

Most people were told to eat nine servings of fresh fruit and vegetables a day, but I can tell you most women are eating a lot of fruit-- and they’re not eating the kind of fruit my great grandmother ate. An apple in her day had 2 grams of fructose, which is what makes fruit sweet. An apple today has been hybridized for sweetness. It’s more like a sugar bomb and has typically 20-25 grams of fructose. So what we want to do is steer away from the high fructose fruit and eat things like olives and avocados which are much better for your hormones.

Caffeine raises your cortisol, and I think a lot of women don’t realize that they're dependent on it and that it’s jacking up their nervous system. So, one thing that happens when you drink a cup of coffee or two or three, is it raises your cortisol level. And that then gives you sugar cravings throughout the day, so that you have this blood sugar that goes up and down, and I want to stabilize it by getting you off of caffeine.

Grains affect the thyroid, but gluten is especially the problem here because gluten looks a lot like the thyroid and so it can make your body attack the thyroid.

You know the average cow in the U.S that’s raised as livestock is injected with six different steroid hormones-- designed to make it fat, but then were eating that cow and eating the toxic fat and getting some of those bad bio-chemistry that’s not so good for you.

The important thing is to realize we all get exposed to endocrine disrupters, [which are] these artificial chemicals that are in plastics. We get exposed to them in a lot of different ways-- receipts that you get at your local store often are coded with bisphenol A (BPA), which acts on your testosterone levels. So in women it tends to make you raise your testosterone, and in men it tends to lower your testosterone. So, this acts as an endocrine disrupter, and we want to stop that war that’s happening in the body and get rid of those toxins.