Accidentally Overweight Read online

  Other books by Dr. Libby :

  Exhausted to Energized (2015)

  The Calorie Fallacy (2014)

  Sweet Food Story (2014)

  Beauty From the Inside Out (2013)

  Real Food Kitchen (2013)

  Real Food Chef (2012)

  Rushing Woman’s Syndrome (2011)

  (All titles published by Little Green Frog Publishing Ltd.)

  First published and distributed in the United Kingdom by:

  Hay House UK Ltd, Astley House, 33 Notting Hill Gate, London W11 3JQ

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  Text © Dr. Libby Weaver, 2010, 2016

  Previously published by Little Green Frog Publishing Ltd

  (ISBN: 978-0-473-18148-2)

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise be copied for public or private use, other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  The information given in this book should not be treated as a substitute for professional medical advice; always consult a medical practitioner. Any use of information in this book is at the reader’s discretion and risk. Neither the author nor the publisher can be held responsible for any loss, claim or damage arising out of the use, or misuse, of the suggestions made, the failure to take medical advice or for any material on third party websites.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-78180-630-2 in print

  ISBN 978-1-78180-675-3 in ePub format

  ISBN 978-1-78180-676-0 in Kindle format

  Interior images: p.3 iStock; all other images © Dr. Libby Weaver

  For Christopher,

  with spectacular gratitude.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Guidelines for Getting the Most out of This Book

  A Little Background…

  Introduction: The Big Picture First

  Digestion: The Basis of Health

  The digestive system

  PH gradient of the digestive system

  Stress

  Bowel evacuation

  Opioids

  TCM perspective on digestion

  Food combining

  Signs your digestive system needs support

  Digestion solutions

  Puzzle Piece 1: Calories

  You know you need to eat less…

  Sometimes you can’t stop—emotional overeating

  Understanding why you overeat

  Signs the calorie piece of the puzzle needs addressing

  Calorie solutions

  Puzzle Piece 2: Stress Hormones

  Adrenalin and the big sugar rush

  How coffee can make you fat

  Cortisol—friend or worst nightmare?

  Silent stress

  Worrying can make you fat

  Adrenal fatigue

  The serotonin-melatonin seesaw

  How to support your adrenals

  Signs stress hormone production and/or the adrenals need support

  Stress hormones solutions

  Puzzle Piece 3: Sex Hormones

  Can estrogen make you fat?

  Fluid retention

  What role does progesterone play?

  The relationship between stress and sex hormones

  What happens when estrogen is dominant?

  Reproductive system conditions

  Signs your sex hormones need support

  Sex hormones solutions

  Puzzle Piece 4: The Liver

  The nutrients you need for detoxification

  Liver loaders

  Cholesterol

  Excretion of cholesterol and estrogen

  Antioxidant defense mechanisms

  Signs your liver needs support

  Liver solutions

  Puzzle Piece 5: Gut Bacteria

  The connection between gut bacteria and calories

  Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)

  The no-good bug… streptococcus

  Signs your gut bacteria needs to be addressed

  Gut bacteria solutions

  Puzzle Piece 6: The Thyroid

  The thyroid hormone cascade

  Hypothyroidism: Underactive thyroid gland function

  Estrogen dominance

  Elevated cortisol brought on by stress

  Thyroid medications

  Blood tests and “normal” ranges

  Signs your thyroid needs support

  Thyroid solutions

  Puzzle Piece 7: Insulin

  How carbs can make you fat—or not

  Food and insulin

  Rushing woman’s syndrome

  How the biochemistry of insulin relates to appetite and fat storage

  The importance of exercise

  Fructose and the liver: Their relationship to insulin

  The glycemic index and glycemic load

  Sweetness of life

  Signs your blood glucose or insulin response needs support

  Insulin solutions

  Puzzle Piece 8: The Nervous System

  The autonomic nervous system

  The nervous system and body fat

  Craving sugar

  Signs your nervous system needs support

  Nervous system solutions

  Puzzle Piece 9: Emotions

  Food is…

  Understand your meanings and rules: The fuel for your life

  Specific meanings and rules

  Emotional pain can serve you

  Network spinal analysis (NSA) and Somato respiratory integration (SRI)

  The Em-Matrix

  Signs your emotional landscape needs some support

  Emotions solutions

  The Wrap-Up

  References and Resources

  Index

  About the Author

  Join the Hay House Family

  Acknowledgments

  To the amazing Chris Weaver. Thank you for your passion, your humor, your eyes, your arms, your immense generosity and opening me to a new phase of learning and discovery. Thank you for being a guiding light for me and helping me take my messages to the world. You surprise and delight me and I adore you.

  To my dear Mum and Dad. Thank you for the way you raised me and for loving me unconditionally. I am who I am mostly because of you both and I wouldn’t be doing this work without the gifts of my delightful childhood. Mum, thank you for being the kindest lady on the planet and my best friend. Thank you Dad for being the wonderful provider and friend that you have always been to me, and for having chickens and parsley in the ba
ckyard.

  John Aiken, aka J. Dizzle, thank you for sharing the “Accidentally” name with me. John is a psychologist who has written a wonderful book called Accidentally Single. Thanks for sharing and for encouraging me to fly above the radar.

  Thank you to a very special place on this Earth called Gwinganna Lifestyle Retreat (Queensland, Australia) for her nurturing of me. The land and the passionate, life-loving people that make up this amazing place will always have a sense of home for me. I am eternally grateful to the process a stay at Gwinganna offers her guests, for it is through this process that I first caught a glimpse of the biochemistry and the psychology of what I now call Accidentally Overweight. Big love to Sharon and Karl.

  Thank you to Petrea for her belief in me, and the way she encouraged me to get this out there and for being such fun. You rock!

  Thank you to my precious Miss Bliss (hi Bella!) for her magical heart and her unconditional love for me. Thank you! I love you. Thanks to Leisel and Ruby Red Rose for the cutest voicemails ever during the biggest work (mission) year of my life so far and to all of my friends’ patience while I hibernated and wrote this beloved book and spent no time on the phone.

  Thanks will always go to Professor Tim Roberts and Associate Professor Hugh Dunstan for their passion for bugs (gut and infective), steroid hormones, biochemistry, immunology, and microbiology, and the inspiration they offered before and during my PhD to explore the whys behind numerous health conditions. And to Dr. Merv Garrett for smashing my brain wide open back in 1997 and being the original pioneer; you changed the course of my life and I am forever grateful to you.

  Thank you to Tony and Sage Robbins for their gifts of insight into the tremendous heart of real human psychology. Tony you are a genius and Sage your feminine essence is a gift to the world. Massive thanks and recognition to Deborah Battersby for her contribution to the world, most recently in the form of Em-Matrix, and for her deep caring. Thank you to Louise Hay for her pioneering work into the metaphysical basis of health conditions. There are times when the lessons I have learned from all of these people have allowed a client to open to what was really at the heart of their health challenge. As I love to say, “It is never about the food. And yet it is about the food for that is some people’s doorway to their own magnificence.”

  Thank you to the children with autism who, through my work with them and their families, gave me an insight into far more than just gut function and poo! Like canaries in the mines, these children are a gift offering us also a warning that we cannot continue living in the way that we are. Our world is too toxic for them. And the Accidentally Overweight are but just one more sign of this.

  To everyone who knows somewhere inside of them that it is not about the food, I hope you are reminded throughout these pages of what you already know.

  Guidelines for Getting the Most Out of This Book

  Please read this whole book. Do not just go to the solutions section at the end of each puzzle piece, or chapter, because you won’t understand why specific changes are being recommended. You’ll also find solutions are offered the whole way through each and every chapter, and you may miss these if you don’t read everything. There is also a reason for the order of the chapters.

  Information is expanded upon as the book continues and we move from the physical—body-fat accumulation—through to the emotional, and along the way you’ll see how they are all linked. Nothing stands alone in our chemistry. Also, to truly get the immense benefits from the final piece of the puzzle, emotions, you need to know the stories that led up to this chapter, which you’ll find presented throughout the book. So please read it from cover to cover and soak it up.

  Do not go straight to the emotions chapter, even if you believe that this is the only part you don’t yet understand. Accidentally Overweight was written as a sequence, so that the information and experiences unfold as you read it from the first page through to the last. Once you have read it all, by all means return to any place you like.

  You may notice that throughout the book I often write “we,” and this is because I am used to working as a team with my clients. Even though I am not physically with you as you read this book, I want you to feel like I’m someone who understands. The details of people’s lives are very different, yet the patterns of responses driving human behavior are often very similar.

  There are sections of Accidentally Overweight that may seem more geared to a female audience. But the messages in the book are just as relevant to men, even if in certain sections men are simply given the opportunity to understand the women in their lives better. This is particularly true of Puzzle Piece 3, Sex Hormones.

  You will see throughout the book that each chapter contains a checklist to help you identify whether a particular puzzle piece might be relevant to you. It is important to note that not all of these signs need to be present for the puzzle piece to be playing a role in the heath picture of an individual. Reading each chapter of this book is designed to help you decipher whether a particular puzzle piece is likely to be part of your health picture. If a chapter resonates strongly, that puzzle piece likely needs attention. If not, then simply learn from the information.

  Also, the signs and symptoms listed for each puzzle piece are not finite. Please note, too, that some of the signs and symptoms can be representative of other heath conditions or diseases, and that these checklists infer that more sinister causes have been ruled out by a medical professional.

  As I came to evolve my concept of Accidentally Overweight more deeply, what began as a random scribble on the page grew into a pie chart, which I’d ask clients to complete so we could establish the areas where they needed support.

  Although today I use the image of a puzzle to depict the concept of Accidentally Overweight, this simply serves to illustrate that often numerous pieces have to come together for an individual to reach their weight-loss and health goals.

  For you to get the most out of this book, I am going to encourage you to begin where I begin with all of my clients—with the pie chart. As you come to the end of each chapter, I’d like you to score yourself for that particular area, not based on a rating of “good” or “bad” but on a scale of one to ten. Ten indicates that this piece of your chart needs absolutely no support or attention—you have that section sorted—while a score of one indicates that you have identified that this particular area needs a significant amount of support and attention. Once you have scored yourself for each puzzle piece, return to the pie chart, mark your scores in each area, and then color in your wheel. The more white space, the more support you need to focus on that area. Most people notice that if their chart were actually a wheel, it wouldn’t be able to turn. It would get stuck in one or more areas.

  Identifying the areas where you need support allows you to focus on the information and solutions most relevant to your health. After you have implemented some or all of the strategies suggested in the section/s relevant to you for four-week periods, you can return to your chart and use a different colored marker to identify your new scores. Your goal is not necessarily to get to ten in all areas. Identify the roadblocks to your fat burning and aim to have more colored areas in your chart. Get your scores (your biochemistry) to a point where your weight-loss wheel begins to turn again, generating the health outcomes you desire.

  “If the answers to what you are searching for were in the places you had already been looking, don’t you think you would have found them by now?”

  ANONYMOUS

  It is time to look at food, health, and your body in a brand new way.

  Figure 1: Your Accidently Overweight Puzzle

  A Little Background…

  Before beginning, I want to reflect on human history so you can begin to appreciate truly just how miraculous our bodies are and also some powerful reasons why human health has shifted so significantly in the past 30 or so years.

  I’m not talking about human evolution in the sense of biblical “creation” versus Darwinian “evolu
tion.” Instead, let this be a brief exploration of the major milestones in the evolution of the human body and biochemistry.

  Human beings have been on Earth for between 150,000 and 200,000 years. We have evolved slowly and steadily over time, and, as nomads, lived off the land that surrounded us as we moved. We were hunters and gatherers and the seasons, the climate, and the weather conditions predominantly influenced our food choices. Humans ate fresh food precisely the way it came from nature. Our diet was based primarily on plants, and other more concentrated foods were added when the opportunity arose from hunting and gathering.

  Approximately 7,500 to 10,000 years ago, humans started to stay in one place for longer periods of time, and basic agricultural practices were established. This was the first time we grew crops and the first time in human history that we consumed the milk of other animals. This was also the first time that repetition became significant in the human diet, as a result of not having to chase our food down, and also having a supply of crops in the field. Our patterns of eating, however, were still based on nature’s rhythms, and our produce was seasonal and at the mercy of floods and droughts.

  While change continued at a very gradual, steady pace, the chemistry developments in our body could keep up. The next most significant change to our lifestyles came during the 19th century, as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Processes were mechanized, and people started to move in big numbers from the country to the cities. There was an enormous reliance on agriculture for food production as population numbers continued to grow, and a day’s work now required less movement as people came off the land and worked in the newly developed factories.

  Propel forward to today. I believe that when historians review our time on the planet, they will identify the past two decades—which have included the invention of cell phones and the birth of the Internet—as the most rapid period of change in human history. We now eat out of packets, which contain numbers (including additives and preservatives) rather than food-based ingredients, and live our lives in front of screens. We don’t have to climb stairs, as there are elevators, escalators, and moving walkways. We don’t even have to go to the store to buy our food, let alone go into the fields and harvest it or chase it with a spear. We can order it online and have someone deliver it.