Free It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways by Melissa Hartwig, Dallas Hartwig Page A

you’re still avoiding junk food and eating low-fat meals and snacks. But you’ve been stuck in the cycle of overconsumption, worsening leptin resistance, worsening insulin resistance, and an even more disrupted cortisol rhythm. Things are Not Good.
    After another rotten night’s sleep, the alarm goes off. Thanks in part to your chronic poor-eating habits, cortisol levels are still abnormally low in the morning, making it even harder to drag yourself out of bed. A cup of coffee gets you motivated enough to shower.
    Your out-of-whack cortisol keeps you from being hungry for breakfast, but you force yourself to eat a bowl of shredded wheat with skim milk, a piece of whole-wheat toast with margarine, and more artificially-sweetened coffee. You head to work, stopping on the way for a “skinny” caramel macchiato, your treat for the day.
    Your high-carb, low-fat, protein-sparse breakfast yields rapid and prolonged elevated blood sugar levels and a disproportionately high insulin response (because you’re still insulin resistant). These high levels of blood sugar and insulin create “silent” damage in the body and increase your risk for a number of lifestyle-related diseases and conditions.
    And that’s just breakfast.
    By midmorning, your blood sugar has crashed (cue cortisol to tell glucagon you need blood sugar stat!) and you’re raging hungry, so you grab a low-fat blueberry muffin and a juice drink. Once again, large amounts of sugar begets large(r) amounts of insulin, and you jump on the energy-focus-mood-hunger roller coaster and take another ride. Since you’re eating high-carb foods every few hours, your insulin levels stay elevated, so glucagon rarely has the need to ask cells to tap into fat stores for energy—not that you could, since you are so heavily reliant on sugar.
    Your lunch (leftover spaghetti-and-meatballs and a glass of skim milk) recreates the same pattern for the third time today—blood sugar spikes and crashes, provoking a cortisol response. By 3 p.m., you’re hungry again. A fig bar and a small iced coffee stave off hunger until you head home.
    When you get home, you’re cranky, lethargic, and totally beat, but you still take the time to prepare a healthy dinner (brown rice, a lean steak, some honey-glazed carrots, and a whole-wheat dinner roll). Since your brain is leptin-resistant (and can’t tell that you’re already overweight), you still have room for a fruit salad with yogurt and granola for dessert.
    Later in the evening, the serious cravings start. You prowl through the pantry and freezer on autopilot, looking for more fat, salt, and especially sugar. You settle on a pint of specialty ice cream and the rest of a bag of pretzels—both highly processed, supernormally stimulating and nutrient-poor (all of which, as we’ve been trying to tell you, promote overconsumption and worsening leptin resistance and insulin resistance over the long term).
    You’re exhausted, but your cortisol levels are abnormally high, so you can’t wind down until after the last late-night talk show—and you’re in for another fitful night of sleep.
    The worst part?
    It starts all over again tomorrow.
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    In this scenario, those “invisible” hormonal disruptions are finally up close and center. Those additional twenty pounds of body fat are immunologically active—and secreting a lot of leptin. Since leptin’s satiety signal isn’t registering in your brain, you chronically overeat—especially food-with-no-brakes, because it tastes so good .
    Your less-than-active lifestyle and continuous overreliance on sugar and carb-dense processed foods has kept your blood sugar and insulin levels chronically elevated for years : you’ve progressed well into insulin resistance—diabetes could be right around the corner. You continue to gradually accumulate body fat, glucagon has no opportunity to tell the cells to use fat as fuel, and you’re desperately reliant on sugar for energy.
    Thanks