The Schwarzbein Principle
You need to be healthy to lose weight, not lose weight to be healthy. That is the core tenet of my unique weight loss approach. To explain how important this concept is to your life, I will be brutally honest: If you are following one of the popular diets, whether it is low carb, low-fat, food combining or limited calories, it is killing you. Diets that are designed to get you to lose weight first break down every component of your body. This causes destruction of your metabolic system, and ages everything from your brain cells to your organs to the skin on your face.
If you are doing cardiovascular exercise along with your diet—such as running, aerobics, kick boxing, or spinning—you're killing yourself even faster.
Popular diets and high impact exercise programs emphasize ways to use up more energy and chemicals than you rebuild. This will cause you to lose weight for a short period of time, but most of the weight loss is due to breaking down cell structure, organ tissue, muscle and bone tissue along with fat loss. In essence, you are overstressing and starving your body, forcing it to consume itself to keep you functioning.
Although you initially lost weight on the scale, you will soon find yourself at a plateau where your body is no longer able to respond to the abuse. It is at this point that your weight will not budge, even if you starve yourself more or exercise harder! Worse yet, by continuing to abuse yourself in the long-term, your body will hit the wall resulting in accelerated aging, degenerative diseases, and more severe symptoms than you had before. This is why so many popular diets end with the unsuspecting victim—for lack of a better term—being heavier and less healthy than they were when they started.
There is a solution to this problem. You can lose weight and still have a long, healthy, and disease-free life. The key is to embrace the concept that health is more important than weight and to understand that once you are healthy, you can and will lose weight. Even better, once you are healthy you'll keep that weight off for the rest of your life.
My approach to health is based on metabolic regeneration, the ability to rebuild and repair. Under the right set of conditions, you possess the ability to repair and heal yourself, whether that healing involves weight issues, degenerative diseases, or chemical imbalances in your body. But if you are not regenerating, you will not have the chemicals that you need to achieve your daily activities or stay healthy. The key to health is therefore to build up your body, not to tear it down.
This is why my health program is different from all the other lifestyle programs being promoted these days. My wellness program focuses on curing all the degenerative diseases of aging, not just obesity. This idea is summarized in The Schwarzbein Principle.
The Schwarzbein Principle means that you have more control over your own health and aging than you were led to believe. It is meant to empower you with the knowledge necessary to make the changes to your daily habits that will help determine your own destiny. It does this by reinforcing the concept that your body is connected through chemical reactions and by explaining that what you do on a day-to-day basis will influence how long and how well you live your life.
The Schwarzbein Principle Program
The Schwarzbein Principle Program works by preventing further damage to your metabolism and helping to heal damage that has already occurred. Years of bad habits—like over-exercising and eating the wrong way—can lead to excess weight, illness, disease, or simple lack of energy. The good news is that if you take action and change your daily habits, you will be able to reverse or prevent further damage to your body and slow down the aging process.
The Schwarzbein Principle Program is a way of life, not a short-term plan, and if followed properly it will lead to better health, more vitality, and your ideal body composition. Here are the five steps of my program, which we'll talk more about in later chapters:
• Healthy Nutrition. There is no calorie-counting or meal skipping on the Schwarzbein Principle Program. I encourage you to eat as much as you need up to five times a day. The only stipulation is to eat a 'square' meal every time. The Schwarzbein Square, that is—a balance of quality carbohydrates, protein, healthy fat, and nonstarchy vegetables.
• Stress Management. Seven hours of uninterrupted sleep is mandatory on the Schwarzbein Program, as is downtime during the day. I'll show you simple techniques to create both a great nights sleep and daily relaxation.
• Tapering off Toxic Chemicals. Substances such as refined sugars, alcohol, nicotine, artificial sugars, caffeine and many over-the-counter and prescription drugs have no place in the human body, but some of them are a valuable aid while you transition to a healthy lifestyle. I'll show you how to taper off of toxic chemicals so that you won't ever miss them.
• Cross-Training. Moderate exercise is good for you; too much exercise destroys you. Whether you're killing yourself on the couch or on the treadmill, I'll give you a simple routine that will energize and revitalize your body.
• Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). Not everyone needs HRT, but if your body isn't producing enough of a particular hormone, you will never balance your metabolism and you will never be truly healthy. I'll show you how to take HRT the right way.
¬2004. All rights reserved. Reprinted from The Schwarzbein Principle, The Program: Losing Weight the Healthy Way by Diana Schwarzbein, M.D. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher. Publisher: Health Communications, Inc., 3201 SW 15th Street, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442. |
