“The Prime” Way to Lose Weight
Improve your gut IQ
Toxic inflammation in the body is an underlying cause of weight gain, and integrative neurologist Kulreet Chaudhary, M.D., has authored her first book, The Prime, to address this culprit. She discovered a wonderful side effect to the eating and lifestyle suggestions she gave her brain patients - they spontaneously shed excess pounds. So in her book she teaches the same techniques to everyone else to help you sharpen your brain and smarten and heal your gut.
Weight gain isn't from food, but instead, from the body’s environment. Bad bacteria and fungus in the gut can add pounds to your frame, as toxins accumulate. Find out how to make your body healthier by adding in simple teas and herbs and without giving up the foods you love.
All about The Prime
Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary took time to talk to LadyLUX about her new book, The Prime:
LadyLUX: Please tell us the main concept behind The Prime.
Dr. Chaudhary: There is an underlying biochemical cause for weight gain that involves the accumulation of toxic inflammation in the body, neuroadaptation in the brain that results in food addictions, and a change in gut flora that favors the overgrowth of “bad” bacteria and fungus. If you address these biochemical obstacles, weight loss becomes a spontaneous outcome of a healthier biochemical state. Most diets are doing things backwards—asking people to change their behaviors around foods before addressing the underlying chemical state that is resulting in these behaviors. In The Prime, it is not about what you can't have or do; it's about adding simple teas and herbs, and succeeding without giving up any foods you love.
LL: How can people spontaneously shed excess pounds?
Dr. Chaudhary: By addressing the biochemistry that is resulting in the accumulation of the extra pounds first. This toxic inflammatory state is the result of our diet being filled with food that has been radically altered from its original form. This change in the nature of our food supply has resulted in a dramatic shift on our cellular biochemistry that favors weight gain. When you address these changes—i.e. fight biochemistry with biochemistry—you even the playing field and break out of the cellular prison that results in weight gain and chronic disease.
LL: How can you sharpen your brain and heal your gut?
Dr. Chaudhary: The underlying cause of neurodegenerative conditions and brain fog is the same underlying cause of weight gain and it has to do with nerve damage that is occurring in the gut—literally brain damage in your gut. The answer to losing weight spontaneously is to make the gut smarter by bringing the enteric nervous system (the brain in your gut) back online and in control of your food choices. When this happens, the enteric nervous system (or ENS) can override the cravings and other negative effects. The best way to do that is to fix the digestive system, cultivate a gut environment that allows good bacteria to flourish, improve nutrient absorption, and reverse the brain’s neuroadaptation to toxic foods so the ENS can heal and start working again. This is a big part of what my new book, The Prime, accomplishes for you.
The bottom line is that you don’t need more willpower. You need a smarter gut. This is why you can be smart in other areas of your life, such as in your career or personal life, but still not able to change how you eat. It is not a personality flaw. It is a gut bacteria flaw. Even better news is this: If you thought your brain was smart before, just wait until your gut becomes smart, too.
LL: Why do so many people have problems with their gut?
Dr. Chaudhary: Our modern diet of processed foods with additives, preservatives, and a highly addictive combination of sugar, salt, and fat has essentially disrupted our natural communication between our brain and our gut. The added toxic load of these unnatural foods has also derailed our body’s natural detoxification systems so that we can’t process or transform the toxins into less harmful substances. The end result is a slow mind and a dumb gut.
LL: What is food addiction?
Dr. Chaudhary: Neuroadaptation is the brain’s amazing ability to adapt to whatever you do to your body. Eat a lot of sugar? Your brain adapts. Take drugs? Your brain adapts. Live with chronic stress? Your brain adapts.
Neuroadaptation can work for or against us. Many pleasurable things trigger the release of dopamine, but drugs and alcohol trigger a much larger dopamine response. If this extreme pleasure is repeated often enough, your brain adjusts to create a more normal, stable environment for itself again, by switching off some of your dopamine receptors.
Drugs and alcohol are not the only substances that have this addictive effect, so do certain foods. In fact, many food substances, especially those far removed from their natural forms (i.e., highly processed), have a neurological impact quite similar to the impact of a drug.
To your brain, a candy or French fry binge doesn’t feel all that different from a cocaine binge. They even look similar on a PET scan, which is a type of imaging that allows doctors to look at organs and tissues, lighting up the same parts of the brain. In someone who is very overweight, the brain similarities are even more striking.
You can power through a diet like a drug addict in rehab, but the sad fact is that most addicts relapse, even after getting clean. Dieters are no different. Unless you ease your brain out of its adaptive state slowly and gently. Working with instead of against neuroadaptation means there is no stress and trauma related to withdrawal. When detoxification from addictive substances (no matter what they are) is a gradual process, the brain can adjust in a way that feels much less painful.
Fixing your digestive tract
LL: What is a leaky brain?
Dr. Chaudhary: You may have heard of the blood-brain barrier (let’s call it the BBB). This is the barrier that keeps the harmful junk floating around in your body out of your central nervous system (CNS), where it could do real damage. This isn’t a completely impenetrable barrier, however. Some substances need to enter the brain for nourishment and function.
This is all common knowledge for most doctors. Yet there is more to the story. The brain in your gut, the enteric nervous system (ENS), has its own similar mechanism protecting it. This is called the gut-blood-brain-barrier (let’s call it the GBBB). Most neurologists don’t even know it exists because most of this information is in gastroenterology journals, which neurologists generally aren’t reading, unless they are looking for the gut-brain connection, like I am.
The GBBB is more vulnerable to penetration than the BBB, and here’s why: Your digestive tract must allow nutrients out. When the gut is exposed to continuous toxins and “new to nature” compounds such as chemical preservatives, overly processed foods, and inflammatory foods such as gluten and refined sugars, the gut mucosa becomes chronically inflamed and they can no longer protect the ENS.
Now for the link to the brain: Once you’ve got a leaky gut, the brain in your head is at risk, too. The same inflammatory particles that can break down the GBBB can have a similar effect on the blood-brain barrier. You don’t want those troublemakers loose in your bloodstream, but once they get in there, they can go anywhere, and they often end up attacking the brain. This is why I often say that leaky gut leads to leaky brain. Once you open the door to the brain, all kinds of dysfunction and degeneration can result.
Fix the gut, stop the brain damage in the gut, and the brain in your skull has a chance at recovery.
LL: Can you prevent food cravings?
Dr. Chaudhary: Yes!!! Absolutely! You do this by disrupting neuroadaptation to the wrong foods (there are specific natural herbs for this as well as certain foods and spices), healing the gut (this involves several steps outlined in The Prime), and fostering a better gut flora.
LL: Is inflammation a real problem and, if so, what causes it?
Dr. Chaudhary: What we are realizing in medical research is that inflammation is the common final pathway for almost all disease such as diabetes, heart disease, and even brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. Inflammation is largely associated with many of the habits that we engage in as part of our modern lifestyle, particularly the processed foods we eat. But it is also a result of our exposure to all of the environmental toxins that are in the products that we use on a daily basis—our furniture, clothes, dishes, cleaning detergents, etc. Our detoxification pathways become totally overwhelmed because we were never built to sustain this level of injury from our foods and our environment. Fortunately, there are ways to remove these toxins from our bodies and reduce the inflammatory response associated with it. This is one of the hallmarks of the program in The Prime.
LL: What happens if you don’t prepare properly for weight loss?
Dr. Chaudhary: You are basically approaching the issue backwards and doing it in the hardest possibly way. It’s sort of like climbing a mountain, but deciding you’re going to do it naked. You can still do it, but if you have the right equipment, it just makes it so much easier and more comfortable.
LL: How much weight can people expect to lose if they follow your program?
Dr. Chaudhary: Most of my patients lose about 20-30 pounds initially and then as their ENS (the brain in their gut) gets back online, their other healthy habits spontaneously kick in and they go onto lose even more weight after they’ve finished the program. So, the program itself usually results in a 20-30 pound weight loss, but the overall weight loss doesn’t stop there. We have had patients lose up to 100 pounds over the course of 1-2 years simply because their healthy habits spontaneously kicked in after the program.
LL: Who will have the most success with your program?
Dr. Chaudhary: The people who lose the weight the fastest are people who have Fake Fat or lymphatic suppression, which causes accumulation of water weight. Also, people with the most amount of “toxic weight” tend to have the most success because this program is a deep detoxification process. In our culture, most weight gain is due to accumulation of toxic weight due to the nature of our diets and exposure to all the environmental toxins.
LL: Is there a certain age that this works best with?
Dr. Chaudhary: No, this is what surprised me. I assumed that my younger patients would respond the best. But toxic weight tends to accumulate over time so it really is just more dependent on how much toxic weight you have. Older age is usually associated with more toxic weight, which is why this program works so well for people as they get older, but now parents are giving their kids sodas in baby bottles so really we are aging much faster and accumulating toxic weight much earlier. This makes this program beneficial at any age.
LL: Is exercise essential?
Dr. Chaudhary: Exercise isn’t included in the program at all. Even studies show that it’s not really exercise that determines weight loss, it has more to do with diet. Most of the foods we choose to eat are driven by “invisible” biochemical factors, so really this is more of microscopic battle rather than one that if fought on the treadmill. Think about how long you have to run to work off an 800 calorie box of cookies verses never feeling the urge to eat them in the first place. Additionally, when you are in a toxic inflammatory state exercise can be difficult because you’re body doesn’t even have enough energy for daily maintenance let alone a 90-minute workout just to work off one little extra snack you ate that day. What I’ve seen in my patients is that once they finished the program, they naturally began to have more energy and wanted to move and exercise. It was spontaneous. Once they started working out, it supported the work they did in the program and they went on to get more tone and fit, but the majority of the weight loss occurred even before they started an exercise program simply because of the changes that were happening in their gut and brain while on The Prime.
LL: What matters most for good health?
Dr. Chaudhary: A smart gut—by far the most important first step for good health. You can’t accomplish any health goals until you first improve your gut IQ.
Visit drkulreetchaudhary.com for more info.
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