Fast To End Cellulite - Part One

I have little patience with the nonsense still talked about cellulite. On one hand most medical opinion tells us that cellulite is a ‘normal’ condition which inevitably invades the bodies of 80-90% of post-pubertal females. On the other hand, the ridiculous debate about whether or not cellulite even exists or is just plain old fat has been going on for thirty years and is still getting nowhere. Meanwhile, the volume of expensive treatments designed to banish puckered flesh continues to grow. Spending a fortune on cellulite creams and lotions to smear on our legs and bottoms offers little help when it comes to actually clearing the dreaded peau d’orange. Whether or not you care passionately about having smooth sleek thighs, if you see cellulite developing you can be sure your body is telling you that something within needs attention. Just as the appearance of slime in a river bed indicates that the ecology of the earth is disturbed, a peau d'orange thigh tells us that the ecology of your body is out of whack. And, if you want to shed cellulite, nothing short of a revolution in body ecology for good is called for.

KICK CARBS AND SUGAR

Foods high in grain-based carbohydrates, sugars, and packaged convenience foods—all of which are littered with artificial colours, sweeteners and flavourings—cause cellulite to develop. They also perpetuate cellulite deposits making it virtually impossible to shed them. Yet more than 90% of people in the developed world still eat this stuff believing that they are following “a healthy diet.” For the past 60 years or more we have been lied to and profoundly misinformed about what constitutes genuinely healthy eating. The kind of foods our bodies need if we are not only to prevent cellulite but also protect us from degenerative conditions such as heart disease and cancer, diabetes and obesity, are quite different than we have been told. To learn more about this I suggest you read the first half of a small book I wrote a few months ago called HEALTHY AND LEAN FOR LIFE. You can download it for free from www.curaromana.com, it’s at the bottom right hand corner of the home page. It also has lots of references you can pursue if you want to go into more depth. Meanwhile, the bottom line on cellulite is this: If you want to end cellulite forever you must dramatically reduce such foods and start eating in whole new ways.

INTERMITTENT FASTING

Clearing cellulite long-term requires as a first step that we detoxify our bodies of the waste we carry around as a result of many years of conscientiously eating the types of foods we have been told to by the media, international food manufacturers and government guidelines. One of the easiest and most efficient ways of doing this is following a sound version of intermittent fasting for, say, three weeks. It’s one of the most powerful and effective ways of deep cleaning the body that I’ve ever come across. There is growing evidence that it can improve health all-round. Intermittent fasting, which comes in several varieties, by no means asks that you starve yourself one day and binge the next. The most discussed at the moment is where you eat normally for four or five days each week while “fasting” other days—in some cases taking from 100 to 250 calories on your fast days. The down side of this kind of intermittent fasting is that many who have done it—often in an attempt to lose weight—find that, as soon as the novelty has worn off, it’s hard going for them to continue since they fall into old habits and end up craving carby and sugary foods.

A BETTER WAY

Easier to maintain and more efficient is the form of intermittent fasting which involves timing your meals to create a window of seven or eight hours a day when you are allowed to eat. During the rest of each 24-hour period you take in no food. Instead you drink a lot of clean water and herb teas. Easier to carry out than the 5:2 approach, this kind of intermittent fasting brings gentler and more rapid cleansing to the body—the vital first step towards shedding cellulite. It also doesn’t encourage binge eating. Here’s how it works. Leaving behind the long held belief that everybody needs three meals a day, you begin the day’s eating period at, say, 11 am and finish it at 7 in the evening. Or you might start at 10am and stop at 6 pm. As soon as the fasting part of the day begins, your body starts to use up its stores of glycogen (sugar) a process that takes about 8 hours to accomplish. After that your metabolism shifts from sugar burning to fat burning which is ideal, for many reasons. Fasting in whatever form it takes is nothing new. It’s been investigated for generations via clinical practice as well as animal studies. It has long been known that the lifespan of animals can be significantly increased by intermittent calorie restriction—in other words, fasting. Recently the therapeutic effects of such fasting on animals is being extrapolated and projected onto human beings even though human studies on intermittent fasting are still as scarce as hens’ teeth. As far as animals are concerned, fasting practices have been shown to bring benefits including better metabolic efficiency, prevention of diabetes, protecting against cardiovascular disease, improving insulin sensitivity, reducing body weight and improving pancreatic functions. It will be some time before science can prove that similar benefits from intermittent fasting can be applied to humans.

CELLULITE CONNECTIONS

A lot of what I have learned about the fundamentals of fasting with regard to cellulite clearing has come to me in the past four years while working with women on Cura Romana’s online programs. When starting their program many women calmly tell me they have tried everything and they are sure that nothing is going to help clear their peau d’orange. What they haven’t understood is that cellulite is no simple cosmetic problem. It is a sign that internal pollution is present in a woman’s body which as a first step must be cleared. When they have completed their program to the surprise and delight of many they discover that their cellulite is much diminished. In some cases it has even completely disappeared. I became fascinated by this phenomenon. I knew, of course, that all these women had shed a great deal of excess fat. I also knew that losing weight in no way means that a woman will also lose cellulite deposits. After about two years of mulling over what I saw happening, I began to understand what was going on. The highly specific Cura Romana Essential Spray+Food Plan part of the program, a three-week highly specific regimen during which participants eat only two meals a day—lunch and dinner supported by the power of Essential Spray inadvertently establishes a pattern of intermittent fasting with the benefits it can bring but much more thanks to the rebalancing that occurs in control centres of the brain. This not only detoxifies the body as an intermittent fast does it can also end sugar cravings, eliminate long-term food addictions, establish better hormonal balance and create natural appetite control. All of these changes, quite naturally encourage cellulite to begin clearing. So, by the time these women were ready to enter the next part of the Cura Romana program, Consolidation, their bodies had already gone through the process that deliberate intermittent fasting aims to achieve.

FROM GLUCOSE TO GOOD FATS

An essential principal for clearing unwanted cellulite is being able to shift metabolism away from burning sugar to burning the right kinds of fat for energy. This shift had already become established by the time they were ready to start Consolidation. Step one in cellulite clearance accomplished. Consolidation is the time during which a woman carefully tests specific foods, which foods in effect their body thrives on and which foods it ‘hates.’ Although there are fundamental principles such as cutting carby and sugary foods that can be applied to all of us, discovering this is a highly individual process because each woman’s body is completely unique. As she begins her food testing she discovers what foods work best for her and which foods undermine her health and trigger weight gain. In this process, she comes to understand that she can eat as much as her body wants of the foods it loves so long as she drastically reduces—in a few cases completely eliminates—those it does not handle well.

SPONTANEOUS INTERMITTENT FASTING

What astounded me, once I figured out what was going on, was that having completed the Essential Spray + Food Plan portion of the program, about 80% of women chose not to return to their old habit of eating three meals a day. They awakened each morning clear headed and unburdened both physically and emotionally having spent 16 to 18 hours since dinner the night before without food. Such women, by now deeply in touch with their own bodies, had discovered for themselves a form of spontaneous fasting akin to the way our Palaeolithic ancestors ate. As hunter gatherers these early humans—whose genes all of us still carry—ate when they were hungry and food was available. The rest of the time, unbeknownst to them, they were experiencing their own brand of intermittent fasting. Discovering all of this taught me something fascinating. Intermittent fasting is far more than the latest craze. It’s a process which—once the human body has become detoxified and metabolically balanced—human beings take to like ducks to water. Once they experience the transformative gifts it can bring a great many people choose to make it part of their lives permanently. As far as cellulite-clearing is concerned, the women I have worked with who spontaneously choose to eat this way tell me that their bodies continue to shed more and more of the dreaded peau d’orange while their overall health continues to build. Next week we’ll look at the second essential step that anyone serious about keeping cellulite at bay needs to take: Making significant changes in the kind of foods you choose to eat as well as how these foods can be successfully incorporated into every experience of intermittent fasting. See you then...

To learn more:

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition January 2005: 81(1); 69-73 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition November 2009: 90(5); 1138-1143 International Journal of Obesity May 2011: 35, 714-727 Click here View Part 2 - Cellulite: Clear The Sludge