If you’ve been searching online for the most effective weight loss diets, there’s a good chance you’ll come across The Hormone Diet. Your hormones are among those factors that could affect your weight. So, the hormone diet aims to reset your hormones through food to get them back to optimal levels and help your body lose weight more effectively.
Related reading: Diet for Hormone Balance: Is Keto Best?
But is there enough research to support this diet? And is it effective at helping you to lose weight? Let’s find out.
What is the Hormone Diet?
The Hormone Diet is a diet plan that originated from a book by Dr. Natasha Turner, a Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine and a New York Times bestselling author. It aims to control women’s hormone fluctuations through diet modifications. She believes hormone fluctuations are the main reasons behind weight gain and other health issues.
The Hormone Diet is a three-step diet plan lasting for six weeks. It claims to harmonize your hormones and address fluctuations by following a specific diet. Aside from diet modifications, it includes instructions for exercise routines and detox methods. It also requires you taking supplements.
The book claims to be the first diet book that emphasizes the importance of having a healthy hormonal balance to achieve a healthy weight and the first to encourage healthy lifestyle habits to improve hormones and burn unwanted fats.
How Does the Hormone Diet Work?
The first step of the diet is a two-week detoxification phase. During this phase, you must remove several food groups from your diet. These include cow dairy, gluten, peanuts, various oils, sugar, red meat, artificial sweeteners, alcohol, citrus, and caffeine.
Related reading: Can Keto Coffee Help You Lose Weight?
You also need to take supplements like fish oil, probiotics, and anti-inflammatories to help with the detoxification phase.
In the second step, you can add some foods to your diet while observing how your body reacts to specific food types. It’s still a restrictive phase since it requires you to avoid foods considered “hormone-hindering,” which include fish believed to have high mercury levels.
You must also avoid meat, non-organic coffee, dried fruits like dates and raisins, high fructose corn syrup, and peanuts. Other foods to avoid are processed foods, nitrates, artificial sweeteners, and refined grains.
In the third step, you’ll follow a similar diet from phase two, but you must add physical activities, such as cardiovascular exercises and strength training.
Is the Hormone Diet Similar to the Hormone Reset Diet?
You could also come across the Hormone Reset Diet when researching the Hormone Diet. But take note that these two diets are different. While both diets aim to reset metabolic hormones to encourage weight loss, the Hormone Reset Diet follows a different procedure.
Created by Gynecologist Sara Gottfried, the Hormone Reset Diet consists of a 21-day program that restricts the consumption of meat, fruits, alcohol, grains, and dairy to correct hormonal imbalances.
The main foods on the Hormone Reset Diet mainly consist of whole foods. However, you are to eliminate certain food groups in every phase. The foods the diet includes and excludes, as well as the diet phases, will depend upon the results of a quiz you have to take to determine the type of hormonal imbalance you have.
Is the Homone Diet a Low Carb Diet?
You may be wondering by now if this diet is in fact a low carb diet. Well, you may be pleased to know that it is not. Grains are restricted on low carb diets whereas this diet only restricts refined grains.
There is some controversy over drastically restricting carbs, especially long term, as it can lead to reduced thyroid hormone output, increased cortisol output and decreased testosterone level. This hormone dysregultion is what the Hormone Diet aims to correct.
Additionally, you have to avoid red meat on the hormone diet but followers of the keto diet can eat grass-fed red meat.
Related reading: Health Benefits of Protein for Keto
Is the Hormone Diet Effective for Weight Loss?
You will likely lose weight on the Hormone Diet. Among the diet’s goals are reducing inflammation and insulin resistance. Studies show that these are the two main factors associated with obesity.
Related reading: Hormones and Weight Loss on Keto
In fact, there is evidence to prove that highly processed foods, which you need to eliminate while on the Hormone Diet, are the number one contributors to weight gain. These foods are more calorie-dense than unprocessed foods and can cause hunger hormone dysfunctions, leading to weight gain.
Related reading: Low Carb or Keto For Weight Loss – Which is Best?
In addition, highly processed foods can further lead to insulin resistance, a condition where the body begins to ignore insulin, the hormone responsible for regulating blood sugar levels.
Insulin resistance can result in weight gain since insulin levels will increase to compensate for their ineffectiveness, resulting in more fat storage.
Highly processed foods contain high amounts of added sugar. So, if you are trying to lose weight, these are the foods you must avoid.
Related reading: 6 Damaging Effects of Sugar
Other Health Benefits of the Hormone Diet
The Hormone Diet’s focus is to help you lose weight and improve overall health by encouraging the consumption of natural and highly nutritious foods while exercising regularly.
Additionally, the Hormone Diet may have a positive impact on mental health and help you get enough sleep. Both are essential components to optimize health that can also affect the weight-regulating hormones in the body.
For instance, high levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, have been found to increase abdominal fat. Improving your mental health, getting adequate sleep, and managing stress can help reduce cortisol.
Compared to other weight loss diets, the Hormone Diet eliminates the need to count calories, making it more freeing, unlike other diet programs. Instead, it encourages you to eat to satiety to prevent unnecessary cravings.
Since the Hormone Diet is not unnecessarily restrictive on calorie consumption, you will not have to deal with rebound weight gain or reduced metabolic rate should you decide to stop the diet.
Final Thoughts
The Hormone Diet is a 3-step program that limits certain food groups in every phase to control hormone fluctuations, believed to be the main causes of weight gain. Aside from requiring the consumption of whole foods, it also encourages regular exercise and getting enough sleep to help your body lose weight.
Although its main focus is weight loss, the Hormone Diet can also improve your overall health and well-being thanks to its positive effects on your hormones.
Even if you will not specifically follow the Hormone Diet, eating whole and nutritious foods can be good for your health and helps you achieve your ideal weight. However, some people might find the Hormone Diet overly restrictive and burdensome.
If you want to achieve optimal health and maintain your healthy weight, you can follow the best parts of the diet, which are to focus on eating whole foods, exercising more, and getting enough sleep.
