The Eat-Clean Revolution with Tosca Reno

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In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Tosca Reno explains how you can ditch sugar, eat clean and regain your health.

Tosca is on a mission to inspire people to transform their lives – and to commit to changing for life. She’s started an Eat-Clean Revolution and she wants you to join her!

She is author of the books: Your Best Body Now and the Eat-Clean Diet series, and The Start Here Diet. Tosca is one of North America’s most renowned health and wellness experts leading the pack in the battle against obesity.

Main Questions Asked:

How do you get clients to move beyond the fear of letting go of a food they ‘cannot live without’?
How do we get off of sugar when it’s such an addiction for us?
How is sugar disguised in our diet?
Can you tell us about your 4-week program?
Can you share with us a real case of someone you worked with?

Key Points made by Tosca:

Nutrition is a component that is often overlooked. When people want to begin their physical transformations, they think all they need is exercise but it doesn’t work like that. In truth, to undertake that physical transformation, 80% of how the body looks and feels has to do with what we’re eating.
The Body Beautiful Body Healthy Formula goes like this: 80% nutrition + 10% genetics + 10% training = 100% beautiful new you.
Science has proved that 30 minutes of exercise performed per day at a maximum heart rate of 65% to 75% or higher will promote and protect brain and blood volume, brain function. It does a thousand different things to enhance physical health, not just your blood chemistry, etc. but your muscle shape, your metabolic rate, how you feel, your flexibility, your heart – there are so many aspects of it.
I was a self-confessed sugaraholic.
When I learned how to eat clean, I discovered I could take my physical well-being, my health, and turn it around through positive lifestyle change.
Strike sugar from the diet. This is the single most important activity you could do to help yourself.
Getting rid of sugar is the hardest thing you’ll ever do but it will yield the greatest results.
Begin by identifying where the sugar components live in your life. Then follow a program of eating clean: eat properly prepared, well-sourced, whole, nutrient-dense foods that are not packaged, processed, and refined, and contain the complete package that Mother Nature intended for you to consume to help bring you back to health.
Any foods that are carbohydrate-based, heavily processed and refined will act like sugar in the body.
Foods that are engineered by scientists in lab coats who have figured out how to seduce us through manipulating food and flavors and textures and then we crave these sugary, salty things that will derail us in our health.
In short, if you can’t pronounce the ingredients and the ingredient list is as long as your arm on a packaged food, you likely shouldn’t be eating it.
This is where the Eat-Clean, or The Revolution as Dr. Oz likes to call it, fits in. That is to eat 6 smaller meals per day based on the consumption of lean protein, complex carbs, and healthy fats all at once. Not starving yourself. Not counting calories. Counting calories is completely missing the point of the quality of the food.
Eat foods that are free of preservatives, toxins and refined goods. I want to be eating foods that will actually contribute to my health.
Diet foods are a big myth. They’ve made us heavier than ever.
Think about your big Why. The reason that’s big enough to get you to make changes in your diet today. It doesn’t have to be frightening. These can be simple adjustments we can make to get ourselves back on track.
Sugar is not a food. It didn’t exist 400 or 500 years ago. We created it by refining the devil out of sugar cane and beet sugar.
We have a powerful taste for sweet. That’s the way we’re programmed as human beings but we can change that. It’s a changeable, moveable, organic thing.
Sugar has the same addictive qualities as heroin and cocaine. It is a white crystalline substance. You get this powerful desire, this rush. The brain floods with chemicals but it’s temporary. You crash and then you want more.
I feel that sugar is more dangerous that heroin and cocaine because we intuitively know that both of those are bad for us but we’re not that clear on sugar being bad for us and yet, the American Heart Association just came out and said, “Whoops, sorry! We were wrong about all that fat. No, it’s not the fat that’s causing heart disease. It’s sugar. And by the way, sugar is to blame for Type 2 Diabetes.” And now Type 3 Diabetes which is another name for Alzheimer’s and dementia.
We are in the grip of a food that is not a food. We need to put our glasses on and be enlightened that we can avoid it by understanding how it’s disguised, how it appears in our diet, how dangerous it is and how to move away to eating clean, nutrient-dense, whole foods instead.
Google “sugar” and you’ll come up with a list of a hundred different names or disguises for sugar.
A sample breakfast: a bowl of Rice Krispies, a glass of orange juice, a piece of white toast with commercial peanut butter = massive sugar load for the pancreas to mop up.
We don’t have to make ourselves crazy about it but you can begin somewhere by making a change. My breakfast this morning was sautéed spinach greens in coconut oil with a bit of turmeric, over easy eggs, and that’s breakfast. You can have any number of things that do not have those massive hits of sugar.
This is a 4-week Strike Sugar Program. It’s loaded with menu plans, recipes, and there’s a light emphasis on exercise but I’m mostly helping you to reset the organs of blood sugar handling by detoxing or clearing them of all processed foods, all sugars except for a few natural ones. We’re very tight even on natural sugars. There are certain natural foods that are quite high in sugar.
Some results from detoxing include: increase in libido, warding off diabetes and becoming pregnant, less headache, less back pain, skin has cleared up, less irritability, more energy to get through the day, a robust feeling, a feeling of well-being.
I worked with one young family. Mom and dad were overweight by 150 pounds. Both wore sleep apnea gear to go to bed. The children were highly disordered, very irritable, moody, couldn’t sleep through the night, wild nightmares, etc. The parents were irritable, moody, and on high blood pressure medication, heading towards Type 2 diabetes. Really no quality of life.
By putting them on the Eat-Clean Strike Sugar program, they lost weight. And they learned how to eat foods that don’t come out of a box and regained their health.