Radical Metabolism doesn't have to be time consuming or expensive—here's how you can save both time and money on the plan.

It's no secret that eating healthy and taking nutritional supplements is an excellent investment in your health and for your weight loss goals, but sometimes the budget or a busy schedule can get in the way of your best intentions. Over the past four decades, I've worked with thousands upon thousands of men and women looking to improve their health and slim their waistlines, and I've taken notes on the creative solutions they've come up with to fit my plans into their hectic lifestyles and tight budgets.

While at first glance, Radical Metabolism may look like it's full of expensive, exotic ingredients, I can assure you that I created this plan with options in mind just for people like you. I'd like to share with you my comprehensive Top 10 Tips to keep this plan within your budget and save on time.

1. Don't Skimp on Supplements
This may sound like a strange way to save money, but hear me out. Inexpensive supplements that seem to "fit the bill" for this plan are not always all they're cracked up to be, and not worth the investment in my opinion. Several retailers were investigated in 2015, and the worst was found to have only four percent of their products contain the DNA of the ingredients listed on the label (read more about this here). This is why I'm so careful about the manufacturers I recommend to you, and I believe their quality is worth the investment. If you follow the tips I'm giving you, I assure you it will free up some room in your budget to invest in a few high-quality supplements to enhance your success on this plan.

My must-haves for this plan include Weight Loss Formula, Bile Builder, and CLA-1000, all from UNI KEY Health.

2. Menu Plan
Ever heard the phrase "failing to plan is planning to fail?" It's especially true when it comes to your diet. It's important to plan out your meals and snacks and make your weekly grocery list from that plan. Plan at least a week at a time to really make your budget work for you. By sticking to your list and buying only what you need, you'll avoid the added expense of buying foods you won't use that eventually spoil in your refrigerator. Even though I've included a sample menu plan in my book for the three weeks of the Radical Reboot, you are welcome to create your own if it doesn't suit your tastes or your budget. Make sure you keep track of which recipes you and your family enjoy, so you have a list to pull ideas from later on when Radical Metabolism becomes a lifestyle for you.

3. KISS (Keep It Simple, Sister)
If you're like me, when a plan like this comes your way, you flip right to the lists of allowed foods to see what you're going to be eating. Radical Metabolism has a wide variety of foods, from everyday vegetables that are probably already in your refrigerator, to decadent treats you haven't even thought to buy for yourself. When you're on a budget or have limited time, it's important to keep your ingredients list short and simple.

The three foods I've seen questions about in my Radical Metabolism Facebook group, are watercress, daikon radish, and celeriac (celery root). If you have trouble sourcing any ingredients in the plan, substitutions can always be made, just choose from the list in the book and be sure you aren't using a more starchy carb or vegetable. For watercress, substitute arugula or rocket, or another bitter green. For daikon radish, substitute red or icicle radishes, or simply omit the radish altogether. My favorite substitute for celeriac is cauliflower, which is widely available and easy to find on sale.

When looking at the healthy fats, choose only a couple of budget-friendly options to start with. My recommendations for the best bang for your buck are hempseed oil, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, bone broth, and ghee. Look at your menu plan and see which of these fabulous fats fit with what you plan to cook.

Radical proteins are another investment to consider. At first glance, they may all seem out of reach, but I assure you, this is not the case. Choose the most versatile proteins that can provide more than one meal. My choices would be grass-fed soup bones, grass-fed hamburger and whole pastured chickens.

When looking at fruits and vegetables, except for the juices, frozen alternatives can be considered for both cost savings and convenience. It's such a treat to put frozen pineapple in the blender for a sorbet-like dessert to get your serving of fruit in for the day. Or cover frozen berries in fresh cream and sprinkle with a little Flora-Key probiotic for a sweet, almost ice cream-like treat. Also look at which vegetables will give you more than one day's worth of servings. Cooking one butternut squash and freezing into the ½ cup portions you will need, yield at least a week's worth of starchy carbs you can use in many recipes.

4. Buy in Bulk
Even if it's only food for one person, you can still take advantage of bulk bargains. For instance, if your favorite grocery store has organic blueberries on sale, they will give you a discount if you buy by the case, and you can take them home, wash them, and freeze what you know you can't eat within the time they're fresh. The same goes for cases of pastured chicken breasts, grass-fed hamburger, and even nuts and seeds.

5. Don't Limit Yourself to the Grocery Store
There are nationwide coops, local buying clubs, farmers markets, and you can even go direct and get to know your local farmer to get deep discounts on excellent quality meats and produce. Timing is everything when it comes to farmers markets and local farmers. Hitting the market at the end of the day often means deep discounts so the farmer doesn't have to take their produce home. Farmers offer CSA memberships or if you go directly to the farm, they may have cuts of meat that don't sell well you can get for a steal, or you can exchange work on the farm for your monthly share of produce.

Azure Standard is an organic coop that has monthly drop sites around the country. You simply place your order online, choose your pickup site, show up at the appointed time, load your food, and go. Apples keep a long time when refrigerated properly and they often sell organic by the case for less than $1 per pound. Bountiful Baskets is a bi-weekly produce delivery with organic options, and there are many others that are similar. Local buying clubs take advantage of deep discounts on foods and nonirradiated spices offered by companies like Frontier Coop.

If you stick with the grocery store, it pays to shop around. Stores like Sprouts and Aldi are popping up all over the country and sell grass-fed beef, pastured poultry, and organic produce for much less than conventional grocery stores. And don't forget Costco. Their frozen organic vegetables and fruits are some of the best deals I've found.

6. Make It Yourself
Whenever possible, cook from scratch and make it yourself. Whole, natural foods prepared from scratch, full of love, are the healthiest thing you can do for yourself and your family. It not only saves money but tastes so much better than store-bought alternatives. It doesn't have to be time-consuming if you plan ahead.

Ghee is simply clarified butter, which can be made from regular butter in your oven. Buying dried beans in bulk and cooking in an Instant Pot breaks down lectins and is healthier and more budget-friendly than canned alternatives.

Save the peels from your vegetables in a bag in the freezer and add to the bones from your chicken and make your own bone broth. Freeze in individual serving sizes to save time later when life is too hectic for much meal prep. Throw frozen vegetables, pre-cooked meat, and frozen bone broth into a pot and heat, add Radical spices, and you have a quick and flavorful soup that cooks itself while you are busy doing other things.

7. Meal Prep Ahead of Time
On the weekend (or whenever your days off happen to be), prep and cook foods for the week. Make Radical Lemon Cubes, and wash and cut the fresh vegetables you need for the snacks and recipes you'll be using during the week. Store in labeled containers in the refrigerator in the portions needed for each recipe you're using that week. Cut vegetables like jicama, carrots, and celery make great crunchy snacks and store well in water in a wide mouth, quart size glass canning jar while saving space in the refrigerator.

8. Batch Cook to Save Time and Money
For a while, crockpot meals were all the rage. You do the meal prep all at once, freeze the meals in gallon-sized bags, then thaw one the night before, throw in the crockpot in the morning, and have dinner when you get home. While this is a great option for soups and stews, some vegetables don't freeze well and these meals often share the same texture, which can feel repetitive after a while. Batch cooking is another timesaving alternative that gives you a wide variety of options.

When you buy pastured chicken, it's usually whole, which is good for our purposes. Depending on how many mouths you have to feed, roast one or two (or even three) whole chickens in the oven, then pick the meat off the bones and put in individual serving sized containers. Use the bones to make bone broth for many of the Radical Metabolism main course recipes. One chicken can be used for three meals or more, even in a large family.

Brown several pounds of grass-fed hamburger at once and freeze in the portions you need to make taco salads and a variety of other recipes. Reheating the meat in a little water with dried spices on the stove will actually infuse the flavors you're looking for better than it would if you were adding them to raw meat.

9. Grow It Yourself
I know this sounds daunting, but it's much easier than you think. Microgreens, especially from sunflower seeds, are some of the most expensive greens served in fine dining establishments. You can grow them on a tray in a sunny window and harvest in less than a month for just a few dollars.

If you are feeling more adventurous, you can grow most vegetables and herbs in a pot or even in a bag of soil, or try your hand at gardening. A packet of seeds is less expensive than even one head of organically grown lettuce, and yields so much more, in a surprisingly short amount of time. There are a variety of gardening techniques that are simple and time-saving, and your county extension office has free information available and even a master gardener who will consult with you for free to get you started or help you problem solve.

There are also a lot of "weeds" that are edible and pack a big nutritional punch. Dandelions are a great example of this; the greens can be used in salads while the root can be roasted for a delicious tea. Make sure they haven't been sprayed with herbicides or insecticides before harvesting. It takes time to learn friend from foe, but learning to "eat your weeds" can be fun.

10. Enlist the Help of Friends
There's a new type of gathering emerging, and it's pretty—exciting meal prep parties. At these gatherings, participants either pay a fee to the organizer, or it's done potluck-style, where each member brings an ingredient or part of the list of ingredients, and everyone gets together and assembles the same meals for the week. If you have friends you want to introduce to Radical Metabolism, this is a great way to do it! You can start with a 4-Day Cleanse party, split the list of ingredients between friends and do all the juicing and make the soup together, then share your weight loss successes at the end.

For most of you, this isn't your first "diet rodeo." You've searched for years and tried a variety of plans, only to end the day still feeling fat and fatigued, struggling with an "over forty" sluggish metabolism. On top of that, it seems like your thyroid problem is progressively getting worse, not better. If this is you, then get ready for Radical Metabolism to breathe new life into that tired thyroid and recharge your stalled metabolism!

You can purchase Radical Metabolism at: www.radicalmetabolism.com

For the last three decades I have found myself rewriting the rules of nutrition—and now, with Radical Metabolism, I'm at it again. Why? Because the latest science paints a new picture, and it's not a pretty one. I am well past fifty, and in moving through that transition I was personally challenged by a metabolic slowdown. The plan in this book has evolved from my discovery of what worked for others and myself. I happily report that my tummy pooch has finally disappeared!

We are living a modern toxic nightmare and the old remedies don't work. Every day we face an invisible war deep within our body as hormone-disrupting environmental pollutants contaminate, and progressively erode, our cellular defenses.

Petrochemicals, plastics, heavy metals, fake hormones, radiation, microbes, and other toxic agents all wreak hormone havoc on our biology. Most of these toxins are hidden, lurking in our food, air, and water, as well as body care, household, and cleaning products, and even technology, which makes them even more insidious. This is not your parents' or grandparents' world anymore. Our planet—and our body—are crying out for help.

We have more than 70 trillion cells in the body, and every one of them is at risk. Once enough of your cells become compromised, then your tissue and organ function will soon follow. Healthy cells begin with healthy cell membranes. Without them, your body essentially stands naked and defenseless against those toxic assaults, which results in hormone disruption and inflammation. Inflammation is the number one factor driving nearly every chronic disease today. Back in 1858, physician Rudolf Virchow, the "father of modern pathology," said, "All diseases are disturbances at the cellular level." He argued that to treat a disease, we must first understand the cause—and the cause is always found at the level of the cell. There are many examples. Alzheimer's disease involves defective processing of amyloid precursor proteins by cells in the brain. A genetic predisposition to high cholesterol is caused by the defective cellular uptake of lipoproteins. Cancer occurs when cells develop aberrant growth patterns, and autoimmune diseases arise when cellular communication runs amok.

And so it is with metabolism.

After working with literally thousands of "fat, forty, and fatigued" females, the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place for me. It became clear that no diet in the world would work if your metabolism has turned toxic. One reason many diets fail is they don't correct the shutdown of key fat-burning tissues in the body. You have three important metabolically active tissues: brown fat, muscle, and your microbiome—that vast community of microorganisms inhabiting your gut. Each of these prefers a speci.c type of food for its optimal function. If you don't properly fuel these fat-burning tissues, they aren't going to return the favor by giving you a radical metabolism and a healthy weight.

Another critical missing link concerns the role of the much-maligned omega-6 fats—the pariah of both conventional and alternative health experts. We hear so much these days about ditching omega-6s for omega-3 fats, but as it turns out, high-0quality omega-6 fats are the most critical fuel for reigniting sluggish mitochondria—the energy engines in your cells.

Essential fats and certain essential amino acids fast-track your metabolism for lasting weight loss, as well as being vital to the nourishment of your cell membranes that surround and protect the mitochondria.

As you will read shortly, the mitochondria are linked to the metabolically active "brown fat" that eats up heavy-duty amounts of glucose and fat for dramatic weight loss and fat loss, and decreased risk of insulin resistance.

In addition, no disease can be healed if your cell membranes—which direct nutrients in and poisons out—are weak and unstable. Radical Metabolism is all about what to eat to rebuild and fortify those lipid (fat)-based cell membranes, so that toxins are prevented from moving up the chain and gunking-up the function of every cell, tissue, and organ in your body, from your brain to your thyroid, gallbladder, liver, kidneys, and skin. This is also where omega-6 fats really shine. True healing requires we protect ourselves at the source—at the cellular level. Finally, breakthrough research reveals how putting back the missing omega-6s can boost cellular energy, to gain vitality and accelerate fat burn.

But reinstating omega-6s is just one unique aspect of Radical Metabolism. Eating "good fats" does you no good if you can't properly digest them. So, this program also introduces the forgotten but powerful role bile plays in the body's slimming systems. Bile is stored in the gallbladder to break down dietary fat and remove toxins from the body. Harvard Medical School research has revealed that subjects with improved bile health showed a remarkable 53 percent spike in metabolism.

Even more fascinating is a study out of Finland finding that people with decreased bile production are nearly ten times more apt to experience hypothyroidism. With low thyroid on the rise, this provides great hope to the millions of hypothyroid sufferers who experience metabolic slowdown as well as fatigue, dry skin, and constipation. Besides hypothyroidism, studies have also connected poor quality bile with chronic fatigue, migraines, depression, and autoimmune disorders.

If you no longer have your gallbladder, no problem! Unlike other diets, the Radical Metabolism plan helps you compensate for this to ensure you can fully utilize and digest all those good and essential fats that are your body's preferred fuel. This is a key difference between Radical Metabolism and Paleo, Paleo Plus, and/or ketogenic diets. I don't want you overloading on fats if you don't have a gallbladder or suffer from poor bile quality (as most weight-loss resistant individuals do) without nutritional backup, as this can result in weight gain instead of weight loss—as well as decreased energy, gastrointestinal problems, stress on the kidneys, and other issues.

Putting It All Together
As you read, Radical Metabolism will probably shake up your long-held beliefs and assumptions about what is healthy, especially when it comes to diet. I sure hope so! I'm not just talking about weight loss—I'm talking about staying energized for life. Let's put the brakes on aging—I'm talking about gaining the tools necessary for dodging age-related illnesses so you won't spend years stuck in the hospital revolving door. If you find the word radical a bit intimidating, rest assured that the strategies herein are actually really quite simple and straightforward, designed for easy integration into today's busy lifestyle. However, these simple strategies produce radical results!

In the first part of this book, you'll learn the scientific basis for the program before moving on to the protocol itself, so you can understand the rationale. I start by laying out my five Radical Rules to rescue a stalled metabolism, which are foundational to the program. Each of the five must be addressed if you want to reignite your internal cellular energy and fat-burning tissues to fix your broken metabolism. More than 80 percent of readers will feel better after just four days of implementing the basic Radical Rules. In the second half of the book is the eating program itself. It kicks off with a 4-Day Radical Intensive Cleanse, followed by a 21-Day Radical Reboot—a two-part "cellular makeover" diet designed to jumpstart your detox pathways and your metabolic healing. The final section expands the menu with fifty amazing recipes, and provides additional guidance for staying on track for the rest of your life. Here is what you'll learn:

• How to harness the power of omega-6 oils to fuel brown fat to effortlessly stoke your fat-burning fires,
• while fortifying your cell membranes and ridding your body of toxins.
• How bitter foods are key to metabolic healing and digestion. These support your gallbladder health, bile flow, fat breakdown, and better absorption of fat-soluble vitamins for immunity and skin health.
• The fabulous foods (herbs, fresh veggies, bitters including watercress, berries, and supplements) that will kick your metabolism into overdrive, reboot your gallbladder (or replace what's needed in the form of bile salts if you no longer have your gallbladder), and heal your gut by feeding you "from cell to soul."
• How to optimize your protein and amino acid intake to prevent muscle loss, boost your mitochondria, and reset your "metabolic thermostat."
• How to reduce your exposure to unsuspected toxins that may contaminate some of the foods you love, such as bone broth, chocolate, and green tea.
• How to modify your kitchen to steer clear of common food contaminants, such as aluminum and Teflon.
• How soups and juices can be combined into a powerful cleanse that rejuvenates and resets your system.
• How cleansing beverages, such as refreshing hibiscus and dandelion teas, help clear toxins.
• A special section about prebiotic and probiotic foods (jicama, miso, sauerkraut, yogurt) to optimize immunity.

Because this program deals with all the toxic environmental challenges of our modern world, think of it more as a lifestyle program than a "diet plan." For you to regain your health and maintain it over the long run, these changes will need to be permanent. After all, although there are steps you can take to mitigate the toxins in your home, it's unlikely our overall environmental toxicity problem is going to vanish anytime soon.

Lastly, radical times call for radical changes, but these techniques don't all have to be implemented overnight. If you begin to feel overwhelmed, simply slow it down a bit... you know, baby steps. Stress is as detrimental to your health as bad fats—so getting stressed out over these changes is counterproductive. Please know that we are here to support you every step of the way, online and otherwise. Be kind to yourself. It's important to recognize and applaud even your smallest accomplishments. If it took ten years for your metabolism to turn against you, you can't expect to completely heal the relationship in less than thirty days. But with a little willingness and determination, you can succeed. You can radically improve your metabolism and be on your way to an ageless, radiant you.

Let's get started!

Excerpted from Radical Metabolism: A Powerful New Plan to Blast Fat and Reignite Your Energy in Just 21 Days by Ann Louise Gittleman, PhD, CNS. Copyright© 2018. Available from Da Capo Lifelong Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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Radical Metabolism–A Powerful New Plan to Blast Fat and Reignite Your Energy in Just 21 Days