My 21-Day Challenge to You: Lose the Weight—and the Wrinkles! New York City is my home. And I love to eat—hey, I’m Italian!—so when I’m out on the town, I hit every place from Le Bernardin to the Pearl Oyster Bar.
But back in 2015, when I was strolling around the city, I did a double-take when I walked past Brodo in the East Village and saw its menu: bone broth. Just bone broth.
Turkey broth. Pasture-fed beef broth. Amish chicken broth. I was amazed to see that New Yorkers were discovering the food I’d been prescribing for years—and suddenly they couldn’t get enough of it. People were abandoning Starbucks in droves for their daily fix of bone broth, and chic restaurants all over the city were selling it faster than they could make it.
And it wasn’t just a New York craze. Celebrities like Shailene Woodley and Gwyneth Paltrow got hooked on their daily fix of bone broth; morning talk-show hosts raved about it; and foodies everywhere started making it in their own kitchens.
As it turned out, that was just the beginning. The craze has since become a full-blown revolution. Today, you’ll find bone broth in grocery stores and on restaurant menus everywhere. And from NFL players to the Kardashians, everyone’s drinking it.
I’m thrilled to see the bone broth movement catch fire, because as a doctor who’s been prescribing bone broth for decades, here’s what I know: Bone broth isn’t just broth. And it isn’t just soup. It’s concentrated healing. This broth, made from meat, poultry, or fish bones and simmered until it turns into nutrient-rich “liquid gold,” is one of the world’s oldest and most powerful medicinal foods.
Millions of people are discovering that there’s more to bone broth than meets the eye. That’s because this magical food strips weight off your body and takes years off your age. When you combine the power of bone broth intermittent fasts with a core diet of fat-burning foods, you will drop pounds like crazy—and at the same time, you’ll erase wrinkles and under-eye bags.
In fact, if you’re willing to commit to just 21 days on this diet, I promise you this: You will transform your body.
How do I know this? It’s my job. I’m a naturopathic physician and a certified nutritional consultant with more than 20 years of clinical experience, and my specialty is transforming people. What’s more, I’m really good at it. Over the course of my career, I’ve helped thousands of people lose weight and become healthy, sexy, and energetic again. My success stories include everyone from 450-pound patients who lost all of their excess weight to Hollywood celebrities who need to have perfect bodies and faces for the big screen. And bone broth is a key to my transformations.
--------Jenny showed up in my office weighing 180 pounds. As soon as I said hi, she started to cry. Why? Because she was sure I couldn’t help her. “Nobody has,” she said. She told me she went on her first diet at 13, and 20 years later—after Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem, and a dozen other diets—she weighed more than ever. Now she was borderline diabetic. And after watching her mother die from complications of diabetes, she was terrified that it would happen to her. Jenny knew she needed to lose weight. But every diet she’d tried left her weak, trembly, and hungry. She’d lose 5 or 6 pounds right away, but she could never keep the momentum. After the first few days, her cravings would grow so strong that she couldn’t do anything except obsess about food. After a week or two, she’d crash, bingeing on ice cream and pizza. And then she’d feel disgusted with herself. She’d seen me on TV, and she wanted to believe that I could help. But she’d been burned too often to really think I could. So I didn’t promise her anything. Instead, I simply described my program. And then I said, “Just give me 3 weeks.” She did. At the end of that time, she’d lost 20 pounds. Six months later, she now weighs 130 pounds. She’s not prediabetic anymore. She looks like she’s 25, and she feels like a teenager. Just 6 months ago, Jenny looked matronly. Nobody noticed her when she walked by. Men ignored her. Women dismissed her as “no competition.” Instead of being the center of attention, she was on the sidelines. And instead of posing for pictures, she was hiding behind the camera. In essence, she was invisible. Now, however, Jenny looks hot—from her slim figure to her glowing skin. The first time she came to my office, she was wearing a plus-size flowered muumuu—that classic “overweight old lady” dress. On her last visit, she wore skinny jeans and a halter top. Invisible? Not this girl. Not ever again.
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Why was Jenny able to lose weight so quickly on my program, after decades of struggling? Because I took the pain and fear out of dieting. When I showed her that she never had to starve in order to lose weight—and that, in fact, she could eat
well—I gave her the information she needed to transform her body and her life.
Now Jenny has enough confidence and energy to light up a room. And when she walks through a door, heads turn.
MY SECRET WEAPON FOR FAST, HUNGER-FREE WEIGHT LOSS: BONE BROTH
I’ve been guiding weight-loss transformations like Jenny’s for more than two decades. However, it took me a while to discover the most powerful weapon in my weight-loss arsenal.
Early in my career, I quickly established a track record of success. But I wanted to do even better for my patients—and, in particular, I wanted to achieve the biggest results in the shortest time for patients struggling with obesity.
Many of the people I work with merely want to lose a dress size or a pants size, but others are dangerously overweight. They’re diabetic, they have heart disease, they have sleep apnea, and they can barely move. So they need to drop weight fast.
As any weight-loss expert will tell you, fasting is the quickest way to jump-start weight loss (even though it’s difficult or impossible for many people—more on my easy and painless solution for this shortly!). Unlike mere calorie restriction, fasting sends your metabolism into hyperdrive (I’ll talk more about this in Chapter 3). That’s why I’ve always encouraged my obese or even mildly overweight patients to fast at least 1 or 2 days a week. Besides cutting down on calories, here are some of the reasons fasting jump-starts weight loss.
■ It optimizes hormones. Fasting causes your levels of insulin to drop and your levels of another hormone called glucagon to rise. Think of glucagon as the mirror image of insulin. While insulin packs on fat, glucagon pulls fat out of cells (I’ll get into this in Chapter 3).
■ It makes levels of human growth hormone surge. This hormone burns fat and builds lean muscle, sculpting the core, arms, and legs.
■ It cleanses the body. Think of the fluid around your cells—your cellular matrix—as similar to the water in a fish tank. When it’s filled with sludge, the cells are sludgy, too. Fasting cleanses your cellular matrix, removing debris that makes cells sluggish.
So fasting works. And it works immediately. But here’s the problem: Fasting can be hard.
Over time, I found that while many people can handle total fasts with ease, many others can’t. They get hungry and shaky. They start having headaches. They can’t focus at work or at home. They get anxious, and they start obsessing constantly about food. So they give up.
No way was I going to let this happen to my patients. For many of them, I’m the “last chance” doctor—and I wasn’t about to let them down. And while I knew my patients could lose weight over time without fasting, I also knew that they needed to see immediate results. Both emotionally and physically, they had to get a quick win.
So I had to find an answer. I needed to create a program that would give these dangerously overweight patients—and all of my patients, including those who need to lose only a few pounds—the immediate benefits of fasting without the drawbacks.
And then it hit me:
bone broth.
Copyright © 2015 by Kellyann Petrucci, MS, ND Foreword by New York Times Bestselling Author JJ Virgin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
