Interview with Jillian Michaels Introducing Master Your Metabolism

In the seven seasons that Biggest Loser has been on the air, we’ve watched Jillian Michaels transform people’s lives in and out of the gym. She helps her contestants understand the emotional side of their weight loss journey so that their weight loss will be manageable and long-term.

Today she told us that she even uses her own team of doctors for her contestants, not the Biggest Loser doctors who merely tell Bob and Jillian if they’re allowed to do something with a contestant. It was in using her own endocrinologist that she discovered an issue with season four’s Julie Haddon. Jillian recalls in Julie’s first weigh-in, usually one of the most substantial on the show, she had only lost two pounds. She didn’t understand it, but her endocrinologist did, and pointed out that Julie had PCOS and insulin resistance, two bio-chemical disorders affecting her metabolism.

More after the jump

“I didn’t understand it until that moment,” says Jillian, who used that knowledge to help Julie become the second place contestant on season four. Jillian began working with those doctors to better understand her own metabolism. In her new book, “Master Your Metabolism,” which releases April 7, she shares the culmination of 17 years of fitness knowledge, with revelations about her own health and experience with weight loss. Her doctors told her that she had hypothyroid, estrogen dominance and low testosterone. Years of eating “frankenfoods” (her name for fake, preservative-filled, chemical foods), yo-yo dieting and what she calls treating her body “like a lab rat” had harmed her natural biochemistry.

“Oh my god! This is the key to the kingdom. I have to understand this,” she says. She worked with medical professionals, and co-writer Mariska Van Aalst, to break down the information to make it digestible and understandable for everyone. Much moreso than the work of say Diana Schwarzbein, whose book on a similar topic Jillian says will make your head hurt to read. “It was like reading quantum physics!,” she says.

In “Master Your Metabolism,” Jillian outlines a smart and approachable plan to remove all the fake foods from your diet and replace them with whole, natural foods. “You’ve got to start taking processed foods out of your diet,” she declares, explaining that those foods do cause diseases like cancer or diabetes, they disrupt your body’s biochemistry and attach the growth hormones. For some, these will be drastic dietary changes, but she says she can either “appeal to your mortality or your vanity,” and when you follow her three-step plan for diet and fitness, you’ll likely win on both sides. The plan also pays moderate attention to fitness, requiring about four-to-five hours per week in the gym, using both strength and cardio training.

If you’re ready to understand your metabolism and how you can work with it to attain healthy weight loss, then cracking open “Master Your Metabolism” is worth your time. Be prepared to change your eating habits for the better, and get fit under Jillian’s expert tutelage.

See part two of our interview, as Jillian discusses her future on The Biggest Loser.

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