HOUSTON – A new diet trend claims that the healthy foods you're eating could actually be causing you to gain weight.
The Lyn-Genet Plan is looking at how foods react to the chemistry in your body, claiming it can reduce the effects of diabetes, chronic pain and arthritis by eliminating inflammation.
"If you're switching one food for another it doesn't seem like a diet, you're just eating foods that are right for you," said Lyn-Genet Recitas, the author of "The Plan."
Recitas claims the trick to staying slim or reducing inflammation may have more to do with your body's chemistry than counting calories.
"The Plan" came after hundreds of people were monitored for weight gain after eating everyday foods. It eliminates everything in the first four days except for some fruits, mixed greens, olive oil and other easily digestible ingredients. Then it adds more complex foods.
If weight increases, Recitas believes it's because those foods cause inflammation and are therefore deemed "reactive."
"That can be bloating after a meal, or constipation, or your joints hurting, or headaches, or low energy or irritability but it's always going to show up, interestingly, as weight gain," said Recitas. "Because when you eat a food that doesn't work for you, you have a histamine response, and that's short-term water weight gain but that stays on as actual weight, because that makes your cortisol levels rise and now we're talking about actual weight gain."
For 21 days, "The Plan" adds foods back into your diet, holding off on foods that more often cause an increase on the scale. For example, Recitas claims 85 percent of people gain weight when adding back typically healthy foods like Greek yogurt or salmon. She said there's hardly any weight gain with things like pit fruits and mixed greens, but anything that causes weight gain the day after adding it into your meals should be eliminated from your diet.
Once you find the right combination, Lyn-Genet said you can lose up to ten percent of your body weight.
"I'm not sure how much science there is in that," Memorial Hermann dietician Sharon Smalling said. She prefers to tell patients to moderate foods than eliminate them.
Physical therapist Pamela Bercutt believes in The Plan so much that she regularly recommends it to her patients.
"I think a lot of diets say everything in moderation and she's saying, 'Mmm, no. Let's weed out the things that trigger you.' She also believes in dark chocolate and joy in her life and having a glass of wine," Bercutt said.
Bercutt said she's seen plenty of patients benefit from "The Plan" over and over by keeping those simple pleasures and learning what unique reactions their body has.
"I actually treated a woman with rheumatoid arthritis, and the thing she loved the most was coffee, and it was killing her arthritis, and it's documented that caffeine effects your joints," Bercutt said.
They took her coffee habit down to one cup a day.
"That was her main trigger, and when you have inflammation in your joints, you'll have inflammation all over your body, and just by cutting out that one thing, she lost ten pounds," Bercutt said. "It's the weirdest thing your body reacts when it's not happy about what you put in it."
After the successful release of The Lyn-Genet Plan, she's releasing a cookbook Dec. 30 with recipes of the "low reactive" foods.