Weight Optimization - Rule One
- Doc Mac

- Dec 8, 2025
- 8 min read
Updated: Dec 22, 2025
Doc Mac's
The PAUSE Blog
Live Long! Live Well!
“Doc, if you had to name the single most important rule for eating to optimize one's weight, what would it be?”

EAT LIKE TOM
Imagine a man who lives in quiet solitude along the most beautiful river you’ve ever seen. His log home rests at the gentle bend of an earthly Eden. Butterflies drift through sunlit air. Birds glide effortlessly overhead. Frogs croak in rhythm...okay, maybe no frogs.
He wakes as the light spills in, steps outside, and draws in a deep breath of the cleanest air imaginable. His lungs celebrate as oxygen slips easily into his bloodstream.
He walks behind the house to the chicken coop and opens the door. The chickens burst out with joyful chaos, pecking at seeds and scratching for worms. While they feast, he follows a narrow mountain path. From his pocket, he pulls a cotton bag and, as he walks, fills it with wild morel mushrooms. On the way back, he spots a few chanterelles and gently tucks them into another bag.
Returning home, he stops at the coop and gathers a few warm eggs. The chickens know the routine and scramble back into the safety of their shelter.
Inside his home, he lifts a small door in the floor and pulls out a crock of cool butter, churned by his own hands.
He stokes the fire in the stove and sets an iron skillet over the heat. A knob of butter hits the pan and melts into gold as he chops the morels and chanterelles. He scatters the mushrooms into the butter and lets them brown. In a small bowl, he beats the eggs and adds another knob of butter. When the mixture is smooth, he pours it into the pan. As the eggs begin to set, he spoons the browned mushrooms over the top and folds the omelet closed.
He plates his finished omelet, dusts it with salt and pepper, and crowns it with a sprig from his herb garden. He chooses a fork from the drawer, polishes it with a cotton napkin until it sparkles. He cuts a small bite, places it into his mouth, and savors it as he chews. He nods once, then smiles.
Want to learn the most powerful tool we have to optimize weight and live a long and healthy life?
Here it is…
GOD-MADE FOOD
“The food that talks to your cells.”
Because we are, in many ways, walking reflections of our hormones, to live long and live well, we must also be the supervisors of those hormones. The problem? You can’t supervise what you don’t understand.
If you make consuming God-made food and avoiding human-made food a lifestyle, your hormones will be better balanced, your weight will be more ideal, your health will be optimized, and you will have improved clarity of thinking.
"The first rule for optimizing hormones, weight, health, and mind is to eat God-made foods."
THE HOPE PROTOCOL
The HOPE Protocol is a system developed over the last 46 years of practicing Health Optimization with tens of thousands of patients. I have learned there are four strands to live a long, high-quality life.
Hormones - We are nothing more than a reflection of how well-balanced our hormones are.
Organic - The closer we are to God-made sustenance, be it what goes into our bodies or what surrounds our bodies, the better we will age.
Purification - I have found that we must treat different organs one at a time to be as healthy as we can be. I start with the liver, then the gut, then the muscles, and so on.
Enlightenment - Our mind is the lead. We follow it wherever it may go. I have found that we must learn to be our own leaders through discipline and attitude.
Do me a favor, I'm retired and have been for over ten years. I write this because there is just too much experience in me not to share. My only reward is you leaving a comment below. If you don't want to comment, at least click on the heart at the bottom of this blog.
If you are middle-aged and your hormones and weight are not where you would desire them to be, talk to me.
For example, I will teach you all thirteen rules of weight optimization in a one-hour conversation, and it's free!
I do have a roster of women and men who hire me to be their hormones, weight, health, and mind coach, but there will be no sales because my roster is always full.
Learn the HOPE Protocol in one hour instead of a year's worth of blogs. Click below to find a convenient time to talk to me.
For those of you who want to know more about why it is so important to eat God-made Food, I have placed an excerpt from my next book below. READ ON...
"IT'S ALL ABOUT THE HORMONES."
Every feeling you feel (joy, sadness, motivation, exhaustion) is influenced by the food you eat. And when you eat, you’re not just feeding your cells, you’re feeding your hormones. And when your hormones are nourished, how you feel follows.
So when I say, “It’s all about the hormones,” what I really mean to say is this:
"If your hormones are balanced, your feelings will be too."
I write about feelings because the two goals the people I coach desire are:
To Feel Great
To Look Great
To feel great, your internal chemistry must be in harmony. Balanced hormones are what cause this harmony.
"Your food directly dictates hormonal balance."
Not all cells produce hormones, but many different cells and tissues influence hormones or are affected by them; hormones are chemical messengers that travel via the bloodstream, but only specific "target cells" with matching receptors respond, meaning hormones affect nearly all cells, but in specialized ways.
While endocrine glands (such as the pituitary and thyroid) are primary hormone producers, fat cells, the gut, heart, kidneys, and even brain cells secrete regulatory hormones that impact our feelings, metabolism, growth, and other functions.
Our hormone-producing cells weren’t created to decode laboratory food. They were designed to respond to God-made signals from His food: real protein, fats, fiber, minerals, and micronutrients.
When you eat real food, your hormone-producing cells do not have to guess what the message is. It understands clearly.
When you eat human-made food, the messages these formulated foods send are misinterpreted. This could cause your hormones to make you feel:
Overfed and Undernourished.
Tired but Wired.
Satiated and Hungry.
Many of the people I consult think that because of these crossed wires, they lack willpower. The real problem is that their food is having a "failure to communicate" with their hormone-producing cells. This lack of clear communication causes our hormones, our lives, to become imbalanced.
"God-made food preserves the communication that optimizes life; human-made food disrupts it."
Choose God-made food that balances your hormones, therefore your emotions, and that will allow us to achieve our goal to FEEL GREAT!
"IT'S ALL ABOUT THE INFLAMMATION."
Chronic inflammation is slowly killing us. It is the toxic soil beneath cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and Alzheimer’s. Every bite you take is either feeding your cells so they can live long and function well, or feeding them irritants that force them into constant battle. And that battle leaves behind a smoldering cell otherwise known as inflammation.
Every cell in your body contains mitochondria, your cellular metabolic engines. These engines run on nutrients found in real food: amino acids, fatty acids, B-vitamins, magnesium, potassium, zinc, and antioxidants. God-made foods deliver these nutrients in bioavailable forms, meaning your cells can actually use them.
Human-made foods strip nutrients during processing and then attempt to “fortify” them back in isolation. But isolated nutrients do not behave the same way as nutrients combined in their natural environment. For example, Vitamin C is readily absorbed from an orange, but not as readily from a supplement. When nourishment is combined with emulsifiers, preservatives, seed-oil byproducts, and refined sugars, you activate inflammatory pathways in the gut, vascular system, and brain.
“God-made foods lower the inflammatory load. Human-made foods raise it.”
"IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MICROBIOME"
So, where is the primary breeding ground for chronic inflammation? Your gut. And who lives in your gut, your microbiome, a world filled with a multitude of different microbiota.
Your microbiome requires God-made nutrients to do its job properly: regulating appetite, immunity, hormones, and longevity. And if you’ve been following my work, you already know that one of my favorite lines is:
“You are only as healthy as your gut.”
Trillions of microbiota influence digestion, immune defense, neurotransmitters, estrogen metabolism, and mood. These organisms evolved to thrive on the components found in God-made foods. Many, if not all, of these components are stripped from human-made food, starving beneficial bacteria and feeding opportunistic strains. Artificial sweeteners, refined starches, and preservatives disrupt the microbial balance, driving appetite, insulin resistance, anxiety, inflammation, and immune dysfunction.
“A menu built on God-made food grows microbial diversity. Human-made food collapses it.”
And when the gut collapses, so does health.
GOD-MADE–ORGANIC–NATURAL
You might have noticed that I prefer to use God-made over the words organic or natural. Organic has become a label, and natural is more of a marketing ploy. God-made Food is simple, actual food in its original form.
God-made foods are foods that still resemble what they were when He spoke them into existence: plants, animals, earth, sun, water, and time. They are foods that do not require a chemist's translation for the human body to recognize.
I originally used Organic, to mean real, non-human-made foods. Organic is the second strand within The HOPE Protocol. The problem with “Organic” isn't what it means; I look for the organic symbol on all my foods.
After decades of helping others, I have found that God-made is what I should have used. HGPE. Okay, now you know why I didn't change it.
God-made foods have one ingredient: themselves. An egg. A carrot. An apple. A fish. A ribeye. Olive oil that came from cold-pressed olives. Butter churned from cream. These foods come with built-in intelligence, nutrients arranged in ratios that the human body has evolved alongside for millennia. They don’t need fortification. They don’t need enhancement. They come with instructions already written into their biology that our biology understands.
Your hormone-producing cells excel with God-made food.
Your gut excels with God-made food.
Your mitochondria excel with God-made food.
If you know someone who will benefit from this blog, invite them to read it by forwarding this link.
And if you like this blog and want to be notified when the next one is released, you can subscribe by CLICKING HERE.
US-IE
Vicky and I are retired, and our passion, besides teaching others how to optimize their hormones and weight, is to live every day to its fullest. Here is this blog's Us-ie.

Malaga, Spain
Málaga, Spain, is where ancient history, Mediterranean beaches, and modern city life throw a very stylish party together—and everyone’s invited. It's located on Spain’s Costa del Sol in Andalusia, and is one of Europe’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, founded by the Phoenicians over 2,800 years ago. Today, it blends Roman ruins, Moorish fortresses, and sleek rooftop bars with effortless charm. It's a walkable old town packed with cathedrals, museums, and shaded plazas. In the morning, we toured a 1,000-year-old fortress and ate fresh sardines grilled on sticks on the beach by lunch, well, at least I did.
🇪🇸 The Macs
Hormone and Weight Optimization Author and Coaches
HOPE isn’t just a feeling. It’s a protocol
It's all about your hormones!
Medical Disclaimer
The information contained in this newsletter is provided for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, nor should it be construed as medical advice or a substitute for professional medical care. No doctor–patient relationship is created by this content. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified healthcare provider before beginning, modifying, or discontinuing any supplement, medication, diet, or health program, including but not limited to zinc, especially if you have a medical condition, are pregnant or nursing, or are taking prescription or over-the-counter medications. Individual responses and requirements vary, and any reliance on the information provided is solely at your own risk.




Comments