I’m Starting Again

by | Jan 9, 2013 | Food Choices, High Protein Diet, Weight Loss | 0 comments

This is a post on fattoskinny.net that I have commented on regarding weight loss

Itsoversugar’s post:

I’ve tried FTS before and did not stay on it for long. Here I am, many, many months later, basically the same weight I was before. I’m ready to do something about it now. Every year I make a resolution to lose weight. I’m not going to do that this time. What I really want to do is gain health. And if weight loss results in getting healthier, then I’ll be pleased.

I’m going out to do a grocery hall in just a bit, so I have some healthy foods to eat. Right now, I’m eating an egg, fried in butter and topped with a little cheese to hold me over until my errands are done.  I’ll post my menu for the day when I get back.  I’m so excited to be back!!

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This was my answer:

That’s a really great shopping list you got there, practically not a carbohydrate in sight, well, apart from the Kool Aid and the sugar for the family.

I used to have a problem getting good meat and so forth until I tried some of the mail-order meat producers especially the ones that produce the grass-fed beef and other naturally raised animals for the table. I found that their quality of meat is far superior to that I could find locally and because I could buy it in bulk, it turned out to be cheaper as well and oftentimes carriage was free or included in the price.

Hope that helps,

Mark

Ladies and Gentlemen over 60 Continued

by | Jan 9, 2013 | Carbs, Fat Loss, Food Choices | 0 comments

This is a post from Pam, a 62-year-old lady, about carbs which I have replied to over at forum.lowcarber.org

Pam’s post:

I will soon be 62 and still find my weight struggles continue. I have done LC over and over for the past 20 years. I am successful when I limit my carbs to 30 or less/day, but I find it difficult not to give in to the carbs when I’m stressed or happy or when the wind is blowing…I need some support and encouagement as I’m sure many of us do. The older I get the easier it is to resign myself to being overweight. But I know for the sake of my health it is more important than ever.

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My advice:

Hi Pam!

Yes, I know exactly how you feel. I find it hard to keep away from the carbs as well and have done, really, ever since I started low carbing myself, but after a while, I realized this was as much down to habits as anything else so I started to have a look at what these habits of mine were and how I could break them.

 I believe the answer is actually quite simple, if I didn’t have carbs in the house then I couldn’t eat them. So what I did was in effect, was change the way I shopped. I no longer bought any items that had high carb to them thinking “I can resist, and anyway other people in the household would like to eat them”; instead I left them in the shop which is exactly where they should be rather than in my cupboard only later to be in my stomach.

So my advice would simply be “if you don’t buy it then you won’t have it at home to eat it”.

Hope that helps,

Mark

Can’t eat “this much” meat? It’s not what you think

by | Jan 8, 2013 | Fat Loss, Food Choices, Portion Sizes | 0 comments

Here is a copy of the a post I replied to at Active Low-Carber Forums about eating meat

WereBear wrote: 

So often, new low carbers find themselves eating more meat than they have in years.

For many, this is simply permission to eat as they have always wanted. For others, especially those who have been avoiding meat for whatever reason, it becomes a wrenching transition. It’s very tempting to conclude that we are “natural” vegetarians, or that “they” were right, meat isn’t good for us! or that low carbing is not going to “work” for us.

But that might not be what is really going on. We embarked on low carbing because we wanted to change things; our weight, our health, our moods. More change, not less, is what we need to embrace.

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This was my reply:

Having just finished my delicious breakfast of eggs and bacon, I have to say I’m in a very good mood and totally agree with WereBear. Yes, she is right, portion size does play a huge part in retraining the way we eat and I find myself continually surprised at how little food satisfies me nowadays especially when I remember eating huge portions of pasta only to be hungry a few hours later and yes, I do love eating meat now. Yet even after I switched to the low diet way of eating, I too found I was still bloated on occasion and that did cause me some concern for quite a while. It was only when I  went back to basics that I really discovered that not only my enzymes were out of balanced but also my stomach bacteria was totally out of balanced  through years of eating pap and useless nutrition.

So being the studious chap that I am, I pulled out all of my notes on how the digestive system works and got stuck into finding the most effective cure for me; and I found it was simply a course of complete probiotics that not only brought my problem with bloating into a swift conclusion, as in the space of three to four days I had a normal stomach again and I have to say, felt much better within myself. I also supplemented for a while with enzymes and I do sometimes go back to those just to make sure that everything is talked up as it should be.

So for my experience, there you have it, if you deal with the enzymes, you deal with your bacteria and as WereBear had suggested, you take account of your stomach acid, you should find that your low carb journey is exactly as it should be, free of problems with your stomach and digestion and free to eat exactly what you know you should be eating.

Hope that helps,

Mark

Friendly Bacteria

by | Jun 1, 2012 | Milk Products | 0 comments

Is there a battle going on in your stomach?

Over time our digestive system builds up the bacteria it needs to deal with the food we normally eat. But among the useful bacteria, there are millions of unhelpful ones too. Here we look at how to build up the good while reducing the bad and gaining that healthy edge.

Within our stomachs, or more specifically the colon, there are over 500 bacterial species. However, that number pales into insignificance if you count the number of cells in our bodies, they are outnumbered by the number of cells in our gut by 20:1.

The good bacteria in our digestive system are used to break down the food that we eat, so that our bodies can use it in more useful ways. For instance, when the good bacteria break down the carbohydrates they can provide up to 10% of our daily energy.For low-carbers like us, of course, there is the advantage that even though we are eating lower amounts of carbohydrates we still require almost the same amount of energy. That means that our bodies have to get that energy from elsewhere. And we all know that the best place to get that is by starting to break down the fat stored in our body.
However, that does not mean that you should neglect the good bacteria in your stomach, as they also help the body to fight infection and diseases by overcoming the effects of the bad bacteria that can also take up residence in our gut.The are two schools of thought as to which is the best way to do this.

  1. Top up our existing good bacteria by eating some more of the same from some other origin – Pro-biotics. (remember ‘O’ for other origin)
  2. Eat foods that encourage the right conditions for good bacteria to thrive – Pre-boitics. (remember ‘E’ for eating)

The Reading University Trial

Under the auspices of the University of Reading, food bioscientist, Gemma Walton PhD, came up with a study where she would take 8 hard working men, put half of them on pro-biotics (cultures containing the good bacteria which we find in foods such as yoghurt). The other half were put on a pre-biotic diet (the pre-biotics in this case coming from things like vegetables, leeks, bananas and other foods which make the environment in the stomach a much nicer place to be for the bacteria that are already there).The only down-side to this test, and I’m glad I wasn’t doing it, was that the two groups had to be checked daily for changes in the bacteria. Well, I’ll spare you the unhealthy details, but suffice to say, our hard working guys “pooh” showed remarkable differences between the two groups!!

The consensus of opinion, from this and other tests that have been made, is that over a longer period the probiotics will show more of a difference. But that difference will not be as profound compaired with a pre-biotic diet.

What needs to be remembered here, is that no matter how many pro-biotic drinks and yoghurts that you take, if you’re not putting them into a gut that is otherwise healthy the effect that they have will be drastically reduced.

Contrariwise, if you are changing your diet, i.e. cutting out the foods and so forth that make your gut an unhealthy place for bacteria whilst at the same time increasing foods that make your gut a healthy place for bacteria, then obviously the effect is going to be far more marked.It’s clear that the bottom line results, from this and other tests, that the most healthy thing you can do for your stomach is to give the bacteria what they like to eat, i.e. a good pre-biotic meal. In this case, the bio-scientist recommended that the best vegetables to feed the good bacteria are things like artichokes, garlic, leeks, onions, shallots and those sort of things.

The whole idea of eating pre-biotically, is to increase the amount of inulin you eat each day. It’s recommended that if you eat between 8-10grams extra of inulin a day, then the good bacteria in your stomach will work far more efficiently.

Foods that are high in inulin are things like bananas, onion, garlic and leeks as I mentioned earlier, but also things like Jerusalem artichoke, chicory and so forth. Obviously, things like this will be most effective when they are eaten raw. However, even if they are cooked, a high proportion of the inulin will still be passed through to what you get to eat.

Having looked at both fibre and the bacteria in our stomachs, we have touched a little bit on the subject of gas. So just how much gas does the average person produce? Obviously a lot of that depends on diet, and the averages range between ½ a litre to 3 litres of gas a day. Not quite enough to power the planet, but getting on for something like that!

The shocking thing is that without healthy bacteria in our gut, we would actually produce anything up to five times more than this amount!

That’s because the healthy bacteria in our stomachs do two jobs:

They overrun the other bacteria in our stomachs which are the ones that produce the most gas as part of the process that they go through to break our food down, and then other bacteria convert the gasses to smaller volumes before they eventually pass through and we get rid of them.

When you have a stomach upset, obviously the bad bacteria can sometimes overrun the good bacteria, which is why you’ll often get intense wind when you’ve either had a stomach upset or you’ve been over-eating. More crucially been over-eating the wrong types of food.

In part, regularly eating too much is often the cause of excess wind for many folk.

Just cutting down on quantity can have a dramatic positive effect – reducing both discomfort and wind.
When the group who were given foods which made their guts more healthy were tested, they were found to have seen their good bacteria numbers increased by over 100million.
The pro-biotic group, however, (the one taking the little drink of bacteria each day) saw little change over the week.

Small Changes in Your Diet can Make a Huge Difference

by | May 27, 2012 | Cravings, Fat Loss, Food Choices, How Your Body Works, Metabolism, Sensible Eating, Snacks | 0 comments

Each day we make as many as 200 food choices.

These are influenced by many things, even the folk we’re eating with.Even though each of those choices may only represent a small contribution to our final health – they all add up to making an
immense difference.

You’ll probably notice that many of our reader’s questions are about small things. They are about the details in diet. Sometimes people ask me “surely, if I just take care of the big things then I don’t really need to worry about the small things?”

But when you analyse anything, the big things are made up of lots of small things. If you take care of the detail in your diet, then each of those things that you take care of will add up and make the big things far more effective. Here are a couple of those small things that you might like to consider:

Firstly, when you go to the supermarket or your local shop to stock up, look down the ingredients list to make sure you avoid eating foods that have got artificial sweeteners, MSG and a whole range of additives and colorants. These are the things that many manufacturers have to put into their food in order to put back the flavour and vitamin content that their processing has processed out.
Try as much as you can to use organically sourced and grown produce. By sticking to
organic (from a reputable producer), you know that you are not going to be eating and digesting pesticides, phosphates, all kinds of hormones and all the other things that commercial food producers use in order to overcome the problems that their fast-food production line cause.

It’s making those healthy choices, the small ones, that all add up to a much healthier lifestyle.

And it’s not just what you eat!

A small choice you can make every day is just to take the elevator to get up two floors, or take the stairs. Taking two flights of stairs briskly will do far more for your heart than taking the elevator, that’s for sure.

Doing that five or six times a day, is just like jogging to the top of a ten-storey building!

It’s those type of small changes that I’m talking about, those small changes can make a really big difference.

The reason for making those choices is clear.

In Europe, the U.S.. Australia and in fact most of what would be considered the western world, its poor lifestyle choices that (e.g. what we choose to eat, to exercise, etc) account for the leading causes of death. Things like cancer, heart disease, diabetes and the rest.

In fact, the WHO (World Health Organization), in it’s recent World Cancer Report, have said that the rates of cancer would increase by 50 percent over the next 15 years. Statistics like that are cause for concern.

However, all is not doom and gloom as WHO also intimates that at least a third of the cases could be prevented by folk making better lifestyle choices.

Some folk think that in order to make these changes they have to make a lot of sacrifices. But in reality, this is just not so.

If you think about it, it won’t cost you much at all to take the stairs (often times it’s quicker than taking the lift). In fact just 20 or so miniutes of
exercise a day can make the difference .

And to eat organic may cost you a few more
dollars a month, but these are all a small price to pay in exchange for a long, healthy, active and
sickness free life.

Eating More Dairy to Lose Fat

by | May 26, 2012 | High Fat Diet, High Protein Diet, Milk Products | 0 comments

Cheese, Cream, more cheese, in fact everything and anything dairy can be found on many lowcarb plates.

We would be lost without it.

But, as this article shows, eating dairy is more than just a way to cut down on carbs…

Eating high calcium, higher fat dairy foods, have been a long term stable tenant of the low-carb way of eating, and for good reason – it works – as part of a healthy low carb regime.

Now, a recent study conducted in Denmark has observed that the more calcium you eat in your diet the less body fat you will have, and therefore the less you will weigh.  This points to the fact that not only is dairy a high-energy food, it could be that dairy itself can help you absorb less fat.

Professor Arne Astrup, Head of Human Nutrition at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen, Denmark, undertook a study to prove this fact.

In the study, a group of volunteers spent one week eating a diet that was high in calcium, typically more than 2000milligrams of calcium a day; and week 2 was on a low calcium diet, where they were eating around about 500milligrams of calcium a day.

These diets were designed so that they had the identical amount of calories and crucially, they also had the same fat content each week.

The known science led the researchers to expect that the higher calcium diet would indeed cause the body to absorb less fat than on the lower calcium diet.

However, the results that actually came out were even better than expected, in fact on the higher calcium diet tests on the subjects excretions showed that they passed through twice as much fat as they did on the lower calcium diet.

Putting that another way, on the higher calcium diet they absorbed only half the amount of fat than they did on the lower calcium diet.

What this means for low-carbers is that when you eat dairy products, not all of their calories count.

But of course, that still doesn’t give you an excuse to binge out on cheese!