Healthy Diet at Home

This morning I was taking a stroll through some of the threads over at Low Carb Friends, and I ran into something that really disturbed me. A patient of Dr. Westman was there asking for help. She has been on the high-fat low-carb diet known as Nutritional Ketosis for 4 months now. She is eating 20 carbs or less, is losing about 1 to 2 pounds a week, but she feels horrible. For some reason, she is not adapting to the state of Ketosis. Despite a high salt intake, she's having excruciating foot and leg cramps, gets dizzy, and comes near to passing out during her gym activities. She says she has zero energy, so her gym routine has dropped from 5 days a week and 1 trainer session, to just the training. She is taking magnesium and potassium supplements, along with chicken broth every day, but nothing is helping. She's exhausted and feels horrible, and yet, they want her to continue with the regimen she's been on, even though it's not working for her. That doesn't make an

(This is Part 1 of a two-part series. It was originally posted at my Sharing the Magic of Low-Carb Living blog. I'm moving it here because the information is important, and I have other plans for that blog now.) Over the course of my low-carb journey, I have tried several different types of low-carb diets. Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution, Atkins 72, the Kimkins Diet, Protein Power, and a round of hHCG are just a few. Each time I made a change or tweak, I would carefully evaluate my progress to see if what I was doing was working, or if I needed to toss it aside. In the Spring of 2009, I started participating in a 100-Day Very Low-Carb Challenge. The reason I entered into that challenge was because a traditional low-carb diet had stopped working for me. Since the whole idea of a low-carb diet is to find your own personal carbohydrate sensitivity, I thought the basis for the challenge made perfect sense. If you aren't losing weight, then you're eating too many carbohydrates. Perio

Lately, I’ve had a few readers ask me, “What is Atkins 72?” Since I use that term quite often, I thought maybe more of you might have the same question. Most people think of the book, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution , whenever they talk about a low-carb diet. But that became quite confusing over the years because every new edition Dr. Atkins put out carried the same name, even though the diet had changed. The basic principles of the Atkins program stayed fairly consistent, but the Rules of Induction, food quantities and types, how you add carbohydrates back into your diet, and even the way you count carbohydrates changed – depending on which edition you were following. That made it difficult to help someone who didn’t understand how to do the Atkins Diet correctly, or to give advice when someone was stumbling or had stalled. To make it easier, the low-carb community began using the year the edition was published attached to Dr. Atkins’ name in order to distinguish one plan from anothe

(This is part 2 of a multi-part series on How to Tweak a Low Carb Diet . If you didn’t read part 1, you can do so by clicking on the how-to link.) When I started low carbing in January 2007, the 2002 version of Atkins was considered the bible of low carb dieting. However, even among those who proclaimed you HAD to follow that version by the book, they were using the latest Atkins Nutritionals’ (ANA) recommendations to override the book’s instructions. So if you were not eating a minimum of 20 net carbs per day on Induction and getting the greater majority of those carbs from vegetables (12 to 15 net carbs per day), you were either blasted for not doing Atkins, or you were written off as someone who was playing an I-am-on-a-diet game. You were also counseled to spend the majority of your calories on consuming tremendous amounts of fat. Those calories had to be a minimum of ten times your current weight in order to avoid starvation mode. You had to drink a minimum of eight glasses of pur

You don’t have to be new to low-carb diets in order to make one of these 6 dieting mistakes . They are just as common among those who have been dieting for a while. That’s because as time goes on, we tend to become more relaxed in the way we implement our personal carb-restriction programs, and forget what’s most important. So whether you’re new to the low-carb lifestyle or have been journeying for months, here are the top 6 dieting mistakes you’ll want to avoid. 1. Not Eating Enough Salt Mistake #1: Not Eating Enough Salt (Photo by Casey Konstantin ) This mistake cannot be stressed highly enough, because it’s the foundation for the low-carb myth that the Induction Flu is about detoxing from carbohydrates or sugar. It’s not. When you begin a low-carb diet, the body loses most of its glycogen stores. Since there’s 3 or 4 grams of water attached to each gram of glycogen, you’re going to lose a ton of water in the first few days. That will throw your electrolytes out of balance. Electroly

Why Does a Low-Carb Diet Stop Working? A low-carb diet plan is an effective weight-loss tool because it promotes satiety and teaches us the importance of eating nutrient-dense foods. We learn how our prior eating habits contributed to our present metabolic situation. We learn that our personal metabolic defects can cause us to crave the very foods that create these imbalances. We also learn that changing our diet can literally correct those imbalances and change our lives. However, for many dieters, counting carbohydrates and staying within a certain daily allotment isn’t enough to achieve success. In my own case, the problem with not losing weight on a low-carb diet can be traced to a variety of issues: hidden food sensitivities celiac disease leaky gut syndrome endocrine disruptors fat malabsorption probably excessive ASP and who knows what else But weight-loss problems are never the same for everyone. In general, the closer you get to goal weight, the more important calorie counting

Is a Low-Carb Diet Sustainable? (Photo by Alpha ) As most of you know, I’m extremely partial to the 1972 and the 1992 versions of The Atkins Diet. The ’72 version was based on Dr. Atkins own experiences following a low-carb diet and a few initial clinical observations. The original ’92 version (the first edition) was based on the feedback that he actually got from his patients. Many of them were cheating by adding a few vegetables to Induction along with the salad, which they eventually admitted to. Since Dr. Atkins patients still lost weight easily eating that way, Dr. Atkins decided it was okay to add 2/3 of a cup of cooked vegetables to his Induction Plan. Because of that addition, he lengthened Induction from one week to two. The second edition printed around 1999 was exactly the same as the first one except for a one-line comment he made about how he couldn’t find anything unreasonable about deducting soluble fiber grams from the total carbohydrate count – the type found in the ps

What Am I Not Losing Weight On Atkins? When it comes to weight loss, patience is vital. We all lose body fat at different rates, and each body undergoes different protective processes that we sometimes have to simply wait out. While some people lose weight slow and steady, others lose weight in stages. But if you’ve crossed over that 4-week line where you haven’t lost pounds or inches, what then? What can you do to encourage your body to let go of some of that excess body fat? 1. You Might Be Eating Too Much Fat There are many reasons why your weight loss might have stalled, and some of them are extremely contradictory. Eating too much fat is one them. While today’s low-carb mantra claims raising the amount of dietary fat you eat can cure everything from weight loss stalls to the Atkins Flu, before Dr. Atkins passed away, that wasn’t what the Atkins Center was telling folks. In fact, checking out the amount of fat you’re eating was the first thing they always asked you to look at back