Healthy Diet at Home

I recently received a comment from a reader that suggested my lack of dieting success was probably due to my inability to stay with one particular low-carb diet plan long enough to reap results. The advice I received was to go on a low-carb, high-fat diet and give it six months or more to work before analyzing.  That was similar to the advice I received from the zero-carb folks a few years ago when despite the fact that I had gained about 20 pounds in the first three weeks and was experiencing abnormally high blood glucose levels, they told me to eat only beef, drink only water, and wait six months before reviewing the results. They didn't seem to care about the resurrected neuropathy. They were just sure that their way was the only way.  The problem with that type of advice is that it doesn't work for everyone.  Take Responsibility for Your Own Health Correcting metabolic issues isn't always as easy as lowering your carbohydrate level. For example, I'm juggling vertigo...

(This is part 4 of a multi-part series on How to Tweak a Low Carb Diet . It discusses my weight loss journey so far. If you didn’t read part 1, you can do so by clicking on the how-to link. Part 1 also includes links to the rest of the series.)  I took a quick glance at the archives to see if I could discover exactly when I first started doing the Kimkins Diet back in 2007, but I kept it quiet due to the controversy surrounding that plan. I can remember communicating with Jimmy Moore several times back then, as he was doing the Kimkins Diet himself, but I couldn’t find anything I had actually posted to this blog. People were very emphatic back then that you had to eat a certain amount of dietary fat. You had to eat a ton of protein, and you had to get a certain amount of calories, or you were not doing low carb. Because of these self-made dietary restrictions, these same individuals refused to call Kimkins a low carb diet. They insisted it was a glucose-burning diet, even though it...

There is a lot of confusion these days about metabolism. It seems to be a scapegoat that people like to blame when weight loss doesn’t happen easily. If they’re following a low carb diet and struggling to succeed, then they believe that all of those years of eating carbohydrates must have destroyed their metabolism and made them fat. On the other side of the argument are those who oppose low carb dieting. These people claim that carbohydrate restriction will permanently alter your metabolism, but what’s the truth? Will eating carbohydrates or following a low carb diet ruin your metabolism – or not? What is Metabolism? Low carb dieters generally do not like to hear about the energy equation. Dr. Atkins told us that we no longer need to worry about calories, so most people believe the energy equation isn’t applicable to them. Calories don’t matter, they say. Dr. Eades has tried to set the record straight, but far too many people still do not want to go outside and drag the equation bac...

(This is part 5 of a multi-part series on How to Tweak a Low Carb Diet . It discusses my weight loss journey so far. If you didn't read part 1, you can do so by clicking on the how-to link. Part 1 also includes links to the rest of this series.) After leaving the Kimkins’ weight loss diet behind, I began reading through Lyle McDonald’s website and body building forum because of a comment I received to one of my blog posts. This commenter had gotten stuck when she was almost to goal weight and had broken her stall by incorporating Lyle’s technique of using refeeds to reset her Leptin and other hormone levels back to normal. She warned me that the forum participants were not always nice to each other, especially newbies, and that they could be a bit over-the-top, but she believed the information I would find there would help me decide what to do next. That piqued my interest. Not only because I trusted the source of that information, but because I knew there had to be a valid reason ...

This afternoon, Jimmy Moore popped up in my Facebook feed. Since he follows a Nutritional Ketosis program rather than the Atkins Diet, I rarely read his blog any more, but I do read his Facebook posts when I'm there. In this particular Facebook post, Jimmy was quite upset. Apparently, a couple of twin doctors in Europe (Alexander and Chris Van Tolleken) decided to do a 30-day experiment to discover for themselves which was worse for a dieter: eating sugar or fat. I could tell by Jimmy's Facebook comments that the low-carb diet the article's author had decided to follow didn't turn out very well. He took offense at the doctor's personal experience of being "thick headed" during those 30 days, and argued that the doctor wasn't following a Nutritional Ketosis diet, so he might not have really been in Ketosis. Plus, 30 days is not long enough to become keto-adapted. In Jimmy's opinion, anything other than the Nutritional Ketosis parameters he follow...

(This is Part 2 of a two-part series. If you didn't read Part 1, you can find it here . This post was originally published 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.) Once I realized that the zero-carb folks didn't understand biology, I stopped posting to that particular forum. I didn't know if I was hurting myself by being there. However, I was enjoying the thread on Frankenfoods, and I couldn't read and participate in that thread unless I was a member of the forum. So I just kept silently reading. In addition to the forum, I read everything about biochemistry that I could find on education websites. I read everything on the Bloodsugar 101 website. And I read everything on the "Over 50s" thread at the zero-carb forum as well. That thread began to reveal a lot of things that I was going through. From the gain of belly fat, to the rise in blood sugars, I ...

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...

how many carbs should you eat per day to loseweight? reducing the amount of carbohydrates in yourdiet is one of the best ways to lose weight. it tends to reduce your appetite and cause�automatic� weight loss, without the need for calorie counting or portion control. this means that you can eat until fullness,feel satisfied and still lose weight. high carb low fat vegan diet, 1 why would you want to do low-carb? for the past few decades, the health authoritieshave recommended that we eat a calorie restricted, low-fat diet. the problem is that this diet doesn�t reallywork. even when people manage to stick to it, theydon�t see very good results. an alternative that has been available fora long time is the low-carb diet. this diet restricts your intake of carbohydrateslike sugars and starches (breads, pasta, etc.) and replaces them with protein and fat. studies show that low-carb diets reduce yourappetite and make you eat fewer calories and lose weight pretty much effortlessly, as ...

(This is part 7 of a multi-part series on How to Tweak a Low Carb Diet . It explains the path I have traveled in my weight loss journey so far. If you didn’t read part 1, you can do so by clicking on the how-to link. Part 1 also includes links to the rest of the series.) My diet break obviously refilled my glycogen stores, since I was eating more carbohydrates, but that wasn’t a surprise. I was okay with the eight-pound weight regain because everything happened exactly as Lyle McDonald said it would. Although each of us have the potential to hold different amounts of glycogen in our liver and muscles, there was no reason to believe those eight pounds were fat. I was used to inputting everything I ate into Fitday, and that didn’t stop during my break, so it was easy to keep tabs on my daily calorie count. That helped to keep me zeroed into maintenance. Overall, my complete diet break went well, except that I took my husband’s suggestion and enjoyed a full month off from dieting that Dec...