Healthy Diet at Home

It’s a myth that all overweight people have insulin resistance and/or metabolic syndrome. It’s also a myth that everyone’s insulin and blood glucose levels soar into the clouds when they eat carbohydrates. If you have normal blood glucose control, your body’s sensitivity to insulin will quickly take care of the small rise in glucose you get after you eat. In fact, typical folks never see a rise in blood sugar levels much above 120 mg/dl (6.6 mmol/L) – no matter how much starch and sugar they eat. The problem comes for those of us with an abnormal response to the carbohydrates we eat. Reasons for that vary, but taking the necessary steps to correct the problem can often make us feel ill. The Atkins’ Flu, Detoxing from Sugar, and Carbohydrate Withdrawal The first two weeks of a low carb diet can send the body into a tizzy. We’re restricting the body’s first-used fuel source, emptying out glycogen stores, dumping a lot of excess water, and coaxing our liver to begin breaking down stored b...

Slipped off Your Low-Carb Diet? Here's How to Recover Quickly! Did you go out to eat at a restaurant?  Restaurants are famous for hiding sugar and other carby fillers in their food.  Maybe you went to a party, and couldn't tell if your food was really free of carbs, or not. Perhaps, you deliberately caved in to those delicious looking cupcakes that someone brought into the office, or you decided to chuck the dieting game and just kick back and enjoy your vacation.  Now that you've come to your senses, you know you blew it, but you're hoping that it won't harm your low-carb diet efforts too much. Whatever happened, it's over now. Don't beat yourself up about it. However, the Ketostix might be giving you a bad time. Instead of turning pink this morning, they stayed beige. The scale bounced up a pound or two, and now, you're craving those chocolate chip cookies you used to make for the kids before you went on the Atkins Diet. You're afraid that you aren...

I ran into a horde of regurgitated news release type articles the other day that pointed me towards a new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition this month. It was a short-term study – just two weeks long – but it clearly showed how a low-carb diet burns more liver fat during Atkins Induction than a low-calorie diet does. I didn’t read all of those articles, because the first two were just copies of the original press release put out by UT Southwestern Medical Center – the sponsor of the study. So I took a trip over to PubMed where I actually found two studies published this month comparing how low-calorie diets and low-carb diets affect fatty liver disease. What is a Fatty Liver? Even though the researchers of the two-week study say fat in the liver “ is due, in part, to increased hepatic synthesis of fat from carbohydrates via lipogensis, ” The American Liver Foundation says a little bit of fat in the liver is normal. Maybe that’s because so many America...

Beef Sensitivity? I’ve wrestled with myself for the past couple of days about “where” to place this post. I didn’t want to discourage anyone from entering into, or sticking with, a typical low carb diet. Atkins and The Protein Power Lifeplan both work equally well for most individuals, though they do differ in application. Honesty finally won. But since the relevancy of this topic falls across several of my blogs, I’ve decided to focus here on how my current problem relates to general low carb diets. Recently, I decided that since my weight had reached the upper limits for a maintenance phase, I would enter into Atkins Induction to carve off the body fat I’d gained – knowing that the first week’s weight loss would be mostly glycogen and water. That held true; I weighed in at 158 pounds last Friday, down almost 5-1/2 pounds for the first week. But I didn’t expect what happened next. I have one more day to go to keep my Atkins Induction commitment, but…I’m seriously reconsidering that de...