Healthy Diet at Home

It has taken me a long time to reach this point. I don't really know how I feel about it all . . . just yet. The additional tests that the first nurse practitioner ran came back quite abnormal. But I didn't hear from her until I chased her down a couple of weeks later. She was very confused and was trying to figure it out on her own. In the meantime, everything in my body was racing. My metabolism was high, but the body was in starvation mode, so I don't understand her personal need to figure it all out. Since Cigna's insurance chart said our local Endocrinology clinic was not set up to take Cigna patients until January, I just wanted her to run the blood work for me, so I could decide if it was worth it to pay for the doctor visit myself, or if I should wait until our new insurance became effective in January. Hubby's company is dumping Cigna for a local health insurance company instead. When I didn't hear back, I called the clinic and asked for a copy of my r...

As I talked about in my last post, the holistic practitioner that has been working with me lately suggested that I move toward the Paleo Diet in order to regain my health. That caused me to smile. Not only because I didn't expect her to say that, but because after spending 5 years on a strict, whole-foods low-carb diet of just meats, eggs, vegetables, berries, and healthy fats, I was no closer to health than I was before I started. That's the naked truth. Foundation Claims of the Paleo Diet I decided to look into the Paleo Diet anyway because I was relatively familiar with the program. I started with Lorin Cordain's website since he was the founder of the Paleo movement. I thought I would get a clearer picture of what the diet was all about if I went to the source. What I understood after the hours I spent reading there was that Paleo is based on mimicking the foods our ancient ancestors ate before the Agricultural Revolution because those are the foods our bodies are gen...

Okay, she's not really a doctor. She's an holistic nurse practitioner who performed our annual physicals so that hubby's work would pay for our health insurance premiums. It took me over 4 hours to find the doctor she works with because Cigna's online listing showed over 400 family practice physicians that specialize in pediatrics. Calling the phone number on our insurance card was a nightmare. The computer voice just kept saying, "I'm sorry, I don't understand you." That's because I got angry. Speaking to a real life representative wasn't an option it gave me. Eventually, I screamed at the computer voice that I wanted to speak to real live person. A lot of good that did me. "I'm sorry, I don't understand you. Let's try again." Somehow, I finally ended up with a live person, but I don't remember how. She wasn't very helpful. She kept insisting that there were over 400 doctors within a 20-mile radius from us. Doc...

A low-carb diet is one of the heathiest ways to eat, but unfortunately, it takes more than diet and exercise to reach your weight-loss goals. For most people, successful weight loss also requires you to make a mental adjustment. For that reason, many people wonder, "Will a low-carb diet work for me?" The answer to that depends on your motivation, personality type, and determination to succeed. What's at the Heart of a Low-Carb Diet? Before I introduce you to the three personality types that are most likely to achieve success on a low-carb diet, let's briefly discuss what sits at the heart of carbohydrate restriction. Better health through correcting insulin and blood glucose imbalances, improving cholesterol markers, an adequate protein intake, lower hunger levels, and gaining better control over your cravings all make a carb-reduced diet extremely attractive to dieters. But don't forget that the basis for low carbing originally came from "observation" o...

(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 ...

(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...

Here in Utah, the weather has been fickle this past summer. Temps have reached unusual highs for days at a time, but it has also rained a lot. While the weather hasn't been cold enough to make a pot of soup yet, this green bean and ham crockpot recipe can be served as a side dish by using a slotted spoon to scoop out the good stuff. That way you don't have to wait for soup weather. If you choose to serve it as a side dish, don't forget to add a pat of butter to the top of your serving. Yummie stuff! Green Bean and Ham Soup (Crockpot Recipe) Most of the time, I make this using raw bacon end pieces instead of ham because we are partial to the Sugardale brand of ham, and stores in our area do not carry it as often as we would like. Usually, it just shows up during holidays, such as Mother's Day or Easter. We did find a pile of Sugardale ham steaks at LoLo's. That's a relatively new store around here that is managed by the original Food4Less folks, and owned by Ri...

I've had a wallop of a winter this year. It's been quite cloudy, rainy, and humid. For me, that means lots of vertigo and off balance challenges. My husband also fell at work last December and splattered one of his thumb tendons, went through surgery to correct the problem, but the doctors still cannot figure out what is wrong with his wrist. His schedule has been a bit twisted this past winter as well. He's been doing graveyard, which was extremely difficult, but has now moved back to a daytime schedule. While doing graveyard, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to get completely off of Melatonin. I've been cutting down on the amount I've been using ever since I watched a youtube video last year that talked about the possibility of having to use it for the rest of your life. I didn't like the sound of that, so when my hubby went onto a graveyard schedule, I thought it was the perfect time to completely quit. Since I now have that under control, my next st...

Although summer temps here have been a bit higher than normal, we've been having a lot of monsoons lately, which has been playing havoc with my vertigo. In addition, my computer died last week, and we had to go out and buy a new one. Now that I've got a computer back up and running again, I found another email from Infobarrel asking me to remove the links to my articles from this blog. Since I've been getting the emails every week for awhile now, I wasn't all that surprised, but it's getting discouraging. At first, we were told that no links were allowed. Then we were told that no-follow links were okay. But I'm still receiving emails asking me to remove them.  So.... I'm going to remove all of them, so that the emails will stop (I don't want to jeopardize my ability to write there), and then carefully go back through all of my posts and add a "Related Articles" section at the bottom of the post that lists the URL of an Infobarrel article when ...

How to Plan the Perfect Low-Carb Fourth-of-July Celebration (Photo by Jeffrey Kontur ) If you’re following a low-carb diet, you can still have a fantastic Fourth-of-July celebration without having to worry about popping yourself out of Ketosis. You don’t have to sit on the sidelines or deprive yourself of holiday goodies either. With picnics and barbecue parties the most popular ways of celebrating America’s freedom and independence, it’s easy to surround yourself in colors of red, white, and blue – yet still maintain control over those carbs! All it takes is a little bit of thought and preparation. With that in mind, you don’t want to wait until next Tuesday morning to start figuring out how to stay on plan. If you do, you’ll end up with a plain bun-free burger or hotdog, a boring lettuce salad, a handful of pork rinds, and maybe a few strawberries for color. Eating that way when everyone else around you is chowing down on potato salad, baked beans, corn-on-the-cob, and colorful cupc...