If you're too fat, you'll lose weight here; if you're too thin you'll gain weight here. That's the balance Chef Davies-Tight, an animal-freer, seeks and finds along with the sublime in all of it. Chef Davies-Tight experiments with popular weight loss methods to develop her own. WHY can wait!
Eat the same, weigh the same, leads to old fat accumulation that never gets recycled. The body only burns what it takes in and needs, then stores the rest. If you’re always eating the same, those fat stores don’t get replenished with fresh fat.
Your fat contains the toxins and all the junk that you consume in one way or the other, that doesn’t get processed, assimilated or eliminated through waste channels.
I personally think it’s better to deplete those fat cells now and then in order to eliminate the debris in the cells that has no purpose except to muck up the works and keep the cells from functioning optimally.
A Japanese cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016 for his research on how cells recycle and renew their content, a process called autophagy. (two Greek words: “auto” or self and “phagy” to eat.) After about 17 hours of fasting, these cells start eating the cells that are the ‘debris’ of the body. They clean the house so to speak: dusting, sweeping, vacuuming, washing, waxing, deodorizing. Squeaky clean!!! They especially like ‘brown’ fat cells. The real bad boys, the visceral fat.
For a few years now I thought I’d be happy at 147 pounds, given that I weighed 167 pounds. You know the feeling and the words – ‘all I need to do is lose twenty pounds? But you never get there. And it weighs heavy on you.
Most diners wouldn’t expect soup made from canned products to taste this good. Maybe it’s the combination of walnut and flax oil with the skin and pith of a minneola orange and the San Marzano tomatoes, the herbs and spices and high quality veggies and beans that make it soar, but for sure I would serve this soup to the most discriminating palates with full confidence in their enjoyment!
Less water, longer cooking time creates a chewier rice. Cooked with spices, herbs, Italian cut green beans and sun-dried tomatoes. Tossed with a tomato and vinegar based Barbecue Sauce! Served as individual molds, topped with white and black sesame seed, drizzled with sesame oil and topped with fresh basil. An unexpected delight to be sure!Reduced fat!
Ponce De Leon. The fountain of youth. Why have I been searching for it, since my teenage days? I wanted to discover the fountain of youth. The real fountain of youth. I can see where someone might think sunshine and warm weather are more conducive to longer life than bitter winters.
The Foods You Choose May Be Genetically Determined
My father-in-law had heart disease. He died at sixty-three of heart related issues. He once said to me, ‘I quit drinking and smoking and gained fifty pounds. He also ate a half a pound of bacon every day. He did not eat fast food – was not a burger guy. He liked bagels, pastries, chicken and dumplings, sausage and bacon. Lots of meats; was not big on cheeses. He was a general practice doctor of medicine.
I grew up on Miracle Whip. My mother was one of the first ones to convert from mayonnaise to Miracle Whip then kept on with it. Mayonnaise was okay when eating out, but it didn’t have that fresh zing to it. Lately I’ve become discouraged by the calorie and fat counts in plant-based vegan mayonnaise – I like a lot of mayo when I do use it, that’s the reason. If I only used a teaspoon at a time it wouldn’t matter, but then who can taste and feel such a small amount?
Even though I developed several animal-free recipes over the years I decided to make the ultimate, the shining star of all MAYOS. And just so nobody can take me to court over the use of the name mayo, I named it after the county of Mayo in western Ireland. Hey, I’m a big part Irish; I think can do that.
If I can’t, then I’ll have to negotiate and anyone who knows me – only the governments of the world read me – I don’t get circulated much – knows I don’t negotiate. I’m not sports oriented and negotiations are too much like sport. They’ll be okay with it. Did you know they have an International airport? Quiet, private vacation spots, not a lot of people sounds just right for me!
County Mayo is on the west coast of Ireland. Its scenery ranges from verdant to desertlike, with rocky cliffs at the Atlantic coast. Clew Bay is dotted with small, steep-sided islands, including Clare Island. At the eastern end of the bay, Westport town is known for its Georgian architecture and Westport House, a mansion with dungeons. Nearby is Croagh Patrick, a mountain linked to St. Patrick. ― Google
The FLUFF part is aptly named after Marshmallow Fluff, when as a child the only time I would eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was if it had Marshmallow Fluff on it and no peanut butter or jelly.
This is better than any of the mayos I made previously, though each of those were great in their own right, plus it’s better than any store bought plant or vegan mayo including Miracle Whip and Hellman’s.
IT’S JUST UP THERE – IN THE CLOUDS – NOBODY CAN REACH IT – it’s that good – all facets. Perfect texture; when you mix it in a salad, the salad doesn’t turn all oily. And it came to me in a dream (Just kidding, I was wide awake when I dreamed this up – I’m not giving some ghost refusing to identify itself credit for this one. There’s something about walking into the kitchen, that makes my brain automatically go into development mode.)
Don’t forget the fenugreek, and use powdered okay? Don’t crush your own, it will insert hard bits that we don’t want.
It’s all about the FLUFF. At first use, one might think that the fluff was going to dissipate, but not so. It holds up. It can be briefly microwaved and used as a warm sauce. Microwave it too much and it thickens too much.
Spread it on a sandwich in place of traditional animal or plant mayos. Use it in potato, pasta and tofu salads. Dips, yes! Top a hot dog or burger – with or without the bun.
One Tablespoon ANIMAL-FREE FLUFF MAYO contains 8 calories and .30gm fat. Hellman’s Vegan Spread contains 7o calories and 8 gm fat per Tablespoon in comparison. Two Tablespoons is only 16 calories compared to 140 calories of Hellman’s.
It spreads great, sets on top of the bread instead of soaking into it. A plus, so you know it’s there!
Now, the only plant milk I tried with this FLUFF MAYO was EDENSOY UNSWEETENED SOYMILK. I’ll be trying others. It can be bought online @amazon or store.edenfoods.com.
I’ve always been interested in my body – not only image, but how it worked.
I wasn’t born, or blessed some may say, with the body I wanted.
You don’t have to be athletic or well-balanced or have a high tolerance for extreme exercise to want to do what’s best, given what you have to work with, that contributes to better health and feeling of well-being.
I never could have skate-boarded or water-skied or snow skied. Even bowling wasn’t easy – that hand-eye coordination and mixed dominance in the brain tricked me up every time. Me knitting is like watching an impaired person, crocheting was certainly not my game. Mother tried to teach me, but no way Jose.
When young I could run, but then those tachycardia issues developed and the breathiness. I loved the water, but no one expected to see me on anybody’s swim team, though I had beautiful form some would say. I was forced to join a neighborhood softball team and it was an embarrassment. My mother fought for something for the girls and I had to at least show up and try.
I tried golf and couldn’t hit the ball; who cares where it goes as long as I could hit it. Not going to happen. The others thought I was pretending not to be able to hit it. I wasn’t. I gave it a hundred percent of wishing and hoping.
I need some food, just writing about all those fun for most everybody else athletic exercise activities in which I could not participate and have fun made me hungry. One has to get on the board at least. That wasn’t going to happen.
Arnold Schwarzenegger once said that he visualizes everything the night before that he wants to do the next day in the gym. It works he said.
Hey, I could dance, but not for long. And I have to go with my own movements, since because of that mixed dominance thing I get my right and left mixed up, so nothing flows as it should. No dance contests for me.
People who can do all these physical activities and do them reasonably well, don’t know how lucky they are.
No one would believe that I was buying MUSCLE & FITNESS magazine since the late seventies. No one would believe that I read Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book while walking around a bookstore in Massachusetts. Read the whole book, that’s how small it was and the print was large, but that’s how interested I was in muscles. To this day, anytime his name is in the news, I pay attention. I recall the one thing he admitted to in the book was treating girls, everybody called women, girls back then, like sex toys or something like that. He also talked about vomiting after extreme exercise.
I have dystonia, a neurological condition that effects certain skeletal muscles by irregularly contracting them, pulling parts of the body affected into abnormal positions – controlled by the basil ganglia of the brain. The same region that causes Parkinson’s disease. Some say it’s the opposite of Parkinson’s.
That condition emerged after an accident on an amusement slide where I went airborne and came down hard on my spine, then up again, then down again till I swirled at the bottom, struggling to get up with a small child in my arms. I remember at trial, the defense claimed I should have put my arms out to protect myself, thereby not taking necessary steps to prevent injury. Of course I lost, not being a born-in-Oregon person.
I was an active kid. No one would say I was challenged as a child or even as a young adult; I just wasn’t athletic. Tall, skinny, lanky isn’t a handicap. I was quick – at everything, and precise.
I remember trying to back up on my ice skates and just couldn’t figure it out. Kids would show me how they do it, mothers of my friends showed me, but didn’t tell me the process. Maybe it’s one of those things that you either innately know how to do or you don’t. No amount of teaching or showing will change that. No one’s going to be able to teach me how to hit a golf ball.
I wasn’t good at factory work either. I tried it though, with every intention of doing well. Nanny Kay can do it, so can I. Not so.
I’ll tell you though, all the failures were not for lack of trying. I tried everything, put my all into it.
I’m chuckling out loud now watching myself as I write on a fat-free chef site about exercise. What could I possibly know that everybody else wouldn’t simply laugh at or that they already know?
Nothing. Everybody knows more about exercise than I do. Even though it has always been a part of my life, front and center for huge sweeps of my life, I couldn’t follow and stick to any exercise program that I ever read about or watched on a video that anybody else promoted. I guess that makes me a DIY person.
My specialty is staying active. I can’t sit for long. It’s in my DNA that ‘not being able to sit still long’ thing. Even sitting in the short term, something on me is moving.
I have a treadmill in my room. I have a rowing machine. Well, half a rowing machine. I injured myself low to the floor, thinking I was Cory Everson of body building fame. I got creative with it, just because I was feeling so good, but the next day and for six months later every time I looked at that rower I cursed it in my mind.
I almost threw it away, the whole of it, when I decided to break it up and remove the long seat bar and the seat. What’s left is the head. Now that I can work with and hopefully not injure myself. I either stand to use it or sit on the desk chair or the side of the bed to use it. Haven’t been injured since the last time. Good for me.
I have two cords, red and green different resistances, in the closet hanging over the clothes rack which is a perfect place, since the rack is super-secure. I don’t do long distance; I get up close. Working in a small space on my total trunk. I don’t spread anything out. Lanky, which I am, is not well-suited for that.
I’ve got three poles of varying height, which could get me into trouble if I don’t treat them just right. They’re my spotters. That super tall one I’m not sure about.
I have two 5 pound dumb bells and two 10 pound dumb bells.
I already know how to do yoga, been doing it all my life. I’m not very good at holding positions for very long though. It’s that need to move thing I have. I learned over the years that simply stretching without being so mechanical is most beneficial for me.
Breathing is important and I can hold my breath too long and end up dead. So all that training before sleep for all those years might help if I was ever water-boarded, but all it did was expand my lungs, the relaxing part when in extreme positions is not really my thing, although I do it well.
I was hypnotized once or a few times to quit smoking (different people, different times) back in the early eighties. With this one guy, I went back – satisfaction guaranteed – and said it didn’t work. He said yes it did, you were hypnotized, you had all the requirements, galvanic skin response, pulse, respiration. I said, well that may be true and I’m not doubting that I got into a state, but it didn’t do as you promised, make me not smoke. You were hypnotized, he said. I said, perhaps I could have been, had you not gotten up and tip-toed to lock the door. Yeah, yeah, he said he did that so nobody would come in. I’m thinking I was the only one there, who’s going to come in? He didn’t even have a receptionist. So I did get into what some might call a hypnotic state, like I said, I do it every night before sleep, but I was very alert in my state-ready position to pounce if I had to. First thing, when I got back to the car was light up.
Sorry for digressing so much, must be the Fenugreek I’ve been wrestling. Too little, too much? I’ll figure it out.
Been taking 1/4 teaspoon of Creatine powder in my coffee each morning along with 1/4 t. Fenugreek powder. It’s too early to tell anything about it. Something I learned was it takes a while for effects of supplements to effect the body in any significant way. It takes time. Sure I can lose 6 pounds in 6 days, but I can’t do that every six days. It doesn’t work that way. I like results. Everybody does, sooner rather than later, caught on as a phrase because everybody identified with it.
I figure I’m working up to something, like a dance I do before painting, cooking or writing.
We finally decided to go the caffeine-free route, doing now and then half caffeine/half espresso, probably on week-ends. Neither of us, especially me, likes regimentation, but I’m beginning to lean that way. One night a week animal-free burger night. Sundays are for brunch. One day a week pasta and red sauce. We both need more routine in our lives, especially now with age and COVID out to get us. Everyday, some sort of regimented exercise. I can’t go to bed without it. If I do, then I have to exercise in bed – leg lifts 100 in every direction usually quiets the nerves in my body, which remnants of the coronavirus seem intent on sparking to keep me awake.
At almost 73 years old I still take no prescribed medication. I must be doing something right I often tell myself. That knowledge, however, doesn’t make me slack off of me.
I want to be in that place…where I can’t slouch even if I want to. No it’s not a straight jacket. It’s a muscular jacket.
Way back in the early eighties again I read a piece in one of the muscle magazines about a then 50 year old woman, who told her body building story. Now decades later what I recall of it and did recall from time to time throughout the years is her saying she couldn’t slouch if she wanted to.
I’m on board with that. That’s my goal as far as body building goes. Don’t laugh, I know, I know, Lanky Sharon Lee doing the body kick to sit like a stick. No kicking, remember no injuries.
I’ll get there, sooner rather than later. I’m all set up for it.
If it’s food, if it can be eaten, it has fat in it. Fat of some kind in some proportion, no matter how small, it’s there.
So, fat-free in the area of food doesn’t exist.
Even carrots contain fat. Plain ol’ carrots. Just try to peel a 50 gallon drum of them and see the fat accumulating on your hands.
There’s fat in fruit, not much, but it’s still there.
Essentially fat-free is what I’m going for. Then almost fat-free, when I need perhaps a tablespoon per 4 servings to emulsify the ingredients (to make stuff blend together).
I’m going back and forth between fat-free and not fat-free. Or fat-free and fatty. That’s my life and my choice.
It may make more sense to stay at a more even pace by doing low fat all the time. That doesn’t fit me. I want to indulge sometimes without going crazy.
I’m not ever going to sit down and eat a pound of butter or drink a cup of olive oil. But I do want some nut butter sometimes. And I do want some rich sauces and the occasional rich dessert.
So I prefer to be strict and then not strict. We’ll see if I can continue that up and down, varying amounts of fat and still lose the weight I need and want to lose – yoyo style.
The SWING diet, besides being animal-free is pretty much my style of eating.
Using that foundation I’ll experiment with different methods until I get comfortable with my process and discover more of what works for me, not simply what I like.
Ever wash your own clothes, either at home in a machine or at the laundromat? What happens when you overload the machine? Your clothes don’t get as clean, because they’re packed in too tightly not allowing for the freedom of movement required for the water and detergent to reach every fiber.
Many fat people are malnourished, believe it or not. They stuff their guts so full that the enzymes needed to digest the food, cannot possibly work as efficiently as when a smaller portion is put in the stomach, allowing not only for better digestion, but greater utilization of the vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats and carbohydrates.
When you over-pack your stomach you produce the same effect as when you pack too many clothes into your washing machine.
Ever see a tracker trailer going uphill with a full load compared to a lighter load? A truck with a full load will crawl up the hill, stressing the engine, and then speed down it by the sheer weight of it. A lighter load climbs and descends the hill with greater ease, proving that the more weight you carry around, the more difficult it’s going to be to move and the greater stress it puts on all your body parts.
The straw that broke the camels back. People overloading a camel with bundles and boxes of goods for sale; it’s based on the same principle. Overload anything and it won’t operate efficiently. There’s a law of nature somewhere in there that humans seem to resist. One more chicken leg, or piece of pie or milkshake or box of canned goods won’t harm. But it does.
A belated Happy New Year to you all. Weighed in at a whopping 197 this AM when I finally found the courage to step on the scale I’ve been avoiding for three months. See what happens when you’re not vigilant? It just creeps up on you. So, what happened????!!! I spent two months making a ghetto apartment habitable after being evicted after being turned down by better housing because of the eviction. Seems my attorney worked for somebody else. Two days after we thought we won, an eviction notice showed up on our door and our big time lawyer quit, with a big gotcha.
Sometimes simple and easy meets perfection standards!This is one of those times!The soup and the Jade rice are fat-free; the pan-fried veggie dogs and drizzle of extra virgin olive oil if you so choose, contribute a low-fat factor!!
The last time I made orange rind strips I did so for drying purposes. When dried I packed them up, stored them at room temperature and saved them for future use. They were good and, in a liquid, reconstituted to a nice chew.
I used to have a sweet tooth as a kid and into adulthood. When I finally conquered that habit, I just never went back to it.
It’s kind of like going animal-free. At some point you don’t look back. You could put me in a hotel room with a refrigerator filled with all kinds of animal meat dishes and I wouldn’t touch them.
I wouldn’t even toy with the idea. My interest in eating animals disappeared over time. It’s like the fat. The more I eat, the more I want. The less I eat, the less I want. That’s why manufacturers put the animal in everything – even salads and now desserts. The egg and the milk wasn’t enough. Now they’ve got to have the flesh in there too.
Advertisers know, based on scientific studies, that people’s interests wane and habits loosen their grip over time if people aren’t continuously re-exposed to keep that familiarity ever-present with whatever it is that they want you to do. Buy their product is their main interest and whether you do or don’t directly affects their bottom line. So they pay attention to studies that predict behavior. So then they can change yours by the advertisement techniques they use.
It’s like moving away from home and being homesick for a while, then it’s okay to live on your own finding the path in life that suits you, rather than simply following in the footsteps of your family. You lose the familiarity that kept you tethered, which allows you to branch out in your own direction.
Switching from EATING ANIMALS to ANIMAL-FREE is much the same process.
How do I know? I know myself and having the benefit of looking back over a long life, the picture of the process becomes even more clear.
There’s a period of adjustment between going from the old to the new. That’s life. Quitting anything has that adjustment period that follows which many call withdrawal – that varies among individuals. Whether the cessation of any activity is sudden or gradual, losing the familiarity factor is what makes us not want it any more. We branched beyond it and saw other things of interest and value to replace it.
Editor’s Note: Mastering Diabetes, Cyrus Khambatta and Robby Barbaro’s groundbreaking book on reversing insulin resistance, debuted on February 18. In this abridged excerpt, the authors take a hard look at the ketogenic diet for diabetes treatment.
If you are living with diabetes, you may have been told to eat a low-carbohydrate diet to control your blood glucose or you may have been told to eat a very low-carbohydrate diet, otherwise known as a ketogenic diet. Regardless of which form of low-carbohydrate diet you may have come across, understanding the pros and cons of low-carbohydrate and ketogenic nutrition for people with diabetes will give you the information you need to choose what’s right for you.
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WHAT IS A KETOGENIC DIET?
A ketogenic diet involves eating between 30 to 50 grams of carbohydrates per day in order to achieve a metabolic state known as ketosis, in which your muscles and liver derive the bulk of their energy from fatty acids and amino acids instead of from glucose found in carbohydrates. To do so, those adopting ketogenic diets are told to get 70 to 90 percent of their calories from fat—from meat, eggs, sausages, heavy cream, cheeses, fish, nuts, butter, oils, seeds, non-starchy vegetables, avocados, coconuts, and small amounts of berries, while avoiding almost all fruits, starchy vegetables, breads, pastas, legumes, milk, and yogurt.
ARE KETOGENIC DIETS GOOD FOR PEOPLE WITH DIABETES?
Many people around the world who eat a ketogenic diet are able to lose weight, achieve a flat-line blood glucose profile, greatly reduce or eliminate their need for oral medication and insulin, and reduce their total cholesterol. So why aren’t we recommending this diet ourselves? Because despite these advantages, there are four very important points to take into consideration:
Evidence-based research conducted in large numbers of people over long periods of time consistently demonstrates that eating more animal products increases your risk for premature death, no matter what short-term benefits may unfold in the process. Similar large-scale research demonstrates that eating more whole plant foods reduces your risk for premature death.
The short-term benefits associated with a ketogenic diet can also easily be achieved using a low-fat plant-based whole-food diet, as seen in research dating back to the 1920s.
Low-fat plant-based whole-food nutrition is the only approach shown to reverse heart disease (the leading cause of death of people living with all forms of diabetes), whereas diets high in saturated fat and cholesterol have been shown to promote heart disease.
There are many examples of long-lived societies around the world who eat plant-based diets, and zero examples of long-lived societies who eat a low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet with a high intake of animal products.
While the ketogenic diet may seem like a logical approach to reducing blood glucose fluctuations, it is based on the outdated and incorrect carbohydrate-centric model of diabetes, which points a finger at carbohydrates as the cause of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, even though overwhelming evidence shows that low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets are actually the cause of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.
ARE THE SHORT-TERM BENEFITS OF A KETOGENIC DIET WORTH IT FOR PEOPLE WITH DIABETES (OR THOSE AT RISK FOR DEVELOPING IT)?
Many doctors today are quick to recommend a ketogenic diet to patients with type 2 diabetes based predominantly on short-term studies, such as a 2005 study in which scientists from Temple University followed 10 obese patients living with type 2 diabetes for two weeks and observed a 0.5 percent reduced A1c (a measure of average blood glucose) and a 75 percent increase in insulin sensitivity.
Indeed, based on the short-term evidence, a ketogenic diet is a very effective tool at promoting short-term improvements in body weight, blood glucose, A1c, and triglyceride levels. In the long term, however, a ketogenic diet is unlikely to provide the same results, and it’s more likely to pose risks, as is the general class of low-carbohydrate diets. In large-scale studies performed over long periods of time, the evidence-based literature consistently shows that low-carbohydrate diets worsen long-term health, increase the risk for many chronic diseases, increase the risk for infectious diseases, and increase mortality.
Take, for example, the 2014 study in which researchers from Loma Linda University summarized the results of three separate Adventist health studies (covering more than 100,000 people): In comparison with their meat-eating counterparts, lacto-ovo-vegetarians were 38 to 61 percent less likely to develop diabetes, and vegans were 47 to 78 percent less likely to develop diabetes. They concluded that vegetarian and vegan diets offer significant protection against death from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, and that those who chose to eat more meat and dairy products in the long term significantly increased their risk for death.
In a 2016 study, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School analyzed data of more than 130,000 participants from the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. They found that for those who were already living with diabetes, eating more animal protein raised the risk of all-cause mortality, whereas eating more plant protein reduced that risk.
Most mainstream diabetes recommendations encourage eating more animal protein as a means of losing weight and “stabilizing blood glucose,” but large-scale research shows exactly the opposite.
A more recent paper showcasing the effect of a ketogenic diet in 262 people living with type 2 diabetes demonstrated that only 14 percent of patients were able to maintain a ketogenic diet over a 2-year period. In addition, after 2 years patients had an elevated fasting glucose, elevated fasting insulin, elevated A1c, elevated total cholesterol, and elevated LDL cholesterol, despite significant reductions in their use of oral medications and insulin.
THE TAKEAWAY
If a ketogenic diet was the only way to improve your metabolic health in the short term, then the benefits would certainly outweigh the prospect of no improvements at all. However, practically all “diets” work in the short term, because diets prompt you to pay attention to the quality of the food that you’re eating, how much you’re eating, when you’re eating, and how you feel between meals. The difference between dietary approaches becomes much more apparent over the course of time, and those that create long-term sustainable habits and provide lasting metabolic fitness will always beat out those that are unsustainable as well as those that negatively impact your long-term metabolic health.
And this is exactly why we strongly caution you against adopting a ketogenic diet without understanding that the short-term metabolic improvements can easily trick you into believing that it is a smart long-term option, when the evidence-based research demonstrates that people who reduce their intake of carbohydrate-rich foods and substitute more fat-and more protein-rich foods from animal sources are at a greater risk for chronic disease and premature death.
Now for the good news: Unlike ketogenic diets that haven’t been studied in depth for long periods of time, almost a hundred years of evidence-based research has demonstrated that a low-fat plant-based whole-food diet is an excellent option for simultaneously maximizing your overall metabolic health, reversing insulin resistance, and dropping your chronic disease risk.
Around 34 million Americans—roughly 1 in 10—have some form of diabetes, and another 88 million have prediabetes. Read on for an overview of how diabetes works; how type 1 differs from type 2; common symptoms; and how you can prevent, manage, or (in the case of type 2 diabetes) even reverse it.
By Courtney Davison, Last Updated: Nov 11, 2021
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THE DANGERS OF LOW-CARB DIETS
If you have diabetes, you may have been told at some point to eat a low-carb, high-fat diet, such as the ketogenic diet. While these diets can help normalize blood sugar levels in the short term, they fail to address the underlying cause of type 2 diabetes: insulin resistance.
This is why people on high-fat diets might experience high blood glucose immediately after eating fruit, whole grains, or other carb-rich foods. “From a biological perspective, this makes perfect sense, because the more fat you eat, the less tolerant of carbohydrates your muscles and liver become,” explain Khambatta and Barbaro in their book Mastering Diabetes. But “fruit is not to blame for elevated blood glucose; it’s the high-fat foods you ate before eating fruit that makes it difficult for your muscles and liver to metabolize glucose effectively.”In the long term, high-fat, low-carb diets also increase the risk of heart disease and premature death from all causes.
REAL-LIFE SUCCESS STORIES OF TYPE 2 DIABETES REVERSAL
If you’ve already been diagnosed with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, you can likely improve your outcomes by eating more whole plant foods and avoiding animal products and highly processed foods.
For inspiration, check out these first-person testimonials from people who reversed type 2 diabetes after adopting a whole-food, plant-based diet….
Talk about a unique way to use Tofurky Oven-Roasted Deli Slices!Make noodles out of them, right out of the box.Mix them with salsa and cheese, herbs and spices, heat till warm, then serve as a dip or spread!
Hot here means temperature not Scofield Scale heat.
I scared Steve with the soup when he got up and I told him to go see it. ‘Nice color, he said. ‘Stir it, I said. ‘Nice. ‘Maybe I’ll thicken it a bit, I said. All of a sudden he started laughing and grabbed his chest bending over, then said, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know what that was, then remembered that sachet thing – ‘that thing you talked about – the sachet thing. He took a deep breath and let it out like he just went through something. ‘Bouquet garni, I said as he continued to laugh.
So sachet it is. STEVE’S SACHET SOUP. Lipid Lowering. I’ve got my title – actually two of them!
What’s a lipid?
‘Cholesterol is a type of blood fat, and blood fats are known as lipids. Cholesterol and other lipids are carried in the blood attached to proteins, forming tiny spheres, or “parcels” known as lipoproteins.
Steve needs to lower his lipids. Although not horrible, he eats about 4 pounds of nuts a week, plus he puts oil and margarine on everything. People who have been in heart failure and had stents inserted need to get their lipid panel numbers lower than those who don’t have heart disease, according to his doctor.’
“Intuitive eating is a simple idea. It means that you make peace with all types of food. Unlike traditional diets that restrict or ban certain foods, intuitive eating requires you to stop looking at food as “good” or “bad.” Instead, you listen to your body and eat what feels right for you. Mar 5, 2021
What Is Intuitive Eating? – WebMD”
Comment from Sharon: Whoever came up with this intuitive eating scam is so far off the mark of doing what’s right for your body, and the environment, which happens to include all the animals on the planet who intuitive eaters dream to consume.
So back up and back down. Wrong is wrong intuitively speaking or not. If you’ve been eating animals all your life, then your body has become addicted to the flesh and blood. So of course intuitively your body will tell you to eat what it craves. Intuitive eating feeds your addictions.
Your mind seeks to please to keep your alert mechanism in check, even though it knows what you consume is hurting you; it figures not giving you what you want will hurt you more through the added stress of withdrawal from what you’ve been consuming all your life as normal and good for you.
So, tell your mind/body what you want, based on the science and your early experiences with food. If you’re addicted to anything, withholding that which you crave will not make you intuitively feel better.
If you’re addicted and you think listening to your body will force you to make the correct decisions, you’re wrong; it won’t.
Listen to how you felt as a child before the massive deluge of eating all the wrong things hit you like a tsunami. Take yourself back to a better time, then research and be willing to feel the discomfort of withdrawing from those foods which hurt not help your body.
That’s the real intuition talking. The intuition of addiction is a broken intuition. Look elsewhere to heal your intuition.
People use dressings, sauces and condiments on just about everything they eat. So that’s an area we can work on in lowering the fat and caloric content of what we put on our food.Nobody would suspect that there is a fat-reduced creamy sauce enveloping the fresh fruits and rind matchsticks in this delectable salad!
A thick, rich, creamy hummus mayo. The density requires less on a sandwich, thus saves calories. Save even more calories plus fat by adding beans. Super creamy makes the palate difference in this hummus turned into mayo!
AGAR WORKED, until I stopped using it out of concern that it would block the absorption of necessary nutrients. I read it some place and it set off an alarm, so I quit it. Well, don’t believe everything you read, my mother once said.
So much of the debate over palm oil centres around whether it’s good for the environment that it’s easy to overlook another important question: is palm oil good for you?
The nutritional profile of palm oil is quite similar to other cooking oils. One tablespoon contains about 120 calories and 14 grams of total fat, including 7 grams of saturated fat, 5 grams of monounsaturated fat, and 1.5 grams of polyunsaturated fat.
That’s similar to other edible oils, though they differ in the type of fats they contain. Palm oil contains more saturated fat than olive oil (and about the same amount as butter), but less than other tropical oils such as coconut oil.
Palm oil can lower cholesterol
Palm oil contains monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which are known to be beneficial to health. It also contains saturated fat, which has been linked to cardiovascular problems, but research has shown that “palm oil does not have incremental risk for cardiovascular disease” when consumed as part of a balanced diet.
Palm oil is also free of cholesterol, a waxy substance that can increase your risk of heart disease. There is even evidence that a diet containing palm oil can actually reduce cholesterol levels: in a 2015 clinical trial published in the journal Food and Function, both palm oil and olive oil reduced cholesterol by 15 per cent.
Palm oil is free from trans fats
Palm oil is also free of trans fats, which are known to be unhealthy. Vegetable oil such as soybean, rapeseed and sunflower is liquid at room temperature, so in order to be useful in many food products it has to go through an industrial process to turn it into a semi-solid. That process, known as hydrogenation, creates trans fats which are known to be linked to cardiovascular disease.
Palm oil is naturally semi-solid at room temperature, meaning there is no need for it to be hydrogenated and therefore it contains no trans fats. According to The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, replacing trans fats with palm oil may reduce heart disease risk markers and improve blood lipids.
Palm oil has played an important role in improving diets as countries around the world have moved to ban or restrict trans-fats in foods. Many manufacturers have turned to palm oil as a natural alternative in foods that require solid or semi-solid fats.
There’s also evidence that palm oil may have additional health benefits. It’s high in tocotrienols, a type of vitamin E with antioxidant properties. Some research suggests that tocotrienols can slow the progression of dementia and lower stroke risk.
Palm oil is extracted from the flesh of the fruit of E. Guineesis using pressure. In its unrefined form, the palm oil is bright orange in color due to high amounts of carotene pigments. The oil is semi-solid at room temperature and is highly resistant to oxidation and prolonged exposure to heat. Palm oil is widely used in margarine and vegetable shortenings.
Palm Olein
When the semi-solid palm oil is refined, it separates into palm olein and palm stearine. The palm olein has different characteristics than the palm oil, most notably that it remains completely liquid at room temperature. It is highly heat resistant, similar to palm oil, and it also resists the formation of breakdown products during frying and increases the shelf life of many products.
Main Difference
Although palm oil and palm olein are produced from the same plant and share many similar properties, the main difference between them is their chemical state at room temperature. Semi-solid palm oil is used more frequently as a fat in bakery products, whereas liquid palm olein is considered the “gold standard” and is the most widely used oil for frying in the world.
Because they eat FOR EVER, instead of for the moment.
Or, they eat like there’s no tomorrow.
Either way produces the same result: Eating more than the body NEEDS FOR NOW.
Eating FOR EVER is a form of hoarding. It’s an addiction and because it results in progressive sickness it’s a disease.
How to cure it? Treat it like any other addiction?
Nobody really knows how to treat addiction. Even the treatment centers that focus on punishment or reward or avoidance/abstinence or medication or psychotherapy or substitutive positive addictions don’t give a money back guarantee for the thousands of dollars required to get the treatment. Some of the most expensive centers hide large recidivism rates.
ONCE YOU START YOU CAN’T STOP.
That’s what all addictions boil down to.
In that regard, over-eating is like any other addiction.
Where over-eating differs from other addictions is the stockpiling of food in the body itself.
One could say that alcohol and drug addicted humans drink and drug FOR EVER, but they really don’t. They’re not stock piling drugs and drink in their bodies.
Yes, they can’t stop once they start. But the drugs and drink leave the body.
With food, a big part stays in the body as fat, as adipose tissue, as a source of pride and accomplishment. Look what I saved. Look what I have in case of a global food shortage? Free food I carry with me every place I go. Suitcases of it. I’ve got it made in the shade.
Try to give that up.
It’s not unlike the anorexic human, who does the opposite. With the hoarder, the more the better. With the anorexic, the less the better. The anorexic intuitively and instinctively thinks they’ll survive longest, because they need so little to do it.
When the rest of the world is hungry, because they’re accustomed to eating so much FOR EVER, the anorexic isn’t even hungry, much less feeling deprived.
In the minds of the over-eaters and the under-eaters, they win – until they don’t. Until they realize they miscalculated. Living isn’t about FOR EVER. It’s about RIGHT NOW. What does my body need now. Not for tomorrow or the next day or week or year or forever.
WHAT DO I NEED NOW TO SURVIVE?
If surviving is the goal and if surviving makes me happy, then I can only count on NOW. Nobody survives forever. Making your body/mind work together to survive in the short term to equip us for the longer term doesn’t involve the excessive or scant amounts consumed at the high end and at the low end of the consumption continuum.
Your engine runs better on moderate amounts for the NOW, short term and long term. After the NOW stage, you replenish (all humans do), so you never have to worry about the long term except where it involves quality of what you consume NOW.
Many humans think the more they eat of a healthy food, the healthier they’ll become. Not so. Too much is an overload, and overload always spells trouble in the NOW. The body stops absorbing nutrients to protect it from poisoning itself and throws all the excess into the fat bin.
If you’re too skinny, you’re at risk for disease. If you’re too fat, you’re at risk for disease.
If you put too much and too many harmful substances in your body you tip the scales over fifty percent and that’s at a dangerous level. If you put too little into your system, then the body starts feeding on itself and that spells trouble too.
The mirror will tell you the truth. If too skinny or too fat, you’re trying to live FOR EVER.
All you have is today. Don’t deprive yourself or indulge yourself, and you’ll be good for tomorrow, then do the same tomorrow and you’ll be good for the next day and on and on.
Steady.
Later Gators,
Sharon
ADD-ON:
Note that the only skinny person in this photo of fat women is belted to a wheelchair. I’m not sure what that’s intended to convey. Perhaps if you’re not fat, you’ll end up in a wheelchair.
PROUD TO BE FAT OR SKINNY OR WHEELCHAIR BOUND? OR ALMOST NAKED?
This is where addicted people want to change the world’s view of themselves, so they can keep the obsessions that do and will lead to disease and early death.
Light, dark skin women all wearing the same white underwear. What does that convey? What I see is a lack of individuality.
People already see their fat or their lack of fat. Removing some garments doesn’t tell a different story.
They’re acting smug, going to tell the world to accept their addictions.
The lengths people go to hold onto their fat won’t surprise anyone when the world finally sees the fat as a product of disease, a psychological disorder that’s a killer.
The world accepted anorexia nervosa as a disease/disorder, now they must do the same with the opposite of anorexia. There’s a reason why there’s an organization called OVER-EATERS ANONYMOUS.
These two #BEYONDBEAUTY pictures tell subversive lies.
All addicts do.
The food industry of course wants to keep fat people eating what they’ve been eating and get thinner people to eat more, just as the spirits, wine and brew industries thrive by the excessive drinking habits of consumers.
In the end, it’s up to the individual to find a cure for themselves, because the respective industries providing addicts and those becoming over-users the product they crave, and the governments that depend on those tax dollars attached to the product aren’t going to do it.
Steve and I have been half the time dying and half the time living with long COVID this year.
In an effort to cope I bought this skeleton yesterday at Walgreen’s.
If I die first, her name is Sharon.
If Steve dies first, his name is Steve.
If nothing else, when faced with traveling the remainder of life’s journey alone, it will give the survivor something to laugh about – maybe even cherish.
Find something that you and your partner can laugh about and hold onto that laugh forever.
THE LAW OF INERTIA KEEPS YOU FROM LOSING OR GAINING WEIGHT
Quitting one food or beverage to lose weight may not work. For instance, say you quit alcohol and you cut calories by 500 per day. Your body will instinctively try to replace those 500 calories with some other food or beverage to keep you where you were with your caloric intake.
It’s like the law of inertia. A body tends to stay where it’s at whether still or in motion. The inertia resists change. The body doesn’t like big changes. It takes a while to adapt to produce the change desired.
So discourage not, when you’re attempting a change or conversion and your body resists. It’s built that way so you don’t flip flop all over the place putting your body/mind into chaos.
Keep at it. Let your body/mind know who’s boss. Don’t punish yourself when your body/mind doesn’t respond quickly to your demands.
The best way to let your body/mind know you mean business and that you really do want and need what you say you want and need is to stay the course with or without obvious benefit.
Eventually you’ll reap the benefits as your body/mind falls in line with your aspirations.
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So why do people get worried that they’re losing muscle plus fat when they lose weight?
It’s the nature of the beast.
It’s the nature of the beast to worry – about every action that creates change within and outside your body, the organism that is you, that you and you only own and control. It’s your body that’s changing and you’d better be worrying about the result. It’s your responsibility to do that.
It’s normal. Your body/mind is designed to expect inquiries into the self and what is going on with it at all stages and junctures of change. So you worry, then you realize both are your beast’s nature then you realize that in order to lose fat, you’re going to have to lose some muscle along with it.
Body building is different. Builders take growth hormones and aminos to add muscle mass. But they control where it gets added, or the sequence in which it gets added, by the extreme weight lifting, pulling and pushing they do to further expand the growth in the muscles they target.
Increasing exercise increases the need for more energy, which burns fat, but it also requires that the organism consume more calories.
Steve walks five to seven miles a day five days a week at work as a security officer. Then on days off he walks to various stores to shop.
No one would believe at his size that he walks that many miles. For five years he’s done that.
Throughout my life when I exercised the most is when I was the heaviest. Now that I have chronic pain from chronic injuries I can’t exercise nearly as much. The more I exercise, the more pain. Short term I used to be able to do about anything within reason. Not so now.
When I was a skinny kid, I didn’t exercise and didn’t weigh myself. I was active, very active. When I quit my nursing job to go to college, I gained twenty pounds. I wasn’t as active as I was working an eight hour shift then coming home to do chores.
I also ate more, since I was sitting around either in class or at home doing studies. Boredom appears to be the primary factor. What to do now or next. I experience that now, working such long hours on the computer.
It doesn’t matter that I’m up and down, up and down, doing other chores or activities in between the computer work. The frequent changes in activities doesn’t appear to contribute to weight loss as one might think.
So don’t sweat it when your muscles get smaller when you lose the fat. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s part of the big picture. You can worry if you want to; it’s normal. But in the same way that your body/mind alerts you to any loss – because that’s it’s job in case we fell asleep – it’s up to us to translate that as a good sign that your body/mind is communicating to you that it’s awake and attentive to what’s happening to YOU.
It’s not just a ‘HEY YOUR BODY’S ON FIRE’, stop doing what you’re doing. It’s more like a ‘MEMO TO THE BOSS’, you can’t have it both ways, lose only fat and not some muscle along with it. Be realistic in your demands of your organism. Settle down. It’s okay.
Later gators,
Sharon
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