Sugar Addiction

I have just ordered some books on sugar addiction as I am sure this was part of my problem.

With cutting out fat, which is what I did for years, I ate more complex carbohydrates to try and fill me up. Trouble is it did not work. All that glucose just made me more hungry after meals and I ate more bread to try and feel sated.

Some of these books are also advising on what I have already discovered. My body is much happier on a higher percentage of fat and I dont put on weight as long as I dont eat grain carbohydrates. At present I am continuing to lose weight.

I dont know where this is going to stop and what I am going to look like when my body weight has stablized. I can already see fat has gone from my forearms and face and the bags under my eyes have gone.

Maybe I was never supposed to be obese but the dieting advice I received over the years was completely wrong for me. Eating bread and pasta and potatoes even though they are low calorie just fed my sugar addiction.

Now I am on a medium calorie eating plan with added good fats and am feeling so much younger than I have felt for years.

My body is thanking me every way it can for finally stopping the sugar diets!

The Fat Diet

This is the most phenomenal diet I have ever tried. It is just amazing how well it is working for me when I have failed at diets so many times.

This diet/way of eating fixes the underlying problem with my metabolism. I dont handle sugar well and have problems with low blood sugar in the afternoons if I have a high carb low calorie lunch.

This is not a low calorie diet. I am eating about 1500 cals per day and am adding butter and good oils back into my diet after being fat phobic for 50 years. I also have between 20 to 30 gms of carbs each day from milk and vegetables.

It is so wonderful to sit down to a meal and feel free to eat as much as I need and leave the table feeling satisfied and know that I am not going to feel hungry again for at least 4 hours. Next time I am hungry is time for another good meal.

For me this is a one way street. Knowing what I know about myself now I can never go back to eating the way I did. Trying to go low calorie so eating carbs with very little or no fat. I did not even enjoy it but thought I had to eat that way to try and keep my weight down. Guess what it did not work.

This is not a crash diet. I am presently losing 1 and 3/4lbs each week but it is very steady. I rarely find the scale going up. Just a nice steady almost effortless weight reduction.

Something I never even dreamed was possible. I thought the obesity and struggle was my lot for the rest of my life.

Jeans

Got into a pair of jeans yesterday. Glorious day.

Yes they are my biggest pair but 2 months ago I would have been no where near being able to zip them up.

Have got a rack of jeans in various sizes so will be great to work my way back through them.

In a few months these jeans may be too big!

I never thought I would be free of that behaviour around food in the afternoons. It has been so much a part of who I thought I was. It was just something I had to live with and fight every afternoon. That burning desire for calories in the afternoon. When I was dieting I would have a reason to try and ignore it but when I was off the diet or feeling weak I would give in and the diet would be a complete mess till the following day when I would start all over again.

Even now having not binged for 3 months I still have that waiting feeling around 3 or 4pm to see if it is going to start again. Whether my blood glucose will drop too low and I will be back in the pantry or the fridge. Every afternoon I make myself a cup of tea around that time and there is no desire to eat abnormally.

To me this is the biggest breakthrough. I always knew how to lose weight, only this is the easiest method I have tried. But with the out of control behaviour I was concerned about putting it back on again as I have done so often in the past. Now I have understood that behaviour and am eating so it never happens I have faith that the weight I am losing will never come back on again.

It is all about reactive hyperglycaemia and insulin. This is a cure.

Normal relationship with food

In 50 years I have never had a normal relationship with food until now. Food, especially carbs, had such power over me. If I knew there was left over chocolate cake, or dried fruit with museli cereal I could not relax in the afternoon until it was all finished or till I was so stuffed I felt sick.

I know now that was a symptom of a disordered carbohydrate metabolism. I ate too many carbs for lunch and as it was low calorie and low fat it hit my system very fast. I ended up with high glucose, followed by high insulin. The glucose would be stored in the fat cells but there was still too much insulin and my glucose blood level would come crashing down and I would have reactive hyperglycaemia. Then I would binge and the whole sorry process would start up all over again.

I believe know that the problem was caused by a) lack of fat and b)too many carb grams.

I am consuming around 30gms of carbs these days. Mainly from milk in my coffee and vegetables including tomatoes and onions.

I have increased my fat intake from zero ( a left over reflex from my years of low fat dieting) to around 50gms per day of butter, olive oil and coconut oil.

It seemed totally counter intuitive to be adding calories back into my diet when I want to lose weight but I had tried everything else I could think of and was still 100kg. It was a blind act of faith and boy is it paying off.

This is just a breeze. Weight is dropping. Another 200grms over the past 2 days. I am eating well and leaving the table satisfied and can forget about any food in the pantry or fridge till the next mealtime. Carbs have lost their hold over me. Free at last!

New You Atkins cook book

The above book arrived from Amazon yesterday. It is a 2012 one so quite up to date.

What is useful is that the recipes are graded as to whether they are suitable for Atkins phases. 1 2 3 or 4 and whether they are quick weekday dishes or weekend dishes that need more time.

They say that you can now have up to 5 cups of low carb veg on Atkins even in the early stages. Some of the recipes need baking mix which is only available in USA and UK but if you stick to the meat veg meals ( rather than the desserts and baking) all the ingredients are readily available in most supermarkets.

Yesterday I made DH some fish fillets dipped in egg and breadcrumbs and fried in olive oil. For mine I did egg and dessicated coconut ( unsweetened) and fried till coconut brown in crispy and the fish cooked. It was delicious and something I will do again.

I am really beginning to see progress here. My face is much less round with fat cheeks as it was before. I worked out I need to get down to around 85kg to drop under the obese classification and be simply overweight.

I have so much more confidence in myself and my ability to finally do this. All due to putting fat and good oils back into my diet. It may not be fast but it is steady and fairly consistent.

I want to be slim!

Is that too much to ask. To be a 'normal' weight after 50 years of yoyo dieting. For a few brief moments I have been under the 70kg but most of the time I have been up in the 90's.

For the first time, on Atkins, making sure I add the fat, I am beginning to think that maybe it is going to be possible.

To finally lose the weight and keep it off.

The struggle to lose weight is not building up day by day as it does on a low calorie low fat diet.

I take each day as it comes and my blood glucose is remarkably stable. I do not get binging moments or cravings.

I look forward to my meals. Am satisfied as I leave the table and often dont think about food for the next 3 to 4 hours.

I made a ratatouille the other day with olive oil, herbs and some spice. Am having that for supper with half a tin of pink salmon, some grated cheese and some of my hung yogurt cheese. Heat up the lot in the microwave. Quick supper and very tasty.

I am having tomatoes and onions every day and it is not affecting my weight loss at all. I could not live on a diet that bans tomatoes and onions.

My downfall food is bread and cereal. Any grains and I know I would be back on the binging wagon instead of this slow drift weightloss which seems to happen by magic.

7.7lbs a month

That is what I lost last month. This is not so much as losing as normalizing my weight. I dont feel on this diet that the less I eat the lower my weight will be. I eat a good 3 meals a day with added fat and oils and wait to see how my body is going to react.

Before I would be trying to punish my body by with holding food to get a lower weight the next day. It would all end in tears when I lost control around food and went for a binge.

It is amazing to me how that destructive behaviour has gone. It had been part of who I was for so long, since childhood. That daily battle with food every afternoon never went away. I was always waiting for it to start. I would buy 3 chocolate bars in town, eat 2 on the way home and then share the last one with DH!

Now I dont do that any more. Not once in nearly 3 months. It is not that I am resisting the craving. I just do not suffer from them any more. I can easily go 5 to 6 hours without food without any distress whatsoever.

The answer for me was not pills or potions or injections. It was the healing power of good fats and oils. Just adding in around 300 cals of butter, olive oil coconut oil has been enough to cure my eating disorder I have had for over 50 years and I have dropped 11kg in 10 weeks. Only 20 kg to go to get to a normal body!

wheat Belly

Read a couple of good books which just arrived from Amazon.

When you eat at the refrigerator pull up a chair and Wheat belly.

The wheat Belly is a new issue in 2011. The Dr is saying that he believes the nature of wheat has changed over the last 50 years and this plus the instructions to people to give up fat has lead to the mushrooming obesity and diabetes that we see today.

I know that bread is one of my main downfall foods when dieting and I do need fat to stop the binging so I believe he may have the answer to the problem. It is not sugar so much as wheat.

The refrigerator book made me laugh out loud. I will be passing it on to my daughters as I am sure they will enjoy it too.

Why we need fat

For years as a fat person I have tried to cut fat out of my diet whenever I could. I have non stick pans and learnt to 'dry fry' vegetables so that I would not have to add fat. I would never add butter or cream to my foods. I believed what I was told that the reason I was fat was because I was eating too many calories and that if I cut down on my calories I would lose weight.

Guess what It did not work. Fifty years later I am fatter than when I started.

What no body told me was that our bodies need fat and oil in our diet. Certain fatty acids are essential and the body cannot make them. It is not so much about calories as about carbs and insulin that are the cause of the obesity problem.

Now I add a small amount of butter to my eggs. I fry my veg in a little olive oil. I am losing weight and feeling I have so much more energy.

Ladies Diets

While I love the idea of eating all the protein and fat that I want and it has certainly got my cravings and binging under control for the first time in my life I have been finding the weight loss slower than I would like.

So many of these Low carb books are written by male Drs and I wonder if they are aware of the needs of the ladies.

I decided a couple of days ago I was fed up looking at the same number on the scale so took a look at what I was eating.

Luckily I am just not hungry in the mornings so for the past 2 mornings have changed my normal fried omelette and mushroom breakfast to 2 boiled eggs with a dab of butter on each. It has worked and I am now another lb down. Still found I looked at my watch at 12.10 thinking it was coffee time and it was lunch time. So did not make any difference to the rest of the eating for the day.

Keen to get below 14st again!

Attitude to Binging

Because of my long history of craving and binging I have never really felt slim and normal. I have always had the concern that a binge was only a day away and I would start putting back the weight that I had fought so hard to lose.

Because, by adding fat back into my diet, I have cured the binging episodes I now feel that I am on the right course to normalise my body weight. I dont feel that next week I am going to be 7lbs more than I am today.

However this does seem to be a slower process than I am used to. Its a hare and a tortoise method of dieting.

Is it better to be a tortoise and keep the weight off or a hare where the weight drops rapidly but comes back equally rapidly!

I do hope I will have dropped another lb by the end of the month. Just to give me the encouragement of getting under 200lb.

Funny thing is I feel slimer at this weight than I did when I was 170lbs last year. Something to do with being in control of my eating habits for the first time in my life.

seven hours without food

I had my breakfast as normal yesterday. Mushrooms fried in olive oil and a tomato/onion omelette at around 8.

I set off to sort out my D computers at 10.30am and started the antivirus update at 11am. It was painfully slow as it had not been updated for ages and eventually finished at 2.40pm. I could not leave it as the staff are not very computer savey.

So by the time I got home for lunch it was 3. I was surprised at how well my system coped. I was hungry yes but did not feel the need to send out for a pie or burger or some high carb thing. I had the control to be able to wait for my meal and that is very unusual for me. Previously I have been a clock watcher to see when is my next feeding time!

Life does seem less blaah these days. Dont think activities have changed but my attitude has. Have more spontinaity. Am being less frumpy and stuck to my chair!

Learning not to put on weight

Sometimes I think that is just as important as knowing how to lose weight.

We can go into self denial mode, maybe only for a short time before we binge, but the reward is the scale going down.

I have managed in the past to lose 50 to 70lbs over the course of about 10 months in this way.

Because I never understood the underlying metabolic problem that caused the obesity as soon as I came off the diet the weight started coming back. A lb here a couple of lbs there and then I was on the slippery slide back to where I started and maybe even heavier.

This way of eating with 30 to 50% of calories coming from fat is not a low calorie diet. I am eating about 1500 cals per day. So once I come off the 'diet' I am not going to find myself eating everything in sight. That will mean much more control over what I decide to eat and not have that eating without thought that has troubled me in the past.

Am getting into smaller size clothes and looking forward to being able to wear more of my nice smaller outfits.

Once you start doing this, taking a chance on adding good fats back, it makes losing weight a dream come true.

Tim Noakes

Hi

Some news in SA on low carbing.

Sports guru is now saying that carb loading is the wrong nutrition advice. He has just lost 15kg with Atkins low carb and says that is the diet answer. His father died of diabetes after being told to carry on eating carbohydrates.

Was on TV and in the magazine I bought.

I am still plugging away. Found some woolworths diet drinks in town yesterday with sucralose rather than aspartame which I hate. So bought some of those. Tonics, lemonade and bitter lemon. If I do have a sweetened drink will only have it during a meal to try not to produce too much insulin. I will have to see if the cravings come back after the meal.

So far my cravings and binging are so far in the past I can hardly remember what is was like to suffer like that. Every diet in the past I have had binging episodes in the afternoons. Rarely in the morning but afternoons and evenings were always the worst.

Low carb has cured that.

Diet for Life?

I have been a yoyo dieter all my life. Losing 50lbs this year 60lbs the next. I could never hold my weight at a 'normal' weight.

It is going to be interesting this time, once I have lost the next 42lbs, 18lbs have gone already, to see if I can now hold a low weight. Now that I have learnt that my body runs better on a high fat diet.

My low blood sugar episodes in the afternoons are now a thing of the past. I no longer have cravings and drive to find food mid afternoons.

If I can carry on eating like this I really have hope that I might finally beat my obesity problem for ever.

The diet is satisfying, filling and I have no need to nibble or eat for 5 hours after I have eaten.

Fat free diets dont work

For years I have been having a fat free diet.

Low fat milk, dry 'fry' food in a non stick pan. I truely believed that if I ate fat I would be even heavier than I already was.

Now I know that was a total lie. Eating fat as part of a low carb diet is the dieters answer to prayer.

It is satisfying, you dont eat too much, you leave the table having felt you have had a good meal. It holds you for 5 to 6 hours till the next meal and you dont even think about food. It cures the craving and binging. Yes that has gone for good.

I will never go back to my low fat diet. I buy butter by the lb and big bottles of olive oil. I also add cream to my chicken and mushrooms. Make stronganoff. Add proper mayonnaise to my salads.

Every time I get on the scale my weight is down. Failure is not just lurking round the corner any more.

At last something that works without denial, without starving.

Fat Power and Binging

Back under the 200lb on the scale. I never want to go above that again and maybe, just maybe, now I have found this way of eating I never will be that heavy again.

I do find this very counter intuitive. Before on diets I could make bargins with myself and could see that if I ate less on one day the scale would go down.

This diet I eat practically the same quantity of food each day. I make sure that I have my 15gms of butter at breakfast, 25 grms or so of good fat, butter, olive oil, cream or mayonnaise with each of the other 2 meals. I rarely need a snack but if I do it can be peanut butter or a small apple with some hard cheese.

I have had absolutely no urge to binge in the last 2 months. I cannot believe it was so easy to cure that out of control behaviour. I thought I would always be fighting the urge to binge. I can now walk past the fridge in the afternoon or my husbands open packet of biscuits without even a thought of finding a high carb snack.

How I wish I had discovered this 45 years ago. Dont think my life would have been different but I would have been much happier in my skin.

A diet that works

Seen a new number on the scale this morning.

I cant believe this is working as I am adding butter and olive oil back into my diet. I gave up all fats and oils 50 years ago when I first got fat.

Having never willing added calories to my food I am finding this a very strange way to lose weight. But it is working and I feel so much better. Less hunger, more positive getting things done.

It is not particularly speedy. About a lb a week but I can live with that as long as I can continue to eat like this.

Fat is the answer

Amazing I have found my blog again. Thought it had vanished into the ether.

Not posted for a year. Weight started to go up, carb intake increased and I just gave up again!

This is now something new. 7kg gone and I am not starving. I am consuming fat and oils. Butter cream and olive oil at every meal. Been on this now for 2 months and I have hardly felt hungry.

Dont have any cravings or being tempted to binge in the afternoons.

Weight loss is slow but I am feeling so much better and eating so much better so at present I am prepared to let my body set the pace.

LCHF

I have realised over the last few years I have been trying to do a low cal low carb diet. Reading the new Gary Taubes book: Why we get fat and what to do about it. I have seen that the idea behind these diets is to increase the fat and oil intake while dropping the carbs.

I am still very fat phobic and feel that I am tempting fate by increasing my fat intake but I did do it yesterday by having an extra meal mid afternoon which helped me get through to supper. I know I have reactive hyperglycemia which is the cause of the overeating and generally feeling terrible in the afternoons. Yesterday I had no problem at all. I also feel much better this morning and full of energy and plans.

Will carry on like this and see what the scale does. I have a feeling that it is going to increase by about 1lb a week! Will be brilliant if I can lose weight and eat like this.