Restaurant Suggestions

When eating out, always ask how your meal will be prepared. Grill your waiter or waitress about sauces, dressings, and fillers. meatballs, for example, might be a great low-carbohydrate choice, but only if they are made without bread crumbs. A piece of fish might contain hidden carbs if the sauce on top of it is made with sugar. When looking at the menu, look for words such as scampi, garlic and oil, grilled, poached, braised, baked or broiled. Also, remember to get more vegetables, either as a salad or as a side dish. Few restaurants serve enough with the meal.

The Thyroid

Thyroid hormone helps regulate metabolism, energy levels, mood, body temperature, and various bodily organs. If your thyroid is not functioning optimally, you will gain wait easily, resist weight loss, feel cold, become depressed, and suffer from dry skin, thin hair, low sex drive, joint and muscle aches, high cholesterol, and fatigue. The American College of Clinical Endocrinologists estimates that 1 in 10 Americans have an underactive thyroid and that half of them remain undiagnosed.

Fat: The Whole Truth

Besides improving the taste and texture of food, dietary fat is vitally important for good health.

Dietary fat:

• Is critical for proper brain and nerve function, eyesight, skin health, and even sperm count.
• Slows the progression of age-related memory loss and other cognitive disorders.
• Bolsters mood and prevents depression.
• Is used to make cell membranes, hormones, and hormone like substances.
• Carries the fat-soluble vitamins A,D,E and K. (Without fat, you’d become deficient in these vitamins.)
• Helps convert carotenes into vitamin A.
• Enables mineral absorption.
• Allows the body to fill in bone with calcium and other minerals.

The Importance of Fat Balance

The consumption of trans fats, sugar, and refined carbohydrates may not be the only factor in the rising rates of heart disease in this country. An imbalance in our conumption of different types of fat may also contribute to the problem. As it turns out, our bodies evolved on a diet that was relatively rich in a type of fat called omega-3 fatty acids (found in salmon and walnuts, among other foods) and relatively low in omega-6 fatty acids (found in many vegetable oils, particularly soy and corn oil). Many researchers believe that no more than twice as many fat calories should come from omega-6 fats as from omega-3 fats, but most of us are consuming 25 times as much omega-6 fats as omega-3s. Our consumption of omega-3s are low for a number of reasons. Few of us eat enough fatty fish, walnuts, flax, greens, and other foods that are rich in this type of fat. Commercial farming also reduces the natural omega-3 fats that would normally be present in animal meat, eggs, and vegetables. Eggs from hens that eat insects and green plants, for example, are richer in omega-3s than eggs from hens that are fed soy. Worse, most processed foods are loaded with omega-6 fats from corn or soybean oil.

A low-carb diet promotes fat burning.

Cells throughout your body are capable of burning a number of different fuels for energy, including carbohydrates (in the form of blood glucose or muscle glycogen), protein, fat, and ketones (by-products of fat burning). By putting yourself on a carbohydrate budget, you’ll consume fewer carbohydrates than your body uses for energy. After 2 or 3 days on our eating plan, your body will have burned through its store of carbohydrates in your muscles and liver. Once your carbohydrate gas tank reads “empty,” insulin drops and stays low. Think of insulin as a switch. When it’s high, you burn carbohydrates for energy and store excess calories as fat more easily. When it’s low, your body can burn fat rather than storing it, and it will also burn triglycerides—fat in the bloodstream-lowering your risk for heart disease.

The importance of the right amount of movement at the right time.

On our #StubbornFatFix plan, you exercise only once you feel ready. For many people, that’s only after losing a considerable amount of weight. Trying to force your body through intense cardio or weight lifting routines from the very beginning of a diet usually backfires. Why? In the beginning, with your metabolism out of balance, exercise just causes even more imbalance by keeping you in a burned-out state. It taxes your body at a time when you need rest. Plus, you feel tired. Who wants to exercise when they’re tired? It’s much better to change your eating first and then slowly add in exercise once you feel more energetic.

MEAT: NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE

Since the 196os, most meat has come from factory farms. Animals are usually raised in feed
lots, where they are crammed into a small space
with little ability to move. Instead of grazing on their natural diets of
grass and shrubs, most factory-farmed cattle, for instance, eat grain,
soy, and corn. This unnatural diet changes the nutritional value of the
meat, making it higher in pro-inflammatory fats and lower in heart- healthy fats such as omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid
(CIA). Grain-fed beef is also lower in vitamin E, beta-carotene, and
vitamin C, important antioxidants that protect your body against
serious illnesses such as prostate cancer.
Factory-farmed meat usually also contains trace amounts of
antibiotics. With animals crowded together in small lots, diseases
spread rapidly. To combat disease, ranchers routinely give antibiotics
to livestock, even when the animals display no signs of illness. The
antibiotics, by the way, also make animals gain weight, possibly by
killing their intestinal bacteria. The problem is that the antibiotics
make their way into an animal’s fat and muscle tissue. The farming
industry, of course, will tell you that there are no antibiotics left in
meat by the time animals go to slaughter. However, the Food and
Drug Administration has admitted that meat and poultry are not
routinely tested for antibiotic residues and that antibiotics almost
undoubtedly end up in the meat you purchase at the store. The agency
is generally short staffed and under-funded, which prevents it from
being everywhere it should. The scientists at the FDA have also
mistakenly assumed that antibiotics in our food supply are harmless.

 

#meat #meatIndustry #stubbornfatfix

FAT: THE WHOLE TRUTH #DrKeithBerkowitz

Besides improving the taste and texture of food, dietary fat is
vitally important for good health. Dietary fat:
• Is critical for proper brain and nerve function,
eyesight, skin health, and even sperm count.
• Slows the progression of age-related memory loss
and other cognitive disorders.
• Bolsters mood and prevents depression.
• Is used to make cell membranes, hormones, and
hormonelike substances.
• Carries the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K.
(Without fat, you’d become deficient in these
vitamins.)
• Helps convert carotenes into vitamin A.
• Enables mineral absorption.
• Allows the body to fill in bone with calcium and
other minerals.

Avoiding High Fructose Corn Syrup can be tricky.

In recent history, we’ve gone from 20 teaspoons of sugar per person per year to about 150 pounds of sugar per person per year.
High fructose corn syrup is the real driver of the current epidemic of Increased sugar consumption, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, dementia, and of course, Type 2 diabetes. But avoiding it is not as simple as it sounds, Manufacturing companies rename the HFCS so
In addition to “corn syrup,” watch your food labels for…

– Maize syrup
– Glucose syrup
– Glucose/fructose syrup
– Tapioca syrup
– Dahlia syrup
– Fruit fructose
– Crystalline fructose . #ingredients. #DrKeithBerkowitz #healthymindset #healthybody

Pucker up for lemon juice.

Among numerous other health benefits, the acidic nature of #lemon juice blunts blood sugar spikes and helps control the release of energy after a meal. Also:
• Lemon juice is an excellent source of vitamin C—a cup of #lemonjuice, just 15 calories’ worth, packs almost 50 percent of your daily value.
• One #study in the journal Public #Health #Nutrition found that low vitamin C increased the likelihood of developing abdominal fat by 131 percent.
• Another study of more than 20,000 people showed that people who ate the most #vitamin C-rich foods were three times less likely to develop #arthritis than those who ate the least.
• Vitamin C helps prevent #cholesterol from sticking to cell walls, and lemon’s flavonoids attack free radicals and protect against cancer.
#DrKeithBerkowitz

Light or Dark Olive Oil ?

Learn more about how lowering your carbs and increasing fat intake can change your life and health for the better with “The Stubborn Fat Fix” – available on Amazon. 

Visit http://ift.tt/2xPq9vh for more info.

The problem isn't animal fat alone

Countries that consume diets rich in saturated fat tend to suffer very little heart disease, whereas countries that consume diets rich in hydrogenated trans fats suffer high rates of heart disease. Population studies show that people who eat small amounts of trans fats, white flour, or sugar do not have heart attacks. Common sense should tell us that the problem isn’t animal fat alone. It’s trans fats, sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and refined carbohydrates.

The Benefits of going Flour-Free

White and wheat flours are refined products that offer very little in terms of vitamins, nutrients, and/or minerals. They are complex carbohydrates and therefore are made up of simple glucose units and thereby can increase in your blood glucose level. An elevated blood glucose level stimulates the pancreas to secrete insulin. An elevated insulin level is the underlying factor in many health problems, including obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, and cancer. The key to preventing these health conditions is keeping blood glucose levels stable and insulin levels low.

Metabolic Burnout

Your adrenals or pancreas or both can’t keep overproducing hormones, so they eventually hit a zero balance (or are in the red). Your adrenals may run out of funds first, then your pancreas. When the adrenals don’t secrete enough cortisol, you feel tired. When the pancreas doesn’t make enough insulin, you have official diabetes, although you’ve been developing it for years. Other parts of the body start to break down during this stage. Yeast will more easily colonize the digestive tract and the thyroid begins to break down.

Metabolic Resistance

High cortisol levels cause fat to be deposited in your abdomen, and insulin and cortisol rise and stay elevated. In the case of insulin, your muscle cells now don’t recognize its signal. Once your cells stop responding to insulin (called insulin resistance), your pancreas must produce 10 times as much of the hormone to shuttle sugar into cells, Your brain doesn’t recognize increases in insulin either, so it never responds by turning off your appetite. As a result, blood glucose is even more erratic than during metabolic overdrive, alternating from very high highs to very low lows, and you’re constantly hungry. High insulin levels tend to lower levels of other important hormones too, which can erode health in many additional ways.
Your sleep is probably starting to become erratic. You may feel okay when you are at work and under stress, but you crash when you get home or go on vacation. Elevated levels of cortisol during the overspending stage have now taken a toll on various bodily tissues, slowing metabolism through a loss of muscle mass, impairing digestion, and weakening immunity.

Metabolic Overdrive

When you’re stressed, you’re in overdrive. When you toss back a triple-shot espresso, you’re in overdrive. When you exercise beyond your body’s capabilities, you’re in overdrive. Overdrive is how you speed up the metabolism. This confuses a lot of people, because if they are struggling with excess weight, they assume that they want to speed up their metabolism. This isn’t always the case. 

Staying in overdrive too often can outstrip your metabolic resources. Stress and lack of sleep, for example, cause the adrenal glands to overproduce the stress hormone cortisol and keep levels elevated. When cortisol increases, so does your blood glucose, to provide your muscles with fuel should you need to run fast. The problem is that your muscle cells don’t need the glucose when you are responding to emotional stress or lack of sleep, so the hormone insulin increases to shuttle the excess glucose into your fat cells - usually the ones in your abdomen. In an overspent state, insulin does this too efficiently. Too much insulin causes blood glucose to drop too quickly. You crave the one thing that can quickly raise blood glucose: sugar. If you turn to sugar and fat - as most people under stress do - glucose rises, insulin rises, glucose falls. You’re hungry again. 

Overdrive can also result from eating a lot of sugar, HFCS and refined foods. In this case, blood sugar rapidly rises and falls, and so does insulin. To compensate for the volatility of rapid rises and falls in sugar and hormones, the metabolism runs fast. In fact many of my patients who have hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) are fairly slender. It’s not until the progress to “metabolic resistance stage” that they start to gain weight. 

As overdrive progresses, the problem magnifies. When insulin levels remain high too long and too often, your brain and muscle cells eventually stop responding. Rather than soaking up blood sugar, muscle cells ignore rises in insulin. Your body starts conserving calories, and you see the results in your gut. Your abdomen grows. Even when you cut calories or portions, you can’t seem to get rid of the spare tire or love handles. Meet metabolic resistance, also known as Syndrome X and metabolic syndrome; it puts you at risk for and can also lead to diabetes or polycystic ovarian syndrome, a condition in which women develop high levels of male hormones, cysts in their ovaries, and, frequently, infertility.

Unstable Blood Sugar/Diabetes Mellitus/Hypoglycemia Symptoms

If you answer "yes" to any of the questions below, you will benefit from making an appointment with us.
1. Are you hungry 1-2 hours after meals?
2. Do you wake up at night to urinate?
3. Are you excessively hungry or thirsty?
4. Do you crave "sweets" or carbohydrates?
5. Does anyone in your family have diabetes?
6. Do you gain most of the weight in the stomach?
7. Do you feel faint or lightheaded if you miss a meal?
8. Do you have frequent mood swings?
These are some of the symptoms consistent with unstable blood sugar, pre-diabetes, diabetes or hypoglycemia. The problem is that one hundred percent of carbohydrates are converted into glucose resulting in high blood sugar and high insulin levels. Controlling carbohydrate intake is the key to normalizing blood sugars and insulin levels. Type 2 diabetics who reduce carbohydrate intake can often decrease or eliminate the use of oral medications or insulin. Type 1 diabetics who lower carbohydrate intake can often help avoid large fluctuations in blood sugar. Because doses of insulin will need to be reduced, physician supervision is necessary.

When in doubt, eat real food

If you want to indulge in something sweet, do so, but make it a small serving of real food. Ice cream means sugar and cream, and almost nothing else. Don’t go for the low-fat or artificially sweetened varieties. These are not only less satisfying and satiating, but they also tend to cause people to lose self-control. It’s psychological. When we eat reduced-calorie foods, we assume we can have more. When we eat high-calorie foods, we assume we can have less and stick to it.

The Principle of Adding Indulgences #TheStubbornFatFix

Ok, so you know The Stubborn Fat Fix diet plan will help you drop pounds fast and stay healthy. But the problem is, it will only work if you can stick with it. What if you really love ice cream or chocolate or bread? Are you destined to a lifetime of shopping in the plus-size area of the department store? In a word, no. There are times when you’ll crave chocolate. Decades of mental and emotional programming cannot be easily undone with good intentions. Also labeling something “forbidden fruit” makes it more desirable. Our ultimate goal is to get you to follow the plan for life, not just a couple of weeks. That’s why our plan allows indulgence foods.

If you feel the need to eat something sweet

Use the fruit or chocolate option provided in your diet plan. Save your fruit for the time of day you most like to have something sweet. For many people, that’s right after dinner. Indulge in your sweet treat when you are relatively full. This will prevent you from overdoing it. In lieu of fruit, try mixing various types of spices into ricotta cheese. We prefer cinnamon because it tends to improve good sugar, but cardamom, cocoa, vanilla, mint and other sweet spices can work just as well. You can also drizzle up to 1 tablespoon of sugar-free chocolate syrup on top.

The Rest Prescription

You might be thinking “What does rest have to do with weight loss?”. We’re so glad you asked, because rest has everything to do with weight loss. Chronic unrest- lack of sleep coupled with a high-stress lifestyle- can nullify the best diet and supplement plan. We’ve seen this happen so often in practice. We counsel a patient who seems to be doing everything right. According to her food records, she’s eating exactly as prescribed, yet the weight isn’t budging. Then we dig a little deeper and learn that she’s up repeatedly at night to soothe her kids back to sleep, on the go constantly during the day, and draining herself further with intense exercise at the gym.

This type of unrest keeps the fight-or-flight response in a permanent “on” position. Our bodies are designed to handle periodic influxes of stress hormones. Triggering your fight or flight response just once a day probably won’t interfere with weight loss, because your body easily clears these hormones. Triggering it every 5 minutes? That’s a recipe for weight gain.

Here’s why. Every time you trigger your stress response, your adrenal glands pump out the stress hormone cortisol. If cortisol levels remain high- as they do when you don’t get enough sleep, keep yourself awake during the day by consuming lots of caffeine, or generally feel edgy and jittery- your entire metabolism becomes imbalanced, suppressing thyroid function, raising blood sugar and blood pressure, weakening muscles and bones, and triggering the body to store more abdominal fat. 

Sleep deprivation and our waistlines

Sleep deprivation has a direct impact on our waistlines. One in three women who experience sleep problems almost every night are obese, compared with one in five women who have trouble sleeping just a few nights a month. How many of us have said “I’ll be able to stay awake a little bit longer if I just eat these pretzels (or another snack food)”?

Sleep deprivation alters levels of many hormones, including serotonin and leptin. This makes you feel hungrier during the day, strengthening cravings for starchy carbohydrates and sweets.

This effect can begin even during childhood: a study completed in Japan determined that 6 and 7 year olds who slept less were more likely to become obese than their peers who went to bed earlier and slept longer. Children sho slept fewer than 8 hours were nearly three times as likely to become obese as children who got 10 or more hours.

Emotional Eating

Do you eat when you are under stress? How about when you feel sad or angry? Although emotional eating is very common- among men and women- it’s also destructive. In fact, it’s the main reason David Schipper, one of our clients, regained his weight. After losing 33 pounds and keeping it off for 6 months, he took on more responsibility at work. The longer hours and stressful dead-lines had him derange of bagels and cookies.
To overcome emotional eating- whether you eat out of stress, sadness, anxiety, or even happiness- you must break with the association that links your emotional state with eating.
First, get honest with yourself. There’s probably a little voice inside your head that’s whispering phrases such as “But I’m really hungry”, “But I really need it” or “But I can’t stop myself”. Oh, hush, True hunger comes on slowly. You can satisfy true hunger with any food, including broccoli. Emotional hunger surfaces quickly and centers on one or two specific foods. With emotional hunger, broccoli or meatballs won’t do. You must have the bread or bagel or cake or cookie or whatever it is that calls to you.
As soon as you realize that you are craving a specific food, you need to find a way to soothe yourself with something other than food. There are plenty of nonfood-related activities you could employ, such as going for a walk, listening to music or calling a loved one. Think about which emotions drive you to eat and think about other ways you can deal with these emotions.

Trans Fats 101

These come mostly from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils in restaurant fryers, margarines, packaged snacks, and baked goods. These fats raise the risk of heart disease by upping the bad LDL cholesterol and triglycerides and lowering the good HDL cholesterol. Although they occur in slams amounts in meat, they primarily come from packaged baked products (cookies, cakes, breads, crackers) and fast food. Eat as few trans fats as possible. They are listed on labels, but be careful of packaging. A food can claim that it contains zero trans fats even if it has 0.5 gram or less. If you eat more than a single portion, you may be getting more trans fats than you bargained for.

Pucker up for lemon juice 🍋

Among numerous other health benefits, the acidic nature of lemon juice blunts blood sugar spikes and helps control the release of energy after a meal. Also:
Lemon juice is an excellent source of vitamin C- a 1/4 cup of lemon juice, just 15 calories’ worth, packs almost 50 percent of your daily value.
One study in the journal “Public Health Nutrition” found that low vitamin C increased the likelihood of developing abdominal fat by 131 percent.
Another study of more than 20,000 people showed that people who ate the most vitamin-C rich foods were three times less likely to develop arthritis than those who ate the least.
Vitamin C helps prevent cholesterol from sticking to cell walls, and lemon’s flavonoids attack free radicals and protect against cancer.

Heart Disease & Fat - The American Paradox

Before the 1920s, heart disease was rare in the United States. By the mid 1950s, however, heart disease was the leading cause of death, as it still is today, for both men and women.
If fat is so bad for us, one would assume that Americans started eating more of it in the 1900s, in step with these rising rates of heart disease, not to mention rising rates of diabetes and obesity. That assumption, however, is incorrect.
Internationally renowned nutritionalist and biochemist Mary G. Enig, PhD, has studied the eating patterns of Americans dating back as far as the late 1800s. In her highly regarded book ‘Know Your Fats’ (Bethesda Press, 2000), she convincingly uses U.S. Department of Agriculture data to show that fat consumption and heart disease have no connection whatsoever. According to her review of government health records and food consumption statistics, Americans cut back on animal fat between 1910 and 1970. In the early 1900s, Americans were eating mostly saturated and monounsaturated fats in the form of butter. lard, coconut oil, and olive oil. By the 1970s, Americans were eating fewer animal fats and less butter and lard. Since the 1970s, Americans have cut back on saturated fat even more.
Has all of this fat cutting done any good for our hearts? No. Heart disease rates are going up, not down.

When someone offers you food that you are trying not to eat

Saying no requires you to put aside your need to please others. Be assertive. Say something like, “I feel flattered that you thought to bring me this find. I am trying hard to lose weight, however, and this is not one I can eat. I feel horrible that I need to turn away your offer, but I hope you understand.” If this person is a true friend or supporter, he or she will sympathize. Friends and loved ones should want to help us grow into our better selves. If you feel guilty about turning down these requests to eat, realize that the friend or loved one is the person who should feel guilty. That person is the one who is blocking you from growing into a better you.

Success Story

Maureen Wellington lost 12 pounds on The Stubborn Fat Fix!

This is the only diet that works for me. I just needed a little guidance and motivation to get myself to do it. The Berkowitzes handed me a list of food recommendations, and I follow it. I’ve lost 2.5 to 3 inches all over my body. This weight loss is costing me a small fortune in alterations. I feel so much better now too. My blood pressure and blood sugar are down.

Since I committed myself to the plan, I have not had any cake, pie, or ice cream. Do I miss them? No; I’m better off if I don’t eat sweets. I keep them out of the house. I now watch everything that goes in my mouth. I’m more aware of eating, and I reach for real foods rather than processed foods. It’s a healthy lifestyle, bottom line.

After you reach your weight goal

You will need to remain conscious of your eating choices for the rest of your life. You don’t, however, have to eat 100 percent healthy all of the time. Most of the time, eat real foods: eggs, meat, vegetables, fruit, whole grains, legumes, and so on. Some of the time, splurge. It’s okay to enjoy ice cream every once in a while. It’s okay to savor a chocolate chip cookie or a small slice of pie. It’s okay as long as you hold yourself to a reasonable portion and stay in control as you eat.

Break old habits

Our bodies signal us to eat based on our usual eating habits. You get hungry at 8am because you usually eat at 8am. Same with lunchtime. Same with dinner. If you snack at mid afternoon, you’ll start to get hungry for your snack around the time you usually eat it. If you decide not to snack or have a meal at a given time, your body will still expect the snack, and even if you are not physically hungry, you can get a case of pseudo-hunger where you feel hungry even if you just ate 20 minutes earlier!

Hypoglycemia: The underappreciated blood sugar disorder

Poor eating habits, the addition of unhealthy ingredients, increased stress and poor sleeping habits has led to the increased incidence of this underappreciated blood sugar disorder: hypoglycemia. Individuals with hypoglycemia can often have symptoms that include: headaches, increased irritability, difficulty concentrating, palpitations, light-headedness, fatigue, anxiety, excessive sweating or urination, leg cramps, dizziness and clamminess. Other symptoms can be related to eating. Patients I see with this diagnosis often feel more tired after meals, feel “sick” when they either miss a meal or if a meal is delayed. Traditionally treatment for hypoglycemia has been to give sugar. Unfortunately, this treatment only provides temporary relief and in very sensitive individuals causes an even greater reaction thirty minutes to two hours later. Although, a strict low carbohydrate diet is helpful, it does not always solve the problem by itself. At the Center for Balanced Health, we help patients manage their hypoglycemia by telling them to: - Eat five to six small meals a day about every three hours. Think of yourself as a fuel-efficient automobile. You want constant flow of energy (glucose) throughout the day. - Avoid meals that are too small or too large especially at night. Meals that are too small will not provide enough energy to get you through the day. Meals that are too large place a larger burden on your metabolic system to process these nutrients and thus can trigger a hypoglycemic reaction. - DON'T skip meals especially breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day because it sets the tone. - Balanced eating. Always have some protein and fat at each meal or snack. Avoid and limit foods high in sugar or other refined carbohydrates especially on a empty stomach. Still utilize a controlled carbohydrate approach and get your carbohydrates from foods high in fiber (dark green leafy vegetables, non starchy vegetables, avocado, high fiber low carbohydrate crackers as examples) - Get a good night’s sleep. Good sleep helps replenish your system so that your body works more efficiently. - Use of a fiber supplement (make sure you take with enough water) or eating a high fiber food (without refined carbohydrates or sugar) before meals or snacks can help slow the absorption of carbohydrates and thus prevent rapid declines in blood sugar. - Exercise regularly. Strength training can improve glucose metabolism - Avoid alcohol, caffeine, tobacco use - Avoid the use of stimulants If you suspect hypoglycemia, the best diagnostic test is a glucose tolerance test with insulin levels and an HgbA1c. I usually do this test in my office because a glucose challenge can sometimes precipitate symptoms of low blood sugar.

Include Vegetables at every Meal

Vegetables contain fiber, so they will fill you up and keep you regular. Vegetables also contain important antioxidants, nutrients that protect your cells from oxidative damage. Add more veggies by rounding out lunch and dinner with side salads and heaping servings of steamed or sautéed broccoli, cauliflowers, greens, or another veggie of your choice.

Your heart runs better on ketones

The increase in ketones that results from fat burning can cause minor, short-lived side effects , including dizziness, headache, low energy levels, and weakness. These symptoms simply indicate that your body has become more efficient at burning fat- they are the same sensations that long-distance runners or athletes experience after long periods of exercise. The fact is, every cell in your body is capable of using ketones for energy, and your heart and brain run 25 percent more efficiently on ketones than they do on glucose. A low-carbohydrate diet slightly raises ketone levels.

Ingredients to avoid for weight loss

If you see any of the following words on the ingredients list, your food contains additives that could interfere with weight loss:




Crystalline fructose

Corn oil

Corn syrup

Cornstarch

Dextrose

High-fructose corn syrup

Hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated vegetable (usually soybean) oil

Hydrogenated starch hydrolysate

Maltodextrin

Soy grits

Soy protein concentrate

Soy protein isolate

Soy lecithin

Textured soy protein

Yeast overgrowth affects men too

Yeast overgrowth in your GI tract slows down your metabolism and despite popular belief, yeast overgrowth isn’t something that only affects women. Plenty of men have it too. We recently treated an executive who had been diagnosed with sleep apnea and was using a breathing machine to keep his windpipe open at night. It turned out that a yeast overgrowth in his GI tract was causing an excessive amount of post-nasal drip. Within four days of starting our diet, the man was no longer using his breathing machine, and his wife no longer complained of him snoring.

Rearrange your kitchen

Which types of food do you have sitting in plain view? Which foods will you see every time you open the refrigerator, freezer, or cupboard? Many clients have told us that they’ve easily gone days or weeks without pasta, potatoes, bread, or other high-carbohydrate foods, but when they saw those foods- say their spouse brought home a fresh crusty loaf of bread from the bakery- they lost their resolve. If possible, get rid of tempting foods that you will not be eating in the coming weeks. If other family members complain, put these foods in an inconvenient location or out of sight. For example, put bread in the freezer. Put snack chips in the highest kitchen cabinet, one you do not open very often. Put chocolate and other extremely tempting foods in an opaque container, and put the container out of sight, too.

Follow these tips from Monday to Thursday to help undo the overindulgence of the weekend!

Fluids are key since extra salt, sugar, and alcohol can dehydrate your body. Start the day with a tall glass of water or warm cup of any type of tea, then drink throughout the day, aiming for 64 to 100 ounces to flush out the pollutants from the weekend.

Plan to eat three meals, with lunch four hours after breakfast and dinner between 6 and 7. Focus on nutrient-dense foods that are low in calories but high in vitamins and minerals since weekend fare tends to be the opposite: high-calorie and low-nutrient.Have an afternoon snack around 4 p.m. of green drink powder mixed in water or a smoothie. Look for one (such as Greens Plus) containing sea vegetables, probiotics, grasses, and enzymes that will help aid in digestion. You can also have a whole-food snack after dinner if you are hungry.

Take a multivitamin, and at every meal pop a 1,000-milligram omega-3 supplement, which will help reduce the inflammation that can be caused by poor eating. (Talk to your doctor first if you are on any medications since omega-3s may interact with some meds.)

Are You Ready To Lose Weight Quiz

1. Are you devoting a lot of mental and physical energy to one or more huge life projects (a wedding, divorce, career change, geographic move, purchase of a new house, starting or expanding a family)? 

2. Are you willing to forgo certain types of foods and beverages when you’re eating out, at a party, or doing something social with friends and family? 

3. Are you wiling to temporarily curtail your social life if you find you lose control of your eating in social situations? 

4. Are you willing to change your behavior forever to lose weight and keep it off? 

5. Are you willing to make weight loss your top priority for the next few months or year (or however long it takes to reach your goal)? If you answered 'no' to 1. and 'yes' to the rest- you're ready!