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