Last month my husband and I started a new diet, called Banting or the new food revolution. It's basic principal is avoid carbs and sugars and replace with fat and protein and the bulk of your food with micronutrient rich foods.
After a few days your body starts burning the fat it has stored and goes into Ketosis. This is a very dangerous state for someone with diabetes but an effective way to burn fat for someone who doesn't.
The first few days are the hardest when you have sugar and carb withdrawals. All of modern day processed foods are packed with carbs and sugars (read the labels on your food, it's quite scary!), when you see low fat products all they have done is taken out the fat, which your body burns as fuels, and replaced it with carbs and sugars, which your body stores and sends your brain signals that you're still hungry.
It is quite a radical change to how we normally eat, especially for my husband, who lived on carbs. The amazing thing is though that, now that the carb craving has passed he eats only one meal a day with a snack later in the evening and has loads of energy and his weight is dropping fast. This is great because he has a great deal of weight to lose!
I was getting frustrated because my body wasn't going into ketosis (we got sticks from the chemist to test and my husband's ketones were really high but mine had no change) to be fair, though, I wasn't following it 100% ;-p
My other concern is my ph balance, my body is quite acidic at the moment, another bad byproduct of the modern diet and I want to swing that balance back into alkaline to improve my chances of fighting off the development of cancer.
We had a bit of a blow out this weekend as we were away with friends and, after being on diet for a WHOLE WEEK the resistance was pretty low lol. I'm definitely feeling the effects of it today. I'm very tired and lethargic again today. I have been blaming it on my chronic fatigue syndrome but last week I was feeling a lot more energetic. I've decided to give it a real go for the rest of the month and see what effect it has on my body.
For breakfast I have a bit of watermelon. (melons should always be eaten on their own as the body digests it better, if eaten with other fruit it tends to just ferment, thus not giving you the good nutrients from it) the watermelon is to help my ph balance.
I was hungry an hour later but didn't have time to make an omlette so I had a few strawberries and a half a mango (both good for alkaline ph) topped up the bowl with full fat Onken plain yoghurt and poured some double cream over the top (these are neutral ph) the fat from the double cream helps the ketosis and sweetens the yoghurt with the fruit so avoids artificial sweetener, which pushes up your insulin.
For lunch we had my favourite salad. A big bowl of mixed leaves, I buy iceberg lettuce but also 2 or 3 bags of different mixed leaves, including spinach (all these greens are good for my ph) and some cucumber and orange pepper. I fried up a bit of bacon, with all the fat on as that's what the body burns as energy.
Note: Don't use hydrogenated oil like Sunflower to cook in, use butter or coconut oil. You should use extra virgin olive oil to drizzle over your salad but also not to cook with as the heating process releases toxins.
I mixed some tuna, Helmans full fat mayonnaise (this is the only one that has really low carbs and sugars, the rest are ridiculously high) and tomatoes to dollop on top of the salad. Sprinkle the bacon on top and cut in some cheese like Bree, Feta, Halluomi (this one you have to cook a bit in the pan with the bacon) or cheddar, whatever floats your boat. I am trying to restrict the cheese from a ph point of view as the bacon is quite acid forming and so are the cheeses so I only had a bit of Bree.
This salad is remarkably filling and usually leaves you without hunger pangs for the rest of the day. If you are feeling hungry later you can either have the yoghurt with fruit and cream or a light supper of meat and veg. We're working on having the mail meal of the day at lunch time.
No comments:
Post a Comment